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Comment by hungryforcodes | Hacker News Reader

Connecting people with their peers is most certainly not damaging-- any more than socializing in general.

Facebook started off GREAT! I singed up almost as soon as it was available to the general public (remember it was just open to university students at first).

At that time my timeline was basically text only and the content came from only my friends. It was like a fun online party -- not unlike online chat systems from the old days.

Then mysteriously all the people I enjoyed interacting with, disappeared from my timeline. Then I started getting content vaguely unrelated to my friends. Then meme photos I didn't want, ads and now basically just videos I hate and am bored of.

So the original concept is fine. It's just where we ended up that is mind numbing and alienating.

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It certainly is quite damaging because that connection isn't an accurate representation of a real-world connection. When you see someone in the real world you see them sneeze, you see them cry, you see their successes and their failures. When you are 'friends' with someone on social media you see a carefully curated window into a reality that doesn't exist. This gives young people unrealistic expectations for themselves and others that I would certainly call damaging. It takes all the healthy parts of human interaction, processes them , and spits out a refined version coated in advertisements.

It's not new (we've been doing that to young people since media was invented) but the level of pervasiveness is.

The online world is the real world now, or at least a large part of it.

Also meeting people in person is often annoying and damaging. I jest but, also not. :p

> Facebook started off GREAT!

I'm glad early fb was a good experience for you, but studies have found that when fb was just opening to universities, lower grades and higher demand for mental health services would follow.

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

So I just spent 20 minutes of my life going down this rabbit hole, including the google doc.

Full disclosure: one of my research areas in university was adolescents, and working exactly with these types of studies.

Anyways, the main theme which keeps coming back in this material is that the actual change begain in the EARLY 2010s, which is exactly what I'm saying. My assumption is that basically as social media started to focus more on visual content (photos and videos), people started getting weird feedback about how awesome everyone ELSE was, but you were not. Etc.

Keep in mind that teens are notoriously hard to study, and alot of this material is self reported. Many teens are basically always depressed and suicidal, and or become so for some small reasons such as the results of a report card or other such factor. This is why they are a higher risk group for this sort of stuff than say the average adult. At the same time you can't really shelter them too much, because it's the experiences they gain in adolescence that allow them to build their life toolkit.

Also keep in mind this is just US teens. The rest of the world is -- well -- the rest of the world, so the data cannot really be extrapolated to more than this country.

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