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The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

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261–270 of 527 posts

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wife went cold turkey on social media and then had to join Instagram and LinkedIn for her business. Now she's addicted to Instagram. No LinkedIn, not you, you boring Ted Talk humblebrag.

People love LinkedIn cringe on instagram and twitter - but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious

A comedy act called 'Wankernomics' just showed up in my YouTube recommendations. I thought about booking a ticket to their show but its too close to reality.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#262
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It is like alcohol: perfectly fine in reasonable doses, but harmful to people that get addicted.

“Perfectly fine” is a bit of a stretch. No amount of alcohol is good for health. WHO now say even small amounts increase risk of cancer and liver disease.

Having to share a world with people who take way to seriously the long tail of things that will kill you so little you need massive sample sizes and meta studies to quantify the effect is a hell of a lot worse for my health than ~2 light beers per week and a steak a month.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#263
post #93
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the EU should flex their regulatory muscle and forbid algorithmic feeds on by default unless the networks break european society as the US is broken.

They should just say that algorithm is editorialised and needs to be subject to the same regulations as newspapers (fined for fake news, editor can lose his journalist status).

Is journalist a formal status? It's not like the owners of Linkedin or Facebook actually care if they can't get a press pass anyway.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has moved heavily into group chats and I’m not sure it’s coming back. Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances. Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into…

Any way you cut it, "feeds" are more addictive. Your family and friends only post a couple times a day, but you have all day at work to look for some quick stimulation. I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets less depressed…

> actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around.

This happens virtually everywhere. It is extremely rampant. I have yet to find a place where there are humans and it does not happen, excl. friend circles.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#265
post #41

I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can…

I wrote my own client for Twitter, which was later adapted to also support Bluesky. The idea behind the project was to scrape porn easily, but it's also an amazing tool where it shows me the feed I personally want to see. This is pretty much the only way I interact with these services.

username checks out

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#266
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue they've been told is important, right? For example it was vital in the minds of some in USA to put import taxes (tariffs) >100% on all Chinese goods. They would have seemed to care about that, until Trump got told that wasn't working (or, as likely, the market had been swung far enough) and did a 180 removing tariffs on what the public were told were the most vital things to tariff... All those people didn'…

But remember that this is supported by traditional media (Fox news). It's not just social media.

Correct. The term for these type of unreliable sources in support of an ideology is propaganda.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#267
Look, if your "connections" require you to engage in the social media slop, they are not worth it. If your family forces you to be on FB, your family is dysfunctional. If you have lost your friends after deleting your account, you had no friends in a first place.

Yes, we can live without social media. I know it is possible from my own experience. And when everyone has a phone and e-mail address, you can stay connected without FB or other account.

It will require more effort, but valuable things rarely come without it.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#268
post #2

With ai, i hope the feed is more useful to me.

The ML model exists to benefit Facebook, not you. It maximizes for your engagement with the platform, not your happiness or usefulness.

Could it be possible to counter it with another ML model that browses your feed?

For example, scraping your feed and presenting to you only the content that corresponds to some pre-defined labels (with a tiny bit of randomness to spice things up).

Although how could the automatic labeling work for videos from the user-end? Hashtags would be the simplest indicators, however also easily misleading.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#269
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But less :D

I got shot 7 times in the head rather than 10.

When I got on it I'd just see local events and stuff people I knew posted. Now it's "science" pages and shorts, which spread disinformation.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#270
post #41

I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can…

> many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life

You want nourishment instead of toxins! ^_^

The thing called "social media" is mostly a US export. It craves monetisation — at the expense of all else, including factual information.

What it has done to US society and public discourse is plain to see.

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