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Back when I was in school, if you weren't popular and wouldn't get invited to parties you wouldn't find out what you missed until the next day or after the weekend and by that time the whole FOMO would blow over but now thanks to the advent of always-online mobile devices and social media you get to watch your friends or colleagues _Live_, go on fancy trips and have fun without you, providing you with a constant source of FOMO.
Same with online dating. If you were bad with the opposite sex you'd get rejected by the women in your circles, but at least you'd get a chance to talk and meet face-2-face and still stay in touch platonically later. Now you can get rejected, ghosted and stood up by thousands of other potential mates before they even meet you which must do wonders for your self esteem (/s).
Same with finance. Some would make more $ than you but you wouldn't know about it. Now you can FOMO while you watch others making $$ on trading platforms from their Cryptocurrency or TSLA stocks and feel left behind in the rat race.
My $0.02
On the contrary, with online dating, I think people who are "bad at dating" have an advantage compared to old fashioned social circle dating. You get much more practice, ie opportunities to improve, and also many more chances to find someone who's a great match. When things go south you haven't made a friendship awkward, you just move on.
If you don't look at bad dates as a learning opportunity, and instead allow yourself to blame factors outside of your control for causing your bad dates, you tread dangerously close to incel mentality.
I'm not convinced that online dating is quite the effective learning environment you're making it out to be. You are much more disposable online, and people tend to have less empathy. If the only feedback you get is ghosting, then it could be something you said recently, the person could be busy, or perhaps a more attractive match came along. It's usually challenging to narrow it down if you aren't making the most basic mistakes.
Some men bitterly turn misogynistic as a result of their failures, but that doesn't mean that their failures are entirely unique and personal.
Sure you get more practice but what you're getting practice with is online dating, not dating in general.
If you're a man who's not in top 10% of most desirable, it's a barren wasteland. Your best hope becomes to attempt to match with basically anyone, and even when you do match most won't respond. So maybe you tried to be witty the first several times and got no response or possibly unmatched. A lot of men will lose their wit after this and just start sending "Hey" in hopes of getting some kind of response.
Meanwhile if you're a woman, nearly anyone who you click 'like' will be a match (except for the few you really want). The men you'll match with may not be charming because they've become tired or desperate or jaded, some may be outright rude, sexist, or cruel, and maybe the guy you want isn't responding at all -- because he's in that 10% of guys that all of the women are trying to match with and he's ignoring you.
The upside of it being impersonal so you have more freedom to screw up without much effort or commitment is also it's downside, where the people you match with don't put much effort or commitment in for you either.
> If you're a man who's not in top 10% of most desirable, it's a barren wasteland
Then how comes the marriage/dating rates are way higher than 10%?
Self-selection. The women who aren't chasing the top 10% find a workable match sooner and remove themselves from the pool.
It's the same adverse-selection effect as "why are all my job candidates terrible?" Because you're only interviewing the people who have failed to get a job.
Lagged effects.
You don't get any practice. That's the problem. Online dating is a distinctly different game from dating. And the problem is that sooner or later it will have to turn into actual dating. But you are being filtered through an unreasonable and non-working filter.
If you want practice and opportunities, go out and and try yourself in bars/clubs. I know it sounds scary and and even superficial but it's humane and it does work. I know, I've been there. My social circle never worked for this purpose, especially not after high school. I've tried online dating about a decade ago just to find that it's completely dysfunctional (it was, even back then!).
However, talking to actual people in bars was always fun even if scary at first (I like that environment a lot, so that might be a factor too, others may work for other people). Heck, even a rejection feels real and _less_ upsetting than online. Not to mention that even the rejections are waaay more civilized and a lot less likely. I used to keep thinking about how to fix online dating back then and one of the problems is that socially unacceptable behaviour is not only goes without negative consequences there but it's actually the easy thing to do. Thus no surprise the whole thing ends up being toxic pretty quickly as people constantly annoy and provoke each other through this.
E.g. if you start to talk to someone in a bar, even if you say the most boring thing possible, they will almost never just turn their back on you and don't respond. Even a quick rejection will probably include a smile and a response like "no, thanks", or "I'm with my friends", etc. But, at least in my experience and my case, that would be below 10% and the other 90% would be at least a short conversation. Which just feels good. Compare this with what you get online. (In my case it was, again 10 years ago!, the reverse or even worse. I.e. over 90% no response. Same person, same looks.)
I have a friend who is very good looking (and I mean it: girls turn around after him in the bars or straight walk up to him) and even he doesn't have too much success online. I mean he does get matches, probably a lot more than e.g. I would get, but then he usually runs into dates not working out, girls looking vastly different than on the profile picture, etc. This just doesn't happen IRL.
> If you don't look at bad dates as a learning opportunity, and instead allow yourself to blame factors outside of your control for causing your bad dates, you tread dangerously close to incel mentality.
I definitely don’t disagree with the above, but I honestly don’t think the exact opposite is very good either. In other words only blaming yourself can get you in a heap of self-doubt, discouragement, distraction and all around lack of faith and hope in ever having a dating life or serious relationship. I mean at this point you don’t think the opposite gender is the problem you think you yourself are. I honestly fall into this trap way too often. Can also say I’ve fallen in the above quoted sections trap from time to time too. But I’m not saying forget doing self introspection. That is important but also don’t beat yourself up. I’m saying you and speaking in general here these comments are not directed towards the parent commenter in any way.
You don't improve, you just fake it better. That's what most people do anyway. This is for me the most overlooked problem with privacy. If you have your life out in the open then everyone who has an interest in you can tell you the things you expect to hear without knowing whether they're genuine or just stalking you. It's much easier to flirt someone if you know what movies/music/books she likes, what bars/cafes she visits, what's her political view etc. And this creates a culture of vultures who fake their identities all the time.
Furthermore, I implore anyone who thinks that online dating is easy to create a fake profile with a photo of a semi attractive woman as a test. You get flooded with thousands of requests in no time. I tried it on Facebook and I reached the 5.000 friends limit in just four days. There's no way anyone can reach out and flirt in this mess. You become irrelevant in the noise.
Just a quick note of my thinking. You are calling it FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) but it's full-fledged MO, without the FO part.
Missing out is not necessarily meaningful. FOMO is the anxiety caused by missing out. which may cause you more pain than actually missing out on that thing.
Ah this is a great point - worrying about something that could happen as opposed to worrying about something that did happen, but _also_ leads me to the conclusion that the very idea of “missing out” is pure fear, a narrative about what other people are doing and the self-imposed expectation that you should be doing the same thing, right? Maybe there is no MO without FO?
If you choose to miss out then watching other people having fun on snapchat is no problem. The anxiety and/or depression kicks in when you see your friends or social group having fun together without you when you never were invited in the first place.
Emotions just are. Thoughts come and go, but we may or may not pick the ones on which we loiter. If undesirable emotions ebe when we loiter on certain thoughts, repeated behaviors may emerge. Let's do this to get rid of that emotion, your brain might say to itself.
Missing something, like your sunglasses, makes you wonder where they are, look for them, call people asking if you left them over, etc. This is worry, which is a light version of fear.
"Missing out" isn't like looking your sunglasses but still makes you wonder if where you are isn't where you should be, which is still a type of anxious behavior which will lead to repetition if the emotional response is allowed to go on unchecked.
Check out "Plutchik's wheel of emotions" for emotion groupings.
Perhaps "feeling of missing out" could work as a good description? If more reminds one of things that one is "missing out" on, one probably feels more that one is "missing out" more than otherwise would, given equal amounts of things that others are doing that one is not doing?
colloquially this is how the acronym is used though (doesn't have to make sense)
There is also the _Freedom of Missing Out_. What if you lived a life unconstrained by the various appointments we all have to make, a life where you're not obligated to go to parties, play the dating game, or buy the latest fast-fashion item of clothing?
Some people want to go to parties and date the opposite sex because they enjoy those things, not because society is telling them to. Most people like being in relationships and hanging out with friends.
Allowing your identity to be defined by other people is not healthy.
You mention cryptocurrency, so I have to ask. Do you think Satoshi is sitting on a yacht tweeting out photographs of their fancy trips?
A guitar teacher told me the same things about guitar learners:
Before people just learned some basic stuff and were happy. But nowadays they constantly compare themselves with thousands of youtubers guitarists who are very skilled and then always think that they themselves are shit compared to them.
This is true of the guitar, but even more dangerously true when it comes to fitness and body images.
Yeah, fake natties all over the place. Sponsored by Gymshark and other supplement shops so they obviously cannot admit to using steroids etc... because they would lose the $$ from sponsorhip asap.
Envy is a negative-sum emotion. It's no fun to be envious, and while people think it must be enjoyable to be envied, it's really not. When you're aware of it at all, it's just uncomfortable. It's a shitty emotion on both sides, but it's great for capitalism.
Comparing yourself against others is a loser's game. If the person is better, you lose. If the person comes out worse, you're taking a dip by comparing yourself at all to that person, so you still lose.
This is so true. Similar is the case with professional social networking platforms like Linkedin. Back when I was in school, I could be content with being the topper of my class. But now, seeing all these people with similar background, doing better than me makes me so envious. Sometimes, I think to leave these platforms, but then these platoforms have been useful to me in keeping up to date with my field and in job hunting.
Bertrand Russell (obiviously) lived before social media, but he saw what the information age was doing to people. He didn't put it this way, but with enough information you can see your place on the bell curve. Now most people realize they are average, and not extraordinary at all. Even really smart people are still pretty close to the middle.
Russell puts it better, of course:
http://bactra.org/Russell/on_youthful_cynicism.html
"Moreover many kinds of beauty require that a man should take himself more seriously than is possible for an intelligent modern. A prominent citizen in a small city State, such as Athens or Florence, could without difficulty feel himself important. The earth was the center of the Universe, man was the purpose of creation, his own city showed man at his best, and he himself was among the best of his own city. In such circumstances Æschylus or Dante could take his own joys or sorrows seriously. He could feel that the emotions of the individual matter, and that tragic occurrences deserve to be celebrated in immortal verse. But the modern man, when misfortune assails him, is conscious of himself as a unit in a statistical total; the past and the future stretch before him in a dreary procession of trivial defeats. Man himself appears as a somewhat ridiculous strutting animal, shouting and fussing during a brief interlude between infinite silences."
Any certainly, man's place in the bell curve is not the only problem here, but it is a prominent one, and one that existed before social media, and is almost certainly aggravated by the other problems of social media.
This is it. The social media depression effect is that you're always comparing yourself to the _top_ of the bell curve rather than the middle.
Suppose you have 52 friends who all go on vacation one week out of the year. Every week you will compare yourself to whichever one who is posting their fabulous vacation photos. This doesn't mean you're having a worse life or missing out, you're completely average. You just only notice the 51 comparisons in that direction and don't notice the 51 comparisons during your own vacation week.
Interestingly, I never had this feeling. My reaction was always like: oh, cool, this guy's there, that gal is doing this thing. Or maybe "well, that's a good idea, I'll try it go/there one day."
Maybe because I was aware of what you are saying, that everyone shares their best experiences and moments, and even those in an inflated way and on top of this, FB will find those and make those posts more popular (because people will react to them more strongly). Though thinking about it, I never had this feeling when I've learned about this IRL while I knew some people actually can get envy (i.e. feel bad) when they hear others are doing good or have fun even if they were 100% OK with their situation before hearing that.
I suppose my response to these kind of posts falls somewhere in the middle. Looking at somebody's vacation pictures doesn't make me specifically jealous to them, but it adds to the generalized malaise of being at the tail end of the bell curve. Sure, intellectually you realize you're probably average, but I think it erodes away at your subconscious.
I don't understand. Athens man didn't understand he was going to die and be forgotten? Only modern man is aware that life is a "brief interlude"?
(Not that I think everyone would agree with the infinite silence part.)
Senior (1), I can see your point. The stoics who lived well before Russell certainly did not put a lot of value in the emotions of the person. I'm paraphrasing quite badly here, but Marcus Aurelius said something to the effect of "everything that will happen has already happened, there is nothing special about me, and it's natural for me to die and be forgotten."
I think Russell still paints a valid point, however you're right to think that perspectives were not uniform in the past, nor are they uniform now. I do believe, however, statistical awareness does add a bit more weight to Russell's perspective.
(1)
https://youtu.be/ZISMQ9O3EDQ?t=108
I also don't think Russell was speaking to stoics, but the local, or regional, experts.
There's a common saying, "why be a big fish in a small pond?" It's used mostly to critique an idea that you should reach for something more - competing in a bigger city or bigger stage to better yourself.
Now, the 'pond' is no longer tied to where you live - it follows you everyday on YouTube, Twitter, Blogs, everywhere.
As I think is argued by Russell and everdrive, the pond has become the full connected world and 'opting out' is hard to do... making the regional experts that provide beauty to smaller communities inferior to the common man who sees greatness on the inter webs scrolling through ads.
What's probably worse, I imagine this connection has removed a few potential regional experts drive to spend the hard time working and learning. I fear many of these people could have become one of the real 'greats' - had they retained the little glimmer of 'unfounded confidence' that is washed away with the constant stimulus of other greats.
Finally, I'm not saying all is lost... some thrive in this and view stimuli of the greats as inspirational... but it's definitely not the same skillset that previous generations used to thrive.
I agree. It's an observation on the great flattening.
When I was a kid, the neighbor who knew something about Ham radio was a brilliant expert, the neighbor who made bread was an exceptional baker, and the guy down the street who could paint portraits was a talented artist. Now, compared to all the talents in the world, they were all just competent at best, or even mediocre. In those days, the comparison wasn't visible. Now it's in everyone's face 24x7.
It doesn't mean you can't enjoy the activities. But if you're vested in being the best or even notable, you're now competing on a global scale rather than just your town.
And therein lies the crux of the issue:
> It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the activities. But if you’re vested in being the best or even notable, you’re now competing on a global scale rather than just your town.
So true, and all this becomes sinister when you begin to realize that ‘enjoyment’ comes in many flavors - and lot of enjoyment comes from sharing with others. So when other people say (not you I don’t think), “well you can do X just for the love of doing X,” they miss out on is the response, ‘well yeah, but I want to share it with you, too!’
The kind of cynicism that Russell discusses is also very explicit in the book of Ecclesiastes.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
I the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem.
And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
Definitely worth RTA before comment - at least skip to page 25 for the visual charts. It looks like social media usage may not correlate to depressive symptoms.
Author's conclusion:
This paper finds that social media usage decreases the level of depressive symptoms employing a two-way fixed effects model. Direct information on people’s feelings about using social media also supports that using social media can be beneficial. This result implicates that society may have underestimated the importance and contribution of social media.
There's a lot which can be discussed in terms of what is being measured in this study, and what else might make sense to measure. Or how this study's results compare against other similar studies.
I can only skim the article at the moment. At the risk of commenting without RTA: perhaps this is about how you use it? My wife uses Facebook for coordinating things in the community, coordinating kids play dates, and for just browsing very fluffy random bits of interestingness. She _ruthlessly_ curates her feeds to remove anything political or generally negative. When I look at her feed it bears no resemblance to the toxic wasteland that I see in my feed. It reflects my usage, what engages me, even if it’s for the worse and leaves me feeling gross.
I know a lot of Twitter defenders say "oh just follow the right people" but you don't know they're the right people until you follow them and then when you have to unfollow or add more mute words the damage is already done and you're already thinking about the thing you didn't want to see.
I've muted around 3000 accounts and 200 words, which is a lot when you consider I don't even post on the platform I just read it and still my feed will have political hot takes slip through the cracks.
Twitter has the data, they could put a huge "Politics On/Off" switch in preferences but they choose not to because they know that forcing me to look at politics is both more profitable, ideologically I think they think controlling what political message I see is important too and they're fine with the tradeoff being mental health damage.
I agree. Earlier this year I muted and blocked on Twitter until there was almost nothing left in my feed. And then the ugliness grew up again and I ignored it. Very interestingly late last week my Twitter feed suddenly went from being dominated by ugly political yelling to mostly benign cultural commentary. I was struck by it and wonder if there is an on/off switch that was thrown in order to cool things in the days before the election.
Twitter stopped showing "liked" tweets from people you don't follow on the timeline. It's been an enormously positive change, in my opinion. It also happens to be a change that their users have been requesting for years. But, they have ignored those requests until they felt that this feature might actually hasten the destruction of American democracy. Dragging people into fights with people they've never met is quite good for engagement, as has been endlessly noted. I have no doubt they'll reinstate this feature after the election.
Speaking personally, there are several people I follow who never actually generated real content. Instead they just liked asinine, toxic political takes, which then filled my feed.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/2020-elec...
Every time I visit Twitter, I'm reminded incredibly forcefully why I don't use Twitter. The level of discourse is just so much lower than anything else I see day to day, even major subreddits.
Yep, on Facebook, unfollow is your best friend.
When Trump announced his first campaign in the quaint old days in 2015, I began cleansing my Twitter feed of anyone who switched from nerd stuff to politics. After a couple of months I was left with no one to follow, so I left Twitter entirely. Good riddance!
Hmm I don't unfollow for the occasional politics, but for mindless spam (which could be politics, but not necessarily).
For example, I unfollowed someone who started to post photos of their every meal. And I unfollowed my own mother because she tends to repost every scare "chain letter" that comes across her :)
More and more I think the greatest good that can be done for global society is for someone to just kick the plug out of the wall at Twitter and Facebook.
These aren't critical infrastructure. These aren't even remotely necessary services. They're the box of Sugar Coated Chocolate Bombs on the breakfast table of communications. They add no nutritional value to a person's day. They only exist to foster addiction to serve themselves.
As much as I hate to say this but they are pseudo-critical infrastructure. In some parts of the world Facebook is synonymous with the internet. Here in California during the wildfires it was my experience that twitter gave better emergency notification, both from local municipalities and 'neighbors' than any other source.
As terrible as modern social media culture is, there have been positive effects on the world. Lets not forget things like the Arab Spring which might have not been possible without twitter.
Then again it helps all 'minorities' ranging from BLM to neo-nazis. I'm not sure if total net effect is positive.
It's one of those things where I don't know if the genie can be put back into the bottle. You could reset the clock I guess but it's a fairly easy service (in that there aren't many unknowns) to build back up by someone else with some VC money.
Some people use login with Facebook to authenticate their work / project / hobby sites. When you block them those will become unusable for some people.
Note that the conclusion here is not the typical one. From the abstract, emphasis mine:
I find that using Twitter _decreases_ the level of depressive symptoms by 27%.
Making money by creating ways to make people feel miserable. This is social media effect in general. Most of decision making in social media companies is psychology based. Dark UX patterns are not made by designers, designers only implement. Zuckerberg - He studied psychology and computer science and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi and Kirkland House. Yes social media can be used as a channel for information, but only if individuals are aware of dangers ahead of time and most people aren't. In general: If you consider yourself "Smart and Educated" in 2020 you don't use social media. Period. Online dating? It's suicide and can distort your self perception to unbelievable falsehoods.
Do people that frequent tech sites such as HN really download documents posted on someone’s personal Google Drive?
Facinating
It's not as if hotlinking to a Google Drive file creates any nefarious situation for the owner. It was bad practice to do that on people's personal FTPs, but there's no harm to sharing a Drive file.
Yeah, I see PDF and google drive. Not clicking that.
The empirical findings cannot provide more information on whether this term is positive or negative. There is also no theoretical reason if [complicated equation trying to quantify emotional responses] should be positive or negative. Therefore, it is possible that different studies find different correlations, and the true social media effect is negative.
Why is it that humans think emotional output may quantified by observing sense information alone? It should be self evident that people who use social media "encode" emotional responses in their words, and some do it on purpose to "trigger" others who may not have defenses against the "fake emotional outrage" or other negative emotions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
I would love to see the effect on Big 5 personality traits. I expect Neuroticism goes up substantially.