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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore.

It used to be addictive, before social media, when it was a social network. You were interacting with real people, you could meet new people, "stalk" people you know IRL, share stuff about yourself or find out stuff about others. You would try to find your crush on FB and check see if you have common acquaintances. And you would obsessively watch who looks at your page and who likes your posts. The thing that made it addictive were the actual human interactions that people crave.

I wish someone would make a site like that again!

View on HN

I feel as though it's impossible for anyone to write a thread on HN about Facebook without someone immediately coming in and saying that Facebook is stupid and they deleted their account years ago.

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!

Fully agree, HN is absolutely not the place to get insight on population-level experiences with tech (or most anything else population-level; my pet peeve is people generalizing their education experiences). These population-level problems are far better understood by a process of deduction and looking at what the data says.

I always read these types of comments remembering the response to Dropbox [1] or Slashdot's response to the iPod ("No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.").

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

So what? Facebook has a lot of users, that doesn't negate the point that quitting is not hard, people just like Facebook, they don't want to quit.

> What you’re doing right now is the most important thing you could be doing, according to you.

A very powerful quote on preference falsification but I can’t for the life of me remember where it came from.

If quitting facebook is framed as impossible, then those who want to quit will feel helpless. Posts like the one above are helpful because they tell people that there is hope. You can quit facebook.

Should we tell alcoholics that they'll never quit and their plight is hopeless? Or do we amplify the voices of those who succeeded in quitting, in the hopes that others may find inspiration to do the same? I'll do the latter.

What we shouldn't do is amplify the voices of people who were never addicted in the first place. That doesn't provide hope, if anything it works to de-legitimize how challenging quitting can be

My read of captainmuon's comment is that captainmuon once considered themself addicted to facebook.

I grew up in "Small Town America" in a large family and was really one of the "few" to ever move away (if any). The "problem" for me is that there really isn't an alternative to Facebook for sharing pictures and videos of my son and family for my close family to be a part of. I could have a personal blog, gallery, etc, but my grandparents that are on facebook (my son's great grandparents) don't get to see how much all of their friends enjoy them as well, etc.

In that sense, it's really not so much a problem. It's been an amazing crutch to a sort of depression caused by thoughts such as "my son is lucky enough to have his great grandparents and I'm across the Nation chasing money," etc.

I guess I'm one of the ones really stuck in the rut.

I don't think that kind of usage is a problem. If you are actually using it to share stuff occasionally then it's just a more accessible blog (well besides the privacy issues).

If you are spending hours a day trying to attract attention then that's an issue. If you spend hours a day posting every detail about your life then it might be an issue it might not - it's just a matter of deciding how you want to spend your time.

> there really isn't an alternative to Facebook for sharing pictures and videos

I seem to manage; I use email and a website. These technologies have been working fine since around 1996.

The only "social media" account I've ever had is this one; and I'm pretty new here.

Consider teaching your rels to use straightforward technology that's been around for forty years (maybe since before they were born).

There's nothing special about Faceache; it's just a website with a messaging service (and an "app"). The only thing going for it is people who continue to use it, because they have "friends" who want to live in a Faceache bubble.

Look, that's cool; if you and your friends and rels think it's a good service, then you don't need any "alternative". I'm not going to beat you up for relying on Faceache.

But your ongoing use of Faceache, which you explain in terms of network effects ("but my grandparents that are on facebook") makes you part of the problem you yourself are complaining about.

But then I'm getting my novelty sugar hit by hitting HN forty times a day.

I think my wife is addicted, she will pick up her phone to do one thing but first goes to Facebook and scrolls, then she forgets what she was using her phone for.

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

That doesn't seem at all like addiction to me, that's just a mundane routine. If she had a panic attack when FB went down this week then I think we could say it's an addiction.

I think you are right, I was interested what would happen while it was down and she was fine once she knew it was down, until then she kept saying her internet wasn’t working.

Sounds like that Afroman song, to me. "I was gonna clean my room, but then I got high..."

If a habitual behavior is bad enough to interrupt somebody's ability to accomplish routine tasks, then it's pretty conclusively an addiction.

but it's not. the vast vast majority of people spend a few minutes scrolling through fb, the same way people here scroll through HN, it's a totally meaningless time waster.

When you open your phone to do something other than look at HN, get distracted by HN, and forget why you opened your phone, that's a problem. Scrolling a few minutes here and there isn't the problem.

It's really not, that's just human nature, this happens to people all the time for all sorts of distractions on their phone.

"wellness" settings can limit the amount of time per day she spends doing it if she wants to alter her behavior.

I’m not sure she wants to stop tbh

To my partner the internet was down, not Facebook and Instagram. I tried to explain the difference but to no avail.

"Addiction is a biopsychosocial disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences."

"Despite adverse consequences" is a key component of addiction. For instance, many people can consume alcohol fairly regularly without the alcohol causing trouble for them. But if the alcohol starts to get in the way of work or disrupt your family life, that is a textbook warning sign of alcoholism.

If her compulsive use of facebook is getting in the way of things she wanted to do instead, that sounds an awful lot like addiction.

Thank you for this definition

That was me for years.

The way I quit was to log out. I compulsively kept opening a new tab but having to log in was enough to make me close the tab. The compulsion vanished much quicker than I thought. In a week or so Facebook was out of my life.

Is that worse than spending time on Reddit, HN, Youtube, etc.? What about watching TV or movies?

You could make the argument that the content is worse in some way but even that is debatable since depending on who you follow on FB (groups, etc.) really changes what the content is.

Herein lies the banality: facebook is boring, but if you're bored, it's better than nothing. I don't begrudge folks using it to pass the time on transit to avoid interacting with the public... but I've witnessed quite a few people scrolling endlessly while half-watching tv, half-participating in face to face interactions, etc. I've fallen into that trap myself, during a period of intense burnout -- my ability to focus or produce dropped to zero, and... gotta get that dopamine.

I'll assert that it's much worse than nothing.

"Nothing" isn't bad. Meditate. Let your imagination run wild. Relax. You can't do those things on facebook dot com.

For people with severe anxiety or depression, meditation can actually aggravate the situation and do significant harm. Letting one's mind run wild in that situation leads to more anxiety, suicide planning, etc.

But, I'll amend my statement: facebook is less boring than a blank screen.

That's absurd. There is no scientific basis that would support your assertion. In fact, increased social media activity leads to a higher chance of suffering from depressive episodes. Meditation has been shown to to actually combat symptoms of depression.

If you can't sit still with your own thoughts for 60 seconds without spiraling, then you shouldn't even be remotely near social media.

> That's absurd. There is no scientific basis that would support your assertion.

Why are you so confident in that? Have you done your research? I learned that from a licensed psychologist, and know several people who have had severely negative reactions to "mindfulness" training, but it only took 30 seconds to find these two links:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210202-how-mindfulnes...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251840-mindfulness-and...

> If you can't sit still with your own thoughts for 60 seconds without spiraling, then you shouldn't even be remotely near social media.

Not exactly disagreeing with you here, but neither is meditation necessarily better. Therapy is probably the best thing, but social media is "free." And, note that I'm not in favor of social media, merely explaining the cost-benefit analysis that people in this hole use. Reasoning from your high horse will result in different cost-benefit analysis, which won't make any sense to the people whose lives you might like to improve.

Is there any evidence that therapy is helpful? Haven't seen any evidence supporting it but I might not be searching correctly.

Have you looked at Google scholar? Less than 5 minutes of “effectiveness therapy anxiety” gave me multiple pages of results going back decades.

I would be wary with different meditation practices. I don't think it's a one-size-fits all.

Zen Buddhism and other traditions have very long history and experience with meditation. Now the West unfortunately sometimes imports ideas superficially, and meditation might be one of them. 'Mindfulness meditation' seems to have specific suggestions that probably haven't stood the test of time (or scientific evidence as mentioned).

However, sitting a few minutes quietly (without worrying about specific technique) shouldn't do any harm, is probably good for you.

Also very emphasized in those traditions is controlled breathing. It can be very helpful when stressed as well.

If it makes you feel unwell, stop doing it! Also maybe consult with someone with experience.

Well, if you do "meditation" (or "do nothing") in a way that results in shutting down all thoughts except the depressive ones, then it's going to make things worse.

In that case, you might be (temporarily) better off adding some very powerful and addictive thoughts or feelings to cover up the depressive ones; I think this might be in fact one of the main uses of social media and videogames.

Yep, even something mindless like candy crush is probably better than social media. But... what's actually missing for a lot of people is actual community. So many of us live in tiny bubbles in big cities, we crave human interaction... so the lure of social media is powerful. It's actually a miasma of drama (if my family is indication) that appears to shatter actual community, both on and offline, sending people further into their increasingly socially inept bubbles. I wish I had solutions to offer. It's a goddamn mess.

“If you’re bored, you’re not paying attention.” - Sam Harris

Yeah, feed the enragement beast.

What do you mean? I don’t understand (honest question).

Well, the Harris quote implies that the opposite of boredom is "paying attention." I'm drawing a connection between that and what facebook likes to talk about: "engagement." But what really drives that, is when folks get enraged. I use the term "enragement."

This can be true of many apps and the internet, despite the endless content it has. I don't use Facebook, but I check Instagram or Twitter too often. I do the rounds of the handful of news sites I check, and then check again before there's anything new.

I try to make sure my Books app is front and centre, and I always have something on the go. Doesn't always work though.

+1. My news feed is like 90% memes and ads. I have like 3 friends that actually make interesting text posts that foster discussions. Everything else is a waste cognitive energy.

I Facebook for support forums for autoimmune conditions. It is drastically better then Reddit for finding answers or suggestions.

Every question gets dozens of answers many of which are very insightful and useful if repetitive.

The sort of stuff that doctors don’t like to explain like my bloodwork says this what does that mean and what should I do next. people will have excellent answers.

how can you be sure that they're good answers?

I'm not in any Facebook groups but as a general principle it's a lot easier to verify a true claim than it is to come up with a true claim from nothing.

Because I spent years researching my conditions. A lot of people on the forums have as well. Plus some treatments show up again and again as “this worked for me”

For example I was getting up 10x a night to pee for years. Kept seeing post to try aloe Vera freeze dried pills. $$$

Finally tried it. And I slept through the night now.

Understanding test is another one.

A crap ton of doctors will see a negative test and automatically declare you don’t have X condition even if you have every single symptom. Eventually you learned that a large percentage usually get negatives on that test. That there are alternate test that can be run. But most doctors aren’t even aware they exist.

Oh so a lot of the moral and legal support. Imagine having the flu for 30 years And trying to live a normal life. Everyone calling you lazy and a whiner and if you try and do something about it you get labeled as a hypochondriac and it all being dismissed as anxiety. Some diseases take on average seven years or more to get diagnosed because because of these problems; mine took 20 years.

Reddit used to be really great for this type of community when subreddits could customize stuff and even have a dedicated Wiki. It's really gone the opposite direction in the last few years. They still can have these things but the tools are literally 10+ years behind.

maybe you need to curate your feed? mine is no memes and few ads which I ignore. it's all posts from family and friends . also stopped following friends who I aren't close and friends that post too much

I certainly could curate my following list more, but that takes too much time. Manually unfollowing ~1.1k is boring.

Also, I am in FB groups b/c at one point they were important to me (like looking for housing in SF). I don't exactly want to leave the group b/c I know I will need it later, nor do I want to deal with unfollowing all of the groups I don't are about.

Sounds like being the FB equivalent of an IRL hoarder!

Why not drop out the groups and rejoin in the unlikely event you really do need them later? Most people I know get by very well with no FB groups at all.

I've certainly done left and rejoined before. I worry that Group moderators might not allow me back in (either they stop accepting new members or get annoyed at someone for jumping in and out). Also, there is some friction with joining Groups. Group owners ask filter questions and delay admissions by days. You can "unfollow" groups, but that requires a few clicks.

FB groups are the best way for me to find roommate-style housing. "{city|country} expat" Groups help me plan my travels and answer questions. I don't know of other platforms that provide this service for me at low costs.

Why would I spend a lot of effort on getting myself addicted?

If you unfollow people, Facebook will just fill the gap in your newsfeed with more stupid memes and ads.

Remember that time when they were constantly pushing us to watch terrible videos on their platform?

Maybe you can curate it if you really work at it, but... ugh

I deleted my account several years ago and tried to get my girlfriend at the time to do the same thing. She was in favor of the idea, but facebook would show her a bunch of people with a message like "but what about all these people, won't you miss them?" and it did a great job of picking people who she most likely would not have kept in contact with if not for facebook, so she never deleted it.

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

You don't need to delete your account, you just need to delete the app in your phone and the job is done.

Not if you've got a browser...

People talk about how boring Facebook is, but two days ago, when it went down for a few hours, it was all anybody talked about. There were multiple "Facebook is down!" threads here on HN, including a 1200+ comment thread about it. You can say "well, that was just morbid curiosity..." but then I'd ask for a pointer to another equally urgent response to an event. Any event. If all the smart kids find Facebook boring and not-at-all addictive then why did it suck up all the oxygen on the internet when it disappeared for a couple hours?

A FAANG going down for hours is interesting even to people who don't associate with that company. You're trying to frame this as a contradiction, but it isn't.

There's a difference between Facebook, Inc (the company whose services were down) and facebook.com (the website that this article is about, which people are saying is "over").

It wasn't just Facebook (the social media website) that was down, though; it was Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down (if you're keeping score, that's 3-4 of the top 10 apps for both iOS and Android, depending on how you count Messenger), a large number of services that (surprisingly to many people) turned out to depend on Facebook's services, and a general firestorm of DNS DDOS's from services trying to access Facebook.com. That turns into a large portion of the internet behaving badly, not even counting that Whatsapp is the commons on which much of the non-US world's communications are built.

Besides all that, it's unusual for such a globally major website to be down at all, much less for hours. From a reliability perspective, that ~6 hours that Facebook's systems were down sets them an upper limit of 99.93% availability for the year.

> Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore.

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.

"And you would obsessively watch who looks at your page ..."

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.)

What hooks people like us (whatever that means) isn’t necessarily what hooks normal people (ditto).

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.

They don't necessarily need to target normal people, it's possible that over time they have optimized their site to attract those with certain traits that are most profitable.

This is sadly true. Genuine social interaction is rewarding but not addictive, as evidenced by thousands of years of history. And there's not a lot of ways to profit from it. On the other hand, getting people to come back every day or every hour for messages that compel them to buy things or vote a certain way is priceless to the right bidders.

Hm, could be, if the whales collectively outspend the rest of us collectively.

I’m in the same boat.

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.

it's not that Facebook is boring or interesting, it's that we're hostages [1].

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 think there really is a need to get rid of Facebook completely if you use it for useful things. If you don’t do much there you don’t feed them any information and or contribute to toxic discussions.

>I wish someone would make a site like that again!

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.

This actually sounds super cool and I think would fill a void a lot of families/groups are using right now with group texting.

Godspeed!

Maaaan I wish I could get in on something like this. I’m a noob web dev and I’d love to work on a substantial project with a skilled dev. This sounds like a really cool idea.

I follow a certain set of pages/groups for some hobbies and have muted almost everything else, including almost all people. You can pretty much make a custom feed that way, though the quality will depend on the quality of posts in those groups (which is on average very low).

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).

In the early days of Facebook, I really liked it. Like you said it was nice to see what everyone was up to. Then it changed, and the signal to noise ratio went to about 0. I had to unfollow so many people because I got tried of all the political stuff (from both sides). Anymore my feed is just ads.

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

Your post sounds an a lot like an addict “chasing the dragon”. Complete with how great it was in the beginning, how it’s no longer as good as it was you first started, how you are no longer satisfied and hoping for something new to come around that would be as good as when you first started using.

I think the addicted people still use it like you are describing (as well as looking at the feed).

You know what, you're right, I never noticed this change, probably because I quit FB years ago. It's just a content aggregator now, there's not much social about it aside from FOMO.

Wait... you could see who looks at your page?

I use messenger only on desktop but it is painfully slow.. Even message notifications load after many seconds

> Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore

You are not 'most people' then

he wrote a substantive post, the main thrust of which you're not responding to.

what he said is how captivating he found facebook before they made a number of changes to it. So he is actually saying he is a part of most people, give what he says some creedence.

> I wish someone would make a site like that again!

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.

Non-profit would be a perfect business model. It isn't like that level of functionality requires a multi $B company to run it.

"Non-profit" is a type of business, but not a business model.

You are technically correct, but "non-profit" designation opens up the potential for a healthy and positive business model that doesn't rely on the theft of user data.

I'm convinced that there is a service people will pay for. My idea is that _somebody_ in a social group will want it to happen, and that they can pay for the whole group.

I paid to boost a Discord server for my whole friend group, and they still insist on sticking to the WhatsApp group chat because "we don't want to download another app, everybody already uses WhatsApp".

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