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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

tldr;

The higher the income, the less time spent online. More income generally means less free time, less time at work to screw around, and vice versa.

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The study measured primary home device use based on click-stream data from comscore. This requires interpretation with the following considerations:

- The dataset they used is from a commercial entity with its own vested interests

- Secondary home device and non-home device use is not included; An increase in substitutes to the primary home-device should lead to lower primary home-device use

- Only click-stream data that can be gathered by comscore can be included

- Sampling bias of comscore (paper does not describe correction for this)

The higher the income, the higher the impact of non-primary devices is (simply, because with higher income you have more secondary devices)

The study only measured home use.

I also think the correlations categorized by type of contents are way more interesting than the TlDr.

Have you never worked a menial job? If anything there's a direct correlation between pay and opportunities to spend time on social media.

It depends on the job. Someone working security at a parking lot vs someone busing tables, or working as a barista.

The data is in direct opposition to your assumption. Individuals with incomes below $15,000 spend more time online than those with incomes above $100,000.

The study only measured home use. We can't use it to draw conclusions about how people in different income brackets use their time at work.

My hypothesis would be something resembling a Poisson distribution. Most low pay, non-office jobs have little to no opportunity for social media, middle income office workers have lots of opportunity, and as you go up the pay/responsibility scale in office settings you see less and less social media use.

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