And IMHO the group most vulnerable to any negative effects of social media are mostly on TikTok these days. Why is no one ever like “ByteDance is a drug cartel”?
"As a genxer with an addictive streak, TikTok is undoubtedly as addictive as crack."[1] "Tiktok is also addictive in a way that no competing app has managed to capture."[2] "Tiktok is absolutely more addictive than Facebook."[3] "I like to think of TikTok as the crack cocaine of addictive social media."[4]
The article wasn't about ByteDance's revenue. And ByteDance didn't try to organize public opinion against informed consent to my knowledge. Facebook campaigned for attention and got it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28137353
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28134963
And maybe they’re right: so I’ll keep an open mind if someone posts some figures.
I’ve submitted some anecdotes to the thread but I think I clearly labeled them as such.
They said something about Facebook in response to an article about Facebook. You replied with whataboutism. I showed people criticize ByteDance when relevant. Even call them crack sellers.
Facebook is cancer on society and zuck and sheryl sandberg are the pathogenic leeches
Your statement seems to imply that cigarettes are known to cause physical bodily harm and that Facebook does not.
This also sounds eerily like the statement Andrew Bosworth (FB exec) made:
"While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation."
But Facebook does not just impact the user, unlike sugar. Your actions can directly impact me. So it is more like cigarettes in that regard.
The privacy implications aside, all social media is going to have negative mental health outcomes in the long run as all platform's best case scenario is for users to view more and they do that by ignoring what may be good for it's users mental health.
If Mark Zuckerberg saw what Facebook is today and what fuels it back in the early days I'd suspect he'd be disgusted by it and the direction it's trying to drag people into (Metaverse). It's worse than big tobacco because people don't need to go out and buy or pay for social media in the traditional sense. They just need to pick up something they likely already own and pay with time. They don't know the motive is ad revenue, not their own well being. Social media are marketing sales companies. But they claim falsehoods such as entertainment or community. They don't highlight how those things get them paid on earnings calls. They talk about their ad revenue.
Social media should require a label every time a user opens the app. A warning, no different than cigarettes. Showcasing the negative mental state its users can have, showcasing the negative an echo chamber can create and showcasing how people can become so sick they make life altering choices due to consuming social media.
I tend to agree that there’s research supporting the thesis that people’s inclination to post only the highlights of their lives on social media creates an unrealistic and frankly depressing comparison for the median viewer of it. Most of us didn’t just graduate from a prestigious university or get married or welcome a child into the world and it’s easy to be like: “well my life sucks”.
But the nicotine/sugar debate is kinda missing that we sell alcohol at 7/11 which is devastating in excess to my health, my loved one’s sanity, and fatal to the guy I run over driving. We tried prohibiting that and it ended very badly. Is too much Internet better or worse than too much whiskey? Debatable I guess, but, free country?
I’ve known Andrew Bozworth for years and we have disagreed plenty of times. But he’s in the top like 5% of people I know on integrity in all the ways we can sort of measure that as individuals: tells people the truth, keeps promises, admits mistakes, treats his wife and kid well, all that. And whether you agree with his life’s work or not: he’s not in it for the money, I don’t know his finances but he joined early, I’m pretty sure he could buy like a pro sports team if he wanted. He works hard because he wants to achieve his goal. I’m not sure I agree with his goal, but he isn’t faking it.
In many respects I agree here. But, like sugar and nicotine: alcohol is an active choice that one must pay for in a much different way - the barrier to entry is not the same. We can also draw parallels that advertising by the liquor company is targeting me to buy it. But liquor companies aren't marketing companies playing a slight of hand game. They sell a product, not the ad. Is alcohol detrimental to society in certain respects? Yes. The argument here, however, seems to be: that it's OK to add another unhealthy aspect to our lives. But it's much harder for a 12 year old to buy alcohol. It's not hard for that same 12 year old to misunderstand the motives of Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. Alcoholism and Social Media share health negativities. But they are not the same in ease with which to consume.
Andrew Bosworth (not Bozworth) knows very well the negative implications of the product he works on, yet continues to stand behind it even if "...he could buy like a pro sports team...". Just because he's rich doesn't mean his intentions serve anyone other than himself. He penned "The Ugly" at Facebook and knows the platform can have dire implications. I didn't claim he was faking it, I was stating that your response seemed to take a cue from his analogy. Irrespective of that I also don't think the analogy is a good representation of the state of social media.
I mean, I quit with a lot of unvested stock because it wasn’t obvious to me that I was making people net happier by my work, which is a way that I want to feel about my work.
But I think that the number of people on this site who organize their careers around pure altruism is small enough that I’ll probably live through those people throwing rocks because I’m arguing that this subject is nuanced and complicated.
I think I said that Boz and I have disagreed plenty over the years. But if he’s going to get burned at the stake in a public forum because he’s had to make very, very difficult decisions and didn’t always make the right ones, we’ll tie me to the same post because I’ve badly fucked up on much simpler decisions.
The only character reference I can hope for, or frankly would want, is that I’m pretty good at my job in spite of my personal issues.
I wasn’t trying to spin up a big contentious thread, I was trying to inject some first hand knowledge of how this stuff works so that people can make informed judgements about it.
If having worked at FB half a decade ago and thinking Boz is a pretty stand up guy in person makes me a pariah?
Then I guess it’s a beautiful day for an auto de fay.
I suspect Zuckerberg's morals didn't change much. What makes you think they did?
For the same reason that anti-tobacco advocates focus on Phillip Morris and not pipe smokers- its the more well known incarnation of the product. And, frankly, I don't think a lot of people realize that TikTok is a social network. I think a lot of people see a few videos out of context and think it's like YouTube (or at least the older, less big production of Youtube from back in the day)
Before someone posts a “whataboutism”, I don’t know what happens on the extreme nonsensical left. I mostly read tech news, WSJ and “The Hill”.
This isn’t meant to beat up on conservatives. But let’s see what’s happen in 2020.
Fox News was the go to place for conservatives. Then they fairly called election results and their news articles called the accusations of the election being stolen “unfounded” and then people started leaving Fox News for News Max.
RedState purged all of their never Trump journalists who clearly had their conservative bona fides because they were losing readers. Anytime that RedState does still occasionally admit the election wasn’t stolen, people threaten to cancel their subscriptions.
Trump of course is the poster boy for the extremists. But when he started touting the benefits of the Covid vaccine and boosters, he is boo’d and cancelled by the extreme right and they say he is kissing up to the establishment.
The Wall Street Journal has always been center right. But because it didn’t tote the “populist agenda” or the “election was stolen”, the conservatives are abandoning it too.
The issue I'm referring to is that any advertising-supported platform has an incentive to generate "engagement" and divisive, outrageous content will generate a lot more of it, regardless of whether it's misleading or even completely false.
Politics-wise, the landscape would be much better if all constituents were given a fair, unbiased view of the media "market" not tailored to each individual to generate the maximum level of outrage just to further enrich some assholes. People can still decide which sources to read & trust but at least it's a conscious choice and they are free to look elsewhere, even if only to see what "the other side" reads.
We shouldn't equate them. Facebook can scale out its ability to do harm in ways that Big Tobacco couldn't even dream of.
True. Tobacco breaks encourage us to connect with our fellow human beings, social media mostly makes us hate each other more ;P
Why are you so sure about that? Both are harmful, Facebook is bigger.
It took a lot of effort get my Facebook/Instgram feed to be a mostly positive experience, but TikTok's algorithm did it immediately.
For me it brings back the fun of the early internet.
The "crack" element of it is you can feel productive consuming it, after all, you are kinda learning. My hack is I want to start taking notes during some TikToks and then not return until I perform the recipe, craft, life hack, etc.
But I did spend 2016 in a content moderation group. And 2016 was both the inflection point of everyday people saying “FB is fucking with elections” and believe me or not, a totally clean election at least as concerns the outcome (I voted for Clinton FWIW).
Most people’s objections to the effect of social media on politics, and I used to do this for a living, seem to boil down to: “It’s the platform’s responsibility to put downward pressure on stuff I disagree with”.
I don’t mean to be flip, but one person’s “misinformation” is another person’s “free speech”.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-british-medical-journal-st...
Because defending Facebook ( whether part of it or as a whole ), will be an extremely unpopular opinion on HN.
1. No one knows ByteDance, only TikTok.
2. No one on HN uses TikTok much. The demographics / target audience are child and young adult. Like SnapChat. So it is not on their Radar.
3. HN for the past 10+ years have been hating Facebook, it is borderline a cult. Trump era has turned this up to eleven.
4. They all think Facebook is the root cause of misinformation and spread. It is why the community or country is divided. It needs to be destroyed. Which is a strange take because I think twitter is far worse.
5. So Anything but Facebook, if TikTok will destroy Facebook, they will gladly side with TikTok, even though ByteDance the company is Chinese.
Having lived through an era in Hong Kong where only one voice and one view is allowed. I tend to have a contrarian take than most on HN.
Once the censorship cat is out of the bag IMHO there a lot more ways for that to go wrong than to go well.
Agreed, far less people have committed suicide or foment genocide from smoking.
That sounds counter-intuitive but if I’m eyeballing that wrong I’d be in your debt if you’d point me at some figures.
No sarcasm, I legitimately want to know.