For everyone here who --like me-- has never bought into Facebook, and never gotten hooked on it, congratulations. We are free of the Facebook dopamine dispenser, unlike our poor friends and family.<p>Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go refresh the HN front page for the 10th time today, and after checking how many upvotes I got on my latest comments, don't mind if I jump back over to reddit for a while, and then back to watching the Larry David clips that YouTube is sending my way.
Are they taking about the same Facebook? I find it utterly boring and only use it for messenger anymore.<p>It used to be addictive, before social media, when it was a social network. You were interacting with real people, you could meet new people, "stalk" people you know IRL, share stuff about yourself or find out stuff about others. You would try to find your crush on FB and check see if you have common acquaintances. And you would obsessively watch who looks at your page and who likes your posts. The thing that made it addictive were the actual human interactions that people crave.<p>I wish someone would make a site like that again!
The author who wrote this has tweeted, on average, 1-2x a day for 10 years. <a href="https://twitter.com/jaronschneider" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jaronschneider</a><p>Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society (an information/propagation architecture that exploits how people process information, imo).<p>For me, Facebook is nothing more than a hometown forum. I havent logged on in months.
I personally found Facebook hard to quit, but not entirely impossible. I would compare it to giving up cigarettes: not easy, but I got through it. I am coming to terms with the fact that I have have a very serious and damaging internet addiction, however. Like many serious addictions, there's a lot of shame attached to my real addiction, which is 4chan. 4chan is like being addicted to heroin. Every day is a battle to look away from the train wreck, and so far I haven't been able to overcome this addiction in any meaningful way. What's interesting is that the site doesn't use any of the scandalous techniques that facebook is currently getting heat for, yet it has a grip on me that's basically ruined my life as much as a crack addiction could ruin a person's life. It's so bad that I've spent many years of my life living in very close proximity to hard drug users, because of the poverty my addiction has caused me. So, I guess what I'm getting at is we might have a bigger problem than just facebook, or at least I do.
I find the premise ridiculous. I mean yes, there are people who are addicted to it. There are people who are addicted to lots of things, from playing video games to climbing ice-covered mountains. But the idea that it's harder to quit facebook than to get rid of, say, opioid dependency - which literally rewires your body's biochemistry - sounds like complete BS. Of course, if your life is so empty you have nothing to do but browse facebook, sure it's hard to quit, but it's not because of the strength of the addiction, it's because of the weakness of the alternative. I'm sure if you cut off that person's internet access and threw their phone into a lake, they'd be cured pretty soon.
Imagine if nicotine had network effects (edit: I mean as strong network effects as fb). You can't quit unless all your friends do too. I hear some alcoholics have a similar challenge when their social life revolves around drinking with peer pressure not to abstain.
Facebook is like vendor lock in for human social interactions and emotions.<p>That's probably why Zuckerberg tries to acquire competitors - trying to lock in your behavior and then sell it to the highest bidder. Makes sense when you think about it.<p>When I suggest people delete FB apps from their phones, they start writhing uncomfortably, and try to justify not doing so by making some half-ass claim that their social life will suffer if they did. Its the same response I would expect from someone who is a moderate alcoholic and is told to drink less wine during the week. The addiction is obvious.<p>My experience after deleting FB apps from my phone - social life changed for the better and I feel less anxiety. It turns out, most of my FB "friends" weren't really my friends. And I can still check FB / Insta via web if I wanted to. Added bonus - FB can't track me as well.<p>FB will do what FB does - try to steal as much data and attention and sell it to the highest bidder. But you can only blame them so much. Collectively, its on people to change and take responsibility if they feel they have grievances related to FB.<p>Still, I have hope - awareness for social media's downside effects is only increasing. Ms. Haugen's testimony and the Social Dilemma documentary demonstrate that.
It's not just Facebook, it's social media in general. More precisely, it's infinite scroll, which has become a ubiquitous design decision across social media. I recently finally succeeded in developing a healthy relationship to social media, and it involved disabling infinite scroll where I could (using Hackernews, moving to old Reddit) and quitting the social media sites where I couldn't (mostly Youtube). I'm scared to touch Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter because the infinite scroll mechanism is so addictive.
I don't find any particular service difficult to quit, but its pretty much impossible to never be on some sort of dopamine grinder on some level.<p>Video games are a nice escape hatch in this way. If you pivot to a game, and then beat the game, there's a moment of nothingness where you have nothing gripping your attention constantly. Or at least that's my experience.
Does anyone else find it hard to personally connect with the well-researched claim that people respond with a fight-or-flight response to ideas that challenge their core beliefs? I've always found ideas to be more interesting the more they challenge my core beliefs. This is true of math and science, but especially true of things like religion. I remember how wonderful it was as a teenager to find challenges to the ideas I was raised with, debating my positions with people online, and appreciating losing debates and having my mind opened to new ideas.
I want to thank my insufferable American aunt who did nothing but spin every post and comment into being about her. Made it very easy to quit about eight years ago.<p>Twitter is trickier. I actually enjoy the discourse (once I figured out how to filter the loud angry idiots).
You know what worked for me to get rid of Facebook? I turned it into a chore and eventually broke it.<p>When I deleted my old account and created a new one a few years ago, I decided to run a little experiment: I started hiding everything that was not posted directly by friends. "[unknown person] posted on [friend]'s wall"? Hide [unknown person]. "[friend] liked a post by [some page]"? I hid that page. A friend shared a post by someone or from a page? You bet I hid those too. And the same for groups, events and so forth.<p>I did that a little bit every day, for 3 years, until Facebook became pretty much barren. My friends only really post a handful of things a day and the rest is just cruft. Around that time I also discovered that Facebook started exposing who had uploaded your contact info as part of a marketing list... so I started leaving negative reviews and blocking those pages.<p>Does this sound like a total bore and a chore? Yes, yes it was. I think I got it going for so long mostly out of spite for the platform. Eventually, it got so bad that it started literally breaking Facebook for me. Sometimes no posts would load at all. Eventually, some of the hiding options stopped working! After a year or so, the experience got so janky and unrewarding I just deleted my account. I took the chance to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp as well, since this was around the time where the latter started pushing for more telemetry.<p>I got most of my closer friends to jump on Telegram and Signal. I do miss Facebook a bit, in that it's become harder to keep up with some people that don't use other platforms... but not too much. I'm setting up a blog for myself to share whatever I want to write, my tech tutorials and maybe set up a photo gallery.
As someone who's recovered from multiple substance addictions in the past, it is so painfully obvious when I see social media addicts. It's literally the exact same behavior. The compulsion, the lack of awareness, the ignoring of friends and loved ones while mindlessly scrolling; it's all there. Social addiction is even more sinister because the feedback loop is scientifically optimized in a way no substance could ever match, and it feeds the most base primal need that humans have which is status and recognition. It's more powerful than even hunger. I don't know how we can possibly get away from this.
I quit Facebook around 6 years ago and it was So easy. Facebook is trash, the ui is trash, I mean it's ridiculous, and that was 6 years ago. I can't imagine how bad the ui is now, but it gives me a headache to try.<p>I can only imagine it must be likes, I've rarely gotten likes on any platform. I assume it is because I am writing what I can only assume is gibberish to others. This simple fact stopped me from being addicted.<p>Be less likeable and quitting social media is super easy. Just tell the truth, that seems to work great at reducing likes.
It was really hard to quit for me for sure. Near the end I kept telling my friends it feels like posting to FB is just slapping the feeder button in a rat cage, or that I feel like I'm suffering for outrage burnout. I quit just before the lead up to the 2016 election because my feed was becoming a warzone and it was really upsetting. I didn't like seeing family who I loved turning into raging assholes. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made but in some ways it was almost like when I was trying to quit smoking. I'd go away for a week and come back, tell myself I quit again and come back again in one to two week cycles. The only thing that got me to finally leave was backing up all my account assets and actually deleting it. I've never looked back. I feel like I made the right choice especially seeing things like /r/hermancainaward and seeing how polarizing the effects of social media are still accelerating discourse. I think the worse thing is seeing dialogue by meme becoming the most prevalent method of sharing ideas. Taking a complex idea shaving it down to 5 to 10 words with funny image in the background is not the way to have an argument, changes no minds, and seems to have hypnotized entire demographics into ideological mania.
Equally true if you replace "Facebook" with "online media". They optimize their articles and headlines for virality, including this one, just as aggressively as FB optimizes its algorithms. They're just two different parts of the same electronic drug-pushing machine.<p>Give your attention and care and trust to the goals and people in your life that are worthy of it.
That "Facebook" we always speak of is never the same thing for everyone. Every Page "like", every "friendship", will change what one sees in their social bubble.<p>I, for one, am glad that my social bubble is utterly boring and un-engaging, and my level of engagement with Facebook is inversely proportional to my engagement/passion in life as such.
What I noticed about my son’s peer group is that FB just doesn’t occupy their mind share. It’s mostly Roblox, Minecraft, Netflix, YouTube or some other game.<p>FB may well be an addictive space now but I suspect its growth has just about peaked. I keep hearing kids say that FB is something adults use and hence isn’t cool or trendy.
The uproar over and magnitude of digital ink spent on Facebook is interesting.<p>This uproar seems to persist even if the discussion is restricted to Americans who are adults and not using Facebook for a commercial purpose (i.e. the use is for amusement or in free time).<p>It seems to be a disconnect from the generally pro-free speech, pro-personal liberty/accountability tone of HN.<p>Are HN'ers calling for regulating social media companies because of toxic/manipulative/addictive free content served to adults?<p>If so, who gets to decide?<p>This discussion is separate from the monopoly power, anti-competitive, anti-democracy angles, which are discussions all their own.
I disconnected from nearly all social media about four years ago, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.<p>I did not even notice the recent Facebook outage in my daily life, and wouldn’t have even been aware of it without HN.
I joined in 2011 and hard--deleted my account in 2012. I was working on public critiques of a well-funded scam industry at at the time, and concerned about peopple using FB to harrass my family. But I was also inspired to leave by a quick series of unilateral anti-user changes to TOS implemented with no warning or opt out by Br'er Zuck et al. I still use some surveillance media platforms for news aggregation and hobby purposes, but the whole FB ecosystem is dead to me and I feel fine
I have no interest in supporting Facebook, but this article takes a bunch of generals ideas and opinions and states them as fact with little attribution in the context of each statement.
Addiction is a complex subject. Personally, I think FB/Social engagement is habituation, but if somebody shows me there is a persisting dopamine/oxy rush, and its affecting neurotransmitters such that when you don't do it, you feel down, I might change my mind.<p>"addiction" is this decades "Schizophrenia" or "bipolar" being misapplied, when it has specific meaning.<p>I should of course add, not a doctor, not a clinical psychologist. Maybe habituation and addiction are closer than I think.
The issue is not Facebook.<p>The issue is being equipped to handle information forwarded by your FB friends.
Skeptical thinking, the impulse to distrust anecdotes first, the impulse to double check articles by using other news sources:
It's a skill that should be taught to kids early.<p>I enjoy Facebook to read about what my extended friends and family are doing.
I'm ok with FB showing me ads, even personalized ads, if that is what it takes to use this free service.
I'm not sure that it actually is dopamine addiction. Wouldn't we need to have some sort of brain assay to say that it is? There is another chemical though, which does not have as deleterious effects as dopamine, and that's oxytocin. Oxytocin, if I recall correctly, doesn't have the boom-bust cycles (ups and downs), it's just a free glowing high that may have source in social relationships.
Addicion or not, still something in communication domain we needed - messages that are a bit more permmament then sms's and IM.<p>But yea, scroll of ignoring is a brain cancer and time waster.<p>HN looks similiar, but for sure it contains Usenet like quality of content, usually. But maybe in last year or two day to day links are less fresh...<p>And, mandatory :> I logged off FB years ago and wish it disappear from Inet for good !!
I never could understand what was addictive. I kept my account for a few years because I used the chat and posted art my friends and family would enjoy. When I got a smartphone I quit the platform since I could do that stuff on my phone's messaging app. Only thing that seems appealing to me now is the marketplace versus Craigslist.
I disagree.<p>If someone provided a simple service for friends and families to share photos and updates, it's possible Facebook could be disrupted. I have no evidence to back up my claim, but I think those are the only things people truly care about.<p>It is the only thing I miss after deleting it two years ago. I certainly don't miss Messenger, the Feed, or news.
I have been just as addicted to Hacker News as I have been addicted to Facebook. Since I discovered this site in 2007, it has at times been a daily routine to come here. Of course you don't spend as much time on HN as on FB. It only takes a few seconds to scroll to the end on HN.
I am sorry but there is no way that that lack luster product is half as addictive as porn let alone opiods.<p>All of our first hand experiences disprove the narrative. Anyone here helplessly addicted? Sure a couple people might have issues but treating it like digital cocaine is a bit much.
I think it's becoming a more and more accepted that some subset of the population just can't help themselves the question is what do we do with them? A second internet with permeated child safety controls?
I think “most” is a little exaggerated. Most people I know rarely post anything or when they do it’s actually useful. Same for Twitter. I don’t know anybody who posts a lot or gets into flame wars.
I quitted 8 years ago, banned in my personal DNS, never looked back.<p>I use private chat apps to replace it, and full disclosure I enjoy from time to time loosing some time on twitter.<p>INT-P speaking, this may be helping me.
I used to think so, now I'm living a more nomadic life. It's a convenient way to text and call people when you don't have a set phone number.
facebook helped me stop visiting, by insisting on showing me absolutely everything from one acquaintance (who is a fine person), all the dog photos from another friend, and effectively nothing else.<p>no idea what sort of failure mechanism that was, but it made things really boring.<p>i’ve still got my account, there’s just no point. i know what i’ll see already.
Do you know what should be illegal? The way facebook does account deletion.<p>When you 'delete' your account, you actually put it into a special state for 30 days. If you log in, even accidentally, during those 30 days, the cancellation is canceled. So, if like most Facebook addicts (as I was), you had the habit of typing 'facebook.com' every 30 minutes or so, it would undo your facebook deletion request.<p>The proper thing to do is to either delete the account immediately (although I understand why maybe losing all your data is a bad idea), or, get rid of the automatic reinstatement and require users to go through a separate process to reclaim their accounts before data purging.<p>Facebook knows that by operating with this cancellation scheme, they can basically prevent cancellations of the addicted, since moments of clarity when someone requests deletion are soon clouded by moments of habit when someone types in 'facebook.com' to satisfy the itch.
Instagram is actually much worse. FB is not super addictive, at least it wasn't for me. But IG is, and it very clearly has been _designed_ to be that way. It took some effort for me to get off it, and my wife is unable to kick the habit even after I demonstrated to her _with data_ that her Instagram browsing is now a full blown part-time job, and that time could be put to a much better use. TikTok, FWIW, is even more addictive than that, on top of effectively being foreign intelligence spyware. This is being done deliberately much for the same reasons Big Tobacco added stuff to tobacco to make people buy more cigarettes.<p>There are basically two benefits to social media, in my view:<p>1. It de-centralizes narrative peddling from just 5 or so people who own all of the media to a much greater number, so it gets harder to "make people believe in absurdities to get them to commit atrocities". I'm sure someone will argue the opposite, but the fact is, if FB existed in early 00s, NYT would not be able to sell us the Iraq war. Ms. Haugen is arguing that the 5 people should regain that capability. I disagree with this very strongly. I'd rather have disinformation from multiple sides rather than from just one - easier to read between the lines that way.<p>2. It lets families and circles of friends communicate a bit more effectively than, say, an instant messenger would. I think the trend there is actually towards messengers - my friends worldwide basically have our own "feed" in Signal which we do not share with anyone else, and from which messages disappear after 4 weeks. Zuck clearly saw this trend much earlier than most people, hence the acquisition of WhatsApp for an eye popping amount of money.<p>IG / TikTok are borderline useless in either of those things. They just drive jealousy, depression and mental illness in people since no matter how well off you are your life won't be as exciting as the collage that consists of the best 30 seconds of someone's year. It basically looks like your life sucks and everyone else's doesn't, even though it could very well be the other way around IRL, and things intrinsically seem that way to nearly everyone who uses the product.<p>As a side note I'm very disappointed that Petapixel chose to participate in what is an obvious and crude political hatchet job.