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A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

salon.com

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Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#11

Post by have_faith »

Brigadirk wrote: post #4

I quite liked facebook. I don't have the urge to constantly check it, nor post much on it, but it was useful for events, casually keeping up with life events of acquaintances, and keeping a rolodex of semi-friends (e.g. people I met on holiday and would like to run into again). I deleted it because the company seems thoroughly evil and doesn't respect my privacy. But if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alter…

> if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alternative

I'm working on something at the moment. More experiment than anything else for the time being but the purpose of it is to have a minimal "social network" for keeping in touch with people, and that's about it. Very little in the way of notifications and most facebook-like features. Just a way to keep in touch and keep contact details for people you care about.

Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#12

Post by astazangasta »

Brigadirk wrote: post #4

I quite liked facebook. I don't have the urge to constantly check it, nor post much on it, but it was useful for events, casually keeping up with life events of acquaintances, and keeping a rolodex of semi-friends (e.g. people I met on holiday and would like to run into again). I deleted it because the company seems thoroughly evil and doesn't respect my privacy. But if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alter…

Here you go: https://joinmastodon.org/

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#14

Post by brightball »

I can confirm. I deleted the FB app, and deactivated my account for months and it was pretty fantastic.

The problem for me now is that I'm a Clemson alum and Clemson is doing awesome right now...so I reactivated my Facebook just to celebrate everything with all my friends from college.

I ended up finding a fairly happy medium of unfollowing every person who posts anything even remotely political (even if I agree with it) and now my feed is essentially football trash talking + friends celebrating life events.

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#15

Post by gtufano »

vxxzy wrote: post #9
bpchaps wrote: post #5

Anyone think the same holds true for HN? :)

In general, many people waste time on internet. The internet and all of its available information is hard to resist (at-least in my case). I've come up with a fix though! I simply have an addon in firefox that refreshes the web-page in 20 seconds! It is just enough annoyance to give up (especially after I am over halfway though an article..)

I'm not sure if this is a good thing... You're basically conditioning yourself to not read anything that lasts more than 20 seconds...

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#16

Post by BeetleB »

I suggest people actually look at the plots in the paper. As an example, on P55, they show the effects on subjective well being for many metrics (life satisfaction, loneliness, etc). Note that a number of these metrics have a large enough standard deviation that it spans both the positive and negative range.

Most news outlets focus only on the mean (most of which are positive). But when your standard deviation is large enough to change the sign, don't put much stock in the outcome. If there's one thing that was hammered into my head when I took statistics, it's that a confidence interval of (-1, 5) does not mean the true value is more likely close to 2 (or positive, or whatever). There's no valid reason to focus on the positive values more, when your confidence interval crosses the zero point.

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#18

Post by Brigadirk »

have_faith wrote: post #11
Brigadirk wrote: post #4

I quite liked facebook. I don't have the urge to constantly check it, nor post much on it, but it was useful for events, casually keeping up with life events of acquaintances, and keeping a rolodex of semi-friends (e.g. people I met on holiday and would like to run into again). I deleted it because the company seems thoroughly evil and doesn't respect my privacy. But if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alter…

> if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alternative I'm working on something at the moment. More experiment than anything else for the time being but the purpose of it is to have a minimal "social network" for keeping in touch with people, and that's about it. Very little in the way of notifications and most facebook-like features. Just a way to keep in touch and keep contact details for people you care about.…

You can monetise it the same way as facebook. I'd be more than happy for my data to be sold and analysed, as long as they were used according to strict ethical guidelines.

Perhaps worth giving DuckDuckGo a look, at how they're making money.

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#19

Post by Brigadirk »

astazangasta wrote: post #12
Brigadirk wrote: post #4

I quite liked facebook. I don't have the urge to constantly check it, nor post much on it, but it was useful for events, casually keeping up with life events of acquaintances, and keeping a rolodex of semi-friends (e.g. people I met on holiday and would like to run into again). I deleted it because the company seems thoroughly evil and doesn't respect my privacy. But if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alter…

Here you go: https://joinmastodon.org/

Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try.

Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

#20

Post by justwalt »

have_faith wrote: post #11
Brigadirk wrote: post #4

I quite liked facebook. I don't have the urge to constantly check it, nor post much on it, but it was useful for events, casually keeping up with life events of acquaintances, and keeping a rolodex of semi-friends (e.g. people I met on holiday and would like to run into again). I deleted it because the company seems thoroughly evil and doesn't respect my privacy. But if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alter…

> if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alternative I'm working on something at the moment. More experiment than anything else for the time being but the purpose of it is to have a minimal "social network" for keeping in touch with people, and that's about it. Very little in the way of notifications and most facebook-like features. Just a way to keep in touch and keep contact details for people you care about.…

You could try indiscriminately selling users data.
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