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Comment by jetrink | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this happened, would teenagers would be upset or relieved? There's a This American Life episode[1] in which several teenage girls explain the complex etiquette of Instagram. It sounds stressful, it sounds exhausting, it sounds like a full time job. Right now, anyone who opts out also excludes themselves from a major aspect of school social life.

1. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/573/transcript

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My nieces will instantly delete something they post if it doesn't get enough likes right away which seems so anxiety-inducing. :-/

I wonder what would happen if deletion wasn't an option. Like how it didn't use to be possible on Twitter. Would that make it worse? Or better, because then everybody would be in the same boat?

Social media on the blockchain, hmmm...

ha! Just like old hackernews comments :)

They would be upset. 100%. Many of them just don't care about the inner workings of the app.

agreed, it just seems easier to make being on social media mandatory; then the kids would hate it

Maybe that is the downside of the general policy of abstraction that Devs use, that software should be made to look as simple as possible, and all the apparently "unnecessary intricacies"(which could have disastrous effects) should be dumped under the hood.

The point of abstraction isn’t to hide information from you. The point of (properly done) abstraction is to allow you to work without having to worry about the details.

Abstraction has nothing to do with this. The problem is the side effects of social media. Even if Facebook open source their algorithms, I doubt anyone could have conclusively predicted this. We only know all this because of empirical sampling of the user population.

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