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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

I'm rather reminded of the ads from the early 20th century for "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!" [1]

[1] - https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/doctors-smoking/more...

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In what sense?

Social media is bad for you. Though I'm not sure that social media enjoyed a "social media is good for you" phase. There are certainly studies I'm sure that are out there, but the general consensus seems to be negative.

Oh, at least here in Brazil, people still find it strange if you say you don't have an Instagram account. There's this idea of being a bit weird for not following this trend.

Brazil is an exception, though! Did you know we are the third country in the world with the largest number of Instagram users? [0]

Social media is very cultural here, so I'm not sure that we are representative of a larger trend in social media acceptance worldwide.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/578364/countries-with-mo...

Not surprised given the high cultural pressure for vanity there.

The edu-only era of Facebook was good, as well as the preceding livejournal era.

The shift from social networks to social media was subtle, and insidious.

Social networks, systems where you talk to your friends, are okay (probably). Social media, where you consume content selected by an algorithm, is not.

That's a great way of framing it!

And was basically driven by social network companies saturating organic friend content volume (and viewer eyeball time).

So they turned into social media companies driven by infinite synthetic (in the no-connection sense) content.

Scientists aren't all health practitioners.

They did, 2006 to 2008-2010, when LinkedIn was considered hot and useful.

In the same sense that "More scientists hang out with Neo Nazis and White Supremacists than with any other political party."

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