Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

It's odd though that it's the only thing. I've always thought that susceptibility to addiction is a personality trait that make you usually get addicted to more than one thing.

It removes comment/upvote numbers from Hacker News and makes it far less able to exploit human psychological loopholes related to numbers.

I, on the other side, am scrolling hn, lambdartheultimate, Haskell subs and discords, hoarding caml research papers... doing nothing. I was mostly a snub variant of the above.

Once I hit 1000, I’m outa here. Promise.

The core difference is that while Facebook seeks to keep our eyes on facebook, places like HN actively encourage people to post links to material outside the core service. HN doesn't try to keep eyeballs on targets. (And HN is so tiny that it loads faster than anything on work connection out in the middle of nowhere.)

Personally I loathe the company and would be happy if some fatal DNS or other issue took it down for good or if it were legislated out of existence by the EU/US. But we also need to be aware of the value it provides other than as a bullhorn for anti-vaxxers and other nutjobs and perhaps think of how to build a safer and more ethical alternative.

It’s not overwhelming — I generally feel it hits the sweet spot of signal-to-noise. I only pull up Twitter a few times a day, and scan to find interesting things there. My Twitter feed is generally light — I don’t follow any individuals, only sites I want to see updates on without having to poll them.

So glad to be done and over with that sort of addiction. Social media is as addictive as cigarettes or booze and we are way behind on treating it in the same ways.

Instagram still sort of works like an actual social network for me. I've found it's actually super important for dating (in my age group/scene/whathaveyou).

I think FOMO is the main reason most people are still on there, not so much "addiction".

On a technical level, it's not hard. On business level, it's doubtful if there's a compelling enough business model to prevent it from becoming another surveillance capitalism platform. And on a societal level, it seems impossible that living generations will ever trust a platform en masse again enough to achieve such ubiquity.

Facebook has a massive training set at its disposal, claiming more monthly active users than humans have lifetime heartbeats. If FB isn’t chronically addictive for normal people with that sample size, then either (0) A/B testing isn’t as capable as we like to think it is, or (1) FB isn’t even trying anymore.

I still use it for messenger, but most days I don’t even look at Facebook.

You can still meet people in real life, just the other day I asked out a girl at a concert and we got drinks afterwards. That’s much more straightforward than installing 30 apps and chatting with bots.

In fact I had a girl offer to add me on Instagram and I just said no. It’s not that serious ( plus typically if she won’t give you her number she doesn’t actually want to date you.)

I’ll agree Facebook used to be much better. For example I was( like 10 years ago) in a college group and I actually went out with a girl from that. I think if your in a closed community it can still be fun.

Yeah, me too. But you usually don't have to look beyond your immediate family to find someone that uses Facebook (or at the very least an FB-owned property) a ton. We aren't typical!

I will make a site similar to that. I really want to. I have plan all drawn up for how it will work.

Its ad free, but with premium services for those willing to pay. One member of a family or group can pay for everybody.

The site is ephemeral, all posts are removed after three months. Its not a place where you store all your photos.

Its a site where friends and families share their holidays, their baby photos and birthday invitations. There won't be sharing news.

I'm not scared to take on the behemoth, I'm one guy in a home office. I only need a few thousand subscribers to make it worth my while.

I've got about 2 years left on my current project, then I'm going to start.

Maybe not addicted but she has a habit of going to Facebook every time she uses her phone.

You are not 'most people' then

I used a relatively small-scale website with all this functionality before Facebook or the term "social network" existed. However regarding seeing who visits a profile, I do not remember Facebook ever allowed the user to see who was viewing their profile. Today, one can create a "page" (cf. profile) and Facebook lets one pay to promote a page. Facebook gives some very basic metrics on whether the page is getting visits, with less detail than a basic web server log. It might be interesting if Facebook allowed users to see who was accessing their profile because from what I have profiles are routinely being accessed by accounts that the user is not aware of. Facebook might seem "dead" to some folks as they do not see much activity, however there may be regular activity that they cannot see. Their data is being used by Facebook and their profile data is being accessed. Connections are being made. (As in connecting the user to other people, locations, institutions, etc.)

Same. But I've also stopped using Messenger lately, mostly because I haven't had much of a social life due to Covid. Messenger is super convenient though to get in touch with people, as you don't have to exchange phone numbers to be able to message someone you recently met. But at the same time I'm worried that years worth of my private communication are being stored unencrypted and eventually leaked, so I've been nudging friends I communicate with frequently off FB, successfully (Signal or Whatsapp).

All that said I do miss FB a bit, since a lot of actual friend updates happen there. I don't really understand people who complain about political bullshit. I suppose a) you don't have proper adblockers (if political ads are a thing in your area) and/or b) you are friends with the wrong people.

But also, as you say, people are too afraid to share the more intimate stuff that made it interesting and social in the first place. So it's kind of a dead end.

If I would delete my Facebook, I would lose contact to a whole slew of people I've encountered over the years, who I chat to once in a while over messenger, or I see that they've done something. It's bitter to cut these people out of my life.

(here the 'addict' image works again; former addicts often need to cut their drinking/drug buddies out of their life to stay clean, even though they may be real friends)

Stopping myspace, on the other hand, felt a bit less bitter, perhaps because that was more like an adolescent phase everyone grew out of.

[1] hostage term from @doctorow https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1441107515865849866

I don't see how people enjoy it anymore. Guess they like all the doom scrolling.

Absolutely. Not only are the people on Twitter much more toxic, the trending feed is way more prone to manipulation and influence campaigns. If I don't know someone directly on Facebook, I'm probably never going to see their stupid hot-takes. No such separation on Twitter. Also, whenever I scroll through Facebook, more than half the posts are advertisements anyways. It rarely shows me anything of value from my friends and somehow fixates on the same dozen people. Oddly, I was never even very friendly with those dozen in real life.

People say Facebook is dangerous because people fall into a loop of following content they already like and falling into grouptthink. Firstly, how in the world does not apply more strongly with Twitter? Second, on Twitter it is possible to bombard non-followers with repeated, biased, and motivated messaging. I think this is far more insidious because it creates a false sense of consensus and you can condition people to react a certain way with repeated messaging. And, these users don't even need to actively follow the influencers' accounts.

Edit: I don't even follow people like "Brooklyn Dad, Defiant!", "Duty to Warn", or "Palmer Report", yet I am always seeing content from these paid influencers whenever I click on a trending topic. So imagine if you're not a partisan person and you consistently keep seeing messages from these kinds of accounts. Chances are, eventually, some of their tweets are going to influence how you think and give you a biased view of things.

I'm always surprised that Reddit gets a free pass in these discussions. Reddit has been home to some of the most egregious bad communities and misinformation hives.

Their invisible-hand moderation system allows a small number of moderators to completely control the conversation in a subreddit. Banning dissenters and removing comments that don't agree with what the moderators want people to see is an easy way to make it look like everyone is in natural agreement on a topic.

The weirdest part is that most tech people readily admit that Reddit is full of terrible content, even on the front page. The common retort is that it's not so bad if you create an account and manually remove all of those bad subreddits from your list, but by the same argument Facebook isn't a problem because you can simply not subscribe to the bad content.

I don't really see how that can be true when only 20% of so of the population actually use Twitter. It's very small beans compared to Facebook, or YouTube for that matter.

It's way healthier than Facebook, where blocking the crazy friend of your aunt may cause endless real life discussions.

Twitter is a fraction of the scale/influence, especially outside of english speaking countries.

WhatsApp is the de facto communication platform in some countries. Facebook is the internet in some parts of Africa. India has nearly as many Facebook users as the US has adults in total.

Even if you don't use Facebook yourself, society around you uses it... a lot... and that impacts you.

How many other 4chan addicts do you know in person?

"Weakness of the alternative" is a large reason people get addicted to things in the first place. It goes hand in hand.

I remember thinking that if I were an alcoholic, this would either be the best job in the world or the worst job in the world, depending on your perspective. I can't imagine how much harder it would be to actually quick full-blown alcoholism if all the booze is free. Obviously you were allowed to just buy a soda or seltzer or something, and that's usually what I did, but I could totally see it being ten times harder to quit when all your drinks are comped and all your peers are drinking around you.

As a former smoker, it took me moving from an office full of smokers to an office where I was the only smoker to finally motivate me to quit for good. I tapered down over about a year with a vape though, and I think that almost has an anti-network effect in that you kind of look like a bellend!

(did that trigger an emotional response?? It bothered me to write it)

Ironically, I feel like online platforms should be a better venue for that type of thing, since it's asynchronous and you don't have people in front of you awaiting your response. Obviously it doesn't tend to work that way, though.

And then, I grew up and left the bubble. I was fortunate enough to get a job working with people who held diverse viewpoints. I still found myself resisting those viewpoints instinctively, but I learned something that surprised me at the time: the people who held those viewpoints were good people! Who'd have thought? I'd been told those people were the enemy. Unbelievers, sinners, "of this world".

As my relationships with those people grew, the cracks in my own belief systems started to grow.

I'm now in my mid 30s, and would describe my mindset as that of a scientist. I'm excited to learn when I'm wrong, because it means I learned something new about the world.

I often think about the people I left behind, many of whom are still deeply in the bubble. I wonder if I got out because I was predisposed to have an open mind, and when given the opportunity I took it, or if I was just exposed to the right combination of things to help me see the light.

All of this to follow up on this:

> Does anyone else find it hard to personally connect with the well-researched claim that people respond with a fight-or-flight response to ideas that challenge their core beliefs?

I can still feel some kind of connection to that early version of myself, or at least I know it was there and now it's not. This history has established within me some empathy for people who still do react poorly to new ideas, and I've found that it helps me better understand (not accept) the viewpoints of others around me that might otherwise seem insane.

Edit: I know it's not great to complain about downvotes, but I'm really puzzled here.

I believe a large part of this is due to people's personalities. Namely, Openness and Agreeableness. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits) It stands to reason that someone who is low on openness and not agreeable would react poorly to their core beliefs being challenged, and vice versa.

Secondly, in terms of liberty, Facebook is a company doing what they feel they need to do. What course of action, aside from government intervention, would prevent them from removing posts they thought were harmful? What would be the threshold for the government to intervene in a web service's moderation policy?

I don't like Facebook, but I can't deny the value it has added to my life.

https://cluster.co/