Not disagreeing that this predated Facebook. But the problem is that Facebook took this known vulnerability in human psychology and exploited it to the absolute max.

The product has been meticulously engineered to push all your social acceptance buttons. It would have been possible to design a product that helped people gain awareness of and transcend the deep underlying insecurities that give rise to addictions of all kinds, including social media. They deliberately chose not to build that product because it would be less lucrative, at least in the short term.

Giving Facebook a pass on this is like giving a heroin dealer a pass because opioid addiction predated their business. It’s true but it doesn’t absolve any of the moral responsibility for profiting off a product that causes harm.

Can Facebook be disrupted by the fentanyl of social networks?

Cute, but your analogy is somewhat flawed as fentanyl is like heroin on steroids. (As long as we’re mixing metaphors...)

What the world really needs is the naloxone of social networks.

You misinterpret me, I'm not asking what the world needs, I'm asking what it's possible to give them for profit.

If wondering if we could create a social network that offers 50x the social validation (fentanyl is like 50x the potency of heroin). Maybe machine learning can find the right combination of color flashes to cause people to have a social bliss seizure. Maybe while simultaneously reading their rapid eye movements to extract their credit card information from their short circuiting brains.

Catch me at YC2019

The answer is sort of yes, digital fentanyl is in our future. It’s a simple ML model that tells you what you want to hear based on your previous reactions and cross-person prior training data. Whatever your hidden insecurities are, that’s where it will bind. Once it becomes variative enough to keep you on your toes and precise enough to strike in yout heart you will no longer care that’s it obviously failing the Turing test.

Otherwise fully functional adults often succumb to sexual advances of sweet-taking suitors even if they rationally know the sweet-talk is bunk. And so it will be with this - humanity will fall to an AI before the AI can even develop consciousness.

Sounds like the basis for a good novel/movie. Even suggests a title:"Turing Incomplete".

See, your attitude is exactly what is wrong with Silicon Valley culture. You’re joking about technology to give people social bliss seizures for profit, hahaha hilarious. Meanwhile millions of people are actually dying from addiction, and not just heroin.

A member of my immediate family died by suicide recently. She suffered from massive self esteem issues as a result of chronic childhood abuse. She turned to Facebook for social validation, as one does, but was more prone to serious addiction due to her trauma. I’m not saying Facebook killed her, but it certainly added rocket fuel to the fire of her downward spiral.

I encourage you to reconsider your glib attitude towards dangerous addictions. It’s not so funny when people you love die from this stuff.

Please accept my sincerest condolences for the death of your family member.

In some ways I followed a similar path to that of your relative, in part because I often obtain validation by publicly satirizing elements of society I think are wrong. I've found satire the best tool in my toolbox at sparking conversation and even changing minds.

I've considered your proposal, and respectfully choose to continue the path I'm on. Whether or not you agree with it, I hope you'll believe that my motive is to cast a negative light on the victimizers and not the victims.

Best regards to you and yours

Wait, now you’re claiming that your original post was satire? Perhaps you should clarify that to the multiple people who have responded with comments in earnest.

Regarding your claimed motive to cast a negative light on the victimizers, uhhh... yeah. That might be believable, except that you’re doing the exact opposite in this thread. I hate to break it to you, but leaving insensitive comments about addiction which you later claim are satire isn’t really helping the situation.

You are also pretending to be respectful with your choice of language, but you’re not actually showing any respect at all.

At this point the only logical conclusion is that you’re trolling. In my experience, behind every troll is someone who is suffering and needs psychological help. Whether or not you believe it, I know there’s a “true self” of yours underneath the facade you’re showing here on HN that actually knows how to help people and not hurt them.

Whatever happened to you to make you this way, I wish you all the best in working through it.

Yikes! I get that you don't believe me, but I sincerely was trying to be respectful of your opinion and your grief. I've had quite a lot of death in my family, so I empathize with the grief people experience during similar times.

A lifetime of things, good and bad made me this way. I don't agree that I have any particular pathos I need to nail down, but being better is always the goal, right?

This whole thing just turned into a whirlwind of Poe's law.

This dispute isn't about my grief, despite your manipulative comments, nor does it have anything to do with Poe's law.

It's about you pushing buttons by making insensitive and disrespectful comments, then continuing to feign ignorance, avoiding responsibility for your hurtful words and finally trying to shift blame for the situation onto me.

The technical term for what you're doing is emotional abuse and gaslighting. This behavior is typically observed in those who have had it done to them. If you were paying me to be your therapist, I could help you fix the bugs in your psyche. But I'm not your therapist, and you seem to recognize nothing odd about your behavior, so there's no point in continuing the conversation at this time. Be well.

I mentioned Poe's Law because you took for granted everyone who responded to me, responded in earnest. I took their responses as sarcastic. Poe's Law. You think my condolences were insincere, I'm asserting that they were not. Also your name is MindGam3 and you're leaning on the hostility and remote diagnosis pretty hard, so that could be a thing, I'll take for granted that it's not. Also, you find it hard to believe my original comment was satire, implying you believe I intend to bring a seizure machine to YC2019. There's so much Poe's law at play right now that this thread could be used as an example in schools.

I downshifted from jokes to (an attempt at!) sensitivity not to manipulate or gaslight you. Perhaps I was trying to manipulate you into feeling less upset.

I thought I pushed your buttons with my original insensitive and disrespectful comments because of the death of your family member. If that's not the case, I don't know. I've nearly forgotten what the point of all this is.

Perhaps what you consider feigning ignorance, gaslighting, and manipulation stems from me not meeting your hostility with hostility, I understand that the mere suggestion of that is probably like 4th or 5th dimensional gaslighting.

I'm happy to acknowledge some of the things I say are offensive to some people, I'll continue trying to talk to people I offend with respect, until cynicism gets the best of me and the glib persona takes over completely ;)

I'm not willing to censor myself because you want me to though, I think I spelled that out clearly enough without feigning anything.

Dude just don't worry about it. A lot of people take offense at just about anything in 2018. They victimize themselves and then just try to shift the blame on you for lack of emotional development.

Eh, I don't really want to paint him with any broad ad hominem brushes, nor do I believe that mindgam3 is feigning offense here.

It's feels icky to get autobiographical, but the major reason of why I leaned into the conversation at the expense of my pretty funny joke is because of May 22, 1998. It was the day my brother succumbed to a gunshot wound to the head inflicted by his roommate.

For a while after that, whenever a kid would allude to shooting someone in the head while talking about videogames or playing, it felt like a punch to my gut. I remember lashing out at people once or twice over it. It never brought any satisfaction, or helped with my grief. Trying to dominate the forms of communication between 5th graders to shield my heart was a silly, tyrannical proposition. If it had even worked, it would have taught me all the wrong things.

Fortunately the mere idea of not talking about headshots was well beyond the capabilities of an entire school playing goldeneye. Haha

It's good to let someone stir your tanks every once in a while. Last night I got to try striking a balance between kindness and conviction, normally it's just sarcasm and conviction.

Eventually someone is going to invent wireheading and none of this will matter. Most people will hook themselves up and never return.

If something like this was possible, wouldn't Facebook have already discovered it?

I sort of assumed that's why the bought oculus, but no, not necessarily.

To believe otherwise is to fall into the trap the economist does in the following folksy anecdote.

An economist and his friend were walking down the street when the friend spots a 100$ bill on the ground. "Hey look, a 100$ bill!" he exclaims. The economist keeps his eyes locked forward, saying "Can't be, if there were - someone would have already picked it up."

Believe in yourself and your dreams, Cyph0n.

Actually when I read the title, I assumed it implied the causality going the way that makes sense (e.g. "FB addiction linked to need for social acceptance" = "FB addiction caused by need for social acceptance").

Upon further reflection, for me, I don't think the verb "linked to" implies any particular direction of causality. I would find it reasonable to word a headline as either "diabetes linked to twizzlers" or "twizzlers linked to diabetes", even though the causality clearly can only go in one direction.

When you say it is a positive feedback loop, you already describe it as a self-augmenting vicious cycle. In such a cycle, the initial cause becomes soon less important. People might start to use a social network because they feel temporarily lonely, perhaps because they moved to another place. But if that social networks leads to people spending more time on the net than with people in real life, it very quickly contributes to that cause.

A better question to ask would be whether Facebook increases self-confidence and leads to more self-validating social interaction outside of the Internet. Given what I see and hear, I don't believe this is the case.

I wonder what happens if you remove the positive feedback loop - allow users to post and share, but remove likes, shares, comments, number of followers/friends and other 'vanity' metrics. Or, allow likes and shares but don't expose the numbers to the OP. Would a person still share or post on social networks as much as they do right now? I think that person's answer to that would suggest whether or not they use Facebook or social networks as a means for self validation.

The article states “people who believed they needed to be socially accepted in order to have worth as a person were at higher risk of using Facebook in compulsive and maladaptive way”.

"A linked to B" is a bidirectional relationship that means "B linked to A". Any interpretation of a direction is purely imaginary.

Horse linked to carriage.

Carriage linked to horse.

Use of the word "link" at all is a often big clue which says "we're careful not to assert a causal mechanism".

I think the big thing is with the internet, it makes a lot of these things much more discrete, as in, parsing information and evaluating it in chunks, rather than have a sense of continuity. Everything is either on or off, true or false, black or white. Encourages a frame of mind that selectively gathers and redistributes information. It may make sense with present 'state' but it might not make sense with respect to the humanities, respect to art, respect to many of the other sciences, history, etc. Picking up on lots of patterns and applying the data of today to fit the model. Then upvote, downvote, change the world.

What direction do you think “linked” implies?

I find no bias in this language. To me, this reads as suggesting mere correlation.

yes! it is hard for me to imagine a wholesome social network existing. it is the toxicity which is driving the engagement. It would be like selling a drug that isn’t addictive - why on earth would that be a billion dollar product?

Pain pills versus vitamins?

But, we have no social vitamins.

I'm not so sure, a Skinner Box is designed to condition its occupants. Facebook cultivates a user's thirst for validation from other users. On a much, much smaller scale, Hacker News does it with the point system. That's not surprising, everybody is going for engagement. I disagree that every obsessed Facebook user is innately hooked on approval from others. Facebook pays the big bucks, has hundreds if not thousands of employees focused on this specific goal.

On HN, I really try to ignore the points. I personally know for me, if I simply read a point of view that is valid, that is enough to stick with me such that it continues to be part of my personality, or allows me to draw from my own self in slightly stronger way - the world is accepting of me, tolerant. I don't need to encourage it to be that with points. All I need to do is see 'Is it? Or is it not?'.

People are affected and influenced because they accept it as a rule of functioning. They want to influence things in such and such a way therefore they are subject to the same tactics of manipulation. Always depends on the rules you choose to believe in about the mind. Nerves that fire together wire together, and so on.

Facebook is categorically toxic at this point.

in any scientific article, if you reverse the causation in the title and it makes more sense, the author probably made an error.

As a wise professor sitting in the audience said to the lecturer: "Normally we put the dependent variable on the Y axis".