Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhwang5 | Hacker News Reader

Quarantine only reinforced people's zombie-browsing (FB, IG) habits, since there's nothing else to do.

> financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2020

The quarantine period is only 15 days or so for US, a bit more for couple other countries.

40 days in India with India having the largest Facebook user base and second largest Instagram user base. And this is only going to grow even more.

Umm.. that[1] is not even remotely close. It just includes about 7-8 days of lockdown period from India.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_lockdown_in_I...

Those were not all in Q1 which this quarterly result is about.

It's so sad because there's so much more to do. Socializing with your family, exploring intellectual curiosities, exercising, reading old books, learning something new.

The human brain compute in this modern age is sadly wasted.

Must... scroll... the endless slot machine of dopamine!

this is an extremely stressful and worrisome time for many people. many are also dealing with loss from death of loved ones due to the virus.

it's great that you are apparently able to use this extra time positively.

but for many, right now is basically as close as can be to hell. i don't blame anyone for turning to some mindless entertainment.

I'm not sure that's sad. People should do the things they enjoy, including randomly browsing and chatting on an app.

People can spend time on gaming, TV, music, reading novel, sleep, rolling on the floor, watching K-Dramas... And that's fine. It's a misconception that humans need to optimize for productivity. Some people optimize for happiness instead (myself included), and there is nothing sad about that. In fact, I'm pretty happy :).

Social media use is not generally associated with higher degrees of happiness or satisfaction, but in fact in some demographics like adolescent girls with increased self-harm and loneliness.

The rise in loneliness (and its associated effects) over the last ten years that thas largely coincided with the advent of social media have been so extreme that some countries like the UK have created a distinct ministry and government strategies to deal with it.

But maybe can you think about the causation in an opposite way? Isn’t because in the guise of neoliberalism society has become increasingly hypercompetitive and alienating that people are flocking into those social media sites as a last resort, no matter how horrible do you think it is?

I’ve seen people suggesting to leave social media to find real opportunities for human relationships, but if you really have enough social capital for that you wouldn’t be vigorously surfing around on Reddit or Twitter in the first place. (In other words: how dare you have the sheer luxury to leave social media and say that it’s harmful to you!)

Connecting with friends/family over Facebook doesn't count as socializing? How about communicating over Whatsapp or Messenger?

Wouldn't being distanced from your friends and family kind of increase the usage of mediums you can use to connect with them, and see what's up in their lives?

Also, humour through content like memes, videos which platforms like Instagram, Tiktok provide is a nice escape from all the gloomy news.

While you can use platforms like Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp to kind of socialize in new ways like your home workouts, cooking things etc.

to be honest, if people are not using facebook, they might still use twitter, tiktok or whatever.

not everyone is going to learn sth new when they have free time. I do not think that is a waste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com