I don't understand the appeal of FB; we have other means to be connected with the people we care about. I've never understood the appeal of broadcasting yourself to the entire planet either... it's bizarre.
The relationship between social media use and well-being
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#12[deleted]
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#13100% confirm. I quit FB after being on it for a decade and I'm significantly happier.
More productive at work. Significantly less angry.
The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends from college.
I think people take for granted how much of a motivator a little bit of loneliness can be.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#14I've worked on social networks for several venture backed companies, and I opted out of their use half a decade ago. Drug dealers aren't users.
I like the opium analogy. Socially acceptable as long as the East India Company is forcing it down our throats. (But at least we'll get Hong Kong out of it!)
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#15I am curious what's the point of being connected all the time? It's a question I've been asking myself since the U.S. election. So I can have access to a bunch of garbage people post on the Internet? So I can chat people quickly? There's like a handful of truly useful things on the Internet. Most of the useless things though take up 90% of time on it. I'm failing to see the value at this point.
Why would you follow/friend people who post garbage? If you're using it as a contact list, you can "unfollow" your "friends" on Facebook, so their posts don't show up in your feed by default but you can still contact them. Or even use messenger.com instead of the main Facebook interface.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#16I think my experience and satisfaction with Facebook has steadily decreased in a linear relationship with how many friends I have on my friends list. My guess is because:
1) the more friends I add, the more likely I am to add that guy on Facebook. The guy who always posts very annoying political posts, or the guy who posts very smug+condescending posts.
2) I find myself comparing with my friends, especially when they post pics of them on vacation or news of some promotion.
3) I spend too much time worrying about how to curate posts and post stuff that a. impresses people and b. doesn't offend anyone.
I probably just care too much what others think, but that's my 2c.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#17100% confirm. I quit FB after being on it for a decade and I'm significantly happier. More productive at work. Significantly less angry. The big one is that I'm making much more of a point to spend time with people who actually live near me rather than chatting it up with my friends from college. I think people take for granted how much of a motivator a little bit of loneliness can be.
Ditto.
The reality is the number of tenuous social "connections" I had went down, and the number of high quality connections went up, since I now actually have to invest time in those relationships (which I've also come to value quite a bit more).
And I couldn't agree more with your comment about being less angry. Facebook is the worst kind of soapbox...
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#18My mental health improved dramatically when I deactivated facebook. I use instagram and Twitter sparingly these days. For some reason, I am unable to use facebook sparingly. When I am active, it is the first thing I check in the morning. I only use facebook after writing exams and deactivate as soon as I register for a new semester.
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#19I strongly feel that social media must become a pull based model instead of a push based model - so like RSS where I subscribe. On the client side, we should use simple machine learning and filtering to show content that is truly useful to us (I love to know what is happening is my sister's life).
The current setup of giving info to a company and that company pushing all sort of crap on me is not for me. Granted they could do the machine learning on their side but these for-profit ad driven corporations do not have the users best interest in mind. They just want to get us hooked.
Ghost can have this feature!
Re: The relationship between social media use and well-being
#20I came to the same conclusion a few years ago, when I delete my social accounts like Facebook. They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life. That it's completely boring, while all of these people are living these amazing adventures everyday. Combine that with all of the vitriol comments plaguing all of…
>They only show you the best slices of individual lives, all day, every day. When compared to your life, it makes it look like you're doing nothing with your life.
Exactly. You end up judging your interior by others' exterior. They show you a highly edited version of their life, made to impress everyone else. You're doing nothing but constantly chasing a phantom life you can never have, because no one else really has it either.