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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

#361

Post by pbourke »

banads wrote: post #146
izzydata wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not wrong for you. Wrong for the world. There exists other people.

What degree of practical responsibility does a person in Brazil have for something bad happening to someone in Sierra Leone? Abstaining from frequent infotainment aka "news" does not equate to being ignorant of important things happening in the world, nor does it equate to abdicating responsibility for all the things you can practically influence.

> What degree of practical responsibility does a person in Brazil have for something bad happening to someone in Sierra Leone?

That's a great example. The hypothetical Brazilian could vote for a politician that does not promote burning the rainforest [1], which contributes to the negative effects of climate change on the people of Sierra Leone [2]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49450925

[2] https://www.sl.undp.org/content/sierraleone/en/home/presscen...

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

#362

Post by satysin »

Quitting Facebook wasn't difficult. I had nothing of value from it by the end.

Quitting Instagram also wasn't difficult.

Sadly quitting WhatsApp is proving very difficult as it is used by so many (at least here in Europe).

I use Signal with most family members now but when I meet someone new and we exchange contact details it is always "you're on WhatsApp yes?" and never anything else.

To be fair WhatsApp does work well and as far as I know is still end-to-end encrypted so I do not think Facebook are mining my messages but I could be wrong.

It does bring me to the question of how WhatsApp is making money for Facebook or how they plan to monetise it without destroying it. A secure messaging platform is quite different to a trashy public social media platform like facebook.com.

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

#363

Post by peteretep »

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…

This will get lost in all the other comments, but I switched to just the BBC, The Economist, and FiveThirtyEight for news this year, rather than spending muuuuuch too much time getting my news from Reddit-linked sites.

My mental health has never been better, and I’m not sure I’ve missed anything important.

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

#364

Post by newscracker »

satysin wrote: post #362

Quitting Facebook wasn't difficult. I had nothing of value from it by the end. Quitting Instagram also wasn't difficult. Sadly quitting WhatsApp is proving very difficult as it is used by so many (at least here in Europe). I use Signal with most family members now but when I meet someone new and we exchange contact details it is always "you're on WhatsApp yes?" and never anything else. To be fair WhatsApp does work w…

WhatsApp shares some metadata about your conversations with Facebook, which is used by Facebook to show you ads or show your contacts on Facebook ads.

There was a plan to shove ads into WhatsApp statuses, but that was abandoned (or maybe suspended for the near future) recently.

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

#365

Post by an_outsider »

I want to propose an idea for increasing competition in social networks, but I don't know what the downsides/unintended side-effects are.

My idea: Governments around the world should block Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram on specific days of each week, say Saturday and Sunday. There should be fair warning - say the actual blocking starts happening only 1 month after the public announcement.

Wouldn't people be inclined to use the next best thing, automatically creating more competition, and more importantly force their friends to use other social networks?

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

#367

Post by nate_meurer »

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…

Same for me. I use Leechblock on my computer and AdGuard on my phone. Both pull a blocklist from pastebin that includes nearly news website I've ever visited -- nearly 200 of them. I occasionally add new ones that I encounter while surfing.

If I avoid all news to the extent that I no longer no what's been going on in the last few months, my anxiety level goes way way down. There's a washout period of a couple weeks, and after that it gets really easy; I no longer feel the need to pop dopamine with tidbits of current events. Not even a little. I avoid it like a former addict avoids drugs.

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

#368

Post by OJFord »

I haven't logged in to Facebook for about three years. When that 'off-Facebook data we have on you' page was released recently, I worked up the courage* to try to login, see it, and then finally 'delete' my account.

(*I've been slightly concerned that it will be depressing one way or the other, either three years' messages and invitations to things I missed, or little of that! Since I just sort of stopped logging in, I never posted that I wasn't using it for example.)

But I couldn't login. Facebook wanted me to prove my identity by contacting a set of my 'friends' that it chose, and I had no idea who they were. The only other option was to upload a scan of my passport, which felt a bit much considering my only aim was to get off properly and be appalled at the data it already has on me.

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

#369

Post by newscracker »

veb wrote: post #109
mindcrime wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, because I have an ideological aversion to closed off / walled-garden protocols like that. Part of what my switch away from the whole FB/Twitter/Etc. thing is going to be going back to mainly using XMPP for chat. And anybody who can't, or won't, join an XMPP network and use an XMPP client is somebody I don't need to chat with.

You might like PixelFed ( https://pixelfed.social/ ) it's a completely open sourced project based on federation.

I use it for some non-personal stuff. I don’t have any followers (doesn’t matter to me). I’m eagerly waiting for the mobile app, since that’s the biggest barrier when suggesting it to people. Beyond network effects, better integration with the camera and the photos library is what many people seem to appreciate (and filters...but Pixelfed has those already).

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

#370

Post by tsukurimashou »

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

depends on which bubble you find yourself in, I guess.

And I think depression and anxiety comes more from all the terrible "news" you get from around the world, it probably applies to "news" in general.

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