8 ms·

A “gold standard” study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health

283 points by smashcash 8y ago

throwaway5752 8y ago
On the web app once a week to keep in touch with older relatives. Nothing installed on mobile, no whatsapp/instagram. Loving it.
nindalf 8y ago
This is the second article discussing the same study. Previous thread was based on the NYT article [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19041021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19041021 Very interesting to see the difference in tone in the headline alone between NYT and Salon. * NYT - This Is Your Brain Off Facebook. Planning on quitting the social platform? A major new study offers a glimpse of what unplugging might do for your life. (Spoiler: It’s not so bad.) * Salon - A "gold standard" study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health. A unique study praised for its rigor finds numerous upsides to deactivating your Facebook account. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psychology-health.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psycholog...
- shmageggy 8y ago
  Having read the Times article, which I found very informative and balanced, this highly editorialized headline makes me uneasy, especially because this one already has twice as many upvotes. I feel like we're living in a bizzaro-world where objectivity doesn't matter and all of reality is becoming a sleazy used car lot.
malvosenior 8y ago
”Those who deactivated also observed a decrease in political polarization and news knowledge, and an increase in subjective well-being.” Surely not reading Salon and its ilk would also result in this. Half of the toxic political posts on FB originate on sites like Salon, HuffPo... I think they’re more at fault for the political polarization of our society than FB which is mainly just a conduit.
- twoquestions 8y ago
  FB also magnifies the worst posting from these outlets. You get the ultra incendiary stuff shared by everybody, while the more chill stuff doesn't get as much engagement and is ignored. I've been shown "Look at this awful thing!" stories more than once.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    It’s true people will share the most toxic of the content. Still, I blame the source that created it more than any other party, and it’s rich to see one of those sources claim to take the high ground and not even mention their own outsized role in the situation.
  - balabaster 8y ago
    The ultra incendiary stuff is really just playing to the human propensity to want a witch hunt. Mob rule. Squash what we don't understand and thus fear because our lizard brains are becoming more conditioned to govern our thought processes instead of our adult brain that can reason and think critically. Playing to our emotional brain just feeds this constant cycle of emotion. Eventually we'll all wake up from our slumber and realize how we've been manipulated for so long, but until then it's just going to be witch hunt after witch hunt. There's only so long we can succumb to this before we all begin to wonder what the fuck we're doing allowing the media to continually manipulate our own sense of well-being in order to keep the sentiment in favour of their stakeholders. It's pretty sick, honestly, but eventually we will all wise up to it - it's inevitable. Let's just hope it's before we destroy our humanity.
Brigadirk 8y ago
I 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 alternative I'd be more than happy to become on of their first adopters.
- have_faith 8y ago
  > 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?
  - Brigadirk 8y ago
    You can monetise it the same way as facebook. I'd be more than happy for my data to be sold and analysed, as long as they were used according to strict ethical guidelines. Perhaps worth giving DuckDuckGo a look, at how they're making money.
  - justwalt 8y ago
    You could try indiscriminately selling users data.
  - kuuspa 8y ago
    I think there are ways to monetize. Duck duck go manages to do it, so why not? A company like this was never supposed to be the most valuable company in the world.
  - naravara 8y ago
    >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.
bpchaps 8y ago
Anyone think the same holds true for HN? :)
- owens99 8y ago
  That’s a study everyone on this site is probably interested in
- vxxzy 8y ago
  In general, many people waste time on internet. The internet and all of its available information is hard to resist (at-least in my case). I've come up with a fix though! I simply have an addon in firefox that refreshes the web-page in 20 seconds! It is just enough annoyance to give up (especially after I am over halfway though an article..)
  - gtufano 8y ago
    I'm not sure if this is a good thing... You're basically conditioning yourself to not read anything that lasts more than 20 seconds...
  - Brigadirk 8y ago
    I use a pomodoro-method timer addon that blocks a certain list of websites when it's ticking.
    - sevensor 8y ago
      I recommend the procrastination setting. I have it set for 10 minutes -- I just need enough of a kick in the seat to stop wasting my time.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  Yes!
fiveoak 8y ago
Anecdotally I use Facebook to coordinate social events with friends and find that it's been a helpful tool to easily keep in touch with friends. I've reconnected with friends through it too. I try and avoid political things and post a lot of cat pictures from a local cat shelter that I volunteer at, which people seem to enjoy. I dunno, I just try and keep my feed filled with mostly positive/upbeat things so maybe that helps?
- smokeyj 8y ago
  > I just try and keep my feed filled with mostly positive/upbeat things You know Zuck has experimented with making people’s feeds negative to see the impact on their usage? I get Facebook works for you, but consider the company is run by a truly evil and insidious man. As an organizer consider helping people leave.
  - jaabe 8y ago
    One of my social groups made our own personal space for organising events and after 6 months we went back to Facebook because every other social group didn’t leave. So you get a new platform, but if you only do one event every few months then there is no really no reason to check it, and then suddenly no one is doing events. Like it or not, Facebook is the modern yellowpages and you need something everyone is on to replace it. I think that’s going to happen sooner or later. It’s anecdotal of course, but very few people in my social circle use Facebook for anything but organising events, and you don’t need their app, messenger or even to log on more than once in a while to do that. If you couple that with the fact that everyone is tired of their bullshit, I think they seem ripe for disruption.
beezlebubba 8y ago
It's much more fun feeding Facebook with bogus info.
brightball 8y ago
I can confirm. I deleted the FB app, and deactivated my account for months and it was pretty fantastic. The problem for me now is that I'm a Clemson alum and Clemson is doing awesome right now...so I reactivated my Facebook just to celebrate everything with all my friends from college. I ended up finding a fairly happy medium of unfollowing every person who posts anything even remotely political (even if I agree with it) and now my feed is essentially football trash talking + friends celebrating life events.
- wccrawford 8y ago
  So it was fantastic, right up until the point that it wasn't? That's the whole point. Most people feel a need for Facebook for some reason or other.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    > So it was fantastic, right up until the point that it wasn't? They seem to have found a happy medium with Facebook, which seems to be the key with social media - stay in contact, but don't let it rule your life. That, as well as pretty much everything else requires finding a balance. Things that fit that "great until it's not" description: - Eating Chocolate Cake - Sex - Programming - Driving - Fasting - Being Awake - Sleeping - Not Working
BeetleB 8y ago
I suggest people actually look at the plots in the paper. As an example, on P55, they show the effects on subjective well being for many metrics (life satisfaction, loneliness, etc). Note that a number of these metrics have a large enough standard deviation that it spans both the positive and negative range. Most news outlets focus only on the mean (most of which are positive). But when your standard deviation is large enough to change the sign, don't put much stock in the outcome. If there's one thing that was hammered into my head when I took statistics, it's that a confidence interval of (-1, 5) does not mean the true value is more likely close to 2 (or positive, or whatever). There's no valid reason to focus on the positive values more, when your confidence interval crosses the zero point.
marricks 8y ago
Can confirm. I tried deactivating and then cutting down but that just never works. Deleting is the way to go. Old friends you want to connect with? There’s always email and a phone number. People actually reach out to me outside of that awful service to say “Hey Foo is in town” or “We’re having a reunion for Bar”. Just delete it, notify people first, save the images you want, and torch it. Everything incremental just allows you joining it again later which Facebook is more than happy to facilitate.
- ip26 8y ago
  It's a lot more difficult to do, but a deep cull of your friend list might replicate a lot of the value. Those acquaintances you met ten years ago and haven't spoken to since? Unfriend or at least unfollow. Get it down to the people you actually talk to & care about.
  - marricks 8y ago
    People reconnected with such acquaintances a couple decades ago without Facebook. I find not having FB way better for those relationships anyways, instead of creepily knowing their life story since I stopped seeing them )because of FB) we have something to reconnect and talk about if I do run into them. And I did manage my FB friends well, I deleted it when I realized FB facilitated those conversations in ways I hated and most of my feeds was ads anyways.
insickness 8y ago
It would be interesting to see a study on general social media beyond facebook, such as reddit, instagram, hacker news, etc. I can waste hours on non-facebook social media. It's nice for those times I'm tired and just want to kick back and not think too hard. I'm fairly certain it lowers my attention span but I wonder if there are other negative effects.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Reddit is basically Twitter with a thin veneer of politeness. My guess would be that it's not good for mental health unless you go fishing for validation by towing the party line in every sub you visit.
emgee_1 8y ago
The morally right thing do, if you did not already, is to delete Facebook. I pity you if fb is running your life. Heck why do I have a smartphone? :;)/-&@&)($&!
dnate 8y ago
For those not ready to completely delete their facebook account yet, I recommend: 1. deleting the app 2. Using a custom facebook style (like this one [1]) which deactivates the news feed. That way you can still use it to check your messages occasionally and have to actively make the decision to scroll through the news feed by deactivating the extension. 3. Deleting messenger once you have told all relevant people that you will be less reachable through facebook, more through email / signal whatever alternative you use. I have been using facebook less and less that way and realized how often I was mindlessly scrolling through the feed. [1] https://userstyles.org/styles/128616/quiet-facebook-official https://userstyles.org/styles/128616/quiet-facebook-official
- thecouve 8y ago
  Which extension is this?
- DanHulton 8y ago
  Same. I've been using "News Feed Eradicator for Facebook": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat... I still keep my FB account for messages and events, since my friends and family won't all delete Facebook en masse, but this has removed a whole bunch of wasted time.
cntlzw 8y ago
Can confirm. Deleted FB half a year ago. Nothing really happened. I still feel in the loop with all my friends and even remember their birthdays. Checking FB was just a noise that kept me distracted during the day.
yotamoron 8y ago
I deleted my fb account 4 years ago. My only regret? Not doing it sooner.
dekhn 8y ago
It's not accurate to call a study gold standard it fits randomized but the patients can see which arm of the study they ended up in
gamblor956 8y ago
Can confirm this is true. When other people deleted their Facebook accounts my mental health improved from no longer seeing their negativity in my feed.
tombert 8y ago
Obviously one eccentric's anecdote doesn't mean anything for something in-any-way scientific, but I deleted my FB about four years ago after I realized that my primary usage of the platform was arguing with people. I spent hours at a time constructing (what I thought were) brilliant arguments for my obviously super-important viewpoints. Eventually it got bad enough to where I actually lost friends IRL because of it, and I figured it wasn't healthy to dedicate so much time to arguing, and I deleted my account. I feel like a lot of my time suddenly became free, and I get am overall less stressed out. It could just be a placebo effect, but there's about a zero-percent likelihood that I'll reopen my account any time soon.
teliskr 8y ago
I’m sticking with MySpace
scottlocklin 8y ago
I despise facebook, but salon's article is ... clickbait. The results of the study are generally positive, but fairly small, and I wouldn't describe their stats as any kind of "gold standard." I don't think the study should be praised for its rigor either. It's extremely mooshy, and I'm certain someone FB friendly could do the same study and easily get a different result. Look at the plots of the data in the appendices; they're silly: http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf
PretzelFisch 8y ago
I read things like this and wonder how is my Facebook feed so different. For the most part I just see my friends and family posting about their day and photos of the kids.
cjohansson 8y ago
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
rchaud 8y ago
Here'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.
- danpalmer 8y ago
  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).
  - rchaud 8y ago
    This is essentially a Reddit-like setup. I do use FB Messenger to talk to friends but aside from that, FB for me is basically Reddit with real names. I don't really make use of the "social" aspect, as I've had the account since 2005 or so and posting on people's walls became passe around 2010 or so.
porpoisely 8y ago
Even better for your mental health is stop reading news. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... The truly toxic part of facebook and much of social media today is the amount of news and politics that have been allowed on it.
- FiveSquared 8y ago
  And the comments. How to not worry in one paragraph. If you can’t control, don’t worry. If you can, do something! Also, imagine if you are blind and walk around for 5 minutes with your eyes closed. Imagine if you are permanently blind. How will it be like to live as that forever! Open your eyes. You have the power of sight! More than you will ever need to survive! Edit: Why the downvotes?
- fredley 8y ago
  I agree, I actively tried to go on a news diet last year, it was really hard. Especially in the current climate (in the UK and US at least), avoiding news chatter is nearly impossible, and trying to cull your curiosity to read up on such stuff takes serious willpower, even if you cut out the places that inject it into your thoughts (e.g. literally any feed). I find myself compulsively checking news sites at least a few times a day. Obviously (as a Brit), there's nothing but depressing news to be read...
  - naravara 8y ago
    The best thing for me was when I went to India for a week. Because the time zones are almost flipped, I slept while all my news sources were active and vice-versa. I basically just checked my news feed once in the morning and once in the evening and life felt much smoother, even though I was doing a lot of fairly stressful work at the time. It's basically just a morning and evening edition paper.
    - fredley 8y ago
      I lived in India for a year and I remember this experience very well! Essentially nothing would change during the day on British/American news sites, and I had no interest in domestic news.
samdoidge 8y ago
At what cost to your social life and relationships?
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  To be fair most relationships that put an important emphasis on Facebook to be maintained are probably not very important.
  - samdoidge 8y ago
    Personally, Facebook has allowed me to rekindle / develop several relationships.
- lenocinor 8y ago
  Mine still seem pretty good even after stopping reading the News Feed completely years back. It's not quite deleting Facebook -- I still use Messenger a lot, and also the events now and then -- but it's in the same ballpark, and I don't miss it at all.
ddtaylor 8y ago
I 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?"
advertising 8y ago
Got off fb 5 years ago. Now on instagram is my problem.
ricardonunez 8y ago
If you want to use Facebook for the groups or business purposes, you can disable the news feed. I use the Firefox add-on 'Disable Facebook News Feed' or 'Kill News Feed' on Chrome. If you want to reduce their tracking on Firefox use the tab containers.
t0mbstone 8y ago
You don't have to quit Facebook to get the mental health benefits. All you have to do is unfollow everyone! Literally everyone. Your feed will be blank and peaceful, but you will still be able to maintain a presence on messenger and maintain your profile for people to reach you. You can also still interact with private Facebook groups and things, if you want. This is what I did, and it curbed my addiction to checking facebook. After a while, I slowly started following specific people again (mainly just the people I interact with on a daily basis, and the few family members that I can actually stand). The moment someone starts stressing me out by posting nonsense or clutter, they get unfollowed. It's very zen, and my mental health has drastically improved from it. P.S. If you Google "Facebook Unfollow All", there are multiple tools and things like browser extensions which make this as simple as one button press to accomplish. It can be pretty tedious to do manually by hand if you have a lot of friends.
- newsgremlin 8y ago
  I took the hardline approach and just logged myself out of it and removed easy access to it. Think I'll take up your solution
- enedil 8y ago
  That's exactly what I did several months ago. My mental health improved too. I have only a handful pages I follow and no people.
- lenocinor 8y ago
  Yeah, I ended up with something similar, where I only had Facebook friends if I thought I had a chance of talking to them directly sometime soon. It's been way better for me since then (although occasionally people that don't understand this policy seem to be confused / unhappy that I'm not their Facebook friend).
- JimiofEden 8y ago
  This was my approach as well, and I can highly vouch for it. I found myself checking facebook at a party, or with friends. And caught myself doing it and felt really, really stupid because of it. But I have a lot of friends that schedule events purely on facebook or only contact me on messenger. So I unfollowed everyone I sometimes check specific pages of my friends, but I am more prone to just contacting them and asking them how they are doing specifically. As a result, some people have been pushed away, others have been pulled closer, and I've found who I genuinely wanted to hear from and communicate with. Though this plus restricting who can see my profile in the first place does sometimes make it a bit difficult for people who I've casually met to reconnect with me. Maybe I'll loosen that up a bit.
mishurov 8y ago
Doesn't matter. Apple consumerist NPCs are beyond cure, it's in their nature.
romeisendcoming 8y ago
Never used it. Thought it was complete vanity and laziness as is much of social media.
davesque 8y ago
It's funny that a study is now required to show this. I remember before Facebook was even a thing. Back then, it was just common knowledge that an obsession with one's social life would lead to shallowness and a sense that one's life lacked meaning as well as all sorts of other problems. It took me a while to even get a Facebook account because of this. I think before Facebook people used to have stronger intuitions about the negative sides of popularity contests, the dynamics of group think, and the pressures of conformity.
newcombinator 8y ago
If Facebook is detrimental to your mental health you're probably a snowflake and should delete facebook.
- kazinator 8y ago
  No, just a "flake". A "snowflake" (slang much newer than "flake") is someone who has an inflated sense of entitlement and uniqueness. Though it does seem that "snowflake" has recently evolved in a way that there is some overlap with "flake" (emotionally sheltered, easily distressed by ideas running contrary to one's world view).
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We ban accounts that do that, and you've already done it more than once. In addition to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you might find these links helpful for getting an idea of the spirit of this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html
bobochan 8y ago
I am prepared for this to be a minority opinion, but I liked FB when I joined and I still really like it. There may be many alternatives, but as someone who grew up with an acoustic coupler modem and an Apple //+, I do not take for granted the fact that I can video chat with friends around the world for free with Messenger. In a time of political and social conflict I am soothed by daily stories of the mundane: a kid doing better than expected on a spelling test, or scoring a goal in soccer; an unexpected meetup with an old classmate; or a selfie of someone going on a hike. I get great recipes on FB. Many friends have quit FB and reported that they feel better, and almost everyone on this thread is reporting the same thing, so there must be something to it. Honestly though, I have a hard time understanding why looking at a FB feed would bother someone. If it is anxiety over privacy, then absolutely, leaving FB absolutely makes sense. I get the feeling that it agitates people for other reasons though, but I am not sure what those are.
- tsumnia 8y ago
  > In a time of political and social conflict I am soothed by daily stories of the mundane I think this is one of the reasons; instead of accepting hardships exist and dealing with them, some people use social media as a filter for life. As such, since they avoid hardships, they never trained on dealing with hardships. I've spoken about it in my comment history, but I think some people lack perseverance/grit in this regard. A gas station cashier may be less motivated to get out of their job for a better career because they are busy getting entertained on their phone rather while than being bored during dead times. I still have Facebook mostly for planning things with groups, but have all notifications disabled. Now, I only check it once a week to see plans change or if I was tagged in a picture. I just don't care about the rest.
  - bobochan 8y ago
    It seems like the sign on that equation is wrong though, no? If social media was really a means of avoiding hardships then wouldn't leavers report great angst from withdrawal? Instead they report being happier. I keep seeing the word humblebrag come up in discussions on FB and I have to wonder if the real reason is that some people see social media as a form of competition. We now see both the good fortunes and misfortunes of people in a much wider global circle, which can provoke either jealousy or anxiety. > I just don't care about the rest. Everyone is different I guess. I could never say that I do not care about the welfare of friends and family.
antisthenes 8y ago
What is a "gold standard" study?
charliebrownau 8y ago
I found some good alt platforms with ACTUAL FREE SPEECH - Minds instead of Facebook - Gab instead of twitter - diasp.org instead of google plus - Bitchute instead of Youtube - Startpage or https://searx.me/ https://searx.me/ or Duckduckgo instead of Google/bling
moretai 8y ago
Why isn't this common knowledge? People have been off facebook for a long time. Are people that shallow? That stupid?

283 points by smashcash 8y ago

On the web app once a week to keep in touch with older relatives. Nothing installed on mobile, no whatsapp/instagram. Loving it.

nindalf 8y ago

This is the second article discussing the same study. Previous thread was based on the NYT article [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19041021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19041021 Very interesting to see the difference in tone in the headline alone between NYT and Salon. * NYT - This Is Your Brain Off Facebook. Planning on quitting the social platform? A major new study offers a glimpse of what unplugging might do for your life. (Spoiler: It’s not so bad.) * Salon - A "gold standard" study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health. A unique study praised for its rigor finds numerous upsides to deactivating your Facebook account. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psychology-health.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psycholog...

shmageggy 8y ago
Having read the Times article, which I found very informative and balanced, this highly editorialized headline makes me uneasy, especially because this one already has twice as many upvotes. I feel like we're living in a bizzaro-world where objectivity doesn't matter and all of reality is becoming a sleazy used car lot.

malvosenior 8y ago

”Those who deactivated also observed a decrease in political polarization and news knowledge, and an increase in subjective well-being.” Surely not reading Salon and its ilk would also result in this. Half of the toxic political posts on FB originate on sites like Salon, HuffPo... I think they’re more at fault for the political polarization of our society than FB which is mainly just a conduit.

twoquestions 8y ago
FB also magnifies the worst posting from these outlets. You get the ultra incendiary stuff shared by everybody, while the more chill stuff doesn't get as much engagement and is ignored. I've been shown "Look at this awful thing!" stories more than once.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  It’s true people will share the most toxic of the content. Still, I blame the source that created it more than any other party, and it’s rich to see one of those sources claim to take the high ground and not even mention their own outsized role in the situation.
- balabaster 8y ago
  The ultra incendiary stuff is really just playing to the human propensity to want a witch hunt. Mob rule. Squash what we don't understand and thus fear because our lizard brains are becoming more conditioned to govern our thought processes instead of our adult brain that can reason and think critically. Playing to our emotional brain just feeds this constant cycle of emotion. Eventually we'll all wake up from our slumber and realize how we've been manipulated for so long, but until then it's just going to be witch hunt after witch hunt. There's only so long we can succumb to this before we all begin to wonder what the fuck we're doing allowing the media to continually manipulate our own sense of well-being in order to keep the sentiment in favour of their stakeholders. It's pretty sick, honestly, but eventually we will all wise up to it - it's inevitable. Let's just hope it's before we destroy our humanity.

Brigadirk 8y ago

I 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 alternative I'd be more than happy to become on of their first adopters.

have_faith 8y ago
> 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?
- Brigadirk 8y ago
  You can monetise it the same way as facebook. I'd be more than happy for my data to be sold and analysed, as long as they were used according to strict ethical guidelines. Perhaps worth giving DuckDuckGo a look, at how they're making money.
- justwalt 8y ago
  You could try indiscriminately selling users data.
- kuuspa 8y ago
  I think there are ways to monetize. Duck duck go manages to do it, so why not? A company like this was never supposed to be the most valuable company in the world.
- naravara 8y ago
  >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.

bpchaps 8y ago

Anyone think the same holds true for HN? :)

owens99 8y ago
That’s a study everyone on this site is probably interested in
vxxzy 8y ago
In general, many people waste time on internet. The internet and all of its available information is hard to resist (at-least in my case). I've come up with a fix though! I simply have an addon in firefox that refreshes the web-page in 20 seconds! It is just enough annoyance to give up (especially after I am over halfway though an article..)
- gtufano 8y ago
  I'm not sure if this is a good thing... You're basically conditioning yourself to not read anything that lasts more than 20 seconds...
- Brigadirk 8y ago
  I use a pomodoro-method timer addon that blocks a certain list of websites when it's ticking.
  - sevensor 8y ago
    I recommend the procrastination setting. I have it set for 10 minutes -- I just need enough of a kick in the seat to stop wasting my time.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
Yes!

fiveoak 8y ago

Anecdotally I use Facebook to coordinate social events with friends and find that it's been a helpful tool to easily keep in touch with friends. I've reconnected with friends through it too. I try and avoid political things and post a lot of cat pictures from a local cat shelter that I volunteer at, which people seem to enjoy. I dunno, I just try and keep my feed filled with mostly positive/upbeat things so maybe that helps?

smokeyj 8y ago
> I just try and keep my feed filled with mostly positive/upbeat things You know Zuck has experimented with making people’s feeds negative to see the impact on their usage? I get Facebook works for you, but consider the company is run by a truly evil and insidious man. As an organizer consider helping people leave.
- jaabe 8y ago
  One of my social groups made our own personal space for organising events and after 6 months we went back to Facebook because every other social group didn’t leave. So you get a new platform, but if you only do one event every few months then there is no really no reason to check it, and then suddenly no one is doing events. Like it or not, Facebook is the modern yellowpages and you need something everyone is on to replace it. I think that’s going to happen sooner or later. It’s anecdotal of course, but very few people in my social circle use Facebook for anything but organising events, and you don’t need their app, messenger or even to log on more than once in a while to do that. If you couple that with the fact that everyone is tired of their bullshit, I think they seem ripe for disruption.

beezlebubba 8y ago

It's much more fun feeding Facebook with bogus info.

brightball 8y ago

I can confirm. I deleted the FB app, and deactivated my account for months and it was pretty fantastic. The problem for me now is that I'm a Clemson alum and Clemson is doing awesome right now...so I reactivated my Facebook just to celebrate everything with all my friends from college. I ended up finding a fairly happy medium of unfollowing every person who posts anything even remotely political (even if I agree with it) and now my feed is essentially football trash talking + friends celebrating life events.

wccrawford 8y ago
So it was fantastic, right up until the point that it wasn't? That's the whole point. Most people feel a need for Facebook for some reason or other.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  > So it was fantastic, right up until the point that it wasn't? They seem to have found a happy medium with Facebook, which seems to be the key with social media - stay in contact, but don't let it rule your life. That, as well as pretty much everything else requires finding a balance. Things that fit that "great until it's not" description: - Eating Chocolate Cake - Sex - Programming - Driving - Fasting - Being Awake - Sleeping - Not Working

BeetleB 8y ago

I suggest people actually look at the plots in the paper. As an example, on P55, they show the effects on subjective well being for many metrics (life satisfaction, loneliness, etc). Note that a number of these metrics have a large enough standard deviation that it spans both the positive and negative range. Most news outlets focus only on the mean (most of which are positive). But when your standard deviation is large enough to change the sign, don't put much stock in the outcome. If there's one thing that was hammered into my head when I took statistics, it's that a confidence interval of (-1, 5) does not mean the true value is more likely close to 2 (or positive, or whatever). There's no valid reason to focus on the positive values more, when your confidence interval crosses the zero point.

marricks 8y ago

Can confirm. I tried deactivating and then cutting down but that just never works. Deleting is the way to go. Old friends you want to connect with? There’s always email and a phone number. People actually reach out to me outside of that awful service to say “Hey Foo is in town” or “We’re having a reunion for Bar”. Just delete it, notify people first, save the images you want, and torch it. Everything incremental just allows you joining it again later which Facebook is more than happy to facilitate.

ip26 8y ago
It's a lot more difficult to do, but a deep cull of your friend list might replicate a lot of the value. Those acquaintances you met ten years ago and haven't spoken to since? Unfriend or at least unfollow. Get it down to the people you actually talk to & care about.
- marricks 8y ago
  People reconnected with such acquaintances a couple decades ago without Facebook. I find not having FB way better for those relationships anyways, instead of creepily knowing their life story since I stopped seeing them )because of FB) we have something to reconnect and talk about if I do run into them. And I did manage my FB friends well, I deleted it when I realized FB facilitated those conversations in ways I hated and most of my feeds was ads anyways.

insickness 8y ago

It would be interesting to see a study on general social media beyond facebook, such as reddit, instagram, hacker news, etc. I can waste hours on non-facebook social media. It's nice for those times I'm tired and just want to kick back and not think too hard. I'm fairly certain it lowers my attention span but I wonder if there are other negative effects.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Reddit is basically Twitter with a thin veneer of politeness. My guess would be that it's not good for mental health unless you go fishing for validation by towing the party line in every sub you visit.

emgee_1 8y ago

The morally right thing do, if you did not already, is to delete Facebook. I pity you if fb is running your life. Heck why do I have a smartphone? :;)/-&@&)($&!

dnate 8y ago

For those not ready to completely delete their facebook account yet, I recommend: 1. deleting the app 2. Using a custom facebook style (like this one [1]) which deactivates the news feed. That way you can still use it to check your messages occasionally and have to actively make the decision to scroll through the news feed by deactivating the extension. 3. Deleting messenger once you have told all relevant people that you will be less reachable through facebook, more through email / signal whatever alternative you use. I have been using facebook less and less that way and realized how often I was mindlessly scrolling through the feed. [1] https://userstyles.org/styles/128616/quiet-facebook-official https://userstyles.org/styles/128616/quiet-facebook-official

thecouve 8y ago
Which extension is this?
DanHulton 8y ago
Same. I've been using "News Feed Eradicator for Facebook": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat... I still keep my FB account for messages and events, since my friends and family won't all delete Facebook en masse, but this has removed a whole bunch of wasted time.

cntlzw 8y ago

Can confirm. Deleted FB half a year ago. Nothing really happened. I still feel in the loop with all my friends and even remember their birthdays. Checking FB was just a noise that kept me distracted during the day.

yotamoron 8y ago

I deleted my fb account 4 years ago. My only regret? Not doing it sooner.

dekhn 8y ago

It's not accurate to call a study gold standard it fits randomized but the patients can see which arm of the study they ended up in

gamblor956 8y ago

Can confirm this is true. When other people deleted their Facebook accounts my mental health improved from no longer seeing their negativity in my feed.

tombert 8y ago

Obviously one eccentric's anecdote doesn't mean anything for something in-any-way scientific, but I deleted my FB about four years ago after I realized that my primary usage of the platform was arguing with people. I spent hours at a time constructing (what I thought were) brilliant arguments for my obviously super-important viewpoints. Eventually it got bad enough to where I actually lost friends IRL because of it, and I figured it wasn't healthy to dedicate so much time to arguing, and I deleted my account. I feel like a lot of my time suddenly became free, and I get am overall less stressed out. It could just be a placebo effect, but there's about a zero-percent likelihood that I'll reopen my account any time soon.

teliskr 8y ago

I’m sticking with MySpace

scottlocklin 8y ago

I despise facebook, but salon's article is ... clickbait. The results of the study are generally positive, but fairly small, and I wouldn't describe their stats as any kind of "gold standard." I don't think the study should be praised for its rigor either. It's extremely mooshy, and I'm certain someone FB friendly could do the same study and easily get a different result. Look at the plots of the data in the appendices; they're silly: http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf

PretzelFisch 8y ago

I read things like this and wonder how is my Facebook feed so different. For the most part I just see my friends and family posting about their day and photos of the kids.

cjohansson 8y ago

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

rchaud 8y ago

Here'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.

danpalmer 8y ago
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).
- rchaud 8y ago
  This is essentially a Reddit-like setup. I do use FB Messenger to talk to friends but aside from that, FB for me is basically Reddit with real names. I don't really make use of the "social" aspect, as I've had the account since 2005 or so and posting on people's walls became passe around 2010 or so.

porpoisely 8y ago

Even better for your mental health is stop reading news. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro... The truly toxic part of facebook and much of social media today is the amount of news and politics that have been allowed on it.

FiveSquared 8y ago
And the comments. How to not worry in one paragraph. If you can’t control, don’t worry. If you can, do something! Also, imagine if you are blind and walk around for 5 minutes with your eyes closed. Imagine if you are permanently blind. How will it be like to live as that forever! Open your eyes. You have the power of sight! More than you will ever need to survive! Edit: Why the downvotes?
fredley 8y ago
I agree, I actively tried to go on a news diet last year, it was really hard. Especially in the current climate (in the UK and US at least), avoiding news chatter is nearly impossible, and trying to cull your curiosity to read up on such stuff takes serious willpower, even if you cut out the places that inject it into your thoughts (e.g. literally any feed). I find myself compulsively checking news sites at least a few times a day. Obviously (as a Brit), there's nothing but depressing news to be read...
- naravara 8y ago
  The best thing for me was when I went to India for a week. Because the time zones are almost flipped, I slept while all my news sources were active and vice-versa. I basically just checked my news feed once in the morning and once in the evening and life felt much smoother, even though I was doing a lot of fairly stressful work at the time. It's basically just a morning and evening edition paper.
  - fredley 8y ago
    I lived in India for a year and I remember this experience very well! Essentially nothing would change during the day on British/American news sites, and I had no interest in domestic news.

samdoidge 8y ago

At what cost to your social life and relationships?

ddtaylor 8y ago
To be fair most relationships that put an important emphasis on Facebook to be maintained are probably not very important.
- samdoidge 8y ago
  Personally, Facebook has allowed me to rekindle / develop several relationships.
lenocinor 8y ago
Mine still seem pretty good even after stopping reading the News Feed completely years back. It's not quite deleting Facebook -- I still use Messenger a lot, and also the events now and then -- but it's in the same ballpark, and I don't miss it at all.

ddtaylor 8y ago

I 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?"

advertising 8y ago

Got off fb 5 years ago. Now on instagram is my problem.

ricardonunez 8y ago

If you want to use Facebook for the groups or business purposes, you can disable the news feed. I use the Firefox add-on 'Disable Facebook News Feed' or 'Kill News Feed' on Chrome. If you want to reduce their tracking on Firefox use the tab containers.

t0mbstone 8y ago

You don't have to quit Facebook to get the mental health benefits. All you have to do is unfollow everyone! Literally everyone. Your feed will be blank and peaceful, but you will still be able to maintain a presence on messenger and maintain your profile for people to reach you. You can also still interact with private Facebook groups and things, if you want. This is what I did, and it curbed my addiction to checking facebook. After a while, I slowly started following specific people again (mainly just the people I interact with on a daily basis, and the few family members that I can actually stand). The moment someone starts stressing me out by posting nonsense or clutter, they get unfollowed. It's very zen, and my mental health has drastically improved from it. P.S. If you Google "Facebook Unfollow All", there are multiple tools and things like browser extensions which make this as simple as one button press to accomplish. It can be pretty tedious to do manually by hand if you have a lot of friends.

newsgremlin 8y ago
I took the hardline approach and just logged myself out of it and removed easy access to it. Think I'll take up your solution
enedil 8y ago
That's exactly what I did several months ago. My mental health improved too. I have only a handful pages I follow and no people.
lenocinor 8y ago
Yeah, I ended up with something similar, where I only had Facebook friends if I thought I had a chance of talking to them directly sometime soon. It's been way better for me since then (although occasionally people that don't understand this policy seem to be confused / unhappy that I'm not their Facebook friend).
JimiofEden 8y ago
This was my approach as well, and I can highly vouch for it. I found myself checking facebook at a party, or with friends. And caught myself doing it and felt really, really stupid because of it. But I have a lot of friends that schedule events purely on facebook or only contact me on messenger. So I unfollowed everyone I sometimes check specific pages of my friends, but I am more prone to just contacting them and asking them how they are doing specifically. As a result, some people have been pushed away, others have been pulled closer, and I've found who I genuinely wanted to hear from and communicate with. Though this plus restricting who can see my profile in the first place does sometimes make it a bit difficult for people who I've casually met to reconnect with me. Maybe I'll loosen that up a bit.

mishurov 8y ago

Doesn't matter. Apple consumerist NPCs are beyond cure, it's in their nature.

romeisendcoming 8y ago

Never used it. Thought it was complete vanity and laziness as is much of social media.

davesque 8y ago

It's funny that a study is now required to show this. I remember before Facebook was even a thing. Back then, it was just common knowledge that an obsession with one's social life would lead to shallowness and a sense that one's life lacked meaning as well as all sorts of other problems. It took me a while to even get a Facebook account because of this. I think before Facebook people used to have stronger intuitions about the negative sides of popularity contests, the dynamics of group think, and the pressures of conformity.

newcombinator 8y ago

If Facebook is detrimental to your mental health you're probably a snowflake and should delete facebook.

kazinator 8y ago
No, just a "flake". A "snowflake" (slang much newer than "flake") is someone who has an inflated sense of entitlement and uniqueness. Though it does seem that "snowflake" has recently evolved in a way that there is some overlap with "flake" (emotionally sheltered, easily distressed by ideas running contrary to one's world view).
dang 8y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We ban accounts that do that, and you've already done it more than once. In addition to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, you might find these links helpful for getting an idea of the spirit of this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

bobochan 8y ago

I am prepared for this to be a minority opinion, but I liked FB when I joined and I still really like it. There may be many alternatives, but as someone who grew up with an acoustic coupler modem and an Apple //+, I do not take for granted the fact that I can video chat with friends around the world for free with Messenger. In a time of political and social conflict I am soothed by daily stories of the mundane: a kid doing better than expected on a spelling test, or scoring a goal in soccer; an unexpected meetup with an old classmate; or a selfie of someone going on a hike. I get great recipes on FB. Many friends have quit FB and reported that they feel better, and almost everyone on this thread is reporting the same thing, so there must be something to it. Honestly though, I have a hard time understanding why looking at a FB feed would bother someone. If it is anxiety over privacy, then absolutely, leaving FB absolutely makes sense. I get the feeling that it agitates people for other reasons though, but I am not sure what those are.

tsumnia 8y ago
> In a time of political and social conflict I am soothed by daily stories of the mundane I think this is one of the reasons; instead of accepting hardships exist and dealing with them, some people use social media as a filter for life. As such, since they avoid hardships, they never trained on dealing with hardships. I've spoken about it in my comment history, but I think some people lack perseverance/grit in this regard. A gas station cashier may be less motivated to get out of their job for a better career because they are busy getting entertained on their phone rather while than being bored during dead times. I still have Facebook mostly for planning things with groups, but have all notifications disabled. Now, I only check it once a week to see plans change or if I was tagged in a picture. I just don't care about the rest.
- bobochan 8y ago
  It seems like the sign on that equation is wrong though, no? If social media was really a means of avoiding hardships then wouldn't leavers report great angst from withdrawal? Instead they report being happier. I keep seeing the word humblebrag come up in discussions on FB and I have to wonder if the real reason is that some people see social media as a form of competition. We now see both the good fortunes and misfortunes of people in a much wider global circle, which can provoke either jealousy or anxiety. > I just don't care about the rest. Everyone is different I guess. I could never say that I do not care about the welfare of friends and family.

antisthenes 8y ago

What is a "gold standard" study?

charliebrownau 8y ago

I found some good alt platforms with ACTUAL FREE SPEECH - Minds instead of Facebook - Gab instead of twitter - diasp.org instead of google plus - Bitchute instead of Youtube - Startpage or https://searx.me/ https://searx.me/ or Duckduckgo instead of Google/bling

moretai 8y ago

Why isn't this common knowledge? People have been off facebook for a long time. Are people that shallow? That stupid?