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Comment by lamby | Hacker News Reader

> Less Facebook == more happy

More productive, less distracted, etc., sure but was FB really getting you down that much? Am I just using Facebook "wrong" in that it's not upsetting me the same way it upsets others?

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Every time I'm on FB. It's pleasant, really pleasant. But, every single time I'll go on the site and to do a thing like, check on the plans for my friend's birthday party. I end up spending like 30min or so more time than I expected to just browsing aimlessly.

It's not like they are putting a gun to my head but, they are using a billion dollars of research and my friends' faces to entice me into doing something I don't want. I'm more or less a monkey and my social circuitry just is so super-stimulated that it's annoying.

And all of that is before the FOMO kicks in and I start feeling bad that my life isn't as nice as my friends even though among my friends, I have a very enviable life (my friends have confided in me as much). But, my every day life cannot compete with the highlight reel of all the best moments of all my friends' lives.

Even though I know all of this stuff consiously, it still affects me because keeping guard and watch over everything constantly is hard. Falling into how it's designed to make you feel is easy.

Deleting FB off your phone is the best thing.

This overwhelming feeling, I'm convinced, is one of the driving factors that created Instagram and Snapchat because it was smaller and less invasive. Ironically, they became just like FB or in some ways (to some people) worse as they grew.

We are social animals and FB weaponizes the faces of all of your friends to suck as much attention from you as possible. It's as unfair a fight as there ever has been in the history of commerce.

Funny thing is that anyone with half a brain cell notices this if you just try to look at it even a bit. People are manipulable to do things they do not like to do. Yet any time there is a comment in HN stating that marketing may not be the best thing since sliced bread, there will be tons of messages of type "hey, just last week I saw an ad of an even I actually wanted to go, so there is nothing bad ever in people throwing ads at my face against my will". Weird. (And don't get me started on the whole damn "science" of economics being based on the (obviously unfalsifiable as per popper) assumption that people always and anywhere just maximize their utility.)

Think about Facebook the way you might think about alcohol. For many (if not most) people, even the occasional overindulgence isn't going to cause too much harm. But for some, it has an insidious effect and sometimes the best strategy is to simply swear it off completely.

For me, it was more like cigarette usage: "I can quit any time" I thought, even as the constant demands for my attention distracted and upset me. Recognizing how much I disliked Facebook, then quitting cold-turkey was the only way I was able to break my addiction.

I quit Facebook initially because of notification spam. However I discovered something afterwards. I had less negative feelings toward family and friends. I had unconsciously been forming an opinion of them that was based on the habits Facebook was encouraging rather than their actual personality.

In a sense I'm a lot happier not knowing that Great Aunt Gertrude shared that post. And most of the time Aunt Gertrude didn't even think about what she was sharing so the opinion wasn't based in fact.

I just never read the wall thingy. When I go to FB, it's either directly to the messenger or to facebook.com/<my username>. I really only use it for the IM. I hate how it's 2017 and it doesn't have simple things like bold* or colors, that were available in AIM/MSN/Yahoo/EveryotherMessenger before (not to mention until the early 2010s, FB message was the most unreliable piece of garbage in the world. If you used Pidgin/Audium/anything XMPP, half the time messages wouldn't get through).

I have too many friends spread across the world to ever quit FB, but I only really use it for messages. I only post things if they promote my website and pull people to my content and away from Facebook. Since that's all I do, my posts obviously don't get as much reach. It's kinda the opposite of the Silent Bob effect. You have a friend who always says crap and you ignore them. If someone says things only once a week; you pay attention when they have something to say.

Facebook basically penalizes people who only speak when they have something important to say and rewards people who cannot learn to shut the hell up.

*I realize it has bold now, but it doesn't work universally across all their tools: mobile, web, etc. I know people who just use unicode symbols for italics because it's more reliable.

To me it resembles that condo mailbox, filled with spam and colorful leaflets I know I don't need so pick them up and dump them annoyed into the trash box provided for my convenience and everyone's right next to it. Once a week I end up on Facebook for a few seconds, check to see if someone left some important message, and if not quickly leave the screaming place. For all those needy souls of relatives and acquaintances I instructed my twitter to automatically repost on facebook, which is rare but at least gives them something to feed upon.

The most important features on Facebook are hide, unfollow, and block.

having spare moments to think through your day/mood/plans, etc., makes a huge difference to someone who otherwise will ceaselessly distract themselves to avoid said thoughts.

Facebook, per se, maybe not. It could be anything that fills in the holes

People are different. Some people react badly to alcohol, some don't. Facebook depressed me, closed it years ago. Enjoy your facebook.

> Am I just using Facebook "wrong" in that it's not upsetting me the same way it upsets others?

Maybe you just don't have an accurate baseline and it's not that using Facebook upsets you but that not using it increases your well-being.

Try not using it for 2 weeks and see if you notice a difference.

Nope, you are using it the right way. Apparently it is not for everybody, but some can use it without being distracted.

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