Time to put together a study on the relationship between HN use and well-being!
The relationship between social media use and well-being
41–50 of 132 posts
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#42My use case is going to be in a minority, but I find Facebook vital for keeping in touch with friends and especially family back home.
I was thinking about ditching the platform before making a rather abrupt decision to move to the other side of the world for a couple of years. That couple of years has turned in to 5 and counting, and it's really come in to its own.
I've got a fairly heavily curated feed after I stopped following a bunch of people and pages, so I don't really feel like anything is being shoved in my face any more than other places I frequent online.
It works. It's asynchronous so the timezone difference doesn't get in the way, while still being a heap more useful than email. It definitely maintains connections that I'd struggle to keep otherwise. Now, will I keep it once I return home? There's a good question.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#43I can certainly agree with the study abstract and most posts here, but would add a twist: social media use is depressing, but falling out of touch with faraway friends is even more depressing. I've been on and off FB over the years, and what I've found is that the only thing worse than being on FB is not being on FB. There are many people I'd just never talk to if I didn't use FB, and I do think the connection is som…
I have never been on FB. I email occasionally with far away friends. A phone call once in a while.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#44Just for some balance but I don't understand the hate for Facebook, I use it fairly often and it's been a positive impact for me. I use it occasionally to connect with people I've just met, see what friends are up to, send messages to meet up and keep in contact with people out of the country. I've connected to people I otherwise wouldn't have through it, got closer to people I know through it and met up with people because of it. I'm completely aware that people only share the best slices of their life on it and it doesn't depress me.
I think if you let Facebook consume your life and it somehow impacts you a lot you need to think about why that is and not blame Facebook. You could get equally obsessed with hackernews comparing yourself to other users and clamouring for upvotes.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386
> We investigated the associations of Facebook activity and real-world social network activity with self-reported physical health, self-reported mental health, self-reported life satisfaction, and body mass index. Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being. For example, a 1-standard-deviation increase in "likes clicked" (clicking "like" on someone else's content), "links clicked" (clicking a link to another site or article), or "status updates" (updating one's own Facebook status) was associated with a decrease of 5%-8% of a standard deviation in self-reported mental health.
So it's not a causal link then? If it's not there's surely many reasons why having low well-being would make you spend more time on social networks (e.g. you'd go out less so have more time to spend on social networks)?
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#45I feel the 'social media is bad for you' thing, but for different reasons. I mean, I don't really understand the 'feeling inadequate because of my cousin's baby pictures' thing. I mean, I am happy for them, but that isn't the life I want, so I don't feel bad that I don't have it. Alternately, I could be less jealous than most people, but let's run with the more realistic first reason. For me, the problem with social…
> lots of people are there who lack a background in early internet culture or academic culture
I think this hits it. Many (most?) people just aren't used to having people disagree with them. Let alone voice those disagreements and be expected to defend their beliefs and explain why they think they're right.
For many people the way they think is correct, just is correct. It's not something that needs defending or even investigating. It's just how things are.
Perhaps the problem is fundamentally how many different people social media exposes us to. And maybe if you weren't exposed to that in your formative years, it's a hard thing to get used to.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#46I removed the FB app from my phone and have the willpower not to use a browser to check it. Stopped short of deactivating my account so that I can still get the occasional message on Messenger.
After the insanely contentious, toxic US election and cry of grief and fear from the left over the results, I got so burnt out with getting on FB and seeing so many reasons to be angry and afraid. Cut myself off completely and after a short time I completely forgot about it. The urge to check FB is totally gone, I feel like I'm missing nothing. It was a great decision, only wish I had made it sooner.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#47Only on internet forums like this I see people claiming about quitting facebook and so on.
I don't see the signs in the real world.
Having said that I too almost never used it from the beginning. I didn't need so many years to figure out why I'm not going to like it. I was on it in the early days just as a techy interested in internet technology then I gave it up and never looked back.
Mind you it has become only more socially costly to not be on it. A few times I tempted to get back in again at least in a limited capacity (just having a basic profile so people can message me if needed). But didn't.
I have also heard harsh comments and so on.
Like one person said (not directly to me) ... "what do you mean?!! don't you have any friends?".
More than anything what I find annoying is this expectation from the society that every person in the world must subject themselves to the invasion of Facebook for their convenience and amusement.
I don't go around ordering everyone must eat at my favorite Pizza joint. Why should the people be pressured to some private social network?
If it was more like email that isn't owned by any one entity I would be more understanding.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#48I strongly feel that social media must become a pull based model instead of a push based model - so like RSS where I subscribe. On the client side, we should use simple machine learning and filtering to show content that is truly useful to us (I love to know what is happening is my sister's life). The current setup of giving info to a company and that company pushing all sort of crap on me is not for me. Granted they…
I'm with you- I love RSS and hate Facebook's news feed. Unfortunately, that is one of the biggest reasons why the masses chose Facebook over Twitter.
> Facebook, meanwhile, continued to add to the variety of posts available to their algorithmically generated feed. Yes, the early adopters who had gone to the trouble to tune their feed complained, but the real beneficiaries were users who didn’t want to go to the trouble of making sure they saw something interesting — whether related to friends and family or not — whenever they visited Facebook. And, starting in 2009, those users had even less motivation to get Twitter working: Facebook was good enough.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#49I feel the 'social media is bad for you' thing, but for different reasons. I mean, I don't really understand the 'feeling inadequate because of my cousin's baby pictures' thing. I mean, I am happy for them, but that isn't the life I want, so I don't feel bad that I don't have it. Alternately, I could be less jealous than most people, but let's run with the more realistic first reason. For me, the problem with social…
Thank you, that was extremely insightful. Sometimes it's a pity there is no Reddit gold equivalent in HN.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#50I know that it's easy to rag on Facebook specifically but it should be noted that this effect most likely exists in all forms of media where the user is able to compare their lives to someone else's. Even while using this site I doubt I'm immune to finding someone who's accomplished something cool while I'm still hacking away on the same thing from last month or whatever.
It's just seems better for my health to live my life instead of seeing someone else live their's. Hell, maybe some day my accomplishments will make someone else feel bad about their lack of any. I mean, even Caesar cried when he read about Alexander's conquests.