Can we just, I mean just stop using and caring about most social media. Especially facebook, it offers no meaningful value. It's slow, obtuse and haven't made life better for anyone in the last decade I suppose.
Maybe whatsapp has some use, but otherwise what's even the point. I don't even have ads on whatsapp not yet anyways, I will get my family to switch when they do.
I don't care about you Meta/Facebook or whatever it is.
I think attitudes mattered more than law, but some laws (e.g. advertising restrictions, and packaging requirements) may have helped change attitudes, but growing awareness of the health issues was the key.
In 1950 tobacco was cool. By 2000 it was very definitely not. In western Europe at least, sales of premium brands were falling sharply and volumes shifting to cheap brands - a lot less profitable even for the same volume. Long before UK law changed to ban indoor smoking most offices started banning smoking indoors, and pubs started doing so too (a major chain, Wetherspoons, gradually banned smoking at all its pubs).
The manufacturers tried to grow in other markets - one tobacco company investor relations person showed me some beautiful pastel coloured cigarettes in a very fancy box aimed at Eastern Europe. It did not work in the long run as attitudes changed globally.
Definitely. Smoking used to be the default and non-smokers were viewed as being eccentric like vegetarians/vegans still are today and having a small non-smoking section was seen as something for "those people" like restaurants that have just one or two meatless options now. It was a huge social shift regarding smoking starting in the early 1990s -- decades after the health issues were known.
WhatsApp is a real hard breakup in much of the world. It's the defacto standard for communication around here, and even a bunch of businesses use it exclusively. One can hope the EU will eventually mandate unlimited SMS on cellphone plans, but I don't see WhatsApp being dethroned another way
> One can hope the EU will eventually mandate unlimited SMS on cellphone plans, but I don't see WhatsApp being dethroned another way
I doubt it.
Here in France, cell plans have had unlimited SMS for a very long time now. Yet, WhatsApp still is extremely widespread. Now, I'm not the most socially connected guy around, so I may not be attuned to any new developing trends in the matter, but IME it doesn't seem to lose any popularity, and something like 95% of the people I interact with on WhatsApp are locals.
WhatsApp is the “best” Meta app by far. It does just offer an easy, secure way of contacting people using their phone number, through text, voice, images, video.
None of their other apps come close. It doesn’t even look like a Meta product to me.
Unlimited SMS isn't the solution. In fact most of the countries where Whatsapp is dominant already have unlimited SMS (probably because pretty much nobody is using it anymore).
What I'd like to see is interoperability so that I am not forced to use Whatsapp because everyone else is using it and my friends in the US aren't forced to buy an iPhone just to use iMessage
it's here to increase visibility of the ycombinator brand, it's startups, and the technologies related to what they do. discussions around it were going to happen anyway, so own those and shape.
create an ecosystem, and then mold / skim / ingest / bask in it.
it's the same reason why BigCorps try really, really hard to get ownership / mod control of subreddits, and/or having their marketing assets responding to discussions in their sub or elsewhere.
Good luck finding any objective distinction between HN, Reddit, WhatsApp, Signal, or email + listserv and "social media"!
Or finding any one of "social media's harms" that could not, in some world where Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok did not exist, be delivered in just as socially harmful (and beneficial) a form by sufficiently-accessible versions of the apps and protocols you value and use every day.
I met someone recently whose primary addiction is Wikipedia.
For me, Signal and Hacker News are the most addictive pieces of software I still use.
Serial television (best delivered by WebTorrent and The Pirate Bay) is by far the most addictive, for me, so much so that I had to quit.
And you can definitely run successful social movements and political campaigns (for both very good and very bad things) over HN or WhatsApp/Signal, given sufficient adoption.
I would argue that it's more or less that humans don't like change, and that boomers get upset about change. It seems that the older you get, the more egotistical/selfish you become.
I'm not saying my grandma is selfish for not wanting to switch away from WhatsApp, but I am saying that it'd be hard to convince her to switch, hence I don't try.
> I'm not saying my grandma is selfish for not wanting to switch away from WhatsApp, but I am saying that it'd be hard to convince her to switch, hence I don't try.
Ever considered that you may be the selfish one for even wanting her to switch?
You want to make your life more convenient at the expense of her convenience because switching from whatsapp is a huge inconvenience.
They are investing big fat 0 in safety features. The only money they spend is on facade of safety. I have reported many times obviously fake scam bot accounts that would send me private messages and at best I would receive feedback that they didn't remove the account.
I understand the comparison, and if it were up to me, Facebook (aka Meta) and so forth should be disbanded and chopped up at once. But ...
> Recent research shows that social media design features like infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds may encourage compulsive use and contribute to anxiety, depression, and social comparison.
So their design is addictive; not disagreeing. I think most of us know that, even as adults, how infinite scrolling on youtube for shorts, lead to a "just one more video" effect. But even with those shenanigans in mind, I simply do not see this anywhere on the same level as smoking. The health data with regards to smoking is all there, people lose about 10 years when smoking for a long time - at the least. You can find similar data points elsewhere, e. g. sumo wrestlers in Japan dying about 15 years earlier than the rest of the population. Those data points are absolutely significant. There is no way to deny that. But comparing this to the addictive scrolling or what not ... we don't have anywhere near similar data points.
That does not mean one should look at addictive design as anything but "innocent" or "harmless", but the comparison to smoking is simply not on a factual level. If anything Facebook should be eliminated for lobbying and bribes - we witness this right now when so many states push for age sniffing of everyone using the internet while concomitantly attacking VPNs. This is not accidental - this is deliberate. And the common lie is "but but but think anyone of the kids!!!".
Perhaps it’s not about the length of life but instead the quality of life. Gambling addiction is bad but doesn’t necessarily reduce lifespan in a way comparable to smoking, for example.
i sort of want to defend the article because it isn't comparing the health effects of the tobacco industry and social media, but rather their pr strategies... but that being said the article is very weak, so i don't want to defend it.
Social networks in the current form are, what, 10 years old? We already see collapse of attention and mental effects on people of different ages, full impact will be seen only in 20-30 years when current generation grows up.
> And the common lie is "but but but think anyone of the kids!!!".
I’m the first one to call out “think about the kids” bullshit, but this is directly applicable here.
> Social networks in the current form are, what, 10 years old? We already see collapse of attention and mental effects on people of different ages, full impact will be seen only in 20-30 years when current generation grows up.
Any doomscrolling effect on mental faculties in 20-30 years would be completely dwarfed by the effect of AI. It won't even be a rounding error.
I just posted on another thread where someone was proudly showing off a piece of software that they vibed. Even a single minute of googling would have shown them that their goal was already achievable on current linux distros without any extra software, but now we have someone who could have learned something instead remain completely ignorant.
Doomscrolling has nothing on the +ignorance that all-in AI users are experiencing, especially since they can't tell that they're getting objectively dumber.
> I just posted on another thread where someone was proudly showing off a piece of software that they vibes. Even a single minute of googling would have shown them that their goal was already achievable on current linux distros without any extra software, but now we have someone who could have learned something instead remain completely ignorant.
What makes you think they’re ignorant instead of just not giving a shit? There’s no money to make in “achievable on current Linux distros without any extra software”. The hustle culture that permeates this is another consequence of social networks.
Did they? I know they bought oculus, but that's like saying Elon built Tesla when Tesla was already being built before he showed up to throw money at it.
Somewhat tangential... I "love" how a pack of Luckies cost 10 cents in 1917 and now they are at about $10.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
Can we just, I mean just stop using and caring about most social media. Especially facebook, it offers no meaningful value. It's slow, obtuse and haven't made life better for anyone in the last decade I suppose.
Maybe whatsapp has some use, but otherwise what's even the point. I don't even have ads on whatsapp not yet anyways, I will get my family to switch when they do.
I don't care about you Meta/Facebook or whatever it is.
You could make a similar noble call for everyone to just stop using cigarettes in 1950.
It would not work. What ultimately worked were laws designed to curb tobacco use combined with public education campaigns.
I think attitudes mattered more than law, but some laws (e.g. advertising restrictions, and packaging requirements) may have helped change attitudes, but growing awareness of the health issues was the key.
In 1950 tobacco was cool. By 2000 it was very definitely not. In western Europe at least, sales of premium brands were falling sharply and volumes shifting to cheap brands - a lot less profitable even for the same volume. Long before UK law changed to ban indoor smoking most offices started banning smoking indoors, and pubs started doing so too (a major chain, Wetherspoons, gradually banned smoking at all its pubs).
The manufacturers tried to grow in other markets - one tobacco company investor relations person showed me some beautiful pastel coloured cigarettes in a very fancy box aimed at Eastern Europe. It did not work in the long run as attitudes changed globally.
Definitely. Smoking used to be the default and non-smokers were viewed as being eccentric like vegetarians/vegans still are today and having a small non-smoking section was seen as something for "those people" like restaurants that have just one or two meatless options now. It was a huge social shift regarding smoking starting in the early 1990s -- decades after the health issues were known.
it was not cool by 200 because there were explicit laws banning marketing campaigns to make it cool -- marketing works.
literally, you can't sell this to kids and ads designed to make it seem cool to kids are verboten.
the laws made the change.
> Maybe whatsapp has some use
WhatsApp is a real hard breakup in much of the world. It's the defacto standard for communication around here, and even a bunch of businesses use it exclusively. One can hope the EU will eventually mandate unlimited SMS on cellphone plans, but I don't see WhatsApp being dethroned another way
> One can hope the EU will eventually mandate unlimited SMS on cellphone plans, but I don't see WhatsApp being dethroned another way
I doubt it.
Here in France, cell plans have had unlimited SMS for a very long time now. Yet, WhatsApp still is extremely widespread. Now, I'm not the most socially connected guy around, so I may not be attuned to any new developing trends in the matter, but IME it doesn't seem to lose any popularity, and something like 95% of the people I interact with on WhatsApp are locals.
The UX and feature set of WhatsApp is much better than SMS. India has practically free SMS but WhatsApp remains pervasive.
WhatsApp is the “best” Meta app by far. It does just offer an easy, secure way of contacting people using their phone number, through text, voice, images, video.
None of their other apps come close. It doesn’t even look like a Meta product to me.
Meta acquired WhatsApp, thats why its the best
As the other user pointed out, it definitely stands out among other product acquisitions.
They acquired instagram too, and somehow they transformed that into the same sort of shithole as modern Facebook...
Unlimited SMS isn't the solution. In fact most of the countries where Whatsapp is dominant already have unlimited SMS (probably because pretty much nobody is using it anymore).
What I'd like to see is interoperability so that I am not forced to use Whatsapp because everyone else is using it and my friends in the US aren't forced to buy an iPhone just to use iMessage
Easier said than done. You're still here, which is understandable since Hacker News is by far the most addictive one.
Hacker News is a forum, not social media.
ycombinator ain't doing this as a charity, mate.
it's here to increase visibility of the ycombinator brand, it's startups, and the technologies related to what they do. discussions around it were going to happen anyway, so own those and shape.
create an ecosystem, and then mold / skim / ingest / bask in it.
it's the same reason why BigCorps try really, really hard to get ownership / mod control of subreddits, and/or having their marketing assets responding to discussions in their sub or elsewhere.
Good luck finding any objective distinction between HN, Reddit, WhatsApp, Signal, or email + listserv and "social media"!
Or finding any one of "social media's harms" that could not, in some world where Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok did not exist, be delivered in just as socially harmful (and beneficial) a form by sufficiently-accessible versions of the apps and protocols you value and use every day.
I met someone recently whose primary addiction is Wikipedia.
For me, Signal and Hacker News are the most addictive pieces of software I still use.
Serial television (best delivered by WebTorrent and The Pirate Bay) is by far the most addictive, for me, so much so that I had to quit.
And you can definitely run successful social movements and political campaigns (for both very good and very bad things) over HN or WhatsApp/Signal, given sufficient adoption.
> I met someone recently whose primary addiction is Wikipedia.
I met someone recently whose primary addiction is whisky. Therefore, whisky is social media.
> Good luck finding any objective distinction between HN, Reddit, WhatsApp, Signal, or email + listserv and "social media"!
Hacker News:
• doesn’t have a personalized feed
• encourages intellectual discussion rather than brainrot
• doesn’t support images or videos
Doesn't matter. Just as addictive and many of the same hazards apply. We are no better than people doom scrolling Facebook.
The problem is it that it has a helluva lot of momentum from normies. Easily enough to outweigh the resistance of the likes of you and me.
The only thing will break it is a better / easier alternative. And with enough success that will probably turn into the next big bad.
> normies
I would argue that it's more or less that humans don't like change, and that boomers get upset about change. It seems that the older you get, the more egotistical/selfish you become.
I'm not saying my grandma is selfish for not wanting to switch away from WhatsApp, but I am saying that it'd be hard to convince her to switch, hence I don't try.
> I'm not saying my grandma is selfish for not wanting to switch away from WhatsApp, but I am saying that it'd be hard to convince her to switch, hence I don't try.
Ever considered that you may be the selfish one for even wanting her to switch?
You want to make your life more convenient at the expense of her convenience because switching from whatsapp is a huge inconvenience.
It's not about age, it's about social connections that keeps you on your toes all life long.
> It seems that the older you get, the more self-respect you develop.
FTFY.
Only if you switch off all the consumer hostile platforms...
"Everyone will not just"
They are investing big fat 0 in safety features. The only money they spend is on facade of safety. I have reported many times obviously fake scam bot accounts that would send me private messages and at best I would receive feedback that they didn't remove the account.
They're not even moderating anymore
I understand the comparison, and if it were up to me, Facebook (aka Meta) and so forth should be disbanded and chopped up at once. But ...
> Recent research shows that social media design features like infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds may encourage compulsive use and contribute to anxiety, depression, and social comparison.
So their design is addictive; not disagreeing. I think most of us know that, even as adults, how infinite scrolling on youtube for shorts, lead to a "just one more video" effect. But even with those shenanigans in mind, I simply do not see this anywhere on the same level as smoking. The health data with regards to smoking is all there, people lose about 10 years when smoking for a long time - at the least. You can find similar data points elsewhere, e. g. sumo wrestlers in Japan dying about 15 years earlier than the rest of the population. Those data points are absolutely significant. There is no way to deny that. But comparing this to the addictive scrolling or what not ... we don't have anywhere near similar data points.
That does not mean one should look at addictive design as anything but "innocent" or "harmless", but the comparison to smoking is simply not on a factual level. If anything Facebook should be eliminated for lobbying and bribes - we witness this right now when so many states push for age sniffing of everyone using the internet while concomitantly attacking VPNs. This is not accidental - this is deliberate. And the common lie is "but but but think anyone of the kids!!!".
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-05-23-many-mental-illnesses-r...
To be fair, if I doomscroll an hour a day for 50 years, I'd literally lose 2 years of my life. (1hr/day * 50 years)/24hrs = 2.1 years.
That's only fair when you think doomscrolling is the same as being literally dead.
Not resting in peace, that’s for sure.
this assumes that 1) you're not learning stuff while scrolling -- which may be true -- and 2) that you're not enjoying it or getting a benefit from it
"if I spent 1 hour a day meditating/working out/playing baseball/walking my dog for 50 years I'd waste 2 years of my life"
Perhaps it’s not about the length of life but instead the quality of life. Gambling addiction is bad but doesn’t necessarily reduce lifespan in a way comparable to smoking, for example.
i sort of want to defend the article because it isn't comparing the health effects of the tobacco industry and social media, but rather their pr strategies... but that being said the article is very weak, so i don't want to defend it.
Social networks in the current form are, what, 10 years old? We already see collapse of attention and mental effects on people of different ages, full impact will be seen only in 20-30 years when current generation grows up.
> And the common lie is "but but but think anyone of the kids!!!".
I’m the first one to call out “think about the kids” bullshit, but this is directly applicable here.
> Social networks in the current form are, what, 10 years old? We already see collapse of attention and mental effects on people of different ages, full impact will be seen only in 20-30 years when current generation grows up.
Any doomscrolling effect on mental faculties in 20-30 years would be completely dwarfed by the effect of AI. It won't even be a rounding error.
I just posted on another thread where someone was proudly showing off a piece of software that they vibed. Even a single minute of googling would have shown them that their goal was already achievable on current linux distros without any extra software, but now we have someone who could have learned something instead remain completely ignorant.
Doomscrolling has nothing on the +ignorance that all-in AI users are experiencing, especially since they can't tell that they're getting objectively dumber.
> I just posted on another thread where someone was proudly showing off a piece of software that they vibes. Even a single minute of googling would have shown them that their goal was already achievable on current linux distros without any extra software, but now we have someone who could have learned something instead remain completely ignorant.
What makes you think they’re ignorant instead of just not giving a shit? There’s no money to make in “achievable on current Linux distros without any extra software”. The hustle culture that permeates this is another consequence of social networks.
> What makes you think they’re ignorant instead of just not giving a shit?
They said so. They didn't know how to do this, and they said so.
Facebook. They're still Facebook to me. Rebrand all you want, you're just Facebook, incapable of doing anything beyond buying WhatsApp and Instagram.
And making them worse, let's not forget that.
they're quite capable of lobbying governments to obliterate the free and open internet because they don't want to do age verification
They did conjure up some hardware along the way too.
Did they? I know they bought oculus, but that's like saying Elon built Tesla when Tesla was already being built before he showed up to throw money at it.
i mean they also created React, not that i really use it
Net negative
[dead]