Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
guilfordjournals.com
Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
1–10 of 153 posts
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#2About half way through my college education I decided I would only use Facebook for messages and otherwise eliminated all social media from my life aside from Reddit and Hacker news. Since then I found my outlook on life has improved dramatically and recommend most people do that.
The problem with social media is you only see the interesting parts of people's lives, so you're forced into a loop of thinking your life is pointless and boring, while for the most part everyone's life is pretty boring aside from some brief moments
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#3I agree with the conclusions. I got rid of all social media except for Reddit ( for ML related discussions) and Hacker News. I always calmer since. It amazing how fast my mind felt better from the negativity.
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#4About half way through my college education I decided I would only use Facebook for messages and otherwise eliminated all social media from my life aside from Reddit and Hacker news. Since then I found my outlook on life has improved dramatically and recommend most people do that. The problem with social media is you only see the interesting parts of people's lives, so you're forced into a loop of thinking your life…
[deleted]
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#5I agree with the conclusions. I got rid of all social media except for Reddit ( for ML related discussions) and Hacker News. I always calmer since. It amazing how fast my mind felt better from the negativity.
Hacker News and Reddit are the worst though.
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#6I've deleted all my social media accounts besides Reddit and HN. The only thing that's stopping me from visiting these two is addiction. I don't read the news, mostly, why bother? It does much more harm than good. You don't need 1000 hrs of newsreading to vote effectively.
My next step is to make a personal website with some contact details and a scraper script for the links in the HN top 30-40 that I can run as a cronjob.
While cutting social media is not a panacea, I have found a significant improvement in the amount of free time I have, and I don't compulsively think about what other people are doing.
It's a good exercise to assume that engagement in social media is work and multiply how many hours you've sunk into it by your usual hourly wage...
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#7Luckily I never got into Instagram or Twitter, but I was big into both Reddit and Facebook for a long time.
I cut off Reddit completely after a run-in with yet another subreddit wannabe dictator mod. It just wasn't worth the drama, not to mention the crappy usability of the site, especially on mobile.
For Facebook, I can't cut it off completely, it is unfortunately indispensable for arranging events and interacting with my group of friends/acquaintances. I mostly interact in a couple of concert/festival-related groups, and run one of them myself. That said, I have cut off all games and apps, and I mute all the stupid meme pages that people like to share from. New ones do pop up once in a while, and obviously those get muted too. The result is that my Facebook experience is 90% chatting with like-minded people about music. I use a Chromium plugin to delete all of posts and likes that are more than ~6 months old, because nobody should care about old FB posts.
I also keep my FB account for Messenger, as it has become the de facto standard instant messaging service here in Denmark.
For discussion on other subjects, I'm a long-time member of an old-school forum that charges $10 for an account. That seems to weed out most of the low-content trolls and idiots, and aside from a few deliberately stupid subforums, the discussions are relatively intelligent and entertaining.
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#8The abstract mentions limiting social media use to about 30 minutes a day. Why not eliminate it completely? I'd imagine the gains from maintaining relationships can be found elsewhere (e.g. phone calls or real life meetups).
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#9The abstract mentions limiting social media use to about 30 minutes a day. Why not eliminate it completely? I'd imagine the gains from maintaining relationships can be found elsewhere (e.g. phone calls or real life meetups).
For all its faults, Facebook is very useful for arranging events and makes it easy for people to RSVP and provide/ask for more information in the event posting itself. It also provides a low barrier of entry and low complexity way of creating groups for discussion and sharing between friends. This is extremely helpful for people who aren't super tech-savvy.
Yes, you can do this stuff elsewhere, manually keeping email and phone chains going, but FB does put all of this stuff in one place and makes it relatively easy to use.
That is not the problem with FB. The problem is all of the other junk they keep pushing, all the ads and games and gamification.
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#10I agree with the conclusions. I got rid of all social media except for Reddit ( for ML related discussions) and Hacker News. I always calmer since. It amazing how fast my mind felt better from the negativity.
Hacker News and Reddit are the worst though.
Reddit can be, but HN is IMO the best social media site there is in the IT space, because of the clear guidelines, active moderation and well thought out mechanics which for example enables both flame-war suppression and anonymity, no small feat.