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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)

#61

Post by HenryBemis »

mylons wrote: post #25
siquick wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I wonder if being on Facebook reduces your motivation to build new friendships (it does take some work) since it allows you (with little effort) to maintain some form of very limited remote relationship? As someone who moved away from my home country about 8 years ago and is still in touch with old friends via WhatsApp on an almost daily basis, this (regretfully) definitely rings true.

keeping up with old friends is good, but not to the point where it interferes with the now.

Regarding keeping/losing old friends, I always believed that making new friends (and losing some of the old ones) is vital to someone's progress. Especially in a world that people relocate. I read this nice article about this here:

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/if-youre-not-losing-friends...

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

#62

Post by Super_Jambo »

ken wrote: post #56

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…

The problem with Facebook (and similar) isn't just that it's easy the problem is it's designed to be addictive in order to scrape data and sell adverts.

It's a honey pot of whatever can be made by frighteningly dedicated amoral money driven software engineers and data scientists. The goal is to make a zero marginal cost product that uses your friends to make content and so entrap you spending time looking at adverts to make facebook money.

We regulate gambling because a certain proportion of the populations mental heuristics can be exploited by it. But we are now seeing incredible effort expended to find more exploits of peoples mental heuristics. Perhaps you are immune to facebook as I am immune to gambling? But it's only a matter of time before all our brains fall victim to something.

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

#63

Post by ovi256 »

wfbarks wrote: post #26

Does the article establish a causal link?

No, it's a longitudinal study (it looks at several existing groups with different levels of facebook use and gives them a survey to measure life satisfaction). This can extablish correlation, not causality. The causality can be completely reversed from their hypothesis - unhappy people use Facebook more.

Only an experiment, doing an intervention on a group, can establish causality. You stop eating for two days, you're starving - hey, not eating causes starving, who knew ? In this case, if you can make low-Facebook-using groups to use a lot, and vice-versa, and measure the effect of this intervention, that would establish causality. However, you can imagine the practical difficulty of ensuring people change their habits. They rarely do it when it has a positive impact on their health, they certainly won't do it for an experiment. This is called patient compliance in medical jargon.

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

#64

Post by jakecopp »

ajxs wrote: post #48
jakecopp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not adblock the news feed and delete the app? Then you are able to stay in contact with those far away, and make new friends at random events you may not have heard about otherwise? I dislike their monopoly on the friend graph just as much as anyone else, but at least in the Sydney university demographic FB Events are ubiquitous.

I'll admit you have a good point with keeping abreast of events in certain circles. That's essentially what I did though. In my original post I noted that I have an anonymous profile on one social network that doesn't do anything except for chat with a few people, it doesn't even have any 'connections'. Hi from another Sydney-sider by the way!

That's true, I guess it works out to be the same.

Isn't Sydney wonderful!

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

#65

Post by test1235 »

mceachen wrote: post #38
theNJR wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd pay $5/month for a private network that is just this. My data is mine, no ads, no tracking. Simple, close friends, no addiction triggers.

I'm building that! After a decade in the adtech business, PhotoStructure is an act of penance to let your richest metadata source, your photos and videos, stay yours and yours alone. I'd love to have you try it out and hear your feedback. https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/ Disclaimer: I'm the founder.

Love the sound of this. I've signed up to the beta, and wouldn't be surprised if you experience a bump in traffic - your blog post sells your product well.

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

#66

Post by jacobush »

Super_Jambo wrote: post #62
ken wrote: post #56

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…

The problem with Facebook (and similar) isn't just that it's easy the problem is it's designed to be addictive in order to scrape data and sell adverts. It's a honey pot of whatever can be made by frighteningly dedicated amoral money driven software engineers and data scientists. The goal is to make a zero marginal cost product that uses your friends to make content and so entrap you spending time looking at adverts…

First they came for the gambling addicts, and so on.

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

#67

Post by Broken_Hippo »

siquick wrote: post #21
debrice wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if being on Facebook reduces your motivation to build new friendships (it does take some work) since it allows you (with little effort) to maintain some form of very limited remote relationship? Maybe without Facebook, we (remote people) would be more motivated to build new local, face to face, and fulfilling friendships?

>> I wonder if being on Facebook reduces your motivation to build new friendships (it does take some work) since it allows you (with little effort) to maintain some form of very limited remote relationship? As someone who moved away from my home country about 8 years ago and is still in touch with old friends via WhatsApp on an almost daily basis, this (regretfully) definitely rings true.

See, I'm the opposite. I moved away from my home country a little over 6 years ago.

Facebook meant I wasn't quite as lonely as I might otherwise have been. I've never had many friends where I lived anyway, but as it works out... I do now. Facebook has helped facilitate that and facilitate communication with the local friends.

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

#68

Post by popcorncowboy »

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.

"I dunno, it didn't happen to me. (Therefore this problem is not _really_ a problem)."

While it's a very human reaction to go "I don't see what the problem is" until the waters are lapping at your front door, your single data point inference provides plausible cover for the damage-peddlers to go "see, everything is fine". You suggest the clear evidence for harm is at best, debatable.

Smoke your whole life and never get cancer? Lucky you. But don't be that guy saying "I dunno man, I'm fine you know".

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

#69

Post by coldtea »

ken wrote: post #56

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…

>Facebook is a city. It's full of zany characters, and beautiful art

I'd say it's the last place one would (or should) look for "beautiful art"...

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

#70

Post by NateEag »

theNJR wrote: post #29
ineedasername wrote: post #28

I think ( or at least for me, this is the case ) that there is a threshold. A certain amount of casual usage doesn't make me feel bad, and in fact can be gratifying-- sharing nice photos with family & friends. But very regular or constant use is bad.

I'd pay $5/month for a private network that is just this. My data is mine, no ads, no tracking. Simple, close friends, no addiction triggers.

If your photos live on the service's servers, they are no longer yours. That's intrinsic to the nature of software as a service.

I realize that makes me sound crazy, but after years of reflecting on software, privacy, data ownership, and decentralization, I have not been able to avoid the conclusion that Stallman was basically right.

If your data lives in a cluster with a bunch of other people's, it's a tempting target, both to legitimate businesses and to outright theft. It's only a matter of time before someone gets it, as the constant parade of breaches and data sharing scandals show, and once it's out there you can't undo it.

I have speculated that open source services that are easily self-hosted (start the installer, enter a domain name, and pick a cloud provider) might be a passable answer to the desire to have both accessibility, shareability, and independence.

Funding their development is trickier, obviously.

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