Is Facebook geared to dullards? | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook geared to dullards?

roughtype.com

60 pointsdoron54 comments

Am I alone in feeling that this headline is self-aggrandizing snobbery?

Facebook succeeds by providing universal access: it must be a tool that anyone can use.

Is a hammer geared to dullards? Is a coffee mug?

Just because it is simple enough for everyone to use doesn't equate to being "geared for dullards". I know it's cool to hate on Facebook, but attacking them for one of their key successes is absurd.

Now whether Facebook attracts dullards is another matter entirely....

Edit: It's clear that the article references research which is actually interesting and on-topic. However, I'm disappointed to see a headline like this on HN, which both misrepresents and colors the research.

I don't think the author meant that its simplicity (from a user experience perspective) was the reason -- it was what you can do with Facebook that may make it for people who require less of a cognitive challenge.

The best software is so simple that anyone can use it, but the converse (simple software is only used by simple people) is definitely not true.

Facebook is designed to maximize engagement. With that goal in mind, what kind of user is more desirable? One who digs into deep issues, or one who spends all day chatting with friends? Sure, the research doesn't say what Facebook's intent is, but if they're seeking to maximize engagement, we can guess where it will go.

Is chatting with friends for dullards?

One who digs into deep issues

What does that even mean? In my observation there's a few hundred people in the world who actually "dig into deep issues". They are supplemented by about fifty million others who think they are being deep because have just taken a freshman philosophy class and/or drugs.

Out of curiosity, which do you think you are?

Neither. (With occasional episodes of class 2 back when I used to go to first-year philosophy lectures, but that was twelve years ago...)

Chatting with friends all day correlates with low NFC. I wouldn't use the word "dullards", which is one reason I could probably not get a job writing attention-grabbing headlines.

By "dig into deep issues" I just meant activities associated with high NFC. I think such activities are correlated with intelligence, but I wouldn't hazard a guess as to how good a predictor of intelligence they are.

  Is chatting with friends for dullards?

I dare say that Facebook has an extremely lose definition of a friend.

I can count my real friends on one hand and don't think that's low.

If I have any social networking anxiety, it's not about friend count. It's anxiety over wasting my life catering to wannabe web personalities trying to build a following via attention-whoring or wasting precious moments of my life scrolling through every mundane update every idiot on my list posts when their new baby farts (or, worse, the ultra sound images and the nine months of constant uninteresting updates that follow).

Am I a snob for not giving a fuck about every single second of your life? Fine. Call me a snob, then. My time is too precious to waste stuffing it full of crap about your life. When you have something really important to say that will mean something significant to me, then you can come tell me. Or call me. Or email me directly. You're not the damn Daily News. You're not so important that you need to broadcast your every thought and action to a legion of followers. You can have direct interactions with me. One on one. And if you can't, then whatever it is probably isn't that important in the first place.

I have the decency not to bother with Facebook or Twitter. Why? Well, I am a writer. I'm also a bit of an entrepreneur. I also value other people's time and don't feel that every thought I have or action I take is worth sharing with the world. Inf act, I feel that very few are. And when I do have something of value to share, I'm not going to do it on Facebook or Twitter. I'll do it on a website, like we've done for fifteen years and it'll have more thought given to it than a 140 character spam of my new startup or a "so drunk lol!" followed by seventy-eight photos of me getting wasted at a bar, like a rookie.

I mean this in the kindest possible way -- but you're a snob. :-)

I was resistant to facebook at first, but I've found it a great way to keep in touch. Yes, sometimes people over-share, and sometimes there is a temptation to over-share yourself. But if you're an adult, it's easy to recognize that and make allowances for that in other people. It's part of the human social fabric.

And it's quite useful to be able to post vacation photos (as one example), or blast out an update and have group comments -- it seems less isolating, and frankly less annoying, than group email updates when your friends are geographically separated.

Do people "collect" friends? Yes... that can happen. But like anything else, you can use it like an adult, and play to it's advantages, rather than it's disadvantages.

To some geeks, uninitiated social contact that doesn't make their own special needs primary is an annoyance. But -- trust me, the resulting anger and isolation isn't really worth the curmudgeon act. You are not that busy, you're are probably not solving world hunger, etc... lay off the snobbery.

Now Twitter on the other hand, is a little different. Its nature is to be more of a public platform. Something public personalities use -- and in that case, the character limit makes something that should be deeper, much too shallow. I use it as a headline news ticker ('cause the existing RSS tickers are less capable than twitter clients), but don't bother following individuals.

The thing is, the signal on a social network like Facebook is not strong enough to overcome the noise and it would require that I spend precious time parsing through a significant amount of that noise just to reach the few rare bits of signal. I'm not concerned about myself over-sharing, because I have at least some reasonable sense of "is anyone going to give a damn and will this be of any benefit to anyone whatsoever". I'm more concerned with he deluge of other people's mundane daily lives. I don't need to be a receptacle of their stream of consciousness and I don't need the chore of parsing through it for anything useful.

I'm, frankly, a little offended that you are suggesting that snobbery is involved and that it has an element of "well, your commentary doesn't my my needs the priority, so it is therefore of no interest to me". That's hardly it, at all. It's more an issue of "I don't need to be bombarded with every trivial thought and action of your entire daily life and I would not bombard you with the same". News shock -- you are not that important and neither am I. And you don't need to post the constant stream of inanity to "keep in touch" -- assuming that you even need a third party utility to "keep in touch" (isn't that what email is for?).

For example, I finally logged into my Facebook account while posting this and here were the most recent updates that greeted me. Note that the age of every poster here is between 25 and 50. No, I'm not solving world hunger, but am I a snob for saying that all of the below is a complete waste of my time and that the only reason a person would post any of these things is that they either have keyboard-turrettes or are some degree of attention whore?

Do I have anything more significant to say with the same frequency of all these inane posts? Do I have anything truly earth shattering and mind-bending and enlightening that absolutely must be shared with a hundred people several times per day? No, I don't. So I don't post. I choose not to add to the noise that other people (presumably people that I am either close friends with or at least vaguely associated with) have to sift through. Interesting how that makes me a snob, rather than considerate.

* Someone posted a picture of their cat.

* Someone posted a picture of something really old in their freezer and asked if they should still eat it.

* Someone made a snarky comment about Obama.

* Several people posted links spamming projects they're doing (shows, events, etc).

* Someone posted their tarot reading (again).

* Someone said they should have been in bed an hour ago.

* Someone answered questions in some app about how tall they are.

* Someone said they saved a lot of money grocery shopping today.

* Someone liked Dial brand soap.

* Someone said the work day will never end.

* Someone said they "love being a mommy".

* Several people posted links to random stupid youtube videos.

* Several more stupid updates from apps (no matter how many you click "hide" on, there are always more).

* Someone said "that dream was different!"

* Someone made some vague drama-infused comment about their relationship or a friendship or something (I couldn't tell which).

* Someone said they can't wait for Friday.

Another way of thinking of this. I call my mom maybe once a month and talk to her for half an hour or so. The woman who gave birth to me. The woman who raised me. The woman who sacrificed a lot in life to make sure that I was fortunate enough to become the person that I am today. I talk to her once a month-ish. Just long enough to catch up on the most important things and let her know she's important in our lives.

I would not want a running stream of every action and thought my own mom made. Why on earth would I want one every hour or two from every single friend or associate I have. People overshare. Too much and too frequently. And too trivially. Whatever happened to going out and having a drink and shooting the shit with your friends? That's fine, every now and then. Keeping in touch when something big is fine. I don't, however, need to hear from you every damn hour on every damn thing going on. And they don't need to hear that from me, either.

As I said, people absolutely adore talking about themselves. They are attention-whores. They want to broadcast as much inanity and/or drama as they possibly can to the largest audience they possibly can and it's usually a one-way-street (though even more so on Twitter). If they had even one second of consideration for the value of their contribution and the value of their "friends" time, they wouldn't post nearly as much of the crap that they do.

And it's not just your buddy. Or the guy at work. Or the ex-girlfriend. Or the random dude you met at a convention that friended you when you got back home. It's the tech celebs. It's the tech industry darlings. It's Scoble and Kevin Rose and everyone else. Trust me, I've considered following the twitter feeds of some of these people. After all, they stumble on to some cool things and have some interesting thoughts to offer. But even with these people, the level of noise is just incredible. So much so that I stopped following any of them ages ago and don't bother to follow anyone anymore, because I know that for every interesting 140 characters I get from them, I'll have to pour through many thousands of characters of trivial crap (or even meaningless crap, when it's just semi-inside stuff between them and someone else).

My time and attention isn't more valuable than anyone else's, but that doesn't mean that it should be wasted, either. It seems entirely reasonable to expect people to have at least a little bit of a filter on their output with respect for the dozens or hundreds or thousands of people that are going to be subjected to their signal (or more often, noise) before submitting.

And yes, I realize the hypocrisy of my statement after I just sat here and wrote about a thousand pages. Sorry.

You should have edited this down. :-) Frankly, this seems even more condescending than what you started with and gives me a less charitable impression.

However, I get your main points, and feel the same frustrations at times with "social" apps, but it's never bothered me to such an extent. If someone was bothering me that much, I'd hide them or un-friend them -- they provide that service, you just have to have the guts to use it.

In my experience, there are very few people that fall between the two. They are either the examples I provided above or they are, like myself, silent until they have something to provide that is of a real contribution and not just "I have a mouth, so I'm going to make stuff come out of it because I can!". So it's either a flood of drivel or a silent vacuum.

I concede that social networks are not 100% noise, but the signal value is so small that I don't see there being enough return for the amount of work needed to whittle it down to mostly 'content'.

You write like everyone who posts to Facebook or Twitter expects you to read everything they post. I don't think anyone posts with that expectation in mind.

I understand that isn't the case, but they obviously want as much attention for each update as possible or else they wouldn't bother and regardless of their expectations, it's still more stuff that every other person has to sift through.

Well, I disagree that you have to sift through it. Normally, I am a "completionist" and don't want to miss anything, but I've come to accept that most content on social networks is transient and I couldn't read it all even if I tried. Even Facebook's "full" feed doesn't include everything.

I think, though, that audience targeting is the weak point of Facebook and Twitter right now. I think many times people post something with a few people in mind or at least a subset of their social graph. For example, when I post technical articles that probably are interesting and relevant to my technical peers, my HS friends and family will see them also. I don't think you can blame users for doing this or chalk it up to vanity. Their posts are probably relevant and interesting, but just for a subset of their graph.

A Googler made an interesting presentation describing this problem: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

Perfect! Well put.

I have just read the fine blog post, which taught me the term "need for cognition." Having read it, I posted a Facebook link to the blog post visible to my 554 FB friends titled with the question, "The suggestion of one research finding is that people who like to use social networking sites don't like intellectual challenge. Can you think of any counterexamples?" I will see what happens over the next several hours.

The use case I see most frequently on Facebook among my circle of FB friends is posting links to external publications to elicit discussion--the general use case here at Hacker News. I think people with need for cognition can learn from Hacker News, and if they shape their Facebook friend list intentionally they can learn from Facebook. The second person to Facebook-friend me, connections with whom drew me into the majority of my friend list on Facebook, is a parent I met at conferences on education of gifted children, an occasional participant in email discussions of parenting issues and education reform issues. Over the years I have developed a lot of email relationships (the old-fashioned term would be epistolary friendships

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2006....

for friendships maintained mostly by writing letters) with parents all over the world who are frustrated by anti-intellectual school systems and who want education for their children that challenges their children intellectually and helps them learn at full speed throughout childhood. In such a friendship environment, I encounter a lot of intellectual challenge. I have to LOOK IT UP if I make a factual assertion that differs from what someone else thinks (much as many people do here on HN). My friends are not screened by occupation, place of birth, country of citizenship, political persuasion, religion, or any other criterion but interest in pursuing learning and improving education for everyone.

I think intellectually curious people make use of Facebook as "free riders" in much the same way they used to make use of AOL as free riders. (This is not even to mention the number of people who learn from HN without posting much here.) I can well believe that many people waste a lot of time on Facebook, so much so that my slogan in Facebook comments is "Friends don't let friends play Facebook games," but high use of social networking sites (FB or HN) is at most a correlate of lower intellectual engagement at the group level, rather than lower intellectual challenge being an invariant outcome of heavy use of social media. The study design reported in the submitted link is not an adequate study design

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

to make the claim that all persons who use social media a lot fail to challenge their thinking.

P.S. By the time I had finished typing this comment, I had already received a reply to the submitted link on Facebook: "Well, I don't know people's IQ's, but many of my friends on FB have graduate degrees and almost all of them have bachelor degrees. I think it can provide an extra outlet for those of us who want to have more intellectual discussions and may be limited by our day to day/ face to face interactions." The writer of that comment is a very smart woman now living mostly as a stay-at-home mom for her exceptionally gifted young children (one of whom has been a pupil of mine in the mathematics courses run by my nonprofit organization). As I just edit this comment by adding a few more details, I see other replies challenging the assertion that heavy users of social media are in all cases persons who avoid intellectual challenge.

P.P.S. after further edit: A recent comment from a FB friend is "Does the fact that there are multiple Rhodes Scholars on my friend list (and they have regular activity...) count as data?" Of course, that friend knows that that doesn't exactly count as data, but then another friend commented, "Perhaps the high-NFC subjects of this particular study just couldn't find other high-NFC friends on FB." It surely does matter how intentionally one seeds one's friend list and how one models intellectual behavior on FB.

Anecdotal evidence doesn't really counter quantitative research.

I'm sure there are very smart people that use Facebook regularly.

What struck me as disappointing about Facebook is that, despite my friends being an interesting bunch, I could never seem to provoke any kind of discussion on Facebook. It seems that most of the people I had a connection with view Facebook as a broadcast only medium (or at most, a case of comment once then move on).

It may be wrong to generalize about the people using them, but social networks seem to have the net effect of stifling discourse in my experience. I'm not sure why this is, and I'd rather it wasn't the case.

As I've pruned my friend-list on facebook, I find I have more and more time to get into interesting conversations with my friends.

I haven't checked if those that respond the most have small friendlists, but I bet there's some weak correlation there. Anyway, I enjoy facebook for this sort of discussion, and as a percent of words typed, it consumes a high percentage of my facebook typing.

As a percent of total posts I make, though, those in-depth conversations are a fairly low percentage.

"Are you ashamed that you find Facebook boring?"

     Why, yes.

"Are you angst-ridden by your weak social-networking skills?"

     My God man, you are reading my mind

"Do you look with envy on those whose friend-count dwarfs your own?"

     Sorry, no, you don't get 3 yes.

http://changingminds.org/techniques/resisting/yes_yes_no.htm

http://changingminds.org/disciplines/sales/closing/yes-set_c...

When I read the first couple sentences, I felt this guy was trying to sell us something and not necessarily trying to inform us, and what do you know, he is promoting his book at the bottom.

Carr is a well-established and credible blogger whose position on this has been known for a long time. He certainly hasn't crafted it to support his book, but rather the other way around. And the post does inform us. The study is interesting and I'm glad to hear of it.

Weird, I skipped over the part where he was selling the book, even though I read the comments.

Thanks for posting this though. It's always good to know peoples motivations for doing stuff as it naturally introduces a bias.

Without knowing more about the study, I'm skeptical. Back in 2009, a study claiming that Facebook use was correlated with poor academic performance got a lot of press. Once people looked at the data in more detail, though, a different picture emerged -- http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/05/01/faceboo... has more.

The conclusion seemed a little simplistic to me, what would have been interesting is seeing how facebook usage varies between NFC's and not-so-NFC types. As in ... do the NFC's try to get news updates and participate more in intellectual discussions on facebook or do they also make banal status like the rest of the folks on facebook.

Missed opportunity.

This is interesting. I feel like saying "Facebook is geared to stupid people" is offensive and inaccurate, but I've definitely felt like "social" applications have a fatal flaw, which is that they can't succeed without getting progressively dumber over time. The early adopters of services like Facebook and Twitter are smart, curious, technologically-adept people like HN posters. But if the product isn't "dumbed down" a bit, it can't appeal to the masses and can't really grow, and if it stops innovating (which is hard to do while not growing, because VCs aren't likely to fund a product that only 5% of the population is smart enough to use) then the smart people get bored. So, a "social" application feels intense pressure to grow and inevitably becomes stupider (in terms of its users) over time. Add to this the fact that dumb people have more free time and lower standards regarding the use of it, and the usage-weighted average IQ can easily drop below 100. Then you become Myspace.

Facebook was built to dumb down harmlessly. It started at Harvard, then the Ivy League, then the top 100 (or so) colleges, then all colleges, then everyone. This was a great strategy for marketing while scaling and it worked. How it will progress from here is unclear.

For non-"social" counterexamples, Google and Wikipedia have managed to avoid this by taking what "social" views as a contrarian strategy: instead of trying to suck people in and get them to spend hours on the site (which creates the low time-weighted IQ problem) they try to get people to the information they want as quickly as possible. Google's ideology is, "You're smart enough to know where you want to go, we're just going to get you there." Facebook's is, "We're going to try to suck you in to our space as long as we can."

It could very well be that the relationship between NFC and certain forms of social interaction in general is very strong and Facebook is simply a reflection of that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition cites a few surveys. Here are some facts about NFC:

"need for cognition was related weakly and negatively to being closeminded, unrelated to social desirability, and positively correlated with general intelligence" [http://psycnet.apa.org/?&fa=main.doiLanding&fuseacti...]

"currently enrolled students high in the need for cognition expressed greater life satisfaction than students low in the need for cognition" [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCR/is_2_38/ai_n6130...]

"People high in the need for cognition are more likely to form their attitudes by paying close attention to relevant arguments (i.e., via the central route to persuasion), whereas people low in the need for cognition are more likely to rely on peripheral cues, such as how attractive or credible a speaker is" [wikipedia]

"people who are high in the need for cognition scale score slightly higher in verbal intelligence tests but no higher in abstract reasoning tests" [wikipedia]

"Research has concluded that individuals high in NFC are less likely to attribute higher social desirability to more attractive individuals or to males" [wikipedia]

"The need for cognition is unrelated to social dominance orientation." [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3852/is_200101/ai_n8...]

Sounds almost like "need for cognition" has a big overlap with simply "introverted".

I don't see where you're getting that conclusion from, based on the items in the comment you're responding to. The chief conclusion about the social interactions of high-NFC people seems to be that they care more about the quality of arguments when being persuaded than the attractiveness of the arguer.

Taking the Carr and Wikipedia 'high NFC' qualities together, don't you see a description of people who often prefer thinking deeply to themselves over superficial smalltalk and other group social 'grooming' activities?

Compare 'high NFC' with 'introverted' as described by this famous "Caring for your Introvert" article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-f...

The Need for Cognition Scale can be found here: http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/ncs/

Note (from the link): "Based on previous research, the Need for Cognition Scale appears to be a valid and reliable measure of individuals’ tendencies to pursue and enjoy the process of thinking"

It has nothing to do with Intro/Extroversion. NFC may have some correlation to Intro/Extroversion, but one cannot draw that conclusion from the NFC study alone.

I want to know if they asked reliable questions like 'how many friends do you have', or ones which people are prone to lie about like 'how much time do you spend on facebook per week?' Maybe the 'NFC' people are just more willing to admit how much time they really waste on FB.

NFC = Need for cognition. SNS = Social network site.

"The key finding," the authors write, "is that NFC played an important role in SNS use. Specifically, high NFC individuals tended to use SNS less often than low NFC people, suggesting that effortful thinking may be associated with less social networking among young people." Moreover, "high NFC participants were significantly less likely to add new friends to their SNS accounts than low or medium NFC individuals."

Seriously? Correlation, Causation etc? Nothing to do with intelligence or the need for cognition here IMO. If you have good social skills, then you're better of on FB too. ()

= Anecdotal evidence.

It seems like you're using a colloquial meaning of the phrase "need for cognition", but it has a specific well defined meaning in psychology (see the link in the blog post for a brief description, or Cacioppo, Feinstein, and Jarvis PB 1996, 197-253 for a deeper description). Whether or not NFC measures anything meaningful, and whether or not a single scale factor is sufficient for account for NFC are possibly valid objections, but that it doesn't sound like using facebook requires cognition isn't. That's actually the point. Here's a correlation between NFC and some behavior that isn't particularly cognitively intensive.

As for the criticism that it's correlation and not causation, NFC has been shown to be relatively stable, so it's extraordinarily unlikely to be the case that facebook usage lowers NFC. It's possible there's an unknown confounding variable, but no one's going to look into that until a correlation's been established, so it's unfair to attack this study for establishing the link which may get other people to study this more deeply.

Does NFC actually correlate with anything? I'm curious to see what (if anything) my score means, but all the papers I'm seeing are behind pay walls.

This is only one of the findings of the study ... Carr didn't bother to quote the rest. From the abstract at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1951356

"The findings showed that the SNS use had a negative association with NFC and a positive association with ICT innovativeness. Specifically, people who were more likely to engage in effortful thinking used SNS less often, and those who were high in ICT innovativeness used SNS more often. Meanwhile, those who spent more time on SNS were more likely to be multitaskers."

I'm not sure if facebook is geared to dullards, or if it just dulls the mind ...

Almost everyone uses it, but I'm guessing that dumb people spend more time on it. Smart people use it to get in touch with people they haven't seen in a while, whereas dumb people spend 25 hours per week throwing sheep.

Or smart people don't use facebook.

I doubt this. A lot of smart people use it, just not very often or for very much of their day. It's at risk of ending up with the same problem as online dating sites: the average user of one of those sites is a decent, normal person... but the defects spend 20 times as much time (and send 50 times as many messages) on them as everyone else.

that's where the 'remove from friends' option comes in very handy...

I see studies like this and am prone to think ill of them (or the people reporting the results). The sample is "436 college students". This is not really a statistically sound number or demographic slice given the Facebook's current numbers. Also, it seems to have one of those "1 + 1 = cheese" moments in associating simple, behavior, and dullard (which came first "simplifying Facebook or the dullard?").

law of social networks or events: everything was cool when I first got here, but adding the guy after me screwed it up.

Keep in mind that as much psychology research as possible is done with college students as subjects. After all, requiring your Psych 101 freshmen to fill out a questionnaire is a lot easier, quicker, and cheaper than recruiting a wider range of subjects.

And your "law of social networks" also applies to real-world immigration.

yeah - it applies to a lot of group dynamics. Working and growing up on a reservation tends to skew my views on immigration.

I had to deal with a lot of studies a decade ago and am not very happy when I see crud like this. It filters into the political arena and some really stupid policies come from this crud (Look at any gun violence study and map its participant's locations or check demos on a lot of polls taken in Florida). The sound bite is more important than the procedure.

Wow. It seems like this research hurt the feelings of some Facebook users. I see Facebook's utility, but I fail to care. The people I care about are already in my life - daily. I see no use in staying abreast of what people I otherwise would not communicate with are currently up to.

Facebook is becoming more boring every day, though. I've never really used it that much, but I have friend who have, and they are starting to quit it and ignore their accounts because it's becoming boring and spammy.

The signal to noise has grown much louder. 25 friends in 2005 was worth about 2000 now. I liked it a ton in college when it was just for college students, but now it just seems awkward to talk to everyone you've ever met in your life in one social space. That should only happen at weddings and funerals.

This is kind of a shallow assessment in itself. I'm a social butterfly, let me spread my wings and network! Trivial little snippets of life between me and my best friends, extended social circle and local arts scene all amount to a conveniant and rewarding way to passively share time with friends.

Is Myspace geared to dullards? Is Friendster geared to dullards? Is email geared to dullards? Is the written word geared to dullards? Is chiseling glyphs geared to dullards? Is cave painting geared to dullards?

Facebook is AOL.

So, who 's feeling bad, and who's feeling good about yourselves now? I feel good. I have some genius friends on fb who never post. It s the inherent antisocial nature of creative ppl I guess

In other news, snow is white.

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