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Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

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Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#121
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my wife is addicted, she will pick up her phone to do one thing but first goes to Facebook and scrolls, then she forgets what she was using her phone for. Maybe not addicted but she has a habit of going to Facebook every time she uses her phone.

"wellness" settings can limit the amount of time per day she spends doing it if she wants to alter her behavior.

I’m not sure she wants to stop tbh

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#122
post #19

The author who wrote this has tweeted, on average, 1-2x a day for 10 years. https://twitter.com/jaronschneider Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society (an information/propagation architecture that exploits how people process information, imo). For me, Facebook is nothing more than a hometown forum. I havent logged on in months.

> Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society I'm always surprised that Reddit gets a free pass in these discussions. Reddit has been home to some of the most egregious bad communities and misinformation hives. Their invisible-hand moderation system allows a small number of moderators to completely control the conversation in a subreddit. Banning dissenters and removing comments that don't agree w…

I have a carefully curated list of subs on Reddit that are well moderated and informative. There just isn't an easy way to do that with Facebook or Twitter. Both of those platforms will show me "related" content I don't want to see.

Reddit might do that with their app (I don't use it so I don't know) but with a third party client or the old website I can pretty effectively avoid trolls and nonsense.

It's a controversial topic but I personally think the downvote makes a huge difference in my experience on social media. You see it here on HN as well.

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#123

The uproar over and magnitude of digital ink spent on Facebook is interesting. This uproar seems to persist even if the discussion is restricted to Americans who are adults and not using Facebook for a commercial purpose (i.e. the use is for amusement or in free time). It seems to be a disconnect from the generally pro-free speech, pro-personal liberty/accountability tone of HN. Are HN'ers calling for regulating soci…

If the platform is controlling what you see or interact with based on opaque algorithms does that really still qualify as free speech?

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#124
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll assert that it's much worse than nothing. "Nothing" isn't bad. Meditate. Let your imagination run wild. Relax. You can't do those things on facebook dot com.

For people with severe anxiety or depression, meditation can actually aggravate the situation and do significant harm. Letting one's mind run wild in that situation leads to more anxiety, suicide planning, etc. But, I'll amend my statement: facebook is less boring than a blank screen.

That's absurd. There is no scientific basis that would support your assertion. In fact, increased social media activity leads to a higher chance of suffering from depressive episodes. Meditation has been shown to to actually combat symptoms of depression.

If you can't sit still with your own thoughts for 60 seconds without spiraling, then you shouldn't even be remotely near social media.

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#125

I personally found Facebook hard to quit, but not entirely impossible. I would compare it to giving up cigarettes: not easy, but I got through it. I am coming to terms with the fact that I have have a very serious and damaging internet addiction, however. Like many serious addictions, there's a lot of shame attached to my real addiction, which is 4chan. 4chan is like being addicted to heroin. Every day is a battle to…

This got dark fast. Any behavior that is getting in the way of daily life is an addiction. Doesn't have to be drugs or gambling. Therapists have extensive training in coaching patients out of these behaviors or at least better understanding them. I hope you can find the help you need.

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#126
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society I'm always surprised that Reddit gets a free pass in these discussions. Reddit has been home to some of the most egregious bad communities and misinformation hives. Their invisible-hand moderation system allows a small number of moderators to completely control the conversation in a subreddit. Banning dissenters and removing comments that don't agree w…

I hate Reddit mostly for its hive mind. For example: There is a video of someone blasting music and neighbor clearly being upset. The offender calls the lady Karen. Then, all the comments are bashing so called "Karen". Even though many places in the US have laws in place to prevent people from blasting music all day. Stating this brings many down votes. I had an awful neighbor in an area where houses are close apart.…

Reddit is an amazing platform for niche hobbies and tech forums.

It is fucking terrible for its political news. It's so clearly biased AND it leaks into every default subreddit.

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#127
post #77

I personally found Facebook hard to quit, but not entirely impossible. I would compare it to giving up cigarettes: not easy, but I got through it. I am coming to terms with the fact that I have have a very serious and damaging internet addiction, however. Like many serious addictions, there's a lot of shame attached to my real addiction, which is 4chan. 4chan is like being addicted to heroin. Every day is a battle to…

Creating a 4chan support group for ex-users would be very challenging. How many other 4chan addicts do you know in person?

[deleted]

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#128
post #19

The author who wrote this has tweeted, on average, 1-2x a day for 10 years. https://twitter.com/jaronschneider Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society (an information/propagation architecture that exploits how people process information, imo). For me, Facebook is nothing more than a hometown forum. I havent logged on in months.

> Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society I'm always surprised that Reddit gets a free pass in these discussions. Reddit has been home to some of the most egregious bad communities and misinformation hives. Their invisible-hand moderation system allows a small number of moderators to completely control the conversation in a subreddit. Banning dissenters and removing comments that don't agree w…

Because there is no such thing as Reddit. Every sub is different. SilphRoad and the fandom subs for Dark and Twin Peaks were terrific communities when I participated there. Hobbyist subs for modding PC cases and programming languages have consistently great communities. Front-page Reddit is a totally different animal, but assuming you can remember words or deal with six bookmarks instead of one, you can go to the specific subs you want without ever having to see the front page at all.

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#129
You know what worked for me to get rid of Facebook? I turned it into a chore and eventually broke it.

When I deleted my old account and created a new one a few years ago, I decided to run a little experiment: I started hiding everything that was not posted directly by friends. "[unknown person] posted on [friend]'s wall"? Hide [unknown person]. "[friend] liked a post by [some page]"? I hid that page. A friend shared a post by someone or from a page? You bet I hid those too. And the same for groups, events and so forth.

I did that a little bit every day, for 3 years, until Facebook became pretty much barren. My friends only really post a handful of things a day and the rest is just cruft. Around that time I also discovered that Facebook started exposing who had uploaded your contact info as part of a marketing list... so I started leaving negative reviews and blocking those pages.

Does this sound like a total bore and a chore? Yes, yes it was. I think I got it going for so long mostly out of spite for the platform. Eventually, it got so bad that it started literally breaking Facebook for me. Sometimes no posts would load at all. Eventually, some of the hiding options stopped working! After a year or so, the experience got so janky and unrewarding I just deleted my account. I took the chance to get rid of Instagram and WhatsApp as well, since this was around the time where the latter started pushing for more telemetry.

I got most of my closer friends to jump on Telegram and Signal. I do miss Facebook a bit, in that it's become harder to keep up with some people that don't use other platforms... but not too much. I'm setting up a blog for myself to share whatever I want to write, my tech tutorials and maybe set up a photo gallery.

Re: Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit

#130
post #19

The author who wrote this has tweeted, on average, 1-2x a day for 10 years. https://twitter.com/jaronschneider Twitter has by far become a more egregious platform for society (an information/propagation architecture that exploits how people process information, imo). For me, Facebook is nothing more than a hometown forum. I havent logged on in months.

The greatest trick Twitter ever pulled was convincing the world Facebook were the problem.

The entire world lives in an altered reality. Always have been. Now you just say Facebook enough times and people believe anything. We deserve what we've got.

Facebook even has a simple path to less toxicity and seems to have done it, Twitter has no other state than toxic. The genealogy of toxic Facebook is also traced to Twitter.

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