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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

#271

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

Don't really remember how, but my family switched to using a single snapchat group to share baby and pet pics, which imo works better for that use case. Even taught my grandmother how to open stories, even if she sometimes gets lost when they update the app. Maybe not much better than FB on most issues, but it's nice to get in and out without the facebook timesink, and these kids (probably) don't have to worry about…

GroupMe is another alternative which works similarly. Have two sets of social groups which use that instead of Facebook.

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

#272
FB is the new cigarette.

But it's the 1940s & we're being told by big tobacco that maybe all of these symptoms aren't correlated.

Narrator: They were.

I'm trying to build something new from the ground up using a pull-based model + intimate groups of people you care about. Would love early beta testers that are parents of young ones: https://trypersona.com

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

#274
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assad. Iran. Russia. Hezbollah. Those are the perpetrators of genocide in Syria. 500k+ have been killed, 13 million displaced. Additionally, ISIS was invited into Syria by Assad (details in the Syria thread below) to muddy the waters and make things "complicated" as you describe, but also to add another party to murder Syrian Arabs. That is not a reductionist description, that is reality, just like the following stat…

There is a great danger with convincing Americans that “they are bad and we are good” is justification enough to invade, kill, or otherwise bring destruction on another nation. Such simplistic reasoning allows those in power to do whatever they wish to other nations provided they can paint that nation as the bad guy. I do not in any way support Assad. I also don’t fully understand what is going on there and what the…

Can you fill this in?

  The U.S. should intervene in Syria
  Pro
    ...
  Con
    ...
What makes it complicated? If you're unsure of the truth of pro/con arguments or need to dissect them, you can use https://en.howtruthful.com/o/ to make a hypertext representation of the tree of arguments.

I made HowTruthful, so this is self-promotion. But I'm going to keep self-promoting because it's important to let people know that dissecting arguments doesn't have to be as arduous as they think.

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is HN not social media?

That's debatable. Where is the social element? If you stretch the definition of social media long enough you could also call the usenet, mailing lists or Wikipedia social media. HN isn't really about human connections or personal interactions. We might discuss them, but HN isn't designed or usually used for creating them.

The comment section, submissions themselves, upvotes, and the user profiles - some of them even reaching celebrity-like status, for better or worse - are social elements in my eyes. And yes, I would also classify the usenet and mailing lists as social media. As for Wikipedia, maybe certain parts.

On the other end you have traditional media with fewer social elements and a limited number of content publishers: the press, books, television, radio, and read-only websites.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" of course you're affected when the government decides on a new policy ... but how does knowing about it on the same day or in the same hour mitigate that?" It saves people a nasty surprise when the policies they relied upon fall out from under them, or to try and head off future issues by calling up their representatives. For example, I was able to call up my representative regarding changes in immigration policy.…

Policies don't disappear the very next day, though. It's not that somebody that relies on some policy will be left stranded at the bus stop because he didn't watch the news that day that the program has been canceled. RE becoming politically active: it's good to be informed, I totally agree. But that's not something you get from the news. I can't imagine you watching CNN and saying "whaaaaaat? I'm going to call my re…

I actually do in fact read a few news sources to get a pulse on local happenings and call my representative upon situations like becoming a sanctuary city.

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

#277
After a friend, who always posted on social media about how great their life was going, suddenly committed suicide, I quit all social media and never looked back. That was two years ago and I don’t miss any of it. On social media there is a sort of relentless peer pressure to come across as having a perfect life and I think that’s really unhealthy. I have found that having sincere relationships with a few good friends outweighs a bunch of vapid “likes” from a horde of casual acquaintances.

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

#278

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 quit politics on Facebook. Just aggressively unfollow anyone who regularly posts political stuff (whether I agree or not).

That alone has turned my feed into my friends families and their kids, sports trash talking and the more urgent or relevant local stuff. It’s great.

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

#279

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 gave up on cable and eventually live TV for similar reasons. I would rather read the news than be subjected to someone's sensational idea of news, which I now call olds because it's just the same thing rehashed over and over. That lead me to give up on Facebook, which I found to be the same thing rehashed over and over by different people.

I don't even watch live TV anymore, unless something I'm actually interested in is happening. I've actually watched Senate and House proceedings and election results on public TV (over the air, since I quit cable years ago), and gotten more informarion tham any news channel could dish out.

I am about to quit Twitter, because I realize how utterly useless it is. And I'll probably quit Mastodon, too, because I don't use it either.

So many people say "I can't leave, because I want to keep up with X." Since I've quit Facebook, people call and text me more than before. In lieu of sending out some mass communication and blaming me for not seeing it in a flood of atrocious content, people who want to stay connected take the time to do so in a more direct way.

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