

Facebook is the 21st century tech equivalent of cigarettes - oznathan
http://oznathan.quora.com/Facebook-is-the-21st-century-tech-equivalent-of-cigarettes-And-now-I-can-finally-prove-it

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graeme
This is consistent with my anecdotal experience. People talk about Facebook as
something that gives no satisfaction, but they do anyway.

Facebook also has some extraordinary benefits, so it's hard to quit. I meet
more people when I travel, I've made new friends in town, and I met my
favourite author as a result of his Facebook presence.

But that's 1% of my time on Facebook. The other 99% is pure waste. But
something about it makes it very hard to go in, take care of what I intend to,
and leave. I don't have the same trouble with most sites.

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kken
"How to quit XXX" can mean many things.

* Smoking: How to stop a nicotine additiction

* Alcohol: How to stop an alcohol additiction

* Vi: How to end the program once you have started it out of curiosity. (Hint: Kill process from another console and never look back)

* Facebook: How to find the hidden options to erase your account and data.

The pretense of the article is a bit idiotic, but I am not sure it is to be
taken at face (haha) value.

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Atroxide
And this article is the 21st century article equivalent of cigarettes.. Both
will give you cancer.

First off, he uses his personal google results, in incognito mode you wouldn't
get these results (and you don't get anything related to facebook at all with
this search query). Second, the term "How to quit facebook" isn't the same as
"How to quit smoking" since "How to quit facebook" could be asking how to
delete an account (which has nothing to do with addiction.) Third, there is a
bias towards technology when using google search, things dealing with
technology and especially the web will ALWAYS be higher up than searches
relating to physical things, you can't use frequency of web searches as any
type of statistic when comparing between a web based search and a physical
based search.

So basically, this article is just as cancerous as cigarettes. Take it with a
(HUGE) grain of salt.

~~~
teebrz
The Google search is only mentioned once in passing in the text, and in the
image.

Their argument is based on the number of users/groups on lift. This is of
course, also pretty flimsy - but I don't think its being presented as
scientifically rigorous; just as an observation that many people are trying to
give up Facebook (and apparently having some trouble).

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thewarrior
Its become fashionable to bash Facebook but comparing it to cigarettes is a
bit extreme.

People need something to waste their time. Real life can get very bland at
times. If Facebook didnt exist its not as if people would suddenly start self
actualizing , writing novels and building companies. They'd probably be
watching TV. We all need to turn our brains off for a few hours every day.

Till recently it was television and now its Facebook. But its way better as it
is interactive and ties into the basic human need to gain the approval of
others.

Those who profit are the ones who recognize these basic human needs and tap
into them.

HN is the same thing but targeted at nerds. But the basic flow is the same.
Its mindless and effortless , offering just enough novelty that you don't get
bored.

People criticize things like Facebook and Farmville for being mindless and
dull. But thats precisely why they're popular. Its an endless stream of slight
novelty for very little effort. We need novelty and creating it ourselves can
take too much effort. At the end of a long day our brains are just too tired.

Thats why we have Michael Bay Movies , Chick Lit and Twilight.

In the days before TV and electricity, alcohol and drugs may have been one of
the ways to unwind and maybe in a weird way that validates OPs thesis.

I use Facebook mainly for the chat feature. Facebook turns acquaintances into
friends and though some people dislike this ,for me its a big plus. It keeps
me in touch with people who share common interests whom I wouldnt get to meet
as often in real life.

Also Facebook is a gateway drug to participating in other online communities
and realizing the power of people forming groups over the internet.

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scotchmi_st
Addiction is quite a vague word, and gets mistreated. It isn't a good word
when we're considering whether continue with a particular behaviour. Instead,
we should just be looking at whether something has a negative impact on the
individual. Smoking is generally thought to have a overall negative impact on
a person, and those around them, mostly as it significantly increases their
chance of death. To some degree it's possible that someone who spends their
whole day on Facebook wouldn't have time for more important activities, and
would see some bad outcomes there. But those people aside, using facebook has
a lot of very beneficial social effects, such as allowing friends who don't
see each other very often to stay in contact. I think the effects of using
Facebook are a net positive.

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hornbaker
He really should have used an incognito browser window for his Google "how to
quit..." autocomplete example (facebook, smoking, vim, drinking), as it's
apparently biased from his own browsing habits.

Going incognito in Chrome, the list is quite different (smoking, a job, your
job, smoking weed):
[http://i.imgur.com/wsH60zm.png](http://i.imgur.com/wsH60zm.png)

Which makes me curious: does everyone else see the same list in Chrome
incognito, or is Google doing some tracking by IP / browser fingerprint?

(Someone should build GoogleCounselor.com, an automated service to tell you
what your bad habits are.)

~~~
oznathan
I have never googled anything related to quitting facebook, cigarettes,
drinking nor vim. I don't even know what vim is.

But it would have been better to search in incognito mode.

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croisillon
As a non-smoker currently reading Allen Carr's "Easyway" in order to find a
solution against my procrastination problem, I completely understand the
parallel but I don't agree. Facebook might be OP's habit to kill time but this
works equally good with any Twitter, Reddit, or even HN. The problem (for
addicts) is that those websites constantly stream some short new items, easily
read, easily forgotten. It's the same dynamic indeed as going for a smoke
instead of doing some work but it's not exclusive to facebook and facebook is
not killing you.

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vezzy-fnord
I lost it at the idea that there are more poor souls trying to figure out how
you exit from vi[m] than there are alcoholics looking for advice on quitting.

Alternatively, one could argue that using vi[m] is equivalent to a harmful
addiction and the only cure is Emacs.

Otherwise, the issue is more accurate when you do 's/Facebook/web/'.

~~~
dasil003
Everything you said here exactly mirrors my response to this article. I
understand intellectually how addictive Facebook is, but for me personally
it's nowhere near as addictive as HN, or countless other intellectual stimuli
on the web.

But the addiction is more like a food addiction than cigarettes, because I
need to consume a certain amount for my career. It's just a question of
reigning in excess and focus when I need it.

