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In your opinion, what is your criteria for declaring that a platform is "bad for you" and "an unhealthy habit"?

Personally, I spend ALOT of my free time lurking 4chan's /g/ "technology" board, 4chan's /ck/ cooking board, and a carefully curated list of my favorite food and technology related subreddits on Reddit. I personally consider my addictions to be quite healthy because I learn and absorb a tremendous amount of information from sites that focus more on "actual content that matters" and less on worshiping the same small group of narcissistic acquaintances that congregate on platforms where "disliking" content is frowned upon.

Sure there's a lot of stupid crap on 4chan and reddit is full of corporate and government shills, but the internet has grown SO MUCH lately that the signal to noise ratio isn't as bad as it was in the early 2000s. My only problem nowadays is that I don't have enough time in a day to read/watch/comment on all the important stuff I find on the net. Compare that to the early 2000's, when useful information on the internet was so scarce, that I had to use minesweeper in my highschool computer labs to pass the time.

I for one am happy at how much content there is on the internet now. If you're smart, you can curate your own nonstop stream of "useful" content without that much effort. Problem is that you have to reject content that is curated by big businesses like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and program your own method of retrieving things that matter.

People will always complain about the exponential growth of information. Look at newspapers and the printing press. I'm sure that people reacted the same way towards pocket watches and newspapers as people nowadays are reacting to smartphones and social media. Some people just have addictive personalities in general, and will blame not being productive on whoever's in charge of "information" at any given moment.

Not the parent, but I would say that a platform should somehow add value to your life to be "good for you". HN, Reddit (depending on where you go), other sites etc can entertain, teach, and connect you with interesting people. Social networks I've found are value detractors for me because:

A. I don't care what 95% of people I am connected with are doing, and I regularly talk to the people I care about anyway.

B. I can't have any meaningful discussions on them

C. They are dominated by high volume posters who tend to be very opinionated. Very opinionated people tend to have extreme opinions which are usually wrong and aren't particularly interesting to me.

D. The networks present a false sense of reality which lowers happiness. Everyone always posts their highlight reel which makes you feel like the whole world is killing it constantly and you aren't.

> D. The networks present a false sense of reality which lowers happiness. Everyone always posts their highlight reel which makes you feel like the whole world is killing it constantly and you aren't.

This! I can resonate with all of your points. But this one is one of their major weaknesses.

> The networks present a false sense of reality which lowers happiness. Everyone always posts their highlight reel which makes you feel like the whole world is killing it constantly and you aren't.

If this is what happens in your feed, you have a shallower and less genuine set of social media connections than I do. I get highlights, sure, but just as much lowlights, and quotidian events that don't meet either description.

I suspect that the people who connect with networks of people who do exclusive self-image-burnishing social media posts would also connect with people that provide the same kind of fronts in other venues (including in-person), though I'll also grant that if you tend to connect predominantly with such people, social media magnifies their effect, as it's easier to consistently present an image online than in person.)

> you have a shallower and less genuine set of social media connections

I don't think you have to be "shallow" to be biased towards posting highlights.

You spend a nice vacation in Asia? Your kid managed an important accomplishment? Found a restaurant that's awesome? Aren't these the kind of things that you naturally have the tendency to share?

In contrast, you spent your saturday doing nothing at home? Your kid did an average thing? You ate food that's just "okay"? Am I shallow if I don't like posting these things? Sure some of the days I might want to post about some average or bad things, but I think I'm still biased towards the highlights

As to point C, I think the problem you have is that you are following or associating with people whose opinions do not agree with your own. There are many opinionated people who are insightful, intelligent and interesting. Volume of posting does not always imply 'wrongness'. Similarly, regarding point A, why are you even connected to these 95% of people you don't care about? Perhaps if you curated or controlled who you connected to better you would find social networks much more valuable.

So essentially- the lack of a "dislike" or "downvote" button makes people unbearable?

As someone who cooks a lot, I was curious what /ck/ could have to offer. I hadn't been to 4chan in years. I'm not sure how this board has tremendous amounts of useful information.

/ck/ is actually one of the sanest places on 4chan, in my personal opinion. It's not the nicest place on earth- I mean, it is 4chan, so memes and rudeness aren't against the rules. Couple that with optional anonymity, and you're bound to encounter some rough edges here and there.

Having said that though- I've been there since 2007, and I used to get lots of compliments for posting original content (pictures of food being cooked). People love to talk about food there- plus you get to hear actual line cooks talking about things. You don't have to wait forever to get a reply on a thread, and good threads (like costco food threads) can go up to hundreds of replies before being pruned. All in all, I don't hate the place. My usual bookmarks each day are: 1) HN 2) Reddit 3) /ck/ + /g/ + /fit/ 4) google news (only if important stuff is hapenning in the world, though I Have to admit that the fastest place to get instantaneous information nowadays is /b/)

>I hope this platform dies, rather quickly. Because it harms society and individuals more than we are aware of.

I'm not deleting my account. I only signed up because I was using the Facebook API for something once and needed an account to test. Other than that, I occasionally post links to news, pictures (look at my food! look at this funny animal!), and I check on groups that I belong to, especially the trading ones. The groups are especially useful. I also only ever log in from a single place, my mobile.

It always amazes me how people use it. What did you think was going to happen to that data? How do you think a service as large as Facebook was paying it's bills? People don't need to stop using Facebook. They need to sit for a second and think about they are using it.

My problem is not how they use / misused the data. Thats a whole different chapter. I am accusing them of having made a platform that is designed to make you come back, as often as possible. They give you the illusion of being connected, liked when you post something and others hit the like button, but in reality many of your contacts feel miserable when you did something that they can't. And all that happens is that your attention gets distracted, whenever you login. Also, this is a machinery that allows to manipulate the psychology of the masses. Manipulate the masses in a way our societies never have seen before. Democracies are vulnerable. They always have been. But never as much as with platforms like this.

And by the way: This man is a genious. He made half the population of the world believe that privacy isn't something valueable, that we should share our most precious moments with half the world.

Edit: minor change

"designed to make you come back" ... but that's true of the whole ad-supported internet, broadcast TV etc. If it's free, you are the product. Still a problem, but not just a FB problem.

> What did you think was going to happen to that data?

In some sense you are right, but in this context you are missing the point. The whole point of this recent uproar is that 3rd parties got access to significant amounts of data without consent. Why should people expect that to happen?

I think the biggest problem with a lot of companies is that it's all about growth. Every year more money, more customers etc. Eventually something will give when you're trying to provide a free service and become a huge company. They have to sell something to someone who will pay.

So for a social media company that is free for users and requires a huge software development effort? What are their assets? Pretty much just users. Maybe their code based. I think it's almost inevitable that they put ads on stuff and then later sell your data. What else were they going to do? Start asking users to pay a subscription? Sell the software so that others can spin up their own social media websites?

Its become a cliche but "if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product". Now obviously companies with products and services you pay for, are still going to screw you over. But yes, I think this is exactly what people should expect to happen.

>Today I felt like in my childhood, going to appointments, not killing time on my way to my appointment, having seen my surroundings like back in those days without so many distractions. A wonderful feeling.

Well put. For me, it’s not FB that is standing in the way ... it’s HN! ;)

That being said, this place tends to have much higher caliber comments that what I read on FB, and I learn so much from both articles and discussion. I’ll #neverdeleteHN

Pro tip: If you go to touch.facebook.com and request a desktop site, it will let you access your messages on a mobile web browser without installing messenger. :D

Also mbasic.facebook.com, the JavaScript-free version of the site.

Same with m.facebook.com, just request the desktop site and you can access messages.

Though it's not particularly fun to use that way as touch events become quite sensitive and you end up clicking things you didn't mean to

It doesn't have to be all or nothing.

I've installed plugins to disable my newsfeed and it's been great. Can't really think of a downside to it as it previously was a waste of time and only promoting superficial forced relationships through superficial comments.

You can totally stick to using Messenger as it still promotes 1-1 intentional relationships, and messenger is relatively easy to migrate off of as you can always get your closest friends to add you on alternatives.

> Previously I would check my FB feed a dozen times a day

Wow. Is this still common these days? I rarely check FB. Honestly, I end up checking Twitter and HN way more.

This is, conservatively, once an hour while awake, which doesn't seem all that much. You are the outlier here, I think. Many people check Facebook much more frequently than hourly.

I never understood these posts. I’m not a huge fan of companies that make their living by selling their users privacy data, but Facebook is just a platform.

I have an account because my social circle organizes events on there, but that’s the only thing I use it for. I log in once or twice a month and have made a total of 3 posts to my wall since 2014.

I understand that it can be a tine sink for some people, but so can 4chan, Reddit, hacker news and other social networks.

And that is the thing I don’t understand. Why is wasting your time talking to strangers on HN more valuable than talking with people you actually know on Facebook?

That being said I’m happy for you. Everyone should drop things that make them miserable, and you’ve managed to do so which I think is great.

I already does not use facebook and the likes. For me, I had a similar feeling after I blocked reddit/hn domains.

>I hope this platform dies, rather quickly. Because it harms society and individuals more than we are aware of.

Reddit/HN are places where places that can make you feel like you are doing something or "contributing", without actually making any real impact. A feeling similar to the the illusionary feeling thing you refer in your comment. On one had, it helps individuals to grow and on the other, it restricts their actions to an isolated chamber where the real world remain safe from their thoughts/questions.

So I think, after a certain point. You should forcefully disconnect/distance yourself from these platform, and start to engage in more real world activities. For ex, write a blog, write actual newspaper articles. Send your thoughts to actual news papers for them to publish in such sections, engage in local activities and discussion Etc.

An example of this is that when we came to know about the testing of self driving vehicles happening, many of the people here might have asked "What are the tests there were done before these vehicles are put on road"? Is there any legal groundwork in place?

But those questions remained safely in the realm of the HN servers as some binary pattern in a Hard disk platter. They didn't get out it the real world. They didn't get translated into real question to real authorities.

>Reddit/HN are places where places that can make you feel like you are doing something or "contributing", without actually making any real impact.

Impact for its own sake is overrated. That's not to say you should navelgaze and philosophize about everything but you really do need a balance. The startup community in particular is in love with the image of hustle and whirlwind activity usually just for the sake of ingratiating a handful of egos.

Blogs and newspaper articles have been left in the dust. We can romanticize the long form journalist but really that's a step back. The pool of ideas is now open to anyone with a well worded comment. Rather than privileging a credentialed journalist to express an opinion for us there is a battle of contrasting ideas from many more (though never all) backgrounds to find consensus. To me this is the future. A handful of ivy league graduates pontificating back and forth in op-eds through limited newspaper and magazine space is the past.

You might argue that this will create an environment full of emotion and rhetoric but really that's business as usual. The well educated have just been schooled in how to dress up their opinions as though they were facts. Internet comment sections are about deciding how a problem or conversation will be framed not necessarily about solving those problems. Framing/rhetoric and analysis of virtues are a huge part of determining what "impact" will look like.

> But those questions remained safely in the realm of the HN servers as some binary pattern in a Hard disk platter. They didn't get out it the real world.

If no one would bother to read them sure. But I fail to see how the fact that information is stored in a 'binary pattern in a hard disk platter' makes it less relevant than it being stored on a slice of fallen tree... Especially in our day and age I would argue for the opposite, the virtual medium has become more important - because more people are using it to get their information.

> virtual medium has become more important - because more people are using it to get their information...

"More" does not necessary equals better..Having talk with a concerned authority or a minister might be thousand times better than communicating to a million reddit/hn readers..

Can you think one single instance where a reddit/hn comment ended up having a real world impact?