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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

I came to the same conclusion a few years ago, when I delete my social accounts like Facebook. They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life. That it's completely boring, while all of these people are living these amazing adventures everyday. Combine that with all of the vitriol comments plaguing all of these sites, and it's easy to see why someone would think less of themselves. It's good to be social, but these networks are not the answer.

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>They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life.

Exactly. You end up judging your interior by others' exterior. They show you a highly edited version of their life, made to impress everyone else. You're doing nothing but constantly chasing a phantom life you can never have, because no one else really has it either.

So many people complain about this, and I just don't get it. Maybe if I'm not part of the solution, I'm part of the problem?

When I'm stuck at my desk and I see someone posting vacation pictures from Spain, I say "man, that looks nice, I wish I was there!" And that's it. Maybe it makes me think about where I want to go next, but it doesn't send me into some existential crisis.

I wonder if there are personality types more prone to being affected by stuff like this? If anything, I'd think I would -- certainly prone to depression, particularly in my younger years. But I just don't care. I wonder why that is, and what is different among people who are affected by these things differently.

The entire idea is that the effect is subconscious. Sure, seeing one person post vacation pictures from Spain won't affect you then and there, but over time as everyone posts awesome pictures you will inevitably feel that something must be lacking in or wrong with your life.

I don't know. I see all of these people complaining about these effects, and it simply doesn't bother me in the same way (not to say it couldn't possibly have a subconscious effect).

But I feel as if it caused the same effect in me as it causes in others, I'd be talking about how I'm going to "take a break" from $socialnetwork for a month, and how much better I feel, and so on. But I don't. It's just a tool. I use it and enjoy it. If I didn't, I wouldn't.

But imagine if you were didn't have anyone to go on holiday with or you couldn't afford it. You'd feel much worse about seeing your old school mate going on a fancy holiday. We live in a very unequal world so this is bound to be a common occurrence.

Part of the allure of Snapchat seems to be that people are much more willing to share the human, "FML" style moments when they don't have to worry about them being there permanently. Some people still use it as a "look at all these cool things I do" platform, but then, that tells you as much about those people as it does about the communication channel.

Some of my favorite Facebook friends are the ones who post stuff like "there goes my 'no more Taco Bell' resolution, bring on 2018!" on, say, January 10.

So, I do not use social media besides HN, but my partner explained to me the "magic" of snapchat commnets - they are only shared between the commentor and poster, not all the followers.

I think this lends itself towards intimacy, rather than exhibitionism.

Seems it easier to be a troll on Facebook, not Snapchat.

Yes, people don't understand that Facebook is performance art. When you're reading what other people post, it's what they want to show you, and may have little or no relevance to their real life.

When I used facebook I always liked to share my failures with friends. I tried to make them funny. I liked dealing with it that way, it let me move on.

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