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Comment by _wp3r | Hacker News Reader

Social Media platforms are like being famous without any of the good parts.

You just get all the shitty parts of living your life with 1000 fake friends(I mean fans) like a hero complex, or an influence complex, or hyper sensitivity to judgement, or addiction to others opinions, or addiction, or suicide, or an inability to communicate with people different than you, or an inability to determine fact from scam, or a permanent state of social one-up-manship, or a constant stream of unending judgement for all your actions in a public forum, or shit tons of fake friends, or complete social isolation in a room of people, or an advocate complex.

All for the pretend reason of "communication" or "connecting the world".

Humans are not built to have close social bonds with 50+ people, it breaks down something about what grounds us. It is why there is a cliché for the famous person with all the bad parts above.

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Humans absolutely are not built for large social networks. There is a theory called Dunbar's number that suggests that humans have a cognitive limit of ~150 social relationships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

"A friend to all is a friend to none." -Aristotle

IMO, the continuation to Dunbar's number (theory) is Yuval Noah Harari's theory, as outlined in Sapiens.

That is, early humans were intelligent animals, but limited in our sophistication by Dunbar's number, so to speak. That is our range of social behaviour (and therefore most behaviour) was biologically limited to small social groups.

The Palaeolithic revolution circa 50kya-100kya was (according to YNH) the invention of language and "fiction" sophistication which enabled cooperation and in larger groups. The concept of a "tribe" with ancestors, shared traditions and social cooperation in much larger groups. Much larger groups allow for much more sophistication.

In some sense, he defines human progress as the quality of cooperation in larger groups. Basically culture takes over from biology, in determining effective human social group size.

Social networks are just another advancement in this trend. All these advancements are somewhat pathological, because they're at odds with our innate (noncultural) limitations. Consider how bad we are at "politics" and how "politics" is a bad word. The contrast is decision making in small, tight knit groups.

Nobody says you have to be (fake) close friends to the people you network with on social media.

I follow Paul Graham on Twitter. I don't think he is my friend (if only because he doesn't know I exist).

Or you just look at cool pictures every once in a while.

Although few people will read this follow up comment.

Since 2008-2009 and the mainstreaming of social media, the US has seen a 40% increase in suicide rate for 15-24 year old's.

The "good" does not out way the bad.

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