Hacker News Reader

Comment by rckoepke | Hacker News Reader

Definitely worth RTA before comment - at least skip to page 25 for the visual charts. It looks like social media usage may not correlate to depressive symptoms.

Author's conclusion:

> This paper finds that social media usage decreases the level of depressive symptoms employing a two-way fixed effects model. Direct information on people’s feelings about using social media also supports that using social media can be beneficial. This result implicates that society may have underestimated the importance and contribution of social media.

There's a lot which can be discussed in terms of what is being measured in this study, and what else might make sense to measure. Or how this study's results compare against other similar studies.

View on HN

I can only skim the article at the moment. At the risk of commenting without RTA: perhaps this is about how you use it? My wife uses Facebook for coordinating things in the community, coordinating kids play dates, and for just browsing very fluffy random bits of interestingness. She ruthlessly curates her feeds to remove anything political or generally negative. When I look at her feed it bears no resemblance to the toxic wasteland that I see in my feed. It reflects my usage, what engages me, even if it’s for the worse and leaves me feeling gross.

Yep, on Facebook, unfollow is your best friend.

When Trump announced his first campaign in the quaint old days in 2015, I began cleansing my Twitter feed of anyone who switched from nerd stuff to politics. After a couple of months I was left with no one to follow, so I left Twitter entirely. Good riddance!

Hmm I don't unfollow for the occasional politics, but for mindless spam (which could be politics, but not necessarily).

For example, I unfollowed someone who started to post photos of their every meal. And I unfollowed my own mother because she tends to repost every scare "chain letter" that comes across her :)

I know a lot of Twitter defenders say "oh just follow the right people" but you don't know they're the right people until you follow them and then when you have to unfollow or add more mute words the damage is already done and you're already thinking about the thing you didn't want to see.

I've muted around 3000 accounts and 200 words, which is a lot when you consider I don't even post on the platform I just read it and still my feed will have political hot takes slip through the cracks.

Twitter has the data, they could put a huge "Politics On/Off" switch in preferences but they choose not to because they know that forcing me to look at politics is both more profitable, ideologically I think they think controlling what political message I see is important too and they're fine with the tradeoff being mental health damage.

I agree. Earlier this year I muted and blocked on Twitter until there was almost nothing left in my feed. And then the ugliness grew up again and I ignored it. Very interestingly late last week my Twitter feed suddenly went from being dominated by ugly political yelling to mostly benign cultural commentary. I was struck by it and wonder if there is an on/off switch that was thrown in order to cool things in the days before the election.

Twitter stopped showing "liked" tweets from people you don't follow on the timeline. It's been an enormously positive change, in my opinion. It also happens to be a change that their users have been requesting for years. But, they have ignored those requests until they felt that this feature might actually hasten the destruction of American democracy. Dragging people into fights with people they've never met is quite good for engagement, as has been endlessly noted. I have no doubt they'll reinstate this feature after the election.

Speaking personally, there are several people I follow who never actually generated real content. Instead they just liked asinine, toxic political takes, which then filled my feed.

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/2020-elec...

Every time I visit Twitter, I'm reminded incredibly forcefully why I don't use Twitter. The level of discourse is just so much lower than anything else I see day to day, even major subreddits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com