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Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
111–120 of 153 posts
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that downvotes do exactly that. A couple and you’re marked as downvoted by fading, a few more and your comment is collapsed. “By policy” or not. It’s treated as a “make the bad man who said the mean things go away so he won’t fool or sway other people”. Just like Reddit.
Well, America has xtreme gun conrol laws, so the rest of the wolrd thinks you aree extreme, which elads to downvotes. BTW, mass shooting are EVERY WEEK IN THE USA. Swisterland has guns and yet they have feweer. Its the culture and lack of traiining.
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Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#113Social media use Pavlovian conditioning to drive adoption. Even the notification icon is – a bell. I stopped using all of them and I suggest you do too. If needed to stay in touch, send your friends and family a voice message as an email attachment, they'll appreciate the sound of your voice more than generic emojis.
>a voice message as an email attachment Dear god why
Normal speaking speed is 150 words per minute, which when recorded equals to a ~1MB M4A file. I typically send 7-minute audio recordings, meaning roughly 1,000 words or about 2 pages of A4 text.
Rather than getting slammed with a wall of text, the recipient of my audio message can listen to it as they're driving, cooking or eating breakfast. Human voice is expressive and the audio message conveys nuance that gets lost texting. Finally, all text messages are being monitored in some fashion but I do believe audio recordings are still relatively safe and private.
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#114I've been off social media for years now, entirely, and I'm back to a point where the rest of my friends and just society itself are so fully entrenched into some sort of social media that I'm getting very lonely and depressed. I've actually thought about making a Facebook or Instagram account again and just placing strict rules on it, but even that really creeps me out. My friends are always telling me about cool ev…
Isn’t HN social media the same way Reddit is?
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#115I've been off social media for years now, entirely, and I'm back to a point where the rest of my friends and just society itself are so fully entrenched into some sort of social media that I'm getting very lonely and depressed. I've actually thought about making a Facebook or Instagram account again and just placing strict rules on it, but even that really creeps me out. My friends are always telling me about cool ev…
Isn’t HN social media the same way Reddit is?
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#116I quit my Facebook account in April and have not looked back. I connect with people in Signal, Twitter, Slack and LinkedIn. Quitting Facebook felt like uninstalling a program which was eating up a lot of ram in my life.
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#117I've been off social media for years now, entirely, and I'm back to a point where the rest of my friends and just society itself are so fully entrenched into some sort of social media that I'm getting very lonely and depressed. I've actually thought about making a Facebook or Instagram account again and just placing strict rules on it, but even that really creeps me out. My friends are always telling me about cool ev…
I know that they work hard to make it addictive, but isolating yourself because of a fear of a lack of self-discipline is not a solution IMO. Use it to your advantage and have the strength to withstand its negative aspects. Ignoring the newsfeed can be enough if you're susceptible to comparison with others (which is one of the big reasons that social media is bad for people). There are browser extensions to hide it […
Hiding the newsfeed is the key. Keep events and messenger. Use Firefox fb container and a vpn to limit what fb knows about you.
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#118I'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…
Another strategy that works for me is rather than cutting news entirely, strictly stop going on sites that are sectionalist/ overly politically biased.
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a tech job that requires a lot of non face-to-face human interaction through slack, with people I never build relationships with. Still super lonely :D Dating is also near impossible because I don't want to use social media.
Get a coffee job on the weekends or go volunteer , really fun way to make friends . The coffee job requires zero brain work so it’s not mentally exhausting when you sit down Monday’s to not move and just code all day. Might take some guts to get into social zone but after breaking through its way worth it . Easier to just think about impermanence of your life each 10 minutes, you will die in a couple decades and rot…
> [..] then the small issues become meaningless when faced with death reminder .
On the contrary I find I get depressed and anxious when I think about death. I just came out of being a "serial hypochondrist" which was caused by that reminder and related thinking. I manipulate my timeline perspective and it works very well to keep those thoughts at bay.
Re: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit and HN provide what I call “false novelty”. It’s a torrent of new information and entertaining images, but none of it really provides any sort of lasting impact beyond the first 5 minutes or so. When you do new things in the real world, these become major events that anchor your memories and sense of time. You can probably vividly remember some vacations, concerts, your first kiss, and a thousand other novel l…
But don't you find you learn things, get introduced to new concepts and so on? I definitely think that HN has improved me as a software developer, if only to show me how much unknown stuff there is out there. Reddit is a bit more questionable but I've definitely found useful things in some sub-reddits. And sometimes all I want is something that will easily wile away a few minutes.
Sometimes.
First, I am far from being above using HN and Reddit, as evidenced by me typing this. So, this is not a “you should stop using X” rant, because I can’t stop using it either.
I think as a means of getting professional news, HN and Lobste.rs are basically unparalleled. These have been an unambiguous success for me
As a means for being informed in general it seems to work, but I’m dubious about the utility of being “informed” about things in which I have no stake or power to change things. Recent example is discussions about Swedish cashlessness. I don’t live in Sweden, nor will I travel there soon. So what utility does taking up some of my precious attention with this un-actionable information have? I genuinely don’t know, but I fear that the opportunity cost of such reading might be catching me in some subtle way.
As a means of entertainment, my original comment stands.