
Facebook is bad for you: Get a life - chetanahuja
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21583593-using-social-network-seems-make-people-more-miserable-get-life
======
zxcvvcxz
Alright, here are my honest gripes with facebook:

\- Professional contacts. I can't share anything I consider "funny" (in the
stupid, I'm-in-my-early-20s way) with friends because I have investors and
recruiters and these other professional fucks ready to judge me.

\- I'm tired of seeing your achievements. God damn just wait until I get some,
okay? I don't care if you just started med school and are posting pics of your
doctor ceremony thing. I'm busy making crappy Android apps and trying to quit
pornography... Can't exactly brag about that.

\- If I post something not cool or impressive, it dilutes my "brand". My
reputation is important for getting laid. Therefore I don't post anything and
keep my best photos up.

\- Speaking of getting laid, too much girl drama whenever I add them on
facebook. I don't want you posting a photo of us together, because that sends
the signal to other girls that I'm not available when I would definitely
consider myself so. I also don't want pics of me and a bunch of my guy
friends, because that's "gay" for not having girls in the group.

\- Constant reputation management. If I post anything, I need to be vigilant
for a few days to make sure no stupid highschool friends post anything.

\- Fuck you for backpacking through Europe and taking photos of _everything_.

\- The chat generally only allows for simple and content-lacking conversations
(because that's what state your brain is in as you browse FB). Doesn't anyone
sit down once in a while and write out emails to those important to them?

\- Real-time status updates. "I don't want to see this" is my favorite feature
of FB.

\- Feeling bad for less socially popular people. When the post an update and
aren't getting any likes, I really want to click "like" to make them feel
better, but then I remember that I'd look uncool for associating with them.

\- Advertisements. I almost feel sorry for FB, because unlike Google (who
knows what I'm looking for), they don't have much to work with aside from
looking at people instagramming their food or sharing links from news sites
such as this one. As a result, their ads always suck. I actually don't mind
well-targeted ads that I receive in my gmail inbox.

In short, I hate everything about FB, and it makes me feel like a terrible
person everytime I use it.

~~~
threeseed
Facebook is merely a website for messaging and sharing photos. It is because
of YOUR friends that you get the experience you do. So if you are having a
poor experience then find better friends. Or remove them from your feed. Or
setup groups so you can filter content better.

But honestly the problem quite clearly is you. The immature use of the term
'gay' to be derogatory. The fact that you dismiss the uncool people in your
group because of fear of what others will think. The anger you have towards
people who are merely enjoying their possibly once in a life time trip. You
sound like a terrible person in spite of Facebook not because of it.

~~~
psychotik
It's easy to judge, isn't it? It takes some courage to be honest and
introspective, regardless of how you may judge the poster. What you say about
this person says as much about you as it does about them.

~~~
threeseed
Can you show me at what point there was some actual evaluation of why he was
doing the things he was ? Because sorry but I don't see anything courageous or
introspective there.

I just see a blind rant by somebody who clearly cares way too much about what
his friends think.

~~~
sanderjd
Admitting things that make it obvious that you care too much what your friends
think is courageous and introspective. He opened himself up to the inevitable
ridicule of people like you (courage) and openly described things about
himself that are widely viewed negatively by society (introspection).

------
danneu
Every time Facebook is brought up, some of us attempt to enumerate the reasons
why we ostensibly hate Facebook.

But frequently our list just looks like an inventory of our own self-limiting
beliefs, bitterness, and narcissism. Perhaps we really hate Facebook so much
because it so effortlessly unmasks us and our conflicts with the world.

In an impressive dance of culpability evasion, we come here to re-convince
ourselves that the deactivation button is a secret transcendental portal into
social nirvana instead of acknowledging the possibility that the deactivation
button is our only chance to turn the tides of a personal battle we are merely
losing against ourselves.

~~~
samstave
Funny how your comment comes across very similarly.

 __ _" I have it together, and am so self-aware and capable of keeping a
balance with my relationship to Facebook. I mean who are these losers that
would have a problem with it? I am so much better than they, and I can still
have my FB account as well!"_ __

~~~
richardjordan
His comment didn't come across like that at all. He just pointed out that the
bitterness and vitriol directed towards Facebook seems detached from the
experience of folks who use it to keep in touch with family and friends quite
happily.

~~~
samstave
If you re-read his comment, its filled with as much vitriol and bitterness.

~~~
danneu
I'm not trying to be hostile. I switched the pronouns to the first-person
plural.

~~~
samstave
You may not be ___trying_ __to be hostile, however below are the direct bullet
points you make in your post.

Can you read how these would be used as descriptors to ones aversion to
Facebook WITHOUT being considered "hostile" evaluations. Not to mention they
are ___UTTER_ __assumptions on your part as to _WHY_ someone is against
Facebook.

* inventory of our own self-limiting beliefs [1]

* bitterness [2]

* narcissism [3]

* unmasks us and our conflicts with the world [4]

* impressive dance of culpability evasion [5]

* the deactivation button is a secret transcendental portal into social nirvana [5]

* a personal battle we are merely losing against ourselves [6]

\---

So, if I am ___against FB_ __, I am 'afraid of my own limitations' (assumption
is that this is in contrast to FB's 'greatness'? _ __ _in your opinion?_ ___)

\---

[1] & [2]: Am I automatically "bitter"? Why? Is it due to points [1] & [2]
above? (I think these two points may allude to your youthful? perception that
FB is "killing it" and therefore awesome just due to their scale.)

\---

[3]: Why am I narcissistic if I eschew the posting of my life to a 1 billion
strong shared "HEY LOOK AT ME!" site?

\---

[4]: Ill give you this - I have many "conflicts with the world" \-- but,
Facebook has 0 role in forming these opinions Aside fro mthe fact that it is
now proven they are culpable, to use your words, in the spying on the US for
the NSA.

\---

[5]: This is an interesting one. I'd really like to have a discussion about
this one. First of all, the word "culpability" means; To have a hand in... in
as much as my being "Tax Cattle" provided the funding for the efforts of
various activities of the USG, or my being an "online set of eyeballs to be
targeted by Google/Yahoo/Inktomi/Whomever-thefuck... then yes - I am culpable.

However, your use of this term is laying the balme on the users for FBs
actions. Seriously - What are you trying to imply.

You are stating that "those who complain about FB being a crappy service to
sign up for, are the same people CULPABLE for the service being crappy"

This is a ridiculous claim.

\---

[6]: If [5] couldn't be any worse. Now you've just accused anyone of being
against FB as being some zealot who is seeking their transcendental hipster
orgasm by being against FB - completely ad hominem... this is ___your_
__arrogance in you 're own argument. You think you are above those who claim
to not like FB - that you're accusing them as the effective equivalent of
"Holy warriors seeking salvation through their denouncement of FB."

\---

[6]: I AM SUCH A SYCOPHANT TO FB, I CANNOT EVEN CONTAIN IT:

Lets analyse what you said:

 __ _" a personal battle we are merely losing against ourselves"_ __

OK; so assume I am against facebook and I vocalize that sentiment. What you,
Danneu, are stating is that I am in a personal battle, which I am losing
against "ourselves".

I can only believe that you mean a battle against "those who accept FB to be a
completely normal, natural evolution of "us" \- whereby; if, I am against it,
then "I am fighting myself" because how else would I not want to have
[whatever facebook/is want(s)]"

You are really saying that "resistance is futile" \-- and that is lame. I
wrote about this here on HN almost two years ago, you are the reason why the
following could be true:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4237959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4237959)

------
tokenizer
I don't have a facebook account, and I find the idea of using it for keeping
in touch with past acquaintances not very alluring and frankly a diatribe.

You're not supposed to focus so much on other people's lives. Instead of
people growing into better people through self defined improvement, people now
seek gratification through others and their acknowledgment. Instead of going
to a concert with a few choice friends and living in the experience, some just
anxiously try to record the moment, which has ironically been lost with the
vision of the future.

Don't ask me what the optimum amount of social contact and level is for a
person, but suffice to say what people are currently doing is not it.

~~~
agumonkey
"""living in the experience, some just anxiously try to record the moment,
which has ironically been lost with the vision of the future"""

Louis CK illustrated something close :
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpAwhSSe7F0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpAwhSSe7F0)

~~~
smsm42
That's why I practically stopped taking photos on vacations. I discovered I am
replacing actual experiences with attempt to record the experience for some
future myself, thus sacrificing my present enjoyment for the shadow of future
recollection of the enjoyment that I didn't actually have because I was too
busy trying to record it.

~~~
agumonkey
Yeah, a bad analogy would be throwing a party vs being invited. All in all it
feels very weird how this 'data' era is twisting our conception of 'existing'.
It seems like a gigantic ball of noise, no signal. Too much content of lowered
moments. Very unsettling. Slightly digressing, I'm also having a non-digital
reaction. I used to love the unaltered quality of digital data versus fragile
analogical mediums. But now I'm far more interested by used objects. We used
to see them as flawed or tainted, and with the experience of perfect digital
duplicates, I sense a loss of memory (no pun intended). Our perfect bits have
no past, no history. An old photo I sense the effect of time. A book with
notes on the margin. What was negative has positive value now. And reflecting
on how I felt reassured about digital before, I'd say it was an immature fear,
a paranoid need to keep things "perfect". Which goes back to what the previous
post said, instead of stressing over saving something, enjoy it fully and let
it live or die.

~~~
quantumpotato_
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation)

~~~
agumonkey
I wish you'd say a little more but thank you anyway I forgot that book
existed, now I have a stronger desire to read it.

------
aylons
Am I the only one who feels the same in technical forums or even in Hacker
News?

Of course people will talk about things they know (and I come here to see
these), but I can't help but have a feeling that I don't know enough, or that
I can't keep with the technology and knowledge. Or worse: that I can't even
get a good grasp of established tech, or that I am not smart enough.

At deeper levels, this probably relate to the "impostor syndrome"[1], as we
compare our whole knowledge to a curated selection of every other person
knownledge.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome)

~~~
dsuth
Nope, guess I'm just that smart. ;)

But seriously, everyone comes to tech forums with different levels of ability,
experience, understanding, and skill in getting these things across. Geeks are
especially prone to under-valuing their talents as most of us are introverts,
and tend to self-judge quite harshly.

The best life lesson I've had on this problem (which I've definitely struggled
with) was from a very intelligent guy, who came to work at the same company as
me when we were both quite new. I was crossing over from my field to a new
field which he was very experienced in, and he was doing the same (crossing
over into my old field). We naturally connected, and he was completely
unconcerned about asking me questions which a person in his new position
should have had down in muscle memory by that stage. He didn't care though -
he accepted that he didn't know them, and did his best to learn as quickly as
possible.

The takeaway: don't tie your self-esteem to your level of knowledge in any
particular area. It's definitely the easy path, but it's also a precarious
ledge once you're 'there', especially in the tech field. Just accept that your
value lies in being able to reason through things, and that you'll always be
less knowledgeable about something than someone else (but also conversely,
quite likely to be more knowledgeable about _something_ , however esoteric or
seemingly useless).

In short, have fun and don't sweat it. Most people are in the same boat. :)

------
keiferski
Well that's funny, considering that I constantly meet cool people in person
and then add them on Facebook to keep in touch.

The constant "Facebook is evil" makes no sense to me, as it's the easiest way
to keep in touch with a wide variety of people around the world. If I deleted
my Facebook, I'd lose touch with dozens of people worldwide. Could I email
them? Sure, but that's broken and impersonal.

~~~
EliRivers
_Could I email them? Sure, but that 's broken and impersonal._

How much more personal can you get than one person writing a message
specifically to one other person?

~~~
keiferski
Because I have to look up their email (jabberwocky586@yahoo.com) and
deliberately send them an email length message. On Facebook, I see their real
name, their photo, their about page, and various recent things about their
life. If I want to talk to them, I tap the chat bar and say two words.

Email is extremely cold and impersonal compared to Facebook chat. Most
"normal" people don't use email outside of business or more specific uses.

~~~
EliRivers
Whereas to me, what you describe sounds fantastically superficial and
impersonal, whereas in sending a personal eMail I've had to actually,
deliberately think about my interaction with them. I suppose context goes a
long way.

~~~
threeseed
And yet to me it does sound more personal. Because by adding someone on
Facebook you have opened up your life to them on a semi-permanent basis.

With email there is the assumption that the relationship will be more
intermittent and flippant.

~~~
EliRivers
_you have opened up your life to them on a semi-permanent basis_

You have opened a lifetime of impersonal comments directed at a disinterested
crowd. By its very nature, it won't be personal.

"I'm having beans for dinner."

"Beans a legend lol"

"I'm getting divorced and I've told you and the other five hundred 'friends'
here at the same time, in the same way"

------
chatman
Dr. Stallman also reminds us that Facebook is bad. It doesn't respect the
users and their freedom against mass surveillance.
[http://stallman.org/facebook.html](http://stallman.org/facebook.html)

~~~
lukifer
Stallman's criticisms are accurate, but irrelevant. Real people tend to like
and want the service that Facebook offers (frictionless connection to loved
ones), and they deliver. Any anti-Facebook sentiment from the FOSS community
that is not an attempt to create a free and humane disruption is merely wasted
breath (or worse, an in-group shibboleth).

~~~
EliRivers
_Real people_

Yes, because Stallman is fictional. I'm fictional. Anyone who isn't on
Facebook doesn't count as a person.

------
techtalsky
I guess I'm in the minority, but I genuinely enjoy Facebook. Sure, it has its
annoyances, and ads are a much more prominent part of the experience. However,
it lets me connect with my friends back in Seattle (I live in Brooklyn now)
and gives me an outlet for cool photos of my life here in Brooklyn and fun
stuff I'd like to share with my friends. I've built a reasonably fun little
discussion group around my content and the content of my friends, and we all
seem to have a fairly good time with it. I tried Twitter, G+, and everything
else, but nothing gets as much "interesting discussion per post" except FB.

------
vonskippy
Before I yell "Get off my lawn", I'd like to remind what seems to be the main
demographic here on HN (you know, the 20 something "me me me" short pants
crowd) that people, businesses, start-ups, families, friends, entrepreneurs,
new ideas, etc - all got along (and flourished) just fine before all this
social media crap.

So stop using the social media drivel, there's many better ways of staying in
touch - none of which are facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc.

Now get off my lawn.

------
wh-uws
So how do you update or replace facebook with more meaningful interaction?

And no snarky, just delete it, comments. I mean seriously?

There are many people on my facebook whose content I consume but dont interact
with. And I know that it happens to me as well and is where the loneliness
comes from.

How do you fix that without being creepy and showing all who've seen
everything you post (which facebook tracks as it is surfaced in groups)?

~~~
tokenizer
Short answer? You appreciate context over content. Anything and everything can
be content. But not everything can be contextually meaningful.

Take what I had for diner. Should I post that on HN? Absolutely not. Not
contextually relevant. What about a blog post on Angular JS modules? Now that
makes sense.

If facebook has a context like HN, or a meaningful way of identifying it like
Reddit, then it has been lost on me. I mean, facebook's context is that it's
an address book for your local social group right? So that must mean the
context is contextually dependent on that right? I don't think that's 100%
true. Facebook imparts it's own context. Which is basically sharing is caring.
So it's context is basically content!

Long answer? Not sure...

~~~
enraged_camel
>>If facebook has a context like HN, or a meaningful way of identifying it
like Reddit, then it has been lost on me.

Facebook's context can be perfectly described using the idiom, "Keeping up
with the Jonases."

Just like people in real life try to impress their friends and coworkers with
nice cars, big houses, fast motorcycles, shiny gadgets, etc. people on
Facebook try to impress their Facebook friends with pretty pictures, funny
videos, interesting articles, and clever status updates.

------
latifnanji27
Sigh... The study is focused on teens and people in their young 20's - only 82
of them. How could that be enough data given that demographic has already been
largely influenced these social networks while growing up? I'd be curious to
see this study done on older more mature people.

------
tsenkov
I am not using Facebook for the last 2-3 months and I must say, it is a
positive change in my live.

Nevertheless, I would argue that the gain isn't measured in time - I think
it's about the quality of the time spent.

We need free time - its the best way to "always work by choice", isn't it?
Having the "power" to start and stop whenever you want, is a smart trick to
make your work a lot more satisfactory as a process. Maybe if I had this
perfect discipline in me and I didn't need such psychological tricks to help
me, I could be as efficient without any free time what so ever, who knows ...

Yet as a regular human being, I need to feel free to work or not to.

But to make the most of my free time I've decided to distil the choices how to
spend it down to a "better" list, so I don't need to try ripping this
"pleasure" out of my schedule.

So I read random stuff, but on the top pages of Hacker News, I read random
stuff but in my not-so-randomly selected list of blogs that I've subscribed or
twitter feed, etc.

At the end, it's the same time I am away from my work, but the quality of that
time, measured as helpful information I've digested is substantially higher,
at the same (often higher) level of delight.

------
Carltonian
Once the taboo of "I saw this person's update on Facebook, but I can't just
jump into a conversation with them referencing that update without qualifying
it with a: 'I saw your update on Facebook'" then Facebook will begin to
advertise itself as timeshifting social interaction. You can "catch up" with
your friends without having to actually talk to them. Here's one use case
(sorry for anybody seeing me reference this car crash multiple times):

I got in a car crash. If I had Facebook, I could have made a post about it and
explained it once. I've explained what happened to 20 people it feels like,
all of whom have Facebook. After the first few times of realizing I had
basically drafted a script of the accident, I began not going into too much
detail with everyone, only for them to ask more questions until I returned to
the script. All-in-all though, timeshifting social interaction sounds really
bad for everyone, but really good for increasing how much a single person can
consume overall (which is again, probably bad for everyone).

------
progx
Facebook is boring after so many years. The problem will be solved by itself.

------
richardjordan
I don't get the griping over having to share stuff with people you don't want
to - current second ranked comment complaining about professional contacts.

There's no law that says you have to Facebook friend people. I make it clear
there's a simple delineation - Facebook is for family and long established
friends (going back to elementary level in some cases). LinkedIn is for
professional contacts. I publish most things on Facebook for friends only or
for public depending on audience. I don't need more granularity than those two
options.

Done.

Now I get to keep in touch with old friends and family from all over the world
and it makes me smile. It makes me happy to see them happy in their lives.

You don't have to add people who aren't, like ya know, your friends to your
Facebook friends list. If you are doing this you need to look at yourself not
Facebook for failings.

------
chetanahuja
Note: Title is verbatim from the economist article.

------
mccloy
I'm no huge fan of facebook.

But I'm less a fan of 'news' articles with sensational headlines that boil
down to "The way it was was good, so new stuff must be bad." It's not hard to
imagine (or find) similar articles about basically anything that's new and
popular, especially when it happens to be popular with 'young' people.

It seems to me that this article plays on the fact that most people prefer
established norms over change, and most people glorify "how things were" in
relation to "how things are". There's very little meaningful here, only link-
bait.

------
andrewljohnson
I bet the outcome of the study changes over time. Sure, Facebook can be a mean
place, like the school playground, but you tune it out (both mentally and with
software) over time.

If you look at how national populations react to internet ads over time,
behavior changes, and the same goes with Facebook. In the case of ads, people
mostly just become desensitized, and I bet the same goes for the bile on
Facebook. Not to mention how the website changes over time, in response to
measured user behavior.

~~~
silentOpen
Too bad Facebook actively punishes third-party client-side software
distributions that modify its behavior or function according to user
preferences.

------
shmerl
* Social network - good.

* Facebook - very bad implementation of the social network.

------
FollowSteph3
It's because you only see the highlights. And compounded it looks like
everyone is traveling and so on when in fact if each one friend did at most
one trip a year and you had 200 friends it would look like there are four
trips each week. So you think people are traveling all the time, and so on.

------
mb_72
Facebook is essential where I live (Estonia) for promoting the band I;m in,
and for being hooked into music events. Back in my 'home' country (Australia),
it's used less for this purpose, but it is still used this way.

Like all tools - judge it's usefulness, and use it appropriately.

------
cenhyperion
Am I the only one that gets value out of facebook? It's a decent way to share
the photographs I take and a pretty good way of organizing events with
friends. That said, I almost never scroll through my feed as I don't get much
value from it.

------
cliveowen
Am I going nuts or this is like the 5th or 6th article in a couple years that
reports the same thing? Lately I feel like I'm living through a big deja-vu.

------
onedev
Someone writes an article about Facebook being bad once every couple
months....but more recently it's been more like once every couple of weeks.

------
drinkzima
Did I miss something or is there a massive correlation vs causation issue with
this article?

I actually agree with the premise, but I also know that my lowest-value,
highest-boredom moments are spent on Facebook, so it seems like there could be
a pretty large variable in the analysis that is getting ignored (underlying
boredom levels).

------
caiob
did the author say something we all didn't already know?

------
volokoumphetico
I've deactivated facebook permanently (I changed my password to something
impossible to remember before deactivating). This works very well, since
facebook is about having higher number of friends, when there's zero, there's
no point in going back to it. It's value at one point was very high (when I
could still tolerate the level of bullshit amongst my peers on fb; most are
insecure little instagram addicts) but now it's worthless as I can never gain
back some 300+ friends on FB.

What's happening now is that I feel much more free. If someone is not there
for you in real life to talk to face to face or on the phone once in a while,
then I wouldn't have otherwise dealt with them but it was facebook that made
all these uncessary contacts seem suddenly necessary, out of hoarding friends
and contacts on FB to show other insecure FB friends that you are sociable and
awesome.

Now I chuckle whenever I hear some idiot snapping shots of their receipt or
food, it's not the camera shutter, it's the sound of insecurity.

However, I still keep my linkedin account because it's intrinsic value as a
social network tool is immensely more valuable than sharing stupid cat videos
and your "friends" who are nothing more than just a few rows of data stored
somewhere by an entity trying to show the right ads for you to click on. They
might as well tell people to start wearing tshirts that display ads that
matches your previous staring habits (were you just checking that chick out,
time to bombard you with dating site ads on your friends t-shirt!)

~~~
briancaw2
I was off Facebook for a year and felt as free as you described. The problem
is that girls use FB as a vetting tool. It's weird to not have FB and
introduces a barrier to entry in the dating world (pun absolutely intended).

~~~
volokoumphetico
If she uses FB, I'd end the relationship right there. Other things include
taking off heels during sex.

------
thenerdfiles
Facebook needs community moderators, who can ban users from certain networks.

Get creative about the job market.

