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

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

#101

Post by graeme »

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…

I did this also. Most successful "be on facebook but not sucked in" method I've ever done.

I started just by unfollowing literally everyone. I have since readded my immediate family and a couple close friends. I find this doesn't change things, and it's more automatic than remembering to check their pages. They don't post much.

Finally, when visiting Munich I joined a local group. Didn't unsubscribe, so I still see posts. This is sort of handy: if you have nothing followed, facebook will dresge up random stuff such as suggested friends.

With a single group you auto ignore, facebook is content and just shows that. (But beneath family, if there are any posts from them)

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

#102

Post by rchaud »

danpalmer wrote: post #59
rchaud wrote: post #52

Here's my FB setup that has in fact been good for my MH: My feed contains: - Strongly moderated meme pages based on screenshots from a TV show. No political posts allowed. Everyone's here to partake in the shared enjoyment of a show. - Nothing from friends; 1-on-1 is better, and most status updates are networking-style humblebrags anyway. - Nothing from news sites; this should be obvious to anyone who's seen how the…

Would this setup be easier to achieve with Reddit? This is pretty much what I use Reddit for (and then WhatsApp for 1-1, BBC for news, and my calendar for events).

This is essentially a Reddit-like setup. I do use FB Messenger to talk to friends but aside from that, FB for me is basically Reddit with real names. I don't really make use of the "social" aspect, as I've had the account since 2005 or so and posting on people's walls became passe around 2010 or so.

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

#103

Post by tsumnia »

bobochan wrote: post #98
tsumnia wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a time of political and social conflict I am soothed by daily stories of the mundane I think this is one of the reasons; instead of accepting hardships exist and dealing with them, some people use social media as a filter for life. As such, since they avoid hardships, they never trained on dealing with hardships. I've spoken about it in my comment history, but I think some people lack perseverance/grit in this r…

It seems like the sign on that equation is wrong though, no? If social media was really a means of avoiding hardships then wouldn't leavers report great angst from withdrawal? Instead they report being happier. I keep seeing the word humblebrag come up in discussions on FB and I have to wonder if the real reason is that some people see social media as a form of competition. We now see both the good fortunes and misfo…

> I could never say that I do not care about the welfare of friends and family.

I never stated that. I don't care about using Facebook to actively follow online personas of my friends. I see them multiple times a week, so I can find out their welfare then. For random people I'm friends with? Eh, less interested in the Tasty video they shared.

> wouldn't leavers report great angst from withdrawal

That's my point - that by not viewing life through a tailored filter, you have to deal with the less pleasant parts. As these are minor hardships and not major tragedies, happiness is coming partially from a sense of being able to "handle" things.

I am not saying this is explicitly where the happiness comes from, but if people quitting social media are reporting higher scores of happiness then either the metrics are wrong or the next question is "why". At which point, what are the factors that cause happiness, and how are those factors formed outside social media?

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

#104

Post by charliebrownau »

I found some good alt platforms with ACTUAL FREE SPEECH

- Minds instead of Facebook

- Gab instead of twitter

- diasp.org instead of google plus

- Bitchute instead of Youtube

- Startpage or https://searx.me/ or Duckduckgo instead of Google/bling

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

#106

Post by bobochan »

tsumnia wrote: post #103
bobochan wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the sign on that equation is wrong though, no? If social media was really a means of avoiding hardships then wouldn't leavers report great angst from withdrawal? Instead they report being happier. I keep seeing the word humblebrag come up in discussions on FB and I have to wonder if the real reason is that some people see social media as a form of competition. We now see both the good fortunes and misfo…

> I could never say that I do not care about the welfare of friends and family. I never stated that. I don't care about using Facebook to actively follow online personas of my friends. I see them multiple times a week, so I can find out their welfare then. For random people I'm friends with? Eh, less interested in the Tasty video they shared. > wouldn't leavers report great angst from withdrawal That's my point - tha…

Unrelated, I read some of your posts about your PhD research. Sounds fascinating! Best of luck.

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

#107

Post by dang »

newcombinator wrote: post #85

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

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We ban accounts that do that, and you've already done it more than once.

In addition to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you might find these links helpful for getting an idea of the spirit of this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

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

#108

Post by maceurt »

rthomas6 wrote: post #47
RankingMember wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Facebook's solution was initial exclusivity to college students. This made it cool to high school students. Then once high school and college students were all on it, their parents eventually got on. So maybe we could shamelessly copy that exact model for the new federated open-source Facebook replacement.

> If we could just copy their model to acquire customers then....

Then you would be competing with every other social media startup along with the social media sites that have pretty much limitless resources.

Say your website is a success however, you basically have two options: go public and turn into facebook eventually, because your duty is not to the site anymore, it is to the shareholder and to the dollar.

or

don't go public and never get off the ground, because you won't be able to keep your programmers or compete with the tech giants.

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

#109

Post by marviel »

guipsp wrote: post #81
lanevorockz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty much this plus the fact that I've not (yet) reviewed enough of the available literature on ETH, which this site is based on
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