Frequent and infrequent users of social media respond differently to rewards
dornsife.usc.edu
dornsife.usc.edu
A worthwhile social activity is care for the needy. It actually generates love. No love is generated through social media.
The problem isn't in the technology - it's in our silly idea that there's something better in the world than loving, and being loved.
Individuals naturally feel that they are the most important person in the world. We are all the heroes of our own stories, after all, and experientially, the universe literally seems to revolve around us. We'd be better off engaging in activities that remind us that none of that is actually the case, and caring for others is an obvious way to do that.
I think it's also why a very effective way of countering depression is to help others in a meaningful way.
(I'm also a Gen-Xer)
Karma doesn't always hit right away. The older generations who didn't lift up their kids will hit old age and be taken care of by someone--their poor/rightfully resentful kids or help hired with their kids' would-be inheritance.
There seems to be an assumption that the government is there to help and programs are in place, ready to save anyone who wants to be saved at the snap of a finger. As a person who's 5 years homeless (working, college educated) the only real help I get is from employers giving me opportunities to work for above minimum wage at times and customers who tip generously for good service.
There is a facet of service to others in a cash flow based religion, oddly enough. Allegedly even horses feel good after a day of hard work for a kind boss/keeper.
(/Millennial)
Because of this behavior, one person's opinion can become self-replicating, because there is no distinction between consensus and copy.
This social pattern leaves us with a tiny number of narratives being blindly repeated instead of being thoughtfully confronted. The only one who benefits is the narrative itself.
Excellent - this expresses things so succinctly.
I agree with where you are coming from, but I'm not sure social media is actually about that. Making you feel like your content is important is only a goal in-so-much as it incentivizes you to create hype-able content. Social media is a hype engine designed to take randos on the internet and make them famous in front of other randos on the internet. If caring for the needy generates hype, that's what gets hyped. If pranks generate hype, that's what gets hyped. If twerking generates hype, thats what gets hyped.
It's about maximizing engagement to maximize monetization. And that monetization ends up getting balanced with social pressures, PR nightmares, political pressure, and legal pressure. We have a hype machine willing to promote anything that doesn't get moderated away.
I'd say social networking actually captured what you are talking about here. It's goal was to connect friends, families, communities, peers, etc. I've seen that level of connection, that level of community building, manifest in real-world love/kindness.
I don't see that happen on social media outside of people going against the grain and forcing social networking through social media. I have first-hand experience of how surprisingly difficult social networking on social media is; primarily because of the recommendation algorithms drowning out social networking content.
> The problem isn't in the technology
But the issue is the technology. Centralized social networking failed because of the technology. Centralized social networking is expensive. Being a "free proxy server" and archivist for the entire world's communication is a hard technical and financial problem to solve. It's also legally expensive to host a bunch of other people's content for free. And it's socially expensive, people get very upset about what other people say, and get mad at you for proxying that content.
Offering to let the entire world communicate through a single central "town square" for free just doesn't appear to be viable.
The result was that it stopped being about social networking. That entire class of product silently died.
Social networking is dead. What we have now is social media.
I expand on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37300826
It hasn't been called social networking in a long time. It's always been "social media".
Most people's travel isn't something to be jealous of anyway when you pry into it.
But most importantly, enough to enjoy the moment despite the hardship.
Once you discover that it is possible, that it is logical, then a new life awaits.
I have found Mastadon and things like it to not be sticky at all. I wanted to be involved in the community because it seems like its growing, but when I open the app nothing grabs my interest.
I think it is because social networks like Mastadon, Bluesky, Twitter... are "people" or "stream of conscious" oriented, while sites like HN and Reddit are "topic" oriented.
I am really interested in engaging with a topic, and want to read have have long conversations on that topic. However on "people" oriented networks there is no broad coherence to what people are talking about, and I lose interest
In other words, it might be wise to start avoiding Hacker News as well, because it is also a social network.
Then looking over HN in the evening, yet again “everybody else” seems to have implemented their third Haskell compiler for fun. Boring at this point really, to them.
Yet I am scratching my head over how there can be such huge gaps in performance and productivity. It’s the same principle. As a physicist you wouldn’t compare yourself to our darling, Feynman. Physicists are too smart to be doing that (or at least quickly stop doing it). I am apparently very dumb.
I've noticed this personally. In my early social media days circa 2012, going viral with a post of mine evoked genuine gratefulness for the post and appreciation for how much reach it got. Now, going viral is just a habit. 10,000 likes, 1000 shares on Facebook is my new normal. It's not 'special' like it used to be. I still appreciate my viral posts, just not to the extent of my early social media days (this is probably because fewer people were on it in 2012).
Reminds me of drug addicts building tolerance and upping usage to get same “high”.
Probably get the same feeling again if you hit 100K or 1M interactions
Personally, haven’t cared since 2015. FB — stopped using for socials but use its marketplace for selling/buying. IG - keep an account but otherwise have stopped using it.
Still use anonymous social media like HN or reddit. Although lately stick to the fediverse — mastodon, lemmy, and matrix.
Most of my friend groups are migrating towards mastodon. I haven't noticed any political connotations.
Healthy reaction to this small fandom is to take it as an indicator you are doing something good and should not focus on reception, but on the product.
We've got a youth that wants to do youtube, he gets really excited when he gets a subscriber or a share or something. But I'm like... it doesn't count until it's in the thousands or tens of thousands. That's me gatekeeping though, I'm probably being a dick about it.
Isn't this true for nearly everything in life?
E.g. when I won my first marathon, I was ecstatic. Now after winning 20 of them, my happiness is much more muted.
You can even say it about the first time you ate ice cream.
I don't think this is a reason to be worried about social media or make special rules about it.
I genuinely believe that setting goals for yourself and achieving them is intrinsically more valuable than... not doing that, i.e. scrolling.
Like in the previous example, I don’t see how a marathon isn’t also a colossal waste of time. You spend half a day running the and nothing has changed other than you feel good. Fair enough, but same thing with video games or music or social media.
Perhaps a useful hobby could be carpentry or something, but that’s a slim percentage of all hobbies, and even then, there’s probably a machine or a guy who can do it better than you and you can simply pay them.
I don’t see scrolling as a “leisure pastime”, maybe that’s the crux of our disagreement. But if all of one’s leisure time is spent scrolling I cannot see how that is good for the individual compared to just about anything else.
Social media was on the computer. You would interact with it every now and then, then leave. It was useful for making or keeping in touch with friends. You had the good parts without too much of the bad parts.
But once smartphones took over, you were plugged in 24/7. It brings it out at its worst.
Without it, I'd feel lonely lol
Social media is addictive, and to an extent forces you to share things about yourself (there are social consequences for not doing so. I personally don't give a fuck but not everyone chooses that decision)
This is an incredibly misleading comparison. Addiction is not a monolith, and there are degrees of addiction. If you cold turkey quit a serious heroin addiction, there's a serious chance you will die. That is absolutely never the case with social media addiction.
There are always times when we act against our own best interest because our body seems to override our brain - I had ice cream last night that I knew was bad for me. That doesn't mean we're compelled, and it isn't sufficient to call something addiction.
What you're doing here is the equivalent of invoking Nazis in an argument on the internet - going straight to "ITS LIKE HEROIN" for anything that be somewhat addictive is incredibly reductive and degrades the quality of what could otherwise be a useful conversation.
There are also degrees of compulsion. The law compels me to adhere to a speed limit; that doesn't mean my reptilian brain flips out if I go 66.
Within the context of discussing compulsive social media use described as addictive, arguing ad absurdum with reference to heroin isn't as simple as calling everything distasteful Nazi.
And yes, you are entirely right - sugar and other things in that ice cream create an addiction - this is why you had ice cream yesterday even though you knew you shouldn't have had it!
Yes, human beings have agency and are ultimately responsible and accountable for their decisions.
Human beings, like all living organisms, are complex systems. Social media, marketers and advertisers, among others, regularly manipulate and abuse such systems.
So, yes, while it is true that addiction is a spectrum, that spectrum applies to social media as much as it does with other addictions like sugar or amphetamines.
What your argument does is absolve those attempting to abuse such organic, complex systems for their own gain, regardless of the harm it promotes or directly causes.
EDIT:
- Further, in case you're missing the peer reviewed, scientific studies of social media and addiction: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=scholarly+articles+soci...
We are a social animal in the sense that it's part of normal healthy functioning, and that isolation is considered a mode of torture. Social media is a means to connect people that is perfectly manageable if you're an intact person in the same sense that the telephone is a convenient eay to stay in touch. There is no safe dose of heroin to avoid addiction in a healthy person.
This statement refutes the idea that social media or food can possibly be addictive, yet there's this body of research for both which asserts they can be. At best, this is splitting hairs over the definition of addiction. Assuming that Something can be addictive, a person might be "compelled" to act by their addiction to Something.
"His hunger compelled him to eat" is a perfectly reasonable use of the word
Social media can make people feel _obliged_ by social pressure to engage in the platform (via sharing or posting updates about their life to family members and/or friends).
Addiction can also do the same thing, while others may be bored and scroll incessantly (they feel the need to stave off boredom).
There is a myriad of reasons. I felt compelled to respond to your insistence that 'compel' was an incorrect word.
It's pretty obvious that social media users create some pretty intense echo chambers. People are posting erroneous or incomplete information that aligns more with their feelings than with reality.
Maybe what's driving people to become habitual users in the first place is a search for easy answers and their biases confirmed rather than just wanting to be part of a group. People want to be right and it seems they are willing to distort facts to do so and that creates a sort of contagion with the rest of the crowd searching for easy explanations for everything. But who knows.
It's an interesting topic and I hope research continues.
Yet Canada is considering printing individual warnings on cigarettes despite fully saturating understanding that smoking is bad.
I'm fully with each and every tweet warning you "tweeting makes you a dickbag please reconsider"
I vaguely recall somewhere had a speech synthesiser read everyone's comments back at them before letting people post them.
Someone un-ironically complained it made them "sound stupid".
(I think it was YouTube? Not sure).
(Even if I do have a strong memory that this was in addition to the XKCD).
But this is all beside the point.
My favorite thing was the interaction between the health department and a local principal, it went something like this:
Health Department representative reading off of a slide: "fewer than 5% of teens reported they had tried a tobacco product last year, with fewer than 1% indicating they had smoked a cigarette. We attribute this to the DARE and Too Good for Drugs campaigns as well as constant outreach from the DoH."
Principal: "we had to install vape detectors in every bathroom stall and then re-install them and hide them when the kids bashed them. We think that about 3/4 of the graduating class vapes."
Health Department: blank stares
There is what seems to be a willful ignorance about this in many professional circles. It's very strange to me.
In some classrooms greater than 50% of the male students would have "dip" or other oral tobacco products on their desk during lecture.
Engagement is its own reward. People who feel engaged on a topic can reward themselves by simple repetition. They can skip the hard work of criticism, straight to the finish line.
Importance is the result of active filtering. What is it that must be filtered out? Engagement. Who would truly want to filter out their own rewards?
This is where we find a parallel with addiction: people who practice this short reward loop struggle to leave it, but people who don't practice tend to have an easy time avoiding the loop entirely.
If nothing else, this results in highly misleading feedback loops where outlier opinions and ideas are amplified and reinforced. Hang out in reddit for a while and you'd think the world was about to end(either from crime or rightwing hate groups depending on the subreddit).
Go and talk to people in real life who don't hang out online and you will find that much of the hottest topics online barely register in most folks' thinking.
Vocal internet is overly tech, overly American, overly progressive, overly academic, overly LGBTQ+, overly neuro-atypical, overly "misfit/alternative", overly chronically online. This interesting umbrella of demographics shapes internet culture with of course the sizable counter force of the right. This sub culture has somehow bled into media and institutions, becoming THE culture, but not really.
Quite a lot of it makes zero sense to "normies".
I once read a fascinating account of a campaign activist for the Democrats. She would do home visits to get a reading of people's political leaning and try to persuade them to vote for them.
She was in for a shock. She found that people had no answer when probed for their position on seemingly important topics. They had simply never thought about it. Sometimes they do answer yet when probed for a "why", it soon turned out that they made it all up on the spot. And more often than not, the few answers given were contradicting and all over the place.
Turns out it's all bread and games. People know and care about their immediate circles and don't do politics for the sake of politics unless their local lives are drastically impacted.
Even "superior" online characters don't care about politics. They know what is the outrage of the day but wouldn't able to correctly answer the most basic of questions about politics. Yet the strength of their opinion seems inverse to that.
Even "superior" online characters don't care about politics."
This is evidence that democracy is dysfunctional and we need to fix and or change how it works.
There are many important issues of a 'specialist' nature and or of minority interest or that only affect a small percentage of the population that government should address but has either failed to do so or done so inadequately.
If these issues only affect a few citizens or there are only a few pushing government to address them then there's less chance they will be dealt with in a fair and equitable manner. That 'disinterest' of the majority means there is no general oversight of these minority issues no matter how important they are. Thus government decisions about these issues will usually be influenced by the protagonists and lobbyists who have the most power and influence—their wishes prevail and win out even if not in the best interest of the citizenry as a whole.
There are thousands of issues that fall into this category—treaties signed on request of big business, regulations changed or weakened to benefit the few, etc. Take copyright law for instance, in the digital age it needs a gross overhaul but is resisted by vested interests, big publishers etc., also it's protected by international treaties which adds further resistance to change.
The majority of the population couldn't give a damn about copyright so the powerful get their way despite that the majority of citizens would benefit from its reform.
This is just one indictment of democracy's failure, there are thousands more. Moreover, as society becomes more complex and the needs of people become even more diversified, the failure will become even more evident.
When we look at the dysfunctional nature of current politics it's clear we urgently need to rethink how we are governed. A dysfunctional democracy has high potential to morph into totalitarianism.
It's an odd contrast with the perception that everything has become hyper-political, intersectional and everyone is an activist now.
Obama once had an insightful remark about it. Sending a mean tweet is not activism. Political activism means reading legislation, learning how the political system works, learning law, and doing a huge amount of work on the ground. It's a lot of work, often unrewarding.
Hence the Tweet. Zero effort. Immediate reward. Nothing changes.
We know this has been exacerbated by biased and poor media reporting, social media etc. but it seems to me that with the complexities of modern life many don't stop to think about issues, nuances are lost thus views polarize to extremes.
I wonder how much better things would be if we taught kids about politics and how they are likely to be manipulated later in life, and that before arriving at a position it was incumbent on citizens to consider the issues carefully.
Obama's point would be half solved if kids left primary school primed with these notions, even though views were not fully developed they'd be easier to reinforce later.
None of that stuff was drummed into me as a kid and I now wish it had been.
Online culture could be an extension of many good things, and it just isn't.
Maybe it should have been flagged for off-topic hopelessness.
If the more people engage the less value their engagement yields, that's a great natural feedback brake. It might seem like obvious attention dilution, but I think it counters the foundational 'scale' model of surveillance capitalism, eventually making the observed "choices" of users barely above the noise floor.
Social networking was the high point of tech for me. And I think we are past that. Social networking appears to be dead, and it was replaced by social media. I'd say that social networking is good for our mental health and our communities. I'm not sure social media is.
The last 10 years or so have proven to me that centralized social networking is not viable. It's not socially viable. It's not legally viable. And it's not economically viable. Centralized social networking failed.
Social networking, to me, focused on staying connected with friends, family, communities, peers, etc.
Social media, to me, feels a lot like taking randos on the internet and trying to make them famous in front of a bunch of other randos on the internet. The ultimate goal is to find the most engaging, socially/legally palatable, content and hype it up to as many people as possible. The ultimate goal being to create as much engagement as possible to keep people inside the social media experience long enough to effectively monetize them.
You reward engaging content to encourage people to create it. Sometimes you share a portion of monetization back with the most engaging content creators. Other times, you reward engaging content with "internet points" that give people the warm fuzzies of "being liked." Sometimes you let creators sell their own advertisements to self-monetize the fame you've given them. But, ultimately, its about fueling an attention economy that is decoupled from our personal social networks.
When your goal is to take randos on the internet and hype them, you're giving them "a platform" they wouldn't have otherwise. You have ethical/social/legal/moral questions about when it's appropriate to hype content and who you should or should not make famous. Not to mention you're pumping all that content _through your servers_. You have to pay for the storage and transmission of that content. You have to have conversations about your legal liability when it comes to that content.
And I think this is where the recent social media "scandals" went off the rails. Many users thought they were on a social network. They thought they were sharing their content with their platforms. Platforms they built themselves in the real world. A social media app doesn't "give you a platform" with your grandma. You brought that platform to the social media app.
So when the app starts talking about what you are allowed to say on "their platform" many people suddenly realized they didn't have their own platforms. Their communities, their families, their friends, their peers, their _own platform_, was handed over to this hype machine. Users thought they were posting content to share with their friends, family, etc.
But what they were really doing was sending it all to "some dude in Palo Alto."
It's weird that we have to have the conversations we do in our society around social media. It seems very unnatural to me. A byproduct of centralized social networking failing and growing into social media.
Centralized systems are wrong for the kind of communication people thought they were engaged in. Centralized systems work really well for social media. They work very poorly for social networking.
Multimillion dollar team vs primitive brain of human. Many people bound to lose and fall through.
I think the problem is rooted in a large swath of society growing up in isolation. The past few decades has seen a sharp rise in suburban or exurb living (living in isolation), car centric transportation (traveling in isolation), and social media (socializing in isolation). High levels of partisanship in the states as well is not a coincidence. We have generations of children growing up playing video games in the suburbs because that’s all you can do from the moment you are born to the day you become an adult (or get a car).
I don't think that this is the problem. From what I know, hackernews doesn't hire any marketing experts, psychologists or focus groups. It doesn't even support images. I was more addicted to this site than any other, despite the lack of psychological tricks.
And there are many sites that DO employ full psychological warfare teams that I completely ignore. Tinder seemed fully committed to forcing repetitive user engagement. And I dropped that site after about two days, psychologists or not. If all it took to force engagement was a certain list of UI tricks, every funded social site would be able to do it.
I don't think there's a single root cause or an off switch for social media. This phenomenon is here to stay, for better or worse. I think that we will adapt as a species but there's no going back.
(I'm apparently on peak "Idle Game", and thus benefited greatly from the end of Flash browser games freeing me from that pointless waste of time).
Edit: I think my comment was lost in translation. What I meant was, "yes, this was such a phenomenon, and I experienced it too, and I marvel at the amount of time that I wasted in Idle games, and sympathize with others who are also lost in these Skinner boxes"
Analogously, my addiction to Parmesan cheese doesn’t mean heroin isn’t that addictive (or intended to be addictive).
Otherwise discussion on the topic is impossible, as one can always respond with "yea well you're on HN aren't you?!"
I think it's a valid point to question what people mean when they say they're not on social media, yet are posting on HN.
HN has none of those. As a result, I don't consider it "social media", I consider it a specialty news aggregator that has a robust comment section.
Back when FB and the like were new, calling them "social media" was done to differentiate them from sites like HN.
As a kid, I was really isolated - miles from the nearest children. I only saw kids at school. But, in high school, we moved inward to a suburb, and I did a lot of biking to see my friends.
Online spaces for interaction seem to be leading to kids being able to "interact" with each other from afar. You don't need to ride your bike to Mark's house to play a game with Mark and his sister. You just load up whatever online game all three of you own.
I'm not saying in-person interaction is completely dead to kids. I am starting to think the shopping mall as a hangout spot is dead to kids, though.
Anecdotally I was walking half a mile to school in the second grade on my own. My nieces and nephews are the same age and aren't allowed to leave their yard (despite having cell phones!).
There's also the question of "why" — kids today are adept at video calls and tend to play lots of video games (many of which only have online multiplayer modes anyway!). They're generally not spending a lot of time playing outside. Their parents are also spending more time inside.
I'm sure there are a preponderance of reasons for the changes, but I've always suspected that the access to an infinite news cycle (e.g., some kid 2 hours away went missing last night) has made people overly cautious. This could be entirely anecdotal, but I feel like the world was a lot smaller for parents before the internet and this has altered perceptions (despite the fact that most places are actually safer in terms of violent crime rates than they used to be).
Yes, and this is also the result of negative aspects of media (in general, not just social). It's safer for kids to do this now than it has ever been (in the US, anyway), and yet so many parents think it's insanely dangerous. You even see parents scolding (and sometimes calling the cops on) other parents for letting their kids play outside.
It's insane.
The weakening of communities has also made this much worse. Used to be you could play with the neighborhood just fine, if something happened one parent would tell the others or talk about it during a BBQ. Now, very little of that exists. There's so much animosity in communities. Leads to what this article is talking about, but things like NextDoor have made community building a sin. Everyone wants to be the snitch, the "community pillar" by becoming the epitome of a stereotypical no-fun-allowed police.
We've been living in apartments for ages now, yet we still struggle to make our neighbours that live 3 steps away, reliable friends. Everyone is just too busy, too distracted, too this or that. So I can't blame parents entirely for this dilemma we've created, we're all at fault at every level.
Not to mention that parents are constantly fed scare stories about “random creeps” snatching kids up — a profoundly rare occurrence, surely several orders of magnitude less of a risk than that taken on by driving your child to/from school.
In contrast to their other engineered addictions my hunch is (with the caveat that I am not remotely a psychologist) that an important mechanism that enabled this regression was essentially incidental to the nature of these platforms:
Normal people for the first time got a public podium (or they think they do) and thus behave as if the whole world is watching.
Positions and arguments that earlier on were discussed in smaller and more forgiving circles are now in the open.
People get trapped, have to defend a public record, they feel exposed, must double down.
They seek comfort in similarly thinking corners, in newly formed clans, which are, as it happens, much easier to find online and encouraged by the algorithms of the platforms.
The result is large numbers of people absorbed into toxic, self-generated and self-excited virtual realities. A social mechanism that was always active at a low level, but is now on steroids and out of control.
This is just one of the traps: from selfies to influencers, from trolls to click farms the list goes on and on.
The positive impact of "connecting people" is drowned in wave after wave of negative phenomena. If we ever get out of this era intact we'll think of it as a nightmare.
The purpose of broadcasting isn't the same as conversation. People want the result of a positive interaction, but they do that by chasing hundreds of negative ones.
The negative interactions are actually better for the platform as they are (in some studies) almost 10x as effective at driving engagement. So the companies looking for "the most engaging" communities, drive more negative interactions.
The people looking for the most clicks, chase the "dunking" and "counter dunking" interactions, and it becomes at best 90% of the platform, at in reality like 99% of what you see while you're doom scrolling.
Social media is awful, and draws out our worst impulses as a business model.
The physical analogy is that you're listening to somebody, then turn around to speak to a group of "friends" about it whilst the other person can hear you do it. And you'd likely misrepresent what was said and receive an applause for it.
It's a deeply anti-social behavior that in the real world would make you wake up in a hospital pretty soon.
Or how about a retweet of a hot take? Imagine going all over town and plastering walls with a low effort opinion.
Or how about digging into somebody's past to find something offensive from a decade ago? What would the physical analogy look like? Following somebody for 10 years, taking notes, making pictures, interviewing your friends and family? Which would amount to what normally would be a deep criminal investigation, yet here we do it just for kicks?
Social media has normalized deeply anti-social behavior and the consequences are severe.
No, it didn’t.
Social media emerged at a time when the US was returning to the long-term norm of partisan polarization from an aberrant period where political polarization was less aligned with the divide between the two major parties because it was a long period of overlapping political realignments (pivoting around the New Deal and the Civil Rights.)
It was also during a rise in overall political polarization, but that had also been going on since about the end of the realignment period in the mid-1990s, after a drop over the preceding couple decades from the long high of political-but-not-necessarily-partisan-polarization in the overlapping Civil Rights/Vietnam period, but it can hardly explain a trend that started before it existed.
Of-course if we zoom out to longer time scales polarization was rampant and lethal (across most of the world), in ways we thought or hoped we will never see again.
The tragic result of social media as they developed is that instead of helping fix known problems or help build consensus about handling emerging problems, they aggravate them, in ways that we only gradually start figuring out.
I suppose individuals learn to cope with these phenomena rather quickly. I'm not the best at avoiding social media, but I seem to have no problem ignoring the crackpots. I guess most people share a similar approach.
I strongly object to the word "normal" here. Normies, as in the common masses you know from the real world, are nowhere to be seen on social networks. Yes, many have accounts, but they're not a force. Many post nothing or infrequently and then get a handful of likes from their 20 followers.
If anything, social media promotes the abnormal. It does so by rewarding engagement, any engagement. What is reliably engaging? Triggering our brain that is hotwired to pay attention to the negative, strange, unhinged and weird.
Normally, the local madman of a town (village idiot) is kept in check. Ousted, not taken seriously. Social media is basically saying, you know what...you're unhinged, but we believe you should be major. Along with some tens of thousands of others like you, you should run this entire place.
The people will click, surely they do.