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Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

nytimes.com

41–50 of 228 posts

Re: Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

#41
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a groups and events app would have a lot of utility. They could probably bake it into messenger.

> Maybe a groups and events app would have a lot of utility. Facebook has stand alone apps for groups and events, individually. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/10/introducing-the-events-... https://groups.fb.com

Great! Ive seen several communities move off of their own custom built sites into facebook groups

A crude solution driven by the people simply being there

Re: Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

#42
If a Facebook post of a photo of a friend sitting in their new BMW, sipping 30 year old single malt next to a 19 year old bikini model whist reading Grant's Interest Rate Observer on a beach in Nice captioned with a Kurt Vonnegut quote is making you miserable then I suspect there are larger psychological issues at play then social media usage that might be remedied with a walk in a park, physical interaction with another human being or a good book.

Re: Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

#43

It's interesting how the vast majority of responses to this post are from people who have either left facebook entirely, or severely crippled it. Are the majority of HN folks off facebook, or is it just the vocal ones?

I deleted my account around 2010 or so, but started again to help friends with social media marketing and apps. FB pretty quickly resurfaced all the old connections and now it's back to where it was before... annoying as ever.

Re: Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

#44
post #32

Perhaps we should take NYTimes advice a step further and stop letting them make us miserable either. There is nothing actionable in the news; next to no utility. News is simply a time sink that depress your spirit. Whenever I think of reading "legitimate" news like the NYTimes, I am reminded of this quote from a Soviet novel by Bulgakov. In it a doctor gives advice: If you care about your digestion, my advice is [sic…

There is a social advantage to being able to speak about current events.

There is also a part of the news that a well-informed citizen should know about. There are things everyone can do about injustice that require us to know injustice took place. Sadly, the above part of the news isn't the focus off modern news media. The sensationalist spin doesn't help much either.

What I'm trying to say is that news, in and of itself can be good, necessary even. The question is whether current forms of news do this well enough, and what other harm their sensationalism does.

Re: Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

#45
post #32

Perhaps we should take NYTimes advice a step further and stop letting them make us miserable either. There is nothing actionable in the news; next to no utility. News is simply a time sink that depress your spirit. Whenever I think of reading "legitimate" news like the NYTimes, I am reminded of this quote from a Soviet novel by Bulgakov. In it a doctor gives advice: If you care about your digestion, my advice is [sic…

I like reading the newspaper -- print, rather than online -- specifically because it comes out only once a day. It's not an endless stream of pretend-immediate attention-grabbers, but a curated collection of the important stuff that happened yesterday.

If the print newspaper were invented today, it would grab hundreds of millions of VC money in Silicon Valley as the cure for news overload. (I guess the pitch would have to include some silly AI or IoT angle though.)

Re: Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

#46
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually why I deleted my account. The constant anger about everything was just unnecessary in my life.

This comment thread hits the nail on the head for why I deactivated my social media. But I haven't found a good alternative "productive" time waster for when my mind needs a short break.

It's hacker news for me.

Re: Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

#47

Contrary to every comment so far, after I stopped using FB for some time, I've now started to use it again. It is not that I care much about what dinner some random friend is having, but I've started to use it to publish some photos that I take with my smartphone. I don't care much about the upvotes, but as I do a lot of walking on the mountains around my house, I now have a kind of a motivation to snap a photo, add…

Instagram might be a better fit though?

Probably, I don't really know what Instagram is..

Edit: I've checked it, thanks, it seems good, but I'm wary of adding another app to my list. As long as I can add photos and my closest family/friends can see them, FB is enough for me. :)

Re: Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

#48

It's interesting how the vast majority of responses to this post are from people who have either left facebook entirely, or severely crippled it. Are the majority of HN folks off facebook, or is it just the vocal ones?

I don't think it's necessary to be off it, but I do believe it's necessary to be intentional how you use it and aware of how it impacts you. For my own part, I don't share updates about my life anymore and I now ignore updates from my close friends. This came after the realization that Facebook had become a substitute for small talk when we'd meet up. "How've you been?" and "What've you been up to?" started feeling like unnecessary questions when we already knew the answers. But what took longer for me to realize is that that kind of small talk was a lead in to deeper, more meaningful conversations. And when we stopped going through small talk exercise, we didn't get to those more important conversations nearly as often and it impacted how connected I felt with friends. Since that realization, I've started being intentional with how I use Facebook to avoid the sharing of those seemingly insignificant details between me and my friends and my relationships have all improved.

And that's what I see as Facebook's biggest problem. Humans are complex animals that have complex interaction patterns. Facebook is, for better or for worse, altering those patterns, and not always for the better. We need to be very aware of what we're losing when we choose to let Facebook do that to us.

Re: Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

#49
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually why I deleted my account. The constant anger about everything was just unnecessary in my life.

This comment thread hits the nail on the head for why I deactivated my social media. But I haven't found a good alternative "productive" time waster for when my mind needs a short break.

I like to waste time on YouTube and Wikipedia. They're good idle browsing for autodidacts.

Re: Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable

#50
I know hindsight bias is a thing, but I the response in me that bubbled up was "of course."

I think everyone under the age of 40 knows that their insta and fb involve posts that make us look cooler/more hip/sexier than we really are. Isn't that how things have always been? How many nytimes articles have been written about Irritable Bowel Syndrome, to use their example? Or how often do you talk about it with friends before the internet? Has that really changed?

It's just the medium that has changed. Some thing's are new, some are the same. People presenting the best of themselves certainly hasn't.

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