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

>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"...

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.

It also depends on how you use Facebook.

I've noticed that people who use it to share political posts, rants, etc. tend to be some of the most emotionally negative people I've met. (reposting stuff entails low thinking effort)

Whereas people who write little David-Sedaris-like stories about their lives, sometimes with pictures, tend to receive positive emotional benefits. It's like the practice of writing Christmas letters but instead of doing it once a year, you get to do continuously. Sure there is the occasional flexing and humblebragging, but even the most humble among us can't help but share our little life victories on occasion (e.g. Ph.D. graduation, vacations taken, etc.). In my circles, people tend to share stories about their foibles and flaws too, often in a funny way, so it kind of balances things out.

Facebook is an especially great place for introverts to be vulnerable through the medium of the written word. In real life social settings, introverts tend to be crowded out by others and can sometimes struggle to tell their story. When we're in a face-to-face situation, there isn't always the occasion to truly share in detail because the politer ones among us want to avoid hogging all the attention. And even when the spotlight is on us, we don't always remember all the interesting stories to tell.

That's why the written form is so powerful as a tool for self-revelation and vulnerability. It helps deepens relationships. I've had friends who've read my posts come up to me in person to tell me, "I never knew that about you", which actually made it possible to have deeper in-person connection.

I do have a few rules about posting: if I didn't write/create it, I won't post it; and before I post, I ask: "is it kind? is it true?" These rules seem to keep me out of trouble.

Agreed. My actual USAGE of Facebook is a net positive in my life, by far. (this, of course, leaves aside all of the stuff the company does and is accused of).

I keep track of friends and family, see peoples' kids, see what vacations they're on, see nice photos, and yes, some news (some not so nice news).

Whereas twitter is a toxic cancerous cesspool of attention-seeking, all wrapped in an utterly unusably backwards UI.

Instagram's somewhere in between. Can't remember who's who anymore, bit more attention-seeking than FB, quite a bit less than Twitter.

I guess it depends on your use case. I've never found any value in following "influencers" or brands, I'm more interested in what my actual real-life friends and acquaintances are up to, and FB is far better at that. The reduction of anonymity really helps, too. It's more of a community, less of a shouting match.

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?

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.

I guess people look at you on social media and feel bad about themselves

A similar thing happened to me.

But social media ≠ Facebook. I never really used Facebook, and all my friends are (also) on other, smaller, even tiny networks, and some are just in email and video calls.

Through these tiny networks, I actually found new friends.

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.

"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".

It's not what you have; it's how you use it / what you do with it!

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 take it you don't consider HN to be a kind of social media, then? What are your criteria?

Looking at products can be pretty depressing, too. There are some 10+ year old items I own that I'm proud to be using through their complete useful lifetime, but it's hard not to feel a twinge of dissatisfaction and self-consciousness when confronted with reminders that the new products look and perform better. Most of my friends (like most normal people) buy new products at a pace dictated by their desire to have new stuff.

Of course they brag about their awesome expensive new gear, including how durable it is, which is ridiculous, of course, but even more ridiculously, I have to shelter myself from advertising to protect my conviction that I'm not really the ridiculous one. When I'm barraged with advertising, I can't even feel good about choices that reflect my values. More and more that yucky feeling stops me from checking Instagram, which was the last social media app I checked regularly. I'm had enough of paying for "free" services by trading away control over my own thoughts and feelings.

From what you describe it sure seems true. You log onto a website looking for social interaction and instead get a face full of corporate messaging? Sounds isolating, depressing.

If your feed is like mine, 90% of those shared posts, political memes, and other garbage are coming from 10% of your friends. I mostly ignore or just snooze those people and end up with a feed of pretty positive life stories.

IMO it still holds true if you consider Instagram as part of Facebook.

Took a look at your landing page - some immediate feedback - first thing I see is a popup with a video with the title 'the problems with social media'.

I don't think that's the best way to frame what you're trying to do. Don't tell me what it's not or about all the problems with current social media platforms (I already know), just get straight to what your platform does differently. I can then decide for myself if that's better or if I'd prefer it to what's already out there.

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.

no fault of yours, but if this is really successful it will be bought by facebook and drowned like a pillow case full of kittens.

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.

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 dunno, HN can still be very addictive if you don’t have much else going on to distract you. It’s not manipulating you at a micro level in the same way as Facebook properties, but the rules certainly lead to an addictive kind of discourse that probably feels much more valuable than it really is. It’s information junk food, maybe more like the conventional news than social media. It’s not obvious to me that it provides me more value than Instagram.

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.

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.

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.

They draw a causal link when, technically, they have a correlation. Combined with other studies which they cite, they have a compelling argument, but if causality requires something like a double-blind, they don't have it.