Reasons to Quit Social Media

I find that social media has went in a direction that makes it impossible to curate a 'healthy' feed.

The thing that ruins it for me is the constant negativity. Everybody is upset about something. Often, rightly so, but everybody is also extreme in their views. There is never nuance or healthy discussion. Only anger. Even in innocuous things. For example, follow the official account for a sport on Instagram. If you ever wade into the comments it's a cesspit of anger and negativity. Even if you never get involved (I don't ever comment) it effects how you feel.

Twitter is the worst offender. I can curate a feed of people I enjoy seeing content from. This should be enough, but these people can retweet things I don't want to see. Fortunately Twitter allows you to disable retweets for people. But...Twitter populates your feed with tweets people you follow have liked or tweets Twitter thinks you might like. The majority of the time these are things I don't want to see that cause negative emotions. It makes Twitter unusable without customisation via Chrome extensions or third party apps.

When I look around at my friends, the people that have the least negative outlook on life and seem to be most outgoing and happy are the people that don't actively use social media or who never even signed up. They're the people who don't know what's happening in the news unless there is a major crisis that might actually effect them. It's always hard to know from sure looking in but these people seem to have the right idea.

When I look at it objectively, I get absolutely nothing beneficial out of the most popular social media companies (or reading the news constantly). There is something about it all though that makes it really hard to step away. It's FOMO more than addiction. I never last more than a few days, but they're always better days.

> They're the people who don't know what's happening in the news unless there is a major crisis that might actually effect them.

To that end its increasingly hard to stay informed and sift through the negativity, even in Journalism.

While I havent been on Facebook since 2008 or so, and never signed up for Twitter, i have been on reddit since basically launch and digg before that. I use them less and less becuase, as you point out, it directly correlates to my moods.

But moreover, my long term method of staying informed, a highly curated list of RSS feeds, is also hard to maintain and keep a good mood. I find this method preferable because I am less influenced by "popular" talking points and free to make my own assessment. But just the writing is now so biased and negative I find myself cynically reading multiple sources on a single issue and intrinsically distrusting what almost any of them say at their face unless its backed up or said in another source.

At the end of the day its time consuming. And I waver between just watching a nightly news that i KNOW is extremely biased or sifting through the trash to "find" what i feel is a more accurate depiction.

Of course, this waivers depending on what is occurring. During relative "quiet" times ill watch the news, when large events like the Floyd protests or Afghanistan withdrawal occurs, Ill key into RSS feeds to try and suss out a better picture.

That said....there almost always seems to be some major event these days.

> it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm

Honestly, I think it's just the fact that it's a website that allows you to constantly be exposed to different things that are interesting and stimulating. You can remove upvotes, scrolling, all you want, but you'll still have the IV drip of novel content. Constant exposure to novelty is harmful, I think. We weren't designed to have our minds blown every 5 minutes.

Spend a few hours a day having your brain washed with memes and fascinating articles (or at least the titles), and your brain will re-calibrate to this as the new normal, and anything less stimulating (reading books etc.) will feel boring. Constant novelty makes the world seem unstable and makes me feel flighty and anxious compared to more mundane activities, so the mental health connection is no surprise.

Hacker News is less stimulating than other social media because it's text-based, it's about more serious topics, it's well moderated, and it doesn't abuse addictive techniques like infinite scrolling. However, I bet many people here will attest that they sometimes close HN only to open it right back up again. Closing a website only to open it immediately because you are bored is a sign that you subconsciously believe the website is one of the only interesting things you can do. Either your brain is right, and everything besides HN, reddit, Twitter, etc. is actually boring, or these things are just so artificially stimulating that using them causes everything else to feel boring in comparison. I'll let you decide which you think sounds more accurate.

Incitement to racial hatred, done publicly, can be held illegal if it crosses certain thresholds. I don’t think this means Europeans don’t have free speech.

Consider both:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Sta...

This has nothing to do with my church in particular but has to do with the idea of a church. Honestly society benefits if people were members of churches other than my own as well. Even a church not my own would foster community and hopefully want people to become better. And provide a community where people can have true connection

And yes, social media is vile. I'm sorry you don't see that. There is nothing dismissive about calling a piece of software vile. Do you see how confused you've become under it's influence? I literally called a software service vile, after decades of published studies and news reports indicating it's I'll effects, and I've been accused of fostering division among people.

This is the great problem with social media. It confuses fake for real, virtual for physical, and computer programs for human beings.