Twitter I would understand a little better. It's such a tar pit of negative energy, insults, rage bait, etc
I can't. Yes, it's a failure on me, but my experience is better without Facebook in my life.
You mention negativity, and that's part of it. I saw a steady stream of "the world's on fire" type posts. The other side, the rosy view of my friends and family also wasn't great. It was a steady stream of my brain using this as a chance to remind me I can't live up to these people, that I'm falling behind, and that in general, I suck.
It's not true. I could have crafted an equal fantasy and posted it, but I'm not that person. I could let the positive and negative posts go without influencing my mental well-being, but I'm apparently not that person.
All of this is a long way of saying, for me, Facebook is baggage I had to carry around with me. I didn't need to open it, but I knew it was there, ready to mock me at any time. Now my account is gone, and that bit of unnecessary baggage is gone. It added nothing to my life, only made it worse.
One of facebook’s worst long run mistakes was optimizing for engagement vs. enjoyment. It boosts metrics but makes people quit or go cold turkey.
Instagram has never felt like that.
Facebook showed me stuff I didn’t care about it that aggravated me, so I stopped using it. now I’m in thE 5 min a week category. But I’d rather follow more people, but only the important stuff
I try to behave on Facebook like it's 2005 again, before the outrage or glamour.
That being said I think it's totally reasonable that the difficulty each of us experiences in trying to exert such control will vary.
I'm one of the normies like the grandparent comment. I don't use Facebook all that much, and most of what I see there is just a stream of banal life events from a selection of people that I'd otherwise not hear from. Most of it isn't that interesting directly, but I'll admit that my life is enriched by retaining these relationships I'd otherwise have dropped. It's definitely not something I feel bad after using.
Obviously that's not your experience, and there's nothing wrong with that. Certainly you shouldn't be forced to use this platform if it makes you unhappy. Really this just goes down to "people are all different and we all have to find our paths through the world". Technology changes the battlefield a little at the margins, but it hasn't changed the war.
This was part of the problem for me; it made me think I had more friends than I actually did. What I really had was an app that showed me what everyone I used to know at some point was up to, and many of us start to mistake that for friendship. At some point I had the epiphany that I don't really know the kids from my high school friend circle anymore, and keeping up with them doesn't improve my life. We had our time, the friendship fizzled out as they tend to do, and the healthiest thing for me was to just move on.
My life improved after quitting Facebook because it forced me to be more intentional with who I spend my time on. Rather than passively blasting everyone's news feed with something, I send it individually to the people I want to see it. It makes me be an active participant in friendships, which is something I've had trouble with (at least when using Facebook).
What a funny world we live in, in our heads.
well social media is designed to give you little dopamine hits all the time and we all know when we think about it for a second that the constant, cheap stimulation is bad, but it also hijacks our lizard brains and it's designed to work that way.
The big problem I think is that we let the designers of these applications get away with exactly the 'your preferences indicate you like it' line, well the same applies to gamblers in a casino.
And then the next political cycle hit and I straight up quit. I found the political ads more offensive than anything, and I've never been back since.
FB is a terrible place, ignore the poster you're responding to because they very well could be putting on airs while you're trying to be more honest about things. That's the nature of social media, of which HN is included.
It’s like one person has juice and the other has brandy.
Social Networking is not inherently toxic, and quitting many things: sugar, television, even meat, might have the similar effects for some small group of people.
In fact, the entire thread is based on three levels of indirection of misinformation: the Bloomberg article misquoted the paper, and the short-summary referencing Bloomberg made it worse.
Here is the summary of the findings [1]:
"We find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use"
So that's a little bit more information now isn't it? And completely conflates the Facebook/wellbeing issue with a host of other things.
Most poignantly, stopping Facebook usage reduced the amount of factual knowledge a person had access too. So maybe that's not so good?
Maybe by 'removing Facebook' people are simply a little bit more removed from the issues of the day (like elections) many of which can be contentious.
So 'ignorance is bliss' is the result of the study? Or is it really something materially related to Social Networking.
I think we'll need to do some more studying to find out.
How can we distinguish the effect from a general “I’m making a change” groundswell of feel goodery?
Picking up moderate drinking isn't going to make you healthier / more successful.
It's just that successful people tend to be healthier and also are more likely to have a healthy relationship with alcohol.
(Also, worst Oxford comma ever...)
But I do recall an instance where everyone in some college class or something were supposed to abstain from social media for a week, whether they had a healthy relationship with it or not and the group reported substantial increases in life satisfaction.
If I asked you to abstain from any behavior for a week to see if it would improve your life... I bet most studies would show abstention helped.
The relevant question is how this intervention helped, compared to other interventions that could be seen as similar. Eg, if you didn’t watch tv for a week, how would you feel?
Personally, my experiences on FB are extremely tame and similar to yours. However I intentionally sabotaged my experience by unfollowing nearly everyone several years ago. Even my rather fallow feed is an engine of engagement and addictive impulse, in part because of years of conditioning myself to go there when I was bored.
People with lives to lead off social media have fewer of these problems.
Similarly for Twitter, I don't follow people who post ragebait or feel the need to comment on everything.
facebook is all your friends' racist friends yelling at you, interspersed with bizarre ads for products you'll never buy and sponsored links to phony news sites. it's a completely different dynamic and it's much more insidious.
Take control of your social media. It's great!
> I don't get how the site is such a specter of misery for some people
I understand what you're saying; it doesn't have much sway over me either. But it does over a lot of other folks, by design. And that pull is very real, and quite powerful.
That's fine, great even, but do you believe those people are reporting their own experiences accurately?
And orange website isn't?
But it seems to me that there's a substantive difference between the default-circles of Facebook where you see what your 'friends' post/share, and the default-broadcast of Twitter where more things are shouted publicly to the ether.
To be sure, posts on either can be 100% public, and, in theory, you only see what you 'follow' on Twitter, but the design of the platforms is very different, and they have very different incentive structures. (Despite Facebook's incessant drive to increase engagement).
And I think depression and anxiety comes more from all the terrible "news" you get from around the world, it probably applies to "news" in general.
But I also use Facebook primarily for organizing events and group activities.