

Is Facebook geared to dullards? - doron
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/04/is_facebook_gea.php

======
joblessjunkie
Am I alone in feeling that this headline is self-aggrandizing snobbery?

Facebook succeeds by providing universal access: it must be a tool that anyone
can use.

Is a hammer geared to dullards? Is a coffee mug?

Just because it is simple enough for everyone to use doesn't equate to being
"geared for dullards". I know it's cool to hate on Facebook, but attacking
them for one of their key successes is absurd.

Now whether Facebook _attracts_ dullards is another matter entirely....

Edit: It's clear that the article references research which is actually
interesting and on-topic. However, I'm disappointed to see a headline like
this on HN, which both misrepresents and colors the research.

~~~
brlewis
Facebook is designed to maximize engagement. With that goal in mind, what kind
of user is more desirable? One who digs into deep issues, or one who spends
all day chatting with friends? Sure, the research doesn't say what Facebook's
intent is, but if they're seeking to maximize engagement, we can guess where
it will go.

~~~
hugh3
Is chatting with friends for dullards?

 _One who digs into deep issues_

What does that even mean? In my observation there's a few hundred people in
the world who actually "dig into deep issues". They are supplemented by about
fifty million others who _think_ they are being deep because have just taken a
freshman philosophy class and/or drugs.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Out of curiosity, which do you think you are?

~~~
hugh3
Neither. (With occasional episodes of class 2 back when I used to go to first-
year philosophy lectures, but that was twelve years ago...)

------
pstack
If I have any social networking anxiety, it's not about friend count. It's
anxiety over wasting my life catering to wannabe web personalities trying to
build a following via attention-whoring or wasting precious moments of my life
scrolling through every mundane update every idiot on my list posts when their
new baby farts (or, worse, the ultra sound images and the nine months of
constant uninteresting updates that follow).

Am I a snob for not giving a fuck about every single second of your life?
Fine. Call me a snob, then. My time is too precious to waste stuffing it full
of crap about your life. When you have something really important to say that
will mean something significant to me, then you can come tell me. Or call me.
Or email me directly. You're not the damn Daily News. You're not so important
that you need to broadcast your every thought and action to a legion of
followers. You can have direct interactions with me. One on one. And if you
can't, then whatever it is probably isn't that important in the first place.

I have the decency not to bother with Facebook or Twitter. Why? Well, I _am_ a
writer. I'm also a bit of an entrepreneur. I also value other people's time
and don't feel that every thought I have or action I take is worth sharing
with the world. Inf act, I feel that very few are. And when I do have
something of value to share, I'm not going to do it on Facebook or Twitter.
I'll do it on a website, like we've done for fifteen years and it'll have more
thought given to it than a 140 character spam of my new startup or a "so drunk
lol!" followed by seventy-eight photos of me getting wasted at a bar, like a
rookie.

~~~
ezy
I mean this in the kindest possible way -- but you're a snob. :-)

I was resistant to facebook at first, but I've found it a great way to keep in
touch. Yes, sometimes people over-share, and sometimes there is a temptation
to over-share yourself. But if you're an adult, it's easy to recognize that
and make allowances for that in other people. It's part of the human social
fabric.

And it's quite useful to be able to post vacation photos (as one example), or
blast out an update and have group comments -- it seems less isolating, and
frankly less annoying, than group email updates when your friends are
geographically separated.

Do people "collect" friends? Yes... that can happen. But like anything else,
you can use it like an adult, and play to it's advantages, rather than it's
disadvantages.

To some geeks, uninitiated social contact that doesn't make their own special
needs primary is an annoyance. But -- trust me, the resulting anger and
isolation isn't really worth the curmudgeon act. You are not that busy, you're
are probably not solving world hunger, etc... lay off the snobbery.

Now Twitter on the other hand, is a little different. Its nature is to be more
of a public platform. Something public personalities use -- and in that case,
the character limit makes something that should be deeper, much too shallow. I
use it as a headline news ticker ('cause the existing RSS tickers are less
capable than twitter clients), but don't bother following individuals.

~~~
pstack
The thing is, the signal on a social network like Facebook is not strong
enough to overcome the noise and it would require that I spend precious time
parsing through a significant amount of that noise just to reach the few rare
bits of signal. I'm not concerned about myself over-sharing, because I have at
least some reasonable sense of "is anyone going to give a damn and will this
be of any benefit to anyone whatsoever". I'm more concerned with he deluge of
other people's mundane daily lives. I don't need to be a receptacle of their
stream of consciousness and I don't need the chore of parsing through it for
anything useful.

I'm, frankly, a little offended that you are suggesting that snobbery is
involved and that it has an element of "well, your commentary doesn't my _my_
needs the priority, so it is therefore of no interest to me". That's hardly
it, at all. It's more an issue of "I don't need to be bombarded with every
trivial thought and action of your entire daily life and I would not bombard
you with the same". News shock -- you are not that important and neither am I.
And you don't need to post the constant stream of inanity to "keep in touch"
-- assuming that you even need a third party utility to "keep in touch" (isn't
that what email is for?).

For example, I finally logged into my Facebook account while posting this and
here were the most recent updates that greeted me. Note that the age of every
poster here is between 25 and 50. No, I'm not solving world hunger, but am I a
snob for saying that all of the below is a complete waste of my time and that
the only reason a person would post any of these things is that they either
have keyboard-turrettes or are some degree of attention whore?

Do _I_ have anything more significant to say with the same frequency of all
these inane posts? Do I have anything truly earth shattering and mind-bending
and enlightening that absolutely must be shared with a hundred people several
times per day? No, I don't. So I don't post. I choose not to add to the noise
that other people (presumably people that I am either close friends with or at
least vaguely associated with) have to sift through. Interesting how that
makes me a snob, rather than considerate.

* Someone posted a picture of their cat.

* Someone posted a picture of something really old in their freezer and asked if they should still eat it.

* Someone made a snarky comment about Obama.

* Several people posted links spamming projects they're doing (shows, events, etc).

* Someone posted their tarot reading (again).

* Someone said they should have been in bed an hour ago.

* Someone answered questions in some app about how tall they are.

* Someone said they saved a lot of money grocery shopping today.

* Someone liked Dial brand soap.

* Someone said the work day will never end.

* Someone said they "love being a mommy".

* Several people posted links to random stupid youtube videos.

* Several more stupid updates from apps (no matter how many you click "hide" on, there are always more).

* Someone said "that dream was different!"

* Someone made some vague drama-infused comment about their relationship or a friendship or something (I couldn't tell which).

* Someone said they can't wait for Friday.

Another way of thinking of this. I call my mom maybe once a month and talk to
her for half an hour or so. The woman who gave birth to me. The woman who
raised me. The woman who sacrificed a lot in life to make sure that I was
fortunate enough to become the person that I am today. I talk to her once a
month-ish. Just long enough to catch up on the most important things and let
her know she's important in our lives.

I would not want a running stream of every action and thought my own mom made.
Why on _earth_ would I want one every hour or two from every single friend or
associate I have. People overshare. Too much and too frequently. And too
trivially. Whatever happened to going out and having a drink and shooting the
shit with your friends? That's fine, every now and then. Keeping in touch when
something big is fine. I don't, however, need to hear from you every damn hour
on every damn thing going on. And they don't need to hear that from me,
either.

As I said, people absolutely adore talking about themselves. They are
attention-whores. They want to broadcast as much inanity and/or drama as they
possibly can to the largest audience they possibly can and it's usually a one-
way-street (though even more so on Twitter). If they had even one second of
consideration for the value of their contribution and the value of their
"friends" time, they wouldn't post nearly as much of the crap that they do.

And it's not just your buddy. Or the guy at work. Or the ex-girlfriend. Or the
random dude you met at a convention that friended you when you got back home.
It's the tech celebs. It's the tech industry darlings. It's Scoble and Kevin
Rose and everyone else. Trust me, I've considered following the twitter feeds
of some of these people. After all, they stumble on to some cool things and
have some interesting thoughts to offer. But even with these people, the level
of noise is just incredible. So much so that I stopped following any of them
ages ago and don't bother to follow anyone anymore, because I know that for
every interesting 140 characters I get from them, I'll have to pour through
many thousands of characters of trivial crap (or even meaningless crap, when
it's just semi-inside stuff between them and someone else).

My time and attention isn't more valuable than anyone else's, but that doesn't
mean that it should be wasted, either. It seems entirely reasonable to expect
people to have at least a little bit of a filter on their output with respect
for the dozens or hundreds or thousands of people that are going to be
subjected to their signal (or more often, noise) before submitting.

And yes, I realize the hypocrisy of my statement after I just sat here and
wrote about a thousand pages. Sorry.

~~~
ezy
You should have edited this down. :-) Frankly, this seems even more
condescending than what you started with and gives me a less charitable
impression.

However, I get your main points, and feel the same frustrations at times with
"social" apps, but it's never bothered me to such an extent. If someone was
bothering me that much, I'd hide them or un-friend them -- they provide that
service, you just have to have the guts to use it.

~~~
pstack
In my experience, there are very few people that fall between the two. They
are either the examples I provided above or they are, like myself, silent
until they have something to provide that is of a real contribution and not
just "I have a mouth, so I'm going to make stuff come out of it because I
can!". So it's either a flood of drivel or a silent vacuum.

I concede that social networks are not 100% noise, but the signal value is so
small that I don't see there being enough return for the amount of work needed
to whittle it down to mostly 'content'.

------
tokenadult
I have just read the fine blog post, which taught me the term "need for
cognition." Having read it, I posted a Facebook link to the blog post visible
to my 554 FB friends titled with the question, "The suggestion of one research
finding is that people who like to use social networking sites don't like
intellectual challenge. Can you think of any counterexamples?" I will see what
happens over the next several hours.

The use case I see most frequently on Facebook among my circle of FB friends
is posting links to external publications to elicit discussion--the general
use case here at Hacker News. I think people with need for cognition can learn
from Hacker News, and if they shape their Facebook friend list intentionally
they can learn from Facebook. The second person to Facebook-friend me,
connections with whom drew me into the majority of my friend list on Facebook,
is a parent I met at conferences on education of gifted children, an
occasional participant in email discussions of parenting issues and education
reform issues. Over the years I have developed a lot of email relationships
(the old-fashioned term would be epistolary friendships

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2006....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2006.tb00643.x/abstract)

for friendships maintained mostly by writing letters) with parents all over
the world who are frustrated by anti-intellectual school systems and who want
education for their children that challenges their children intellectually and
helps them learn at full speed throughout childhood. In such a friendship
environment, I encounter a lot of intellectual challenge. I have to LOOK IT UP
if I make a factual assertion that differs from what someone else thinks (much
as many people do here on HN). My friends are not screened by occupation,
place of birth, country of citizenship, political persuasion, religion, or any
other criterion but interest in pursuing learning and improving education for
everyone.

I think intellectually curious people make use of Facebook as "free riders" in
much the same way they used to make use of AOL as free riders. (This is not
even to mention the number of people who learn from HN without posting much
here.) I can well believe that many people waste a lot of time on Facebook, so
much so that my slogan in Facebook comments is "Friends don't let friends play
Facebook games," but high use of social networking sites (FB or HN) is at most
a correlate of lower intellectual engagement at the group level, rather than
lower intellectual challenge being an invariant outcome of heavy use of social
media. The study design reported in the submitted link is not an adequate
study design

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

to make the claim that all persons who use social media a lot fail to
challenge their thinking.

P.S. By the time I had finished typing this comment, I had already received a
reply to the submitted link on Facebook: "Well, I don't know people's IQ's,
but many of my friends on FB have graduate degrees and almost all of them have
bachelor degrees. I think it can provide an extra outlet for those of us who
want to have more intellectual discussions and may be limited by our day to
day/ face to face interactions." The writer of that comment is a very smart
woman now living mostly as a stay-at-home mom for her exceptionally gifted
young children (one of whom has been a pupil of mine in the mathematics
courses run by my nonprofit organization). As I just edit this comment by
adding a few more details, I see other replies challenging the assertion that
heavy users of social media are in all cases persons who avoid intellectual
challenge.

P.P.S. after further edit: A recent comment from a FB friend is "Does the fact
that there are multiple Rhodes Scholars on my friend list (and they have
regular activity...) count as data?" Of course, that friend knows that that
doesn't exactly count as data, but then another friend commented, "Perhaps the
high-NFC subjects of this particular study just couldn't find other high-NFC
friends on FB." It surely does matter how intentionally one seeds one's friend
list and how one models intellectual behavior on FB.

~~~
Leynos
What struck me as disappointing about Facebook is that, despite my friends
being an interesting bunch, I could never seem to provoke any kind of
discussion on Facebook. It seems that most of the people I had a connection
with view Facebook as a broadcast only medium (or at most, a case of comment
once then move on).

It may be wrong to generalize about the people using them, but social networks
seem to have the net effect of stifling discourse in my experience. I'm not
sure why this is, and I'd rather it wasn't the case.

------
chegra
"Are you ashamed that you find Facebook boring?"

    
    
         Why, yes.
    

"Are you angst-ridden by your weak social-networking skills?"

    
    
         My God man, you are reading my mind
    

"Do you look with envy on those whose friend-count dwarfs your own?"

    
    
         Sorry, no, you don't get 3 yes.

<http://changingminds.org/techniques/resisting/yes_yes_no.htm>

[http://changingminds.org/disciplines/sales/closing/yes-
set_c...](http://changingminds.org/disciplines/sales/closing/yes-
set_close.htm)

When I read the first couple sentences, I felt this guy was trying to sell us
something and not necessarily trying to inform us, and what do you know, he is
promoting his book at the bottom.

~~~
gruseom
Carr is a well-established and credible blogger whose position on this has
been known for a long time. He certainly hasn't crafted it to support his
book, but rather the other way around. And the post does inform us. The study
is interesting and I'm glad to hear of it.

------
jdp23
Without knowing more about the study, I'm skeptical. Back in 2009, a study
claiming that Facebook use was correlated with poor academic performance got a
lot of press. Once people looked at the data in more detail, though, a
different picture emerged --
[http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/05/01/faceboo...](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/05/01/facebook_and_ac.html)
has more.

------
trustfundbaby
The conclusion seemed a little simplistic to me, what would have been
interesting is seeing how facebook usage varies between NFC's and not-so-NFC
types. As in ... do the NFC's try to get news updates and participate more in
intellectual discussions on facebook or do they also make banal status like
the rest of the folks on facebook.

Missed opportunity.

------
michaelochurch
This is interesting. I feel like saying "Facebook is geared to stupid people"
is offensive and inaccurate, but I've definitely felt like "social"
applications have a fatal flaw, which is that they can't succeed without
getting progressively dumber over time. The early adopters of services like
Facebook and Twitter are smart, curious, technologically-adept people like HN
posters. But if the product isn't "dumbed down" a bit, it can't appeal to the
masses and can't really grow, and if it stops innovating (which is hard to do
while not growing, because VCs aren't likely to fund a product that only 5% of
the population is smart enough to use) then the smart people get bored. So, a
"social" application feels intense pressure to grow and inevitably becomes
stupider (in terms of its users) over time. Add to this the fact that dumb
people have more free time and lower standards regarding the use of it, and
the usage-weighted average IQ can easily drop below 100. Then you become
Myspace.

Facebook was built to dumb down harmlessly. It started at Harvard, then the
Ivy League, then the top 100 (or so) colleges, then all colleges, then
everyone. This was a great strategy for marketing while scaling and it worked.
How it will progress from here is unclear.

For non-"social" counterexamples, Google and Wikipedia have managed to avoid
this by taking what "social" views as a contrarian strategy: instead of trying
to suck people in and get them to spend hours on the site (which creates the
low time-weighted IQ problem) they try to get people to the information they
want as quickly as possible. Google's ideology is, "You're smart enough to
know where you want to go, we're just going to get you there." Facebook's is,
"We're going to try to suck you in to our space as long as we can."

------
jonmc12
It could very well be that the relationship between NFC and certain forms of
social interaction in general is very strong and Facebook is simply a
reflection of that.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition> cites a few surveys. Here
are some facts about NFC:

"need for cognition was related weakly and negatively to being closeminded,
unrelated to social desirability, and positively correlated with general
intelligence"
[[http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&fuseacti...](http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&fuseaction=showUIDAbstract&uid=1982-22487-001)]

"currently enrolled students high in the need for cognition expressed greater
life satisfaction than students low in the need for cognition"
[[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_2_38/ai_n6130...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_2_38/ai_n6130140/)]

"People high in the need for cognition are more likely to form their attitudes
by paying close attention to relevant arguments (i.e., via the central route
to persuasion), whereas people low in the need for cognition are more likely
to rely on peripheral cues, such as how attractive or credible a speaker is"
[wikipedia]

"people who are high in the need for cognition scale score slightly higher in
verbal intelligence tests but no higher in abstract reasoning tests"
[wikipedia]

"Research has concluded that individuals high in NFC are less likely to
attribute higher social desirability to more attractive individuals or to
males" [wikipedia]

"The need for cognition is unrelated to social dominance orientation."
[[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3852/is_200101/ai_n8...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3852/is_200101/ai_n8949421/)]

~~~
gojomo
Sounds almost like "need for cognition" has a big overlap with simply
"introverted".

~~~
adriand
I don't see where you're getting that conclusion from, based on the items in
the comment you're responding to. The chief conclusion about the social
interactions of high-NFC people seems to be that they care more about the
quality of arguments when being persuaded than the attractiveness of the
arguer.

~~~
gojomo
Taking the Carr and Wikipedia 'high NFC' qualities together, don't you see a
description of people who often prefer thinking deeply to themselves over
superficial smalltalk and other group social 'grooming' activities?

Compare 'high NFC' with 'introverted' as described by this famous "Caring for
your Introvert" article:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-f...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-
for-your-introvert/2696/)

------
Tycho
I want to know if they asked reliable questions like 'how many friends do you
have', or ones which people are prone to lie about like 'how much time do you
spend on facebook per week?' Maybe the 'NFC' people are just more willing to
admit how much time they really waste on FB.

------
tejaswiy
NFC = Need for cognition. SNS = Social network site.

"The key finding," the authors write, "is that NFC played an important role in
SNS use. Specifically, high NFC individuals tended to use SNS less often than
low NFC people, suggesting that effortful thinking may be associated with less
social networking among young people." Moreover, "high NFC participants were
significantly less likely to add new friends to their SNS accounts than low or
medium NFC individuals."

Seriously? Correlation, Causation etc? Nothing to do with intelligence or the
need for cognition here IMO. If you have good social skills, then you're
better of on FB too. ( _)

_ = Anecdotal evidence.

~~~
luu
It seems like you're using a colloquial meaning of the phrase "need for
cognition", but it has a specific well defined meaning in psychology (see the
link in the blog post for a brief description, or Cacioppo, Feinstein, and
Jarvis PB 1996, 197-253 for a deeper description). Whether or not NFC measures
anything meaningful, and whether or not a single scale factor is sufficient
for account for NFC are possibly valid objections, but that it doesn't sound
like using facebook requires cognition isn't. That's actually the point.
Here's a correlation between NFC and some behavior that isn't particularly
cognitively intensive.

As for the criticism that it's correlation and not causation, NFC has been
shown to be relatively stable, so it's extraordinarily unlikely to be the case
that facebook usage lowers NFC. It's possible there's an unknown confounding
variable, but no one's going to look into that until a correlation's been
established, so it's unfair to attack this study for establishing the link
which may get other people to study this more deeply.

~~~
Alex3917
Does NFC actually correlate with anything? I'm curious to see what (if
anything) my score means, but all the papers I'm seeing are behind pay walls.

------
paulnelligan
I'm not sure if facebook is geared to dullards, or if it just dulls the mind
...

~~~
michaelochurch
Almost everyone uses it, but I'm guessing that dumb people spend more time on
it. Smart people use it to get in touch with people they haven't seen in a
while, whereas dumb people spend 25 hours per week throwing sheep.

~~~
chadp
Or smart people don't use facebook.

~~~
michaelochurch
I doubt this. A lot of smart people use it, just not very often or for very
much of their day. It's at risk of ending up with the same problem as online
dating sites: the average user of one of those sites is a decent, normal
person... but the defects spend 20 times as much time (and send 50 times as
many messages) on them as everyone else.

~~~
paulnelligan
that's where the 'remove from friends' option comes in very handy...

------
protomyth
I see studies like this and am prone to think ill of them (or the people
reporting the results). The sample is "436 college students". This is not
really a statistically sound number or demographic slice given the Facebook's
current numbers. Also, it seems to have one of those "1 + 1 = cheese" moments
in associating simple, behavior, and dullard (which came first "simplifying
Facebook or the dullard?").

law of social networks or events: everything was cool when I first got here,
but adding the guy after me screwed it up.

~~~
jleader
Keep in mind that as much psychology research as possible is done with college
students as subjects. After all, requiring your Psych 101 freshmen to fill out
a questionnaire is a lot easier, quicker, and cheaper than recruiting a wider
range of subjects.

And your "law of social networks" also applies to real-world immigration.

~~~
protomyth
yeah - it applies to a lot of group dynamics. Working and growing up on a
reservation tends to skew my views on immigration.

I had to deal with a lot of studies a decade ago and am not very happy when I
see crud like this. It filters into the political arena and some really stupid
policies come from this crud (Look at any gun violence study and map its
participant's locations or check demos on a lot of polls taken in Florida).
The sound bite is more important than the procedure.

------
jradakov
Wow. It seems like this research hurt the feelings of some Facebook users. I
see Facebook's utility, but I fail to care. The people I care about are
already in my life - daily. I see no use in staying abreast of what people I
otherwise would not communicate with are currently up to.

------
nextparadigms
Facebook is becoming more boring every day, though. I've never really used it
that much, but I have friend who have, and they are starting to quit it and
ignore their accounts because it's becoming boring and spammy.

~~~
lotusleaf1987
The signal to noise has grown much louder. 25 friends in 2005 was worth about
2000 now. I liked it a ton in college when it was just for college students,
but now it just seems awkward to talk to everyone you've ever met in your life
in one social space. That should only happen at weddings and funerals.

------
jeffere
This is kind of a shallow assessment in itself. I'm a social butterfly, let me
spread my wings and network! Trivial little snippets of life between me and my
best friends, extended social circle and local arts scene all amount to a
conveniant and rewarding way to passively share time with friends.

------
Apocryphon
Is Myspace geared to dullards? Is Friendster geared to dullards? Is email
geared to dullards? Is the written word geared to dullards? Is chiseling
glyphs geared to dullards? Is cave painting geared to dullards?

------
Mizza
Facebook is AOL.

------
ignifero
So, who 's feeling bad, and who's feeling good about yourselves now? I feel
good. I have some genius friends on fb who never post. It s the inherent
antisocial nature of creative ppl I guess

------
yaarg
In other news, snow is white.

