It must be depressing working for Facebook knowing you make a negative impact in peoples lives. If their engineers had higher morals they would find a better place to work at
A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
51–60 of 109 posts
Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
#52Here's my FB setup that has in fact been good for my MH:
My feed contains:
- Strongly moderated meme pages based on screenshots from a TV show. No political posts allowed. Everyone's here to partake in the shared enjoyment of a show.
- Nothing from friends; 1-on-1 is better, and most status updates are networking-style humblebrags anyway.
- Nothing from news sites; this should be obvious to anyone who's seen how the algorithm operates.
- Nothing from Events: my event invites (posted on FB) arrive via email notification.
Result? I almost never check my FB except when I actively think about wasting time with some dumb memes.
A big part of why it's hard to leave FB is because it's become a part of people's everyday ritual. I recommend starting to unfollow some pages and people, and see how that impacts your FB use. Slowly, you can taper it off more and more.
Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the solution is for a photo sharing site to win over the tech crowd with well-thought-out, fine-grained privacy controls and a sustainable business model and then to make it dead easy for non-tech people to share their photos with other non-tech people. ie. I create a single account and my friends each create a single account and I create groups out of those friends, and then I share my photos with a group, a…
> well-thought-out, fine-grained privacy controls The problem with Facebook isn't that some people can see some things you don't want them to. "Privacy controls" are just a distraction from the real problem which is that Facebook can see everything .
It is possible that there are multiple problems with Facebook.
Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
#54I 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?
Sponsored ads and content is probably the only way, other than donations, to keep the service free. You can do ads without tracking, as long as you're transparent about what is or isn't an ad.
The other option is to segment the market with "premium tier" features that only finicky people care about. For example, everyone gets a standard page layout but you can pay to unlock custom style-sheets. Or you can pay extra to display higher resolution photos. Or you only hold onto posts and content for 3 years unless people pay for archival storage (at which point you're basically just running a backup service).
Alternatively, lots of community groups use facebook as a community forum. You can have moderators or forum administrators pay a hosting fee and that maintains the rest of the site.
Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
#55At what cost to your social life and relationships?
Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with the alternatives is they don't have the budget and installed user base Facebook has. Sure, you'll get techie people to jump on board at first (remember Google+?), but all the family members who don't know a Twitter from an Amazon will stick with Facebook because the constant negative Facebook press isn't enough to get them to leave and no longer see pictures of their baby grandson. I'm not sure what…
I think the solution is for a photo sharing site to win over the tech crowd with well-thought-out, fine-grained privacy controls and a sustainable business model and then to make it dead easy for non-tech people to share their photos with other non-tech people. ie. I create a single account and my friends each create a single account and I create groups out of those friends, and then I share my photos with a group, a…
Just my 2 cents - but I would be ok with light, non-invasive advertising, like that by which DuckDuckGo operates:
Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
#57At what cost to your social life and relationships?
To be fair most relationships that put an important emphasis on Facebook to be maintained are probably not very important.
Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
#58I unplugged from Facebook a few months ago. I haven't deleted my account because I have some contacts that I have no other way of getting in touch with, but I probably login to see if any important messages have been sent every 3 weeks and sometimes longer.
Nothing of any value was lost. When I login and see all the garbage spammed at me I ask myself "Why should I care about any of this?"
Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
#59Here's my FB setup that has in fact been good for my MH: My feed contains: - Strongly moderated meme pages based on screenshots from a TV show. No political posts allowed. Everyone's here to partake in the shared enjoyment of a show. - Nothing from friends; 1-on-1 is better, and most status updates are networking-style humblebrags anyway. - Nothing from news sites; this should be obvious to anyone who's seen how the…
Would this setup be easier to achieve with Reddit? This is pretty much what I use Reddit for (and then WhatsApp for 1-1, BBC for news, and my calendar for events).
Re: A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health
#60I 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've been observing https://www.minds.com/ , which appears to be an interesting open-source competitor in the space.
It's based on blockchain, which makes me nervous, but it does allow you to purchase a version of the product which removes all promotion from the product entirely.