Social media break improves mental health
bath.ac.uk
bath.ac.uk
The first thing I noticed was that I would open the app after a few hours away and have 1000+ new tweets, which made me realise I was following far too many accounts. Why am I following my network provider on Twitter?
Now I feel I have a much healthier relationship with Twitter. I open it a few times per day, I see if anything interesting has happened, and then I close the app. There are no tricks to keep me scrolling.
I think the main difference is that scrolling up to view newer content has an end, while scrolling down to view older content essentially doesn’t. I would like to see that approach tried in more third-party clients—primarily Reddit.
I hated it. It took me a while to realize I was no longer in chronological mode. Once I switched back, all the bullshit disappeared. This confirmed for me that algorithms on social media are slowly destroying society.
[1] I don't follow a huge number of people, and also shy away from "prolific" tweeters so my number of tweets per day is not huge. I really treat it like an RSS feel TBH.
[2] I also use the Invidition browser add-on to redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance - so much cleaner.
I mostly dialled out of Twitter as well - I'll still check some accounts occasionally, but I gave up on the timeline. I'd be excited to try a Twitter without bot amplification and (perhaps?!) some poster accountability.
I still enjoy Instagram. It's easy to tailor that to things I want to see - cats, watches, denim - and I can avoid the comments. I'd hate to been a teen with instagram though. I can imagine you could end up feeling very inadequate pretty quickly.
Man, the Internet is a funny thing. On one hand it's so great. On the other- what a disaster. I guess it's like everything, you gotta find the balance that works for you and just keep an eye that it stays balanced.
These people are at the disadvantage in the modern world and need EQ training asap.
I was 100% with you on this up until a few months ago. When they made their big push for Reels, everything went to shit. Now my feed is full of barely dressed women dancing despite me following no accounts of that nature; I guess for not much reason other than being an 18-34 yo male? I’m not morally opposed by any stretch, but it does make me sort of scared to open the app on the train.
I’ve tried following a few hashtags for stuff I’m interesting in (pixel/other digital art, architecture, fancy food), and while some good stuff is surfaced there’s so much hashtag stuffing going on that many of the posts are just unrelated self-promotion.
Like Twitter, every few posts there’s an algorithmically suggested post from someone I don’t follow. There’s seemingly no option to turn this off; only opt out for 30 days.
In the space of this year Instagram has gone from being the only social network I felt I had a reasonable amount of control over to the one I like using second least (least of course being Facebook itself).
Using whatsapp, telegram or any other messaging app is also an option
Doomscrolling is just not that useful when you compare it to like, basically anything else you could be doing with the time, like exercising, reading a book, tidying around the house, just relaxing with your thoughts, etc.
The logical extension of constantly doing stupid stuff (like eating bad food, not exercising, not having a fulfilling life) is indeed physical or mental health problems.
The answer is just to take a step back and examine your life. Are you spending your time doing things you want to do, or are you being driven around on autopilot?
> The answer is just to take a step back and examine your life. Are you spending your time doing things you want to do, or are you being driven around on autopilot?
You can say things like this to heroin addicts, but the first important thing is keeping them from leaving to get more heroin. After they're clean, they might find this sort of introspection to be a reasonable substitute.
That kinda thinking, the new "you're wasting your time on Facebook, go read a book" is just the old puritan "get to work loser". Literally, one of the oldest scripts in the docs to get you to work harder for the man. Damn him.
If you're brain is too tired to do anything but watch cartoons or play video games, or just fart around and not do anything, then that's your god-given right and you don't even have to be tired to do that.
Facebook gives us social connections and those are critical for humans. Far more important than reading a book or going for a walk.
A rather basic take, I'd wager, or if you prefer it, a really superficial analysis, but ok.
The developed world is facing a real mental health crisis and still failing to address it.
Lastly, this is a little of a life hack, but in the mornings I tend to glance once at the top 3 HN headlines; if there's no major "news-news" (ie not tech news) in the top three slots, then it's pretty safe to say that nothing historic like September 11th happened that day. It's a pretty peaceful way of checking that the world's continuing to keep on spinning. :)
HN front-page is certainly algorithm driven, it might not be individualized, but stories that displease the algorithm are down-weighted which, in effect, is a tacit promotion of stories the algorithm chooses not to penalize.
> it pretty rarely has the "if it bleeds it leads" shock-bait type of articles that the alphabet networks do.
I don't agree. HN stories are often baity, inflammatory, and contentious, it is not uncommon to see dang warning the comment section to keep things civil. The type of stories that hit HN aren't always the type we see in the wider media, but the level of toxicity is on par with every other social media site, if only mitigated by careful and rigorous moderation.
Very inspiring
But here you are on HackerNEWS so maybe I am asking the wrong person for help?
Move to an authoritarian country, like China. Seriously.
If you live in a democracy, news is pretty important for informing you for performing your civic responsibilities and exerting your influence on the political system. If your influence is literally zero, then there's no point. In places like that, there's even a self-preservation incentive for disengagement, because engagement can be dangerous if it conflicts with the authorities.
So no 24 hour cable news channels. No algorithmic content feeds. No consuming news through Facebook or Google. I've never been on Twitter, but I imagine it isn't much better and you should quit it if you currently have an account there. Don't just try to stay away or use an app to block it based on time of day. Delete your account and put the site on your home firewall if you have.
Then proceed to consume from healthier. The most obvious is books. Read as many and as often as you can. After that, I still think YouTube channels or something similar on an equivalent platform can still be useful, but you have to be careful. Turn off auto-play. Turn off watch and search history. Don't use the algorithmic suggestion feeds. Block them via custom uBlock rules if necessary. Just ignore them if you can. Subscribe to your trusted channels and let them make word of mouth recommendations for other channels. That is a perfectly adequate level of discoverability. For me, I stick to DIY home improvement, PC and homelab building, car detailing, weight lifting, and some animal information channels. That's it. No current events or culture war topics. Nobody that yells or gets emotional in their videos. After that, blogs.
There is where Hacker News is still useful. You can discover quality blogs. They'll be repeatedly linked to here, rise to the top, and not be causing long arguments and flame wars. Facebook honestly used to be useful for the same purpose. But there is always a balance between discovering useful sources of new information and time spent getting sucked into long arguments and rabbit-holing yourself with outrage bait. At some point, Facebook became not enough of the former and too much of the latter. Hacker News hasn't reached that point yet, at least for me. When it does, I will leave Hacker News as well. Meanwhile, since I bookmarked the highest-quality blogs that consistently show up here, I'll just start going straight to the source.
A few key reasons I don't think Hacker News is that bad yet include the comparatively small user base, somewhat of an industry focus, active and consistent moderation that is fair and well-explained, and no personalization. Everyone sees the same list of links. The list is still algorithmically sorted, but since the algorithm is largely just upvote count and recency and isn't personalized, I don't find it that bad. At least not yet.
But now it seems that hacker news is shadow banning me so I’m just going to stop hacker news as well. (I am posting too fast????)
What’s worse than having an addiction then having someone else control your addiction? So that’s just not useful to my well-being. And I think also it enables a fear of missing out.
That's actually a great way to summarize my views on social media/news. It's letting yourself have an addiction, which only corporation XYZ can satisfy at the cost of at least your time, but often even money, energy, or well-being as well.
Here's one more tip from my experience: if you think you need to know something, go out and do your own research based on action. Don't just watch Yahoo Finance videos every day. Question your lifestyle, and if you're not sure of your financial habits, do some research. Maybe learn how to invest for retirement, or check in on how your investments are doing if you've already started. If you hear bad things about the economy, what change is that going to make on your life? Are you concerned that you're spending too much? If so, then take a look at your budget, do some research on the current state of the economy, and then assess what your budget should be starting tomorrow. Don't just passively sit there endlessly consuming news. Leave it alone, and just come back to it if you have a specific use case that it serves.
Funny enough, I couldn't have expressed my own opinion better myself. I couldn't agree more.
> So no 24 hour cable news channels. No algorithmic content feeds. No consuming news through Facebook or Google. I've never been on Twitter, but I imagine it isn't much better and you should quit it if you currently have an account there. Don't just try to stay away or use an app to block it based on time of day. Delete your account and put the site on your home firewall if you have.
I agree this is necessary if one can't stop myself. My approach is (I use hckrnews.com for HN) if I want to see whether there's anything interesting on HN, I load it up and scan the current page. I click whatever's interesting, maybe check for replies if I've commented recently. That's it. No scrolling or going to previous pages. With this approach I can still benefit from the genuinely useful info and discussions that sometimes get posted here, without falling into the trap of scrolling forever. Otherwise I do completely avoid news
> Then proceed to consume from healthier. The most obvious is books. Read as many and as often as you can. After that, I still think YouTube channels or something similar on an equivalent platform can still be useful, but you have to be careful. Turn off auto-play. Turn off watch and search history. Don't use the algorithmic suggestion feeds. Block them via custom uBlock rules if necessary. Just ignore them if you can. Subscribe to your trusted channels and let them make word of mouth recommendations for other channels. That is a perfectly adequate level of discoverability. For me, I stick to DIY home improvement, PC and homelab building, car detailing, weight lifting, and some animal information channels. That's it. No current events or culture war topics. Nobody that yells or gets emotional in their videos. After that, blogs.
Also agree with this. It's actually crazy that once I put effort into consuming content with purpose, I realized how painfully boring most content is. Most of Netflix is boring, most of youtube is boring, most of reddit is boring. After years of too much social media, watching too much youtube, reading too much reddit, reading a book or watching a movie that I found through looking for specific things I enjoy (rather than what a feed or algorithm suggests) was unbelievably engrossing. I thought I didn't enjoy reading or movies anymore, but it was actually that I developed a terrible habit of scrolling and hoping something good would eventually come my way, much like gambling. I actually read a great article on HN sometime in the past year (actually 2y ago, how time flies) that fits perfectly here:
> My understanding is it’s the little thrill your brain gets from the possibility of finding something super interesting. That’s the addicting piece. The gambling piece of it.
> I read (or more likely heard on a podcast) about an experiment with mice and a food dispensing button. In one case, the button reliably dispensed food every time it was pressed. In the other case, sometimes the button wouldn’t work. The mice with the reliable button didn’t do anything odd. Whenever they were hungry, they would hit the button for some food. The mice with the unreliable button however would repeatedly hit the button, and they ended up being overweight.
> My feeling is that if EVERYTHING on something like HN was super interesting, we’d only be here when we were up for some interesting reads. But the fact is, not everything is. But the possibility that something EXTRA interesting might pop up keeps us coming back in an addictive type of way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23938007#23940090
And that comment speaks to your next point about how HN can still be useful, with moderation.
If you find yourself actively consuming news, do something else. Physically get up and go for a walk, watch a movie, cook something, do some sit ups, take a nap, whatever. One thing I did when I was breaking my social media habit is to literally just do nothing. Very likely you'll feel bored or not know what else to do with yourself, which is good. That's where you start putting in the work to build a new, healthier habit, like a hobby or exercise or something.
> But here you are on HackerNEWS so maybe I am asking the wrong person for help?
I comment based on my own definitions, and I don't consider HN to be news. By news I mean newspapers, news companies like NBC, etc. HN is just a well-curated link aggregator, and I check it for interesting links or useful information, not with the intention of learning some latest update (which is part of what I consider to be news)
I got mostly addicted to it to gain 15k karma points in one year.
The "HN algorithm" (or even the lack of it) does catch my attention.
A reminder that taking your daily dose of digital drugs like Facebook™, Twitter™, Instagram™, TikTok™, etc is not very good for the mind and only gives you symptoms such as being addicted to infinite doom-scrolling as designed by the creators, involved 24/7 with the outrage machine with brainless parrots reposting or retweeting the same manufactured content and manipulating the discussion and also demoralises what is real and unreal; especially when all of them have an algorithm dictating what is seen and unseen.
I know what you are thinking and I get it. It's extremely difficult to leave for good and delete your account(s). The second best way to avoid it is to delete the app(s) or turn off notifications and log out of all of them.
If you can handle a week away from it all, then you are on your way to your first step to changing and breaking the addiction.
I like to think of media to the brain like food to the body.
Most of us don't have the resources to gather our own raw news/info so we outsource this to others, just like most of us don't grow our own food but outsource to others.
Good stimulating media is mentally nourishing like good food is physically nourishing. But a lot of the media out there, social and otherwise is junk. Like junk food, occasionally good for fun but not a constant diet.
Many know how to evaluate the healthiness of food. But many don't have the critical thinking and evaluation skills needed to evaluate the healthiness of media and to ensure a "balanced diet", and developing or teaching these skills something we should be doing more of.
As for the "many people" aspect... That's very subjective and in the context of social media junk food, it is far too many. A balanced media diet, in my opinion, is composed of very little social media.
And yes it's impossible to be substantial in a meme or short video or tweet. Like fast food -- the medium is inherently limiting.
It sure doesn't help when it's not in the interest of junk food and social media companies (I'm looking at your employer) to engage in these practices. That sentiment is in stark contrast of the need to convince people to use a product, and then keep them hooked once they're in/eating.
I think that's correct, but in this case Facebook is McDonald's. It's possible to "eat" reasonably well at each, but it's very difficult to go to either multiple times a day and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
My main issue with this and many similar articles is the use of the generic term 'social media'. The corporate, government, AI manipulated social media platforms mentioned in the article are very different from the human focused free social media many of us have moved to. I regularly tell people that I love social media but not most of the platform social media most people are only aware of.
The average American spends 11 hours on a screen. That's 65% of their life not including sleeping (although we're fighting for that too). We're in the attention economy.
The messages you're seeing about how to live your life, the ads being implanted in your head, the mindless entertainment keeping you from living your life.
Not to say don't participate in these, because they are fun. But do moderate everything you do that includes a screen.
I'm not saying I fully agree with this (I partially do, but I'm skeptic that it would "magically" just work) but that seems to be the assumption.
Now I'm not constantly bombarded with awful news at every opportunity. Just visit smaller subreddits more relevant to my interests.