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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

#21

Post by marricks »

Can confirm. I tried deactivating and then cutting down but that just never works. Deleting is the way to go.

Old friends you want to connect with? There’s always email and a phone number. People actually reach out to me outside of that awful service to say “Hey Foo is in town” or “We’re having a reunion for Bar”.

Just delete it, notify people first, save the images you want, and torch it. Everything incremental just allows you joining it again later which Facebook is more than happy to facilitate.

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

#22

Post by kuuspa »

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.…

I think there are ways to monetize. Duck duck go manages to do it, so why not? A company like this was never supposed to be the most valuable company in the world.

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

#23

Post by insickness »

It would be interesting to see a study on general social media beyond facebook, such as reddit, instagram, hacker news, etc. I can waste hours on non-facebook social media. It's nice for those times I'm tired and just want to kick back and not think too hard. I'm fairly certain it lowers my attention span but I wonder if there are other negative effects.

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

#24

Post by wccrawford »

brightball wrote: post #14

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…

So it was fantastic, right up until the point that it wasn't? That's the whole point. Most people feel a need for Facebook for some reason or other.

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

#26

Post by balabaster »

twoquestions wrote: post #7
malvosenior wrote: post #3

”Those who deactivated also observed a decrease in political polarization and news knowledge, and an increase in subjective well-being.” Surely not reading Salon and its ilk would also result in this. Half of the toxic political posts on FB originate on sites like Salon, HuffPo... I think they’re more at fault for the political polarization of our society than FB which is mainly just a conduit.

FB also magnifies the worst posting from these outlets. You get the ultra incendiary stuff shared by everybody, while the more chill stuff doesn't get as much engagement and is ignored. I've been shown "Look at this awful thing!" stories more than once.

The ultra incendiary stuff is really just playing to the human propensity to want a witch hunt. Mob rule. Squash what we don't understand and thus fear because our lizard brains are becoming more conditioned to govern our thought processes instead of our adult brain that can reason and think critically. Playing to our emotional brain just feeds this constant cycle of emotion.

Eventually we'll all wake up from our slumber and realize how we've been manipulated for so long, but until then it's just going to be witch hunt after witch hunt.

There's only so long we can succumb to this before we all begin to wonder what the fuck we're doing allowing the media to continually manipulate our own sense of well-being in order to keep the sentiment in favour of their stakeholders.

It's pretty sick, honestly, but eventually we will all wise up to it - it's inevitable. Let's just hope it's before we destroy our humanity.

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

#27

Post by Brigadirk »

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 use a pomodoro-method timer addon that blocks a certain list of websites when it's ticking.

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

#28

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

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…

I keep it around solely because my parents / grandparents use it and it's a means for me to stay in their lives from far away. My social circles have totally dropped it.

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

#29

Post by sevensor »

Brigadirk wrote: post #27
vxxzy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use a pomodoro-method timer addon that blocks a certain list of websites when it's ticking.

I recommend the procrastination setting. I have it set for 10 minutes -- I just need enough of a kick in the seat to stop wasting my time.
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