Does HN count as social media?
Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
41–50 of 486 posts
Re: Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
#42Social networks were never social. Human interactions are complex and chatting online is just a glimpse, it distorts biological needs.
Re: Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
#43There's some real things I want to appreciate & root into here, but as a geek growing up, one of my greatest & most persistence annoyances was how easy & happy it was for so many around me to pick being so ignorant, so blind, so insular. Heck yes ignoring the world & big matters makes you happier. Heck yes keeping blinders on & seeing less is safer, more secure, simpler. But fuck that. Fuck ignorance. Face things, se…
When someone develops a distorted picture of the world and becomes an activist based on it, that's just as bad for society as if they had never activated in the first place. In fact you could make a case that it's worse, mass shooters tend to be highly ideological and have views that are at odds with reality.
The problem we have with social media (and to a degree traditional media as well) is that both the nature of the technology and the profit incentives of the platforms encourage shallow thinking and cognitive bias among users. Going from paper to screens was bad enough in terms of its documented effects on focus and comprehension. Add to that shrinking the screen down to the size of our palms, enforcing 280 character limits, amplifying the most outrageous voices etc. and I sometimes wonder how civilization is still intact!
I agree that people should maintain some form of awareness of social issues and participation in them, democracy doesn't work without this. But an information diet heavy on social media will promote a distorted awareness of the world. And time spent on social media feels significant but it doesn't actually effect change. Things that do include: voting, attending a protest, writing to your congressman, volunteering your time and labor, earning extra income which you can donate to a cause, etc.
There are a lot of ways to get informed, participate & influence society, social media is one of the worst. It's the junk food of activism.
Re: Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the news source. There is a noticeable difference between Tweets and unverified Facebook posts, news media from Buzzfeed or Salon, articles from a local newspaper, articles from The New York Times/Washington Post, and articles from the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal. Not all news is designed for outrage. Several publications publish in-depth articles in a neutral way, where you can actually lea…
> Not all news is designed for outrage. I don't think I get anxiety from content "designed for outrage". But if I go to the front page of the Washington Post, here's what I see: > Buffalo shooting suspect wrote of plans months ago, online messages show > Only 22 saw the Buffalo shooting live. Millions have seen it since. > A barrage of ‘never-ending gunshots’: Inside the Buffalo massacre > Ukraine ends bloody battle…
That is the point of my comment: not all news sources are designed for clickbait. In contrast, consider The Financial Times's (FT's) headlines:
>Tiger Global slashes bets on tech groups after stock market sell-off
> News in-depth. Military briefing: why Russia and Ukraine are fighting over a Black Sea outcrop
> Investors pull $7bn from Tether as stablecoin jitters intensify
> Buffett buys $3bn Citi stake in value-hunting stock splurge
> Ethiopia atrocities cast long shadow as city of Lalibela prays for peace
> Qantas says synthetic fuel could power long flights by mid-2030s
Some of the news itself is tragic. But it's a false equivalence to claim that the headlines and article content between news sources (e.g. Washington Post vs. the FT) are equally outrage-provoking or informative. The Washington Post was listed in the middle because their articles are usually highly informative (from the number of interviewed people and documents analyzed), though their headlines are more clickbait.
Both The Washington Post or the FT are different from (typically) Salon, and each is a far cry from social media. Also, the debate of news media in place of discussing social media is exactly the effect that Zuckerberg intended with his comment.
Re: Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
#45At Facebook / Meta, employees often questioned Mark Zuckerberg whenever a study like this came out. Zuckerberg noted that the same held true for news media. Reporters do not like to mention this.
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Re: Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
#46At Facebook / Meta, employees often questioned Mark Zuckerberg whenever a study like this came out. Zuckerberg noted that the same held true for news media. Reporters do not like to mention this.
Sure. But in the same way that 24 hour news networks are an obvious detriment compared to brief half hour or hour long "evening news" programs, social media's patterns to keep you engaged are also a detriment compared with, say, a quick text to the people you care about checking in. There's a real positive buried in there, but the financial incentive to capture eyeballs turns it into a negative.
Re: Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
#47For me, I've found that social media doesn't affect my level of happiness and/or anxiety directly. What it does do, is take up a lot of my time almost imperceptibly - leaving less time for other, more meaningful activities. It makes me feel like I'm running out of time every day, which in turn causes a feeling of anxiety.
Yes, few people probably aren't affected by social media just like smoking & drinking. But from my personal experience many people really feel jealous/unhappy/lonely when they look on false reality. And, those influencer really makes everything worst.
Re: Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the news source. There is a noticeable difference between Tweets and unverified Facebook posts, news media from Buzzfeed or Salon, articles from a local newspaper, articles from The New York Times/Washington Post, and articles from the Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal. Not all news is designed for outrage. Several publications publish in-depth articles in a neutral way, where you can actually lea…
> Not all news is designed for outrage. I don't think I get anxiety from content "designed for outrage". But if I go to the front page of the Washington Post, here's what I see: > Buffalo shooting suspect wrote of plans months ago, online messages show > Only 22 saw the Buffalo shooting live. Millions have seen it since. > A barrage of ‘never-ending gunshots’: Inside the Buffalo massacre > Ukraine ends bloody battle…
To add to this. I don't watch the news anymore (maybe that makes me a bad person). I also rarely read it (except for hacker "news") but... Every few weeks I visit my mom for a few days and she wants to watch the news around 10pm. It always massively over hyped violence, crime, political outrage, and it's funny, in a sad way, that she always gets upset at it and ask her why she keeps watching. She says "for the weather" to which I reply (you can ask your ipad/iphone) but she keeps doing it even though every night it's clearly upsetting her. I think it's a habit like she feels they day isn't over unless she ends the night with news, even though it's 90% designed for outrage and sensationalism.
Re: Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
#49Does this include HN? Asking for a friend. Snark aside, why is this a recurring obsession of HN posters?
In my opinion, yes.
HN has been a significant contributor to my cynicism. There have been enough submissions in the past where I already knew what to expect from the comments section, especially in cases where my stance on the matter is already firm/obvious (such as with tech regulation, climate change, complaints about Twitter threads being reposted to HN, articles about social media dooming us like this one).
My reaction to these cases is typically along the lines of "yes, we know this bad, but what's going to change? What does continuing to complain here accomplish?" It's largely the same mechanism as those other toxic media platforms, and yet HN often falls for it as well. The band of people who decry Twitter et al. at the usual opportunities has persisted for years at this point, and they are unlikely to ever exit this community for good. Yet it's trivial from force of habit to click through to the comments anyway and continue to expose oneself to the usual negativity.
And I don't even use Twitter anymore - it's not like I disagree with many of those negative opinions. But after years and years of reading the same tired arguments, that negativity seems to transcend its original context to worm its way into your thought process as a general, persistent haze.
Re: Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious
#50I quit social media entirely many years ago: it felt like quitting smoking, just less difficult but the same level of benefits. I also shifted how I get news: I don't read or watch "event-oriented" journalism (aka, reporting) and shifted entirely to analysis (through radio and press). The biggest win is that the timeframe is different, as analysis requires perspective, opposite to reporting which only focuses on the…
This is social media.
(Not to detract entirely from your statement with my pendantics.)