> Social media is basically internet era alcohol
God I wish, I’d probably use it more if it had any similar benefits as alcohol.
God I wish, I’d probably use it more if it had any similar benefits as alcohol.
Something this analogy through-line makes me notice, is that we have clear cultural images of what a healthy use of alcohol looks like — going out for cocktails with friends; having wine with dinner; etc; vs. what alcohol abuse looks like — day-drinking, drinking alone, drinking until you pass out, etc. But we don't (yet) have similar cultural images for what healthy vs. unhealthy/abusive social-media participation looks like.
Not smokers took longer to get to know each other and it was harder. But it was nit about cool factor all that much.
Everything else you say is spot on, although the “reward” is a very nuanced minimal for me… it’s something I can go do privately by myself for a few minutes without needing to explain that. It’s probably the biggest conscious tie I still have to the habit.
/me checks how much time I spent on hn this week-end and decides it's maaaybe time to "log out"
It shares many attributes/features with other social media. Does it just come down to excellent moderation on the part of u/dang? Is it the lack of instant reply notifications? Is it that thread depth is capped? Only allowing downvotes for power users? Some combination of all those?
In a way, based on the alcohol analogy, HN is kind of like an evening beer with friends at a biergarten, you drink socially, not too much to even get very inebriated, and if you try to, mechanisms exist to stop you, such as the biergarten owners kicking you out. You're not getting (or are supposed to get) drunk at a biergarten, generally speaking.
On the other hand, many other social media are more like clubs. Sure, you can drink less, but the entire environment is designed to get you to drink more. This is analogous to places like Twitter or Instagram which are specifically designed for you to use them as much as possible, like through only allowing short replies (thus stripping nuance and incentivizing short angry replies) or gamifying like counters and incentivizing heavily cherry picked and edited photos.
It doesn’t have any concept (much less a public one) of “following”, it doesn’t have public likes, it doesn’t have a DM facility, it doesn’t have a personalized algorithm, it isn’t ad supported (and thus isn’t incentivized to tweal its algorithms for maximizing engagement and ad delivery), it has negative (but equally not-public) voting and signals (flagging) that don’t require filling out a form and human review, and it has dang.
From small scale (e.g., "How to create a social media site", etc.) to "How to best use Facebook to sell XXX, to influence political campaigns, to overthrow governments, to confuse your competition, etc.".
A good bibliography?
Too much and you become anti-social, but that's a separate problem.
I think the analogy is we're still in the equivalent of the early days of the Temperance movement for social media, where it's somewhat dysfunctional (like not drinking alcohol in the early 19th century US) to not have at least some account somewhere.
We may well be speed-running this. I won't be surprised by an attempt to ban "hard liquor" like FB and Twitter, nor if they decide to ban everything including "beer" places like here.