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A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

salon.com

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Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#81

Post by guipsp »

lanevorockz wrote: post #79
marviel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been observing https://www.minds.com/ , which appears to be an interesting open-source competitor in the space. It's based on blockchain, which makes me nervous, but it does allow you to purchase a version of the product which removes all promotion from the product entirely.

why would blockchain be an issue? The idea is that you get trusted metrics instead of a black box that you can never see inside.

Not the OP, but I tend to associate anything cryptocurrency/blockchain related with snake oil.

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#82

Post by shmageggy »

nindalf wrote: post #2

This is the second article discussing the same study. Previous thread was based on the NYT article [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19041021 Very interesting to see the difference in tone in the headline alone between NYT and Salon. * NYT - This Is Your Brain Off Facebook. Planning on quitting the social platform? A major new study offers a glimpse of what unplugging might do for your life. (Spoiler: It’s n…

Having read the Times article, which I found very informative and balanced, this highly editorialized headline makes me uneasy, especially because this one already has twice as many upvotes. I feel like we're living in a bizzaro-world where objectivity doesn't matter and all of reality is becoming a sleazy used car lot.

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#83

Post by prophesi »

amelius wrote: post #67
astazangasta wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: https://joinmastodon.org/

Do they support "events" yet?

You could give Hubzilla a shot. Though you have to opt-in to join the ActivityPub federation. And I'm sure the Events only works with users from other Hubzilla instances.

https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#84

Post by kodablah »

have_faith wrote: post #11
Brigadirk wrote: post #4

I quite liked facebook. I don't have the urge to constantly check it, nor post much on it, but it was useful for events, casually keeping up with life events of acquaintances, and keeping a rolodex of semi-friends (e.g. people I met on holiday and would like to run into again). I deleted it because the company seems thoroughly evil and doesn't respect my privacy. But if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alter…

> if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alternative I'm working on something at the moment. More experiment than anything else for the time being but the purpose of it is to have a minimal "social network" for keeping in touch with people, and that's about it. Very little in the way of notifications and most facebook-like features. Just a way to keep in touch and keep contact details for people you care about.…

> Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?

I've been doing something similar. If your network is decentralized, I've been thinking monetization can be in the form of easy VM reselling for the service. Find a provider w/ affiliate $, integrate it into setup. They are the owners of the AWS (or whatever) account and everything's transparent, but you make it easy to install/upgrade. Or could hide the host details and be the "server manager" for them, i.e. managed hosting.

If you are centralized, there are several other ways. You can do a simple one like "completely free to use for companies < $1m revenue/year, $100/month otherwise" (wild number guesses, would need research). Other options can get a bit more sketchy, ala freemium/addons, e.g. pay to style your page, etc.

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#86

Post by Pigo »

RankingMember wrote: post #35
Brigadirk wrote: post #4

I quite liked facebook. I don't have the urge to constantly check it, nor post much on it, but it was useful for events, casually keeping up with life events of acquaintances, and keeping a rolodex of semi-friends (e.g. people I met on holiday and would like to run into again). I deleted it because the company seems thoroughly evil and doesn't respect my privacy. But if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alter…

The problem with the alternatives is they don't have the budget and installed user base Facebook has. Sure, you'll get techie people to jump on board at first (remember Google+?), but all the family members who don't know a Twitter from an Amazon will stick with Facebook because the constant negative Facebook press isn't enough to get them to leave and no longer see pictures of their baby grandson. I'm not sure what…

Not having my parents on the platform was one of the things I liked about Facebook when I first started up my edu account in college. MySpace was still more popular, but Facebook was where all of my college friends could be found. For me, it all gets back to what people use social media for. I liked when it was more about how to connect with people to do something in real life, not when it was the only place that people were communicating.

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#87

Post by lenocinor »

t0mbstone wrote: post #70

You don't have to quit Facebook to get the mental health benefits. All you have to do is unfollow everyone! Literally everyone. Your feed will be blank and peaceful, but you will still be able to maintain a presence on messenger and maintain your profile for people to reach you. You can also still interact with private Facebook groups and things, if you want. This is what I did, and it curbed my addiction to checking…

Yeah, I ended up with something similar, where I only had Facebook friends if I thought I had a chance of talking to them directly sometime soon. It's been way better for me since then (although occasionally people that don't understand this policy seem to be confused / unhappy that I'm not their Facebook friend).

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#88

Post by JimiofEden »

t0mbstone wrote: post #70

You don't have to quit Facebook to get the mental health benefits. All you have to do is unfollow everyone! Literally everyone. Your feed will be blank and peaceful, but you will still be able to maintain a presence on messenger and maintain your profile for people to reach you. You can also still interact with private Facebook groups and things, if you want. This is what I did, and it curbed my addiction to checking…

This was my approach as well, and I can highly vouch for it. I found myself checking facebook at a party, or with friends. And caught myself doing it and felt really, really stupid because of it. But I have a lot of friends that schedule events purely on facebook or only contact me on messenger. So I unfollowed everyone

I sometimes check specific pages of my friends, but I am more prone to just contacting them and asking them how they are doing specifically. As a result, some people have been pushed away, others have been pulled closer, and I've found who I genuinely wanted to hear from and communicate with.

Though this plus restricting who can see my profile in the first place does sometimes make it a bit difficult for people who I've casually met to reconnect with me. Maybe I'll loosen that up a bit.

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#89

Post by kazinator »

newcombinator wrote: post #85

If Facebook is detrimental to your mental health you're probably a snowflake and should delete facebook.

No, just a "flake".

A "snowflake" (slang much newer than "flake") is someone who has an inflated sense of entitlement and uniqueness.

Though it does seem that "snowflake" has recently evolved in a way that there is some overlap with "flake" (emotionally sheltered, easily distressed by ideas running contrary to one's world view).

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#90

Post by 8ytecoder »

tubbs wrote: post #56
mediocrejoker wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the solution is for a photo sharing site to win over the tech crowd with well-thought-out, fine-grained privacy controls and a sustainable business model and then to make it dead easy for non-tech people to share their photos with other non-tech people. ie. I create a single account and my friends each create a single account and I create groups out of those friends, and then I share my photos with a group, a…

Just my 2 cents - but I would be ok with light, non-invasive advertising, like that by which DuckDuckGo operates: https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-business-model/

This. I'd rather like the advertising model turned inside out - like the old days if you will. Instead of targeting me, target the content. If I'm looking at an article about sleep show me a few limited mattress ads. It doesn't have to track me after/before. Nothing goes into my account that says I have a sleep disorder.

I hate ads in general and so provide me an option to pay for and remove it as well.

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