[chihuahua]

I find FB and Instagram so unappealing that there isn't any risk of addiction, for me. The basic idea - sharing pictures and text telling your friends what you're doing - is brilliant, but in practice, most people I know are annoying, and their posts are tedious.

Hacker News, on the other hand, can be slightly addictive, because every time I load the front page, there's a chance there could be something interesting and not groan-inducing.

[avgDev]

I read a lot of books on personal finance, investing and very interested in psychology. I also read medical studies etc.

Facebook is quite interesting. There are few people who I know that are living in misery but are in complete denial. They work really hard on their image and showing off how perfect their family is on facebook. Showing off expensive cars when they are one large bill away from defaulting. I find this fascinating.

Just yesterday one individual had a facebook story, showing the private message she was getting from her friends, that she looks young and so hot etc. It is so bizarre.

[redbell]

> Can [Meta] be sued for its algorithm, or is the content to blame for social media addiction?

Replace [Meta] with [Hacker News] and re-read it again :)

Personally, since I discovered HN about 10 months ago, I have to admit that I got addicted to it in a way that it totally replaced FB and in recent, maybe 60 days, it swallowed my YouTube time as well! Why? Because, every single day I visit HN (or just refresh), I learn something new from the community, whether it's a "spot on" question, an interesting article, some hacker built something cool and "Show HN'ed" it or.. that ”well-thought” comment with some links, otherwise undiscoverable.

Thanks to all of the above and more, HN consumes about 70% of my free online time.

Thank you hackers for this awesome community!

[FollowingTheDao]

In my opinion, the addiction to Facebook is dependent of your oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genetics. It would be similar to the Dopamine 2 receptor (DRD2) genetics link with alcohol addictions.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/could-oxytocin-rec...

http://www.fastcompany.com/1659062/social-networking-affects...

[jwalton]

I’d be happy to know what my friends are doing, but that doesn’t seem to be a service Facebook offers anymore. When I am stupid enough to go load my Facebook feed, it’s about 2/3 ads, 1/3 “recommended for you” posts that I have no interest in, and very rarely something from someone I follow will show up in between, and then half the time it’s someone sharing a news article or a meme instead of actually talking about themselves. The signal to noise ratio for Facebook is essentially zero.