Must Watch - How Social Media is Destroying Your Life

does the letsrun messageboard count as social media?

i aint drank 40s since i became old enough to drink wrote:

does the letsrun messageboard count as social media?

Yeah exactly. But at least it's more fun than most crap I see on Twitter and IG. Maybe it's just me but IG is nothing but yoga girls spreading their yuyus.

I'd say no because it's far more informal and no identities can be easily tied to a real individual whereas with facebook and IG you have real people who post real life things that are verifiable through photos and videos that can make you feel like your own life sucks. It's very easy to forget Letsrun squabbles after switching the tab whereas with facebook and IG you can't easily forget images of actual events happening in someone's life that you wish were happening in yours.

i aint drank 40s since i became old enough to drink wrote:

does the letsrun messageboard count as social media?

Letsrun is not a microcosm of society whereas facebook and IG definitely are. As in the real world, you cannot fake doing the same events that someone else is doing because the bar is higher and you have to be OFFLINE doing those things. You can't just make stuff up about your life as you can on a messageboard hiding behind a pseudonym.

The Industrial Revolution was a mistake.

How is this any different than the rest of life though? In a given day, I see my neighbor outside with his new grill, my boss drives a really nice car into the work parking lot, the guy on the corner throws an awesome party and always has friends over, a buddy meets me and my wife for dinner with a smoking hot new gf, the guy 2 years older than me beats me in our local 5k.

Everything people are envious of on Facebook happens in real life too. What are you going to do, not participate in life because someone else might be better or have better?

One difference is that after you see your boss's new car in the parking lot during the workday, you can immediately forget about it after you leave the office . Same with seeing people having fun on a casual glance down the street. Whereas with social media you're constantly bombarded with images that are easier to imprint in your head. Any given hour you might receive a notification of a new event on some distant acquaintance's timeline. Or it will appear in your news feed. And this happens 100's of times a week in social media era (depending on how many friends you have on your timeline). Before social media you didn't have a constant reminder of how much your life sucks right in the palm of your hands ready to make you feel inferior.

the platform of life wrote:

How is this any different than the rest of life though? In a given day, I see my neighbor outside with his new grill, my boss drives a really nice car into the work parking lot, the guy on the corner throws an awesome party and always has friends over, a buddy meets me and my wife for dinner with a smoking hot new gf, the guy 2 years older than me beats me in our local 5k.

Everything people are envious of on Facebook happens in real life too. What are you going to do, not participate in life because someone else might be better or have better?

I honestly never cared much about the lives of random people I went to high school with who friended me on facebook...until they friended me on facebook.

TAA wrote:

The Industrial Revolution was a mistake.

The agricultural revolution was a mistake.

Just removing the Like and reaction buttons would solve most of the problems.

bartholomew_maxwell wrote:

Letsrun is not a microcosm of society whereas facebook and IG definitely are. As in the real world, you cannot fake doing the same events that someone else is doing because the bar is higher and you have to be OFFLINE doing those things. You can't just make stuff up about your life as you can on a messageboard hiding behind a pseudonym.

I agree with you but lets not forget there are some countries that employ people to do just that on those platforms - to influence news, trends, to discredit a victim (have you seen the leaked Snowdon files?) and there are factories where people build up profiles to engage in online stirring, it is fairly lucrative.

Social media is the Millennial & Gen Z version of smoking. The mental health issues associated with social media usage are going to end up wreaking havoc like lung cancer did from smoking, and it’s going to be a nasty web to untangle due to the complex nature of mental health.

The human brain is not wired for the hundreds of micro-hits of Dopamine received from likes, comments, etc every day 24 hours a day. There is already study after study showing the destructive nature of social media and it is going to continue to get worse and worse as time wears on.

bartholomew_maxwell wrote:

The key part mentioned in this video is that psychology research goes into the design of these sites to make them as addictive as possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Tq2gvGt80

Your English has improved a lot in the last few days. Amazing progress! Well done!

I watched "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix awhile back, and it disturbed me enough to get off social media completely. I only ever had Facebook, but it was more than enough. Not only have I not missed it, but I now get irritated when my wife wants to show me something on hers. I imagine social media is to blame for a great deal of peoples' excess anxiety.

Post Melon wrote:

Social media is the Millennial & Gen Z version of smoking. The mental health issues associated with social media usage are going to end up wreaking havoc like lung cancer did from smoking, and it’s going to be a nasty web to untangle due to the complex nature of mental health.

The human brain is not wired for the hundreds of micro-hits of Dopamine received from likes, comments, etc every day 24 hours a day. There is already study after study showing the destructive nature of social media and it is going to continue to get worse and worse as time wears on.

It's not exclusively Millennials and Gen Z who are using these sites. 10 years ago Facebook was a young person's domain. Today my parents use it far far more than I do.

For those of you who think this is just a bunch of moral panic, you are welcome to your opinion, but I would suggest that you listen to the podcast Your Undivided Attention from the Center for Humane Technology:

https://www.humanetech.com/podcast

There are so many moving parts and nuances, but let's choose one example - Horse & Buggy to Automobile

The thing that differentiates Social Media from the horse & buggy>automobile is that what we're dealing with in the case of Social Media is more akin to giving F-15 fighter jets to child horse & buggy drivers and expecting them to be okay. Plus, this goes WAY down the brain stem. No one is so addicted to their car that they cannot stop driving for more than a few minutes at a time. And cars are not created specifically to crash into each other. Social Media is designed to create rage and division (sometime intentionally, mostly unintentionally). Rage = $$$

I think certain personality types struggle more with FOMO than other. My biggest issue with social media is the constant advertising. I don’t just mean paid ads. When I was a teenager, It used to be commercials were during breaks in TV shows and you knew what they were. Now advertising has been so slickly woven into social media. There are really smart targeted ads popping up 20x a day, and people I respect and follow demonstrating or recommending products that look interesting. They may be sponsored posts and not even true. I have to be very careful. If I did not use social media, I think about 1/3 of the things I’ve purchased in the last year I would not have bought—because I wouldn’t have even known they existed. Some have made my life better (ie: I started drinking ucan on runs instead of gatorade or nuun, and I much prefer it). Eventually in real life, someone in my running club might have showed up with ucan for me to try, and then I’d have bought it. But social media connected me to it and created the want faster.

i aint drank 40s since i became old enough to drink wrote:

does the letsrun messageboard count as social media?

No, it’s the opposite. When I visit LetsRun I feel way better about myself when I compare myself to the other visitors!