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Comment by azemetre | Hacker News Reader

It's very odd, I use to use Instagram and it would make me depressed. IDK how to explain, I don't even have any friends on there I follow. Just something about seeing everyone at their best 100% of the time, doing amazing things 100% of the time, never facing adversity 100% of the time.

I know it's not realistic but it still gets to your head.

I uninstalled it from my phone I feel better about myself after a few weeks.

I'm guessing most of, if not all, social media is the same. I'm slowly trying to ween myself off but it is so meticulously addictive.

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> IDK how to explain, I don't even have any friends on there I follow.

Social media is best used for keeping in touch with friends and family. If you're just browsing popular photos from people you don't know, it's basically an interactive and targeted version of watching TV. We all grew up understanding that endless TV consumption is an unhealthy activity that we should minimize, but it has taken a while for the same sentiment to be applied to social media.

I don't bother with the discover tab in Instagram and I mostly follow people I know. I can usually catch up on everything in 5-10 minutes per day at most, including some comments on friends' photos.

> I'm slowly trying to ween myself off but it is so meticulously addictive.

Being addicted to anything is a massive trigger for depression, especially when it displaces productive activities and replaces them with sedentary consumption. If you can't use something without becoming addicted, it's best to not use it at all.

> Social media is best used for keeping in touch with friends and family.

Not even that... Facebook can show you the worst of your friends and family. Doesn't feel healthy.

Instagram is making this style of usage more and more difficult, most recently by burying seen posts behind a link and feeding you discovery crap after that

> Being addicted to anything is a massive trigger for depression, especially when it displaces productive activities and replaces them with sedentary consumption. If you can't use something without becoming addicted, it's best to not use it at all.

I know it sounds trite but I feel like social media today (or maybe all forms of media honestly) makes the barrier to ill-will extremely easy.

If you were a young adult (at least from what I'm told) in the 50s/60s/70s it was hard to be addicted to TV because it would literally go off the air at 11 pm (or midnight?). What happens after I watch a show on Netflix? It immediately plays the next one.

You couldn't get lost in extreme opinions because in order to see those extreme opinions you've had to of met an extreme person (on a soapbox with xeroxes so I've been told), you wouldn't run into 100s of them as you do when going onto FB, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, tik tok, etc.

How can I as an individual compete with billion dollar companies that literally hire neuroscientists/psychologists to make something as addictive as possible?

> How can I as an individual compete with billion dollar companies that literally hire neuroscientists/psychologists to make something as addictive as possible?

If someone can't moderate their own consumption of something despite their best efforts, abstinence works.

Similar story with alcohol: Plenty of people have no problem moderating their consumption, but a small percentage of people really struggle with limiting their intake. For the latter group, not drinking any alcohol at all is a great solution.

I think this defeatist concept that social media is too addictive to resist sets a lot of people up for failure. It's not only possible to use social media without getting addicted, but it's the norm for the vast majority of people who use social media. If you're in the minority of people who can't moderate your own usage, then abstaining completely might be the best choice. But don't assume that addiction or uncontrolled doom-scrolling is inevitable.

> If someone can't moderate their own consumption of something despite their best efforts, abstinence works.

No, if someone can’t moderate their own consumption, abstinence usually fails.

If a person finds something both easily resistable without immediate past use and hard to moderate immediately after use, abstinence works, but that’s not a super common response. People who have trouble moderating use immediately after a prior use also usually have problems resisting initial use.

Not saying you are wrong, because I wouldn’t know,

But like, how are you able to tell that generally people would have difficulty moderating their use of something shortly after they first begin to use it, generally tend to also have difficulty not beginning use?

That seems like it would be hard to measure/observe ?

It works because it's easy to understand. Simple rules for a complex world.

If the rule is "don't do it", you know whether or not you're supposed to do it in any given case. That's not true if the rule is "be reasonable". If the first beer was reasonable, so is the second. One additional beer never really changes how reasonable your total consumption has been, even though the total range of reasonability is quite wide.

>If someone can't moderate their own consumption of something despite their best efforts, abstinence works.

It doesn't work for sex ed and I don't see why it would work for this.

I assume this is thinly-veiled political sniping?

Just seems like anyone posting here would notice the bleeding obvious - that sex ed happens in a very narrow age band not noted for self-knowledge, gratification delay or self control, compared with people with an addictive tendency across the age and self-control spectrum.

This article is about social media use and depression in teenagers, I thought the parallel and relevance was obvious.

I don't know any alcoholics who transitioned back to casual/social drinking. The ones who beat alcoholism stopped drinking altogether. You just have to admit to yourself it's something you can't control, and avoid it.

It sounds like you're talking about adults. This article (and therefore my comparison) are about teenagers.

You can't see the difference between an activity that stimulates the dopamine reward pathways and the activity that is the reason those pathways exist?

If you abstain from alcohol you can always have a soda in hand and usually still stay socially connected with most if not all friends and family.

If you abstain from meat, vegan options are seemingly everywhere now and everyone can sit at the same table.

If you choose abstain from addictive profit motivated proprietary software, good luck keeping any connection with friends and family. You just stop existing in their universes, and they can't be bothered to try a different communication tool to respect your preference to not have your data exploited to manipulate and addict you.

Ask me how I know.

Do your friends and family ignore direct text messages?

Mine don't but it's always me who has to send them. I don't mind but I can imagine people can feel forgotten.

I don’t see how social media changes this. Life is filled with people who don’t reach out first. It’s not like instagram changes them. The number of direct, meaningful messages between you and them is probably the same, independent of the platform.

Social media facilitates indirect interaction (seeing posts from one another) but it won’t make “Han shoot first” more often.

Stated another way: if you long for others to make first contact with you, social media won’t scratch that itch.

Right, but before social media other people made direct contact (phone, ICQ, Skype...) just as much as I did - now they feel it's enough to post on social media, and if you don't participate in that then you must make the contact.

My grandmother gets 2-5 random calls from her friends daily, the last unexpected call I received from a friend was in 2013 as we all switched to social media posting/commenting then.

This is a fair point.

Somewhat disagreeing with my previous comment: but I’ve definitely seen this effect between iMessage / Whatsapp vs SMS. I’m more likely to interact with people one-on-one through those platforms instead of SMS because of the link/image/gif handling. My android friends without whatsapp/telegram/signal don’t hear from me as much because of that added friction.

The problem isn't that social media is too addictive to abstain. The addictiveness is what keeps you hooked, not what gets you into it.

The problem is that social media is too addictive and also very difficult to avoid.

For many jobs, social media has become if not integral then at least an implicit requirement ("please retweet our press release about new feature X"). It has also become a major news source, especially for niche or specialty topics (HN and reddit are "social media" too btw).

Companies like Facebook (and to less success, Google) are trying everything to create onramps to their social media platforms wherever possible. In many places Facebook is used by municipality governments to post news updates, restaurants to post their opening hours and menu updates, and so on.

"Social media abstinence" is not possible for everyone, difficult enough as it is once you've already been using social media.

My kids schools make announcements on social media before sending alerts using the official SMS and email alerts I signed up for. Some discussions can only be done on facebook.

>How can I as an individual compete with billion dollar companies that literally hire neuroscientists/psychologists to make something as addictive as possible?

You can't, which is the reason we need government regulation. This clearly isn't self-regulating (like most things) and the purpose of government is to act in these matters on behalf of society.

I quit. I self regulated. I don't like these companies, and I think they're evil.

I still don't think it's the government's job.

Do you believe the government should regulate if alcohol should be sold (and advertised) to children/teenagers? What about other drugs?

> Social media is best used for keeping in touch with friends and family.

None fake friends and family. Got a handful of fam that are so fake with what they post. Act like they do it all and now one helps them. Turns out they are narcissistic users.

Question: what does "fake" mean here?

I've seen it a lot, and it's clearly negative, but I don't know exactly what makes somebody "fake". Is it that they tell a lot of lies? Or that they're not trustworthy friends? Or just that they're not very good people?

> Social media is best used for keeping in touch with friends and family.

And we already had a good solution for that: email.

It's admittedly an extreme case, but I've been seeing Instagram fairly directly harm a friend's mental health. She is repeatedly seeing people on Instagram doing elaborate things - decoration, cooking, parenting, etc., and it's giving her unrealistic expectations about what standards she should be upholding in everything she does, be it cooking or crafting or interior décor or parenting or whatever. She isn't just trying to keep up with the Joneses, she's trying to keep up with the Joneses and the Nguyens and the Singhs and the Smiths and the Telliers all at the same time. The extreme impossibility of anyone actually doing this has more or less turned her life into (in her estimation) an endless stream of failure, and it's really wearing her down.

The craziest thing is, it happened so quickly. On year she was doing her own thing and loving it. Then her mom got her onto Instagram, and a year later she was trying to do everyone else's thing and chronically burnt out.

I'm not sure it's entirely Instagram's fault, though. A while back I decided to stop renewing my Make Magazine subscription for more or less the same reason.

> ...it's giving her unrealistic expectations about what standards she should be upholding in everything she does...

It sounds like Instagram is essentially the generalization of pornography.

This is a huge issue with social media and Instagram in particular. I see it a lot on YouTube as well. It’s like the Joneses suddenly became EVEN further ahead of everyone because the internet has such wide reach and only selects for the best of the best.

It destroyed my marriage personally. My ex became obsessed with being the “BEST”. Went as far as creating multiple accounts in Instagram to highlight achievements in multiple areas. The obsession resulted in us no longer knowing each other. We spent essentially no time together and time spent together was spent obsessing over one of the accounts.

When I noticed how it was changing us I deleted it. I hope my ex finds happiness in some way some day. For me, I know I’m a much happier person not being wrapped up in that constant game of comparison against people I simply cannot compare to because my life situation is different.

I see it all as "magic tricks" to varying degrees.

The "reveal" may look cool, but what they did and how much time/effort/money it took to get the result is hidden from you.

I have a very different experience with Instagram in particular. I have a very tightly controlled machinist and woodworker account that has taught me innumerable little things, connected me with people who have helped on all kinds of problems and only given me positive reinforcement. There are other communities I've dipped a toe in that are far more toxic, but I have made the choice to stop engaging in those communities as a result.

On the other end of the spectrum, Facebook used to be a cesspool for me, since I didn't like the amount of politics and high school classmates I didn't like in high school in my feed. Then, I unfollowed everyone that posted any politics of any kind, unfriended people I intended to never see again, and now my feed is only a handful of groups that are incredibly friendly and helpful communities around overly obsessive coffee culture. Otherwise, I now use Marketplace pretty heavily since it seems to have largely replaced Craigslist in my area with better targeting that actually regularly gets my interests right. Now that I have made the choices to use the tool well, it's really really helpful. You have to take some responsibility for the bad experience you have on these platforms -- they only push you content you engage with, so you can choose to stop seeing that crap if you want to.

I tried unfollowing everyone who posted politics back in 2016. I ended up with an empty news feed. I simply had unfollowed every active person in my friends list. Eventually that was the catalyst for me deleting my Facebook account.

I do see value in things like marketplace but my experience when I left was so negative that I find it difficult to go back.

My experience and $0.02:

If you use Instagram the way "normal" people do, it's a path to sadness. Selfies, one-upmanship, parties, perfect cakes, perfect gardens, exotic vacations, etc. All the badness. It's just human nature and it's what the platform has become. Bleh.

If, however, you go into Instagram and aggressively curate your feed to be hyper-specific to a (visual) niche you're interested in, it can be really, really great.

I have 3 Instagram accounts - my "main" one (in which I follow friends), and that's become a hellscape of all of the above. I just don't use it anymore.

My other 2 are hyper-specific: One follows pets (parrots, specifically), the other is all about coin collecting (@numismattack ahem shameless plug). Absolutely zero variation from those themes. And you know what? It's a really fun way to immerse yourself in those respective worlds! All interesting niche content, all the time. I suggest you (and others) give that a try.

Ps - no matter what your main feed is, stay far far away from the "Explore" tab. That is brain poison. It's like pure algorithmic dopamine generation and it's the root of all evil on that platform.

> Ps - no matter what your main feed is, stay far far away from the "Explore" tab. That is brain poison. It's like pure algorithmic dopamine generation and it's the root of all evil on that platform.

Makes sense that an app built pretty much entirely around this feature is the hottest new thing in social media in 2020s.

> you go into Instagram and aggressively curate your feed to be hyper-specific to a (visual) niche you're interested in, it can be really, really great.

I can attest to that. From the beginning I didn't intend my IG to be some personal thing (there's no photo of me in there or details about my private life), just following some artsy subjects I was interested in back in the day. In the meantime is has changed into a feed of modernist and brutalist architecture (I really like that subject) and there's some really neat things I saw in there.

My SO uses IG very similarly, her feed is now filled up by pets, mostly border collies (we have one at home).

The self doubt it can sow is horrible, but the way out is to realise you're in the matrix and it isn't real. For the younger populace, this is more dangerous because they haven't had much time (relatively) to experience the reality of life outside of the coloured glasses that social media offers.

I hadn't used my FB account in about 8 years but hadn't deleted it. Just did that a few days ago and the sense of closure was awesome!

In India, there is a psychological tendency to blame the person rather than the tool, so I'm even more afraid for people here.I mean a case like the suit against McDonald for hot coffee spilled on lap would be laughed at here. i.e. I'm expecting that "you're feeling depressed due to social media, you're the problem" kind of statements might actually fly with the people. I also see this changing for the better, so .. hopeful.

I keep my account, but use Facebook as a tool, not as entertainment.

I use it to search for items I need on the marketplace. I use it to join group chats for small events and organization since it would be a hassle to get neighbors and their friends to ditch it for my sake.

I haven't opened instagram in ages, but keep it around for the very odd link to a post on it, and the same with Twitter.

It has absolutely improved my mood. Even cutting down on HN is good, and cutting reddit from my life was the biggest relief I've experienced.

I had to unfollow a couple of people. There's "having a good time" and there's "constant idyllic life". If you aren't careful it turns from "keeping up with x" to "comparing against x".

That's actually an issue with e.g. Facebook as well that goes back for as long as it's been around - people only post the good stuff, like vacations, parties, etc. Even if they're not intentionally trying to sell this lifestyle that a lot of Instagram influencers do, they are inadvertently causing the same problem. And on the receiving end, the reader of those wants to post those fun things as well, making it a self-reinforcing cycle.

It's an issue with most curated sites, I unfollowed everyone on Facebook. For me, it comes down to "who do i talk to" if I'm not taking to someone I try to unfollow.

Heh, it helps if you're cynical by nature. From the very beginning I always sort of "known" that social media gave a very idealized view of people's lives.

I remember once, I was sat outside at a burger joint watching a lady take literally 5 whole minutes taking pictures of her food at a specific table, while another gentleman (who was NOT with her) patiently stood waiting with a plate of his own food in his hands.

Turns out the light hit that specific table so perfectly that these people were ok with letting their food get cold to get the perfect shot before they ate it.

Of course, they could have been food writers but I've seen this type of scenario play out often enough that I tend to look at a lot of social media as a parody of real life.

That was not Instagram but rather the set of accounts you chose to follow on Instagram.

Choose to follow all dumb meme accounts and you would never have had that experience. Choose to follow all stand-up comedy accounts (or nature or music or comic books) and you would again have an entirely different experience.

It's not social media that is creating those problems, it's the way users choose to use social media. Though I'd readily admit that the proprietors do everything they can to make the initial experience as painfully addictive as possible.

Even for something as subtle as following a nature account – chances are that when you see it, you'll be in bed or on the toilet or at work and not in nature. You could still feel like you're missing out :(

Part of it is the incongruence of your present moment environment doesn't match what your eyes are telling you, causing a cognitive dissonance or confusion of sorts - even if merely feeling based; I imagine people who are mostly in their head, their mind strongly always on, perhaps used as a coping mechanism, are more likely to be less negatively influenced by that incongruence as they may not be as connected to and therefore as influenced by their body, the feelings of body to contrast with mind.

I've stopped using Facebook, IG, etc.. What worked for me is to not completely disconnect. Instead, remove the apps from your phone and turn off all forms of notifications.

These apps want your attention. But you should only give it to them when you want. Not when they tell you.

Yeah exactly. I had been noticing Reddit was really depressing and aggravating me; there was stuff on there that I would see and get angry about it, and the anger was what kept me coming back. When I realized that I uninstalled my reddit app from my phone that very night.

It was a fantastic decision. I still have my account, but I only engage with it when I'm sitting at a desktop computer and have a specific community I'm engaging with. I'm a huge Formula 1 fan so on a race weekend, I'll check out some of the posts on /r/formula1, for instance. But no more /all, and most importantly, no more scrolling endlessly for hours. It's been a really great change.

The charts in the article go until 2019, consider that teenagers have suffered an enormous amount of stress during the last year because of remote learning and lack of real social contacts, poor teenagers are much less equipped to cope with social media induced shame and guilt. It might be that these sad figures will go through the roof in the very near future. I think parents really need to take measures in order to cut social media consumption of their kids, if states are unable to influence the addictiveness of these platforms (how could one regulate something like this?)

> I uninstalled it from my phone I feel better about myself after a few weeks.

Next step: stop watching the news and feel even better

I have the same feeling, and even here in HN, where people makes such amazing things and I'm just here lurking

Besides people I know, I follow my interests on Instagram: generative art, architecture, interior design, music gear and some other niche stuff. I did the same on Twitter years ago, before that it didn't really resonate with me.

Insta is the only social media app that consistently brightens my day.

My secret? Follow topics, not people. My feed is filled with galaxies, animals, art... cool, interesting, inspiring stuff.

You should follow my Instagram.

Its horribly taken pictures of kinda boring moments

I've been a frequent and undiscriminating Reddit user, and while the "idyllic life" / showing off posts make up a nontrivial portion of its content, there's a lot of things to offset it as well. Depression memes, deep fried ridiculous humor, cute animals, car accidents, the adventures of Florida Man, world news, etc. They used to have a lot more - "punching down" content, porn - but they've cleaned the site up over the years to appeal to a wider audience / advertisers / investors.

Sadly this is true for HN also, atleast for me.

Try watching tv all the time and you’ll feel the same. Now a bit of tv to relax from times to times is probably good for you.

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