UK survey of 14-24-year-olds indicates social networks harm mental health | Hacker News Reader

UK survey of 14-24-year-olds indicates social networks harm mental health

qz.com

162 pointspmcpinto93 comments

This is why I removed myself from every social media site within the last few years. Instagram is the only one that sticks around for business purposes, and even that is very addicting. I've setup comment section blocking plugins on all browsers. And I've turned off ALL notifications, except for incoming phone calls on my phone. The smartphone, while an amazing and life changing invention, will be the death of us. Too much constant consumption.

All these applications do is show you the very best slices of everyone's lives. When added up, it makes it appear everyone is living the greatest lives ever, and makes yours seem mundane at best.

Absolutely agree with this, I've come to realize I was addicted to the feed. It took, and still does, a significant effort to control the effect (mostly by regulating access on a scheduled basis).

Just as an aside. I discovered recently that Instagram's web interface (at least on mobile) allows you to upload images. It's a pretty basic offering, but it suits my needs and I've unistalled the app as a result.

Unfortunately I need to stay on the app itself quite a bit, respond to queries etc. A bit of a side marketing/promotion business that is taking off.

Do you have instructions on this? I've never seen it before + can't reproduce it?

Here's what I see when I'm logged into their website on IOS

The camera icon in the centre (much like the app) is what you tap to start the process of uploading your image.

https://postimg.org/gallery/ctpt4i50/

Ironic. You're using a social media site right now.

May I ask how you are defining 'social network'? I'm guessing you and op have different pictures in your heads about what makes a social network, as opposed to a simple forum.

A social network site is a site where you go to interact with other people.

Your definition glosses over important distinctions between different kinds of "sites where people interact".

Any definition will suffer from it because on any single site different people interact differently.

Yet there are still meaningful distinctions that can be made.

For examples, it is easy to identify very key differences between Facebook and HN.

I mostly use Facebook to look at the recent submissions in the Deep Learning group. I mostly come to HN for SV gossip, and to stroke my ego.

Perhaps instead of trying to see the differences, you should look for similarities. For example, how addictive is the site?

The OP commented how sites like Facebook and Instagram seem to distort people's view of what is a normal or good life, as often only the best moments are shared on the site. And this affect can happen even if you are aware of it.

HN is mostly about discussing specific sorts of topics, and doesn't have much of a personal profile, so it is likely that affect is far smaller here.

As for addictiveness, I would agree with you that they are similar along that dimension.

You don't think reading about 300k SE salaries, or startups valued in billions before they turn any profit can distort people's view of what is normal, or good life?

Yes, I think it can. However, this type of content makes up a smaller percentage of HN content, and lack of video and images makes it less visceral. Also, HN commenters are fairly good at acknowledging this and helping each other counteract the distortion.

And yet that type of content affects me much more than anything I ever saw on FB.

My point is, I come to HN for similar reasons as why my gf goes to Instagram. We are both affected by what we see. It might distort our worldview. We are both addicted.

You can claim the high ground, and believe that somehow what you do here is different or more "noble" than what other people do on other social media sites, but that's a very common illusion.

I would guess that the way you use Facebook, by only visiting Deep Learning groups, is a fairly atypical usage pattern.

I'm not trying to claim any personal high ground. I'm trying to understand, in general, how these different types of sites tend to affect people.

I just hope you see how ironic the parent's comment seems, because everything he tried to distance himself from on other sites: addiction, distraction, "constant consumption", seeing "very best slices of everyone's lives" - it's all here.

I understand what you are saying, and acknowledge that HN has some of those things. I simply disagree that they are as prevalent or severe on HN, on average, compared to sites like FB.

Perhaps in time more people will be able to use Facebook (and HN) more judiciously, as you do. That would be a good trend I think.

Just a little anecdote, but my experience mirrors OP's.

I also use FB for groups related to computing. It's not DL groups for me, but something else in the computosphere that concerns me but the aspect is similar. I think a lot of people on this site might display behavior similar to OP's.

After all, facebook is but a tool, it's up to you how you wield it.

I'm curious if p1esk sees these things as really bad or actually normal or acceptable.

If you mean things like "reality distortion", distraction, addiction, then I see them as "bad" things.

However, social sites provide an opportunity to communicate with smart, knowledgeable, caring, or just like-minded people, who might not be available otherwise. To me, that's valuable enough to outweigh the negative aspects.

The so called social media experts usually define it: Facebook, Twitter, Google+

* for young people age 18-24

Whereas I'm 33 and Instagram is the only social network that I use anymore, because the product prioritizes sharing a human experience rather than a political article or an opinion. Snapchat is the same, but I never got into it (cf. my age).

I'd like to see some of these studies that correlate for nature-of-following. It seems like the people who are put off be Instagram follow a lot of celebrities and lifestyle porn. I follow my friends and it's always nice to see what they're up to.

I don't recall ever seeing an ad on Instagram. Must have something to do with the sort of accounts one follows.

Have you ever seen anyone holding a suspiciously prominently placed product? I guess if you really only follow people you know personally this entire problem goes away.

Very true! I'm still on FB, but I do like how Instagram doesn't force you to show your current online status, or how it doesn't rat out your likes or comments...

Instagram does rat out your likes, comments and follows. Check the "Following" tab on the notifications view to see them for those you're following.

It's just down to chance whether the people following you see it, based on how many they're following and how much recent activity there has been with their followings.

Oh, bah. Can't believe I never came across that.

Guess I'm a very basic user...

Thanks.

I am in a similar age range (as yours) and I agree

There is plenty of vanity and marketing on instagram though.

I personally have a preference of opinions over pure vanity.

Two points:

- Vain opinions and opinions based on good marketing that appear on Facebook are still vanity and marketing.

- Curating your feed on any service is paramount, and maybe my anecdotal experience is based on having curated Instagram well, whereas Facebook was a sprawl of vain or disingenuous political theater.

I think the big distinction is in feed curation, and to that end, I believe that Instagram promotes direct follow of highly popular accounts that can reinforce negative self-perception. I just don't really follow any big accounts, just friends whose hijinks I appreciate.

Curation does seem to be the key.

Yes, and I'm willing to bet it's not a linear function. I'd bet 10 bucks that there's a phase change at some point along the x-axis (hours used).

Browsing Facebook 5 hours / week is not the same as browsing Facebook 5 hours a day. So phrased, this seems to be nothing intrinsically new -- television and video games have these kinds of effects as well.

I consider political thoughts and communicating them very much my more human experiences. Though FB etc. seems to be more used for people to agree with each other, not really discuss.

However, I remember the wild west days of forums made by people for people, with child and sibling forums and all sorts of stuff, and politics was always important, as was art, both to just enjoy and to criticize. Even arguing to show off who knew more or could save face better was great. Maybe that's nostalgia speaking, but we did learn from each other, we did change our opinions sometimes. Maybe it was because it was like 100-300 people, over years, more a village dynamic than a mall or festival. You couldn't just steal or destroy and be never seen again, what we did was and immune and not interesting to those types. We also shared photos and videos like crazy, we wrote poems or whatever, but I also wouldn't have missed the bits where we took ourselves too seriously and had drawn out discussions, those sometimes were the best bit. We weren't so uptight, didn't have such thin skins, as is the norm today, that I'll claim. We spawned from something that spawned from something that spawned from stileproject, after all.

I remember this guy being kind of a racist, and we sometimes called him out for it, but otherwise he was still a member, and after a while he wasn't so racist anymore. I still think fondly of that, having shown him the door for "being in the wrong place" because of his initial remarks would have been a huge waste. He became a photo journalist and showed us many great things, too. Sorry for rambling, I don't think I have a point other than fond memories of political debates, and I bet you every one of the inner core will remember that forum for as long as they live, and we didn't even do anything that special.. it's like back then there was grass, and now there's concrete, and that makes the grass seem like a jungle.

Something about the forum communities is that you couldn't isolate yourself from people that disagreed with you. On facebook you can limit who you interact with, so if your ego or your beliefs are challenged you can remove that person from any future discussions. In the forum communities this was impossible unless you were an administrator. Once you became an admin you were then under the microscope from the rest of the community to operate in a fair way, though this didn't stop some admin's from completely destroying their communities or turning the community into an echo chamber.

> product prioritizes sharing a human experience rather than a political article or an opinion

"In the real world, people slow down and look at car crashes. On the internet, they do the same - but it's interpreted by the system as a demand for more car crashes, which the system will then attempt to supply"

- paraphrase of a comment seen on Twitter

I had to look up paraphrase again because I had only ever seen it in the context of taking a larger work and making it smaller whereas your very clear example is larger than the original work. Thanks

Rather superficial attempt at wit. Anywhere "in the real world" that operates on feedback - which in a corporatized world is many things - also has that "interpretation by the system" - see the MSM as the most obvious example.

Sure, it's a common problem of metric-driven and target-driven systems, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem. If we've built systems that reward outcomes that we find bad .. maybe we should do something about it? Or at least encourage people to be aware of when they're participating in the car crash production system.

Currently going around on my twitter is a reminder not to retweet screenshots of professional troll / Mail "journalist" Katie Hopkins calling for a "final solution" to Islam (in the context of the Manchester bombing). That's the kind of thing I mean: engaging with it at all is just feeding the outrage machine. Report and block instead.

My friends started out on Instagram posting simple things about their lives, like a local pond with ducks, or a meal they made at home. Now it's like they only post the really outstanding stuff, adventure/travel or extravagant meals at high end restaurants. And they go crazy with tags, doing the dot dot dot thing followed by a tag block. While the new stuff is cool, I felt they were more relatable and more like friends when they just posted the mundane stuff which honestly makes up 90% of our lives.

This becomes a compulsion where the act of going out becomes motivated by the amount of high-value social media shareable posts.

Such a soul sucking compulsion, truly a product of modern times.

From the report's webpage (https://www.rsph.org.uk/our-work/policy/social-media-and-you...):

> Follow the Young Health Movement on Instagram

Irony is never lost.

From what I gather this found only some correlation, not causation. So I might as well postulate that people with mental health problems are more likely to be on social media. That's not too difficult to believe.

From the report: "One in six young people will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives and identified rates of anxiety and depression in young people have increased by 70% over the past 25 years. Our own research has shown that young people themselves say four of the five most used social media platforms actually make their feelings of anxiety worse (See YHM survey - page 18)" [my emphasis ]

But you're right insofar as this doesn't appear to be a longitudinal study with a control group. But such a study would probably be pretty hard to pull off.

Maybe ESS[1] could help here if questions about social media habits were added - but we'd not see results until a few years hence, obviously.

[1] http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/

I put really little value on what surveyees think causes their anxiety. Epitome of anecdotal data.

If what you're trying to measure is how someone feels, it might be necessary to ask them how they feel - and what they feel influence that. If one person thinks job stress make them unhappy, that might be anecdotal - if seven hundred of a thousand say work makes them unhappy - that might be more towards the "data" end of the spectrum?

I've become convinced all social media is detrimental to mental health. I've stopped using any of it and am feeling a lot better, with no real downsides. My Twitter account is the only one I haven't deleted yet only because I have a four letter username on there which you can't get anymore, but I think I will probably delete it anyway soon.

But don't you consider HN as social media?

Nope. It's just a specialized news feed. I don't make friends on here or really even talk to people most of the time. I only read informative comments, I rarely even note people's usernames.

> I only read informative comments

Um.

How do you know that they are informative before you've read them?

HN has a cool system where comments get up-voted if they are good or down-voted if they are bad. That really makes it easy to sort the good ones from the bad ones.

I think it is because HN does not have "features" like being able to follow other users. I'm thankful of this I don't get Twitter like emails saying "ebbv" liked a post on HN!

you are literally participating in social media right now by reading and writing these comments

I follow places / landscapes / design, wife follows friends (their highlight reel life) and "influencers." It is complete garbage what these people are peddling (for money).

Phone diets will be the next health fad IMO. Can't happen fast enough for me.

Getting everything set up so I can efficiently Internet diet 6-6.75 days a week—not just phone diet—is one of the things on my todo list that I'm not getting done because I'm doing other stuff on the Internet all the time, haha.

You mean the infinite subliminal billboard of our generation?

Not surprised.

Scanning my own personal feed, it seems like everyone is successful and happy. It makes me depressed even though I know the feed is biased.

I've seen a group of English girls around a table in the old square in Prague, one of the most beautiful places in the world for people watching. All of them were not speaking to each other just scrolling through Instagram.

There's only so much time you can spend enjoying a sightseeing spot before it gets boring.

Online photos of oneself in foreign countries have become a fashion accessory. Bonus points if you spent cash to travel to help the poor in a developing country instead of donating it to people who could use it more effectively.

> instead of donating it to people who could use it more effectively

Having lived in Cambodia for 2.5 years, consistently marvelling at the mansions, SUVs, and lunch/dinner habits of the overwhelming majority of the non-profits and charities and NGOs etc sitting it all out very fatly there.. hope you had someone else in mind ;)

Care to elaborate?

Non-profit, charities and NGO often is a actually a lucrative business when it comes to helping the poor there. Also, it may be that the westerners who work there are paid Western wages and live in countries in which life is cheaper.

Just google "volunteer abroad scams". https://holeinthedonut.com/2011/02/21/scam-volunteer-charity...

I'm an effective altruist ;) https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/

That's why you research the effectiveness of charities before donating. (Personally I follow GiveWell's recommendations.)

To be fair, the rent on a nice compound in Cambodia is what... 3k a month? Not necessarily much of a cost.

I donate to Médecins Sans Frontières but more than half my money goes to a company that makes profit off recruiting donators, sooo.

It's entirely possible you bumped into a group of young girls who've had a busy, interesting and stimulating trip through a cool country and who wanted to stop for a quick coffee and a bit of free wifi. Please don't jump to conclusions and judge people like this.

He is probably right, it is the default behaviour in the UK.

It's entirely possible smcl hired those girls to go to Prauge and act that way so that he could tell you not to jump to conclusions. Please don't jump to conclusions.

It's entirely possible that smcl and escherize are in cahoots to tell you not to jump to conclusions. Please don't jump to conclusions.

Exactly, let this be a lesson to you all :D

I've sat in that square and people watched, and played on my phone (looked at days pics, whatever), and talked to friends, and people watched some more. It's Prague, one of the most crowded, touristy places you can go to, and arguably fits the selfie generation perfectly.

You mean the super touristy section where everything is really gimmicky and there's bums everywhere begging for money? God forbid they check their phones for something else to do than wander around one of the most trafficked sites in all of Europe. Gosh next thing you know you'll tell me some people went to Paris and didn't even spend the whole time staring at the Eiffel Tower!

Used to be the same with newspapers, before the rise of mobile phones. Sometimes ppl enjoy to come together to spend some time by themselves, together. No biggie.

Instagram has so much "hidden" advertisement it's just pathetic.

Instagram is full of "lifestyle" or "aspirational" marketing. After years of pragmatic search engine marketing it's an entirely new way of thinking about selling your product or service. Instead of "our product does x, y and z" it's "here's my wonderful life with this product, don't you want it (the life) to be yours?"

"People don't buy products, they buy better versions of themselves."

There's a sibling thread about this on HN right now.

Lifestyle advertising is not new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Generation.

It's not that old, historically speaking, either.

In the context of mass marketing, though, it is again very old. PR is basically propaganda, where these emotional manipulation techniques are very important.

In a way, Holy Church has been doing it for ages.

Reminds me of this movie: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt1285309/

> an entirely new way of thinking about selling your product or service

> here's my wonderful life with this product, don't you want it (the life) to be yours?

What, seriously...? That concept definitely- at least- pre-dates the invention of search engines. I could probably dig up a relevant 90-year old essay by Edward Bernays if I cared to take the time.

Like TV did when I was a kid.

TV, movies and especially music-clips now has even more "hidden" advertisement than ever before.

Why was "Instagram" removed from the title? It is in the linked article and in the body it's explained that Instagram is the worst of them all, so I would say it's highly relevant for the title.

A moderator changed the original title to less baity language from the article (in accordance with the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but couldn't figure out how to fit Instagram in. Since other reports on the same survey single out other social networks (e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/19/popular-soci...) it doesn't seem essential.

They write the same shit every year, every generation.

People said the same thing about newspapers. The same thing about radio. The same thing about rock 'n roll. The same thing about rap/hip-hop. The same thing about TV ( IDIOT BOX ). They said the same thing about myspace 10 years ago. They said the same thing about porn.

I'm sure in 10 years, they'll say the same thing about VR because people need to sell ads and justify their paychecks.

That doesn't make it wrong.

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