Instagram ranked worst social network for young people's mental health | Hacker News Reader

Instagram ranked worst social network for young people's mental health

telegraph.co.uk

252 pointsstartupflix96 comments

I'm curious to know what this looks like for slightly older people. I can see the down side to Instagram: the way it can amplify an obsession with the way things appear from curated snapshots of someone else's seemingly perfect life. And it definitely has less nuanced communication of certain types of ideas - it's not a place to discuss the merits of social policy. But as someone who is slightly older than this 14-24 generation, who finds enriching food-for-thought elsewhere and who isn't obsessed with how other people's lives look, I find Instagram to be the most uplifting of the major networks. It's often more light-hearted than Facebook, and most accounts I follow are purely posting pictures of new products in fields that interest me, pictures of friends doing fun things with their kids, etc. There's much less political flaming, dumb memes, etc. than I unavoidably see elsewhere. I deleted Facebook and LinkedIn from my phone because Facebook just made me feel angry and LinkedIn is just spam and self-congratulation. Instagram is the only major social network still on my phone.

For people who are mature enough to self-regulate and not get addicted to scrolling up and updating their feed, and for people who can avoid an unhealthy level of envying how other's lives appear to be, it seems like a pretty good way to stay up to date with people and hobbies.

Couldn't agree more. I tend to only follow my friends on Instagram (and not celebrities and other special-interest accounts), and it makes me happy to see them doing things that make them happy. Posts that have to do with politically charged or other negative issues are few and far between. Facebook is nearly the opposite of this for me.

It really baffles me how so many people don't realize that Instagram generally will only show the "ups" in a person's life, and often not the "downs", and actually allow that to make them feel bad about their own lives.

I guess at the end of the day I communicate via other channels with a lot of the people I follow, so I know that their life isn't as rosy as their Instagram feed alone might make it seem (though even if I didn't, that "insight" seems like a no-brainer). Perhaps a lot of people in the younger generation use things like Instagram as a primary means of catching up on what's going on in their friends' lives? And growing up with screens in their faces has changed how they react to things in some really bad ways?

Yeah it's ironic that a few years ago people made fun of the narcissistic side of social media: selfies, pictures of inane events throughout your day. That's actually what I DO want to see from old friends. I don't actually care to see most politics, memes, or order-of-operations problems that actual public school graduates can't seem to get.

> And growing up with screens in their faces

I hadn't thought about that. I definitely grew up with a screen in my face, but I also didn't have regular Internet access until I was an adult and already very sure of who I was and what I valued.

Meh, I grew up before computers, and let me tell you: There were plenty of fucked up things to sucker yourself into, before the internet, and when it comes to growing up, unhealthy decisions have always been part of the program.

Just like the newfound diversity of musical tastes and choices, there are more recipes for bad decisions, but you can only listen to so many artists, and the law of probability points to the tendency that the ratio of good and bad decisions has expanded proportionally, and whatever the choices may be, the liklihood of outcome once chosen runs the same odds as ever.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that's what's going on, as far as the big picture frames up.

Yeah, I guess I more meant "grow up with the internet". Or, really, "grow up with services that goad you into oversharing a curated look into your life". I grew up with computers (well, first one around age 8), and hung out on local BBSes until the web came around, but even by then the worst social problems seemed to come from spending too much time chatting online and not enough time interacting with real people or playing outside.

I think really the point is when people started growing up with Facebook. Given that FB has been around for 14 years now, there's a good chunk of people who are even in their 20s now who were introduced to FB as soon as they were old enough for their parents to let them have an account. Instagram came 6 years later, when some of these people were in their teens. A lot of social behavior gets hammered out in those years and growing up with FB/Instagram/etc. rather than being introduced to them post-adolescence might make difference.

I would refrain from attaching value judgments like "mature enough." As far as mental health conditions go, you just don't know what issues are going on within a person or indeed facing a population.

The data only shows that you are not Instagram's power user. It's that simple.

So you can call someone mentally ill based on phone usage, but not immature based on a problem apparently highly concentrated within a low age group? Your virtue has been successfully signaled.

Anecdotal, but there is a documentary right now on danish television, on 4 young girls stressing about, having to be perfect, and bad mental health/self esteem.. and it looks a lot like most of them have an instagram addiction. One chooses places to eat etc. on what would look best on instagram. One aimmessly browsers pretty girls, to see how should look herself.

Horrible.

Relevant movie that explores the psyche behind both `consumer` and `producer` on Instagram: Ingrid Goes West

How's this any different from mindlessly listening to generic pop music and reading teen magazines?

Different things can be bad for the same reason.

Heh. The teenie magazines occasionally have a conscience where you least expect it. This fellow here - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Goldstein_(Psychotherap... - he wrote for the best-known German youth magazine, and he was good. Instagram and Facebook, OTOH, they sell clicks and outrage, because outrage sells.

The illusion of authenticity, the pervasiveness and ubiquitous of mobile phone app usage, and participation in the illusion of the spectacle and camouflaged theatrics of a contrived reality.

Teens can understand magazines have a known aspect of theatrics, whereas the assumption is that instagram is reality and like a Pavlovian dog you must present your life in such a way to gather bonus points from other internet users.

I was recently introduced to Instagram by other 'serious' photographers and they have a wholly different use-case. No selfies or look-at-my-dinner but instead a sort of fast-paced challenge showcase e.g. today might be Sunsets and tomorrow Waves.

It's a way of building reputation , such as how programmers use Github, but because of Instagrams's resizing and compression of photos it's only an interest-generator; the full experience is on Flickr or 500px or whatever. But apparently it's the most lucrative channel for picking-up paid work.

Teen magazines don't let you send in pictures of yourself and collect likes from everybody in your social group.

This is where all the stress comes from. Young girls are under enormous pressure to be attractive and gather tons of likes from their peers. The feedback loop has tightened so much that it reinforces the repetitive behaviour of posting and checking for likes. It's addictive!

By contrast, however, they offer no positive feedback whatsoever. At my school social media contributes positively to most people's self esteem because it is a constant source of positive feedback from friends on personal activities and memories. IDK why we are blaming Instagram for bullying and issues that have been around for years.

> At my school social media contributes positively to most people's self esteem because it is a constant source of positive feedback from friends on personal activities and memories

But that's the problem. People get a "like" or equivalent on a photo or post and they conflate that with self-worth. They then see their friend (or worse, enemy) get more likes and either feel unworthy or a need to compete. I get the short-term self-esteem boost from a popular post, but the long-terms effects of chasing such positive affirmation are not healthy and will likely to lead to deeper issues later in life particularly once you enter the workforce.

Disclaimer: I went to school pre-social media so insert appropriate dinosaur reference.

Having friends and others that care about what you do is inherently part of social species' self worth--that doesn't imply "chasing positive affirmation", which is a problem. Nor does it necessitate a quantitative approach to counting likes. "Likes" are just the modern day version of getting a verbal "that's cool" from a friend. If someone goes around and counts how many positive things are said to them and compares it to others, that is an issues but it's not an issues of technology

Well now we are raising a society where previously neutral social spaces are changing to only permit encouraging and positive things, everything-else-be-damned. Allowing people to constantly pat each other on the back without criticism is going to make people even more spoiled and insufferable

That's an interesting perspective. I also did not like it when things I liked in school like TV and video-games were blamed for ruining my generation.

What do you think about the evidence that more teenagers than ever are suffering from severe anxiety?(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/magazine/why-are-more-ame...)

I agree with you, but one thing to think about is that Instagram is always "on", it always has new content, something new to aspire to. Compare that to the monthly time frame of magazines, some of which might promote the same style for a few months before moving on.

It's also somewhat easier for parents to monitor their kids' magazine consumption (if only because magazines cost money), while it's hard to do the same for IG.

Operant conditioning.

Social media is practically a Skinner Box (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner_Box) with a very tight feedback loop. The randomness of the reward approaches an optimal conditioning schedule.

Listening to pop or reading a magazine doesn't have anywhere near that level of power.

It's kinda sad. But my girlfriend now chooses places similarly. She goes on instagram and looks for good looking pictures and suggest that we go there.

I'm trying to make her spend less time on the app, but it's one of the apps she by default goes to when she is bored.

There's nothing wrong with browsing for beautiful places. Travel magazines, especially the ones in the back of your airplane seat, do this. However Instagram adds a "keeping up with the Joneses" dimension to it with everyone taking selfies that does make things unhealthy.

Are you traveling somewhere because you're actual curious about the culture and history, or because it'll add good content on your IG?

BrooklynCartoons does a spot on job of critiquing our current "culture":

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bfym2nunhbX/?taken-by=brooklynca...

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg_0TIKnvae/?taken-by=brooklynca...

Great cartoons. Ironical to use Instagram to show how toxic the 'gram culture has become.

Can you share the name of the documentary or where I can find it?

it called "De perfekte piger/The perfect girls" its available here, but its in danish https://www.dr.dk/tv/se/de-perfekte-piger/-/de-perfekte-pige... .

Teenagers' sense of groupthink is a much bigger problem than just instagram

The thing about Instagram is it takes groupthink from just a teen's school to the whole world. The bar is just so much higher.

"It’s not enough to just connect people, we have to make sure those connections are positive."

And why should groupthink be an unique trait of teenagers? :-P

It isn't, but it manifests especially strongly in kids

I've heard anecdotes of people who delete posts from Instagram if they don't get enough likes - some figures included a minimum of 100 likes. I can absolutely see where the mental health problems come into play from that.

Interesting. Most of the people I know on it post less than on Facebook and there's a much higher ratio of other photos to selfies/screenshots compared to other social networks. I only post a couple times a month when I feel like I have a photo worth posting.

As more people move over from mainline Facebook and Facebook adds more Facebooky features to Instagram, I expect it will get less useful for this. There's also not a lot of timeline control, so you do end up with situations where someone goes on a trip and suddenly you have 20 posts in a row from a single person at Disneyland.

I suppose if you're using it as an all-purpose social network and trying to maintain a persona, the inability to post anything other than pictures applies a lot of pressure to always have exciting new pictures to post.

I guess they might be working on a post-status-as-a-picture feature.

Wouldn't be surprised. Something akin to Facebook's "short status in large text on a colorful background". Bummer for me though, the lack of that kind of content is the single main reason I like Instagram.

Making you come up with a photo worth sharing added enough friction to posting that people slowed down and only posted when they had something to post. As compared to Facebook where you can just be constantly status updating and sharing links, etc.

The one thing that I want it to do is take the big bursts of activity from a single user and collapse them into 1-2 posts and then "Expand 18 more posts from Bob...", but I'm not holding my breath. More likely they'll try for a fancy machine learning solution that's less predictable from a user perspective, but probably sells more ads because I'm scrolling through it trying to find where it put something.

That's what Instagram Stories are.

Not nearly intrusive enough! Give it a year and stories will also show up in your timeline.

They already do show you a static preview overlayed with the user's round profile photo after you scroll down past 4 or 5 photos on your timeline

And they have a feature called Highlights I believe which allow you to pin stories to your profile, so they're viewable forever

Also, don't forget about the 'race' to get more and more likes on the post.

Oh right, that and comment threads. I turned off notifications and honestly forgot it has all that.

Also the tags.

People post fewer photos, but that shouldn't be confused with having less of an influence on social culture.

Now each post carries much more weight, and therefor is more heavily curated to show that person's perfect life.

It goes further than that though. I know people who wait for a specific hour on Sunday to post their weekly photo because they know that most people check their instagram then and therefor will get them the most likes.

In fact people are going on more adventures and trying more restaurants, which we can argue is a net positive, but it really taints the experience and makes it hard for me to support when so much of the motivation for doing so revolves around taking that perfect picture to share on instagram.

I try not to be a counter-culture cynical critic, but dang.

I remember when Insta was "newer", people used to comment on how much nicer it made them feel compared to Facebook. I also felt that same. But I guess beyond a point, all social networks turn into bit of a rat-race, which also reminds me of college.

Engineering :p

> "Respondents were asked to score how each of the social media platforms they use impact upon issues such as anxiety, loneliness and community building. The site with the most positive rating was YouTube, followed by Twitter. Facebook and Snapchat came third and fourth respectively."

YouTube had the most positive rating!? I'm honestly not sure what to make of this. The experience of 14-24 year olds must be vastly different to the comments etc I've seen there.

Don't look at comments.

Most people probably don’t interact with the comments. Most probably just watch the videos, ignore the comments, or glance at the comments and never venture back due to the toxicity of it all.

Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content. Instagram/Snapchat is the same, except now the comments are pictures with a whole lot of body shaming thrown in.

> "Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content"

This is by far the best, most succinct description of Twitter I've ever heard. Love it. Keeping this one and requoting it forever, thank you

The evanescent nature of Snapchat is probably what's making it less harmful than the others. Though disappearing content probably just introduces different issues.

> Twitter is like taking YouTube comments and making them the content.

Much of it, yes. But 1) tailor your Twitter stream to your (professional) interests, 2) ignore any trending news, 3) unfollow people who tweet random stuff or have too much Trump (or any current politics) in their mix and it will provide useful. I follow mostly computational neuroscience / machine learning scientists, and have heard much about recent research, summary articles or conferences first on Twitter. On an evening just two weeks ago I glanced at my list and saw a poster about one of the most intriguing research findings I've yet seen. Without Twitter I would have had to attend the conference or waited for the paper. Science Twitter is active and growing, and as scientists are busy people for many it has become a popular and low-effort announcement platform for new work (much better than university blogs or press releases and such).

I see much more toxicity glancing on any video's YouTube comments than on my Twitter stream.

Well what was the “most intriguing research finding” you saw? Don’t leave us hanging haha

I find it pretty hard to curate even interesting lists of researchers on Twitter without running into too much fluff or political tweets. I don't blame them for using the medium as it might be intended and of course they are free to share their personal opinions, but in my experience even just a handful of people who tweet a bit too often can pollute your stream enough to make it annoying to follow along.

Maybe Twitter should just let you filter posts based on content. (Maybe it's already possible, I'm not a big Twitter user.)

There is word filter feature, but the UX is a bit clunky and you cant subscribe / paste a big list of words you would like to filter.

A future feature I would like to see in social networks is automatically generating tags for posts and letting people filter out the posts based on that.

With that, I can just choose an automatically generated US politics filter for example and not have to maintain a mute list.

Same here. I only follow graphics programmers and game developers. The graphics people are ok, but a few of them tweet a lot of politics in addition to content I wouldn’t want to miss. And game development is thoroughly saturated in The Culture War, so there’s no practical way to avoid that except to ignore it.

YouTube isn't some tiny niche, it's a huge sprawling expanse of content. You may be shocked to learn that what others view on youtube is completely different from what you watch there, and that leads to different experiences. Not just in the details, but in character as well.

In my experience, the comments vary dramatically based on which part of the site they're on. Compare 70s Japanese jazz albums to political satire.

YouTube is pretty great. Even the comment sections arent that bad from my experience. Youtube has a big 'celebrity' factor but unlike FB, Instagram and Snapchat those 'celebrities' are not your friends. If Logan Paul posts a vid from Japan that does not make me envious but if a friend of mine does I'm more likely to become jealous.

Youtube also has a great utility factor, you can learn a lot from youtube.

I love Youtube. All of the videos by Brady Haran are worth watching, Numberphile, Periodic Videos, and Sixty Symbols. There’s just a ton of great content, but of course there’s also a screaming pit of nastiness, politics, and conspiracy. The good news is that it’s incredibly easy to avoid the bad stuff, and easy to find the good stuff. YouTube is very much what you make of it, while Twitter is mostly toxic unless you curate aggressively.

Youtube (because it's video) is a way more open-ended platform allowing for deeper engagement with any subject matter vs the purposefully restricted medium of twitter or instagram which boxes you into to eye-catching photos, and overstimulating anxiety inducing rapid fire feed scrolling. It's mindless and unsatisfying.

Youtube has almost limitless niches of hours of content.

Definitely crazy depth of content. I’ve spent hours watching someone shoot novel shotgun loads, and that channel took me to another all about how to program and operate a CNC mill, and I spent hours there. I remember being home sick as a little kid, and daytime tv was a nightmare of talk shows and things like The People’s Court. If I was too tired or sick to read, I’d just watch that stuff and wish something else was on.

Now, with YouTube you could watch absolutely anything at all. Physics lectures, classical concerts, or just cute cats and JPop, whatever. I realize people like to most about “the youth of today,” but for the right kind of kid, the world is their oyster. All of the encyclopedias and libraries are online, all of the education and entertainment is right there. It’s incredible. You can learn to cook everything from fried cheese to haute cuisine, learn to play an instrument or just watch a guy acapella with himself, and everything in between. Whatever you want to see is just a click or two away.

Lots of videos on youtube have comment sections that are just full of people who like the content positively discussing it. Usually not the kind of content that makes top trending.

For example, I enjoy the videos of PeterDraws. Just now, I went to his channel and checked out one of his most recent videos. All of the comments are positive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykc_XIPhjPY

Reminds me of a channel I like "Robin Seplut", a Russian man who goes out in the street and feeds cats everyday:

https://youtu.be/933AXPaTkv8

The comments are overwhelmingly positive. His videos are very popular, with quirky titles because of his limited english, no soundtracks, and daily kind gestures feeding starving cats. Just plain positive content.

Re: PeterDraws.. I don't think I've ever seen such a high "thumbs" up ratio with that many total votes.

One thing Youtube allows for, and I see it in both the video you linked as well as the cat video.. is ASMR-type content which serves as a strong antidote for the type of anxiety-inducing social media interactions we see with Instagram and others. I think it's because Youtube (and long form video in general) is a much more expansive medium. It allows for more focused, and slower, engagement vs rapid fire feed scrolling like twitter and insta.

> One thing Youtube allows for, and I see it in both the video you linked as well as the cat video.. is ASMR-type content which serves as a strong antidote for the type of anxiety-inducing social media interactions we see with Instagram and others.

Yes, absolutely. YouTube has it's own anxiety-inducing features, but you're right that this kind of content would never really truly succeed on Facebook or Instagram in the same way it has on YouTube. Peter's videos would probably have to be sped up and edited into something like the art equivalent of those Buzzfeed "Tasty" videos.

Thank you for sharing Robin's videos, I love this kind of content. It reminds me of another channel that I like, which is also very positive: please enjoy "James Blackwood - Raccoon Whisperer," a man from Nova Scotia who feeds Raccoons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHwmCwoqdKA

FYI suicide rates for 10-14 years old have increased 250%+ since 2007.

I know of no other way to more accurately measure the decline and sickness of an age than the number of children that want to willingly kill themselves.

Source is the CDC Mortality Statistics and also Dr. Jean Twenge out of San Diego.

survey found the photo-sharing app negatively impacted on people's body image, sleep and fear of missing out

That’s funny because I (not young) get a bit of joy from Instagram. The FOMO makes me travel and do things I wouldn’t otherwise. My wife encouraged me to start capturing the beautiful things I see and now I go back to my profile[0] and relive some amazing and beautiful moments. The ripped guys (and gals) on there remind me to hit the gym.

Instead I think it’s all about perspective. My wife says “comparison is the thief of joy”. I don’t compare myself to what I find on IG. I use to to inspire me as to what’s possible.

Facebook and Twitter, by contrast, are full of mean people saying mean things. That makes me feel yuck inside. So I try to avoid both.

0: https://www.instagram.com/ryan_marsh/

I really wonder what the user experience would be like if only the creator of the post could see the "likes" on Instagram and Facebook. Similar to Snapchat, I think it would alleviate some of this anxiety and need for validation if we didn't see how much attention our friends get on social media.

Good idea! Sounds easy enough to test with a browser extension. :)

It's what I'm planning on doing!

Like how it's done with the comment upvotes on HN?

Exactly.

Link to report cited in the article:

https://www.rsph.org.uk/uploads/assets/uploaded/62be270a-a55...

I think this goes for all the mainstream social networks. They are just echo chambers where people feed their ego on the ego of others. In the past 4 years I've been cutting down on all this crap, not because I couldn't handle it, but because it provides 0 value to me and only consumes time. Still got all the accounts but dont use them. Cut out snapchat, twitter, facebook, instagram and like 20 news portals. Currently only look at HN to keep up to date and sometimes open Reddit. No games no nothing on the phone. Entertainment is at home or out with friends.

I can believe this - even though as other people mention the study seems poorly designed.

That said I literally just use Instagram for dogs and nothing else. So it’s just a source of joy :)

> I literally just use Instagram for dogs

What do you mean? Can you elaborate? ( Not Trolling) Do you use it to see Dog pics & Videos? or Dog owner stuff?

I use IG exclusively for watching cat videos, and boxing news.

S/he probably means seeing dog pictures/videos. Or if he owns a dog, operating a dog account (god, that sounds weird typing it out).

As NDT said I use it for watching dog pictures (and inflicting my terrible dog photography upon the internet :D )

Whatever is the current most popular form of social media will always be the worst for people's mental health.

Like fb ranks lower on how much stress it induces since "kids these days" simply don't use it much.

Or: Instagram ranked social network most likely to be frequented by people with poor mental health.

After reviewing the report and the associated studies, there are no indicators that this is a causal relationship - just correlations. My immediate reaction is "why are we ruling out the possibility that they are on Instagram / Fb / (insert network of choice) because they do not have healthy EQ (emotional intelligence as a proxy for "mental health" here?)"

I don't have skin in this fight, but I am extremely skeptical of "correlation over causation" with specious conclusions that justify certain opinions that are popular here on HN.

Statistics rarely gives causal indicators (and arguably it would always be impossible to distinguish cause and effect in this case).

So, this is an unhelpful criticism.

Is there a correlation? Yes. Is there a causation? We can't know for sure, but we also can't rule it out and it is certainly worth considering and reporting on in lay terms.

Couldn't you settle this by controlling for initial mental health in two groups, having one group start using Instagram, and tracking any changes? If your point is that it would take work to separate correlation and causation then yes, agreed, but I don't see why you would think we can't know for sure.

That would probably be considered unethical because the expected change would cause harm.

Instead, perhaps you could have group A stop using Instagram and group B continue using Instagram then compare. It would be important to look deeper to see if there are differences within group A between those who and did not replace using Instagram with another social platform.

In addition to the other concern, you don't have a good control here because you intend to select from people who don't (or do) currently use Instagram - but this is already a self-selecting group.

IMO it's probably both. Probably harmful for most people, but maybe only a bit, and for some it can be a terrible negative feedback loop.

Especially as an indicator of one social media platform vs another, it seems unwise in its design. Essentially, it appears that they are trying to gauge each platform's impact on young people's mental state by...asking those young people to guess at the answer. Hmmm...problematic as it is to ask someone (young or not) to evaluate their own mental state, asking them to evaluate which social media platform that they use is responsible for that, seems even more problematic. This does not look like the world's best experimental design, even with the same budget you could have done better.

Timestamped "19 MAY 2017"

Please change the title to reflect this.

I deleted it a month ago. Complete useless waste of time. It's filled with purely narcissistic photos. It can't possibly be healthy for anyone.

I also deleted it! I'm sick of Zucks garbage business model.

Were you also posting narcissistic photos?

I don't see what was wrong with his opinion. Why make it personal?

I didn't make it personal, he (or she) did when they said "I deleted it a month ago". The given reason was stated fairly ambiguously.

If that person doesn't want to see the narcissistic photos of others, they can simply unfollow those that post that kind of stuff. If, on the other hand, they find themselves indulging in narcissistic displays, well that makes a little more sense for why you would quit for reasons of health.

I'm assuming this is heavily biased by your curation. I follow graffiti artists, calligraphy artists, and landscape photographers. My Instagram feed is filled with new artwork that inspires me daily, it is almost like visiting a museum everyday.

you are selling this pretty hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com