Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 211 posts

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#81

Post by WalterSear »

jaredklewis wrote: post #79
rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

For sure, Facebook allows you to keep up with distant family and friends. But my take is that devoting a lot of mental and emotional energy to distant relationships comes at the expense of time that could be spent developing local relationships, which can be more important. I think a good metaphor is after you've broken up with someone, it can be healthier not to hold onto to a lot of photos, memorabilia, and so on a…

> But my take is that devoting a lot of mental and emotional energy to distant relationships comes at the expense of time that could be spent developing local relationships, which can be more important.

This implies that one replaced the other, or that one can be brought about by eliminating the other.

IMNSHO, this is a form of false nostalgia: I saw how much of my parent's generation lived: for most people, social networks haven't replace real world socializing.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#82

Post by rayiner »

Spooky23 wrote: post #58
rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

Facebook is giving you the illusion of having relationships and appeals to some nostalgic programming in our brains. I have a once close friend who moved out to Oregon from the east coast. I talk to him every two years when somebody dies at home. Knowing that his kid won the pinewood derby doesn’t give us anything more in common.

What is an "illusion of a relationship?" If you think of someone and appreciate the little bit of their life story they shared on Facebook, is that an illusion? After all, that's what relationships in real life are built on as well: telling each other what happened at work, about that new restaurant you went to, the joke you heard, the stupid thing your kid did. Facebook is a pretty good vehicle for doing those things over distance.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#83

Post by rayiner »

sonnyz wrote: post #66
anigbrowl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't helpful. Fine, you don't care about your distant friends/relatives daily activities, but that's no help to those of us who do . I live in California and some people who are personally important to me live in florida. I talk to them at least once a day but on an ad-hoc basis, so email isn't that suitable. Edit: corrected geographic confusion Really, what is the point of a post like yours other than to negat…

I think the point of his/her post is to show that from his/her perspective, the "connection" you get to friends and family via facebook isn't valuable. Although it may be to some, it isn't to everyone. I have to agree, as someone that quit many years ago and hasn't looked back since. I still communicate with my long distance relatives, just not publicly. I use a combination of Google Hangouts, email, and just plain o…

> I use a combination of Google Hangouts, email, and just plain old phone calls to keep up to date with their lives. I share photos daily, via google photos, directly to those that I want to see them. And my family, who happen to use Facebook, know to send me photos using other methods.

This seems like an inconvenience you impose on everyone else to do things Facebook handles natively.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#84

Post by codingdave »

rayiner wrote: post #77
codingdave wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like we lived differently than you did -- My parents had people over to play cards and other games on many nights. Or we would go over to someone else's house. On nights when it was just the family at home, we played card games and board games. We also went for bikes rides, went out for ice cream, went on hikes. We threw frisbees, played soccer and football, on the weekends, we'd go skiing, fishing, camping. W…

The average household in 1985 was watching 7 hours of television per day. I don't imagine that left much time for board games and bike rides.

Why did you ask what people did before Facebook, if your intent was simply try to discredit a genuine response with statistics?

Do the math. 17 hours per day with the TV not turned on. And even the hours it was on doesn't mean the whole family was watching. Let also consider how many people watched the news every night, and stayed up for Carson. And an hour of TV after school was probably the norm. Soap operas also were popular in the 80s. Tack on an hour of MTV somewhere in the day, and that just about accounts for the average even before we consider how we spent our evenings.

There was plenty of time for all kinds of things.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#85

Post by wutbrodo »

rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

Yea, I can't really understand why all the complaints about Facebook are so maximalizing. I feel like the authors of all these hitpieces are personally unable to engage in healthy, limited usage of it, so they cast it as as some universal evil that every person is powerless to resist.

I got Facebook in 2006, when it was only college kids (and some high school kids), and my usage throughout college was 99% photo sharing and event planning. 10 years later, my usage of Facebook is......99% photo sharing, event planning, and messaging.

At no point did Facebook launch a feature that pointed a gun at your head and forced you to mindlessly scroll through your feed. Blaming the product/platform for people's unhealthy use of it is like blaming dessert or alcohol for existing: I avoid both of those things a lot more than most people do, but I also wouldn't want a world that completely lacked them.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#86

Post by wutbrodo »

badestrand wrote: post #54
rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

I would love it if Facebook worked that way for me. But unfortunately its just selfies and crappy shares of motivational or "funny" memes. The people that I am interested in mostly never post anything - and me neither, because I a) would like to share with close friends and family but not everyone I am connected to* and b) I find it too stressful to having to worry that my post won't garner many likes and thus will b…

> I would love it if Facebook worked that way for me. But unfortunately its just selfies and crappy shares of motivational or "funny" memes.

I don't know much about Facebook's feed because I don't use it a ton, but can't you just unfollow the people who post this stuff? I'd imagine after doing this just a handful of times, your feed would become a lot better tuned to the kind of stuff you actually want to see.

The ~once a month I do end up scrolling through my Facebook feed, I find a pretty healthy amount of interesting things from those friends of mine that are interesting. The majority of these aren't even links, they're actual posts.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#87

Post by Top19 »

Suggestion: go to church.

It’s a built in community of people who are likely there because of ritual and tradition (am Catholic) and do not care about talking about startups or entrepreneurship (a breathtaking relief sometimes).

Church and religion has gotten a lot well-justified complaints over the years, but by liberal and moderately-conservative people abandoning it in droves, it only made it more conservative and dogmatic sadly.

Also if you think “hey I can’t go to church they don’t believe in XYZ” just know that something like 40%+ of priests believe that gay marriage is possibly within the church’s right to support (again citing Catholic stuff here), so there is a lot more support than you think but political change is hard and it’s harder if you stay home.

Also I will say that it’s almost “cool” to go to church now. It’s been, again for good reasons such as pointless cultural battles in the 90’s that American churches waged, cool to not do religious stuff but now it’s so passé. Whenever I see a person railing against religion on Reddit I can’t help but think they are exactly the person we could have used in the 1920s at the Snopes Trial, but otherwise their viewpoint is entirely unhelpful and conformist today.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#88

Post by 2-4-Flinching »

rayiner wrote: post #83
sonnyz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point of his/her post is to show that from his/her perspective, the "connection" you get to friends and family via facebook isn't valuable. Although it may be to some, it isn't to everyone. I have to agree, as someone that quit many years ago and hasn't looked back since. I still communicate with my long distance relatives, just not publicly. I use a combination of Google Hangouts, email, and just plain o…

> I use a combination of Google Hangouts, email, and just plain old phone calls to keep up to date with their lives. I share photos daily, via google photos, directly to those that I want to see them. And my family, who happen to use Facebook, know to send me photos using other methods. This seems like an inconvenience you impose on everyone else to do things Facebook handles natively.

> This seems like an inconvenience you impose on everyone else to do things Facebook handles natively.

If you're important to them, then people will do whatever they need to keep in touch with you. Inconvenience is when they don't care enough to keep in contact with you. While in a perfect world everyone would accept your impose line of communication, in your case Facebook, everyones preference is different.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#89

Post by cletus »

badestrand wrote: post #54
rayiner wrote: post #42

These articles ignore people’s real alternatives. I’m in my 30s and have a small child. While I love to fly into Chicago or New York for a night of drinking with my still-single friends, that’s not really something I get to do more than once every couple of months. Seeing my wife’s extended family (3,000 miles away in the west coast) is a once every year thing, and seeing my extended family (7,000 miles away in Asia)…

I would love it if Facebook worked that way for me. But unfortunately its just selfies and crappy shares of motivational or "funny" memes. The people that I am interested in mostly never post anything - and me neither, because I a) would like to share with close friends and family but not everyone I am connected to* and b) I find it too stressful to having to worry that my post won't garner many likes and thus will b…

Unfortunately customizing your news feed takes some work. Frankly I'd like a setting that just says I'm not interested in any of the following:

- Tag a friend who ...

- Quizzes

- Inspirational quotes of any kind

- Social game results of any kind (or invites for that matter)

In my own feed I had a few culprits who were largely responsible for this noise. I think only in one case did I have to resort to unfollow (although it's an option). It seems that less than 20 sites/pages are responsible for the vast bulk of these. Or perhaps that's just the case out of my friends. I really don't know. Either way after hiding these posts and choosing to see no more posts from whatever the source page was, my news feed is pretty clean.

Others post a lot of BS politics, which I kinda hate. The more ignorant ones (we're talking family here) I've even baited when bored. But I know people who have started using Instagram to avoid the nonsense politics (even though some of these same people like to share inspirational quotes /sigh).

If you're interested in say family photos and updates then Instagram may be a purer experience for you. Assuming who you're interested in posts to Instagram that is.

As for your stuff not getting shared/liked, well that's a whole other thing. Disclaimer: I work for Facebook. Only for a short time thus far but long enough that I've been involved with a bunch of research on groups. A lot of people take groups pretty seriously. One admin I heard speak was talking about how he always made an effort to make people feel included and heard like if someone's post wasn't getting a lot of comments they'd go out of their way to comment on it and include others so that person felt like part of the community.

So I don't know what your interests are but I'm pretty sure at this point there's a group for basically everything. In the right group you may find more sense of community and less of a barrier to posting and sharing because of good admins and just the common interest you have by being in that group.

Re: Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing (2015)

#90

Post by volgo »

verall wrote: post #47
volgo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> negative influence it's having in politics Read, negative toward my side of the politics.

Media sources designed to target confirmation biases, echo chambers, and viral fake news are a negative influence in all politics. Why do you think they mean only negative towards their side?

> Media sources designed to target confirmation biases, echo chambers, and viral fake news

So you mean basically every political campaigns? Not sure how in touch you are with local politics, but the local political TV ads I see every night have been like this for years

Post reply on HN