Live data from Hacker News

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

nber.org

441–450 of 527 posts

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

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you think it's okay to be rude to a Jewish person at a bar because of literally anything to do with Israel Look I don't have full context here, but more generally there's recently been a lot of conflating Judaism with "support of Israel". If a person is at a bar and you know they support Israel and you're "rude to them" (a subjective statement which can include telling them to re-calibrate their moral compass),…

You're talking about a political conversation in which people are discussing ideas. I'm talking about experiencing a situation in which people I've never even met are actively rude to me because someone told them I "support Israel". I'm perfectly willing to have a conversation about its faults and mistakes. That's not what's going on here. One can be Jewish and not support Israel. One can condemn Israeli policies wit…

To be clear, I was responding to the insinuation that being rude to someone at a bar due to "literally anything to do with Israel" is antisemitic if they're Jewish. Of course being specifically rude to Jewish people due to their support of Israel is antisemitic, but being rude to people who support Israel is not (we can debate whether it's productive or deserved separately).

But since you've gone out of your way to make your position here clearer, I'll offer my response:

> But the reason you're seeing a lot of conflation is that a lot of Jews were murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped from their homes on 10/7

A lot of people, Jews and non-Jews were killed on 10/7 (perhaps you're unaware that the majority of casualties that day were not of Jews).

> and the world took that as an opportunity to blame Israel and to discuss whether these Jews should really have a country at all

"the world" really didn't jump to blaming Israel quite so unanimously on 10/7, though I'm sure those who were already fighting for Palestinian liberation, or who had a deeper awareness of the history surrounding the ongoing occupation, or who were already of the opinion that Palestinians were undergoing a genocide (prior to 10/7) likely thought it important to use the opportunity to raise awareness of the injustices Palestinians had faced since long before October 7.

My own opinion at the time was largely "I don't know too much about the history besides what I learned in my Zionist school and from clearly Zionist friends/family, but as someone who appreciated the separation of church and state in the U.S. and Canada growing up, I disagree with religious statehood and ethno-nationalism... but perhaps a lot of the criticism of Israel is driven by antisemitism also and Zionists seem very convinced that it's justified and necessary in this one specific instance because of antisemitism."

Since then, having spent much more time reading various narratives, I've come to entirely disagree with that. While yes, there is antisemitism, including among those who criticize Israel, it doesn't seem to me that it's any more common among anti-Zionists than it is among Zionists (believe it or not, many anti-semites support Israel).

Furthermore, Westerners "singling out" Israel is much more evidently explained by the Western financial and military support of Israel (in addition to tampering in other middle-eastern affairs) which has enabled a litany of horrifying atrocities inflicted upon Palestinians to continue unchecked.

> The destruction of Israel would involve the deaths of millions of Jews who don't have any other country to go to

The end of Zionism does not mean the deaths of millions of Jews, any more than the end of Nazi Germany meant the deaths of millions of Germans (incidentally, it did because so many chose to lay down their lives in its defense, or in some cases were compelled to). Beyond the casualties in the war (which if we're being honest was more about stopping Germany's expansion than about liberating people from concentration camps and death camps), only a few high-ranking Nazi officials were put to death after the fall of the third reich; beyond the executions of those convicted of war crimes, Germany was indeed able to continue existing as a state which didn't brutally oppress marginalized groups; there weren't widespread executions of ethnic Germans as some may have feared, merely an end to the unjust system of supremacy.

And this is exactly what so many who "single out" Israel are calling for; not "another genocide of Jews" as you're claiming, but a free Palestine for all.

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

#442
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people. In this timeline, after a group of Hong Kong democracy activists planted bombs that killed a few hundred low-level people at the annual Chinese Communist Party meeting, China responded by announcing plans to bomb Hong Kong into rubble, rid themselves of the menace of democracy once and for all. And then when they heard this, your cou…

Your hypothetical is intentionally skewed. Hamas is not a pro democracy group. It's a radical jihadist group. Its mission is not to free Gaza, but to destroy Israel and kill all Jews. The people it killed on 10/7 were not low level government officials, they were civilians, including children. The method of killing was extremely brutal. Moreover, Hamas is not some tiny group within Gaza. It is the elected government…

Your attitude of tolerance is admirable.

If you queried a hundred random people who knew this same Russian and were similarly opposed to his politics, do you believe that one hundred of them would share your perspective? Or would a handful give that guy dirty looks at the bar because they were not in the exact same headspace you are in?

I struggle with comparisons because I'm trying to illustrate for you what those people are seeing when they spontaneously start acting that way that is different from what you're seeing. It's difficult to find any comparable situation as lopsided as Israel's relationship with Palestine, and the almost inscrutable international response to that relationship. Liberal tolerance ethics takes deliberate effort (generalization is a natural cognitive bias), and all of the people who would typically provide guidance on normative ideals suddenly took on the unprecedented position that we should exterminate a couple million people in what is effectively a concentration camp because of a violent outburst against the people who put them there, that this was Good and Righteous Justice, that anybody who didn't want to exterminate them were dangerous fringe actors. People who rejected this propaganda storm found themselves ideologically adrift, latching on to whatever floats.

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

#443
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blue sky allows you to have many different kinds of feeds and I can say the difference in adrenaline level and mood is palpable depending on the feed I use. News items - frustration at the state the world is in. Urban bicycle feed: annoyance at the atrocities of the inept drivers. Feed with cycle side trip pictures: fun. Rust projects, Electronics: the curiosity of learning. Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing fe…

> Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is you can subscribe to someone else’s block lists. That changes the experience quite a lot, to the better. Oh yeah I remember how this worked on Twitter. Make a post that annoys some anonymous blocklist maintainer, and suddenly you're blocked by a whole swath of accounts. Sometimes just following the wrong person or liking the wrong post is enough. No accountab…

The solution is trivial: just be polite and respectful to others.

Everyone is entitled to say their opinion.

Nobody is entitled to force others listen to it.

It’s quite simple, really.

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

#444
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

>I think you have a blind spot to the fact that the war has been an excuse for people to go after Jews

I don't think antisemites have ever needed excuses to justify their conduct to themselves or others. And I have yet to see any outcomes for Jews in the US or UK that even approach the consequences that Arabs and those who have vocally opposed Israel's actions have faced.

>The very first thing I heard from most of the antifa people was some variation of "They had it coming."

Imagine asking some Jewish friends in 1944 in Poland what they thought about the victims of the Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising. You have to put yourself in other peoples' shoes if you want to understand their perspective.

>And with them, I can have a real conversation about the facts without any hatred or heated tempers.

You actually can't. Arabs know very well that they are being racially scrutinized when it comes to their views about this conflict, and they all know that the best course of action is to be as loudly and visibly Not Mean To Jewish Or Israeli People. It's not a real conversation because the power balance is way off; you have the state apparatus behind you (assuming US or UK) as well as a wide range of doxxing and terrorizing organizations like Betar. There is no free speech when it comes to opinions on Israel in either country I mentioned.

>It's indigenous homeland of the Jewish people.

I'm well aware of the Blut und Boden narrative about it, and settler colonialism has made fantastic use of it many times in the past (Liberia for example). It is absolutely an ethnostate however, per its own government's legislation (the 2018 Nation-State Bill). An ethnostate can include preferential treatment to a variety of types of Jews (though not all, as many African ones are excluded or subjected to scrutiny not faced by European ones).

>The fact that you have a problem with one particular ethno/religious state out of all the states in the Middle East and the world says plenty about your personal biases.

I don't, and hell it ain't even just the Middle East. Ask me what I think about the Azeris...

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

#445
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blue sky allows you to have many different kinds of feeds and I can say the difference in adrenaline level and mood is palpable depending on the feed I use. News items - frustration at the state the world is in. Urban bicycle feed: annoyance at the atrocities of the inept drivers. Feed with cycle side trip pictures: fun. Rust projects, Electronics: the curiosity of learning. Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing fe…

* Bluesky is from the same people that launched Twitter and, optics aside, just the same ideology. There is no real deep divide on values. It is about locking up people in echo chambers, information filtering and ultimately ripping out people's ability to organize around a common good. There is only one danger for the 0.1%. The 99,9%. * The people that got disturbed by Twitter's boosting of extremists and nazis, now…

I can not argue about the values of people I do not know personally. I only said that the tool they made seems to be okay in my experience, which I shared.

“Free markets” is an uneducated nonsense. An entirely unregulated market evolves into monopoly. Even without corruption.

Social media for me is just a tool (HN is also social media btw). I find it useful and it meaningfully interacts with the other aspects of my life. When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.

As for the hierarchy: it had always existed and for better or worse the humans and other animals are wired for it. Likewise, they are wired for maintaining the total perceived fairness of the system - so the system eventually autocorrects the extreme imbalance. Often brutally, though.

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

#446
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blue sky allows you to have many different kinds of feeds and I can say the difference in adrenaline level and mood is palpable depending on the feed I use. News items - frustration at the state the world is in. Urban bicycle feed: annoyance at the atrocities of the inept drivers. Feed with cycle side trip pictures: fun. Rust projects, Electronics: the curiosity of learning. Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing fe…

Bluesky has felt like the healthiest experience I have ever had with social media. I don't really use any algorithmic feeds (though I have been toying with building my own), just my following feed.

I find the algorithmic topical feeds nicely solve the problem of discovery for me. There’s a lot of people who are experts in their fields, totally different to mine (e.g. astronomy, physics, photography etc) which makes it interesting for me.

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

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it wasn't clear what I meant. When I said significantly, I meant it in the colloquial sense, not in the statistical significance sense. I was looking for a more digestable figure describing the extent of improvements, not whether the study found them confidently distinguishable (which I just assumed they did based on the wording, good to know they didn't for Instagram).

The best thing you can do is compare it to another study, since turning 0.06 standard deviations into a percentage of happiness isn’t going to be that telling. In general, 0.2 is considered a small effect. So 0.06 is quite small — likely not a practically noticeable change in well-being. But impressive to me when I compare it to effect sizes of therapy interventions which can lie around 0.3 for 12 weeks. Quote: > “50…

Caveat: I'm not very smart

So, if 0.3 is 12 weeks of therapy, then 0.06 is ~2.5 weeks of therapy (0.3/0.06 = 2.4), assuming you pick any 2.5 random weeks of the 12 week course.

Yes, I'm sure the first session is the most important and then a logarithmic curve of blah blah blah.

Essentially, deleting FB is not much, but it's not nothing either.

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

#448
post #392
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "Friends" tab (sometimes "Feed" instead; the A/B testing on this one seems strong) only shows the posts of people you know. Events is still there as well. But in both cases the rate of creation has dropped dramatically since the time you remember, making these nearly useless. That's why the social media services have had to focus on content created by professional content creators instead. The outcome was inevita…

What's the point of posting stuff if nobody will see it because facebook decided so?

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

#449
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In some EU countries yes it is. You need recognised journalists that can be disbarred to report news. Exceptions exist for specialised publications, so science journals don't need journalists.

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

#450
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is you can subscribe to someone else’s block lists. That changes the experience quite a lot, to the better. Oh yeah I remember how this worked on Twitter. Make a post that annoys some anonymous blocklist maintainer, and suddenly you're blocked by a whole swath of accounts. Sometimes just following the wrong person or liking the wrong post is enough. No accountab…

The solution is trivial: just be polite and respectful to others. Everyone is entitled to say their opinion. Nobody is entitled to force others listen to it. It’s quite simple, really.

I was always polite and respectful on Twitter and still wound up on a blocklist. So did many others. There was no notification or explanation provided and no recourse, I just suddenly found myself blocked from various accounts to the extent it degraded the utility of the platform.

Lots of people on the left love to be little commissars, and this sort of thing provides a perfect opportunity.

The implication of your statement is "you probably did something to deserve it, comrade" which is very much in keeping with that mentality.

Post reply on HN