What Happened in 2007?

118 pointsposted 4 months ago
by AJRF
(whathappenedin2007.com)

81 Comments

nkoren

4 months ago

Not explicitly arguing against the thesis of the website, but showing trend lines which allegedly started in 2007 with data that starts in 2006 is... Not convincing.

ajross

4 months ago

Also worth noting that a lot of the graphs (the ACT scores in particular) are constructed to show a downward trend but really seem to be measuring the COVID pandemic more directly.

jwagenet

4 months ago

The SAT and ACT plots indicate an accelerating downward trend beginning in 2018 though, later exacerbated by COVID.

ajross

4 months ago

That is exactly the bad analysis I was calling out.

If you take a data set and point out (while squinting) that it appears maybe to be turning down in the last two data points, any reasonable analyst should point out that those look like routine outliers and that if you want to project a trend you need more data.

Instead, you'd taking a very large (and well understood) signal in the next 5-ish data points and saying that it's proof of the trend. Which is silly.

No, that chart shows covid, period. If someone wants to show an uncorrelated effect across a signal that big, they need to come to the table with a lot more sophistication than a "WTF Happened?" blog post.

jwagenet

4 months ago

Fine, the dips 2018-2019 could very well be noise and we don't dont know if that trend would have borne out after 2020. However, the ACT and SAT composites gradually declined following peaks in 07 and 12, respectively, given the available data.

ajross

4 months ago

Come on. Extremely mildly down-sloping if at all, and without anything like an inflection point that would justify "WTF Happened in 2007?"

You can't do this like this. I mean, you sort of can if the effect is big enough (c.f. the 1971 site which inspired this one, and which makes a much better case). But if you can't eyeball a very clear angle in the chart without argument, you need to come to the table with some kind of fitted curve and real research.

JKCalhoun

4 months ago

Agree. Might as well start with internet adoption, but the phone allows us to carry that weight with us all day. To be sure it started a bit sooner.

cmrdporcupine

4 months ago

Exactly, I've been net-addicted since .. uh, BBS culture in the late 80s, and I almost never use my smartphone but have my laptop or computer screen in front of me most of the day. I don't feel much better held together than my teens with their phones.

philistine

4 months ago

You are absolutely not the typical person. The vast majority of people, and 100% of the people born after 2007, are deeply affected by smartphones. I know I am!

throwmeaway876

4 months ago

Exactly this.

I am convinced about the premise but for the love of god zoom out those charts.

Fade_Dance

4 months ago

>limiting life outcomes of millions around the globe

The US is such a small sliver of the world population, as is the west to some extent. ACT scores and such are extremely US centric.

Smartphones were a positive revolution for so much of the world. Consider the hundreds of millions of children (more than the entire US population exclusively used in this argument) growing up in rural poor households surrounded by illiteracy. They suddenly had access to the wider world. They had the opportunity to take initiative in ways they didn't have before. They had access to limitless education, and an easy way to pick up a global language. When kids left the village for a city they could video chat with family instead of going months of no contact.

To some extent, I'm talking about the final leg of the internet revolution, not phones specifically, but in many areas of the world where electricity is intermittent, it was phones that finally drove wider internet penetration.

Are there downsides? Certainly. is smartphone addiction and social media a problem? Research says that it probably is, but for a long time I've felt that the positive impacts on a global scale are being downplayed, especially in the US. Not everyone who gained cell phone connectivity had a PC at home with a steady power supply as a baseline, and schools stocked with computers. We have a huge wave of new people growing up who had access to far more information than the previous generation. If I'm going to make a casual, broad-sweeping generalization of impact, I'll hazard to guess that the positive impact is being greatly underappreciated globally.

dash2

4 months ago

Are poor people more likely than rich people to use smartphones for literacy and education? My wife comes from a poor household in a developing country and the kids there are mostly playing games on them.

Fade_Dance

4 months ago

Intuitively, kids are kids, and kids like to play.

That said, some kids across all income bases will take the opportunities that they didn't have before.

Traditional education isn't the main impact I was getting at though. It may be harder to measure and quantify.

For example, people that may have had little exposure to their political system now have a more access to exploring it, and organizing political action (see recent Gen Z protests worldwide).

Or perhaps an older teenager moves in with a friend across the country instead of only looking in their village area (the internet enabled me to do that anecdotally, years ago).

Coding and tech literacy will be much higher. Kids generally don't enjoy traditional education and won't sit down in front of math lectures of their own volition (some will!), but a more sizable cohort of kids will get into coding, make a website, moderate a forum/discord and build some scripts, build some game mods, etc.

The most impactful (and perhaps nebulous) change is that there is much more of a global community than there was. It's a different world for the new generations compared to how it was for most of human history. Instead of "American culture gets mass exported" it's much more of a global online community that nearly every kid gets hooked into to some degree. Obviously the Chinese firewalls of the world exist, online circles are tribal just like the real world, and top down algo feeds are clinging onto the top-down cultural export as hard as they can, but it's still a huge shift.

If the focus is on the developing world, some of the comments made in passing like video chat are huge. Going to the city to make money used to mean almost total disconnection from the old community. One of the problems with that is that these places can be "left behind", economically, and with demographic shifts worldwide, this is brewing into a bigger problem as many of these places have and have few young people. That's just one example. (Took that from China, which has a big initiative to improve that longstanding issue that has been building since the initial urbanization wave/birthrate collapse, and it involves phones and technology on many fronts.)

fleischhauf

4 months ago

keyword is mostly here. it opens up the opportunities where there was really nothing before.

JKCalhoun

4 months ago

You sound like a spokesperson for MIT's Media Lab and Nicholas Negroponte. I was skeptical of their message then, even more skeptical now. You acknowledge the downsides but I think we disagree wildly as to whether these outweigh the upside.

I'd rather see a One Book Per Child global initiative. (Maybe Dolly Parton is on to something—Nicholas Negroponte should take note.)

DiscourseFan

4 months ago

Its all very dialectical or whatever

alphazard

4 months ago

The reverse Flynn effect should be by far the most concerning thing on this page. As others have pointed out, some of these trends are specious, but the Flynn effect has held up for a while, and is highly replicated. Even just the disappearance of the Flynn effect would be significant.

An adjacent phenomenon that needs investigation is "Adult ADD". Extending the theory of adolescent ADD to adults doesn't add up. It's surprising that these are considered by default to be the same condition, especially in people who didn't have issues during adolescence. The increase in prevalence demands a non-genetic explanation. Better explanatory theories are: 1. We've collectively decided that this is how we dispense amphetamines to consenting adults. 2. It's a fad (when will prevalence decrease?), and 3. It's the smartphones/apps.

Personally, I think it's mostly 3, with the infinite scrolling apps having a huge effect on attention and executive function, but also some of 1 given the information economy.

This should go without saying: if an intervention is working for you, or a disease theory has given you explanatory power, you should stick with both.

balamatom

4 months ago

"We've collectively decided that this is how we dispense amphetamines to consenting adults"

Damn, now I want this as a spoken word sample on a house music track

marshfarm

4 months ago

The effect is easy to grasp, we're moving away from Pleistocene communication technology, which is benchmarked in dated tools like reading, math, SAT/ACT scores. Human intelligence isn't going away, another form of expression that measures intelligence that isn't text or numbers based is arriving, we simply don't have the capability to measure that, though, here clearly are markets for that intelligence.

ZeroGravitas

4 months ago

I thought to be diagnosed as ADHD you needed to have the symptoms from childhood, as many other things cause similar symptoms?

Your next sentence seems to suggest you think ADHD only affects children?

alphazard

4 months ago

The theory of disease for ADD/ADHD in children has explanatory power, which means that the understanding must be at least partially correct. It's impressive that many children outgrow their ADD, and that temporary use of amphetamines during development can help them outgrow it, so they don't regularly take drugs as adults. Some kids don't outgrow it, and continue to medicate as adults. That's also fine, if it helps, it helps.

What doesn't add up is people with new problems with executive function that start as adults, and suspiciously as they have more control over their screen time, and more money to spend on technology and apps. They get an amphetamine prescription, which definitely helps, but they also get a bad explanation. Something like: genetics, or a story about how their brain was better in the ancestral environment or whatever. Doesn't explain the onset of the condition, doesn't explain why it became a problem completely after development.

ericrallen

4 months ago

This seems to completely ignore, and maybe even dismiss, the lived experience of all the kids who weren’t diagnosed or treated but who developed coping mechanisms to survive school and adolescent life, then found those mechanisms incapable of dealing with the ever-increasing burdens of adult life and finally sought diagnosis as adults after years of struggling to understand things that have been complicating their lives all along.

This kind of dismissive rhetoric increases the stigma around seeking a diagnosis as an adult, which is already hard enough because an entire system of caregivers, teachers, and institutions already failed the undiagnosed person throughout their life and navigating the health care system, especially for mental health, is extremely frustrating - and challenging from an executive function perspective.

esseph

4 months ago

This also dismisses the medical literature itself that just keeps getting more and more refined on this topic.

simpaticoder

4 months ago

Even more important than first order effects are any positive feedback loops we can identify. For example, a stressed person escapes into a screen to quiet their own thoughts, and the screen's contents stresses them out. This feedback loop is common to all forms of addiction, but screens are unique in at least three ways. First, they are legal for all ages. Second, they are personally customized to increase usage. Third, unlike drugs which distort reality, screens effectively replace it for the user. It is to be expected that this would have strong cognitive and even epistemic effects on users, and that these effects are self-reinforcing.

Neoliberal capitalism is not equipped to either identify or solve these problems. Some attempts are being made ("Calm" apps, self help books, etc) but these are sand castles trying to stem the tide. Society as a whole must recognize that screens exist in a superposition of "encyclopedia", "cigarette", "panopticon", and take steps to regulate their use. A bummer for libertarians, but life-saving for society.

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

Arch485

4 months ago

I definitely believe that the modern internet, computers, and phones are bad for us, but this argument is entirely unconvincing. Most of the data _seems_ to be U.S.-specific, which means that this data does not indicate if this is a global phenomenon. Further, a lot of the trend lines don't start in 2007 and could be easily attributed to other causes.

newsclues

4 months ago

Smartphones + Social media

And then COVID appears to have had a massive impact.

On September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to everyone at least 13 years old, was a key date IMO.

resoluteteeth

4 months ago

I don't think teenagers generally had smartphones until much later

Facebook was also quite different back then and it was still something that people mainly used to find people who were in their classes

If it was smartphones plus modern social media I would expect the trend to start at least 5 years later

On the other hand teens already had dumbphones for texting and Myspace before that

Jordan-117

4 months ago

The key difference was porting desktop social media to mobile and giving it an algorithmic feed that prioritized engagement. Everything else is downstream from that: doomscrolling, disinformation, the "pivot to video" that destroyed so many publishers, TikTok, etc.

AJRF

4 months ago

Thanks for that, that seems worth adding.

alganet

4 months ago

2007 saw the first widespread global political campaign over social media. It was an overwhelming success. So good, everyone started doing it. So good, you can't not do it.

That opened a Pandora's box of what can be described as ideological harassment online. Again, we live in a world now in which everyone does it. It is now so pervasive, that the current generation cannot understand what it was before, and therefore cannot perceive what changed (not being nostalgic, lots of things were bad back then).

In my opinion, that explains a lot of related trends related to mental health, perceived internet addiction, even device type market share.

api

4 months ago

I don’t think it’s smart phones per se. It’s social media, and more specifically attention maximizing algorithms.

Those also hit around the same time. People doom scroll on desktops and laptops too.

Honestly just infinite scroll alone is shockingly addictive. Pair it with algorithms that sort content by measured engagement and your brain stem doesn’t stand a chance.

Social media algorithms also prioritize trash content because that’s what maximizes engagement. Think of it this way. One person walks by on the street and says “hi.” Another walks up and strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which one of these maximizes engagement? Which will the algorithm perpetuate? This, IMO, explains the evolution of political discourse over the past 15 years and is why a troll is now President.

Smart phones are just a particularly good platform for these systems, but it’s the systems themselves that are toxic. They work on a desktop screen too. It’s just that laptops and desktops aren’t as portable and are not always with us in the same way, which limits the damage.

macNchz

4 months ago

I think this is correct, but I also have a sense that smartphones and infinite scroll algorithmic social media feeds have acted as a one-two punch, significantly more impactful in combination than each would have been individually.

Modern social media provides effectively limitless opportunity for consumption, but smartphones unlock the ability to actually drink from that firehose regardless of time or place.

Rest is critical for recovery from any sort of stress, but for many people today there is zero rest from this stuff, it’s first thing in the morning through last thing at night, it’s in the car while driving, it’s during the thirty seconds between customers at work, it’s on the beach, in the pool, waiting in line at the post office, at the dinner table, during a movie at the theater, on the toilet, on an airplane, and a million other times and places that would otherwise provide “rest” if it weren’t for smartphones.

owisd

4 months ago

The exact same addictive feed on desktop isn’t quite as damaging because you’re forced to leave it behind when you go outside. You can’t carry your desktop round in your pocket everywhere you go, always available at a moment’s notice to fill every idle moment with slop.

Havoc

4 months ago

It tracks phone adoption but surely social media is the more likely culprit?

user

4 months ago

[deleted]

nonameiguess

4 months ago

I'm not a fan of smart phones or social media. No accounts anywhere except here and my phone isn't even in the room with me with now. Didn't own a phone at all until I was 27.

But still, not liking something doesn't mean it needs to be the cause of all social ills. These graphs don't seem to show anything. You've got trends starting in 2018, 2012, 2022, and some seeming to start before your data even begins, which was 2006, not 2007. Clearly, the only reason you picked 2007 at all is the iPhone debuted that year. The data didn't lead you to that year. These data don't seem to lead to anything. With respect to college admissions tests, the most obvious reason they'd be declining seems to also be the most mundane. With college all but mandatory and skilled trades collapsing, more people than ever are taking these tests, including people who won't do well and wouldn't have bothered in the past.

I'm not generally against the idea that smart phones and social media do real harm. The rise of at least visible and outright hostile political polarization seems related and Jonathan Haidt's arguments about mental health effects are at least reasonably provocative if not conclusive. But there is very little there there with these particular arguments. You may not necessarily be wrong, but I'd caution against starting with a conclusion and working backwards to try and find data that supports what you already believes, bending it if you can't actually find any. That isn't intellectually honest inquiry.

9rx

4 months ago

> Clearly, the only reason you picked 2007 at all is the iPhone debuted that year.

The productivity figures show decline from trend in 2007 with no recovery since. Presumably 2007 was chosen for that reason. This is also the time in popular culture when things were thought to have started to go all wrong.

Whereas the iPhone wasn't widely available until 2008 with the release of the iPhone 3G. The original iPhone was only available to a small beta testing group (~1 million people) in the USA. While it is technically true that some people had iPhones in their hand in 2007, it is highly unlikely that tiny number of people "destroyed the world" by it. Clearly something happened before the iPhone.

superkuh

4 months ago

Nodding along with the site until Fig 8. "Internet Addiction". If it has made up graphs like this with included the rest of the argument is likely made of false premises too.

AJRF

4 months ago

This point is exceedingly hard to get data on! I thought a good proxy would be the prevelance of people acknowledging it as real, but maybe not. I will try replace this. Thanks for the feedback.

superkuh

4 months ago

Yes, it's hard to get data on 'internet addiction' because it's a meme, not a pathology. It's been brought up in committees in the DSM and other places over and over and over because the public demands their meme be addressed. And each time there are null findings. There's no such thing. It's just a commercial/scam for 'treament centers' and people's natural tendency to fear the new.

Making a plot of the trajectory of this scam is nice, but it should at least be labeled properly. Talk about a thing does not a thing make.

dash2

4 months ago

It wasn't a made-up graph. It just looked at academic articles and citations on the topic. That's not an entirely stupid approach.

hollerith

4 months ago

You dont like margins on your web pages?

AJRF

4 months ago

Sorry - that looks terrible on mobile.

I added a little 16px margin now - hopefully that is better. Thanks for checking it out!

owisd

4 months ago

2007 seems a bit early to be looking for an effect. Smartphones were a luxury/tech-nerd/Apple-fanboy purchase in 2007, they didn’t start to see widespread adoption till the iPhone 4/4s (2010-2012) closer to when most of the graphs have their discontinuity. In the US, 50% smartphone ownership didn’t happen till 2014 for adults and 2016 for teens.

Jordan-117

4 months ago

The pivot point was not the iPhone, but the flood of affordable Android smartphones and especially the rise of algorithmic social media apps circa 2012-13.

RestlessMind

4 months ago

Mid-2000's were the pinnacle of the Western power in general and the American power in particular. First Iraq war, then the GFC punctured the halo from the 90's.

After that, the soil was fertile for the rise of populism. Bungled post-GFC recovery, algorithmic manipulations from social media, unmitigated immigration, COVID and its aftermath just fueled the fire further.

Faelian2

4 months ago

Thanks for putting this site together. Despite all the comments here, I find your point pretty convincing.

AJRF

4 months ago

Thanks - I don't really take the comments as entirely negative, people want rigour and I agree the point could be made more convincingly.

I would love for a proper study of this hypothesis to be done.

exasperaited

4 months ago

It's social media. It's really obviously social media. We know it is social media.

But we no longer have any way to prove it, because the malign, anxiety-and-loneliness influence of social media cannot be avoided even if you are not on social media.

1) if you are not on social media, you will be more lonely, because nobody invites anyone to anything anymore except via social media (trust me on this) and people simply assume you've seen the news of their event and judge you if you don't turn up

2) if you are not on social media, you will find yourself excluded from friendship discussions that started on social media, you will find yourself negotiating family arguments wrongly etc.

3) not being on social media doesn't stop you being stuck with leaders who were elected off the back of a storm of social media **wit FUD posting; life's anxieties are real and in many ways worsening fast, and they are social-media-fuelled whether you are on Facebook or not.

4) You cannot properly advertise your product, find all your possible clients or respond to client feedback without engaging with social media; only a handful of tradespeople can really pull off just not being there at all.

There is no control group.

doctorpangloss

4 months ago

Where do you plan to get your time machine, to find a 1971 cohort of ACT test takers that looks like the 2025 one?

Why assume that the OECD is measuring something well? What do you know about them and the PISA test?

RFKJR, an idiot, has charts from the CDC, a reliable source, that show autism prevalence is going up and to the right.

There are two explanations for the chart: one is toxic environment increases and causes autism (RFKJR), and one is more screenings, broader criteria and diagnostic substitution (CDC). Who do you think is right? What do we call CDC's explanation?

Does the chart have "complexity" (you criticize this elsewhere)? Can a chart be both "real" (as in not "fake") but also flawed? Do we pick and choose which charts we use which words for, depending on our politics? (Yes).

Why do you think politically-influenced thinking doesn't apply to you? Do you think "blaming smartphones" is apolitical?

How does your analysis about smartphones differ structurally from an RFKJR presentation? Remember, he's an idiot. You bring out some charts, there's a lot of coincidence time series, and the sources on the face of it are reliable. Does that make "it" true?

RFKJR (an idiot) also talks about "rigor," like you do. He goes and mooks his theories on Fox News instead of Hacker News. Okay, does he ever take down the stuff he was wrong about? (No). Do you see? So even if you are "wrong", you go and talk about rigor, are you going to take down your website? Or bring it down until you fix its flaws? (No.)

Finally. We only talk about charts and benchmarks that align with vibes. Apolitical example: all the AI benchmarks show Anthropic, Google and OpenAI as the "top 3", because if you made a benchmark, as rigorous as it is, that showed something else, people would not believe it. It doesn't matter if what it measures is real. For something political, this problem is acute.

Does this vibes phenomenon exist for "charts" about "crime"? (Yes). Does this phenomenon describe test scores?

jmclnx

4 months ago

On IQs, I remember seeing higher CO2 levels can lower IQs a little bit, higher CO2, IQs get lower. Maybe that could be part of the reason at least for that.

api

4 months ago

This is perhaps the most terrifying idea I’ve encountered in the last 10 years. Humans evolved in a lower CO2 environment. Our lungs are adapted for optimal gas exchange in that environment. At what point do we start literally suffocating?

And this would creep up on us very slowly. Not only would we not notice, but we’d lose our ability to notice. It’d be like the whole species slowly descending into dementia.

Most of what I’ve seen suggest that the effect starts really kicking in around 1000ppm. But as outdoor levels rise, indoor levels, which are usually higher, rise too. They can already hit those levels.

If we keep burning more and more carbon outdoor levels could hit that by the 22nd century.

If we start getting here we need to put away the green moralistic finger wagging and start looking at ways to suck CO2 out of the air like it’s an emergency. Things like ocean seeding or huge scale industrial scrubbers powered by solar or nuclear power, or all of the above.

This is a far scarier possibility than just climate change. The only thing scarier than this is the clathrate gun, which luckily seems to be considered unlikely by most climate scientists (at least unless we get to really insane CO2 levels like thousands of ppm).

EarthLaunch

4 months ago

Take a CO2 meter into a hotel, office, convention center, etc in summer. In many, it will be at 1200+. I've seen up to 2500. This is due to "green" interior air recycling that just happens to save companies a few dollars on air conditioning. How much of society is operating under this lower IQ condition?

dash2

4 months ago

Although there's research along these lines, chatgpt points out that individual effects are swiftly reversed by moving to a lower-CO2 environment. So you could simply walk outdoors or open a window.

api

4 months ago

What happens when outdoors is 1200ppm?

thaumasiotes

4 months ago

> Humans evolved in a lower CO2 environment. Our lungs are adapted for optimal gas exchange in that environment. At what point do we start literally suffocating?

Good news on that front. Because you constantly produce waste CO₂, you have detection mechanisms letting you know when the amount in your lungs is excessive.

You picked the only gas where accidental suffocation isn't a possibility as the one you wanted to worry about.

api

4 months ago

Discomfort only kicks in under more extreme conditions. We're talking about very mild asphyxiation that is not noticeable but degrades mental and physical performance.

CO2 outdoors has gone from about 280ppm to 420ppm in the last hundred years. If we kept going for another century it could approach 1000ppm, which is where you start seeing these effects.

The scary question is whether there is any effect at 420ppm. We don't think so, but very marginal effects are hard to detect. Yet a global loss of an average of 5 IQ points would have significant large scale effects on society. It's also possible that it doesn't affect all people equally, since most things don't.

There have been times in Earth's history where CO2 concentrations were in the thousands of ppm, but there were no humans then.

wat10000

4 months ago

This is also when traffic fatalities on the US halted their decades-long decline and started to increase again.

AJRF

4 months ago

Added a point about that, thanks.

anenefan

4 months ago

The biggest thing for what plagues the net, society in general, did occurred in 2007 / 8 - it was not the phones - it was what the US govt did in response to Facebook's rather dire lack of real mods over "bullying" ... the move to ban anonymous people arguing and flaming - this flowed though eventually via the new terms of service US based software for forums, boards, and hosting sites required to abide by the new laws. Many forums I used to frequent slowly disappeared being unable to adapt to different software and hosting sites that were happy to ignore US laws.

A real name when challenging the status quo unfortunately attaches the risk of retaliation from either the intended organisation or person, or their fanboys, via direct or creative sets of problems designed to waste time and / or money. Sadly the internet is a bit more fuzzy when it comes to trouble and those dishing it out. Social media of course, had welcomed the new rules, and any anonymous account speaking out against a popular idea could be quickly reported and thus indirectly permanently banned until they complied with real life details.

AJRF

4 months ago

I made this site, and I am not wedded to the idea that smart phones are the only reason these trends started to turn weird.

I try to say as much on the site - and while maybe I place a lot of blame on the relationship between the iPhone -> Increased adoption of internet usage -> Social Media usage going up == lots of detrimental effects I think you've an interesting thread i'd like to pull.

Do you have any more information or reading I can do on this and I can add it to the site?

Something changed between 2007 and now, there is just too much evidence to support that, and I think there is a very strong claim Smartphones are a very large contributing factor, but as you will be aware, the causes are very hard to extract.

anenefan

4 months ago

Smart phones probably allowed a greater saturation of a person's time with the internet, esp social media areas purposely stoking engagement with the user. I personally know too many people in real life practically married to their phone who recite any number of things from someone they absolutely believe, wholeheartedly accept the person has some apparent title of expertise, rather than the facts as per a well accepted book or area of printed knowledge. It's perplexing but I know the same ... er ... tool with their apparent title were saying the same in an area back in 2004 for instance, they'd be rubbished via a fairly active discussion vetting most of their inaccuracies - some people used to just have nothing better to do at nights than fix up BS.

I wish I could find more and clearer discussions in regard to when this came in and why. ( I lament the lack of a decent search engine present time - there were at least in 2007 numerous discussions in regard to the changes made in the US at the time, the follow though with software updates in regard to terms of service etc.)

Turns out it started in 2006 [1] [2 - is a bit fuzzy but] ... I though should recall the time as I was following the proceedings and when the decision was announced I was frankly appalled and ranted numerous times when the subject came up at various discussion boards lamenting Facebook seemed to have buttered up the legal areas to save them a lot of money on real live moderators to manage disagreements.

But 2007 seems stuck in my head though, as to me it was 2007 when the real fallout started when it started to roll various discussion sites that engaged in freer speech with robust discussions, occasional flames - to the point forum admins and staff of various message boards, forums using software such as phpbb had to decide the best approach to keep everyone happy and not end up dealing with legal threats.

Now getting back to noted decline in common knowledge and people more readily believing BS and why this law changed how dynamics of how fact challenges worked in Facebook. Once the anonymous common intelligence fighter might have posted factual informative links on someone's facebook wall that's ignorantly alleging total BS ... or maybe by purpose running a scam ... and factual challenges generally irritated them and blocking didn't generally work in the long run as it wouldn't be long before someone else was offended by their sheer lack of fact checking ... but after the rule change - the honestly deluded, the scammer or the bullshitter merely had to hit the report button on the anonymous users comment ... and that anonymous account was more or less gone, not a threat to challenge any BS on Facebook until they legitimised their account. Again it was 2007/8 I recall a number of former Facebook users expressing their dismay they'd lost their anonymous Facebook account, given they preferred their relative anonymity.

[1] https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=84680

[2] https://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.sh...

BoredPositron

4 months ago

Doesn't make any sense if you look at provided data points. The IQ, test scores and sleep quality of people fell because they couldn't have anonymous flame wars on Facebook? The laws you imply happened in 2007-2008 were all introduced in the 2010s. Facebooks real name crackdown happened in 2014...

anenefan

4 months ago

Echo chambers are not a recent phenomenon, but social media turbo charged it refining the engagement factor. The fact moderation by and large in social media platforms were able to utilise a report button and a script, rather than live human moderators was all thanks IMO to the changes as per 2006 (see reply to AJRF [OP], 2007 is when iirc I started to notice the stark changes to the rest of the discussion areas and occasion angry ex Facebook user. The near humanless moderation apart from the occasion cookie cutter, was particularly conducive for designing algorithms to exploit people, especially young impressionable people.

Additionally no one was really closely monitoring the sleep quality of those who frequented the net, or those who were really engaged (near omni present) on the net pre 2005, but I don't recall thinking the conversations had back then were anything as borked as some ... most of the crud in some social media areas. I'm left with a sense, sensibility was much higher a couple of decades ago ... or one knew that they were going to be called out on whatever they said if it was in error.

pas

4 months ago

Google+ already enforced their real-name policy in 2011

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars

Of course the ultimate cause is that the Internet changed from this mysterious third place full information to where we live our private and public life, where there's an unending torrent of things that affect us.

Smartphones and low-latency high-bandwidth ubiquitous wireless networks with large enough data quotas are the vector that facilitated this.

The nature of content changed from funny image macros with silly cats to weaponized out-of-context news videos (and reports, and studies, and data). From mostly boring IRC chatrooms full of cold quasi-autistic greybeards (or sometimes neurotic drama queens and kings) enforcing their idiosyncratic rules that allowed fun little interactions that were collection worthy on now almost forgotten websites (bash and qdb) to public Facebook posts and now to private group chats.

All this in front of the backdrop of global economic growth in its downturn. (The upsides of the China shock - and of globalization, in general - already reaped and now we're left with the boiling resentment coming from those who feel they were defrauded, who are attracted to narratives that dish out blame to elites and everybody close and far away in space and time.)

Previous presidents, infamous and obscure international organizations, and of course vague shadowy groups and half of the population all at once. Beancounters, the MBAs, real estate developers, private equity, CEOs, big pharma, WHO, toxic masculinity, LMBTQAI+, MAGA, and of course the DNC that caused all this by not letting Bernie became the nominee.

When people grow up with expectations that they'll live better than their parents and then that doesn't happen, we don't take it well.

BoredPositron

4 months ago

None of that happened in 2007. I'm not even saying the Internet didn't change, but you are both at least three years too early to make it ground zero for the overall societal change like seen in OP's data. I would even say it's the opposite the 2000s had a lot of vigilantism and political activism that started on the net. Key examples include WikiLeaks, the Pirate Party movement in Europe, and everything surrounding torrents. BarCamps and LAN parties grew exponentially. Most corporations hadn't started enshittification yet. Fringe sites still had hosters. 4chan launched, and Anonymous played games. This was the height of the blogosphere, the Creative Commons movement launched, and RSS was omnipresent. For the normal user, the Internet was probably the freest at the time. I don't know why you wanted to ignore that time and replace it with something that followed years later just to ramble on a forum...

pas

4 months ago

I don't think 2007 was special, it's the usual gradual change (but likely a lot of logistic S-curves summed), but IMHO the change did happen around then.

And usually we see the highpoints of certain processes, like the skyscrapers that top out just before the market crash. (And rarely we hear about the unfinished ones, especially the ones left in drawers.)

With the Internet it feels that we had it in its romantic form in books and movies, then as it really arrived it turned into this really boring aspect of our lives, that nevertheless eat up all the better ones. (And we move less, eat worse, ruminate more on what we said and sent, worry about what we read and received.)

...

Normal users joined Facebook not Google Reader. That's the whole point. (They have phones and Twitter and other bad hyper-palatable addictive platforms and whatever garbage apps their store gave them.)

eli_gottlieb

4 months ago

1) This is basically a meme, a riff on "WTF Happened in 1971?" sites.

2) We know what happened in 2007: the Global Financial Crisis.

api

4 months ago

That’s also the problem with the 1971 version. It’s a site popular among gold bugs who think fiat currency and the collapse of Bretton Woods is to blame, but many things happened in 1971. You’re right that many things also happened in 2007-2008.

Socioeconomic systems are complex. Most things have many causes and causes interact through feedback loops. It’s very hard to understand what’s happening. People keep pretending it’s easy and fixating on singular hypotheses that are almost certainly wrong.

AJRF

4 months ago

I think iterating on hypothesis to try uncover the truth is a better use of time than saying everything is too complex and giving up.

api

4 months ago

I agree, but that’s not what people do. People usually fixate on one preferred explanation and then give up. Usually it’s the explanation that confirms their prejudices and biases.

I don’t think doom scrolling is healthy. I just doubt that it’s a single explanation.

relaxing

4 months ago

What happened in 2007 was the great recession.

Most of the graphs look more like “what happened in 2020.”

This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen someone register a vanity domain for.

judofyr

4 months ago

I’m sorry, but this is such a terribly unscientific approach. You want to make a case for your hypothesis? Follow a structured approach with real arguments.

Saying «I know that correlation doesn’t imply causation», but then only demonstrating correlation isn’t really bringing this discourse any further.

AJRF

4 months ago

Would you have any examples of convincing arguments to see if I can improve it?

Appreciate that extending the date range of data would improve the claims, as would adding more sources - but anything else?

newsclues

4 months ago

It may be unscientific, but it starts a conversation (an important one IMO), that will hopefully lead to real study and corrective measures to get society back on track.

_aavaa_

4 months ago

Basing your site on wtfhappenedin1971 is not a positive signal.