Also stop (or reduce) following the news and online aggregators of news (like reddit, HN, etc.). You'll feel even better and freer.
I deleted my Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts, and felt great since
141–150 of 246 posts
Re: I deleted my Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts, and felt great since
#142Whenever this topic comes up, there are always a lot of comments to the effect of "facebook isn't the problem, you are". Maybe it is best to think of facebook like sugary food. Many people have no trouble having one piece of chocolate and then leaving the rest for later. Many other people are unable to stop themselves from downing the whole 200g block. I think these comments come from people who have no trouble engag…
I think of so many human problems as the "sugary food" class of problems now. Internet addiction†, pornography, gossip, sensationalist headlines. All sugary food. Our brains are wired to seek out that hit of glucose or dopamine in resource scarce environments and it's maladaptive in the long-term for resource rich ones. † which is why I'm here on HN, if I'm honest
"Internet addiction" seems like a different thing than the rest of those to me.
Being addicted to discovering new information and sharing with others sounds pretty healthy to me. I think the difference with HN vs FB is that at some level, you are driving your HN interaction, while FB is driving your FB interaction.
I think it only becomes "internet addiction" when you're not the one in control.
Re: I deleted my Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts, and felt great since
#143The logic for deleting WhatsApp pretty weak and undermines the argument here, especially given the fairly strong encryption WhatsApp uses.
Just remember that while WhatsApp encryption seems really good, they still upload backups of all your conversations unencrypted to Googles servers.
If you trust Google to protect them that is fine. Personally I don't expect Google to fail me in that particular way.
But it also means any E2E-encryption argument from WhatsApp goes out the window.
Re: I deleted my Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts, and felt great since
#144Whenever this topic comes up, there are always a lot of comments to the effect of "facebook isn't the problem, you are". Maybe it is best to think of facebook like sugary food. Many people have no trouble having one piece of chocolate and then leaving the rest for later. Many other people are unable to stop themselves from downing the whole 200g block. I think these comments come from people who have no trouble engag…
That's a pretty good way to think about the problem. However, do we think food manufacturers are doing a good thing by adding filler like sugar and salt to food that doesn't need it to get people eat more of it?
Re: I deleted my Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts, and felt great since
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you don't have to wait for everything else in your life to be perfectly arranged in order to take charge of your own feeling of self worth. In fact doing so makes it far less likely that it will ever happen. This trend of telling people that they are helpless victims of their circumstances comes from a place of compassion, but it is ultimately causing more harm than good. Yes, some things that happen to you, beyo…
Yes pal, let's stop giving preferential treatment to senior citizens, pregnant women, people with disabilities, let all those bastards learn to fend for themselves. The damagce caused by ADA must be estimated in the billions. Lets remove also sex education, those pesky pre-teenagers should learn about how the world works just by their own. Were you fired, lost your insurance and now have cancer? Tough luck. Are you a…
You're awfully quick to jump to living in an every-person-for-themself Mad-Max style dystopia. That is a ridiculous straw man.
You can offer sex ed classes, it is up to the kids to pay attention and apply what they teach. Nobody else can learn something for you. You can offer cancer treatments, but people have to show up and stick with them. You can offer therapy and medication, but people still have to go to the therapy and take the meds.
If every time something goes wrong for you, everyone tells you that hey, "there's nothing you could have done", "of course it doesn't work out for you because of X circumstance in your life". Maybe it feels like you're being kind, but you're just robbing them of agency and telling them that they are doomed no matter what. Is your goal to actually make people's lives better, or to make yourself feel better by adhering to some "good person" script?
Re: I deleted my Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts, and felt great since
#146Scientifically, it's not a robust conclusion. The kind of person who wants to delete FB etc is the kind of person who will feel better after they do it. Personally, I just use FB in a pretty restricted way. I unfollow most friends unless they post stuff I like engaging with. I give FB the bare minimum of my own personal data, and block all the ads they serve. I mostly post questions for discussion, rather than highli…
What specifically makes him “that kind of person”?
Re: I deleted my Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts, and felt great since
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think of so many human problems as the "sugary food" class of problems now. Internet addiction†, pornography, gossip, sensationalist headlines. All sugary food. Our brains are wired to seek out that hit of glucose or dopamine in resource scarce environments and it's maladaptive in the long-term for resource rich ones. † which is why I'm here on HN, if I'm honest
"Internet addiction" seems like a different thing than the rest of those to me. Being addicted to discovering new information and sharing with others sounds pretty healthy to me. I think the difference with HN vs FB is that at some level, you are driving your HN interaction, while FB is driving your FB interaction. I think it only becomes "internet addiction" when you're not the one in control.
I was "addicted" to discovering new information before the internet existed. I biked 20 kilometers to the city to spend hours in the library and dig around in the shelves. When I got got access to the internet in the early 90s I spent hours to search in Usenet news and gopher sources (www hadn't been invented yet). I would not call that always a healthy behavior. It can be pretty inefficient and lacking any direction. Yeah, I sometimes wonder how narrow knowledge my fellow programmers or my early colleague from university who is a professor of computer science today can have.
My interaction on HN could be more focussed to learn something new and not comment something old...
Re: I deleted my Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts, and felt great since
#148Recently I went to Milan and remembered that I had a good friend there. I tried to reach out to him on Facebook and it turns out that he had deleted his account. I couldn't reach out to him again because I never knew his email, or really had much friends in common. It was pretty sad when I think about it. I'm happy that with Facebook I can still keep in touch with most of my friends that I made around the world trave…
You seem to have a healthy relationship with FB. Issue is...FB is actively optimizing the experience to achieve an unhealthy relationship that is effectively an addiction. That’s the evil part.
Re: I deleted my Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts, and felt great since
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even the platform specific issues aside, they're all "A Mark Zuckerberg production" and many people may not wish to use the products of a sociopath
It seems extremely hyperbolic to call someone a sociopath for creating a platform for people to share news about themselves with friends and family. As much as I don't really enjoy using Facebook, it is still the single best way for me to keep up with what's going on in the lives of my extended family.
It might not be strictly psychopatic, idk, not a doctor. However when you call your users dumbfucks, recognizing you are exploiting them and still continue to do it... Why would I use (trust) any of his products?
Re: I deleted my Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram accounts, and felt great since
#150Whenever this topic comes up, there are always a lot of comments to the effect of "facebook isn't the problem, you are". Maybe it is best to think of facebook like sugary food. Many people have no trouble having one piece of chocolate and then leaving the rest for later. Many other people are unable to stop themselves from downing the whole 200g block. I think these comments come from people who have no trouble engag…
One of the most pervasive and lazy ways to think about humans is that we're rational (homo economicus [0]), and any deviation from that is a personal failing. While some people have better impulse control than others, or have different weaknesses than a particular issue at hand, it's mostly a lack of self-awareness that prevents people from seeing that they too are driven by forces other than pure logic. An ever so b…
So are you agreeing with the parent? Setting up environments sure sounds like regulating the shit out of facebook which the parent comment hinted at.