
How Facebook makes us dumber - zabramow
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-08/how-facebook-makes-us-dumber
======
sly_foxx
What I don't get is dumb companies who post a link to their FB(or some other
social media) page on their site:

1\. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put
their logo on your site? No.

2\. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other
social media) and you can only reach them there. If you're banned or they pull
bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you've wasted all this time
building user base for Facebook and not building your business.

3\. You can't even reach them on Facebook, because you now have to pay
Facebook to reach people that have already liked your page.

4\. Posting on social media wastes a lot of time and money(tools + people).

\- Compare this to getting an email address from your visitors:

1\. You are in control of your list.

2\. You can reach them anywhere & anytime almost for free.

~~~
yoz-y
At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of
money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished, nevertheless
I do think that it is better than having an e-mail.

There are several reasons for that:

\- First (at least for me), an unsolicited e-mail goes directly into trash and
I seek the unsubscribe button. Under no circumstances I am interested in
additional stuff somebody has to offer beyond the first service.

\- People who did not buy your stuff/service can still like you on Facebook,
they can do it after they have forgotten some login to your site etc.

\- The single best advertising that actually works is recommendation from
friends. I think that seeing that somebody else liked something on your feed
gets pretty close to that.

\- People do like to have all of their "Internet" in one place. Why go to mail
if they can have everything in their feed?

\- If you use Facebook then they solve a huge number of stuff for you -
administration, spam filtering, server hosting, account management (there are
other solutions to this of course, but it is good to be able to throw all of
this on somebody else)

\- I think posting on media sites wastes no more time than creating mailing
lists and also requires less tools.

\- Advertising for Facebook is mutually beneficial, the more people there are,
the more you can reach.

\- Also, ads on Facebook have great reach (from what I have heard) and are
quite cheap.

\- I would hazard a guess that most people are more likely to have
notifications on for Facebook rather than e-mail.

Facebook is also probably not going to fail, preparing for this scenario is a
nice thought exercise but at some point you have to have some faith in your
suppliers. Same goes for Google (mail, docs), Dropbox (file history), Github
(issue tracker, code reviews).

~~~
inthewoods
"At one point people estimated that a Facebook like was worth quite a lot of
money. I am quite sure that now the value has greatly diminished"

Have you looked at a stock chart of Facebook recently? All time high basically
and worth $220b.

Or did you mean the value the company brings to the user?

~~~
throwaway125
You misread what was said I think. It's about a _facebook like_ , not about
facebook itself.

~~~
inthewoods
Ah my bad - need more coffee.

------
tomp
Hm... the alternative explanation is, people were always dumb, Facebook (and
internet in general) just makes it more apparent by giving us more
oportunities to display our stupidity.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Or: people were always tribal and concerned more with shibboleths identifying
the in-group than truth. Facebook (and Tumblr and Reddit, etc, even HN) just
automates it.

~~~
arama471
I disagree with Tumblr and Reddit being compared with Facebook in this regard,
and completley disagree that HN is in anyway similar in this regard. Facebook
will automatically stop showing you things you disagree with, whilst it has to
be a conscious choice on your part on Reddit and Facebook.

On HN you don't actually get to choose the content in any meaningful way, and
therefore have no means of creating an echo chamber for yourself through other
means then down voting.

~~~
humanrebar
I agree with your assessment of things other than to point out that HN is
already an echo chamber to some degree.

------
hellofunk
There have already been studies showing that frequent visits to FB make a
person more unhappy in their overall life. Now this. So, a major worldwide
internet power -- that is, a single company -- that is trying to disrupt so
much of global life (India, anyone?), with the interesting side effect that it
makes people unhappy _and_ less intelligent. If you had heard this "reality"
20 years ago, you wouldn't believe the future could be so dark.

~~~
cryoshon
Yep, a major worldwide internet power has vested interest in mining data from
its billions of users via its product, which is broadly detrimental to those
users.

To be honest, it seems a lot like the oil companies: major worldwide energy
powers with vested interest in extracting fossil fuels from the earth then
selling them to billions of users to burn, which is detrimental to everyone.

A lot of these mega-scale corporations manage to get away with mass-scale
detrimental effects because of a general state of addiction to their product,
which was legitimately new and useful at an earlier point in time. That, and
after a certain point they become too powerful for any one country to stop.

~~~
hellofunk
Also, because laws are only a subset of the many ways a society handles,
judges, and distinguishes detrimental actions. Laws can only do so much.

------
dest
As a search provider, DuckDuckGo tries to prevent the "gated community"
syndrom: [http://dontbubble.us/](http://dontbubble.us/)

~~~
raverbashing
Yeah, too bad it fails at some searches and falling back to google is needed

For controversial stuff, the bubble is definitely a minus. For factual
queries, it just makes things easier (yes, when I type 'python' I don't mean
the reptile)

~~~
eggie
How does it fail for you?

I persisted and find that although the results are different, they are often
just different. Once I became used to DDG it's started to seem like Google is
the broken one.

It did take a while for me to switch, maybe 3 tries before it was working
right.

~~~
mcintyre1994
One of my really lazy really common searches is the module codes at my
university. It's really nice that Google know which university I mean and
always get it right even if I've never searched that code before.

~~~
J_Darnley
If they're at your university are the results you're looking for not all under
the same domain? I would have expected site:university.com to return the right
results for you. (Okay, perhaps it's not the every-man solution.)

~~~
mcintyre1994
Yep, that'd work - it does make the query considerably longer than the 5
character code though. Like I said, very lazy search.

------
ilitirit
It would be interesting to study Simulacra and Simulation when it comes to
social media and memes.

People tend to align themselves with other people and communities who share
similar beliefs. You can often see this where people Like and Share these meme
images with some "profound" message (eg. "A real man/woman ...") when they
like, agree with or find interesting for some or other reason.

So, what IMO would be interesting to see is how these things changes their
world view and self-image. Are they replacing the reality of life with a
simulacra (the meme; Social Media "friends" I supposed can be argued to be
another simulacra)? How much more likely are they to like/share to share posts
from others who they perceive to have similar world-views, even if they know
very little about the topic? How likely are they to defend ideas which they
only have by virtue of their social connection to other people?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation)

------
secondtimeuse
That's a ridiculous headline to derive from analysis of published article with
title "The spreading of misinformation online".

Sure the idea that Facebook makes us dumber might have some truth in it. But
it cannot be fairly evaluated unless one proves that the alternative Network
Television or Grandma email forwards were not making us even more dumber
before Facebook rose to prominence.

~~~
lubos
I think the problem with the article is that it doesn't dig deep enough.

For example, Facebook news feed is driven by an algorithm to push posts you
are likely to be interested in. Liking an anti-vaccination post or anti-
immigration post will surely result in more similar content in your news feed.

So Facebook inadvertently might be reinforcing confirmation bias more than
anything else due to content being filtered and personalized to you only.

------
nkozyra
Probably not a small nitpick, really, but the article explains not that we're
dumber by using Facebook, but that we are less informed. I think that's an
important distinction not only because people tend to conflate knowledge and
intelligence/aptitude, but because we should worry as much about spending long
amounts of time doing things that provide not even nominal information to keep
our brains pliable and receptive to new knowledge and new ways of thinking.

~~~
neogodless
I think I disagree. We actually spread lots and lots of "information" via
Facebook. In other words, we're "very informed" (whether it's arguably correct
information is another story.) But we are, really, becoming more rigid in
opinions due to this "information" which means, we are less receptive to new
knowledge and new ways of thinking.

(I think, in the big picture, our opinions on this overall point do align, so
please don't completely disregard my comment :).)

------
zappo2938
Reddit too. I just wrote 500 words without using any logical fallacies backing
up my assertions with scientific studies from trusted sources, why does my
comment have -12 points without a single person taking the time to refute my
position in a comment?

I believe managed, licenced hunting in Africa supports conservation efforts,
there is no reason ever to spank or hit a child, all children should be
vaccinated, and pitbulls are dangerous.

So, most people have unfriended and/or blocked me on Facebook. Now I live in a
bubble. I'm not bothered by people who don't agree with me. I'm bothered by
people who can't debate these topics without getting riled up. The African
hunting topic ended with someone threatening my little sister. I can
understand the business decision behind letting people live in a bubble.

~~~
danieltillett
Just out of curiosity why do you think children should never be spanked? Do
you have children?

~~~
zappo2938
I'm not going to say that spanking isn't an effective way to discipline a
child. I can also understand if a 3 year old walks into a street to feel like
spanking the child. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that other forms
of discipline for small children are more effective at correcting behavior and
children who are spanked are often more violent towards other children with
other developmental and learning problems in school. Also, what we can do is
look at how adjusted, happy, and successful people are in life, whether they
are a doctor or lawyer with their own practice, divorced, in jail for violent
crimes, or if they have a drug or psychological problems and compare that to
whether they were spanked or worse as children. What we discover is that
people who were not spanked or spanked very sparingly for example only in the
case they walked out into the street do much, much better in life. So if you
have children and want to play the numbers game, it might be worth while to
explore other ways of disciplining your child. Not only do they work, but they
have better long term effects on the child.

~~~
danieltillett
OK it sounds like you are actually of the belief that spanking should be rare,
rather than never. In this I agree, but I do think from personal experience
that spanking is a useful "thermonuclear" option to stop dangerous behaviour
in young children. To give you an example, I once caught one of my children at
the age of two inserting objects into electrical power points. I gave him a
good spank on the bottom and he never did it again. It is possible that
another solution would have worked, but when you are dealing with a two year
old playing with electricity do you really want to take the chance with
another options? If spanking is rare children quickly learn that to get a
spank means they have crossed a no-go threshold.

My limited personal experience of the results of disincline (of all kinds) is
that inconsistent or random discipline from a parent is worse than almost all
others. Children who live in fear of being disciplined for what appears to
them to be for no reason, or where their actual behaviour plays very little
role in affecting the discipline they experience, fair far worse. It is really
hard as a parent, but being consistent is critically important. No means no.

~~~
zappo2938
I strongly agree with this author: Spanking and Child Development: We Know
Enough Now To Stop Hitting Our Children[1]

> Spanking remains a common, if controversial, childrearing practice in the
> United States. In this article, I pair mounting research indicating that
> spanking is both ineffective and harmful with professional and human rights
> opinions disavowing the practice. I conclude that spanking is a form of
> violence against children that should no longer be a part of American
> childrearing.

My stance is consistent with the recommendations of the American Psychological
Association [2] and the American Academy of Pediatrics [3].

The issue is can we have a discussion about it without unfriending each other
on Facebook building protective bubbles.

[1][http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/)

[2][http://www.apa.org/about/policy/corporal-
punishment.aspx](http://www.apa.org/about/policy/corporal-punishment.aspx)

[3][https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-
life/family-d...](https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/family-
dynamics/communication-discipline/Pages/Where-We-Stand-Spanking.aspx)

~~~
danieltillett
Yes this is one of the reasons I spend far more time on HN than Facebook.

------
ThomPete
What most people forget about networks like Facebook (or twitter for that
matter) is that just a misinformation can spread quickly, corrections of that
information can to.

What FB have helped with is to make sure that neither newspapers nor
politicians will be able to communicate in a vacuum.

What we see now is the first steps of a more enlightened society not a dumber
one because dissent both gets normalized and much better access to minds it
didn't before.

Of course there is going to be people who think alike or people who only
befriend people who think exactly like them. But the second they want to
spread their gospel outside their groups they are going to be met with a lot
of other perspectives and thats a good thing.

------
petke
For all its faults, old fashioned broadcast media was better in a way. It
spread information to you whether you agreed with it or not. Having a strong
opinion on anything was rare, because for all you knew you where alone with
your views. You where not exposed to as many like-minded people. There wasn't
this feedback loop where you decided what information to spread on to that
group of people, and they decided what to spread back to you.

------
hussong
In Germany, vast parts of Facebook have become one big ugly hate fest. I've
read so much utterly terrible crap in the past few days (in the aftermath of
the NYE events in Germany), that I'm still sick to the stomach. People are
completely resistant to any facts contradicting their favorite narrative and
flagging is useless (moderation is a joke). Same for YouTube btw.

edit: typos

------
stn
I guess it's also amplified by the fact that people tend to accept things as
true by default, until it's proven otherwise. In other words, insertion of
data is the way cheaper then its invalidation and probably happen much more
frequently thanks to social media.

~~~
deepvibrations
Agree- I think an anonymous dislike button might help catch some of the bs
posts- I know I would certainly use it a lot on my feed! At the very least, it
would make the poster consider what they have posted in some cases and realise
that people do not agree with or trust the content within that post.

------
DanielBMarkham
Yes, everybody has always been like this, but tech has changed the social
nature of interaction. It's not just Facebook. Any online community (including
HN) has a desire to limit conflict -- you want people enjoying themselves and
contributing. That means "Don't show me stuff that I disagree with"

There's a natural conflict of interest. In the real world, we are forced to
live with and confront those of widely varying opinions. Many times this is a
huge pain in the ass. But it's good for the species overall. Over time,
initially unpopular and ugly opinions get vetted: about one in a 100/1000 turn
out to be a critical evolution in the way all of us think about ourselves.

In the virtual world, no such limits exist. We cannot afford to have the 1%
folks who destroy discourse, so we just magically make them not exist. People
share and promote emotional things which the vast majority can agree on.
Instead of the outliers driving change, we begin to norm down those farther
and farther out on the bell curve.

So people turn inward to their phones and tribes. We physically live next to
each other, but we don't actually live with each other. Instead of a diverse
and accomplished species, we are slowly becoming one large, comfortable mob.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Call me biased, but pretty much every on-line community I've seen in the past
15 years had no desire to limit disagreements. All they wanted is to get rid
of _assholes_.

It's the same on HN and on your Facebook feed, as it was on the old topical
boards and mailing lists. You can argue for any controversial position you
like _as long as_ you do this in a civil and substantial way. What ends up
happening is people getting split into two camps - those who can discuss
things in a detached way and learn from them, and assholes who just want to
call people names. Or, in terms of pg's hierarchy of disagreement[0], groups
tend to split somewhere around DH3-DH4 level.

Which is totally fine, IMO. Unfortunately most Internet denizens seem to be in
the "DH3 and below" group. What we need to figure out is how to make them
abandon their ways and join the civilized world.

[0] -
[http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html](http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html)

~~~
spydum
While I agree with you, this did have me giggling a bit: > and assholes who
just want to call people names.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I guess I need to work on my writing skills a bit more; I still tend to
quantum-tunnel into DH0 sometimes. :).

------
lugus35
What social networks bring is the explosion of the hierarchy of information
that mainstream media and politicians imposed on us for decades.

That's why a lot of media/politics criticizes social networks because it
questions their role and place in the society.

------
cronjobber
> Can anything be done?

Should anything be done?

Entertain the possibility that what is observed is not really about the
"facts," but intragroup signalling serving to maintain group cohesion.

But yeah, since we all hate those groups...

------
div0
So the study confirms that people naturally trust what their friends are
posting, which then confirms that trust is what bonds friends together.

I view Facebook as a means to strengthen existing "physical" friendship,
rather than a place to get unbiased information. So in that sense this is
neither surprising, nor detrimental. Imagine what will happen if your friends
start correcting your political views...

For less biased information, please refer to twitter. And please don't mix
Facebook friends with twitter followings.

------
y04nn
Few years ago Facebook was supposed to work with media to improve the activity
feed. But from my perspective it is just became as bad as it can be, it gives
me no relevant information and 80% of it is garbage. When close friends post
something interesting, it does not get promoted and rapidity falls in the
bottom. Filtering out noise in annoying so I end up not using Facebook as I
used to.

What describe the article is not a Facebook problem, it's an Internet problem,
Google and Youtube make you as dumb as Facebook does.

~~~
mercer
In a broader sense I'd say it's also a societal problem. Growing up in a more
traditional society as well as a Christian community, I had to deal with a
huge variety of people and opinions on a regular basis, whereas nowadays the
default is to associate with 'people I like', which tend to be people I agree
with. And because others do likewise, it's difficult to actively counteract
that, much as I try.

Of course there were some strong biases in these 'older' communities too
(views on sexuality, abortion, etc.), but generally speaking people inside
them varied greatly in political views, social class, upbringing, lifestyle,
habits, and so on. It gave a face to many opinions that I would consider
offensive or dangerous, and by extension an understanding and empathy that is
much more difficult to have these days (for me).

I fear for the future of our societies (and social safeties) in part because
of this. Changing views often starts with mutual respect, and that's much more
difficult to do when opinions get separated from those who hold them, and when
interaction is increasingly opt-in.

------
rdlecler1
I'm generally curious whether or not most people on HN still actively use
their Facebook account.

~~~
neogodless
Of course the members of _this_ tribe would certainly enjoy believing that we
are above _that_ tribe.

------
things
I'm not a facebook user but this just seems to be another article on the
filter bubble.

------
venomsnake
Being extreme in a group is signalling. Which explains the echo chambers that
form.

------
amelius
Actually, I've noticed that when people post misinformation in the form of a
link to an article, FB often has some "See also" items posted below it that
debunk the story.

------
mcs_
I understood I have less than 10 contacts in my life after closing fb 5 years
ago.

------
sjclemmy
Facebook annoys me so much, I've stopped using it. It really is like an
addiction. We've outsourced our feelings of belonging to Facebook. We want to
be careful with that.

------
meeper16
This was made true by the founder of facebook calling his own users "dumb
fucks" [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=mark%20zuckerberg%20dumb%20fucks)

------
meeper16
I've never used facebook/AOL, never plan to. I use the Internet.

------
v4n4d1s
Facebook makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. Same as with every
other technology / medium.

~~~
seanhandley
And it doesn't make dumb people smarter and smart people dumber?

~~~
mseebach
It doesn't do either of those; as always, reality is complex and doesn't boil
down to soundbite slogans.

Hacker News is making us dumber.

------
DominikR
> Once people discover that others agree with them, they become more confident
> -- and then more extreme.

And then the example plus explanation.

> Arriving at these judgments on your own, you might well hold them
> tentatively and with a fair degree of humility. But after you learn that a
> lot of people agree with you, you are likely to end up with much greater
> certainty

This mechanism is considered extreme? Why? When a lot of people agree with me
on some issue then naturally I'll be more confident in expressing my views.

So what if Facebook pairs tin foil hat wearers together so they can share
their views? I doubt that they'll start believing that they are now the
mainstream.

I suspect that the writer of this article just deeply resents the fact that
persons with out of the norm beliefs or thoughts can now effectively organise
and exchange ideas which in turn directly threatens the journalists monopoly
on creating the mainstream narrative.

It is a good thing that ideas and views from other perspectives are now widely
available online. You now can watch RT and then CNN or FOX and conclude that
basically all of these channels are just feeding us propaganda crap with
different goals.

