...because of a race for social points

[thezvi]

Yesterday, I found a chart about US health care costs that claimed to show that our outrageously high costs don't kick in until age 50 or so, at which point we steadily go crazy at an increasing rate, with no jump at 65; I'm not resharing it here because doubts have been raised since then about the data involved. I showed it to Laura, as relevant

Comments

[celandine13]

I wonder if it's a mistake to see it as "fighting" for status. Is fighting the right metaphor for *everything* where there's competition for a scarce resource (in this case, attention)? Do daffodils fight each other for sunlight?

It's more like the human pageant. I think of it more like a carnival, like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkg_lJeHmjs) -- foolish but varied and fun to watch from a bird's-eye view, and even fun to dip into and experience the whirl.

[ledflyd]

If you think facebook is bad reddit is a hundred times worse, especially on the front page subreddits that may have millions of users all vying to be the first posting with a link. Redditors who are secondary content sharers are ostracized as 'karma conspirators' (as opposed to original posters... ?).

Anyway, it's an interesting phenomenon cause by too many users and will likely lead to the websites demise, but the smaller subreddits are still very well done.

[drethelin]

whine whine whine. As with twitter or anything else like this, Facebook is exactly as shitty as you or the people who you're friends with on it are. My facebook gives me interesting links, information about what my friends are doing, photos of people I like and want to see more who live far away, lets me organize events and make things happen, lets me KNOW about events other people are organizing, and talk to people. OH NO PEOPLE CAN ONLY LIKE THINGS THAT IS SO OPPRESSIVE. Not threading is annoying, but having conversations that my friends actually see instead of posting it to a livejournal no one reads seems pretty worth the tradeoff.

Then again I'm not sure why I'm bothering to argue against what amounts to classic counter-signalling.

[oscredwin]

I'm wondering if I'm the first person to read this to do the obvious thing....

[robyrt]

The key problem there is the phrase "if you want the credit". If you don't care about scoring Social Points, Facebook has no power over you.