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Comment by ikeyany | Hacker News Reader

You could take a year-long class on the psychological influence (some call it social engineering) of Facebook and you'd barely scratch the surface.

One example I find particularly interesting is how Facebook slowly expanded what would trigger a notification, keeping people fixated on that red box like rats to sugar water.

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It had the opposite effect for me -- now that everything gives me a notification, half the time I see the red dot on the corner I assune it's something stupid.

I'm not sure, but I feel that the less I engage with Facebook the more trivial the notifications become - as though the threshold were being lowered to get me back on board.

So if I have no posts garnering likes / reactions, I start seeing "Susan is interested in an event near London!" and "Alan is now on Instagram!!" - until I begin posting again.

Yes. This recent thread and screenshot complained about 36 red notifications from Facebook instead of real human beings: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/6zjzge/n...

Facebook is diluting its red alert into meaningless nagging.

It's the same for me, but I'm sure they have all the analytics they need to know what increases engagement and what doesn't...

I suspect it's a question of goals. Facebook talks a lot about increasing usage time and interaction count.

The changes drove me away, but I was a low-time, low-activity user to begin with. Trading me for expanding the value of a 'whale' is probably a sensible move for them.

The worst is if you turn off notifications from Messenger, it flashes up the red number to tell you you need to turn them back on.

I found it very, very annoying at first... now it's just taught me to ignore the red numbers entirely.

Same problem at LinkedIn. Most notifications are "We've found someone you might know" or "We've found a job you might like".

Cry wolf, why don't you.

Disabled all that social media shit way back. Didn't look back once. People who mattered reached out, those who didn't, didn't. Life moved on. So much for all their "psychological influence".

Yeah, it seems like there's a thread on HN every week where half of us jump in to share our story. I haven't been on FB in over 5 years and am much happier without it.

That said, I have other more tolerable addictions (like reddit).

Thankfully Reddit lets you tailor your subscriptions very narrowly, even allowing you to disable notifications altogether. Even if you take a machete to your friends list on a weekly basis, Facebook has a lot of noise.

Yep. I'm worried that reddit is going to abandon that user-friendliness though, under the typical SV pressure to "grow". Fingers crossed it never happens.

It's already beginning. They just introduced "Pages" and Just yesterday I saw a bunch of new users tagging their friends in the posts to "share" with them.

Is reddit even in the black yet? At the end of it the day, we have to make money for our software. All of that infrastructure and developers aren't free or cheap. Let's be honest with ourselves, people are never going to pay for software again like they used to in the 90s and 00s. Kind of in a way, I miss that. I wish you could pop in a CD of "reddit" with your subscription and that would be it.

My only issue with Reddit the amount of astroturfing that takes place.

Take a look at a community like /r/fitness, and you get a lot of people recommending a lifting program that requires you purchase a book.

The worst part is, once it's been brought up enough (read: astroturfed enough), users naturally start to parrot it to fit in.

I'm not saying there's definitely no astroturfing there, but that doesn't sound like strong evidence of it.

Same here. I did use it often in college when it was still .edu only and got a lot out of it so I understand why people like it.

On the flip side, shortly after I graduated I realized it was my default "thing to do" online (i.e. when I open my browser it was muscle memory to type in facebook.com). Yet when I opened it up I cared less and less about what I would actually see. Anything worthwhile I would have gotten a text/call about, everything else was just attention-grabbing noise.

After I disabled my account honestly I can't say parting with it had any negative effect on my life whatsoever. Anyone who would have invited me to something on FB just sent me a message on something else, or text/called. Any friends I wanted to stay in touch with did so any way in other ways. Anyone that I lost touch with wasn't someone I was trying to stay in touch with in the first place.

It's amazing how often I hear people complaining about Facebook or the people they have "connections" with on there, but just not using the platform is almost a foreign concept for them at this point.

Probably we (as in Facebook users) are part of the largest psychological experience in history. With the billion users and trillions of actions, the computers at Facebook have an unprecedented opportunity to make experiments on us to see what makes us tick.

Take notifications as an example. Not that hard to think that there could be some machine learning system trying to find the best possible notification pattern to lure back a user who has not visited Facebook for a while. On Facebook scale you can run large number of tests in reasonable small time frame and still get pretty good number of observations for each test.

Similar thing could be applied to quite many things on Facebook. Most of the things they want to optimize are easy to measure. Like how often we check the site, how much time we spend there, how many times we click ads and so on.

Hysterical notifications are why I deleted the app from my phone. I was getting notified about stuff that I didn't care about, that no sane person would ever care about, and I lost patience with their whack-a-mole settings system.

James Hamblin at The Atlantic experimented with putting his phone in grayscale mode to combat the power of brightly-colored notifications.

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/480240/adventures-in...

I see a similarity between food corporations pouring money into making food addictive and cheap, and corporations competing for our attention by making their digital products addictive.

I highly recommend this TED talk by Tristan Harriss on the topic: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day

https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tr...

It's a war for our attention and the first step of taking it back is admitting that we are easy to distract and persuad-able.

Just avoid it... don't try to outsmart it, accept that it's poison and move on. The complexity of the issue is belied by the simplicity of the available solutions.

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