Yes Facebook does bad things from time to time, researching what days of the week teenagers are most likely to post given content does not, in my mind, qualify as an especially nefarious action.

Also about your "keep track of what's going on in the lives of ..", just call your friends to find out what is going on in their life. People normally don't post everything on facebook. I think its a great service if you want to know what's going on in Kim Kardashian life.

I don't understand the need many people have to know what their friends are doing at all times. I check my friends' Snapchat stories sometimes, but usually I just don't care and they can tell me next time I have a conversation with them.

Not all of my Facebook friends are close enough that I'd call them to keep in touch, but it's still nice to know how they're getting on.

One of my friends from high school just finished her education to become a Doctor. Good for her. I didn't need to know that, but it's still nice, and I would never have known without something like Facebook.

I reminded of the scene in Fight club where the narrator discovers that "Chloe died of cancer". He'd forgotten all about her, but discovering her death made him react as though sad. When challenged as to whether he cares, he says something like "I don't know, I haven't thought about her in a while".

(unnecessary reference, but I guess it frames the other side).

After I'd left uni for a couple of years Facebook became a long list of people I used to know sharing lots of minutae and a few big events in their life. Processing that has a cost, emotionally and intellectually. Is that cost worth paying? My deciding "no" doesn't mean that it's true for everyone!

So if you're a depressed person on social media seeing all those awesome things people are doing, just sends you down a downward spiral, even though a lot of people are probably not much better off.

And you just said it yourself. You didn't need to know your "friend" got her doctors and your life probably had zero impact from knowing, which really is the best case szenario with social media.

I am not saying, social media serves no porpuse though. For event organizing and crowd funding and probably a lot of other things, it comes in handy.

Just wanted to say that the paywalled article in The Australian can be viewed via cache: just fine:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dRqAloI...

Here's a more permanent copy: http://archive.is/paAKu

My apologies, and thanks for the feedback; I won't try this again.

Change is closer than we think.

I tend to prefer Facebook Messenger (messenger.com is great btw - literally a blow up version of an iPad/tablet app). It 100% encourages 1-1 communication and staying in touch with friends since there's nothing else to do there - you can't get sucked into mindless browsing. It doesn't even have any ads as far as I can tell.

(edit - typo)

I'm here neither to attack or defend Facebook, but this is a really crappy way of looking at the world. "People suck anyway, so...."

You could put just about anything after beginning a sentence like that.

I am not here to attack or defend Facebook either, but I think accusing them of being bad just because people get addicted to it is not a good measure. People get addicted to smartphones also but I rarely see people critical of the smartphone as a device.

Thats how I keep up with my extended family 1000 miles away. I do think it's a positive force in the world.

Back in 2011 I also used Facebook to "keep up" with my distant friends and family. I read their posts, looked at their photos, liked their comments, left notes here and there.. Chatted with them..

Then one day I realized that these were all (for me) extremely shallow interactions, and I decided I would make a better effort to stay in touch.

I closed my Facebook account, and made a commitment to reach out directly to the people I cared about. Perhaps less often, but in more meaningful ways.

I started sending monthly emails, and scheduling Skype or (eventually) FaceTime calls, and so on..

Fast-forward 6 years of that and I feel much more connected to the distant people I care about in my life than I ever did via Facebook, and almost all of them have reciprocated my efforts at maintaining a better connection..

Again, this is just my story, but you really don't need Facebook to stay in touch with the people you care about, no matter where they are in the world.

I think there are a lot of positives to Facebook, but a lot of potential negatives for certain kinds of personalities (people who are negative or addictive). With the right attitude though, it's certainly helpful

I look back on my Facebook usage as a cost / benefit tradeoff and in the end the benefits just weren't paying off.

I know exactly what you mean in theory however, no matter how much one views "status updates" inevitably you're drifting apart from those people and caring less about what they're doing, that's natural. I had less time for my closer friends. It felt artificial to have to stay connected, exhausting, though I didn't realise till I left.

One could check updates less, often, but then what's the point ?

If someone really wants to hangout they just contact me via other channels.

Contrast with realtime voice and video. (Facebook has those features but they're nowhere near as utilized. And they definitely do boot show up in feeds.)

Just because you're not willing to make time for someone doesn't mean you can't enjoy an evening of chatting and catching up when your lives happen to intersect.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Wow. Back then it had already degenerated into two things: chainmail and the trap of portraying a life that you don't lead. I left when I realised that absolutely none of that "keeping in touch" was happening. If anything, Facebook estranged people.

To the point of the article, imagine all the good that could be done with this data: an alert system for vulnerable teenagers.

At the height of my Facebook usage, I had less than 100 connections, because even back then I only stayed connected with people I was trying to maintain meaningful connections with.

No co-workers I didn't see socially, no one I went to high school or university with but didn't still keep in touch otherwise, etc..

So I rarely saw "junk" on my feed that was totally irrelevant to me, but it still happened sometimes..

There's something to be said about not directly involving corporations with your communications.

What I'm trying to say is, the internet is great, with it we can move beyond the old hegemony and monopolies.

Unless you talk to them face to face, most, if not all, forms of communication rely on third parties.

But we're talking orders of magnitude of difference.

In general "they" don't read your mail because they can't even if they wanted to. Slow mail is extremely expensive to do a through survailence on.

The intention doesn't matter, the fact is that slow mail is private for all intents and purposes.

You're absolutely right. Facebook can be an immensely negative experience for a person, a damaging force in their life. Facebook also can be a positive force, connecting a person to their friends, loved ones, and community.

Eg maybe getting older was a factor in that.

I lived most of my life without Facebook (born in the late 70s) and it's at least not obvious to me that people had more deeper connections prior to it.

That's the sick part of FB. That I really don't care for my cousin saving the world in Africa, so why should I care what she's doing?

I don't. And the truth is most of us don't care either. We're unable to admit it to ourselves so we pretend to care

Yes, quite a lot of social networking interactions are shallow, as are most real-world social interactions. but I've also made quite a lot of good friendships from what started out as shallow interactions. You're doing social networking right here on HN, you just treat it differently because it's (I presume) somehow connected to your professional activities.

And yes I was indeed sharing a story about what works for me. I never implied it would work for everyone else, or that anyone using FB was doing anything wrong, or that "social networking" is wrong.

You're also right that I am networking on HN as we speak! And these are also very shallow interactions, but that's perfectly ok because this is just HN and I'm just talking with strangers about topics that interest me.

But that wasn't the case with Facebook. Context matters. I was having shallow interactions with people I have deep existing relationships with (good friends who have moved away, family, etc), and I decided that for me personally that didn't work, and I wanted to do things differently.

I rarely use Facebook because it's a time suck and I closed Twitter, but there are a lot of positives from social media, especially if you consider it globally.

I see this claim often, but I've never seen any hard evidence backing this claim.

Au contraire: Social media is a fantastic snooping tool for oppressive (or even non-oppressive) regimes.

"Social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring. A spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground. Social media helped spread democratic ideas across international borders." [2]

"Global Use of Social Media to Fight Corruption Inspires Youth in Brazil" [3]

"In the Bagega community in Nigeria, lead poisoning had resulted in thousands of children suffering serious health problems. The government announced it would release around $5.3 million for remediation but months later the funds had still not reached the affected community." Two passionate guys formed an organization called Follow the Money and amplified the voices of this forgotten community. Within 48 hours of a Twitter campaign targeting government officials and other influential leaders -- and following a campaign by groups including Human Rights Watch -- the funds were released and affected children are now receiving the urgent medical care that they deserve. [4]

[1] https://phys.org/news/2011-09-quantifies-social-media-arab.h...

[2] http://collectiondevelopment.library.cornell.edu/mideast/Rol...

[3] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/09/Brazil-y...

[4] http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/18/opinion/want-to-expose-corrupt...

Life expectancy is up 50 years from 1000 years ago, childhood mortality is at its lowest point in history, education rates are at their highest, global poverty is at its lowest.

None of these are positive forces to you? What time period would you prefer?

The short average life expectancy of primitive humans is entirely an artifact of high childhood mortality and how averages work. If you lived past childhood you were likely to live until your 60's or 70's.

Primitive human lives were not hard and not short, the workweek for hunter/gatherers was less than half of ours. They were strongly biased towards highly egalitarian cultures.

Doesn't mean I'd necessarily prefer that time period to now, but I'm a white guy in a rich nation with a professional career and it's still not an obvious call. For the rest of the world they wouldn't have to think about it, they would hop in that time machine and head for a pre-agricultural era in a heartbeat.

The idea that blindly sprinting in the random direction of the latest discovery and calling it "progress" has not had any downsides is stupidity, as is the willful ignorance necessary to accept a cartoon version of pre-history created in 1651 based on extrapolating from experience in London, without any evidence or knowledge.

I am aware of this, but not sure why you think this negates the fact that life expectancy has increased. I would much prefer a drastically higher chance of living passed childhood. And if I somehow managed to live long enough to have children, I'd prefer that my children don't all die at birth, along with their mother. These desires have only been made possible in the last century or two

Of course you'd prefer to have the modern first world chances of surviving childhood and childbirth. If you had a choice between prehistorical lives for your surviving children or for them all to have the lives of a random child on earth today it's a harder choice. Making your base of comparison the middle ages is also the most skewed comparison possible.

That's not even counting the fact that we are supporting this technological infrastructure not only by reducing the quality of life from less powerful peoples but by massively borrowing quality of life from all future generations.

There have been some attempts to study hunter gatherers that existed in recent times:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/aging_evolu...

The group there isn't necessarily going to be representative, but mortality for young adults was ~2% per year. In the US it is something like 0.1%.

Quants are not the only people entitled to have an opinion on this. While I mostly like the modern world it has lots of downsides too. Simplistic measures like life expectancy reduce the business of living to a handful of metrics and then pronounce things to be good or bad according to how those arbitrary criteria measure up.

That's great if you want to live in a world that's run like a factory where productivity is the highest social good. I don't. I would be fine with dying at 60 or even tomorrow, not because I don't want to live any more but because I've chosen to set my own goals about what sort of life and activity I find meaningful rather than simply maximizing some inherited utility criteria.

Long life would be nice, in general, but it's a fact that one's life might be arbitrarily cut short by some random accident. In your world being out at one extreme or the other of the probability distribution is statistically interesting but nothing more. Your value system lacks any criteria for determining the worth of life other than the most primitive feedback loop of maximizing whatever quantitative factors you've set yourself to measure.

I am friends with a few super-wealthy people, one who had access to great wealth through business and another who's a prominent aristocrat. When I say friends, I don't mean that we hang out to drink champagne, but that I'm privy to intimate details of their family/personal lives. Wealth does not inoculate you against crippling emotional problems.

http://dinghal.com/bibliotheek/The_Crisis_of_the_Modern_Worl...

While the wisdom of the crowds favors the continued existence and growth of Facebook, the wisdom of a tech heavy audience takes a skeptical stance, and the skepticism is heightened when entities such as Facebook and Google are completely robbing us of our privacy one little "byte" at a time.

In the time it took you to read my comment, let us just suppose FB and Google just reduced the privacy of your life by about x%, however minuscule you might think x is. The trouble is, despite the vitriol directed at these entities, the rate not only doesn't seem to reduce, it is actually going up every day!

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

- http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...

Has he ever acknowledged saying this publicly - or ever spoke about how he fucked over the twin brothers? I want a leader who's transparent, open - honest.

You don't get to play the whole "Genius Wunderkind" part, take all the success and notoriety that comes with that, and then say "Oh, young people will just say dumb stuff" regarding your emotional maturity at the time. This is who he is. The quote perfectly sums up Zuckerberg's actual intentions, as demonstrated repeatedly by his public actions. He's a sociopathic megalomaniac, and Facebook is a net drain on society. Fortunately, I think others are beginning to realize it too.

"I'll do good, trust me."

You're not gonna find that in the Holywood drama movie of said leader.

I'm going with "people on Facebook think he needs to go out on a 'listening tour' so he did".