Social media is about me feeling that what I say matters.
Of course my opinion doesn't matter but that's beside the point. I can be brought to feel that my opinion matters.
A worthwhile social activity is care for the needy. It actually generates love. No love is generated through social media.
The problem isn't in the technology - it's in our silly idea that there's something better in the world than loving, and being loved.
I agree. To put it another way, social media feeds the narcissist in each of us -- it's inward-focused -- when what we really need both as a society and individually to to be outward-focused.
Individuals naturally feel that they are the most important person in the world. We are all the heroes of our own stories, after all, and experientially, the universe literally seems to revolve around us. We'd be better off engaging in activities that remind us that none of that is actually the case, and caring for others is an obvious way to do that.
I think it's also why a very effective way of countering depression is to help others in a meaningful way.
At the risk of sounding very much "kids these days", the concept of service seems to no longer be high on people's priorities. There's an art of making yourself better by making yourself small first and taking care of others.
I've seen many use these ideas as a justification to cut anyone out of their lives because they did work for them. Eventually, they lose all sense of purpose as they no longer have anyone to care for (and care for them) and they end up sinking even further into their depression.
I don't think that sounds much like kids these days. If anything, it seems like kids are leaning back towards service now, and it's the older generations that are more cynical, nihilist, and dismissive of service as a priority. I say that as a Gen Xer.
I tend to agree, based on what I personally see. I wonder if part of the reason why is that they are entering a world in full crisis, and service toward others becomes an essential survival skill when dealing with crisis.
There's something Biblical about elders helping lift up the youth and dysfunctional about them continuing to compete as they are today. I can't speak for prior times, but it seems like for at least a generation or two each generation got more wealthy and invented the concept of retirement.
Karma doesn't always hit right away. The older generations who didn't lift up their kids will hit old age and be taken care of by someone--their poor/rightfully resentful kids or help hired with their kids' would-be inheritance.
There seems to be an assumption that the government is there to help and programs are in place, ready to save anyone who wants to be saved at the snap of a finger. As a person who's 5 years homeless (working, college educated) the only real help I get is from employers giving me opportunities to work for above minimum wage at times and customers who tip generously for good service.
There is a facet of service to others in a cash flow based religion, oddly enough. Allegedly even horses feel good after a day of hard work for a kind boss/keeper.
To be perfectly honest, I don't think that's a "kids these days" sort of thing. The concept of service has rarely been high on people's priorities outside of a major crisis or being part of a social group that values it highly and enforces it through peer pressure.
> Social media is about me feeling that what I say matters.
I agree with where you are coming from, but I'm not sure social media is actually about that. Making you feel like your content is important is only a goal in-so-much as it incentivizes you to create hype-able content. Social media is a hype engine designed to take randos on the internet and make them famous in front of other randos on the internet. If caring for the needy generates hype, that's what gets hyped. If pranks generate hype, that's what gets hyped. If twerking generates hype, thats what gets hyped.
It's about maximizing engagement to maximize monetization. And that monetization ends up getting balanced with social pressures, PR nightmares, political pressure, and legal pressure. We have a hype machine willing to promote anything that doesn't get moderated away.
I'd say social networking actually captured what you are talking about here. It's goal was to connect friends, families, communities, peers, etc. I've seen that level of connection, that level of community building, manifest in real-world love/kindness.
I don't see that happen on social media outside of people going against the grain and forcing social networking through social media. I have first-hand experience of how surprisingly difficult social networking on social media is; primarily because of the recommendation algorithms drowning out social networking content.
> The problem isn't in the technology
But the issue is the technology. Centralized social networking failed because of the technology. Centralized social networking is expensive. Being a "free proxy server" and archivist for the entire world's communication is a hard technical and financial problem to solve. It's also legally expensive to host a bunch of other people's content for free. And it's socially expensive, people get very upset about what other people say, and get mad at you for proxying that content.
Offering to let the entire world communicate through a single central "town square" for free just doesn't appear to be viable.
The result was that it stopped being about social networking. That entire class of product silently died.
Social networking is dead. What we have now is social media.
The real problem is introduced when your own opinion is optimized out.
Because of this behavior, one person's opinion can become self-replicating, because there is no distinction between consensus and copy.
This social pattern leaves us with a tiny number of narratives being blindly repeated instead of being thoughtfully confronted. The only one who benefits is the narrative itself.
The best thing I did for my mental health was my gradual decline from interacting and using social networks. I was scrolling through my IG feed mad and jealous because people there seem to have a lot more going in live than I have, until by pure chance one girl who seemed the happiest person on her IG travels randomly outed herself to go to therapy for her depression and suicidal states. This happened almost 5 years ago, and I never looked back.
Do you not feel jealous of the people here who write a Rust compiler over the weekend, make a 7 figure salary at their first job, give lectures on quantum physics at their local community center, sell their bit toggling SaaS so they can retire early, work out every morning, and who are able to save the world from hunger by promoting nuclear energy?
In other words, it might be wise to start avoiding Hacker News as well, because it is also a social network.
The very first example resonates strongly. Here I am struggling with the simplest bugs, all of Sunday wasted on something oh so obvious. Proud of the effectively 7 lines of code produced.
Then looking over HN in the evening, yet again “everybody else” seems to have implemented their third Haskell compiler for fun. Boring at this point really, to them.
Yet I am scratching my head over how there can be such huge gaps in performance and productivity. It’s the same principle. As a physicist you wouldn’t compare yourself to our darling, Feynman. Physicists are too smart to be doing that (or at least quickly stop doing it). I am apparently very dumb.
Sorry for the late answer, and the answer is - I actually do!
The difference IMO is that the person who wrote a Rust compiler over the weekend actually worked hard to arrive at such a point in their life, and instead of jealousy I feel a drive or a motivation, thinking 'Well, if I code/learn hard enough, maaaaaaaaybe I could do that at one point in my life'
I do recommend a good, hard journey in your life though. Take your shoes, or a bicycle, and go somewhere. One week, two weeks. Enough to be tired and want to go back home really hard. Enough to have to deal with a problem without a credit card (good example: bike broke down 10 miles from the closest city, not a soul around to help you).
But most importantly, enough to enjoy the moment despite the hardship.
Once you discover that it is possible, that it is logical, then a new life awaits.
Not the OP. I was thinking about this the other day in relation to social networks like Mastadon and Bluesky vs HN and Reddit.
I have found Mastadon and things like it to not be sticky at all. I wanted to be involved in the community because it seems like its growing, but when I open the app nothing grabs my interest.
I think it is because social networks like Mastadon, Bluesky, Twitter... are "people" or "stream of conscious" oriented, while sites like HN and Reddit are "topic" oriented.
I am really interested in engaging with a topic, and want to read have have long conversations on that topic. However on "people" oriented networks there is no broad coherence to what people are talking about, and I lose interest
> After a time, habitual or frequent users become desensitized to positive feedback, such as likes and comments, from other users.
I've noticed this personally. In my early social media days circa 2012, going viral with a post of mine evoked genuine gratefulness for the post and appreciation for how much reach it got. Now, going viral is just a habit. 10,000 likes, 1000 shares on Facebook is my new normal. It's not 'special' like it used to be. I still appreciate my viral posts, just not to the extent of my early social media days (this is probably because fewer people were on it in 2012).
I feel like bots (or human analogues thereof) have "devalued" these numbers a lot. Loads of people will just like or share things on autopilot, on any social network, and then you get bots adding up the rest - since I'm sure interactions like liking and sharing increase their trust rating, and thus their value, without that kind of activity being easy to detect as being from a bot since it's just a click on a button.
We've got a youth that wants to do youtube, he gets really excited when he gets a subscriber or a share or something. But I'm like... it doesn't count until it's in the thousands or tens of thousands. That's me gatekeeping though, I'm probably being a dick about it.
But isn't there more value in a reward leading you to run marathons than a reward leading you to waste your time (literally a net negative mental health wise) scrolling on a social site?
I genuinely believe that setting goals for yourself and achieving them is intrinsically more valuable than... not doing that, i.e. scrolling.
I think people want different things in life and I don’t think different leisure pastimes are inherently better.
Like in the previous example, I don’t see how a marathon isn’t also a colossal waste of time. You spend half a day running the and nothing has changed other than you feel good. Fair enough, but same thing with video games or music or social media.
Perhaps a useful hobby could be carpentry or something, but that’s a slim percentage of all hobbies, and even then, there’s probably a machine or a guy who can do it better than you and you can simply pay them.
My point was based around the idea that setting goals for yourself and pursuing them is better for you than not doing that. Disagreement on the point would surprise me. I’m not saying we all have to run marathons or hike the AT, but, really, well anything you can set your mind to is good. It could be being a great father or husband, or carpentry, or marathons. Anything is better than doing nothing and scrolling.
I don’t see scrolling as a “leisure pastime”, maybe that’s the crux of our disagreement. But if all of one’s leisure time is spent scrolling I cannot see how that is good for the individual compared to just about anything else.
I think social media really peaked around that time.
Social media was on the computer. You would interact with it every now and then, then leave. It was useful for making or keeping in touch with friends.
You had the good parts without too much of the bad parts.
But once smartphones took over, you were plugged in 24/7. It brings it out at its worst.
The dopamine hit from the like/share notification no longer hits like it did in 2012.
Reminds me of drug addicts building tolerance and upping usage to get same “high”.
Probably get the same feeling again if you hit 100K or 1M interactions
Personally, haven’t cared since 2015. FB — stopped using for socials but use its marketplace for selling/buying. IG - keep an account but otherwise have stopped using it.
Still use anonymous social media like HN or reddit. Although lately stick to the fediverse — mastodon, lemmy, and matrix.
Is that a problem though? You'll filter the people you want to interact with, effectively. I'd personally probably talk more to someone who goes to /pol/ than someone who goes on IG and TikTok. If you say "I use mastodon" that also creates an in-group effect, anyone else who does the same or similar are more likely to hit you up with a conversation due to that fact :)
Isn't this natural?
If you are not sharing 'viral' stuff to conform with expectations to be hip and desire huge audience without providing value, then it is good.
Healthy reaction to this small fandom is to take it as an indicator you are doing something good and should not focus on reception, but on the product.
I feel attacked reading the headline. My friends and I all send each other the stupidest memes. There's 100% a daily need for memes from multiple accounts "content creator" wise. They need to be fresh too. I'm sure every 3-6 months we send each other a few duplicates but... it's more fun to laugh to yourself about something and then fire it off with the "share" button. Then your friends do the same back to you.
This is obviously a serious problem, but I hate the use of the word "compels" in the title. Social media does not compel people to share things. It encourages it by design, absolutely, but nobody is forced to share things. We should take it seriously, but not to the point where we eliminate any concept of human autonomy in the use of these platforms.
Yes, it compels.... Just like heroin compels you to get more heroin. You can argue that human autonomy also has a role in it, but someone's thinking is not entirely autonomous, especially when addicted to something.
Social media is addictive, and to an extent forces you to share things about yourself (there are social consequences for not doing so. I personally don't give a fuck but not everyone chooses that decision)
Heroin isn't addictive because other addicts are convincing you to take it.
We are a social animal in the sense that it's part of normal healthy functioning, and that isolation is considered a mode of torture. Social media is a means to connect people that is perfectly manageable if you're an intact person in the same sense that the telephone is a convenient eay to stay in touch. There is no safe dose of heroin to avoid addiction in a healthy person.
This thread is really not about heroin, though. Take food as an example. A person can be addicted to food (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_addiction) but eating isn't otherwise necessarily unhealthy. A person may be "compelled" to take a certain action for many reasons; I fail to see how the use of that word in this title is wrong.
The sine qua non of addiction is withdrawal symptoms, not compulsion. Social media isn't necessary if you have a productive social life replacement. There is no analog substitute for heroin.
> The sine qua non of addiction is withdrawal symptoms, not compulsion.
This statement refutes the idea that social media or food can possibly be addictive, yet there's this body of research for both which asserts they can be. At best, this is splitting hairs over the definition of addiction. Assuming that Something can be addictive, a person might be "compelled" to act by their addiction to Something.
> Yes, it compels.... Just like heroin compels you to get more heroin.
This is an incredibly misleading comparison. Addiction is not a monolith, and there are degrees of addiction. If you cold turkey quit a serious heroin addiction, there's a serious chance you will die. That is absolutely never the case with social media addiction.
There are always times when we act against our own best interest because our body seems to override our brain - I had ice cream last night that I knew was bad for me. That doesn't mean we're compelled, and it isn't sufficient to call something addiction.
What you're doing here is the equivalent of invoking Nazis in an argument on the internet - going straight to "ITS LIKE HEROIN" for anything that be somewhat addictive is incredibly reductive and degrades the quality of what could otherwise be a useful conversation.
> Addiction is not a monolith, and there are degrees of addiction
There are also degrees of compulsion. The law compels me to adhere to a speed limit; that doesn't mean my reptilian brain flips out if I go 66.
Within the context of discussing compulsive social media use described as addictive, arguing ad absurdum with reference to heroin isn't as simple as calling everything distasteful Nazi.
Note that I didn't compare social media to heroin, I've just made a simile of how something can be addictive just like heroin. I didn't say it was similarly addictive, and I didn't even compare their addictiveness, the simile was used to illustrate the point on a non-controversial example (which everyone knows is very addictive)
And yes, you are entirely right - sugar and other things in that ice cream create an addiction - this is why you had ice cream yesterday even though you knew you shouldn't have had it!
I think you're missing the point of the comment you're replying to, and of the story as a whole.
Yes, human beings have agency and are ultimately responsible and accountable for their decisions.
Human beings, like all living organisms, are complex systems. Social media, marketers and advertisers, among others, regularly manipulate and abuse such systems.
So, yes, while it is true that addiction is a spectrum, that spectrum applies to social media as much as it does with other addictions like sugar or amphetamines.
What your argument does is absolve those attempting to abuse such organic, complex systems for their own gain, regardless of the harm it promotes or directly causes.
Compel is an apt word to use in this situation. Definition is: "force or oblige (someone) to do something" or "bring about (something) by the use of force or pressure" [Oxford Dictionary].
Social media can make people feel _obliged_ by social pressure to engage in the platform (via sharing or posting updates about their life to family members and/or friends).
Addiction can also do the same thing, while others may be bored and scroll incessantly (they feel the need to stave off boredom).
There is a myriad of reasons. I felt compelled to respond to your insistence that 'compel' was an incorrect word.
"Simply telling people not to share certain types of content that could be harmful, dangerous or false will not be effective for habitual users, even if it works for nonhabitual users."
It's pretty obvious that social media users create some pretty intense echo chambers. People are posting erroneous or incomplete information that aligns more with their feelings than with reality.
Maybe what's driving people to become habitual users in the first place is a search for easy answers and their biases confirmed rather than just wanting to be part of a group. People want to be right and it seems they are willing to distort facts to do so and that creates a sort of contagion with the rest of the crowd searching for easy explanations for everything. But who knows.
It's an interesting topic and I hope research continues.
If this isn't real, I'd guess you're remembering the XKCD linked in a sibling comment to yours. I kinda like your version more. The XKCD version where the poster has an actual moment of introspective clarity doesn't make sense to my cynical mind.
In 2022, our local health department did a presentation about the wild success of anti-smoking campaigns in the high schools. They just couldn't pat themselves on the back hard enough.
My favorite thing was the interaction between the health department and a local principal, it went something like this:
Health Department representative reading off of a slide: "fewer than 5% of teens reported they had tried a tobacco product last year, with fewer than 1% indicating they had smoked a cigarette. We attribute this to the DARE and Too Good for Drugs campaigns as well as constant outreach from the DoH."
Principal: "we had to install vape detectors in every bathroom stall and then re-install them and hide them when the kids bashed them. We think that about 3/4 of the graduating class vapes."
Health Department: blank stares
There is what seems to be a willful ignorance about this in many professional circles. It's very strange to me.
I went to a university that oddly enough banned smoking specifically. Not tobacco or tobacco use, but smoking. You could do it at some distance from a building, but that was it.
In some classrooms greater than 50% of the male students would have "dip" or other oral tobacco products on their desk during lecture.
Pay no attention to the left hand, they are one and the same. Owned by the same megacorp. Altria. Tobacco is bad so let’s drive it down and show what a wonderful job we did responding to congress’ accusations we targeted kids to get them addicted for life. Also Altria, let’s sue Juul and hostile takeover and market vaping to children with fruity flavors of candy and mint.
People don't feel the difference between importance and engagement.
Engagement is its own reward. People who feel engaged on a topic can reward themselves by simple repetition. They can skip the hard work of criticism, straight to the finish line.
Importance is the result of active filtering. What is it that must be filtered out? Engagement. Who would truly want to filter out their own rewards?
This is where we find a parallel with addiction: people who practice this short reward loop struggle to leave it, but people who don't practice tend to have an easy time avoiding the loop entirely.
Discussion forums, especially ones driven by moderation, seem to be controlled by a certain subset of the population. Software Engineers and other WFH types, folks without jobs, folks with strong opinions, or folks with nothing better to do in their freetime.
If nothing else, this results in highly misleading feedback loops where outlier opinions and ideas are amplified and reinforced. Hang out in reddit for a while and you'd think the world was about to end(either from crime or rightwing hate groups depending on the subreddit).
Go and talk to people in real life who don't hang out online and you will find that much of the hottest topics online barely register in most folks' thinking.
“Touch grass” as cliche as it has become is legitimately good advice. I’ve been heavily into gaming and internet culture since middle school and I could say for myself it’s one of my personal regrets in life.
Very insightful and I'd say this is true for the internet at large.
Vocal internet is overly tech, overly American, overly progressive, overly academic, overly LGBTQ+, overly neuro-atypical, overly "misfit/alternative", overly chronically online. This interesting umbrella of demographics shapes internet culture with of course the sizable counter force of the right. This sub culture has somehow bled into media and institutions, becoming THE culture, but not really.
Quite a lot of it makes zero sense to "normies".
I once read a fascinating account of a campaign activist for the Democrats. She would do home visits to get a reading of people's political leaning and try to persuade them to vote for them.
She was in for a shock. She found that people had no answer when probed for their position on seemingly important topics. They had simply never thought about it. Sometimes they do answer yet when probed for a "why", it soon turned out that they made it all up on the spot. And more often than not, the few answers given were contradicting and all over the place.
Turns out it's all bread and games. People know and care about their immediate circles and don't do politics for the sake of politics unless their local lives are drastically impacted.
Even "superior" online characters don't care about politics. They know what is the outrage of the day but wouldn't able to correctly answer the most basic of questions about politics. Yet the strength of their opinion seems inverse to that.
"People know and care about their immediate circles and don't do politics for the sake of politics unless their local lives are drastically impacted.
Even "superior" online characters don't care about politics."
This is evidence that democracy is dysfunctional and we need to fix and or change how it works.
There are many important issues of a 'specialist' nature and or of minority interest or that only affect a small percentage of the population that government should address but has either failed to do so or done so inadequately.
If these issues only affect a few citizens or there are only a few pushing government to address them then there's less chance they will be dealt with in a fair and equitable manner. That 'disinterest' of the majority means there is no general oversight of these minority issues no matter how important they are. Thus government decisions about these issues will usually be influenced by the protagonists and lobbyists who have the most power and influence—their wishes prevail and win out even if not in the best interest of the citizenry as a whole.
There are thousands of issues that fall into this category—treaties signed on request of big business, regulations changed or weakened to benefit the few, etc. Take copyright law for instance, in the digital age it needs a gross overhaul but is resisted by vested interests, big publishers etc., also it's protected by international treaties which adds further resistance to change.
The majority of the population couldn't give a damn about copyright so the powerful get their way despite that the majority of citizens would benefit from its reform.
This is just one indictment of democracy's failure, there are thousands more. Moreover, as society becomes more complex and the needs of people become even more diversified, the failure will become even more evident.
When we look at the dysfunctional nature of current politics it's clear we urgently need to rethink how we are governed. A dysfunctional democracy has high potential to morph into totalitarianism.
Many people are politically disinterested even to the point of not bothering to vote. And like you said, even those that are engaged are still not qualified to comment on the more complicated issues, of which there is a growing amount.
It's an odd contrast with the perception that everything has become hyper-political, intersectional and everyone is an activist now.
Obama once had an insightful remark about it. Sending a mean tweet is not activism. Political activism means reading legislation, learning how the political system works, learning law, and doing a huge amount of work on the ground. It's a lot of work, often unrewarding.
Hence the Tweet. Zero effort. Immediate reward. Nothing changes.
"It's an odd contrast with the perception that everything has become hyper-political, intersectional and everyone is an activist now."
We know this has been exacerbated by biased and poor media reporting, social media etc. but it seems to me that with the complexities of modern life many don't stop to think about issues, nuances are lost thus views polarize to extremes.
I wonder how much better things would be if we taught kids about politics and how they are likely to be manipulated later in life, and that before arriving at a position it was incumbent on citizens to consider the issues carefully.
Obama's point would be half solved if kids left primary school primed with these notions, even though views were not fully developed they'd be easier to reinforce later.
None of that stuff was drummed into me as a kid and I now wish it had been.
I think a good chunk of this is caused by an inability to see past the flaws of others, and assuming the worst of people. And also assuming that someone completely lacks personal integrity because of a opinion that they hold that you disagree with.
Instagram seems to be intentionally interrupting this addiction by limiting the number of images shown for a hashtag to only NINE, instead of the infinite river they could be delivering.
Hopefully this study by Wendy Wood and Ian Anderson is experimentally
solid and replicates. If true it deals quite a blow to the plague of
social media - one of the ugly faces of surveillance capitalism.
If the more people engage the less value their engagement yields,
that's a great natural feedback brake. It might seem like obvious
attention dilution, but I think it counters the foundational 'scale'
model of surveillance capitalism, eventually making the observed
"choices" of users barely above the noise floor.
kuro5hin (K5) had a category called MLP (mindless link propagation) and it was a minority of the submissions. It’s interesting that site like Reddit and HN are primarily based on MLP, but K5 is long gone.
I'm not sure I agree I agree with the premise here.
Social networking was the high point of tech for me. And I think we are past that. Social networking appears to be dead, and it was replaced by social media. I'd say that social networking is good for our mental health and our communities. I'm not sure social media is.
The last 10 years or so have proven to me that centralized social networking is not viable. It's not socially viable. It's not legally viable. And it's not economically viable. Centralized social networking failed.
Social networking, to me, focused on staying connected with friends, family, communities, peers, etc.
Social media, to me, feels a lot like taking randos on the internet and trying to make them famous in front of a bunch of other randos on the internet. The ultimate goal is to find the most engaging, socially/legally palatable, content and hype it up to as many people as possible. The ultimate goal being to create as much engagement as possible to keep people inside the social media experience long enough to effectively monetize them.
You reward engaging content to encourage people to create it. Sometimes you share a portion of monetization back with the most engaging content creators. Other times, you reward engaging content with "internet points" that give people the warm fuzzies of "being liked." Sometimes you let creators sell their own advertisements to self-monetize the fame you've given them. But, ultimately, its about fueling an attention economy that is decoupled from our personal social networks.
When your goal is to take randos on the internet and hype them, you're giving them "a platform" they wouldn't have otherwise. You have ethical/social/legal/moral questions about when it's appropriate to hype content and who you should or should not make famous. Not to mention you're pumping all that content _through your servers_. You have to pay for the storage and transmission of that content. You have to have conversations about your legal liability when it comes to that content.
And I think this is where the recent social media "scandals" went off the rails. Many users thought they were on a social network. They thought they were sharing their content with their platforms. Platforms they built themselves in the real world. A social media app doesn't "give you a platform" with your grandma. You brought that platform to the social media app.
So when the app starts talking about what you are allowed to say on "their platform" many people suddenly realized they didn't have their own platforms. Their communities, their families, their friends, their peers, their _own platform_, was handed over to this hype machine. Users thought they were posting content to share with their friends, family, etc.
But what they were really doing was sending it all to "some dude in Palo Alto."
It's weird that we have to have the conversations we do in our society around social media. It seems very unnatural to me. A byproduct of centralized social networking failing and growing into social media.
Centralized systems are wrong for the kind of communication people thought they were engaged in. Centralized systems work really well for social media. They work very poorly for social networking.
These companies have hired focus groups, marketing experts, psychologists, and countless design teams to get people hooked on their platform. Are we really surprised?
Multimillion dollar team vs primitive brain of human. Many people bound to lose and fall through.
I think the problem is rooted in a large swath of society growing up in isolation. The past few decades has seen a sharp rise in suburban or exurb living (living in isolation), car centric transportation (traveling in isolation), and social media (socializing in isolation). High levels of partisanship in the states as well is not a coincidence. We have generations of children growing up playing video games in the suburbs because that’s all you can do from the moment you are born to the day you become an adult (or get a car).
> These companies have hired focus groups, marketing experts, psychologists, and countless design teams to get people hooked on their platform. Are we really surprised?
I don't think that this is the problem. From what I know, hackernews doesn't hire any marketing experts, psychologists or focus groups. It doesn't even support images. I was more addicted to this site than any other, despite the lack of psychological tricks.
And there are many sites that DO employ full psychological warfare teams that I completely ignore. Tinder seemed fully committed to forcing repetitive user engagement. And I dropped that site after about two days, psychologists or not. If all it took to force engagement was a certain list of UI tricks, every funded social site would be able to do it.
I don't think there's a single root cause or an off switch for social media. This phenomenon is here to stay, for better or worse. I think that we will adapt as a species but there's no going back.
Endless A/B testing will climb up some peak in the landscape of human psychology; that you and I are on a different peak may help a bit, but there are ways to find other peaks and money to be made in the attempt.
(I'm apparently on peak "Idle Game", and thus benefited greatly from the end of Flash browser games freeing me from that pointless waste of time).
Oh my goodness how could I have forgotten that decade of my life until you mentioned it? Oh, right, yeah, that's how.
Edit: I think my comment was lost in translation. What I meant was, "yes, this was such a phenomenon, and I experienced it too, and I marvel at the amount of time that I wasted in Idle games, and sympathize with others who are also lost in these Skinner boxes"
“A lot of people are addicted to websites which employ armies of engineers and scientists to generate addiction” is not really addressed by “I am addicted to a site without those techniques.”
Analogously, my addiction to Parmesan cheese doesn’t mean heroin isn’t that addictive (or intended to be addictive).
There are definitely UI tricks used by pretty much everyone when applicable. For example, infinite scrolling is used to keep people’s attention. There are other dark patterns that exist as well
Don’t most kids have bicycles? When I was a teen I used to bike an hour one way to visit my girlfriend.
As a kid, I was really isolated - miles from the nearest children. I only saw kids at school. But, in high school, we moved inward to a suburb, and I did a lot of biking to see my friends.
I suspect that many parents these days would not be comfortable with their child biking anywhere for an hour if they're under 14 or so. In the US I have found that things have changed dramatically for kids over the past 20-30 years.
Anecdotally I was walking half a mile to school in the second grade on my own. My nieces and nephews are the same age and aren't allowed to leave their yard (despite having cell phones!).
There's also the question of "why" — kids today are adept at video calls and tend to play lots of video games (many of which only have online multiplayer modes anyway!). They're generally not spending a lot of time playing outside. Their parents are also spending more time inside.
I'm sure there are a preponderance of reasons for the changes, but I've always suspected that the access to an infinite news cycle (e.g., some kid 2 hours away went missing last night) has made people overly cautious. This could be entirely anecdotal, but I feel like the world was a lot smaller for parents before the internet and this has altered perceptions (despite the fact that most places are actually safer in terms of violent crime rates than they used to be).
It has made people overly cautious, but in many ways the caution is well advised. Look at the rise in deaths from vehicles, driving under the influence, driving while distracted, the size of cars and how large/tall they are now. Even as an adult, you're likely to be met with animosity while riding your bike around, never mind a child. Increase of bicycle thefts, another reason. You can sort of see how a lot of these factors fuel each other, and put parents in a terrible position so that even if they weren't scared of the news cycle it doesn't logically make sense to willingly have their kids deal with such avoidable issues.
The weakening of communities has also made this much worse. Used to be you could play with the neighborhood just fine, if something happened one parent would tell the others or talk about it during a BBQ. Now, very little of that exists. There's so much animosity in communities. Leads to what this article is talking about, but things like NextDoor have made community building a sin. Everyone wants to be the snitch, the "community pillar" by becoming the epitome of a stereotypical no-fun-allowed police.
We've been living in apartments for ages now, yet we still struggle to make our neighbours that live 3 steps away, reliable friends. Everyone is just too busy, too distracted, too this or that. So I can't blame parents entirely for this dilemma we've created, we're all at fault at every level.
> I suspect that many parents these days would not be comfortable with their child biking anywhere for an hour if they're under 14 or so.
Yes, and this is also the result of negative aspects of media (in general, not just social). It's safer for kids to do this now than it has ever been (in the US, anyway), and yet so many parents think it's insanely dangerous. You even see parents scolding (and sometimes calling the cops on) other parents for letting their kids play outside.
Giving a kid a fully open cell phone (which is too often the case) is so much worse than letting them bike around the neighborhood, in terms of the predators it exposes them to. Unfortunately most parents don't seem to understand that.
In the US, parents are sometimes arrested for letting their children go bike (or walk, or play at playgrounds) without direct supervision.
Not to mention that parents are constantly fed scare stories about “random creeps” snatching kids up — a profoundly rare occurrence, surely several orders of magnitude less of a risk than that taken on by driving your child to/from school.
Online spaces for interaction seem to be leading to kids being able to "interact" with each other from afar. You don't need to ride your bike to Mark's house to play a game with Mark and his sister. You just load up whatever online game all three of you own.
I'm not saying in-person interaction is completely dead to kids. I am starting to think the shopping mall as a hangout spot is dead to kids, though.
Whenever I see the claim "the financial companies don't do actual work, they just make up money, but we software companies do" I cannot stop thinking about all the engineering that went into getting people spending more time on social media
It's not just the marketing groups but also peer pressure. Whenever I pointed out on HN that I don't use social media or smart phones as I find them a net negative, people jumped at it mockingly, saying this is the new "I don't have a TV" or argued that it is simply impossible, etc.
Just rephrase what they said in your head as "I'm not on any major social media platforms, and I limit my time on HN" and we can avoid this conversation that happens every time we try to discuss social media or screen time on this site.
Otherwise discussion on the topic is impossible, as one can always respond with "yea well you're on HN aren't you?!"
Social media dramatically increased political polarisation and in this way are quite literaly destroying society and the bonds and social contracts that keep people together.
In contrast to their other engineered addictions my hunch is (with the caveat that I am not remotely a psychologist) that an important mechanism that enabled this regression was essentially incidental to the nature of these platforms:
Normal people for the first time got a public podium (or they think they do) and thus behave as if the whole world is watching.
Positions and arguments that earlier on were discussed in smaller and more forgiving circles are now in the open.
People get trapped, have to defend a public record, they feel exposed, must double down.
They seek comfort in similarly thinking corners, in newly formed clans, which are, as it happens, much easier to find online and encouraged by the algorithms of the platforms.
The result is large numbers of people absorbed into toxic, self-generated and self-excited virtual realities. A social mechanism that was always active at a low level, but is now on steroids and out of control.
This is just one of the traps: from selfies to influencers, from trolls to click farms the list goes on and on.
The positive impact of "connecting people" is drowned in wave after wave of negative phenomena. If we ever get out of this era intact we'll think of it as a nightmare.
Social media removed the corrective elements of previous mechanisms. There's no longer a "trusted party" who helps you when you're in the wrong, there are "enemies" who "dunk on you."
The purpose of broadcasting isn't the same as conversation. People want the result of a positive interaction, but they do that by chasing hundreds of negative ones.
The negative interactions are actually better for the platform as they are (in some studies) almost 10x as effective at driving engagement. So the companies looking for "the most engaging" communities, drive more negative interactions.
The people looking for the most clicks, chase the "dunking" and "counter dunking" interactions, and it becomes at best 90% of the platform, at in reality like 99% of what you see while you're doom scrolling.
Social media is awful, and draws out our worst impulses as a business model.
Agreed. Take something as simple as a "quote tweet".
The physical analogy is that you're listening to somebody, then turn around to speak to a group of "friends" about it whilst the other person can hear you do it. And you'd likely misrepresent what was said and receive an applause for it.
It's a deeply anti-social behavior that in the real world would make you wake up in a hospital pretty soon.
Or how about a retweet of a hot take? Imagine going all over town and plastering walls with a low effort opinion.
Or how about digging into somebody's past to find something offensive from a decade ago? What would the physical analogy look like? Following somebody for 10 years, taking notes, making pictures, interviewing your friends and family? Which would amount to what normally would be a deep criminal investigation, yet here we do it just for kicks?
Social media has normalized deeply anti-social behavior and the consequences are severe.
"Normal people for the first time got a public podium (or they think they do) and thus behave as if the whole world is watching."
I strongly object to the word "normal" here. Normies, as in the common masses you know from the real world, are nowhere to be seen on social networks. Yes, many have accounts, but they're not a force. Many post nothing or infrequently and then get a handful of likes from their 20 followers.
If anything, social media promotes the abnormal. It does so by rewarding engagement, any engagement. What is reliably engaging? Triggering our brain that is hotwired to pay attention to the negative, strange, unhinged and weird.
Normally, the local madman of a town (village idiot) is kept in check. Ousted, not taken seriously. Social media is basically saying, you know what...you're unhinged, but we believe you should be major. Along with some tens of thousands of others like you, you should run this entire place.
> Social media dramatically increased political polarization
No, it didn’t.
Social media emerged at a time when the US was returning to the long-term norm of partisan polarization from an aberrant period where political polarization was less aligned with the divide between the two major parties because it was a long period of overlapping political realignments (pivoting around the New Deal and the Civil Rights.)
It was also during a rise in overall political polarization, but that had also been going on since about the end of the realignment period in the mid-1990s, after a drop over the preceding couple decades from the long high of political-but-not-necessarily-partisan-polarization in the overlapping Civil Rights/Vietnam period, but it can hardly explain a trend that started before it existed.
Well, one thing social media didn't do is eliminate the self-absorption of the US universe. My (anecdotal) empirical observations and speculations about mechanisms that drive polarization have little to do with the US. The patterns we discuss are (alas) quite universal and other cultures are not at all immune to this.
Of-course if we zoom out to longer time scales polarization was rampant and lethal (across most of the world), in ways we thought or hoped we will never see again.
The tragic result of social media as they developed is that instead of helping fix known problems or help build consensus about handling emerging problems, they aggravate them, in ways that we only gradually start figuring out.
When the printing press was developed, people started publishing "pamphlets". The extent of disinformation and political slander that was conveyed through these in the 16th century makes LinkedIn and Twitter pale in comparison.
I suppose individuals learn to cope with these phenomena rather quickly. I'm not the best at avoiding social media, but I seem to have no problem ignoring the crackpots. I guess most people share a similar approach.
That is an important point. People do reflect and learn. Our very discussion is part of this process. The question is at what scale, how quickly, how effective the immunity etc. and what random distress events must be handled in the current setup.
The only reason the far-right exists as a thing in our present age, the only reason that you blame them for being the problem, the only reason you put yourself into that box and blame them is because of social media.
A worthwhile social activity is care for the needy. It actually generates love. No love is generated through social media.
The problem isn't in the technology - it's in our silly idea that there's something better in the world than loving, and being loved.