Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects | Hacker News Reader

Evidence Grows That Online Social Networks Have Negative Effects

technologyreview.com

95 pointsca98am7943 comments

This is my summary based on skimming the article:

The authors find that social network usage has a negative correlation with happiness.

To control for unhappy people turning to social networks (reverse causality), the use instrumental variables (IV). This involves finding an instrument, that is something that causes people to use social networks more/less in a quasi-random way. Their instrument is availability of DSL. I'm not sure how they deal with DSL availability also affecting happiness through other mechanisms (e.g. general internet usage). In any case, the correlation between social network usage and happiness is not significant once they use the IV strategy.

They then use a method I'm not familiar with (structural equation modelling, SEM) to obtain some other results which are discussed in the abstract.

I believe that the abstract (and the popular article discussing it) should have mentioned the insignificance of the correlation when using the IV strategy, since I doubt many casual readers would by able to critically evaluate the SEM strategy (which yielded the results that the abstract and journalistic article discussed).

The title is misleading. Spending time on social networks doesn't cause unhapiness, in fact it's the opposite. It gives you a jolt of brief happiness.

This can explain the correlation. It's not hard to see why people who are unhappy with their lives would spend more time on Facebook.

Facebook is an alternative place where you can get a brief sense of "social" feeling. If you're perpetually unhappy and lonely, you crave it more. And the more you time you spend on it, the worse you feel about your life, causing you to crave it even more. Vicious cycle.

A jolt of brief happiness, not unlike that produced by a sugar spike, may not be all healthy. It's addictive and conditions you to procure instant rewards more, at the expense of delaying gratification which is essential for having some control over your life over the long haul (habits, hobbies, relationships, projects all take concerted effort with non-imediate payoffs.) In other words, the easy availability of these jolts of brief happiness (and ones not associated with getting fat or spending money) may well set the user up for long-term unhappiness.

I'm disheartened to see many of my friends who were never gamers (hence mostly women) now fall prey to addictive social games like Candy Crush and that Kim Kardashian shit, which are things tightly coupled with Facebook usage. I happily find myself immune to their draw--my teens were spent getting on and off addiction to all sorts of games, including even dating sims, though most having far more depth and intellectual stimulation.

> Spending time on social networks doesn't cause unhapiness

> And the more you time you spend on it, the worse you feel about your life

These two statements directly contradict each other. If something gives you a brief jolt of happiness and "the more time you spend on it, the worse you feel about your life", it's only superficially true that it gives you happiness, and it's much much more correct to say that it causes unhappiness.

I'm literally only using the propositions from your own comment here.

They don't contradict each other. It's "correlation does not imply causation" framed differently.

Actually, it's the "it's the feedback loop that increases unhappiness" phrased differently.

I think you're misreading his comment. His latter proposition pretty clearly implies causation: "The more time you spend on it, the worse you feel [if you're already unhappy]". It certainly limits the domain, but that's about as clear about causation as one can be when speaking colloquially.

Because you're taking it out of context

Or perhaps you're just misunderstanding my complaint. The comment taken as a whole ("in context", if you prefer) proposes that social networks provide a brief jolt of happiness in the short-term, but its net result is making unhappy people feel more unhappy in the long-term. Under those assumptions[1], only the most committed pedant would claim that it's incorrect to say that "social networks don't cause unhappiness" is true.

[1] This is the reason I clarified that I was limiting myself to your comment, because the question of whether your assumptions are true is another one entirely.

Online social networks are fine on a conceptual level...beautiful even. Its the commercial interpretation that is completely screwed.

Profit driven, privacy invading, dark pattern driven kind of bullsht. Today my phone wanted me to install this (additional) facebook app to read my friend's 2 line message to me. i.e. Blocking the 2nd half of the message and giving me two options - link to useless help article and an install their app button (hiding the fact that the existing app can read the message - which btw strangely didn't trigger the usual alert). So...Dear Facebook...go * yourself. And yes FB employees reading this - I really do feel like that.

The faults you are identifying are not related to the article. The implication of the article is broader. It would seem to imply that the statement

Online social networks are fine on a conceptual level...beautiful even.

may not be true. Of course, this topic needs further study.

I agree. This comment seems off-topic. Not sure why it's the top comment.

Off-topic indeed & for that I apologize - was just mighty annoyed at the time & the semi related headline trigger a reaction.

>Not sure why it's the top comment.

The new FB app is universally hated - see app store ratings. I wasn't specifically aiming at that but looking back it makes sense that my angry comment resonated widely despite off-topic.

Anyway - sorry for the derail.

It's entirely likely that the dark patterns mentioned above are part of the driver in the context of the article. Knowing and avoiding those dark patterns likely tip the sociological balance of the network towards a less fulfilling place.

A major conceptual issue with social networks is you get the highlights that people are willing to post. Face to face interactions let you see the day to day negatives and positives of peoples lives. However, online everyone seems to doing great, which is vary depressing.

Posts your unlikely to see an old collage buddy post on FB, "My kid just flunked the 8th grade.", "Just found my husband sleeping with X", "The IRS wants to talk to me." etc.

Reading the paper the article is based on (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.3550v1.pdf)- the evidence seems pretty weak:

"Subjective well-being is observed through the answers to the question “How satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays?”. Answers range on a scale from 0 (extremely dissatisfied) to 10 (extremely satisfied)"

The average results are about 7 ( between 7.25 and 7.76 in the North, 7.02 and 7.21 in the Center and 6.85 and 7.26 in the South)

And for social networking sites "the total net effect is negative and amounts to about -0.15%."

So that's a change of like 7.25 down to 7.24 approx

Which seems a pretty marginal result to me. I know they've tried to correct for spurious correlations and the like but it's an inexact science. I mean the change is 1/40 of that of moving from north Italy to the south for example.

Relevant: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-defining-decade/2012...

This is the reason I don't use social networks. So many people are comparing each other and only seeing highlights.

Where is the balance and objectivity? Where is the truth in our relationships when viewed through a filter?

I am unconvinced that social networks are the cause of the correlation here. The proposed mechanism, that social network use engenders a loss of trust, just doesn't make sense to me. Exactly what is it about social networks that would cause trust to erode? More plausible is that people who lack strong social ties with mutual trust use social networks more instead of interacting face to face.

When all you do is view everyone's best moments from that day it's no wonder it leads to a certain kind of depression. I saw it in spades in my ex-gf who is a lawyer working 10-12hrs/day. She would get so depressed looking at 'everyone playing outside' while she was stuck inside working that she would inevitably take it out on me.

Facebook is the Billy Mays of interacting with your friends. The sooner one steps away from the herd they realize the toxicity of the life that's being sold.

Disclaimer: I 'deactivated' my account a month ago and feel fantastic!

The online to offline social networks can solve the faceless social networking; however, you can lead the horses to the water, but you cannot make them drink the water.

"They found for example that face-to-face interactions and the trust people place in one another are strongly correlated with well-being in a positive way. In other words, if you tend to trust people and have lots of face-to-face interactions, you will probably assess your well-being more highly."

Whenever I read about the downsides of social media, for some reason I clearly remember a line from the film To Die For (meant as satire):

"Because what's the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody's watching? And if people are watching, it makes you a better person."

I feel much the same way about it myself. It seems so many are crazily self obsessed.

Hm,

I don't think the title quite follows from the article. There might be an association, but even supposing there is causation the independent/dependent variables aren't necessarily known here: people with low social trust (for other reasons) could be more likely to engage in online social networks as opposed to meatspace social networks.

Endogenous factors are addressed in the paper. Nothing personal, but I'm getting so tired of people on HN saying 'well, maybe they made an elementary statistical mistake...' They're professional statisticans working with a large and robust dataset,a nd they devoted 6-7 pages of the paper to discussing how they controlled for such factors. And they brought up your exact point in the very first paragraph of that discussion:

[...] In particular, while the effect on well-being has been largely explored in the case of face-to-face interactions, we do not have conclusive evidence about the endogenous relationship between online interactions and well-being. This weakness suggests caution about the generality of the results provided by previous literature. Individual effects such as personal characteristics may be correlated with both participation in SNSs and well-being. Happier people may also be more outgoing and open-minded, and may have a higher propensity for various kinds of social interaction. [...]

It's fine to be skeptical, but couldn't you at least do the authors the courtesy of looking at their methods and pointing out where you think they fall short?

I agree that we should always at least read the linked article (and sometimes the original paper) before bringing out "correlation does not equal causation".

However, you are overstating the case for the author's having dealt with reverse causality. From the conclusion:

When we addressed causality in IV estimates, the significance of the correlation between participation in social networking sites and subjective well-being disappeared.

See my top level comment for my own take on the article.

I'm not trying to make any comment on the significance of the result; the authors discuss those factors in detail in the body of the paper (around page 20) as well as mentioning the limitations in the abstract and conclusion.

My gripe is with reflexive and unjustified statistical one-upmanship in HN discussions.

I've long suspected this and have been off social networks since 2007/08. Have taken a lot of grief from friends about it though.

Bad title. Article only says about correlation.

I signed up on facebook because my friends went on a trip and I wanted to see the photos of the foreign country they are visiting.

When you add people you barely know, I think it would be a different feel when they upload how beautiful their life is.

That's just it though: No one has much of an interest of presenting anything less than a "beautiful" life on FB. What you're watching in that news feed isn't reality, it's a carefully curated set of ideal content to make that person look better/happier/richer than they actually are.

Everyone has demons, but no one wants to air that to their peers.

I think you're focusing on the wrong part of the point being made by notastartup though. Given that people are going to try to make their selves look good regardless, it's wise to be selective in who you let into your newsfeed. Someone who connects with a lot of people they barely know will be worse off than someone who only accepts (and requests) connections to people with whom they have a close enough relationship that the happiness will always be mutual.

My point was to remind people that they simply shouldn't care. It's like getting mad at yourself because you don't look like that perfectly cut (and photoshopped) Abercrombie model.

It's not an accurate representation of reality. I don't use facebook outside of what is required for API usage on whatever random dev project I get thrown into this week. The people that are truly in your circle of acquaintances probably don't need FB to stay in touch.

> Everyone has demons, but no one wants to air that to their peers.

The only people who would think nobody bitches/whines/complains on FB are those that have never used it.

It's not that people don't whine, it's that when they whine they are always in the right (obviously untrue). It's a part of the creation of an image that the participants want to portray to other participants, just like the cherry-picked photos and favorite media.

A person who strongly follows particular trends and styles on facebook is much more likely to share the same favorite medias as those facebook participants who share similar interests; this is two-sided, though. On one hand, you could say that it's the interests that shaped the person into the trends and styles that they participate, but the other possibility is that the person is emulating people who have the styles and trends that they wish for themselves, and simply merging information from a suitable profile.

Ever wonder how your friends found the time to read through A Brief History of Time and GEB without you ever knowing of their interests in science and math, or ever having caught them reading a book?

They didn't.

> Ever wonder how your friends found the time to read through A Brief History of Time and GEB without you ever knowing of their interests in science and math, or ever having caught them reading a book?

Or maybe you just didn't know they were interested in the first place. I actually discovered thanks to Facebook that I share interests with many of the people who I didn't ever suspect on being interested in the same things as I.

I'm an active Facebook user with 500+ friends, most of whom I know in real life, and I'm pretty sure almost none of them is consciously trying to "build a better image of themselves" in any other way they don't already do in real life.

Seriously, everybody is "building their image" in "real life" all the time. If you go over to a friend to see the photos from a mountain trip, they will show you the nice one, not the ones when they sleep drunk under the table. Facebook actually makes it somewhat more difficult, because unlike face to face conversations, everything you wrote or posted is there to stay.

I am willing to bet you've only spoken to less than 10 people who you call friends in the last 7 days. Family doesn't count.

What do you call as "spoken"? Does IRC count? If so, than yes, I did. I would have spoken to all of them face-to-face, but I missed last social gathering we have because I'm working on my thesis.

Does IMs like Hangouts/Facebook Messenger count? If yes, then again, I did.

If they don't count, then please explain to me the qualitative difference between talking on IM, texting, talking on the phone, e-mailing, writing letters and speaking face to face as form of thought exchange.

EDIT: now that I think about this... I guess instead of writing this comment I should have just taken your bet :).

> EDIT: now that I think about this... I guess instead of writing this comment I should have just taken your bet :).

I up voted you for this, you are operating against the norms to which I was hedging my bets.

Assuming for a second we mean friend the way you're thinking why does it matter how frequently or recently he spoke with anyone he considers a friend? Are you telling me you have people you no longer consider a friend because you haven't chatted with them in X days?

More importantly though is that when people refer to Facebook "friends" they're using Facebook's noun for a connection. I'm sure it wouldn't bother you if he said he had 500 followers on Twitter, or was connected to 500 people on LinkedIn.

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