Leaks just exposed how toxic Facebook and Instagram are to teens, and everyone | Hacker News Reader

Leaks just exposed how toxic Facebook and Instagram are to teens, and everyone

theguardian.com

35 pointsForHackernews11 comments

It took a really long time for our society to both realize how unhealthy cigarettes were and to actually do something about it.

I really hope sooner rather than later we have similar warnings and age limits for social media. The toxicity is mental rather than physical but holistically to me they seem pretty comparable.

Sounds like it is social harm. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28559303)

Its fashionable to hate on Facebook for these negative effects on mental health but it's a fundamental property of social media, blaming them won't amount to anything in the long run.

If Facebook's own research finds a problem, and they choose not to tackle it because of money, it's absolutely justified to criticise them for their choice.

That can be true and it can be true that social media is a net-negative to society.

I don't think it's an intrinsic property of social media, just one of free-to-use social media designed specifically to maximize engagement.

The alternatives are (1) legislation that forces them to focus on more than just engagement-at-all costs or (2) a paid platform akin to Neeva ($5/month ad-free search engine).

I disagree that this has anything to do with ad revenue models. Engagement would be maximized even without it. User base growth is still paramount.

Here's a list of social media that aren't harmful in the same way (or to the same magnitude) that FB and IG are:

- email

- Flickr

- special interest and professional forums

- StackExchange/Overflow

- Snapchat (partly because they put effort into not being harmful)

- FourSquare (now defunct -- previously a social network for physical location)

- Yelp

- iMessage

- OnlyFans

So clearly there's something Facebook can do, especially according to their own concerned employees. Zuckerberg just doesn't want to do it.

i closed all my social media accounts and now only use Reddit with an anonymous handle that cant be (easily) traced back to my real name.

i think that part about using your real name is where you can get into toxic behaviors. you upload your best pictures, compare yourself to others, etc. if youre hust a handle its easier to just engage in discussion.

an interesting note, when i first decided to leave fb/ig, my first baby step was to deactivate my account (instead of deleting it). my thinking was if I wanted to, i could come back.

4 times it happened to me, that out of nowhere id get an email from fb: "so and so tagged you in a photo". id click the link and discover my fb was again active without my consent. after the fourth time i took the definitive step of deleting it completely and even then i got a message: we received your delete request, but we're going to keep your account for 30 days, if you don't login in that time then we'll actually delete it.

geesh man, they really don't want you to go

This reminds me that I should log back in and do a full delete on my FB account. I deactivated it sometime last summer. Luckily, I never got any of those spontaneous re-activations you did.

StackOverflow (and several sites in SE) have a toxic community. Just look at golang in SO, you are getting frustrated and angry right after joining it.

The reasons have been discussed a lot in the spectrum from "trying hard to keep a site with relevant information" to "ego-driven people given some power become cismic assholes" - but I still would not say that to they are nice places to be in (this is not what you said, I just want to point that these sites can be harmful as well)

We can't blame the lords, they are a fundamental property of feudalism.

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