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The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)

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Re: The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)

#51

Post by jammygit »

> Our approach had three strengths that set it apart from most of the previous work on the topic. First, we had three waves of data for many of our respondents over a period of two years.

I don’t honestly think that 2 years is a meaningful time span to measure how a tech changes people’s lives. It is certainly better than a single snapshot, but some effects take time to manifest - it’s simple behaviourism. More changes require more repetitions.

Edit:

> Second, we had objective measures of Facebook use, pulled directly from participants’ Facebook accounts, rather than measures based on a person’s self-report.

What about twitter, Instagram, and whatever else people use?

This study design also cannot show causation, just correlation. The control group is self selecting

Re: The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)

#53

Post by astura »

01100011 wrote: post #5

I dunno. After moving to the valley and leaving all my friends behind, social media is my one connection to anyone besides my wife. I don't compare myself to people on SM and feel bad. I see my friends and family and generally feel good.

Yup, same here.

I had to leave my home town for work after getting laid off during the Great Recession. It was supposed to be very temporary, well, turns out it ended up being more permanent than I ever imagined.

I use Facebook to keep in contact with all my hometown friends. On top of that Facebook has allowed me to get back in touch with a childhood friend I haven't seen or heard from in 15+ years and it's also given me a great way to connect to new friends.

One of my best friends now I met once at an event in person, we connected on Facebook, and got talking on there. Now we talk most days over text message and we see each other a couple times a month, sometimes going on trips together. Without Facebook we would have had a single conversation ever. Sure, without Facebook we might have exchanged phone numbers after meeting, except that Facebook lends itself to friction-free low "risk" interactions in the way that phone just doesn't.

Re: The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)

#54

Post by anthony_doan »

jammygit wrote: post #51

> Our approach had three strengths that set it apart from most of the previous work on the topic. First, we had three waves of data for many of our respondents over a period of two years. I don’t honestly think that 2 years is a meaningful time span to measure how a tech changes people’s lives. It is certainly better than a single snapshot, but some effects take time to manifest - it’s simple behaviourism. More chang…

https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/3/203/2915143

The study seems pretty sound and they did a multivariate regression for inference too. What is your concern? Confounding factors? Lack of calibration?

> This study design also cannot show causation, just correlation. The control group is self selecting

Sure but then again, causation models are currently barely picking up steam in term of being studied and more of a PhD academia study right now. All you have are statistical inference models that we've been using for most research papers that are doing inference.

While a statistician is going to word conclusion carefully, at the end of the day, somebody is going to have the paint a picture and make some plausible leap.

And then other researchers can build upon the paper and redo it with better data set or a different inference models.

Re: The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)

#55

Post by 01100011 »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #24
01100011 wrote: post #5

I dunno. After moving to the valley and leaving all my friends behind, social media is my one connection to anyone besides my wife. I don't compare myself to people on SM and feel bad. I see my friends and family and generally feel good.

Comparing yourself to others isn't the only potential mechanism here. It might be that you get your social "fix" from facebook and don't make new connections here, feeling worse than you otherwise would have.

Honestly, I'm in the valley. I don't have time to do much socializing outside of work. I work, come home and spend some time with my wife, and sleep. The occasional shopping trip consumes any spare free time.

That and I'm 44. I'm at the age where it is increasingly difficult to generate real friendships with people. I used to be a 'renaissance man', but after I got divorced I basically just work all the time. There's not much left to connect to others with. My stomach is shot so I can't socially drink much. I lack the patience for gaming. I used to like to hike and can't afford the time now. It feels like the next 20 years are something I just need to endure and hope for a nice retirement. It's completely opposite to my worldview, but I'm pretty much starting over financially and don't have a lot of options. If I'd just accepted the other job offer last year, I would literally be sitting on $1M of stock options. I chose wrong. I picked the company whose stock tanked.

Re: The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)

#56

Post by ken »

Facebook is a city. It's full of zany characters, and beautiful art, and people crying for attention for their cause, and not much privacy. The longer I live in a city, the more of a jerk I find myself becoming, and if I stay too long, I feel bad. Lots of people say they've had enough and want to go live in a cabin in the woods. Few actually do.

This is how society has worked for thousands of years. Where some people go and find success, others will follow. It's a positive feedback loop. In hindsight, did we really think the virtual world would scale less well than the physical one?

Social media is terrible, and also great. The worst thing I can say about it is perhaps: it's easy. And like anything in modern life that's easy, it brings out the worst in us. We've reached the point where large swaths of people can spend all day doing easy, nonproductive things, and it's not good for the individual or society. We want things to be easy, but we don't do well when they are.

Re: The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)

#57

Post by randomsearch »

I find it strange that people consider HN to be social media. For me, social media is synonymous with manipulation engines designed to keep you engaged in order to sell advertising. HN isn’t selling advertising, it isn’t trying to addict you. Maybe ten years ago “social media” just meant “interacting with others online” but I think language has moved on.

I don’t like placing HN in the same bracket, because it devalues it. It would be like labelling your local vegan restaurant “junk food” and treating it like McDonalds. Lots of work has gone into actively making HN not like that, and it devalues that effort and the genuine efforts of posters to maintain civil discourse.

Re: The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)

#58

Post by schiavi »

bjornsteffanson wrote: post #50
schiavi wrote: post #9

I have been working in this problem space for the past year or so developing a new kind of social media that I think has some merits. Take away the advertisement model, the public nature of discourse, and replace it with meaningful context-driven one-on-one conversation and I think we might have something. My platform can take any topic and disseminate a discussion to as many one-on-one conversations as people who ar…

For starters, you have a leaderboard. Any sort of number metric or gamification is enough to keep me off a platform. Edit: I just realized the irony of the above as I type this on Hacker News.

I hear you. Overtime the gamification systems have been deemphasized as my assumptions in that area have been proven incorrect. The way users earn a badge currently is by completing virtual events thrown by various communities on the platform. The idea being, I wanted some kind of incentive for users who otherwise aren't interested in certain communities or topics to participate in them and to encourage each community to be inviting to the greater Confidist population. Those "rewards" will be changed from being based on completion to being granted by "any" participation in those events. I want to see how that iteration goes. I think without something along these lines the natural self selection around echo chambers is far too great. I think the next step will be to remove leaderboards but allow for these badges to be viewed possibly when interacting with individual users, but not shown globally. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, much appreciated.

Re: The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)

#59

Post by bryanrasmussen »

randomsearch wrote: post #57

I find it strange that people consider HN to be social media. For me, social media is synonymous with manipulation engines designed to keep you engaged in order to sell advertising. HN isn’t selling advertising, it isn’t trying to addict you. Maybe ten years ago “social media” just meant “interacting with others online” but I think language has moved on. I don’t like placing HN in the same bracket, because it devalue…

well this would be the second time in a week where I would be asking to use the original meaning of a technical term, but if you asked me "is HN social media" I guess I would have to say yes, with the proviso that is has far fewer feedbacks than most social media to keep you hooked and as such is perhaps a net good.

Re: The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017)

#60

Post by sarcasmOrTears »

randomsearch wrote: post #57

I find it strange that people consider HN to be social media. For me, social media is synonymous with manipulation engines designed to keep you engaged in order to sell advertising. HN isn’t selling advertising, it isn’t trying to addict you. Maybe ten years ago “social media” just meant “interacting with others online” but I think language has moved on. I don’t like placing HN in the same bracket, because it devalue…

Social media is also tied to your identity. Sites like HN let you be anonymous and in any case your name and face isn't plastered on every post.
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