Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2020/02/10/study-facebook-quitters-repor.html <comment><USER2> What gave me the most satisfaction is quitting the news. Incidentally I don't have or use any social media either. Except imgur and sometimes among the funny memes I get news.

But I'm afraid for people I meet who always remind me of all the awful things they've seen in the news. I'm aware of none of this until someone tells me.

And yet my life is the same as everyone elses. Not knowing what is going on, living in a country with a high standard of living and personal safety, doesn't affect me at all.

<comment><USER3> I absolutely understand what you're saying. But part of me feels an obligation to be informed to hold those in power accountable. If everyone follows the advice of avoiding the news, what effect would that have in our Govenment?

<comment><USER4> The problem as I see it is that it is almost impossible to be informed enough to hold people accountable. In the U.S. at least the news is almost always of the form: " Person from party A (which you are a member of) destroys person from Party B". Or, "Party B seeks to destroy Issue C".

There is virtually no nuance in the reporting. There's no dissection. For example, the situation with Syria is quite complicated as Turkey, U.S., Russia, Kurds, and Assad all have conflicting goals and desires. Yet all of the reporting I've seen on this conflict has been absurdly reductionist and used to garner support/hatred toward the party in power by the adherents/adversaries of said party in power.

I understand the desire to have an informed populace but I think that is no longer possible. It is too easy to sway large swaths of the public. Witness the rise of anti-vaxers and other thoughtless beliefs. Even if I tried to be relatively informed it wouldn't matter because the vast majority of the people are not psychologically prepared to withstand the pressure of subtle, sustained propaganda.

I have resigned myself to the fact that the republic is dead in the sense of what the ideal of a republic ought to be. I too avoid news and social media. I don't count this website to be what I call social media since there is no identifying information about myself on here and none of my friends knows about my posts on this website.

<comment><USER5> So read something like The Economist or the paper version of the NYT?

<comment><USER6> The NYT I definitely now class with all the rest. In my opinion The Economist stands alone as the only publication I can trust to be nuanced and informative.

<comment><USER7> I'd say the Economist, Bloomberg, Bellingcat, and fivethirtyeight all have good signal to noise ratios.

<comment><USER8> Bloomberg (the website) is garbage, FT is far better. Bloomberg journalists are compensated for stories that "move markets". Ridiculous.

I would really like a free Bloomberg terminal tho

<comment><USER7> >Bloomberg journalists are compensated for stories that "move markets".

Possibly, but that is fundamentally different from infotainment. Even with that bias, Bloomberg never writes an article which fails to answer the most basic questions one could ask about a given story (unlike most "news" [1]). I also qualify them as decent because they generally report trends not anecdotes. Contrast with your local TV station running 1000 crime stories a week no matter the crime stats.

[1][https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of- human...](https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-effort- one-video-is-worth-a-trillion-dollars)

<comment><USER9> This! Whatever its flaws, the fact that it doesn't share the most pernicious ones of most online news sources counts for something. I refuse to pay to access Bloomberg as long as he is running for President, but it would probably be worth subscribing to otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I open facebook for 2 minutes a week and scroll through my relatives' baby and pet pictures. I don't get how the site is such a specter of misery for some people

Twitter I would understand a little better. It's such a tar pit of negative energy, insults, rage bait, etc

<comment><USER11> I drink one glass of fine red wine once a week while having a nice conversation with a good friend. On other occasions I have a shot of strong brandy before stepping out on a cold winter evening. I don't get how alcohol is such a specter of misery for some people.

<comment><USER12> Similarly: Alcohol quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression, and anxiety

<comment><USER13> Actually, those who drink in moderation are more successful and happy than those who quit.

<comment><USER14> So what you're saying is people without an addiction are happier than people who are addicted? Shocking stuff

<comment><USER13> What I'm saying is that the analogy of alcohol is not helpful.

Social Networking is not inherently toxic, and quitting many things: sugar, television, even meat, might have the similar effects for some small group of people.

In fact, the entire thread is based on three levels of indirection of misinformation: the Bloomberg article misquoted the paper, and the short- summary referencing Bloomberg made it worse.

Here is the summary of the findings [1]:

"We find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use"

So that's a little bit more information now isn't it? And completely conflates the Facebook/wellbeing issue with a host of other things.

Most poignantly, stopping Facebook usage _reduced_ the amount of _factual knowledge_ a person had access too. So maybe that's not so good?

Maybe by 'removing Facebook' people are simply a little bit more removed from the issues of the day (like elections) many of which can be contentious.

So 'ignorance is bliss' is the result of the study? Or is it really something materially related to Social Networking.

I think we'll need to do some more studying to find out.

[] [http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf](http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some steps for making Facebook more manageable:

1\. Deliberately go through and prune your friends list down to people you actually interact with or care about updates from

2\. Any time someone shares something you think is dumb, click on the corner of the post and select "Hide all from <page>". This lets you hide anything your friends share from various meme sites without blocking their legitimate posts

3\. Any time you see an ad for a product you don't care about or don't want to see, click "Hide ad" then it will pop up a dialog and you can select "Hide all ads from <company>"

4\. Go through your "liked" pages and unlike / unfollow any that are irrelevant to you.

I do all of the above and Facebook often just stops loading content for me after the first 20 or so posts.

My wife does none of the above and can easily scroll for an hour without reaching an end to the content.

</comment><comment><USER16> After a friend, who always posted on social media about how great their life was going, suddenly committed suicide, I quit all social media and never looked back. That was two years ago and I don't miss any of it. On social media there is a sort of relentless peer pressure to come across as having a perfect life and I think that's really unhealthy. I have found that having sincere relationships with a few good friends outweighs a bunch of vapid "likes" from a horde of casual acquaintances.

<comment><USER17> I'd say Facebook brings out the Narcissus in all of us. Narcissus was cursed by Nemesis to become a flower.

from wikipedia:

> One day Narcissus was walking in the woods when Echo, an Oread (mountain > nymph) saw him, fell deeply in love, and followed him. Narcissus sensed he > was being followed and shouted "Who's there?". Echo repeated "Who's there?" > She eventually revealed her identity and attempted to embrace him. He > stepped away and told her to leave him alone. She was heartbroken and spent > the rest of her life in lonely glens until nothing but an echo sound > remained of her. Nemesis (as an aspect of Aphrodite[4]), the goddess of > revenge, noticed this behaviour after learning the story and decided to > punish Narcissus. Once, during the summer, he was getting thirsty after > hunting, and the goddess lured him to a pool where he leaned upon the water > and saw himself in the bloom of youth. Narcissus did not realize it was > merely his own reflection and fell deeply in love with it, as if it were > somebody else. Unable to leave the allure of his image, he eventually > realized that his love could not be reciprocated and he melted away from the > fire of passion burning inside him, eventually turning into a gold and white > flower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I haven't logged in to Facebook for about three years. When that 'off-Facebook data we have on you' page was released recently, I worked up the courage* to try to login, see it, and then finally 'delete' my account.

(*I've been slightly concerned that it will be depressing one way or the other, either three years' messages and invitations to things I missed, or little of that! Since I just sort of stopped logging in, I never posted that I wasn't using it for example.)

But I couldn't login. Facebook wanted me to prove my identity by contacting a set of my 'friends' that it chose, and I had no idea who they were. The only other option was to upload a scan of my passport, which felt a bit much considering my only aim was to get off properly and be appalled at the data it already has on me.

<comment><USER19> Completely insane to me that a social networking website wants to see your passport. If that isn't some Gibson-esque cyberpunk dystopian elements creeping into our real world, then I don't know what is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I use FB almost exclusively for news about the Middle East, especially Syria where the Assad regime actively targets journalists who tell the truth about what is happening there and very few Western journalists are going into the areas the regime is bombing. I have vowed to not use FB once the regime is gone, people can gather freely, and real news media can operate openly.

My FB feed is mostly depressing these days, as it is filled with images of (among other things) maimed and murdered children. I can see how avoiding that would probably make me happier and more productive, but FB also helps me stay up to date on amazing humanitarian work being done in liberated areas. I also feel that burying my head in the sand would be a betrayal of my fellow Syrians who have, and still are, sacrificing so that my children as well as theirs won't have to fear state terrorism.

<comment><USER21> One of the benefits of social media is supposed to be transparency, and I believe that. However, isn't it an indictment of global callousness that so many people have seen Assad's destruction of Syria and no one is helping? In fact, Russia's bot armies far outnumber Syrian refugees on Facebook, and they're spreading confusion on the whole situation. They're making it seem like Syria is some sectarian black hole, where no one is innocent, and global action will accomplish nothing. That keeps everyone else out, Russia and Iran in, and leaves Syrians to be genocided day in and day out. More people rallied behind Kony 2012, even though it was a campaign of lies. The American public has been successfully and systematically jaded into glossing over the whole Syrian tragedy.

Facebook is probably a net-negative for Syrians all things considered. Your social network may know the truth of who is committing 98% of the crimes, who invited ISIS/terrorists into Syria, and who is responsible for a modern-day genocide (half a million people erased from existence so far), but unfortunately that's not the case for the vast majority of people.

After Syria is destroyed, the history books will ask: how did we allow that to happen? What happened to Never Again? Social media will be part of the answer. We are reduced to tears when watching a film about Rwanda, and merely confused when hearing about Syria. Dictators love it when you are confused, because truth is their greatest enemy. In a state of confusion, the truth is not fully resolved. Moral clarity is dead. The solution starts with caring strongly about this problem. Only then can we begin to address it.

I would be pleasantly surprised if we're not both downvoted. You have my solidarity. I know how hard it is for you to receive zero empathy, and sometimes even aggression, when speaking the truth of who slaughtered your people and deprived you of your country. Keep telling the truth regardless. Part of the problem (of confusion and jadedness) inadvertently originated in the tech industry, and part of the solution will come from the tech industry. It won't know or care about the issue until victims come forth and make the problem clear. The tech industry needs to hear your voice. Creating a tool that is, on net, an accessory to perpetrators of genocide and manipulators of the public, without fixing it, is very, very problematic. Separately, Youtube is deleting video evidence of the genocide (even though it said it doesn't mean to). Many of the posters of those videos are no longer alive, or not in a situation where they can raise a dispute with Youtube. That is perfectly legal, and almost noone knows or cares.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

FACEBOOK, GOOGLE, are you listening? A GENOCIDE is going on. Facebook, your platform is being leveraged by the perpetrators of genocide as a modern-day Pravda of epic proportions. Google/Youtube, you are continuing to delete critical video evidence of the genocide from your servers forever even though activists put you on notice. Help.

<comment><USER22> The US had a moment to help when the Free Syrian Army existed in the first year or so of the conflict. For some reason, our leaders had cold feet and allowed our natural ally to be wiped out.

The UN was hamstrung by Russia and China's veto power.

No smaller power was willing to take on Russia in a proxy war.

<comment><USER21> Even beyond militaristic action, there are so many low hanging fruit that weren't picked. It took until 2019 to sanction any appreciable number of people in the Syrian regime. Many relatives and employees of the Syrian regime are happily flying back and forth between Damascus and Europe. Their illicit assets are safely parked in foreign bank accounts. They're sending their kids to LA and San Francisco, buying $2M homes with straight cash and going to the best private schools. Severe sanctions should have hit anyone even remotely involved with the Syrian government as soon as it became clear how many innocent people were going to be killed. Foreign assets should have been seized as damages to be distributed to the Syrian people in the future.

<comment><USER22> Sure, but I find these sorts of sanctions to be ineffective at the stated goals of preventing killings, etc. And Russia and China, at least, were not planning to participate, leaving a wide open avenue. The UNSC couldn't pass sanctions because of their vetoes.

<comment><USER21> America and Europe can only be hamstrung by Russia's veto if they allow that to happen. There are many global measures that could have helped the Syrian people outside of any action by the UN Security Council. Nonetheless, I agree with you that America left a void of leadership, and that allowed Russia to walk in unimpeded. The Syrian people were about to oust their dictator until Russia came in with reinforcements. My point is, America wouldn't have even needed to send in the Air Force. The most important course of action would have been to prevent Russian entry. That could entail a guarantee that "if Russia or Iran enters Syria, we will create a civilian safe zone using the Air Force." The safe zone would have both saved civilian life and protected the FSA from aerial bombardment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> FB FOMO is a such an issue for myself. I remind myself that no one has a perfect life but nonetheless, I find myself driven to inspect profiles of people I admire, only to be horrified when I realize how much younger, but still more successful, they are than myself, or they do more interesting work, or are paid more, or live in a more appealing city, or take nicer vacations or inhabit more attractive bodies.

It's perfect recipe for feeling inadequate. I console myself by knowing someone is lurking my profile, thinking the same thing.

<comment><USER24> I am glad you shared your personal experience. Quite refreshing to read (even if it's a negative experience) in a thread that usually gathers a gazillion of people who "don't understand what's wrong, I use it only in an healthy way: for events and keeping in touch with friends/family a continent away".

<comment><USER23> FB has 2 barbs which are quite painful when deployed together: 1) The cheap and easy social validation of the "like" and 2) The observation of other people's status-seeking, which invalidates our own.

It's much like a drug- if you can use it responsibly, that's great. But we are just animals and all too often we gradually use FB more and more as a dopamine trigger. Often, this is in the form of edgy memes, angry politics, soft-core porn or just status-seeking. Add some FOMO to the mix and you will assuredly feel pretty crummy.

The FB like button is such an insanely powerful feedback mechanism. I never would have thought, 15 years ago, that such a simple thing could take over people's minds so completely. But it's becoming abundantly clear that not only is FB playing to our weakness, they are playing us against each other. In the scramble for likes, we obsessively refresh our pages. Likes cost FB nothing but the chase for them leads its users to churn in circles, all the while generating ad revenue and which finally resolves itself as Zuckerberg's 18th mansion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder, have fb quitters stopped using all social media? Have they also stopped visiting news websites?

My point is, is Facebook the only negativity inducing platform? I know for me it isn't. The question is how do you deal with the rest of them? Do you balance news intake against the impact on your mental health or you stop consuming news entirely, because in the end whatever it's set to happen will happen regardless?

<comment><USER26> Personally I've changed to leveraging social media to pursue my work and some specific interests. No friends or family.

HN for stay current in my industry.

A very curated Twitter via a third party client for following specific tech creators.

No FB, IG or Reddit. No keeping up with the Jones's or lusting after others lives.

If I want to talk to someone I make a habit of doing it regularly. I text friends and family at least once a week just to say hi. I attempt to maintain my relationships actively instead of the passive "likes" you can send through social media.

<comment><USER27> This seems backwards to me. FB is exclusively friends and family. Those are people I am close to. Why would that drive "keeping up with the Joneses"? Wouldn't following some celebrity or athlete or something drive jealousy more than following friends?

On Twitter, I've attempted to follow industry experts and "special interests" but it seems exclusively about people who I _thought_ would provide insight into that special interest, saying mundane or inflammatory shit.

Maybe it's down to different personality types, but if I'm going to see random shit, I'd rather see it from people I know and love, than from someone I've never met lusting after engagement clicks.

<comment><USER28> > wouldnt following a celebrity drive more jealousy?

No. The whole premise for the keeping up with Joneses are that you know them well. They love in your neighborhood, they have similar jobs, etc. The phycological lie is that based on some things you _should_ be able to keep up. Whereas with celebreties, you know that what they have in unachievable. They have so much you dont. The joneses are just like you, but with that one new thing. And then the next thing. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> the new is interesting however the article is just a quote from another article and a study. It ends up not pointing out any valuable information, like what are the underlying mechanisms. Basically a copycat to get free visitors traffic.

Questions I wish there were answered: is it about anxious browsing? anxious goshipping? compare oneself to others? compulsive procrastination? does it apply to other social networks, is it related to general screen time or just mindless consuming? would movies and stronger leisure activities have a similar effect or just compulsive social network browsing and the mental drain of feeling like comparing to others?

EDIT: spell and formating

<comment><USER30> > "stronger leisure activities"

I would be curious about this part, namely in sporting activities where the participants are considered "lower-performers". I would also like to see some connection to other psychological studies like Fixed/Growth Mindsets. Someone with a fixed mindset may show more life satisfaction quitting than a growth mindset person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm fairly well convinced that I'm going to quit FB soon'ish. The main thing stopping me is that either A. the replacement "thing" I want doesn't exist yet, or B. it does, and I'm just not aware of it.

Given that I have some pretty specific ideas in mind regarding what I want to use instead of FB (think "self hosted blog" but with some very particular details) I don't know that the exact thing I want exists yet, and I don't really have time to create it myself. At least not unless it just natively "falls out" of work I'm doing anyway, which it may well do. I just don't know when that'll be.

<comment><USER32> Have you considered just using FB messenger @ messenger.com? You can log in with your email address instead of your Facebook account. You can also use it while your Facebook account is deactivated (I deactivated mine). No news feed, no ads, just conversations.

Not associated with Facebook, just a happy Messenger user.

<comment><USER31> Not really, because I have an ideological aversion to closed off / walled- garden protocols like that. Part of what my switch away from the whole FB/Twitter/Etc. thing is going to be going back to mainly using XMPP for chat. And anybody who can't, or won't, join an XMPP network and use an XMPP client is somebody I don't need to chat with.

<comment><USER33> You might like PixelFed ([https://pixelfed.social/](https://pixelfed.social/)) it's a completely open sourced project based on federation.

<comment><USER31> I'll check that out. Something based around Fediverse integration / open standards / open protocols is definitely a big part of what I want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> FB is the new cigarette.

But it's the 1940s & we're being told by big tobacco that maybe all of these symptoms aren't correlated.

Narrator: They were.

I'm trying to build something new from the ground up using a pull-based model + intimate groups of people you care about. Would love early beta testers that are parents of young ones: [https://trypersona.com](https://trypersona.com)

</comment><comment><USER35> Facebook is still the best way to get people to gather. I have recently started a fan club for a soccer group, and without Facebook it would have been impossible to organize. No other social media platform addresses that need, that I know of, that has a massive reach to get people with common interests. Organizing events and reaching people is made much easier.

</comment><comment><USER36> Could be an example of the Hawthorne effect - observing any behavior increases performance in that behavior: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect).

Also, it's amazing the kind of site HN will upvote if it confirms their priors. This site is the most spammy looking thing, and it does not link to the original study like it claims (both links lead to a totally separate article).

<comment><USER37> Do.. you not know what Boing Boing is? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boing_Boing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boing_Boing)

<comment><USER36> I know its a three paragraph article with two broken links, on a page with 10 ads, and a spammy looking zoomed in photo of Mark Zuckerberg.

<comment><USER38> You take things at face value without pretense. Please have many offspring, it's not a very common trait.

If facebook as it is today was presented to people today for the first time, they also may have come to the same conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> (1) This article is pretty low-quality, and provides no sources for anything. It certainly sounds plausible enough, but still...

(2) Assuming that this is true for Facebook, I'm pretty sure the same result would hold true for any other social media site for short-form content (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc).

(3) I'm LESS sure about sites for sharing longer-form writing, such as Reddit and HN. I suspect that the effect is not as stark, but that it does hold true to SOME extent whenever you have the gamification of upvotes and downvotes.

</comment><comment><USER40> Rather than going cold turkey on Social Media, I've found it more effective to reduce the amount of content I'm exposed to e.g. for Facebook unfollowing all groups, turning off all notifications, reducing friends; for Instagram unfollowing almost all accounts And turning off all notifications etc.

This has the effect that when I DO inevitably visit these sites, I spend far less time there and it's much less entertaining since I reach the "bottom" much quicker.

Over time I've been able to wean myself off.

<comment><USER38> Facebook has a bottom? I deactivated my account never having reached it. What's it look like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm considering quitting Facebook, and am currently using their feature that lets you temporarily deactivate your account. I'm trying it out for a few days to see how comfortable I am living without it. So far, no downsides. I'm going to keep using this feature until I am ready to pull the plug for good.

</comment><comment><USER42> Quitting Facebook wasn't difficult. I had nothing of value from it by the end.

Quitting Instagram also wasn't difficult.

Sadly quitting WhatsApp is proving very difficult as it is used by so many (at least here in Europe).

I use Signal with most family members now but when I meet someone new and we exchange contact details it is always "you're on WhatsApp yes?" and never anything else.

To be fair WhatsApp does work well and as far as I know is still end-to-end encrypted so I do not think Facebook are mining my messages but I could be wrong.

It does bring me to the question of how WhatsApp is making money for Facebook or how they plan to monetise it without destroying it. A secure messaging platform is quite different to a trashy public social media platform like facebook.com.

<comment><USER43> WhatsApp shares some metadata about your conversations with Facebook, which is used by Facebook to show you ads or show your contacts on Facebook ads.

There was a plan to shove ads into WhatsApp statuses, but that was abandoned (or maybe suspended for the near future) recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm predisposed to believe this is true... But I can't find a link to any evidence or research in the OP, which is a fluffy piece with little actual content. I'm flagging the OP unless someone posts a link to either evidence or higher quality content.

<comment><USER45> The first link mistakenly pointed to the Bloomberg article when it was meant to point to this: [https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf)

Some takeaways:

Deactivation reduced (political) polarization:

"The Treatment group was less likely to say they follow news about politics or the President, and less able to correctly answer factual questions about recent news events. Our overall index of news knowledge fell by 0.19 standard deviations. There is no detectable effect on political engagement, as measured by voter turnout in the midterm election and the likelihood of clicking on email links to support political causes. Deactivation significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news. Deactivation did not statistically significantly reduce affective polarization (i.e. negative feelings about the other political party) or polarization in factual beliefs about current events, although the coefficient estimates also point in that direction. Our overall index of political polarization fell by 0.16 standard deviations. As a point of comparison, prior work has found that a different index of political polarization rose by 0.38 standard deviations between 1996 and 2018 (Boxell 2018)."

Deactivation increased "well-being" by about 20-40% the amount you'd expect for someone getting therapy:

"Deactivation caused small but significant improvements in well-being, and in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety. Effects on subjective well-being as measured by responses to brief daily text messages are positive but not significant. Our overall index of subjective well-being improved by 0.09 standard deviations. As a point of comparison, this is about 25-40 percent of the effect of psychological interventions including self-help therapy, group training, and individual therapy, as reported in a meta-analysis by Bolier et al. (2013). These results are consistent with prior studies."

<comment><USER44> Thank you. That link should be the OP. Mods?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> From the title I initially wasn't sure if this would be about people who quit using Facebook becoming happier, or people who quit working there. Anecdotally both are true among my peer group :)

</comment><comment><USER47> Unfortunately I can't quit Facebook because it's the only way to know people from the other sex. I tried Tinder for a couple of months and it didn't work for me. My assumption is that people feel safer to interact with you if you have friends in common. That's said, I don't use Facebook that often, if I start talking with someone and we enjoy each other company, I kindly ask if we can use WhatsApp and if so, I will stop using Facebook for a period of time.

</comment><comment><USER48> I quit Facebook (+ hipstagram + Snapchat) 2 years ago and deffo report better life satisfaction.

Well Snapchat was accidental quit. They made an app update and the app never launched again. I tried opening it several times and it crashed every time. Snapchat really needs to work on quality control and user experience.

I use WhatsApp to stay in touch with my family groups which are located all over the world. I really wished WhatsApp didn't sell to Facebook and remained independent.

</comment><comment><USER49> Yup.

I hopped back on Facebook in 2012, and it quickly became the nexus of my online life. I started to get wrapped into how I maintained my presence, the kinds of witty things that would make it as posts, the banners and profile pics, and I was always hoping to see a double digit number in the red notification bubble. It all peaked in early 2017 where I was wrapped up in some political ideological battle and I just said "fuck it" and left. Deleted it and didn't think about it.

There were a couple hours at first where I thought I was losing a connection to the world and my friends, but that cold feeling vanished a day later. I felt like I had gotten time back, I felt free.

For all of that, I still putt around on Twitter but that scratches a different itch and I never seem to be consumed by it.

</comment><comment><USER50> I deleted my Facebook account and feel the same as the study: I wish I had done it years earlier.

</comment><comment><USER51> As an aside, if anyone has any unusual things that you have done that have helped with depression, please mention them. I've done the usual route of therapy and meds but that didn't help with my depression or suicidal thoughts. Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER52> Not sure if you're open to controlled substances, psychedelics in particular, but LSD has been the singular thing that has really made an impact on my depression (and I've gone thru the usual round of therapy/medication/etc). Ten years ago I had a serious suicide attempt. I'm happier and healthier than ever now, and I credit a lot of what helped me to LSD. Happy to chat about this more if any body has any questions, but otherwise I find Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind an excellent introduction to psychedelic therapy (although his experience focuses predominantly on psychedelic mushrooms, there's a lot in common as they do have similar but different effects on the brain).

It's important to note that LSD or any psychedelic therapy isn't a cure-all. It's more like an accelerated, intense meditative/therapeutic state that allows you to reflect upon your life in a way that doesn't involve the ego- center of your brain. I highly recommend everyone to try it as it offers a way to introspect on yourself that is pretty difficult to achieve in normal life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> FB is mostly a tool for evil but it's got some amazing parenting resources. On the evil side you have the anti-vax nutters but you also have supportive parent groups for whatever weird disorder/issue/disease/problem your kid might have where the evidence-based stuff is winning out. Global scale organizing of these resources is a net benefit for sure.

I suppose 10 years ago they would have been on yahoo groups. 10 years before that, mailing lists. Now they're on FB and I guess that's alright if you don't mind FB knowing everything about your kids problems.

So yeah FB still evil warmongers against privacy but its power to organize moms does some little bit of good in this world.

<comment><USER54> Is that a net benefit, though? Couldn't those communities re-organize onto platforms that don't harm democracy and rationality? On the one hand, anti- vaxxers have caused a lot of damage, and FB aided in that; on the other hand, FB in general has taken revenue and power from those groups, and do we want FB to have more or less power?

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I quit about a month or two ago. I'm not sure if I am happier or not, mostly because everyone around me is still on it (including my wife). So perhaps there is a bit of FOMO going on. I think I would be happier if everyone I knew quit.

</comment><comment><USER56> Most people decide to quit because they feel Facebook is a threat to these. I know some people have left Facebook because of privacy concerns, but I feel that has a correlation with anxiety. I know anxiety encompasses more than just privacy as well. But if you feel your privacy is threatened, you will experience some degree of anxiety.

So these results should come as no surprise. If they didn't experience any of these benefits, why would they not join Facebook again? What other reasons do people who have left Facebook remain off of Facebook without these reasons?

This article feels tautological.

</comment><comment><USER57> I deactivated my Facebook, don't use Messenger, barely use Instagram. Snapchat is just an archive for old photos/videos. Twitter is a few times a week. Reddit is a few times a day.

Notice more contentment, more focus, less anxiety, less noise. Technology is great for creativity, productivity, learning and entertainment. I prefer to hang out with people, be out in nature or explore a new city.

</comment><comment><USER58> I am enjoying having my time and my headspace back from worries about anything transpiring therein, with a side helping of solace knowing that any data once ago provided is aging unto irrelevance.

</comment><comment><USER40> Rather than going cold turkey, I've found it much more effective to find ways to reduce my engagement e.g by turning off notifications for all platforms, unfollowing friends, groups etc.

I've significantly reduced my Social media usage using this because I'm no longer tempted to scratch the itch of a notification, and when I do visit, there's far less content so I'll almost always reach the bottom' now. I basically no longer use Facebook because I've made it barren for myself and significantly reduced time spent on Instagram.

</comment><comment><USER59> Funny, I left Facebook yesterday. It got too much as I was connected with many of my customers/users and it was just mayhem. It was extremely complex for me to get off Facebook because our website "Login with Facebook", advertising, pages, etc all are connected to my account, so I couldn't simply destroy the account itself or risk locking out hundreds of thousands of people from our platform and apps. I manually unfriended 2000 people (which surprisingly didn't take too long).

</comment><comment><USER60> I'd really like to quit Facebook but I'm holding out for three reasons:

a) Facebook Chat is a way to get a hold of friends or vice versa. SMS is often slow (less of a sense of urgency I guess), and not everyone has my number or even use SMS.

b) The network effect. It's a great way for introverts such as myself to get in contact with someone without the "what's your number?" question.

c) Events. If I didn't have Facebook I would probably not know about them.

How do introverts who quit Facebook get over these obstacles?

<comment><USER52> I quit. I'm an introvert :)

a) You can quit Facebook without quitting Messenger. I did this for a while before pulling the plug immediately.

b) Honestly, quitting Facebook made it pretty clear to me what social circle I (and those within it) seriously wanted to maintain, and who didn't exist in that. This is not to shade on the people outside of this circle, by the way! We only have a limited number of seats at our proverbial table. My closest friends quickly switched to SMS for me. I have more time for them now that my Messenger list isn't filled with people for whom I only have a vague relationship with (this is also more of an indicator of the type of friends I had on Facebook, which may not apply to you).

c) Depends on what kind of events you like, but I've found text/mailing lists/curated apps to be more helpful than Facebook's deluge of events. I do get invited to less birthday parties, but I've never enjoyed those anyways. I much prefer an intimate dinner over a large group gathering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> The overwhelming theme of social media is propagating envy. Look at this amazing vacation, look at how handsome I am, look at this happy family with baby and wedding photos, look at all my money, look at me landing a great job, look we just bought a beautiful new house.

How can one be content with your own life if you're constantly comparing yourself to everyone else. Removing images and video might go a long way.

<comment><USER62> Also, adding some degree of anonymity. It's much easier to delight in a story/post where there's less orientation of the story to an attention-hungry identity and less social pressure on friends to 'like' and so forth. Not that anonymous social forums are without problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I think equating fb to other social media misses the point. It's specifically the privacy violations, whether indirect (people reporting they can no longer make their profiles unsearchable, or posts they thought were private suddenly surfacing) or direct (like "your friend just commented on this post"). None of this can be turned off. Do they not ever think? Use their heads?

</comment><comment><USER64> It seems that throughout history, we've discovered things that were exciting and hyped only to later realize that the addictiveness was damaging for society, leading us to regulating it (or attempting to do so).

I wonder if what we're going through right now with social media will look irresponsible and quaint the way smoking does in Mad Men at some point in the future.

</comment><comment><USER65> True for me, 1 year+ of no fb or insta. Feel so much better than before and I didn't even realize I had anxiety until it disappeared

</comment><comment><USER66> According to my phone I spend about 5-10 minutes a week on all social media combined (with YouTube being the big outlier, but I watch mostly on the TV now).

FB, IG, Twitter, Snapchat… I check them once a week, if that. I think I only keep FB around for some SSO stuff and a few API integrations that I use for work.

About two years ago I went all out and just turned off notifications for _everything_. Not just social media, but news, email, and even text messaging. I have a favorites list that has a few contacts on it that I let through and for emergencies and stuff like that, but in general my phone doesn't do _anything_ unless I receive a call from someone on my contact list. And I guess calendar reminders and bank notifications.

It's awesome.

I get a print version of The Economist once a week. I catch up on the news via podcasts on the weekend or when I feel like it. I probably spend a few hours a week between HN, reddit and The Verge but that's about it. Everything is on my terms and I'm never going back.

You don't realize how terrible everything is for you until you get rid of it all and then you start to wonder why you even bothered with that shit in the first place. IMO notifications just need to go away completely. Unless it's an emergency of some kind there really is no reason why you need notifications in your life.

</comment><comment><USER67> I think your experience with FB has a lot to do with whom you have on your "friends list".

I only have about 200, most of whom don't post much. Of those who post a lot of political stuff I have a fairly good mix so I see a lot of that but I don't get all heated up over it.

A lot of great and funny stuff comes up on my feed so I have a lot of fun with it.

</comment><comment><USER68> I mean there is no point quitting Facebook to spend all your time on Twitter or Instagram either... They are objectively as bad, especially Twitter which is 24/7 of nonsense and petty drama and people yelling at each other or organizing virtual lynch mobs...

Facebook as a way to keep in touch with close friends, as a private family network is fine.

</comment><comment><USER69> I confirm. Facebook stopped properly working for me today: I use it mostly on a smartphone via a mobile Firefox, and it stopped showing more than 4 lines of text in every post, drawing a non-working 'more' link at the end of line four. So, I decided not to report the issue because I feel myself much happier without Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER70> I quit facebook and it improved my relations with my friends and my outlook on life. I also am in less of a bubble.

</comment><comment><USER71> Even if Facebook/Twitter didn't make me less happy or turn me into a person I didn't want to be, I would have quit them for the sheer opportunity cost of time spent on them that my long-term self would rather be spending on other things. (Obviously could apply to HN as well haha.)

</comment><comment><USER72> Facebook kinda tops out as you get older and the rate of adding new friends declines. Turns out most people are doing variations of the same thing and it gets dull fast (admittedly maybe I need more interesting friends).

Twitter is novelty and Instagram is aesthetics. Facebook is reruns of the same ol' show.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think the first link mistakenly pointed to the Bloomberg article when it was meant to point to this: [https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf)

Some of the interesting points from the paper:

1\. Deactivation reduced (political) polarization:

"The Treatment group was less likely to say they follow news about politics or the President, and less able to correctly answer factual questions about recent news events. Our overall index of news knowledge fell by 0.19 standard deviations. There is no detectable effect on political engagement, as measured by voter turnout in the midterm election and the likelihood of clicking on email links to support political causes. Deactivation significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news. Deactivation did not statistically significantly reduce affective polarization (i.e. negative feelings about the other political party) or polarization in factual beliefs about current events, although the coefficient estimates also point in that direction. Our overall index of political polarization fell by 0.16 standard deviations. As a point of comparison, prior work has found that a different index of political polarization rose by 0.38 standard deviations between 1996 and 2018 (Boxell 2018)."

2\. Deactivation increased "well-being", by about 20-40% the amount you'd expect for someone getting therapy:

"Deactivation caused small but significant improvements in well-being, and in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety. Effects on subjective well-being as measured by responses to brief daily text messages are positive but not significant. Our overall index of subjective well-being improved by 0.09 standard deviations. As a point of comparison, this is about 25-40 percent of the effect of psychological interventions including self-help therapy, group training, and individual therapy, as reported in a meta-analysis by Bolier et al. (2013). These results are consistent with prior studies."

3\. After the experiment ended, people in the treatment group didn't feel like they needed to go back:

"As the experiment ended, participants reported planning to use Facebook much less in the future."

"About 80 percent of the Treatment group agreed that the deactivation was good for them."

</comment><comment><USER73> My problem is these are my escapes. If I don't use them then I do not know what else to do with my time.

<comment><USER74> A very good point. And we can't really say for sure if _you_ would have a better experience, should you decide to give it up.

I like the idea of providing people with more contextual and appropriate psychological support than just "hey look, some evidence that it can be a good idea to quit."

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> In my humble opinion, there are 2 types of people who use facebook:

1\. The show offs who want to share every little detail about their every little thing in life.

2\. People who want to keep tabs on their family/friends occasionally.

I started as #1 back in 2004 when fb was still early on and slowly graduated to #2.

<comment><USER76> You forgot 1 other nasty group: those who feel better by judging others. You won't see them post or comment, but they will judge everyone behind their back.

I've see several cases like this from up close, including one extravagant girl (who wasn't doing anything wrong, just posting a lot), that basically cut out her entire family so she could post without all the gossiping.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I almost quit FB (almost only business) and I'm spending more time on HN :-)

Basically I know less about my friends living far from me but they are second/third tier friends anyway: the time spent together in real life is what matters.

</comment><comment><USER78> I am clocking about 10 years w/out FB. Not on whatsapp and all that other stuff. I'm quite happy & when folks ask me how to get in touch, My standard reply is SMS/Phone or Face2face :)

</comment><comment><USER79> I deleted my FB account like 2 years ago? Never looked back. Unfortunately, I still see way too many people around me still using it. Have little faith on masses quitting the service.

</comment><comment><USER80> Knew a bunch of people who simply didn't hear about events anymore, after they left FB.

If you don't inform yourself via other channels, this can get grimm pretty quick.

</comment><comment><USER81> There are just a couple places using it to schedule stuff these day. I'm not sure how to get away from that.

I can't believe none of my 200 friends post anything anymore.

</comment><comment><USER82> The most toxic platform out there is Twitter. Every time I log in I see series of hate tweets we all have for each other, policies,race, celebrities.

</comment><comment><USER83> Someone needs to come up with a single-player social media website that helps people be alone. At the very least it would be a hilarious social commentary.

</comment><comment><USER84> 1\. Unfollow everyone

2\. follow pages and groups that interest you

3\. LAUGH at the comments of idiots that get their kicks out of life by vomiting non-nense.

The future of Facebook looks a lot like the old AOL.

</comment><comment><USER85> I deleted my Facebook account about 2 years ago (created a new Messenger-only account for a handful of ongoing chats). I have never regretted this step.

</comment><comment><USER86> For those that believe access to Facebook is a human right, does the idea that Facebook might be physiologically unhealthy factor into that reasoning?

</comment><comment><USER87> Can verify.

Human are weird animals. We get anxiety looking at others doing good. Maybe we are just really really mean.

Though most of the doing good is just on the surface

</comment><comment><USER88> Quitters of just about _any_ harmful habit will report all that. This doesn't mean that FB is harmful to everyone or even to a substantial fraction of its users. It's just that people who feel it is harmful for them are much more likely to "quit" it, and report improvement when they do. I bet people who just started to use FB also report more life satisfaction and less depression and anxiety. They made a change they felt they needed to make, in both cases.

</comment><comment><USER89> Does anyone have a link to the study PDF? (Boing Boing's PDF link erroneously points to the Bloomberg article.)

</comment><comment><USER90> This is only true if you quit all social media. I started using Twitter for 1 specific topic and now it's all back.

</comment><comment><USER91> The reverse happened to me. I got more depression and anxiety. So, I joined Facebook again after 3 months.

</comment><comment><USER92> As a Facebook quitter, I can confirm.

</comment><comment><USER93> I often forget I even had a facebook. There really is just zero value add to my life from that website.

<comment><USER94> I used to subscribe to the idea that facebook helped you stay close to friends and family. But the issue is most of the friends and family who I want to hear from and wants to hear from me have too much going on to really be active. So the remainder of facebook is peripheral contacts who think that by posting someone's else content (a meme, a political thought, a call to action, whatever) it's somehow valuable to everyone else. I hear marketplace is useful and is supplanting craigslist. But when I look at it, it's full of off-site ads for products I have no interest in buying. Very little of it is actual neighbor to neighbor legitimate items for sale. I deleted the app from my phone over a year ago and haven't really missed it. More importantly, I really fail to see the value that facebook provides.. can you imagine if they'd really pitched to VC's what they've become they'd ever been funded in the first place? "Hi, we are going to attract users who used to forward email spam to all their contacts in the CC line and give them a place online to collect all their BS on one convenient place and then we're going to market all sorts of crap at them."

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> I've recently withdrawn from email, Internet and TV for a while. I'm currently reconnecting.

My main observation is that I'm happy getting back onto the things where I exert some control. Those with little control are harder to stomach:

1\. TV news is one of the hardest. I can silence the adverts but the news itself is a horror. In most "items" I see blatant political manipulation, viciousness without apparent reason, ignorance and stupidity so deep that I'm dumbfounded. So much propaganda and disinformation. Can't find any channel that is much good, not controllable. (Also newspapers, for them add plenty of hysteria.)

2\. eMail has also proved surprisingly hard. The hard part is all the spam. (I don't use surveillance capitalist mail servers, run my own.) I decided to go through my spam traps first. So much utter rubbish that it's put me off. Outnumbers the good stuff even after automated pre-winnowing. Would be better if I could find a way to retaliate effectively against those who pay for spam.

3\. Facebook is quite easy. I have a number of measures in place that put my content under my own control. Not that hard to get back into. (Though I find more people, a lot, are using it less and bailing out altogether as time goes on. It's dying.)

4\. Twitter is dead easy. You choose who you follow. That gives you a lot of control, so can be pleasant to use.

5\. The Internet (WWW) in general is not too bad. I have a variety of tools to control and exclude those who want to watch everything I do. Gives me control.

My take away: The media you can control can be rewarding and worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER96> Sounds like confirmation bias to me.

</comment><comment><USER97> Left Facebook 4 maybe 5 years ago now can't remember. No instagram no snap no WhatsApp.

</comment><comment><USER98> It's shocking to see people call Reuters, NPR and NYTimes unbiased. They are biased.

</comment><comment><USER99> What happens in your real life is still 10-100x more influential in how you feel.

</comment><comment><USER100> i'm waiting for my facebook account to be deleted in a week and the only anxiety i have now...is waiting for it to be gone. it's toxic. i'm much more at peace letting facebook go.

</comment><comment><USER101> Whatsapp growth is off the charts - that's the vertical to attack IMO.

</comment><comment><USER102> Twitter is far more addictive for me, and makes me feel worse.

</comment><comment><USER103> I like looking at my friends pictures on Facebook. But I never understood why I would post any pictures myself. I don't understand the upside. Even my profile photo is blank.

</comment><comment><USER104> I sincerely hope people at FB come to the realization that they can do something powerful to dramatically change the world IF they are willing to forgo the money.

</comment><comment><USER105> Now i am addicted to hacker news instead.

</comment><comment><USER106> When Facebook pays me for my supplied content I would think about going back. But I am not interested in making someone else rich using my data.

</comment><comment><USER107> Can relate, I haven't missed it a bit.

<comment><USER108> Ditto. From my experience and assumptions by many media I've seen, people tend to post the best of what is going on in their lives to social media. Subsequently, not seeing the bad or mundane in comparison to oneself, causes anxiety. There are many other aspects to the social media that might affect life satisfaction. Time spent on the platform rather than being productive is one that comes to mind.

<comment><USER109> Unfortunately, I can't say the same. I quit FB a month ago, and sadly not a single "friend" has emailed me or phone called me since then asking "yo, what's up dude?"

<comment><USER108> If you are upset with the way they treat you, then perhaps you should reconsider your relationship. Have you contacted them? I personally go years without speaking to some of my friends and pick up right where we left off. It feels like there has been no time gap. I do not put much stock in friendship. It would not be upsetting to me if none of my friends contacted me ever again. You may not be the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> People who follow through with major decision report higher satisfaction, says new groundbreaking study.

</comment><comment><USER111> "Facebook is designed to make you anxious, depressed and dissatisfied"

Really? _Designed?_ Come on.

<comment><USER112> Well, it's designed to capture eyeballs; and those are definitely mechanisms to capture eyeballs.

<comment><USER113> If I understood it correctly that's what our parent was implying.

A dike is designed to keep water away and, as a side effect, blocks the ocean view. It would be misleading to say that a dike is designed to block the view, as it misrepresents the builders intention to fit a specific narrative.

If we'd explain dikes that way to someone who does not know the concept, they would assume that dike builders have to be very evil.

Which is pretty unfair, given that if we had better ways of building dikes that - everything else equal - don't block the view, everyone would probably build those instead.

I think that such a deliberate misrepresentation reveals the authors agenda and their willingness to be intellectually dishonest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER114> Facebook and Instagram

</comment><comment><USER115> I second that.

</comment><comment><USER116> It all started with being sick of being presented with walls of negative stuff (usually political, all sides) every time I went into FB. Not wanting to see that crap I started to put people on 30 day holds. I eventually decided that if I had to put someone on 30 day hold three times in a row I should unfriend them. And that is exactly what happened with a number of people.

After several of those cycles I asked myself a very simple question: Why?

That's when I unfriended everyone except close family (a little over a dozen people). I can now derive some value from FB.

I have a long list of things FB should do to actually be more useful. One of the things that always bothered me was that they force you to toss everyone into one big pile and everyone on that pile is exposed to everything you say and do. Yes, sure, you can group friends and explicitly post to a limited subset. Frankly, the implementation absolutely sucks and is a pain in the ass to use.

The model needs to change to everything being absolutely private and not farmed or captured by FB unless the user chooses to open doors beyond that.

There is no reason for my friends from the gym should have any visibility into my family and my conversations with my family. The same applies to work friends or neighborhood friends. You can accomplish this today but the UX/UI are absolute garbage. A user needs to be able to put people into silos and the software needs to enforce privacy between silos by default. It should take work to pierce silo boundaries. Again, no reason for someone's bowling club members to ever see conversations with family.

I had a case with a friend of a friend who would snap tons of pictures whenever he got invited to a gathering at my house. He would proceed to post all of these pictures publicly on FB --as in anyone in the world could see them. I am not paranoid, but I don't want pictures of my kids, home and family all over the internet for everyone to see. If you are not a parent (and, in particular, if you don't have daughters, you might not get this). I asked this guy twice, politely, not to do that. I explained that taking pictures of people in a private residence does not entitle him to post them for the world to see without permission. I eventually had to pay an attorney to give him a call and get it sorted.

Another interesting issue with FB happens when your friends post stuff from publications you do not care to see on your timeline. They offer the ability to block some people and pages, but there are a few holes in that. I don't remember the details. All I know is that I kept being exposed to garbage from a couple of people and the only way to not see it was to suspend them for 30 days or unfriends them. I eventually just unfriended them. I reached out to FB with the issue. They could not care less.

On the business side, they angered a lot of people with their approach to your audience in groups or pages. I have personally invested tens of thousands of dollars in the past aggregating people behind pages only to be slapped in the face by having to buy advertising to reach my entire audience. Imagine having a page with 100K people you spent money to aggregate and only being able to reach a few percent of them with your updates (unless you pay).

I remember when brands used to advertise their FB pages in TV ads. I never understood why they subverted their amazing brands to FB. Well, eventually they all stopped. You don't see that kind of thing any more. Businesses want to own their audience not have to rent it every time they need to reach to them.

For all the good FB does or can do it also has some dark patterns that they should address.

</comment><comment><USER117> It was the best thing I ever did.

</comment><comment><USER118> I, too, find my life is much less stressful when I bury my head in the sand and pay no attention to the corruption of government and progress of society towards capitalist fascism.

Limit your social media feed to only people posting positive news. Cut off the people you don't actually interact with. Remove all the bad news from your daily attention. Now you are in a better state of being: the state of denial.

Goodbye depression and anxiety!

<comment><USER119> Not all bad news is actually true, useful, or even news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> You're delusional or a sociopath if you think working for Facebook is doing anything positive for society. Facebook has to be the single worst thing to happen to humanity so far in the 21st century.

</comment><comment><USER121> What is this?

</comment><comment><USER121> About it plz

</comment><comment><USER122> ITT lots of people justifying using Facebook.</comment>


Ask HN: What did you use to control your holiday light show - <AUTHOR> After driving around Christmas night looking at all the light displays and binge watching The Great Christmas Light Fight http://abc.go.com/shows/the-great-christmas-light-fight I've decided to try to put a small display together for next year.
I'm good on the construction and assembly of frames to mount the lights on.  My question is what to use to control the lights.  I'm sure that some of you have holiday displays running.  Can you post what controller(s) you are using?  How are you synchronizing lights across the display?  Are you using multiple controllers (why yes, I do have a Beowulf Cluster of light controllers).
I figure if I start now I'll have a chance in being done for next year.  Thanks for your help! <comment><USER2> I just plug the strand of lights into the socket on the porch.</comment>


Iran lawmaker says 50 dead from coronavirus in city of Qom - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/32540d09ec101aac057660ef1b0aa970 <comment><USER2> Around 99% of the patients developed a high temperature, while more than half experienced fatigue and a dry cough. About a third also experienced muscle pain and difficulty breathing.

Research from the Chinese Center for Disease Control suggests that around 80% of coronavirus cases are mild. Around 15% of patients have gotten severe cases, and 5% have become critically ill.

Here's how symptoms progress among typical patients:

\- Day 1: Patients run a fever. They may also experience fatigue, muscle pain, and a dry cough. A small minority of them may have had diarrhea or nausea one to two days before.

\- Day 5: Patients may have difficulty breathing — especially if they are older or have a preexisting health condition.

\- Day 7: This is how long it takes, on average, before patients are admitted to a hospital, according to the Wuhan University study.

\- Day 8: At this point, patients with severe cases (15%, according to the Chinese CDC) develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), an illness that occurs when fluid builds up the lungs. ARDS is often fatal.

\- Day 10: If patients have worsening symptoms, this is the time in the disease's progression when they're most likely to be admitted to the ICU. These patients probably have more abdominal pain and appetite loss than patients with milder cases. Only a small fraction die: The current fatality rate hovers around 2%.

\- Day 17: On average, people who recover from the virus are discharged from the hospital after two-and-a-half weeks.

\----

[1] [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2761044](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2761044)

[2] [https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-covid19-day- by-d...](https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-covid19-day-by-day- symptoms-patients-2020-2)

Not allowed to do this and not sure how long this will be up; the entire UpToDate reprint on the latest we know about COVID-19 (Coronavirus)

[3] [https://www.scribd.com/document/448592904/COVID-19](https://www.scribd.com/document/448592904/COVID-19)

\----

Stay vigilant, stay careful, but most importantly, do not spread false information.

<comment><USER3> There's a flu going around in The Netherlands right now, it progresses like this:

\- Day 1: Fever, fatigue and muscle pain with a dry itchy cough.

\- Day 2+: Nausea and diarrhea can be experienced as well as the first day symptoms.

It takes about a week for the worst of the symptoms to die down however the stomach ache, cough and light tiredness last weeks.

My entire family and most of my son's class at school has had it and they're all still recovering. My wife is, after 3 weeks, still really ill. Probably because she's working full time and breastfeeding.

This is what makes the Corona-virus hard: at the start the symptoms are extremely similar to existing flu. Unless the case is extremely severe most people won't see a doctor let alone a hospital.

I don't see how it can be stopped.

<comment><USER4> > My wife is, after 3 weeks, still really ill. Probably because she's working > full time

In my opinion it's high time to call in sick. She is neither helping herself nor her coworkers by going to work.

<comment><USER5> If that's an option.

I lot of people cannot call in sick.

Being sick means being unpaid, and many people cannot afford to go unpaid.

<comment><USER6> > _Being sick means being unpaid, and many people cannot afford to go unpaid._

In Germany being sick means full payment by the employer for 6 weeks, after that you'll receive around 90% of your last net income by your healh insurance company for _72 weeks_ , after that slightly lower unemployment payments for another 12 month. So around 2.5 years of being sick are required until you're actually unpaid.

<comment><USER7> What is full payment if you are paid hourly?

<comment><USER6> You get paid as if you had worked the full amount of hours in your employment contract.

Zero-hour contracts are illegal in Germany.

<comment><USER7> So yeah you lose out on pay if you were planning on working overtime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some further context on the discrepancy between this figure and official figures:

> The Iranian government has denied trying to cover up the full extent of the > coronavirus outbreak after reports suggested that the death toll from the > disease was more than four times higher than official figures claim.

> On Monday, a lawmaker from Qom – a Shia holy city 120 km (75 miles) south of > the capital Tehran which has seen a cluster of cases – accused Iran's health > minister of "lying" about the scale of the outbreak.

> According to the semi-official ILNA news agency, which is close to > reformists, the lawmaker, Ahmad Amirabadi Farahani, said there had been "50 > deaths" from the coronavirus in Qom alone.

> "The rest of the media have not published this figure, but we prefer not to > censor what concerns the coronavirus because people's lives are in danger," > ILNA editor Fatemeh Madiani told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

> But the country's deputy health minister rejected the report. In a news > conference broadcast live on state television, Iraj Harirchi said that 12 > people had died from the coronavirus and 66 had been infected.

> "I categorically deny this information," said Iraj Harirchi.

> "This is not the time for political confrontations. The coronavirus is a > national problem," he added.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/feb/24/coronavir...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/feb/24/coronavirus- live-updates-china-wuhan-hubei-latest-news-italy-lombardy-south-korea-iran- japan-cases-infections-death-toll-outbreak-xi-jinping- update?page=with:block-5e53aa4b8f0811db2fafd5aa#block-5e53aa4b8f0811db2fafd5aa)

</comment><comment><USER8> Reminder that WHO publishes a daily situation report about COVID-19, which is calmer and more informative than most headlines/media stories: [https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel- coronavirus-2...](https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel- coronavirus-2019/situation-reports)

<comment><USER9> The WHO has come across as pretty incompetent in my opinion. We could have stopped this disease from spreading outside of China but the WHO consistently downplayed the severity and claimed travel bans were overkill and would be too damaging economically.

Now they're saying it's likely too late to contain the virus.

Well I wonder what will be more damaging to the economy? The proposed travel bans or the catastrophic effects of a worldwide pandemic? How many people will die in underdeveloped countries because the WHO didn't act aggressively enough when they had a chance? If this hits Africa 10 million could die.

Thanks WHO

<comment><USER10> Do you remember the uproar and all the anti-vaccine sentiment after WHO was seen to "cry wolf" during the last H1N1 outbreak in 2014 or so?

That's probably the reason they were more careful this time. It's hard to know early on exactly how a disease will spread, and how dangerous it will turn out to be.

<comment><USER9> If the WHO is scared to be aggressive in their recommendations because of blowback six years ago then they are even more incompetent than I thought.

It's not as if outbreaks like this happen often. It would be difficult for the WHO to be labeled as overreacting when they only get an opportunity to react once or twice a decade.

The fact that it's hard to know how dangerous a disease will be is a reason to be extra careful, not the other way around. Not knowing how dangerous something is doesn't mean we should blunder forward and hope for the best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With the 150+ Italian cases (3 dead), it's probably safe to say that the virus is out of our control... which we probably never had.

[https://apnews.com/32540d09ec101aac057660ef1b0aa970](https://apnews.com/32540d09ec101aac057660ef1b0aa970)

<comment><USER9> We could have stopped it completely with total travel bans but the WHO advised against it because it could be damaging to the world economy.

Why is the WHO concerned about the economy? Well I have no idea. And is this virus going pandemic going to be more or less economically painful than the travel bans might have been? My guess would be we will feel significantly more pain from a pandemic.

<comment><USER12> > "Why is the WHO concerned about the economy?"

Don't you see that this is always a tradeoff? If the economy tanks, people lose their jobs, which could result in a lot more social unrest than if a virus spreads around the world.

I think it's tough to contain a virus like that with such a long incubation time. But the early efforts might have slowed the virus down somewhat at first, giving us more time to develop vaccines.

<comment><USER9> I find that argument fundamentally flawed. Travel bans are momentarily painful and the unrest is localized. The world economy would feel the pain but most nations would be spared.

Compare that to what might happen when this virus hits NYC. There will be a run on cash and groceries. People will stop commuting. Schools will close. Restaurants and shops will be empty. Now consider the same thing happening in Seoul, Berlin, London, San Francisco, etc. The economic impacts from this could be catastrophic.

And the most ironic thing is that if this truly does get out of hand we will get travel bans. Nations will close their borders. People will willingly (and forcefully) stop traveling via boat or air. We'll circle back to needing travel bans and the only price we'll have paid is millions of lives and a global economic catastrophe. All so that we could avoid some minor short term economic pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems odd that there are no cases reported in Laos, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Indonesia. [https://www.who.int/docs/default- source/coronaviruse/situati...](https://www.who.int/docs/default- source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200223-sitrep-34-covid-19.pdf)

Possibly these countries have no way of monitoring and reporting COVID-19? In which case we are likely to have new, large clusters added in the coming weeks.

<comment><USER14> The thing is, although COVID-19 has a long incubation period in some cases, in many cases it has a short one. And about 15-20% of people will end up in hospital. So it can only spread under the radar for a limited period of time before it becomes obvious. The symptoms are well known by this point, dry cough, fever, shortness of breath.

<comment><USER13> Detecting small numbers of COVID-19 cases against the larger background of flu and other respiratory illnesses is not easy. It's quite likely to go undetected clinically until there is a fairly large number of unexplained pneumonia deaths of related people in a specific location. By this time there has been a lot of local exposure and spread.

"Problems with CDC coronavirus test delay expanded U.S. screening" \- [https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/cdc- coronavirus-116...](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/cdc- coronavirus-116529)

<comment><USER14> Yes, a small number of cases could go unnoticed. But you were talking about large clusters. Say 100 people are infected and 15 turn up at hospital with difficulty breathing. For at least one of them, a doctor is going to take a history and notice the characteristic progression (this disease is the most famous disease in the world right now), then report it to their health authority. The large % of cases that require hospitalisation is a terrifying aspect of COVID-19, but it does increase the chance of detection.

<comment><USER15> Yes, at that point several large clusters will appear within days because of how fast it spreads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > "No one is qualified to discuss this sort of news at all," Haririchi said

This almost made me laugh out loud, tragic though any deaths and disablement are. It does seem to get to the heart of the matter, and not just in Iran either.

<comment><USER17> Sounds like a slightly mangled quote - I think he's saying that no-one outside of the ministry has access to the Coronavirus mortality figures, so the lawmaker is presumably pulling the figures out of his butt.

<comment><USER18> The immediate sentence following gp's out of context quote:

> adding that lawmakers have no access to coronavirus statics and could be > mixing figures on deaths related to other diseases like the flu with the new > virus, which first emerged in China in December.

So, not necessarily out of his butt, could be mixed up.

In any case, 12 dead out of 61 (a quickly rising figure) is already terrible.

<comment> _-___________-_ The 61 is almost certainly rising much more quickly than the 12. Many cases don't get counted early on, so the fatality rate at this stage is overstated and largely meaningless. Same thing happened everywhere else with a suddenly- noticed largeish outbreak.

<comment><USER18> > Same thing happened everywhere else with a suddenly-noticed largeish > outbreak.

I've been paying pretty close attention since early on and nowhere else with a suddenly-noticed largish outbreak had a temporary death rate remotely close to 20%. Not even in Wuhan. In fact 12 deaths currently ranks #3 on the global death count chart when each Chinese province is counted as a separate entity, and any comparable entity has an order of magnitude more cases at least.

Also, it was 8 deaths out of 43 yesterday, so 61 isn't growing faster than 12.

Without more info, I blame this on shitty medical treatment. 20% roughly matches the percentage of severe cases elsewhere.

<comment><USER19> See upthread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22403326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22403326)

<comment><USER18> I've seen that terrible argument with "closed figures" a couple of times now but don't really have the time or patience to write a long rebuttal.

That, and the fact that the post you responded to is comparing apples to apples and does not rely on the validity of any one fatality rate estimation methodology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Iranian 'supreme leader' playbook:

1) Find out about disease outbreak before elections.

2) Tell your people that the reports are a Western conspiracy to lower turnout. (e.g. [0])

3) Get utterly shocked when people die. How could you have known!?

[0] [https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1231530523740266496](https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1231530523740266496)

<comment><USER21> The turnouts were very low this time because they allowed only conservative candidates to run, they have enough ways to rig their elections they'll do #2 just for fun tho.

<comment><USER20> True that. The point is that the Iranian authorities knew in advance about the disease, yet underplayed it so that the already low turnout won't be lower.

Not only that, they kept regular civilian flights to China upto a few days ago while nearly everyone else was restricting flight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The dashboard for monitoring the virus:

[https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...](https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)

<comment><USER23> Here's a dashboard on the same site for Japan's prefectures:

[https://jagjapan.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.htm...](https://jagjapan.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/641eba7fef234a47880e1e1dc4de85ce)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Health Ministry spokesman Iraj Harirchi rejected the Qom lawmaker's claims, > insisting the death toll from the virus remains at 12.

Who to trust?

<comment><USER25> Neither of them. Both have plenty of motive to lie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> According to this video[1], there are _speculations_ that given its high mortality rate, the virus in Iran has mutated.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/02TwdiRUJTA](https://youtu.be/02TwdiRUJTA)

</comment><comment><USER27> USA unilateral sanctions of Iran are not only ilegal but inhumane and criminal.

<comment><USER28> Many view sanctions as war crimes because sanctions, though they superficially target officials/companies/etc, are meant to undermine a nation's economy and hurt the civilian population to pressure foreign governments. Essentially the goal is to starve the men, women and children in order to punish foreign governments. If it was iran or china or russia doing it, we would be calling it a war crime or a crime against humanity. But since we are doing it, we just call it "economic warfare".

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is it time to start treating this like a big deal yet? Their first case was three weeks ago and 50 deaf already? This virus is unprecedented and it is only responsible for individuals with means to start preparing. No reason to wait for the government to tell you to do so. Plus each person that does it early is one less for the potential store rush.

<comment><USER30> > This virus is unprecedented

I think you need to read up on your history.

<comment><USER31> If you have particularly useful historical information to hand then it would probably better to share it rather than hint at its existence.

<comment><USER32> Everyone who had history in high school has historical information about this. There have been numerous plagues throughout history with higher infectivity, higher lethality, and both relatively and absolutely higher death counts. Don't put the burden of looking up simple and easily findable information on other posters when you can easily google it yourself.

<comment><USER33> > _Everyone who had history in high school has historical information about > this_

I don't recall any such information.

There's people on this site of all different ages, who grew up in all sorts of different places. How do you know what their high-school history covered?

In my school, history was mandatory in the first year of high-school, and I think it might have been in the second year as well. Hardly anyone did it as a subject for the remainder of their high-school years.

Needless to say, the content taught in those first 1-2 years barely even scratched the surface of historical topics.

<comment> saiya-jin What kind of backwardish 3rd world country are you from that you never heard in school terms like 'black death', 'spanish flu'?

Even if you didn't, I've noticed it in practically all possible media hundreds of times in all possible topics.

<comment><USER33> Regarding your second paragraph, I never said that I'd never heard the terms. I said that they weren't covered in high school history for me.

There's so many topics that can be covered in high-school history classes, and so little actual aggregate time for those classes - why would you expect those topics be amongst them?

Also, why do you think that criticising such history classes, and the country they're in, somehow negates the point i made?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I believ the sanction put on Iran by the Trump administration is of the main factors for very high mortality rate of Covid-19 _. This has caused suffering not just for the Iranian people but the whole region as now Iran lacks the equipments and medicines to put the epidemic under control. But I doubt the current President cares about that...

_ [https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/10/29/maximum-pressure/us- ec...](https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/10/29/maximum-pressure/us-economic- sanctions-harm-iranians-right-health)

</comment><comment><USER35> I've seen speculation that the virus in Iran has mutated (or the environment is somehow different), and is producing extremely aggressive complications, killing patients within hours of their hospitalization.

At this time of year, there will be even more mass face-kissing and hand- shaking going on than usual. There are entire communities of travelling super- spreaders in Iran right now, this is extremely serious.

<comment><USER36> Probably not. Most likely it's just become widespread there and they haven't been containing or testing. The deaths and serious cases are the tip of the iceberg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fucking hell, these politicians are as much a virus as the virus itself. 100% that number was pulled straight from their hindquarters.

<comment><USER38> how do you know this ? Are you in IRAN can you confirm or infirm the figures ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is a excellent case of the total failure of the media.

Iran had obviously lost total control two days ago.

Yet the media is still going on about South Korean and Italy, it seems clueless.

We also need the immediate relaxation of sanctions around this on Iran. I 'think' WHO might be breaking some sanctions by currently helping Iran.

<comment><USER40> Lets blame the media ?

What are you talking about. The media is reporting whats happening as it gets it, if Iran's media is being silenced that got nothing to do with the virus itself and more about the control of panic.

> We also need the immediate relaxation of sanctions around this on Iran

I'm pretty sure the WHO couldn't give a rats about US sanctions when it comes to human rights and world health.

<comment><USER39> > The media is reporting whats happening as it gets it,

No they simply are not. Should I be watching Fox?

Iran has 12 people dead atm. This is unheard of in any country other than China. We have known this high toll for 3 days. Last Friday is was thought to be 9! Who has headlined this?

CNN has Italy and South Korea as it's headlines right now and today, they pail in comparison to Iran.

This is not a high toll, this is out of control spread of the disease. I feel like this is a clown world. Korea and Italy are not the same as what's going on in Iran.

It's taken this latest report of 50, to make any headway in the news.

As to the WHO not caring I doubt that, but it's still not the point, companies need to be able to free allow supplies in. I don't know what sanctions are in place but companies for instance that supply gasses like oxygen need to know they are allowed to export it to Iran and how do they receive funds?

Why does this article not mention the sanctions if the media is on top of this?

Yes I blame the media.

[https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/02/23/619365/Iran- corona...](https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/02/23/619365/Iran-coronavirus- outbreak-test-kits-sanctions)

<comment><USER41> The NY Times app has consistently had the outbreak in one of the top 2-3 spots for weeks now. Their live updates listed right now show official figures from Iran, Italy, and South Korea, as well as news about China and global markets reacting to the news. I've been closely watching both the NYT and the more panic-driven subreddits for a month now and I haven't seen _anything_ of substance that the NYT has missed. They usually lag by minutes to as much as a day, likely because they're actually fact-checking instead of just mashing the post button like Reddit.

If you're looking for large news organizations to freak out about every little unsubstantiated rumor or crackpot theory that circulates the web, then I don't know what to tell you. Except that you're willfully ignoring the 90% of the time those crackpot ideas turn out to be wrong and spreading them to billions of people would do _far_ more harm than good, especially compared to just waiting to get the facts straight.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My favourite interview question - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/06/my-favourite-interview-question.html <comment><USER2> _What I'm about to say will be blindingly obvious to the Enterprise crowd...The rules must be considered as carefully as the entities. Enterprise developers have known this for years: that's why you see rules engines, table- driven designs, and visual workflow editors in many Enterprise applications._

What a refreshing statement at a time when we're bombarded with so many annoying "SQL is Dead" posts.

Try designing an enterprise production/distribution system where:

      - set-ups must be minimized
      - backlog must be minimized
      - inventory must be minimized
      - trucks must be full
      - warehouse space is limited
      - deliveries must be on time, but not too early
      - sales people must have stock on hand
      - plant absorption must be maximized
      - bills must be paid on time
      - down time must be zero
      - working capital must be put to the best use
      - stockholders must be satisfied

Say what you want about enterprise programmers, but they get stuff built that handles all of these while academicians fuck around with linear algebra and OO castles for years.

After this, Monopoly sounds like a day off. Great post!

<comment><USER3> May be completely besides the point, but my first OO instinct upon approaching the question is to model rules etc. as objects themselves. Only the most naive OO modeler would think that OO objects must be nouns within some physical analogue of the system - to my mind, anyhow.

<comment><USER4> Why would you want to do that? They have no state. You're almost never going to do anything with them except invoke them from specific places. This sounds like complexity for its own sake.

<comment><USER3> First up, there's nothing wrong with immutable objects; indeed, immutable objects have benefits that mutable objects don't. So not having mutable state is not a good argument against modeling them as objects in an object-oriented language.

Secondly, rules do have state, in so far as one rule is distinct from another. Perhaps a rule has preconditions (which could be represented as a binary tree and evaluated through recursion) that must be true before the rule is "active". Perhaps rules have effects, a list of state changes that they impose on the rest of the game world. You could model these as functions, or alternatively again as trees, evaluated through recursion. If the rule system needs to be flexible enough, they could be serializable and deserializable from a text or binary format.

If the game is a simple one, with a fixed set of rules that never change, there's little need for this. But if you look at a game like Monopoly, there's a lot of complexity that comes up in real-life games that isn't so simple to encapsulate in rule lists, such as making complex deals, haggling, borrowing money from other players, even receiving charitable donations from other players to prevent the game ending prematurely.

Move further into business rule systems and the need for flexibility increases again. I've architected systems which needed a generic rule-based system for data validation and workflow transitions; and these rules had themselves rules for when they applied, as older rules needed to be grandfathered in to older data, but expired for new data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No one here or on the original page seemed to consider they should design a Monopoly game on the net to be "fun." Especially since Hacker News is about and for entrepreneurs, it would seem natural to turn an idea like that into money. Monopoly is a game. It should be fun. It had better be fun, or the design doesn't matter because it won't sell.

What makes the game fun? Part of it is the interaction between players, laughing, joking, scheming, and posturing. How do you bring that to a game played over the net? Is text chat sufficient, or can you easily do voice? What do you display to the players? Certainly part of the board needs to be displayed. When I play, I like to see what people have for properties and money. Will I be able to see that Alice has a stack of $500 bills or that Bob has nothing larger than a $50?

The original question is a very cool thought experiment, imho. My initial reaction was that to design this, I'd want to sit and play some games of Monopoly to see what to include and to see what the game is really all about. I've played hundreds of games of Monopoly, but that's not the same as designing a fun game to play over the net. Running through this little thought experiment helps raise many questions about how the game will work. Does each player have a complete client, or is this a server based system (or is it somewhere in between)? How do you handle dice rolls? How quickly can people start a game?

You need to know what you're going to create before you start applying tools to create it.

<comment><USER6> I didn't get into what I would call the "product management" aspect of the question in that post, but if it doesn't bore you to hear it, I have participated in interviews where this question was asked of non-technical people, specifically a product manager and a web designer.

I don't remember if "fun" was specifically discussed, but the discussions were more focused on what users would do and see, very much in keeping with your second paragraph.

The product manager was also asked to consider the exercise from a competitive perspective. What could be done to differentiate a new site from an existing, popular site? is the strategy to be simplere and easier? To cater to power users running into limitations of the existing site? And so on.

<comment><USER5> Not only do I think the "project management" aspect is interesting, I think it is essential!

I develop s/w in an R&D environment. My users are very specific about how they use information, but know almost nothing about s/w development. Likewise I know little of their specific domain, but can develop whatever tools they need. While I can craft and code algorithms that should dazzle them, if it doesn't solve their problem they won't use it. For me, design has to account for the users' experience as well as developing clever and efficient algorithms to solve problems.

I really love the original question, Reg. It was fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "If the candidate uses up all of the interview time trying to obtain perfect requirements, we have a problem. In the software development I do, the requirements are never perfect. I don't demand that a candidate try to create an agile, iterative process on the spot, but I look for someone who knows when to say 'close enough, let's move forward.'"

I think this is a great reason why most interviewing techniques fail. The interview is not a reliable model of the work environment. This is especially true given the fact that people love "gotcha" interview questions which are essentially brain teasers which require you to know some arcane trick to get the question right.

I have seen great candidates spend a lot of time trying to understand a simple problem in an interview. These are people who under normal working conditions would never waste tons of time trying to get a perfect spec before starting work. But, because of the types of interviews people try and pass over as being "reliable indicators of future performance" candidates get stuck trying to find the trick in each question. If you have a candidate spend their entire interview trying to tease out a spec it sounds like a better indicator of the low quality of the interviewer rather than the candidate to me...

When people start heading that direction in an interview, be sensible and say, "Do you feel like you need a complete spec before going on? I promise there's no trick I'm trying to get you to fix" and you'll get the response you're actually looking for.

</comment><comment><USER8> My favourite interview question is "When can you start?"

</comment><comment><USER9> _If the candidate uses up all of the interview time trying to obtain perfect requirements, we have a problem_

I don't know how long your interview is, but if its just an hour and if the game is as ambiguous as you seem to say it is, I think its the fault of the interviewer, not the interviewee. The interviewee doesn't know what your schedule is -- unless you tell them, "You must code monopoly by the end of this hour, warts and all". But otherwise, I think its reasonable to take the full hour on requirements. In real life, an hour on requirements doesn't describe if there should be a splash screen or not.

</comment><comment><USER10> What if your candidate isn't familiar with Monopoly because, say, they didn't grow up in the west?

<comment><USER11> Perhaps hand them the rule-sheet?

<comment><USER12> Reading through a rule-sheet, even carefully, is not going to give you the type of understanding of game dynamics playing even 10 games would give -- and which would be fairly useful in this task.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In my experience, it's already hard to get a good read of a candidate within 45-60mn without adding external entities.

Monopoly is not just an external entity, it's a pretty big one with tight cultural ties. If the candidates you interview were not born in the same country as you, the best case scenario is that they played Monopoly in a different language and the worst case scenario is they never played it.

I prefer to focus my interviewing on questions that rotate around pure coding (if that's what the candidate is interviewing for) and even then, I hardly find the time to dig as deep as I'd like.

</comment><comment><USER14> I know this is kind of beside the point, but my response would ne pretty simple - I've never played Monopply, and have no idea of its structure at all.

<comment><USER6> This has been posted before, with extensive discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2063092>

;-)</comment></comment>