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Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

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Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

#21

Post by 8bitsrule »

My favorite long-term shared-post-and-comments site - far and away the most friendly and community-like - does not have downvotes. You can only 'favorite' a user comment. If your comment is not 'favorited' it is also not slapped with a downvote. (I find downvotes to be counterproductive and often arbitrary if not malicious. And one sows another.)

Moderators decide only what posts are productive. A dozen or so a day result. No topic is too 'far out' or rarified. The posts themselves may also be heavily-favorited, but almost always are at least lightly-favorited by a few readers.

There is very rarely any criticism or argument. The are not nested, they only appear in time-order. This keeps directed replies (and extended snark-fests) to a minimum.

The resulting 'civilized adultness' of the site is fairly unique on the Internet. Oh, and there's a small fee to join.

Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

#22

Post by bengale »

clarry wrote: post #17
stareatgoats wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMO the guidelines, moderation and mechanics all work way better on lobste.rs than here. Here the hivemind effect is pretty damn strong too, so it's going to be frustrating to try have a fruitful discussion if your opinion doesn't align with the group. Here there are enough toxic people that discussions often turn into tiresome, flamey back-and-forth between a handful of people. And here there are too many people wit…

Why do you think it’s different there. Also, how do you go about getting an account over there?

Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

#23

Post by Maro »

Recently I did an experiment with myself where I didn't use FB for 30 days. After about 5 days I didn't miss it, but I was not happier. After the experiment, my usage rebounded, but significantly below prior levels (I post a lot less, so there's less feedback to get me to engage).

Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

#24

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

icelancer wrote: post #18
rwnspace wrote: post #6

I'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 cr…

> I don't read the news, mostly, why bother? It does much more harm than good. It's weird that this is a minority opinion (I happen to agree with you). Some 20 years ago we lacked the ability to consume even 10% of the news we are exposed to today if we just open Twitter, and democracy wasn't collapsing. (some argue we are in a worse spot today, though I disagree - strife does not equal inequality) The cable news cyc…

> with the majority of people thinking that their opinion is worth something has led to some interesting results

What do you mean?

Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

#26

Post by Confiks »

rwnspace wrote: post #6

I'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 cr…

> 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.

About a year ago I was 30 minutes into creating exactly such a script, and then I found https://hckrnews.com, which lists all the posts that reach the frontpage (or are top 10/20/50%).

Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

#27

Post by rtpg »

icelancer wrote: post #18
rwnspace wrote: post #6

I'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 cr…

> I don't read the news, mostly, why bother? It does much more harm than good. It's weird that this is a minority opinion (I happen to agree with you). Some 20 years ago we lacked the ability to consume even 10% of the news we are exposed to today if we just open Twitter, and democracy wasn't collapsing. (some argue we are in a worse spot today, though I disagree - strife does not equal inequality) The cable news cyc…

I... think it's important to know what's up. It especially helps to give a reason to participate in the electoral process.

But soooooo much political reporting nowadays is basically gossip columns. They talk a lot of inside baseball and completely neglect the "the thing happening is actually bad!" aspect. Instead of debating policy, people want to debate the optics of policies.

Cable news is awful about this, but I think newspapers are even worse with their opinion pages. People getting paid 6-digit salaries to just say what their opinion on a thing is! And of course with basically no fact checking. They're just bloggers!

Meanwhile the journalists twist themselves into knots to give the benefit of the doubt to the most cynical leaders we've had in decades. Unless one of them insults journalism, in which case it's a holy war. But if the discussion is just a policy position, there's no issue.

Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

#28

Post by newen »

8bitsrule wrote: post #21

My favorite long-term shared-post-and-comments site - far and away the most friendly and community-like - does not have downvotes. You can only 'favorite' a user comment. If your comment is not 'favorited' it is also not slapped with a downvote. (I find downvotes to be counterproductive and often arbitrary if not malicious. And one sows another.) Moderators decide only what posts are productive. A dozen or so a day r…

Metafilter? Pretty sure the reason there are no arguments is they purged everyone who doesn't follow the groupthink. And the fee helps with banned people not rejoining ofcourse.

Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

#29

Post by clarry »

bengale wrote: post #22
clarry wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the guidelines, moderation and mechanics all work way better on lobste.rs than here. Here the hivemind effect is pretty damn strong too, so it's going to be frustrating to try have a fruitful discussion if your opinion doesn't align with the group. Here there are enough toxic people that discussions often turn into tiresome, flamey back-and-forth between a handful of people. And here there are too many people wit…

Why do you think it’s different there. Also, how do you go about getting an account over there?

It helps that the community is smaller and we've had the occasional meta thread discussing rules & phenomenons, with moderators and active posters alike present. We also have a somewhat tight knit community of active participants & mods on IRC. I think this makes the whole thing more human.

There are other factors, for example downvoting because you disagree isn't seen as a valid reason for downvotes on Lobsters. In fact, when you downvote, you must specify a reason (there's a list of choices). Of course people can abuse the system, but I think it sort of encourages people to go down the right path.

The invite system probably helps keep worst of the worst out.

Tags help people ignore the topics they find frustrating.

Speaking of tags, all stories must be tagged and if you can't find an appropriate tag, the story most likely doesn't belong.

We've been trying to focus on purely technical content (and by that I mean really technical and not non-technical stories that are somehow related to technology) with some art, while avoiding politics, inactionable news, opinion pieces and the like. To be fair, as the community has grown larger, it seems like we've been slipping more and more from this ideal and opinion pieces about "practices" (that's a tag) and "culture" (yeah...) have gotten annoyingly common. We can still filter out those tags.

As for getting an account... I think there's something written about that on the site.

Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

#30

Post by kopo »

jelly_dev wrote: post #2

About 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…

HN and Reddit arent that different from other social media sites.

All of them in my mind are "All You Can Eat" info buffet tables.

This is just the current approach we have of dealing with a new world overloaded by info. It will change as we learn more and more about how it effects people.

In the real world nobody healthy visits an "All You Can Eat" buffet everyday. Same thing will eventually happen with information.

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