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Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety

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Re: Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety

#181

Post by mattrp »

beepboopbeep wrote: post #83

I often forget I even had a facebook. There really is just zero value add to my life from that website.

I used to subscribe to the idea that facebook helped you stay close to friends and family. But the issue is most of the friends and family who I want to hear from and wants to hear from me have too much going on to really be active. So the remainder of facebook is peripheral contacts who think that by posting someone's else content (a meme, a political thought, a call to action, whatever) it's somehow valuable to everyone else. I hear marketplace is useful and is supplanting craigslist. But when I look at it, it's full of off-site ads for products I have no interest in buying. Very little of it is actual neighbor to neighbor legitimate items for sale. I deleted the app from my phone over a year ago and haven't really missed it. More importantly, I really fail to see the value that facebook provides.. can you imagine if they'd really pitched to VC's what they've become they'd ever been funded in the first place? "Hi, we are going to attract users who used to forward email spam to all their contacts in the CC line and give them a place online to collect all their BS on one convenient place and then we're going to market all sorts of crap at them."

Re: Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety

#182

Post by hkmurakami »

bob33212 wrote: post #91
graeme wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your two feeds are very different. I didn’t like facebook, then unfollowed everyone except immediate family. It’s nice now! Not distracting, occasional baby pictures. One of facebook’s worst long run mistakes was optimizing for engagement vs. enjoyment. It boosts metrics but makes people quit or go cold turkey. Instagram has never felt like that.

Facebook doesn't care about enjoyment. They want to maximize eyes on the screen time and sell that for maximum ad revenue. If you are someone who would like to spend 5 minutes a week on Facebook catching up with friends they do not care about you.

They may not care about you, but that doesn't mean we can't mold it to meet our needs.

I try to behave on Facebook like it's 2005 again, before the outrage or glamour.

That being said I think it's totally reasonable that the difficulty each of us experiences in trying to exert such control will vary.

Re: Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety

#183

Post by coldtea »

leot wrote: post #147
coldtea wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I absolutely understand what you're saying. But part of me feels an obligation to be informed to hold those in power accountable. So, how does that work out for you?

You could say the same about not voting.

Well, if you can say the same thing about voting and not voting, then it makes not much of a difference either way...

Re: Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety

#184

Post by war1025 »

Some steps for making Facebook more manageable:

1. Deliberately go through and prune your friends list down to people you actually interact with or care about updates from

2. Any time someone shares something you think is dumb, click on the corner of the post and select "Hide all from ". This lets you hide anything your friends share from various meme sites without blocking their legitimate posts

3. Any time you see an ad for a product you don't care about or don't want to see, click "Hide ad" then it will pop up a dialog and you can select "Hide all ads from "

4. Go through your "liked" pages and unlike / unfollow any that are irrelevant to you.

I do all of the above and Facebook often just stops loading content for me after the first 20 or so posts.

My wife does none of the above and can easily scroll for an hour without reaching an end to the content.

Re: Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety

#186

Post by projektfu »

keenmaster wrote: post #178
projektfu wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US had a moment to help when the Free Syrian Army existed in the first year or so of the conflict. For some reason, our leaders had cold feet and allowed our natural ally to be wiped out. The UN was hamstrung by Russia and China's veto power. No smaller power was willing to take on Russia in a proxy war.

Even beyond militaristic action, there are so many low hanging fruit that weren't picked. It took until 2019 to sanction any appreciable number of people in the Syrian regime. Many relatives and employees of the Syrian regime are happily flying back and forth between Damascus and Europe. Their illicit assets are safely parked in foreign bank accounts. They're sending their kids to LA and San Francisco, buying $2M hom…

Sure, but I find these sorts of sanctions to be ineffective at the stated goals of preventing killings, etc. And Russia and China, at least, were not planning to participate, leaving a wide open avenue. The UNSC couldn't pass sanctions because of their vetoes.

Re: Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety

#188

Post by zelly »

papreclip wrote: post #18

I open facebook for 2 minutes a week and scroll through my relatives' baby and pet pictures. I don't get how the site is such a specter of misery for some people Twitter I would understand a little better. It's such a tar pit of negative energy, insults, rage bait, etc

> Twitter I would understand a little better. It's such a tar pit of negative energy, insults, rage bait, etc

And orange website isn't?

Re: Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety

#189

Post by amurthy1 »

anderber wrote: post #101
INTPenis wrote: post #89

What gave me the most satisfaction is quitting the news. Incidentally I don't have or use any social media either. Except imgur and sometimes among the funny memes I get news. But I'm afraid for people I meet who always remind me of all the awful things they've seen in the news. I'm aware of none of this until someone tells me. And yet my life is the same as everyone elses. Not knowing what is going on, living in a c…

I absolutely understand what you're saying. But part of me feels an obligation to be informed to hold those in power accountable. If everyone follows the advice of avoiding the news, what effect would that have in our Govenment?

Reading news is useful if it helps inform you about issues that you can take action to help address whether via voting or other political action.

This is most pertinent at the local level where your vote has more impact and it's more feasible to take action on specific issues when you learn about them.

Reading about presidential scandals every day when you likely already know who you're voting for just drags you down and benefits no one besides the media companies profiting off your attention.

Re: Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety

#190

Post by keenmaster »

kazarnowicz wrote: post #175
keenmaster wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the benefits of social media is supposed to be transparency, and I believe that. However, isn't it an indictment of global callousness that so many people have seen Assad's destruction of Syria and no one is helping? In fact, Russia's bot armies far outnumber Syrian refugees on Facebook, and they're spreading confusion on the whole situation. They're making it seem like Syria is some sectarian black hole, wher…

This is insane. I had no idea it was that bad. Do you have any sources where I could learn more?

Assad's torture dungeons - https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/12/16/if-dead-could-speak/ma...

Mass arbitrary execution - https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/07/middleeast/syria-executions-a...

Rape and sexual violence used for political means - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/16...

Deliberate Syrian & Russian Air Force targeting of hospitals and systematic erasure of medical personnel - https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2016/03/syrian-and...

Chemical weapons used to gas civilian neighborhoods, including many children, even after the supposed removal of the chemical weapon stockpile (which earned Obama praise and earned the OPCW a Nobel Prize):

- https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/06/u-n-commission-calls-ou...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5bM8kTOsOk (warning: disturbing footage of gassed kids)

Assad inviting terrorists into the country to use them to confuse the world, slander protesters, and obfuscate the genocide - https://www.thedailybeast.com/assad-henchman-heres-how-we-bu...

"Over 500,000 Syrians have been killed and 13 million Syrians have been forced from their homes in the worst humanitarian crisis since the World War II" - Holocaust Museum (emphasis added, that really means something coming from the Holocaust Museum) - https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/museu...

and Assad/Russia want people to believe that "the alternative is worse." The alternative is self-rule by the sweet, generous, loving people of Syria. Somehow, a social media campaign has convinced the world otherwise. Saying that there is a worse alternative, when half a million Syrians were killed (and counting), is to reduce Syrians to subhumans. That is especially insulting given that the alternative is often cited as "ISIS," even though Assad is the one who invited ISIS into the country, and the primary victims of ISIS were Syrians.

Pravda is in our Facebook news feed, and that of our friends whom influence our opinions.

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