Rather than alluding to vague upsides, can you list what upsides you want to assert that social media provides, so that we can do as you say and perform a cost/benefit analysis? As both an early adopter and former user of both Facebook and Twitter, my eventual conclusion was that whatever benefits they offered were vastly outweighed by the mental toll they took on me.

To quote @mumblemumble:

"""

There's another side to this, though. Letting kids roam the internet can give ones who might otherwise be doomed to become misfits an opportunity to find community. Being a queer kid pre-Internet, for example, sucked, and the Web rolling out to households changed a lot of kids' lives. And we have a poor cultural memory of what that experience used to be like, because, before the rise of online communities, a big part of being queer - especially being a queer kid - was being subjected to systematic erasure.

I'm not sure how you balance those two things. My sense, though, is that the balance was better 20, 25 years ago, when the Internet had more small, individualized communities. Most of them have since been squashed by the rise of the social media oligopoly.

"""

I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.

This is all personal anecdotal, and not intended to be a real argument either way.

I have and have had internet in my house since I was 5-10. And I'd have to say: I'm still a misfit, social pariah, currently with no friends. Ironically the most respect (I mean this in the most basic sense of respect) I get from other humans is on here. But things were better when I was younger and worse now that I am 31. I'm not misremembering having more friends when I had places to go and do things in person, I definitely did. And these days I find it increasingly difficult to talk to people who have ever shrinking attention spans. Why is meme speak becoming pervasive in spoken language? Even when I call my mother she can't put down her Facebook or emails for a few minutes to talk. We used to be close. She says she has no time for anything. She's a book publisher and doesn't have time to read the one or two articles I send her every 6 months or so. Even when they are strictly about her field of work. She reads the first paragraph and says she got the "gist", which means we can't talk about it because she has no idea what the other 20 pages said, nor does she care because... well "haven't you seen the top reddit post today. I can't believe (random person) said (random comment) to (random other person)"

To me so many people have just become very boring. I mean what's worth saying/reading that takes 3-5 seconds, really? It's not that I think the internet or online social communication is all bad, or course it's not, but in my experience the bad does outweigh the good. And with suicide and depression rates rising beyond a standard deviation in gen z girls it's hard to feel as if it were worse from them in the past.

I'd say things are worse. Forums were a more personal experience. Fewer people, shared interests, avatars.

Look at HN - how many commenters do you personally recognize, except for the ones that are popular because they're part of YC (so for things outside of this discussion forum) or because they also submit articles they're written (so again for things outside of this forum)?

I probably recognize maybe 10 people, and with the way this discussion forum is designed, I recognize them despite the software, not because of it.

Yup. I really felt like I "knew" people on forums. I recognized their names. Our inside jokes were ones we had created.

These days I never recognize a single username on any forum (HN and Reddit, mostly), even tiny sub-reddits. The culture there is created by the masses, so there are plenty of in-jokes only because tens of thousands of people repeat them every week.

Twitter is the closest I have to a site where I recognize a stranger's voice and opinions. But that's typically one-sided -- even in small hobbiest groups, it tends to be the well-known producers talking to everyone else.

> Look at HN - how many commenters do you personally recognize

It would be 0 for me.

Twitter is better for me in that way, but because is only short interactions, it's not like I'm close to them.

With forums it was way better, for me at least. It felt like family, and in 1 forum I was, we actually had like a 'newbie adoption' thing. With many people there, we actually ended up being internet friends, while on Twitter we might be more like acquaintances.

"Even when I call my mother she can't put down her Facebook or emails for a few minutes to talk."

Anecdotally, it seems like the older generations are some of the worst offenders when it comes to this stuff. The stereotype is of two millennials sitting at a restaurant and both spending the entire meal staring at their phones. While that does happen, I think it's actually a lot more common now for older people to behave like this, maybe because they've had less time to develop any form of social or psychological resistance.

I think we need an evolution of social etiquette to account for this brave new world of self-absorption and rudeness. Pulling out your phone while in the middle of a conversation is incredibly rude, but people do it constantly, without a second thought, in both personal and professional contexts. It should be acceptable to kindly but firmly shame people for this kind of anti-social behavior, just like we'd shame people (perhaps not so kindly) if they started spitting in everyone's drinks or being blatantly cruel to others. I'm not trying to claim moral superiority, as I'm as guilty as anyone of doing it on occasion, but I'd honestly be happy if the person I'm with would say "put that thing away and pay attention to what I'm saying you dick!".

Older people stare at their phones when they're in restaurants because they are often with their spouse, and they already spend 100% of their time with each other. Their lives are encumbered with child rearing, house maintenance, and other time-consuming adulthood chores. So when you see them at a restaurant, they're both thinking Thank god we can finally sit down and peacefully stare at our phones in peace.

I don't really care if two people would both rather do that (except that it's kind of sad for them). But similar to the GP, I have some older relatives and acquaintances who do this constantly no matter who they're with. They seemingly just don't think there's anything wrong with it.

Social media are not the internet. If Facebook, Instagram and tiktok disappeared tomorrow, the internet would keep existing. In my opinion we would all be better, queer kids included.

I agree - I feel like one really important misconception to set aside is lumping "communication" in with "social media".

From a teenager's perspective, Instagram and TikTok are a lot worse for your mental health than say, Snapchat and iMessage.

In addition, for the queer community example - I'd say the perfect parallel for today would be Discord. Anyone can find a community and make friends on Discord, but it's probably not 5% as damaging to mental health because it's a communication based platform

Yes I think this is an important distinction. In my view the most salient divider between modern social media and other social things that use the internet is the presence of activity feeds. The model of pushing everything you do to everyone you're connected with was a huge shift.

I was on the internet communicating with friends and strangers on forums/message boards, IRC, AIM, and pre-feed Facebook well before the news feed was the default model. The "stalker feed", as it was known in 2006(?) when it was first launched, totally changed things, both in terms of the volume and ease of scrolling through content and the kinds of "news" that would be brought to your attention.

Something that sticks out in my memory of when Facebook's feed launched (I was in college at the time) was the additional pressure surrounding the "relationship status" field. Suddenly it wasn't just people who actively looked up your profile who might notice that you were "In a relationship with X", instead the act of updating it was broadcast to hundreds of people. Low stakes for adults, perhaps, but genuinely stressful for teenagers!

Do you think the online queer community is better or worse after Tumblr's self destruction?

doubt it.

I grew up in a suburb and pretty isolated intellectual vacuum where it was hard to learn anything.

I got internet access I could use regularly when I was around 12.

Things were less developed then ~2002 and I didn't have FB until 2007 so maybe it's not directly comparable to the modern web, but the information access was amazing.

There was so much available to read and learn and most importantly, it helped with unknown unknowns.

When you're isolated like that and you don't live in a community of people that can introduce you to new things it's really hard to find where to even look on the map of interesting ideas. You don't know what exists. I wouldn't have been able to learn about computers, wouldn't have eventually been able to come out to the bay area as early as I did. I think people don't realize how the internet frees people that don't otherwise have a personal connection to someone who knows things.

My case isn't even that exceptional (my dad is an MD and smart, he was just the first in his family to really succeed so didn't know how to navigate a lot of the social class stuff) - someone who truly grew up in poverty would have even less access to things via their personal network.

At least for me, there is way more good with the web than bad.

The web and internet access may drive most of humanity to tribal motivated reasoning and echo chambers, but for others it leads to better critical thinking, learning new ideas and arguments and changing your mind/becoming a better thinker.

The upside potential is still there and huge - it's easier to learn than ever.

It just didn't fix the fact that the average person is not well suited to take advantage of it.

>I don't know if the downsides are worse for Facebook or Twitter (engineered for eyeballs and ad clicks), than forums, or where Discord lies on the spectrum.

They're clearly worse. Forums don't have algorithms constantly running trying to hijack your brain stem to keep you scrolling and clicking links...

Neither does HN, but I personally find it as addictive as anything else on the Internet.

There are options in your HN profile to help with this.

"Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero."

There are upsides. From providing self estem from a different source from the local.

It has raised awareness like never before.

It has provided an income for some.

It allows new peer groups not available locally

It provides a safer space to interact with strangers.

Where we got it wrong was connecting these profiles to real life names. That has ruined people's lives.

None of the things you list are unique to social media. They all existed before the rise of the socials. Many of them existed before the internet.

This is like saying the written word existed before the printing press. It certainly did, but technology has fundamentally changed its impact.

Yes, but the increased availability of such things around the globe and across social strata is unparalleled.

Availability and immediacy, too. What does it mean when information becomes available to a broad swath of the population immediately after it comes into existence? For instance, we're already witnessing the effects of speedy dissemination of dis- and misinformation.

Nonsense. Social media and the sensational, vain culture it has inculcated it is entirely damaging and without value. It is _only_ revolutionary and disparages any prior merit and censure without reason. It is a denial of service on reason and experience claiming precedence and priority without any historical context.

I think you have the causation exactly backwards - the vain culture is what gave rise to social media. Japanese "social media" including forums and image boards are biased towards being nonentity as possible. Famous cat owners make efforts to be non-entity as possible compared to US ones often involving owner presence even if just dangling a toy and talking to the cat.

Japan sure as hell isn't perfect socially but they demonstrate that the source of social problems may be found in the mirror collectively and not in new technology.

No. Entrepreneurs understood our cultures tendency towards vanity, self reflective and voyeuristic exhibition, and created businesses based on this. Social media was the exploitation and exaggeration of that vanity. What it is now is a huge business and opportunity for marketing and social control.

> From providing self estem from a different source from the local.

The article explicitly covers this and shows a net negative. So saying there are positive effects isn’t very helpful as any gains are more than offset by negatives.

I think your argument is better through quantification. As I don’t think anyone is making the case that social media doesn’t have any benefits at all, the argument is that the negatives outweigh the benefits.

Of course, I think it’s easier to quantify the negatives than positives. How do I quantify the positive effect that offsets the probably correlated increase in preteen girl hospitalizations? [0]

[0] sorry trying to find the easiest citation for the graph in Lukiakoff and Haidt’s book Coddling of America’s Youth [1] https://livingonparr.wixsite.com/livingonparr/single-post/20...

[1] https://www.thecoddling.com/

To put a finer point on one of yours, social media made very obvious the existence of violence against racial and ethnic minorities by law enforcement, among other social ills.

It's hard and slow work to gain populist support for socially progressive policy. We wouldn't be talking about this stuff were it not for the truths presented to us by the people it affects most profoundly.

Connecting those profiles to real life names has the upside of enabling those teenagers to stay in touch with old friends when everyone moves around as adults

(and I wouldn't say the social networks where profiles don't need to be connected to real names are necessarily any better)

I don't see what real life names have to do with keeping in touch. I've kept in touch with people for 15+ years using IRC nicknames. In a few cases I don't know the other person's real name at all.

Sure people can change their nicknames, but people change their real names too. I've gone by three different 'real' names throughout my life. That may not be super common, but people getting married and changing their name at least once is certainly not rare. The way I see it, a 'real' name is only more real than the others insofar as it's the name the government uses for you. But that sort of realness isn't relevant for social purposes. For social purposes, the 'realest' name is the name people call you.

I mean "here's all the people you went to school with" was literally Facebook's raison d'etre. If I was relying on stored phone numbers or email addresses I'd be a lot less likely to be in touch with some of them (including those whose numbers I still have!)

Sure, it's possible to stay in touch with a long list of monikers and sometimes even not much more difficult, but (going back to the OP I responded to) it's possible and often no more difficult to ruin people's lives across pseudonymous services too. Lack of real name is probably more of an impediment to the casually interested old friend than the concerted hate campaign.

It's a valid point and I have found value in looking up past friends on facebook.

I'm not sure a teenager has the same value. Anyone under 18 shouldn't have real identifying names them.

When facebook came out you had people isolated into networks of schools. Those structures provided better protections and freedom. The transition to fully public with forced real names made facebook into something not for kids but great for older folks.

And for many, the ego had increased exponentially with the attention gathered.

I just finished writing a paper on this. Here are some upsides:

Studies have shown that disclosing information about oneself is an intrinsically rewarding experience [0]. Social media offerings provide a platform for sharing information easily with a large audience, which activates reward mechanisms in the brain. People use social media because it makes them feel good, which is probably the reason for their explosive growth over the last decades.

Social media offers a way to stay connected with people, or at least feel connected, without having to put in much effort. When you open the Facebook or Instagram application, it is immediately filled with recent pictures and status updates of friends and relatives. Not only does this provide you with information, it might also motivate you to contact those people again, which will then reinforce the feeling of friendship. It has been shown that having an active social circle is predictive of lower stress, increased happiness, positive attitude, and self-assessed health [1].

Patients suffering from serious mental illnesses can self-organize into peer-to-peer support groups on social media platforms. Reported benefits include greater social connectedness, feelings of belonging, and being able to share personal stories and coping mechanisms. Through this empowerment, patients can challenge the stigma associated with their condition; and potentially even improve their situation by learning from peers, and gaining insight into important health decisions and possible remedies. If peer support proves insufficient, patients can motivate each other to seek professional help. [2]

Social media platforms are one of the most accessible forms of long-distance communication. Among the reasons for this, is that they are free of charge, an account is set up in a matter of minutes, and communication is not limited geographically. Furthermore, social media enables certain groups of disabled people to communicate with individuals they are normally unable to reach. For example, deaf people usually communicate through sign language or written text. Since the number of sign language ``speakers" is low, written text is the most accessible way to communicate with others. For them, social media offers an accessible and efficient way to stay in touch with friends and relatives that are geographically far away. Christine Forsberg showed that social media use among the deaf and hard hearing increased their feeling of empowerment, when empowerment is measured in self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-determination [3].

Happiness, positive attitude, satisfaction, connectedness, and increased (mental) health can be assumed to provide positive utility, and thus promoting them is ethical from a utilitarian viewpoint. It is worth noting however, that there is a flipside to most of the effects covered above (see section \ref{sec:negative_effects}), and it is unclear whether the cumulative utility of all positive and negative consquences is positive or not.

[0]: Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell. “Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding”. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America109 (May 2012), pp. 8038–43. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1202129109.

[1]: Suwen Lin et al. “Social network structure is predictive of health and wellness”. In: PLOS ONE 14.6 (June 2019), pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217264. url: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217264.

[2]: J. A. Naslund et al. “The future of mental health care: peer-to-peer support and social media”. In Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences 25.2 (2016), pp. 113–122. doi: 10.1017/S2045796015001067.

[3]: Christine Forsberg. “The Empowerment of Deaf Cochlear Implant Users Through Social Media in the UK, the Netherlands, and Croatia”. MA thesis. July 2020. url: http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=152367.

Also, social media has been used to organize riots in the Arab spring, Hong Kong, etc.

Very interesting

> or at least feel connected, without having to put in much effort.

I have experienced the other side of this, so to speak, having someone think that they have made a connection with me or contacted me etc. just because they made a post or sent a tweet/text assuming that I'd see it. I don't always see these things or spend my time logged into these sites.

There are some people (including family members) that simply no longer 'talk' to me but think that they are 'always telling me' things. I've been caught out with things like phone number changes, address changes because someone has moved home and think they have 'told me' because they did some random tweet to 'everyone' some time back.

There are two sides to 'staying connected', social media (generally speaking) has made these connections rather one-sided. Staying connected should be more like a gentle came of catch-and-throw but instead it's more akin to beig stood in front of one of those machines that fling balls at you relentlessly regardless if you are ready or not.

I hate it.

> Social media platforms are one of the most accessible forms of long-distance communication

E-mail? Have you heard of it? Signal? Other IM platforms. And you continue on selling social media as means of friendly communication which is not true. There's gazillion alternatives but those were all eaten up by the giants. All those use cases and people that you mentioned used mailing lists before and were doing just fine.

It says “one of” the most accessible, which is undeniable.

> And you continue on selling social media as means of friendly communication which is not true.

No, I do not. The section about negative effects is much longer, and the conclusion drawn at the end also damns social media. In a scientific paper, you have to present both sides.

I just included the positive effects section here, because somebody asked.

One upside for me is that I only like interacting with people about my interests, not about personal stuff. I don’t want to hear or talk about weather/kids/sports. Social media allows me to discuss woodworking with someone in Galway instead of whatever little common ground I can find with my next door neighbor.

This is not about upsides and downsides. The truth is execs in Twitter, Facebook and Youtube had no clue what upsides and downside would be produced by the system they created.

The happily took credit for the upsides and for the longest time, like almost a decade, laughed out of the room anyone talking about the downsides.

Such people are still in charge of these fucking companies.

There's a reason these people will come out and say they don't let their kids use the apps they work on...

That luddite standard of "expected to know all upsides and downsides of something novel" bugs the royal crap out of me. It not only demands omniscience but implicitly assumes perfection of the status quo by not holding it to the same standards. To call forums for speech reckless is a very novel standard that back in the 90s and 00s would get you mocked as sounding like a third world dictator.

> But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.

apologies but it sounds like PR from the tobacco industry before they got regulated. wonder how we'll look at this in 10-15 years time. the "let's listen to both sides" argument has no place on something this evil and damaging (not just to children) imo.

On the other hand, 'Social media damages teenagers mental health' sounds a lot like puritan arguments against rock music, weed, and video games from decades past. All of those things had legit studies done on them that showed harm, too. Honestly I think the kids are gonna be alright.

Well, sometimes they get things right, like (only stretching slightly) alcohol, which is not great in excess. You have to consider these things individually rather than trying to draw generalizations like "all puritan backlash is wrong."

My argument isn't really "they said these things were bad and they're not," it's more like "these things are actually kinda bad in some circumstances, but mostly we all turned out ok anyway, and things wouldn't really be much different or better if rock music were more heavily regulated when we were kids."

Really? How is rock music bad in some circumstances?

I think I just got hung up on a technicality in your argument.

I mean if you want to factor in the benefits of drugs, be my guest, because spoiler alert: They are fucking awesome.

Or at least they should be if we both detach the stigma and stop lumping in things like Cannabis in with Crack

Absolutely, cannabis is leaps and bounds worse than crack.

Nice troll

I must concur. There is a reason taking drugs has been around for 1000's of years - within reason.

Lots of things have been around for 1000's of years. Rape, murder, clothes, but that doesn't mean they are a good thing.

Being around for thousands of years has zero bearing on whether something is good or bad. It can speak to relative safety. In all the thousands of years, there has yet to be a single death that can be attributed directly to cannabis (and I don't count "marijuana-related visits" to hospitals where regardless of which ailment a person has, if they test positive for cannabis it becomes a "marijuana-related visit", nor do I count deaths where a person just happened to have smoked beforehand).

Good point!

> But you can't accurately assess the whole picture without taking the upsides into account, too.

Trust me, with trillion dollar corporations pushing their propaganda nonstop and self-important, self-appointed lords of industry convincing themselves every little tweak to their website is world-changing, the "upsides" need no signal boost from me.

Sorry to be a bit of a downer, but we absolutely should be talking about the downsides instead of listening to over-powerful CEOs tell us how great their crack is.

Also, you forgot that planes emit CO2, which is not just a subjective judgment, but is objectively bad for our planet in large quantities. ;)

Your analysis of schools doesn't seem so far-off for me, and it's not unreasonable to say that not every aspect of social life should be measured by a calculus of upsides to badsides. The utilitarian 'weighing' mode of thinking is not appropriate for every situation, and I think you (inadvertently) made a good case for why, at least with schools. The fact that schools also educate can be worked into an analysis even of the 'bad sides' as not contingent, but a part of the same system that creates the 'bad sides'.

The very fact that we consider weighing the 'upsides' of something is if we give it, or part of it, legitimacy in the first place - legitimacy that may not be deserved. I'm silent on the topic of social media, but we wouldn't even begin to consider the 'upside' of murder or rape or defamation, for instance - and that's not because people in the past have done that analysis for us, it's because collective experience has shown the analysis isn't worth doing - that the utilitarian analysis is the wrong method to apply to the question, just as there are good and bad methods in science or philosophy.

There is a difference.

Planes and schools are by design positive things.

Social media by design is at best neutral.

Social media is designed to benefit its owners and its customers (ad sellers). At best social media is designed to entertain its users, but the big caveat is that it does it through whatever means necessary. And that's a big caveat. Because at the end of the day, it's an online casino. And we regulate casinos to hell and back.

>"Planes are an outrage! Imagine if you proposed a system that required hours of everyone's time, cost them hundreds of dollars, forced them to sit in cramped positions, and subjected them to invasive scans and searches of their personal materials."

I feel like you're dead on for air travel. I absolutely hate it, and wish it were drastically reduced.