[HN Gopher] Frequent and infrequent users of social media respon...
___________________________________________________________________
Frequent and infrequent users of social media respond differently
to rewards
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 97 points
Date : 2023-08-28 17:10 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dornsife.usc.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (dornsife.usc.edu)
| biogene wrote:
| It's not just social media, its all discussion forums, (very much
| including HN) that has contributed to the polarization.
| [deleted]
| 01100011 wrote:
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| 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.
| hifromLA wrote:
| "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.
| barrysteve wrote:
| Casuistry has become the bread and butter for so much of the
| online culture, it's not surprising.
|
| Online culture could be an extension of many good things, and
| it just isn't.
| xyst wrote:
| 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).
| o1y32 wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| hooande wrote:
| > 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.
| branperr wrote:
| 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
| ethanbond wrote:
| "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).
| thfuran wrote:
| I find it very unlikely that you're actually addicted to
| Parmesan.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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).
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| 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"
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| 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.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| How is HN not social media?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| 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?!"
| [deleted]
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| Most people I know who tout the fact that they "don't
| have a TV" nevertheless watch Netflix, YouTube, Amazon
| Prime, etc.
|
| I think it's a valid point to question what people mean
| when they say they're not on social media, yet are
| posting on HN.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think there are features that most people consider
| defining of social media, such as personalized feeds,
| following other people, etc.
|
| HN has none of those. As a result, I don't consider it
| "social media", I consider it a specialty news aggregator
| that has a robust comment section.
|
| Back when FB and the like were new, calling them "social
| media" was done to differentiate them from sites like HN.
| wrycoder wrote:
| 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.
| skyyler wrote:
| >I did a lot of biking to see my friends.
|
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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).
| svachalek wrote:
| 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.
| gochi wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's insane.
| ethanbond wrote:
| 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.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| [flagged]
| clircle wrote:
| If only there was a way to measure mindless sharing...
| tiku wrote:
| Glad I've decided to delete it all. I notice that I still
| sometimes type "tw" to go to X.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| 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.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| 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.
| psychphysic wrote:
| It's funny that we're so compelled to innumerate all the ways
| social media is toxic and not do anything about it.
|
| Yet Canada is considering printing individual warnings on
| cigarettes despite fully saturating understanding that smoking is
| bad.
|
| I'm fully with each and every tweet warning you "tweeting makes
| you a dickbag please reconsider"
| mmastrac wrote:
| The smoking rates have halved since 2000 with no signs of
| slowing down. Subtle warnings do help.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Suspiciously in time for the even more addictive vaping boom.
|
| But this is all beside the point.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| 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.
| gabereiser wrote:
| 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.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Especially when they're not so subtle, like text on a plain
| cigarette that you're holding up to your face
| trescenzi wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/481/
| ben_w wrote:
| > I'm fully with each and every tweet warning you "tweeting
| makes you a dickbag please reconsider"
|
| I vaguely recall somewhere had a speech synthesiser read
| everyone's comments back at them before letting people post
| them.
|
| Someone un-ironically complained it made them "sound stupid".
|
| (I think it was YouTube? Not sure).
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| If it is me misremembering fiction as fact, it wouldn't be
| the first time...
|
| (Even if I do have a strong memory that this was _in
| addition to_ the XKCD).
| jacknobody wrote:
| 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.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > 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 network 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.
|
| I expand on this here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37300826
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| gottorf wrote:
| 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.
| diarrhea wrote:
| That's why I think the whole "self-care" and "love
| yourself" movement, if it can be called that, is actually
| subtly but genuinely dangerous.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
|
| (I'm also a Gen-Xer)
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| verisimi wrote:
| > No love is generated through social media.
|
| Excellent - this expresses things so succinctly.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| 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.
| harha_ wrote:
| I'm thankful that I quit social media 9 years ago.
| jsjshbrebj wrote:
| you are literally posting on social media right now
| jacknobody wrote:
| Me too, but... umm... HN?
| brtkdotse wrote:
| I'd say that it's not a social media per se, HN shares _a lot_
| its of traits
| speak_plainly wrote:
| "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.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| 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.
|
| Without it, I'd feel lonely lol
| MockObject wrote:
| 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.
| shmde wrote:
| My drug dealer is limiting my meth supply to only 1 packet a
| day instead of letting me OD. Thank you dealer !
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| 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.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| 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.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| 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)
| lr4444lr wrote:
| 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.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| 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.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| 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.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > 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.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| 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!
| koprulusector wrote:
| 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.
|
| EDIT:
|
| - Further, in case you're missing the peer reviewed,
| scientific studies of social media and addiction: https://s
| cholar.google.com/scholar?q=scholarly+articles+soci...
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think you're misreading the comment. They were comparing
| the mechanism of addictive compulsion, not the magnitude or
| the consequences.
| hammock wrote:
| Compel has broader/more varied meaning than you are giving it.
|
| "His hunger compelled him to eat" is a perfectly reasonable use
| of the word
| brachika wrote:
| 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.
| smokel wrote:
| 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.
| diarrhea wrote:
| 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.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Alot of people use travel to try to fix their lives or escape
| their problems. It never works.
|
| Most people's travel isn't something to be jealous of anyway
| when you pry into it.
| plonk wrote:
| Travel did make me happier in the middle of a depression
| though. Doing it regularly is great for the mood.
| deely3 wrote:
| For you, what is a main difference between social networks as
| facebook and HN?
| lbhdc wrote:
| 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
| deweywsu wrote:
| This really rings true. I think....hold on, I have to post
| something on Instagram.
| Animats wrote:
| Remember, sharing is spamming.
| deely3 wrote:
| HN is a spam site, noted.
| nologic01 wrote:
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| "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.
|
| The people will click, surely they do.
| smokel wrote:
| 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.
| nologic01 wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| [flagged]
| pimlottc wrote:
| Perhaps some people only develop such extreme anti-LGBT views
| because they don't actually know or interact with any LGBT
| people
| MockObject wrote:
| Thank you for the example of the polarization we're decrying.
| wussboy wrote:
| 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.
| s5300 wrote:
| [dead]
| bavell wrote:
| Whew, you've obviously been drinking from the social media
| firehose. Perfect example of what GP post is referencing.
| shmde wrote:
| live example of horseshoe theory.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
| wordsarelies wrote:
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| nologic01 wrote:
| 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.
| beauHD wrote:
| > 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).
| gretch wrote:
| > It's not 'special' like it used to be.
|
| Isn't this true for nearly everything in life?
|
| E.g. when I won my first marathon, I was ecstatic. Now after
| winning 20 of them, my happiness is much more muted.
|
| You can even say it about the first time you ate ice cream.
|
| I don't think this is a reason to be worried about social media
| or make special rules about it.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| 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.
| gretch wrote:
| 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.
| KenArrari wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| xyst wrote:
| 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.
| dingnuts wrote:
| tbh I think admitting in public that you use mastodon or
| lemmy outs you as a fringe nut, just like using 4chan /pol/
| does
| Pannoniae wrote:
| 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 :)
| skyyler wrote:
| What makes you say that?
|
| Most of my friend groups are migrating towards mastodon. I
| haven't noticed any political connotations.
| high_priest wrote:
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
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