
The more you use Facebook, the worse you feel (2017) - thtthings
https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel
======
ken
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 go
and find success, others will follow. It's a positive feedback loop. In
hindsight, did we really think the virtual world would scale _less_ well than
the physical one?

Social media is terrible, and also great. The worst thing I can say about it
is perhaps: it's easy. And like anything in modern life that's easy, it brings
out the worst in us. We've reached the point where large swaths of people can
spend all day doing easy, nonproductive things, and it's not good for the
individual or society. We want things to be easy, but we don't do well when
they are.

~~~
Super_Jambo
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.

~~~
ken
I think we're saying essentially the same thing, just with different words and
from different perspectives.

Being easy is the very problem with addiction. It's not merely spending an
excessive amount of time on some activity. People talk about being "addicted"
to, say, running marathons, but nobody views that in the same way they do
gambling or alcohol addiction.

------
01100011
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.

~~~
debrice
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?

~~~
siquick
>> 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.

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

~~~
HenryBemis
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...](https://www.theodysseyonline.com/if-youre-not-losing-friends-
youre-not-growing-up)

------
ajxs
I stopped using any kind of social media five or so years ago, and I've never
looked back. I have a bare bones profile with no personally identifiable
information on one particular social network so I can keep in touch with a few
people who are interstate, but I never browse the public site. My fears that I
would lose touch with people close to me were unfounded. It may be a platitude
to say that the people who don't make the extra effort to contact you aren't
your real friends, but it is true. I lost touch with many people, but not with
anyone who mattered to me. My real friendships all endured. The impetus for my
exodus from social media was the realisation that my online activities weren't
a reflection of my real life persona, but was directly affecting it. I
realised that by using these mediums in the manner that was intended I ( and
so many others ) was beginning to engage in what I would call dysfunctional,
histrionic behaviour. I came to the realisation that the person that I want to
be does not do this kind of thing, and I was completely right.

Not only do I disavow Facebook on moral grounds for the political implications
of their overreach, but I think that it is a product engineered to prey on
human insecurity and profit by perpetuating dysfunctional, harmful behaviour.

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

~~~
remarkEon
I think there's something about interacting with visual depictions of other
human beings that makes the other "real" social networks much different than
HN - what's essentially a pseudo anon message board that has well defined
rules about interactions on the platform (that are easily enforceable but more
importantly well known and easy to describe). We generally come in here to
talk about tech (or tech adjacent things), and we know what we're getting when
we come in here. The people are (usually!) well informed and the discussion
classy and highbrow.

That's not an accident, and neither is what Facebook's doing.

Facebook, and Instagram especially (but I repeat myself), absolutely do prey
on the visual. It's hard for me to put into words what I'm describing (heh)
but I do think visual depictions trigger latent or dormant responses in us
that are too easy to manipulate and control.

------
ubercow13
Does this still hold up? 95% of my facebook feed is now shared posts that
aren’t related to things my friends are doing, and are often posts about
products. There is almost nothing I see on facebook that invites social
comparison with my facebook friends any more.

~~~
dkarl
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.

------
kevingadd
One interesting trade-off here is that modern Facebook intentionally hides
posts from your friends and family, often important ones. See
[https://twitter.com/Hellchick/status/942863353403150336](https://twitter.com/Hellchick/status/942863353403150336)
for one big example. I can imagine this selective filtering having a big
impact on mood, and it seems like they were already doing it back in 2017.
Maybe it's connected with FB's previous research on how to manipulate users'
moods (positively or negatively) with timeline biasing and filtering?

------
moron4hire
I've noticed recently that very few people in my circles on Facebook seem to
be sharing their own posts. Mostly it's resharing another article of some
kind, one they probably found through an ad on Facebook itself. So between the
ads Facebook sends me, and the ones my friends forward on, literally 90% of my
feed is ads.

------
schiavi
I have been working in this problem space for the past year or so developing a
new kind of social media that I think has some merits. Take away the
advertisement model, the public nature of discourse, and replace it with
meaningful context-driven one-on-one conversation and I think we might have
something. My platform can take any topic and disseminate a discussion to as
many one-on-one conversations as people who are willing to participate.
[https://www.confidist.com](https://www.confidist.com) \-- Would appreciate it
if anyone wants to take a look at the current build. Cheers -Nicholas

~~~
bjornsteffanson
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.

~~~
schiavi
I hear you. Overtime the gamification systems have been deemphasized as my
assumptions in that area have been proven incorrect. The way users earn a
badge currently is by completing virtual events thrown by various communities
on the platform. The idea being, I wanted some kind of incentive for users who
otherwise aren't interested in certain communities or topics to participate in
them and to encourage each community to be inviting to the greater Confidist
population. Those "rewards" will be changed from being based on completion to
being granted by "any" participation in those events. I want to see how that
iteration goes. I think without something along these lines the natural self
selection around echo chambers is far too great. I think the next step will be
to remove leaderboards but allow for these badges to be viewed possibly when
interacting with individual users, but not shown globally. Thanks for sharing
your thoughts, much appreciated.

------
jammygit
> Our approach had three strengths that set it apart from most of the previous
> work on the topic. First, we had three waves of data for many of our
> respondents over a period of two years.

I don’t honestly think that 2 years is a meaningful time span to measure how a
tech changes people’s lives. It is certainly better than a single snapshot,
but some effects take time to manifest - it’s simple behaviourism. More
changes require more repetitions.

Edit:

> Second, we had objective measures of Facebook use, pulled directly from
> participants’ Facebook accounts, rather than measures based on a person’s
> self-report.

What about twitter, Instagram, and whatever else people use?

This study design also cannot show causation, just correlation. The control
group is self selecting

~~~
anthony_doan
[https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/3/203/2915143](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.

------
ineedasername
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.

~~~
theNJR
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.

~~~
mceachen
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/](https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/)

Disclaimer: I'm the founder.

~~~
ineedasername
Okay, it's interesting, but a few questions:

How do you manage the "forever" part with a cloud service that could go away?

How is this not just "dropbox, but only for photos"?

~~~
mceachen
> How do you manage the "forever" part with a cloud service that could go
> away?

It's software that _you_ run, on _your hardware_. Currently there's a desktop
installer for win/mac/linux (so people can try it out easily on their laptop
or whatever), but I'm building a multiarch Docker image that runs on a
droplet/ec2 micro/NAS/raspberry pi.

I run it for my family off of a rpi 4 sitting in an external 10tb USB drive,
plugged into my router.

The external drive gets grabbed in case of fire/earthquake, but also gets
backed up to backblaze for offsite backup.

> How is this not just "dropbox, but only for photos"?

Dropbox is a file synchronization service.

* You view your files by folder

* Files can only live in one folder

* There's no automatic organization of your files

PhotoStructure is designed to make browsing _millions_ of photos and videos
fun and easy, and effortless.

* Best-of-class metadata extraction and inference

* Automatic organization and tagging of your photos and videos based on that metadata

* Hierarchical tagging, with random "tastes" of what's in that tag (or child tags)

* Automatic, best-of-class "asset variation" merging (so when you have a RAW and JPEG version of an image, along with a Apple Photos resized preview, and a Google Photos takeout, they all are considered to be variants of the same asset).

* Cross-platform, cross-file-system support (so if you plug in an external hard drive and it automatically mounts to a different path, the files on that volume are considered equivalent).

* All viewed through a webapp and image delivery system that's built to be delightful and responsive even on low-powered servers and low-powered mobile devices

~~~
ineedasername
I'm honestly not criticizing, I think I'm just missing something here. It
seems like a good service in the interface offered, but where are the photos
actually stored? Am I correctly interpreting this to mean that there's no
cloud involved, everything runs off your own computer? Is anything accessible
from another computer?

~~~
mceachen
No problem! It's not a traditional SaaS website, nor traditional desktop app,
so I need to some practice with describing it so it's clear to people.

PhotoStructure runs on a computer you own, or in the cloud, on a computer you
rent. That could be a laptop you have, or a home server, your NAS, or a
digitalocean droplet.

Your photos need to be available to that computer when they are imported into
your library, either by being on a local hard drive, or mounted from a network
fileshare.

Once your photos and videos are imported, the library can be moved or copied
to other computers (say, rsync'ed to your droplet). Original photos and videos
aren't required.

The PhotoStructure interface is via html/css. It runs a web server that is
only available to localhost by default, but there are tools (like localtunnel
and trycloudflare) that lets you access your library from any device that has
internet access. I'm still building out multi-user support, but a library
"owner" has full r/w access, and a "visitor" may see predetermined album
contents

~~~
ineedasername
Awesome! I signed up.

------
randomsearch
I find it strange that people consider HN to be social media. For me, social
media is synonymous with manipulation engines designed to keep you engaged in
order to sell advertising. HN isn’t selling advertising, it isn’t trying to
addict you. Maybe ten years ago “social media” just meant “interacting with
others online” but I think language has moved on.

I don’t like placing HN in the same bracket, because it devalues it. It would
be like labelling your local vegan restaurant “junk food” and treating it like
McDonalds. Lots of work has gone into actively making HN _not_ like that, and
it devalues that effort and the genuine efforts of posters to maintain civil
discourse.

~~~
ubercow13
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.

------
shakna
Worth pointing out that how you feel when using Facebook will also change, not
just with environmental and other personal factors, but always with how
Facebook chooses to respond to you.

Facebook has had at least one experiment in the past to change how the user
feels, and it was A-B tested, not run against everyone. [0]

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-
tinke...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-
users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html)

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14082130](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14082130)

------
tim333
Though this study is better it still doesn't really seem to distinguish cause
and effect. ie is it

\- your real social life sucks so you spend time on facebook, or

\- facebook causes your life to suck?

From personal experience I find more the first one. You could try an
experiment where you persuade participants to be chosen at random to either
spend much longer on facebook or much less so the change would just be
facebook usage rather than other life factors?

------
ekanes
This study shows that they are correlated, but not necessarily causation. It
could EASILY be that people feeling worse use Facebook more.

------
shikharja
> Although we can show that Facebook use seems to lead to diminished well-
> being

How do you define "diminished well-being"?

------
magerleagues
I'd be interested to know if there have been any studies like this that focus
on Instagram.

------
crispinb
Well this is how capitalism is supposed to work - the creation of disvalues to
motivate consumption. You degrade environments so people have to buy posh
housing to insulate themselves from physical reality. Etc. Ultimately (social
media) you degrade human attention to reduce people's freedom to evade trivial
commercial blandishments.

Happy populations would be a catastrophe for capitalism.

------
wfbarks
Does the article establish a causal link?

~~~
ovi256
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.

------
felipelalli
It isn't necessary a study to conclude that. Captain obvious!

