Comment by Tehnix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tehnix | Hacker News Reader

While I certainly get why you’d get off Facebook for privacy reasons, I feel like a lot of the “addiction” comments here and in similar posts as OP’s are a bit of a weird thing to me.

Are people nowadays not capable of moderation? Purely anecdotally, but I mostly see older generations being the ones that hop off. Is it because they didn’t grow up with this kinda of social media and can’t seem to balance what is a perfectly fine way to interact with friends and stay updated without pulling a cold turkey on it?

I personally mainly like to have my FB profile as a catalog for my pictures, and might casually browse it when I got nothing else to do. There’s a lot of value in various FB groups, for example, I’m currently in South Korea for a year, and there are communities in the different areas for posting apartments and asking questions for expats and internationals.

I don’t know what I’m trying to get at, but I feel that the cold turkey approach is rather an indication of a persons lack of self-control and moderation - you don’t have to choose an all or nothing approach, simply disable notifications if that is what’s bothering you, unfollow people that annoy you, and a ton of other methods to handle these things other than going nuke-all.

  Are people nowadays not capable of moderation? Purely
  anecdotally, but I mostly see older generations being the
  ones that hop off. Is it because they didn’t grow up with
  this kinda of social media and can’t seem to balance what
  is a perfectly fine way to interact with friends and stay
  updated without pulling a cold turkey on it?

95% of the people I see on the subway every day are glued to their smartphones without interruption the moment they enter the carriage until they leave. And around 80% of the time I get a glimpse of the screen of those it's facebook/instagram/snapchat/<insert your social network of choice>. This is somehow independent of age. So moderation? Balance? Probably depends on the definition.

I think the grandparent author is simply not possessed by the same personality traits that generally define the type of person who gets a lot of value out of HN. I tend towards OCD, which caused getting off Facebook to take about 8 tries. It wasn't until I found a "last straw" that I finally managed it permanently, and that was the runup to the recent US election. I simply did not want to find myself at odds, politically, with a certain couple of family members, and feel like I could not say anything in response to their posts without damaging a relationship I otherwise highly value. With my all-or-nothing personality and approach to things, "the only winning move is... not to play."

>...simply not possessed by the same personality traits that generally define the type of person who gets a lot of value out of HN

I’m not sure I follow what is implied here? I’m an avid consumer of HN, mostly out of boredom or in my brain breaks.

>It wasn't until I found a "last straw" that I finally managed it permanently, and that was the runup to the recent US election

Or you could a) not be afraid of having political discussions (although that honestly sometimes probably isn’t possible in the way the US handles their discourse), or b) just not comment on those posts. But alas, to each their own, not like I gain anything from people either leaving or staying.

>95% of the people I see on the subway every day are glued to their smartphones without interruption....80% of the time I get a glimpse of the screen of those it's facebook/instagram/snapchat/...

Is there anything inherently bad in that? You have to do something on the boring commute. This is honestly the worst example as a counter-point, literally in a situation where you have little else to do, and even then, that something definitely also depends on where you are.

For instance, in Japan I mostly see people playing games, IM’ing or reading pocket books. In South Korea I honestly don’t see phones that often in public transportation, and in Denmark it is maybe half social networks and half just reading online or listening to music.

The first aspect is herd behavior. I used to take my kids to after school academics (Kumon, although it doesn't matter) and the waiting room was fascinating as the tiger moms (and dads) universally whipped out kindles and the au pairs whipped out smartphones and texted. Strict social classes by device selection. As publicly as possible, strivers read, servants text. As a parent I felt the need to kindle along with them, as its not like anyone socialized and that's what the parent class shows off in after school academics waiting rooms. Possibly no one on the subway wants to social media, but everyone on the subway social medias, so they feel the herd instinct... I worked at a building once with a large poor population (call center on some floor or another) and its a poor person fad to do pedestrian stuff like walking around parking lot while speakerphone talking or preferably video conferencing, like everyone under $20K/yr did that for awhile and they had to copy each other, you'd have like 10 people come off shift and all of them talking to their phones not each other.

The second aspect is social assumption. All smartphone use in a car is labeled as "texting" although I haven't used legacy SMS messages since about the time I got a smartphone (although SMS texting long predates smartphones of course). Culturally among non-technical people all messaging apps from Slack to IRC to the big advertising companies is "texting" which leads to confusion when a normie asks you to text them, they mean guess which of the dozen or so popular messaging apps you connect with them on, whereas I'm trying to remember how to use old fashioned SMS on my phone. Likewise everyone on the subway does social media, even if everyone is actually changing podcasts/music/audio books or reading ebooks or general web surfing around or whatever rando thing. I feel guilty about the endless indoctrination on billboards about "texting kills" when driving, especially when I'm merely changing my audiobook in audible while at a stop sign, not texting someone a copy of War and Peace at 85 MPH, although I don't feel any discomfort about the endless indoctrination about "drinking and driving kills" despite sipping tap water from a water bottle occasionally in public while driving. Worry of what if someone thinks my water bottle is full of grain alcohol isn't part of culture as much as what if someone thinks my safe audible app is (literally) killer app facebook messenger?

Third aspect as an older guy I can still remember when the default "I'm bored" activity was mindless TV watching. You might wish the default bored activity is not social media but something more useful, like online MOOC education or reading great books or prayer or whatever but lets be realistic, endless scrolling social media is of the Mork and Mindy syndicated TV show rerun social class of activity, the people doing it will merely find something even more inane to fill downtime, perhaps spinning fidget spinners to ever higher RPMs. As an inane time filler, social media isn't that bad compared to the realistic practical alternatives.

I think that certain people get addicted in this way, and the lack of self control is an indicator of it. Logically it's seeking short term reward over long term, but I think its bio chemistry too - dopamine.

So I think the thing that makes them addicted and the thing that stops them regulating themselves is the very thing that Facebook uses and promotes.

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