This reminds me of an experiment I started about 6 years ago.
I was getting a little sick of the quality of the stuff Facebook was showing me, so I started fresh. I deleted my account, added back all my friends... but I didn't join any groups or like any pages. Even the ones my friends invited me to.
Then, I started hiding and blocking anything that didn't come from one of my friends directly. That includes stuff they shared from pages or other friends of theirs. I also started managing the advertisers who had shared lists using any of my contact information (FB has a dashboard for that) and leaving 1-star reviews for all of them.
This had hilarious effects on Facebook itself. After about a year of this, sometimes the newsfeed couldn't find stuff to show me, and it even completely broke a few times. Group recommendations started to veer towards substance abuse recovery support (I assume many people create new accounts to join them anonymously). Facebook would insist on showing me stuff from pages or friends of friends even after I hid them, because it seems I had blocked so much stuff their filters were not working right anymore. Not that they actually care.
Of course, the fun I had breaking Facebook doesn't change the fact that this was a huge chore that I mostly kept doing out of spite and habit. When I realized I wasn't even using the platform to keep up with old friends anymore, I realized it was time to let go.
The only FB product I keep using is WhatsApp, and it's only because I failed at convincing my friends and family to move to Signal, Telegram or Discord. It has too much of a stronghold in my country.
This reminds me that the opposite behavior—deliberately engaging the platform in unexpected ways—also produces weird results.
On platforms with less personalized or at least personalized content which is more stable over small time windows, I often like to “reward” ads for things I find reprehensible by clicking them to cost them that fraction of a cent. If I do this on Facebook my feed instantly becomes an ever weirder and increasingly crowded view into the thing I disingenuously clicked. It happens almost instantly, and occupies nearly all of my feed for at least a few days, even up to a couple weeks.
Granted my FB usage is pretty minimal, I mostly post pics of my pup at night and check in to see the usual few reactions in the morning. So my own profile is based only on historical usage and whatever I haven’t been able to block/avoid them collecting on the web. Even so, that profile should be drastically unlikely to be interested in the deluge of ads it surfaces. I find it annoying every time, but I still sometimes click the bullshit, just to see how absurd everything gets so rapidly.
"clicking them to cost them that fraction of a cent."
ahahah, I remember when I tried some paid advertising on facebook for my game, 2 weeks later I visited my mother proudly saying :
- 'Me and my friends see a lot of your commercial on FB, we click on it every time to help you !'
- 'Please stop doing that !'
It costed a lot more than a fraction of a cents by click :p but I putted a low amount and I assume prices are degressives.
> I failed at convincing my friends and family to move to Signal, Telegram or Discord.
Mostly to others reading this, but please don't spend effort trying to move people to other walled gardens. This just guarantees you need to do it again and multiplies the effort required to get people to move to a protocol instead.
To others reading this: Please do spend as much effort as humanly possible to move people away to ANYTHING other than whatsapp. Signal is great, but anything other than a property owned and operated by facebook will help weaken them, which is better for the entire earth.
Both Signal and WhatsApp are walled gardens and having watched overlords who control these apps I might consider Zuck & Co to be more flexible if I must pick one.
A lot of those people had actually installed Signal. I had convinced them. When things broke, features were missing I just couldn’t tell them what to do. Never again.
But in the process of trying to bring them to Signal, I actually understood why my friends and family (many of them are from remote villages; educated or barely educated) prefer WhatsApp — because they “can actually use” WhatsApp and connect to others unlike anything else!
You know how big that is? That trumps everything Sugnal has to offer and it doesn’t offer much to begin with. Element/Vector/Riot/or whatever they’ll name it next isn’t even in that league and it’s good it is not even trying to be an usable person to person individual chat app/service.
Though I wish they used Telegram (yeah yeah, E2E is opt-in). It’s just too superior an app! Too good. But they don’t. So WhatsApp it is.
I'm all aboard the moxie has some incredibly bad rationalizations every time signal adds another sketchy feature train, but what makes you say facebook is better?
Also element works just fine, especially compared to the massive issues facebook messenger has had over the years.
Just don't sign up to any of the biggest three once the protocol reaches mass adoption, and that's not a problem because you can always leave without losing the ability to communicate if someone does something shady, and your private data is private.
Additionally having a long tail with 30-70% of the users makes it impossible to buy. And you probably don't even have to go that far, just not using element is probably enough to prevent matrix from trying it even if they wanted to (which it's clear they don't because they make it easy to leave).
We don't have to 'leave email' or 'leave tcp/ip' every few years because the TOS requires handing over your firstborn or because http is running experiments to see how many people will commit suicide. The idea is borderline-incoherent.
I did the exact opposite with Facebook. The social feed is useless for me, but other features like the ability to browse local events, or the marketplace, drew me back.
I created a new account with a fake name and denied every friend suggestion, but I have joined some groups. The groups are great and don't have the same draw for endless scrolling.
But the events section, there's nothing like it. Lots of free, family events are only advertised through FB, and I will usually spend a few minutes a week finding interesting things to take my kids to over the weekend
I tried that, at least until the supposed quality of FB Market placed seemed to average out to Gumtree/Craigslist levels.
It had some odd results - for a long time, it would only suggest accounts from central Africa as potential friends. Then it quite suddenly switched to likely-looking people from my own country, and scarily interspersed with people that I really did know.
Yet, i still appreciate Fb? why? it has an uncanny ability to group together likeminded individuals. No need to read tabloids, get your junk food pushed to your phone.
"Encrypted messages from WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram are decrypted as they pass across the bridge. The bridge operates in EMS’ trusted environment, with no content scanning or datamining. Bridges will be end-to-end encrypted in the future, but aren’t today."
which defeats the point of why I would choose whatsapp or signal over anything else.
I also undertook a similar experiment, except I would report ads as abusive. My account was eventually banned for using a fake name, even though my name wasn't fake. I could never get through to a real human. To this day, my account is under review. I lost a few friends who I could only contact via FB.
This explains a lot. About 2 years ago my feed suddenly began to be filled with posts from random pages I had followed. Some I had followed a decade ago and had not seen a post from in years. BTW, when I say filled I mean filled. Literally like 30 page posts with maybe one IRL friend or family post showing up in-between.
It got so bad that to actually see the family photos and announcements I cared about I had to manually unsubscribe from almost every page I had ever followed. I guess I'll never know for sure but I'm going to guess "boosting" was to blame?
Once you unfollow every page, they'll start bombarding you with "suggested" posts from pages. There's no way to get away from them anymore. It's how they're able to sneak in their overwhelming amount of advertising.
Well, you can just stop using Facebook. This is basically what I’ve done, because I can’t stand the ridiculously low signal to noise ratio. 90% if the content on FB is content I have no interest in, and I am just not willing to wade through it to get to the parts I am.
It would be nice if we could evacuate walled-garden social media platforms and return to individual websites/blogs + RSS. RSS clients that empower the user to follow, sort, filter, and control their "news feed" of content from individual websites/blogs.
I would love this, or something like it, but I don't think it can happen until hosting is effectively free and managing it is dead easy.
Not everyone has access to a $100 server, reliable power, and unmetered internet, let alone the knowledge and time to be their own sysadmin.
What if organizations in a position to do so, from mobile phone operators to ISPs to public libraries, provided some basic level of content hosting with standardized content management APIs? People with the means and motivation could host their own, but most people wouldn't have to. Perhaps that could pave the way for universal front-end tools and independence from the social media giants?
Related: It looks like someone is trying to address the issue by layering a social media experience atop an existing distributed messaging system (Matrix): https://www.kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/
The problem is the network effect IS the game. Without it, you can have a perfectly functional but essentially useless social media application. MeWe comes to mind for me. I thought it would be a perfect Facebook replacement. I thought wrong. With a user community in the mere hundreds of thousands (last I checked) virtually nobody you know is on MeWe, even though technically they have all the bells and whistles Facebook does, and they pledge not to sell your information.
Recently I came upon the the phrase "cloud repatriation", which seemed
a fresh angle on a word that's fallen on hard times.
Evacuate! Yes we need a Dunkirk for those helpless souls left on the
beaches of Facebook. The idea that they're going to swim, one by one,
back the safety of personal web pages is silly.
Part of the fun of MySpace was customizing your page with backgrounds, music, moving your top 10 friends around, etc. I sometimes think there is a niche market for this kind of social media again, adapted for mobile devices.
I don't use any social media and I've found that many businesses at least neglect their website and quite understandably resort to posting on social media. The few local news sites that I use usually will have an article about a business or a news story and then link to instagram or twitter rather than their website.
I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything but the usefulness of the web lessens year over year. Now that the platforms have locked down even viewing an instagram or twitter fee without an account I almost wish I could just get rid of all links pointing to them.
The easiest thing would be to give in an make an account but I'm too stubborn ha.
During the pandemic lockdowns I found that reactivating my Facebook account was the best way to figure out if a shop did still exist and how they changed their opening hours ... websites unmaintained all in the walled garden. And looking at my "news feed" reminded me that I don't really miss anything from there.
I don't agree with that and think you should reconsider. There are only so many hours a day for most small businesses and they get the most out of social media compared to their website plus theirs a strong chance they themselves or their employees can use instagram compared to something like squarespace.
I have no moral obligation to support social media companies (who I have serious ethical issues with) simply because there are businesses who choose to use them as their sole communications platforms.
In my experience, RSS isn't close to the level of widespread high quality support it had in the early "web2.0" days on the server side - picking an RSS client even with the demise of Google Reader hasn't been my issue with RSS in recent years anyway, its just the content isn't there anymore like it once was.
People I want to follow don't have the technical chops to self-host. One can say it's sad, but I think it's worse that one needs technical chops to self-host.
Come up with a way for anyone to publish content from their phone, with no subscription, and no need for an always-on server, and you'll have the basis for something less centralized.
Tumblr's owned by Automattic now, and they're throwing in some Indieweb features ([this] doesn't look official, but it actually is!). It also has proper RSS. Using a platform like that rather than a totally closed one like FB seems to me like a step up.
Your mileage may vary, but I only ever wanted RSS feeds that provide the actual article content. Just spitting out a feed of links back to the site with headlines is not how I or many others used RSS and RSS readers wayback when. Full article feeds have all but died out now anyway, another nail in the RSS coffin for me.
That's my issue as well with the RSS feeds I use. None of them are full article feeds anymore. These sorts of RSS feeds are a way I can still centralize my feed data, even though they isn't true offline copies. I think this has to do with monetization and wanting to change the text of pages ad-hoc.
It's of course monetization. Everyone jumped on giving away their content via RSS/public APIs in the early rush to web2.0 style standards, then of course retreated from that position when it became clear directing eyeballs to the actual site and keeping those eyeballs there for as long as possible was required to maximize ad revenues, especially for sites giving away written content. The only full content feeds that really survive are the occasional blog or site that offers it as a bonus to paying subscribers.
No worries. I did this search on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=axios+rss I've found this helps to find these sorts of feeds that don't easily show on the site's themselves.
How do you call it when the platform replaces the social network?
80% of the content is created to acquire relevance in/to the platform not to create or consolidate meaningful relationships.
My thoughts are to get rid of the "network" effect.
IE have a DNS where anyone can register whatever they like. That way you can send a message direct to your friend's phone with no middleman.
My invariably naïve thoughts on the SuperSimpleSecretsServer:
- Alice generates 2 publicPrivate key pairs. 1 for the SSSS and 2 for their own use.
- Alice contacts SSSS with PublicKey1.
- SSSS responds with randomstring.
- Alice privatekey1 encrypts the random string and privateKey2 encrypts her IPv6 address and sends both to SSSS.
- SSSS authenticates and stores the encrypted-IPv6-blob against that publickey.
Bob does same.
Alice and Bob exchange (PublicKey1 and PublicKey2) however they do. Alice and Bob can now query SSSS for IPv6 of the respective key(aka person they want to talk to) whenever they want.
But I honestly don't know much about crypto, security, scaling, routing, replication, who'd run it etc etc etc. I just plain don't know much....
1. the focus is still on human readable names and converting that to an IP.
2. the IP address seems plain text to anyone who requests it. Not a key encrypted blob.
So. Not really like what I was describing at all. Maybe it could be tweaked to behave like I wish and it could solve the other aspects of such a service already.
There are some Video presentations to GNUNet and the newest one on the GNS subcomponent mentions "Record confidentiality" - Values in the Table are signed and encrypted by the zone owner. To query a zone you'd first have to get the key of the zone owner, accomplishing what you requested, right?
I think this cannot be done with IP/TCP because of the reliance on each individual to pay for both active web servers and some kind of DNS config. It's possible to imagine other protocols that could force at least text messaging to flow over other networks. Simple text, over a simpler network protocol, might be possible. The governments could potentially force all cable companies to support it, as a requirement of being licensed. That would allow something like the text exchange that universities enjoyed in the 1980s, when the Internet was confined to universities and subsidized by the Nation Science Foundation. Or, for that matter, the government could directly subsidize something similar. But I think the protocol would have to be simpler. Just plain text, I think.
Merely keeping the current system, but wishing consumers would use it differently, is a utopian dream that is unlikely to come true. You need to look at why consumers behave the way in the current system, and then you have to imagine a different system, and that different system cannot look anything like IP/TCP/UDP.
We currently have like 8,000 RFCs. We've designed the world's most flexible system. It is very complex. I think you'd need a system simple enough that you could specify the whole thing in a 50 page document. That kind of simplicity. The simplicity should allow it to be cheap, and therefore easy to subsidize, either by the government or out of the profits of cable or phone or network companies.
> I think this cannot be done with IP/TCP because of the reliance on each individual to pay for both active web servers and some kind of DNS config.
You can pay someone for that, somewhere around the order of $5 a month, probably less, or free but ad-supported.
And that's more or less what Facebook is, except we pay with our data and attention on the back end rather than our dollars up front. The product might be rather different if we did pay in dollars, and for that reason I suspect digital protocols aren't the fundamental problem.
Every time this conversation comes up, someone on Hacker News says "You can pay someone for that, it only costs about $5 a month." Every time. And then someone points out "$5 a month is a lot, even for some people in the developed world, and very much so in South America, Africa, and much of Asia."
$5 a month is far too expensive for most of the world, which is why so much of humanity is now in the walled-gardens like Facebook. So if we want to find a way to destroy the walled-gardens, we're going to have to find an approach that is orders of magnitude cheaper than $5 a month.
$5 isn't THE number. It's a number that's meant to illustrate a monthly outlay on the order of a meal -- something big enough that it might not fall below the level of consideration for some people (I can certainly remember when it was something I had to think about), but small enough that people with an income level that makes them food-secure can probably swing it. As for other places where 5 USD is a lot of money for reasons of currency and local economic conditions, they'd probably have their own markets and pricing on the order of a meal for a month of service.
Any amount will always be a sacrifice compared to free, but given that "free" actually has a cost in terms of privacy, attention, and even baseline function of the tool, there's really no free lunch here, just the currency you want to pay in. Making it actual currency lines up certain incentives better. Even if it doesn't solve the problem among, say, food insecure.
How did you get that from my comment? I said we have almost 8,000 RFCs, IP is very robust, but in its complexity there is a certain minimum, unavoidable expense. If we're looking for a protocol that is cheaper, and therefore easier to subsidize, I'd guess that we need a spec so simple that you could write it out in a 50 page document.
Ok, I get the last part, bad choice of words on "enough".
But the idea that we can't have a grassroots socially networked connection of computers on the internet because of the protocols? I just don't see how you've made a case for that. I certainly don't see why it'd have to be text only.
The complexity of the internet has grown organically based on responding to limitations (mostly). No doubt there's some unnecessary complexity in there, but what you're talking about is essentially throwing everything away. I just don't see how you've made a compelling case for such an expensive proposition.
We need something cheaper than what we have now. People gravitate to walled gardens like Facebook because setting up their own systems is too expensive.
"No doubt there's some unnecessary complexity in there"
At no point did I mention the unnecessary complexity of IP/TCP/UDP, I'm not sure where you got that. I'm only talking about the necessary complexity. It's a great protocol that enables the modern Web. But it is complex enough that there is some expense to setting everything up, and that is why humanity ends up in walled gardens like Facebook. If you want to destroy the walled gardens, then you will need a simpler, cheaper protocol.
Wow, damninstersting.com! What a throwback. I remember loving the posts there back when digg was still popular.
That being said, I have a hard time swallowing the premise of the article.
> When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their Facebook news feeds.
I would expect reddit to frequently link to damninteresting, but I can't recall seeing them on reddit since digg was still around, which to me points out that there is probably a larger problem than extortion for traffic.
I distinctly remember a post from the owner of damn interesting explaining lack of content and/or shutting down at some point too.
Hello! I am Alan, owner of Damn Interesting. We have never actually shut the site down, nor announced intention to do so. There was a long hiatus while I ended a bad marriage and reassembled my life. And on another occasion we announced that we were going to pump the brakes on our exhausting posting schedule to stave off burnout. But we never quit, and have no plans to do so.
I understand your skepticism regarding the premise of the article, but Facebook truly took over as the way people kept track of sites like ours. When Facebook introduced the "boosting" mechanism, and we didn't opt to pay them to regain access to our audience, our traffic tanked almost overnight. We were not the only content creators to notice this phenomenon[1].
Hello Alan! I wasn't expecting a response! An article talking about author burnout sounds like what I remember. DamnInteresting always appeared organically in Stumble Upon, reddit or digg for me, so there was never any reason to "subscribe," then it just kind of disappeared, exactly like you said many people experienced.
I have a distinct memory of reading the sex life of bananas article (https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unfortunate-sex-life-of-...). After reading it, I have actively searched for unique types and varieties of fruits, particularly when traveling. It's habit formed after reading that article that has led me to novel experiences and made a small consistently positive impact on my life. Thank you for that! I remember reading the Galloping Gertie article and the Outer Space Exposure article and thinking "damn that was interesting!" afterwards too. Promises made were delivered.
My default hypothesis was that long form articles are harder and harder to read given the dopamine flood gate that is TikTok/Reddit/YouTube etc. Algorithms that optimize for quick attention would prefer content that requires less investment, resulting in migration to primarily video/gif content. My gauge was that reddit's algorithm (which I still believe is mostly organic) hasn't picked up articles, so it would make sense that Facebook hasn't either. When DamnInteresting was showing up on my social media, Randall Monroe of XKCD was still contributing directly to reddit, and I haven't seen xkcd comics or himself for a long time either. I was kind of expecting an Eternal September situation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September) for social media, resulting in optimization for lowest common denominator content, which is not what DamnInteresting is.
If it's happening to short form media as well, then it is sad to see that it appears to be direct extortion. If it's any small consolation, I have already quit Facebook myself and won't touch anything Meta, employment wise or otherwise.
The article tries to make the reader feel bad about Facebook by pointing out how the site can create negative emotions. However, the author does not seem to be aware of the fact that he is doing the same thing.
Most authors are deliberately trying to elicit emotion in their writing, and you can decide if you want to keep reading or not. Personally, I often get to a point where I realise my mood is being negatively affected by writing, and decide to move on. But that's part of the experience of reading in any media.
The difference is that Facebook would be selective about what writing they would move you on to, in order to deliberately manipulate your emotional state over a long period of time.
If you read the damninteresting post and felt bad, maybe you would decide to go check out xkcd or theoatmeal or something. But on Facebook, the next article would have a similar sentiment, so you didn't get the unicorn break you needed to maintain a good mood.
The decision to move on was taken away from you, without your knowledge, in the interests of "research".
The important difference is that an author is just one person with a
busy life who for a few hours a week writes to manipulate your
emotional state.
Facebook is a machine. It's a gargantuan, for-profit, always-on swarm
of bots spread globally across multiple data centres all programmed to
relentlessly manipulate your emotional state.
When making moral comparisons people forget factors of scale and speed
matter. Quantitative differences become qualitative differences.
> Using Facebook has been scientifically demonstrated to cause depression
Not to say that this line is wrong, but that the evidence for this claim is far from conclusive. The findings from such studies are mixed, partly due to differences in how variables are operationalised.
I believe your interaction with digital technology can be a main driver of depression, but not in the way it's being framed. My psychologist (back when I was suicidal and in a strong depressive episode) told me, that I should have at least 20 minutes of face-to-face conversation to day. That I should go outside and find meaningful contacts, goals, and sense in life. I believe that a lot of people, who sit in front of their computer the whole day are missing this. It doesn't matter what medium you consume as much as what you're actually missing. The few girls which I met during therapy were mainly on tumblr, discord, instagram. I didn't use fb either. Welp, even HN didn't keep depression away!
Having at least a 20 minute long face-to-face convo per day was honestly a great helper, besides the full-time therapy to stop my head thinking, and pills, of course.
Just my two cents to this line. I agree with the other comments about non-chronological feeds being lousy. The article is really trying to push negative emotion towards facebook.
The "it's inconclusive" line is being pushed by FB pretty hard right now, and it feels pretty similar to the smoking industry telling people there's no proof cigarettes cause cancer 20 years ago.
Obviously something is causing marked increases in teen depression and suicide attempts over the same period as the move to 24/7 social media. Sure, it's possible there are other factors, but isn't it obvious that social media is at least playing a significant role?
I don't know how fair it is to say facebook is playing a major role when most of the content consumed on facebook is no longer what your immediate friends post from their personal lives. At one point in time, I would agree that the culture of comparing yourself to others' success lead to dark thoughts. But now there's so much on facebook, it's hard to pin down a specific cause. Is it the fake news, the fear of missing out, the articles about global warming, the economic depression, or seeing posts about covid deaths?
I would argue facebook is not even the main demographic of teenagers anymore. Facebook is full of millenial+. Younger generations are on tiktok and youtube.
Facebook is not social media, instagram and whatsapp and facebook together could arguably be a larger influence but those three still don't make up a majority of social media.
Facebook and social media and the internet itself can be used to escape real life problems. Certain psychologist have already generalized an addiction to encompass all of internet and computer use. The reality is that internet and computer and social media are all tools. The actual issue is some people's unhealthy mechanisms for coping with difficult struggles in life.
This generation happened to live in the time great technological advancements. It's not obvious when you dig deeper into the relationship.
My quick searching seems to indicate that rates were flat or somewhat decreased, but not dramatically.
As a high school teacher, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that though. My students who struggle the hardest often find school to be a significant, additional source of stress. The thinking can also become circular: I’m struggling, and don’t have the capacity to perform (even if I want to do well and have in the past), and that means I’m incapable of performing well, and so I’m struggling more, and so I lack the capacity to…
Rates were flat in a sense of temporal continuity - they stayed around a level that is normal some of the time.
They were very far down in a sense of seasonality. Teen suicide rates are -- normally -- much higher during the school year than they are during the summer.
> The first school year of the pandemic (with full lockdowns) also represents the FIRST TIME IN 21 YEARS that March-June (school months) had the same low suicide rate as July (non school month). Typically, school months associated with 36-55% increase [in suicide] in HS kids.
So about a 30% decrease in suicide rate from shutting down school. I would argue that a 30% decrease qualifies as "dramatic".
Just because something is doesn't mean it's facebook. Especially since basically no teens use facebook.
Your other example also dates you pretty hard. The surgeon general report of 1964 said conclusively that cigarettes cause lung cancer and other diseases. 1964 is somewhat longer ago than 20 years.
Can’t you just replace Facebook with “social media”? There’s very few good uses of social media and the entire thing is free, so there’s no way they are making money doing things in your interest.
Sure. I know I’ve sometimes I’ve gotten unfocused at work and just reload HN every 10minutes. HN is probably net negative on mental health for many.
But I think you’re trying to “gotcha” me.
But HN doesn’t send me notifications, or have ads, or collect data about me, or sell my data, or have curated pictures that forces me to compare my life to others and make me feel bad.
So on a priority list, HN is waaaaaaaaaaay at the bottom.
> In a 1971 television interview, the president of Philip Morris denied the health risks that pregnant women and their babies face, saying that “It’s true that babies born from women who smoke are smaller, but they are just as healthy as the babies born to women who do not smoke. Some women would prefer to have smaller babies.” [1]
The tobacco industry is well known to have distorted the truth for many years after the 50's, and the above quote is just one of many that are very easy to find. Yours seems a tough position to defend.
It's a fact that they did their best to mislead the public for the longest possible time. Does it truly matter how exactly? You can have more than one gun to shoot with, you know.
I’d be interested in hearing a comparison of how researching go about establishing causality for a smoking-cancer link vs. a Facebook-depression link. Obviously, it’s hard to do a proper randomized controlled trial in both cases. Anyone know more about what kinds of methods can be used? I think it would be useful to help this conversation be a little more fact-based and less ideological.
I mean, if the answer does echo the above position that the problem is unhealthy time allotment (fb/insta/whatever is too good at causing teens to spend time on their platform rather doing other things that are healthy for them) that’s pretty terrible news for a company that will do almost anything but reduce engagement time.
Even if we took it as conclusive, OP is far overstating the research by making it seem like "If you use facebook, you will become depressed". It would be like saying "Using a swimming pool has been scientifically demonstrated to cause drownings".
Yes, you can drown a swimming pool, and that is tragic, but you really need to talk about the rate that these bad things happen.
I totally agree with everything you've written, but would just point out that Facebook (and other social media companies) pay huge amounts of money to some of the smartest people in the world whose sole goal is to get you to scroll, scroll, scroll.
Yes, individuals can choose their relationship to technology, but let's not let the drug pushers off the hook.
So what? McDonalds also pays huge amounts of money to optimize their food. McDonalds isn't liable in any way when someone ruins their life with Big Macs. Facebook, like literally every business on the planet, focuses a lot of time & money on getting people to use their product as much as possible. What hook do you not want to let them off that doesn't also apply to literally everyone else? The only exception to date has been narcotics that create physical dependencies, and even then we broadly allow alcohol and nicotine, just with age limits.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's ethical.
I think this is more of an ethical issue than a legal one, slowly our laws tend to move towards ethical boundries we consider acceptable.
What you describe as physical dependency is nothing more but your brain changing in response to the drug that's being administered to it. Not very surprisingly a drug could also be digital or artificial for example gambling.
I think most societies have agreed that because people of the 0 to 18 (give or take a few years, 16 to 21 tends to be the upper range) are particularly vulnerable due to these being formative years that certain actions and substances need to be outlawed until these people can be legally responsible for making these actions.
And companies that deal in these industries should be liable if:
1. They know about the problem
2. They choose to continue.
3. They've got no problem targeting vulnerable individuals.
Of course this ends up being a back and forth between our legal systems and the different industries. But why should we simply accept the situation where these companies are purposefully trying to get people addicted to their services and products regardless of the consequences? Clearly there are ethical mishaps that our current societal system is not processing efficiently.
> But why should we simply accept the situation where these companies are purposefully trying to get people addicted to their services and products regardless of the consequences?
Because in a free society you don't get to play gatekeeper for everyone and judge how good or bad the consequences are on the behalf of others. It's none of your business how other people engage with products & services. Your ethics are not the same as mine and everyone else's.
In a different era you might be a Christian whose ethical boundaries exclude alcohol, supporting a vast program of prohibition. After all, why should we simply accept the situation where these breweries are purposefully trying to get people addicted to their services and products regardless of the consequences?
What do you mean I don't get to play gatekeeper. What do you think democracy and the state is for? Of course society should decide collectively where the lines are drawn. That's what we have done and will continue to do because that's the only way to meet everyone's interests in any sensible manner.
I don't think you really know anything about my personal ethics, my point is that these sort of products and services have been seen by society as a whole as problematic to a certain extent and so they have been regulated. Consuming alcohol as an individual is not something society considers morally questionable but giving it to people who are under-age is a problem and so we have codified that into laws. Why, as you say, in a free society we should limit businesses at all? Why don't we let people sell organs, I mean, surely there are others willing to sell their organs... but really, we know context matters and we know some people are not truly "free" to make the choices we can. Why in a free society we have stopped people from enslaving others? That is definitely an infringement on someone's rights.
In the end, we have come up with structures that aid us in making these difficult choices.
When you bring up prohibition for example, yes, at some point in history alcohol was considered problematic and there were laws that followed these thoughts and made them into law. I mean, as a homosexual of course I can see why this is problematic. I'm not saying we ought to treat these issues lightly, but you need to be able to acknowledge when there are problems and when people are acting in ways that harm others. I think Facebook most definitely knows their business model and practices causes a lot of harm to a lot of individuals but they don't care; why would they? That's not the framework we operate under.
I think one of the biggest problems in modern society is precisely that ethical discussions and responsibility is being left out of the conversation when it comes to markets because we work under the assumption that these problems will be weighted properly by the population that makes use of these services. But is that really the case? I don't think so, and I think a big part of it is that people not only don't have access to the appropriate information but also that the damage "doesn't feel real". So a lot of these externalities simply disappear from our perception yet they are still very real for the people who suffer through them. That's an ethical problem, that's a structural problem, it's a big problem.
I am not saying "we should force people to adopt what I think is right" which is what happened with prohibition. What I'm saying is "we should really define what we think is right in more democratic ways and then make decisions based on that", which is what the state apparatus is supposed to do. But it doesn't because it is systemically corrupt (if you wanna know a bit more on this I recommend reading the book "systemic corruption" by author Camila Vergara). All in all, I think we have the right ideas but not the right structures and that lets companies that prey on people to flourish at every occasion a new exploit is found.
Democracy and the state is not designed for gatekeeping, if that's what you were implying. American democracy was especially designed to counter tyranny-of-the-majority dynamics where society just collectively decides to take away rights. America does not just concede to whatever "everyone's interests" are, its Supreme Court is empowered to strike down popular, democratically legislated laws that violate fundamental rights. There are high profile examples of this like the recent gun laws in New York that were struck down.
America's founders never fully trusted democratic institutions/structures to do the right thing and I don't either. And the problem isn't "not enough democracy", homosexuality would have been considered wrong by practically any electorate in the not-so-ancient past regardless of whatever "democratic ways" or magically corruption-free democratic structures you come up with.
No one, not you and not any democratic majority, gets to make these difficult choices on others' behalf. If people want these structures to aid them, then they can seek them out themselves, you don't get to force it upon them. If you think people aren't informed enough, then inform them, you don't get to bypass them and just assume you know better. It's disingenuous to portray this as structural "aid" when it's not optional.
Posing examples like slavery where the freedom to own slaves conflicts with individual freedom is hardly relevant. When they clash, the individual freedom wins out based on principle, not because not-owning-slaves is democratically popular. America fought a war over it, they didn't just ask for a vote. On principle, I do think anyone should be allowed to sell organs.
This is the same argument used to defend cigarettes in Thank You For Smoking. Quote:
Well, the real demonstrated #1 killer in America is cholesterol. And here comes Senator Finisterre whose fine state is, I regret to say, clogging the nation's arteries with Vermont cheddar cheese. If we want to talk numbers, how about the millions of people dying of heart attacks? Perhaps Vermont cheddar should come with a skull and crossbones.
There is a fundamental difference between the two examples. There are strong social pressures to join social media. Opting out of social media could lead to a less rich social life, especially for younger people. Thus, there is perceivably a large opportunity cost to abstaining from social media, unlike McDonalds. I think millenials underestimate how much social media has completely changed the social fabric for the up and coming generations.
The more disturbing part of the internal studies Facebook did on this is that they found pushing content to their users' feeds that caused more depression and anxiety was good for Facebook's numbers because depressed and anxious people stay on Facebook more. So, Facebook made a calculated decision to prioritize depressing and anxiety causing content rather than more uplifting and alternative content which would make users not stay on Facebook as much.
The central premise of this is that you only get distribution for your page's content if you pay for boosts. That might be true. I can't say. Nor can I say if that's an intentional product change.
It's fun (and popular) to dunk on Facebook (sorry, "Meta") with good cause but you should always be wary of any story that affirms your own biases.
I'm thinking specifically of Yelp's campaign against Google "stealing" their content. More than anything else, this is Yelp blame-shifting and pointing to the big bad Google while collecting a paycheck and doing absolutely nothing to improve your product for more than a decade.
You can have a long career blaming other people for your woes but that doesn't inherently make those claims true.
So does Meta require boosting to get the same distribution you previously got for free? Maybe. But it could also be that this site simply fell off.
I'm a social manager for a marketing agency. The article is right about boosts. When facebook made the switch, my clients saw a huge drop in views across the board. Boosting posts on Facebook is now essential for business pages to grow an audience, in a way that wasn't true back in the day.
You seem to be critical of the article while admitting that you don't really know enough to criticize it. It's a good instinct to check your biases, sure, but you shouldn't have a knee jerk reaction to dismiss something everytime it confirms a bias. Sometimes your bias is right.
Everything is better without Facebook. Can’t they just pay for a small one-time boost, announce their departure from Facebook and abandon the platform and spread the word auto their followers hopefully taking as many users off as possible.
My personal feed has devolved into a stream of clickbait with the occasional update from the few actual people who still post content. But what keeps me coming back? Marketplace, and a couple of special interest discussion groups (the kind that can, and do enforce civilized behaviour).
If Facebook effectively buried their posts years ago, behind what I'll call an extortion wall, why did they continue having a presence there at all?
Their nominal reason for leaving now is that Facebook is a net negative force in the world, but that has been true since the beginning, pretty obvious for at least 13 years, and effectively a matter of public record for at least six years. I think of the people at Damned Interesting as being fairly smart and on the ball, so I refuse to believe they are just learning about this. What changed?
I couldn’t agree more. Facebook is toxic and preys on the weak. Thank God its usage among young people is downtrending so fast. I didn’t have any social media for three years, and I loved it.
Past tense is really doing a lot of work here. A lot of peoples experience quitting Social media mirrors my experience with quitting smoking. On again off again.
This article[1] describes a group of people inside of Facebook who attempted to measure who publishes content that results in negativity, hate, and divisiveness. The result (ctrl+f "Hate Bait dashboard" to see a chart) was the conservative media pushes stories that Facebook "wildly rewards" for driving engagement, incidentally through negativity.
While that is a satisfying answer itself for why Facebook is the way it is (divisive media drives engagement and therefore profit), I think there is more to the story since Facebook employs people like you and I who care about making the world a better place. Why are they not enabled to make Facebook a more positive place?
I think the impact of Peter Thiel on Facebook's policy is probably not well known, but I have to wonder if this is the root of what we see. Peter Thiel, an early investor and board member, appears to be a major MAGA supporter.
From wikipedia:
In June 2004, the company (facebook) moved to Palo Alto, California.
It received its first investment later that month
from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[2]
On 7 February 2022, Thiel announced he would not stand for re-election
to the board of Facebook owner Meta at the 2022 annual stockholders' meeting
and will leave after serving 17 years in order to support pro Donald Trump
candidates in the 2022 United States elections." [3]
There appears to be not just aligned monetary interest, but aligned political interest for keeping Facebook filled with division.
It doesnt matter that engineers and data scientists want to make the world a better place if the KPIs theyre told to optimize are inherently bad for society (like raw platform engagement)
I use facebook because everybody else uses facebook. I actually tried to get away from it for years, but I eventually had to, under protest, get back on it because I was too disconnected.
This is always what people say, yet it’s not really true. You can always stay in touch with the people you care about via other means, and they with you. Yes, there might be some events you’ll get left out of, especially in the beginning when people aren’t aware you’re not on Facebook, but eventually you settle into a calmer social state.
I deleted mine five years ago and I just have a bunch of independent group text threads with family and friends as well as slack/discord. It’s different, and not as conveniently centralized, but it’s certainly not impossible to have a fulfilling social life, go to events, and keep up with people without it. Maybe not so much the third cousin or old family friend. Personally, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything positive by not being on it. Meanwhile, I get to avoid being bombarded by ads, opinions I wasn’t interested in, manufactured outrage, and feeling the need to share my every thought with “everyone”.
It is undeniably difficult to abstain from Facebook. There are local events, family events, businesses, family members, etc. that only operate within the walled garden. And the walls continue to rise, making it more and more difficult to peer at internal content from without.
I've been Facebook (and Instagram)-free for years now, but my personal relationships have suffered for it. Fortunately Facebook is its own worst enemy here, since it keeps making its core products worse and worse for personal relationships. Ads in Messenger, suggested posts, hiding content from friends, dark patterns... it adds up, and over the past couple of years more and more of my friends have abandoned Facebook. Those friendships have largely rekindled. But the heavy users remain jacked in to the News Feed, utterly addicted, to the point where it's difficult to even reach them through another medium.
While it might be difficult to initially leave Facebook, I find it's easy to remain gone once you do. The FOMO disappears slowly, your contacts learn the better ways to contact you, you re-learn how to interact with society through the free web, over the phone, and in-person. While painful, it will eventually dawn on you that those people who won't interact with you anymore simply because you're off Facebook: They aren't really your friends. And those businesses and events that can only be found via Facebook: They aren't worth it.
This is controversial and I always get shot to hell for saying it, but they really aren't worth it. Businesses, friends, even family. If they really require you to use Facebook to talk to them, they don't deserve to be in your life.
After almost a decade off the platform, I still firmly believe that there is no real value there, it's an illusion. It's all held together with FOMO and fear of loss. And you can quite easily lead a fulfilling, happy life without being a part of it.
Well said. The only place where that doesn’t hold (in my experience) is local government and community events. I try my best to advocate for open alternatives, but many non-technical people just don’t understand the problem with closed ecosystems like Facebook and Twitter.
I do agree with your core point, though: it’s all FOMO, and you can work around everything after you realize that the walled gardens are abusive and not worth your time. I do feel for folks who don’t have good alternatives, though — like families who struggle to find out about school events because they’re only distributed on Facebook. But only by continually insisting that others abstain from walled gardens will we eventually tear the walls down. So it goes; some suffering is inevitable.
you don't have to do anything unless someone is holding a gun to your head. Is someone holding a gun to your head? well then they're not your friend and you should unfriend them. i go on facebook maybe once per month or 3 or 4 times per year. not a single friend has complained about that.
Even though I am a bit anti-social, I still have a Facebook page. I like to try and keep up with what is "happening" in the lives of family, friends, and neighbors.
By "happening", I mean things like weddings, funerals, babies born, graduations, etc. I don't mean "What I had for breakfast!", "What movie I saw last night!" or "A running diary of my two week vacation"
I never understand people who want to know every detail of all their friends lives and spend hours scrolling through posts every day.
I hate having to scroll through hundreds of meaningless posts to find major events. Maybe Facebook has a way to do this and I haven't figured it out, but I wish it had a way to "Rank" your posts (1-10). Then every time you posted something you could assign it a rank (1 = "I got married", 2 = "My kid got married", 3 = "I went to Europe for the summer", ... 7 = "This is what I did in Spain", ... 10 = "This is what I ate for breakfast at a cafe in Spain").
Then you could filter events for each of your 'Facebook friends'. Some you would only want to see #1 posts. Others, you might go to level 4. Maybe you go to level 7 for your best friends.
> I never understand people who want to know every detail of all their friends lives and spend hours scrolling through posts every day.
That’s like saying you don’t understand people who want to lose at slots. Those people don’t exist. They just trudge through the misses until they get their next hit.
I use FB roughly in this manner. So I only go in the app about once a month. I’ve learned that if I just like the relevant posts from those people I actually care about, that’s what I will see. They still post crap stuff, but the algorithm usually knows the post is old AND was low engagement so doesn’t show to me by the time I show up.
Downside is I’m that weird guy that’s liking 3 week old posts that are ancient history to everyone else.
I can’t even use Facebook for that. I reduced my Facebook friends to a dozen people and two organizations never saw them in my timeline even through the combined number of posts was a few dozen a day.
Isn't that pretty much it's default behavior? It seems to know pretty well which handful of people really matter to me, and their "content" always finds it's way to the very top of my feed. Pretty much always the first post if it's a big one (usually has a lot of engagement on it).
I have a couple cousins who seem to post every thought that goes through their heads. When I look at my feed I usually see at least a half dozen posts from each of them. Almost all of them are meme stories they liked, comics they read, or some wordle puzzle they solved.
Can I block them or unfriend them without them knowing? Family reunions might get a little more uncomfortable.
>By "happening", I mean things like weddings, funerals, babies born, graduations, etc.
WhatsApp friends/family groups take care of this for me. If we are not close enough for that, I can wait until the next time I visit someone’s home to see pictures of life updates.
"The earliest known version of the idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back” was written by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury in 1677."
> The last Dictate of the Judgement, concerning the Good or Bad, that may follow on any Action, is not properly the whole Cause, but the last Part of it, and yet may be said to produce the Effect necessarily, in such Manner as the last Feather may be said to break a Horses Back, when there were so many laid on before as there want but that one to do it.
But I have to admit, I hadn't known it was that recent and had assumed it to be biblical.
most countries run on WhatsBook (aka WhatsApp) and InstaBook (aka Instagram).
I can't get a drivers license appointment with the local goverment without a mobile number associated with WhatsBook. ...which is a cia/five-eyes dream.
And same for InstaBook. You cannot relate to anyone or find business. Being banned (always without a reason) on InstaBooks means you just lost years of networking because you can't even see the list or contact anyone in any way if all you had was InstaBook direct messages before.
I assume it is less the government office and more the driving instructor.
In my travels through Asia I often noticed how Zuckerberg's "Free Basics" / internet.org initiative which gives free data for reaching Facebook, WhatsApp etc. and Wikipedia completely dominates communication with any local business. SMS, e-mail, phone calls, ... cost money. WhatsApp via cell network is free.
It is fascinating to get cell service in countries that don't have net neutrality. You can buy a 2GB/unlimited calls and texts plan from the largest Mexican operator for US$15. But after that you can get a plan that only allows social media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram for US$2.50. As long as you stay within those walled gardens you pay almost nothing. Hard to imagine anyone breaking that monopoly when the alternative is more than 5x the price.
I was getting a little sick of the quality of the stuff Facebook was showing me, so I started fresh. I deleted my account, added back all my friends... but I didn't join any groups or like any pages. Even the ones my friends invited me to.
Then, I started hiding and blocking anything that didn't come from one of my friends directly. That includes stuff they shared from pages or other friends of theirs. I also started managing the advertisers who had shared lists using any of my contact information (FB has a dashboard for that) and leaving 1-star reviews for all of them.
This had hilarious effects on Facebook itself. After about a year of this, sometimes the newsfeed couldn't find stuff to show me, and it even completely broke a few times. Group recommendations started to veer towards substance abuse recovery support (I assume many people create new accounts to join them anonymously). Facebook would insist on showing me stuff from pages or friends of friends even after I hid them, because it seems I had blocked so much stuff their filters were not working right anymore. Not that they actually care.
Of course, the fun I had breaking Facebook doesn't change the fact that this was a huge chore that I mostly kept doing out of spite and habit. When I realized I wasn't even using the platform to keep up with old friends anymore, I realized it was time to let go.
The only FB product I keep using is WhatsApp, and it's only because I failed at convincing my friends and family to move to Signal, Telegram or Discord. It has too much of a stronghold in my country.