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Facebook quitters report more life satisfaction, less depression and anxiety

• merpnderp 7y ago
  Can relate, I haven’t missed it a bit.
  • ghastmaster 7y ago
    Ditto. From my experience and assumptions by many media I've seen, people tend to post the best of what is going on in their lives to social media. Subsequently, not seeing the bad or mundane in comparison to oneself, causes anxiety. There are many other aspects to the social media that might affect life satisfaction. Time spent on the platform rather than being productive is one that comes to mind.
    • vidanay 7y ago
      Unfortunately, I can't say the same. I quit FB a month ago, and sadly not a single "friend" has emailed me or phone called me since then asking "yo, what's up dude?"
      • ghastmaster 7y ago
        If you are upset with the way they treat you, then perhaps you should reconsider your relationship. Have you contacted them? I personally go years without speaking to some of my friends and pick up right where we left off. It feels like there has been no time gap. I do not put much stock in friendship. It would not be upsetting to me if none of my friends contacted me ever again. You may not be the same.
• tibbydudeza 7y ago
  It was the best thing I ever did.
• DailyHN 7y ago
  I second that.
• nudpiedo 7y ago
  the new is interesting however the article is just a quote from another article and a study. It ends up not pointing out any valuable information, like what are the underlying mechanisms. Basically a copycat to get free visitors traffic. Questions I wish there were answered: is it about anxious browsing? anxious goshipping? compare oneself to others? compulsive procrastination? does it apply to other social networks, is it related to general screen time or just mindless consuming? would movies and stronger leisure activities have a similar effect or just compulsive social network browsing and the mental drain of feeling like comparing to others? EDIT: spell and formating
  • tsumnia 7y ago
    > "stronger leisure activities" I would be curious about this part, namely in sporting activities where the participants are considered "lower-performers". I would also like to see some connection to other psychological studies like Fixed/Growth Mindsets. Someone with a fixed mindset may show more life satisfaction quitting than a growth mindset person.
• cs702 7y ago
  I'm predisposed to believe this is true... But I can't find a link to any evidence or research in the OP, which is a fluffy piece with little actual content. I'm flagging the OP unless someone posts a link to either evidence or higher quality content.
  • eindiran 7y ago
    The first link mistakenly pointed to the Bloomberg article when it was meant to point to this: https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf Some takeaways: Deactivation reduced (political) polarization: "The Treatment group was less likely to say they follow news about politics or the President, and less able to correctly answer factual questions about recent news events. Our overall index of news knowledge fell by 0.19 standard deviations. There is no detectable effect on political engagement, as measured by voter turnout in the midterm election and the likelihood of clicking on email links to support political causes. Deactivation significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news. Deactivation did not statistically significantly reduce affective polarization (i.e. negative feelings about the other political party) or polarization in factual beliefs about current events, although the coefficient estimates also point in that direction. Our overall index of political polarization fell by 0.16 standard deviations. As a point of comparison, prior work has found that a different index of political polarization rose by 0.38 standard deviations between 1996 and 2018 (Boxell 2018)." Deactivation increased "well-being" by about 20-40% the amount you'd expect for someone getting therapy: "Deactivation caused small but significant improvements in well-being, and in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety. Effects on subjective well-being as measured by responses to brief daily text messages are positive but not significant. Our overall index of subjective well-being improved by 0.09 standard deviations. As a point of comparison, this is about 25-40 percent of the effect of psychological interventions including self-help therapy, group training, and individual therapy, as reported in a meta-analysis by Bolier et al. (2013). These results are consistent with prior studies."
    • cs702 7y ago
      Thank you. That link should be the OP. Mods?
• StevePerkins 7y ago
  (1) This article is pretty low-quality, and provides no sources for anything. It certainly sounds plausible enough, but still... (2) Assuming that this is true for Facebook, I'm pretty sure the same result would hold true for any other social media site for short-form content (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). (3) I'm LESS sure about sites for sharing longer-form writing, such as Reddit and HN. I suspect that the effect is not as stark, but that it does hold true to SOME extent whenever you have the gamification of upvotes and downvotes.
• kristiandupont 7y ago
  It seems that throughout history, we've discovered things that were exciting and hyped only to later realize that the addictiveness was damaging for society, leading us to regulating it (or attempting to do so). I wonder if what we're going through right now with social media will look irresponsible and quaint the way smoking does in Mad Men at some point in the future.
• sakisv 7y ago
  I wonder, have fb quitters stopped using all social media? Have they also stopped visiting news websites? My point is, is Facebook the only negativity inducing platform? I know for me it isn't. The question is how do you deal with the rest of them? Do you balance news intake against the impact on your mental health or you stop consuming news entirely, because in the end whatever it's set to happen will happen regardless?
  • lallysingh 7y ago
    Not me. Just FB. Removing just that is a big improvement. I'm still on IG. I don't look into Twitter much anymore, because it's not too different from FB. Social media isn't news. Most of what we call news isn't. There's very little useful news out there. I read "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption" by Clay Johnson which covered the topic quite well.
  • ryannevius 7y ago
    I can't speak for others...but Facebook was my social media gateway drug in 2006. Maybe unsurprisingly, it was also the catalyst which led to me quitting most social media platforms (Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others). Soon after, I made a commitment to only consume news on Saturday mornings. The combination of all of these things has helped immensely, and I honestly feel like I'm missing very little.
  • zweep 7y ago
    I haven't hard quit anything but vastly reduced all of these things. Yes, I have vastly reduced my visits to news websites, Twitter, etc. I have increased my consumption of monthly periodicals, books, and movies.
  • finaliteration 7y ago
    I quit Facebook about 2.5 years ago but was still on Twitter and Instagram for awhile. About six months later I dropped Twitter, and then about a year ago I dropped Instagram. I found that having any of them just added to my anxiety, depression, and overall feeling of being dissatisfied with my life. I don’t currently miss any of them, and I find myself having a lot more time to read books and work on things I’m passionate about. I’ve also found that the people who actually care still keep in contact with me on at least a weekly basis, and it’s a lot more personal and rewarding because we communicate directly rather than through “the void” of social media. I've also found other benefits of quitting such as spending less money because I'm not seeing as many ads for things I don't need, and not feeling influenced to visit/participate in some activity just because other people are doing it. Maybe it's my own lack of willpower, but I found myself doing and buying a lot of things that ultimately did nothing for me because of the constant flood of information from social media. Obviously other experiences will vary and I don't judge anyone who feels like they need social media and gain something from it, but for me it added very little to my life and I feel a lot better without it.
• sub7 7y ago
  Whatsapp growth is off the charts - that's the vertical to attack IMO.
• willart4food 7y ago
  1. Unfollow everyone 2. follow pages and groups that interest you 3. LAUGH at the comments of idiots that get their kicks out of life by vomiting non-nense. The future of Facebook looks a lot like the old AOL.
• rhegart 7y ago
  True for me, 1 year+ of no fb or insta. Feel so much better than before and I didn’t even realize I had anxiety until it disappeared
• papreclip 7y ago
  I open facebook for 2 minutes a week and scroll through my relatives' baby and pet pictures. I don't get how the site is such a specter of misery for some people Twitter I would understand a little better. It's such a tar pit of negative energy, insults, rage bait, etc
  • ricefield 7y ago
    Yeah I'm really confused by the whole "my life got so much better when I got off FB" trope. I don't spend a lot of time on Facebook, but my time spent there is generally pretty positive - I really enjoy getting updates from my friends and family and seeing their photos.
    • blakesterz 7y ago
      I'm confused by it too, but I see it in some members of my family. Full grown, middle aged adults, absolutely ADDICTED to their Facebook feed. Sitting in a room full of people and glued to Facebook. I don't get it, but I can say without adult that those who are addicted to FB are also the most unhappy. So I see that correlation in my own life. I don't know that FB causes or contributes to their unhappiness, or if maybe it's an escape for them, but I see it.
  • Lammy 7y ago
    > I don't get how the site is such a specter of misery for some people That's fine, great even, but do you believe those people are reporting their own experiences accurately?
  • zeroego 7y ago
    Some people are more heavily integrated into the platform. My SO is a part of multiple groups based around common hobbies/preference in memes. Although there's a lot of good content in these groups they can get pretty toxic. Also, seeing your immediate family post political rants/flame other family members or random people on the internet can be disheartening.
  • gamblor956 7y ago
    Righto. I've found that I'm much happier and have more "life satisfaction" when I use Facebook. But I also use Facebook primarily for organizing events and group activities.
• schallis 7y ago
  Rather than going cold turkey on Social Media, I’ve found it more effective to reduce the amount of content I’m exposed to e.g. for Facebook unfollowing all groups, turning off all notifications, reducing friends; for Instagram unfollowing almost all accounts And turning off all notifications etc. This has the effect that when I DO inevitably visit these sites, I spend far less time there and it’s much less entertaining since I reach the “bottom” much quicker. Over time I’ve been able to wean myself off.
  • mygo 7y ago
    Facebook has a bottom? I deactivated my account never having reached it. What’s it look like?
• root_axis 7y ago
  For those that believe access to Facebook is a human right, does the idea that Facebook might be physiologically unhealthy factor into that reasoning?
• Lammy 7y ago
  From the title I initially wasn't sure if this would be about people who quit using Facebook becoming happier, or people who quit working there. Anecdotally both are true among my peer group :)
• schallis 7y ago
  Rather than going cold turkey, I’ve found it much more effective to find ways to reduce my engagement e.g by turning off notifications for all platforms, unfollowing friends, groups etc. I’ve significantly reduced my Social media usage using this because I’m no longer tempted to scratch the itch of a notification, and when I do visit, there’s far less content so I’ll almost always reach the bottom’ now. I basically no longer use Facebook because I’ve made it barren for myself and significantly reduced time spent on Instagram.
• garrygosh 7y ago
  I like looking at my friends pictures on Facebook. But I never understood why I would post any pictures myself. I don’t understand the upside. Even my profile photo is blank.
• coderunner 7y ago
  As an aside, if anyone has any unusual things that you have done that have helped with depression, please mention them. I've done the usual route of therapy and meds but that didn't help with my depression or suicidal thoughts. Thanks in advance.
  • snarf21 7y ago
    Continue to see a licensed professional but one thing I've learned is that people tend to be happier when there is something to look forward to. If everything pending in your life is a dread, it can be a downward spiral. The best approach is to find that thing for you. It could be volunteering or a hobby. It doesn't have to be the perfect thing but just pick one. Learn how to take photographs and how to use a camera with f-stops. Learn how to bake pastries. Join civic clubs or church clubs or hiking clubs. Join a gym and get in shape. If you don't like it, try something else. Search on meetup.com or other similar. Most of these things have an impassioned group of people who will talk about the group's focus for hours on end. It creates anecdotes and funny stories and events to look forward to. It creates a sense of accomplishment even if you only get better at thing X very very slowly. You make progress and improve. "My own sense is that –certainly for males, and maybe for anybody, having a certain amount of fitness and strength makes you proud, and being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know." - Stewart Brand
  • smallgovt 7y ago
    You might want to check out 'The Book of Joy' by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize winner and archbishop). The book lays out what these two men believe are the fundamental pillars of enduring happiness. Instead of doing a poor job summarizing the contents, here's a link to Amazon if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CZCW34Q https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CZCW34Q. Wish you the best.
  • downerending 7y ago
    Damn. Alcohol helped me some, but it's rather difficult to recommend that. Simply accepting that it's going to be part of my life forever has helped some as well. I look for small pleasures, and it takes my life off of my thoughts for a while.
• bitxbit 7y ago
  I sincerely hope people at FB come to the realization that they can do something powerful to dramatically change the world IF they are willing to forgo the money.
• eindiran 7y ago
  I think the first link mistakenly pointed to the Bloomberg article when it was meant to point to this: https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf Some of the interesting points from the paper: 1. Deactivation reduced (political) polarization: "The Treatment group was less likely to say they follow news about politics or the President, and less able to correctly answer factual questions about recent news events. Our overall index of news knowledge fell by 0.19 standard deviations. There is no detectable effect on political engagement, as measured by voter turnout in the midterm election and the likelihood of clicking on email links to support political causes. Deactivation significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news. Deactivation did not statistically significantly reduce affective polarization (i.e. negative feelings about the other political party) or polarization in factual beliefs about current events, although the coefficient estimates also point in that direction. Our overall index of political polarization fell by 0.16 standard deviations. As a point of comparison, prior work has found that a different index of political polarization rose by 0.38 standard deviations between 1996 and 2018 (Boxell 2018)." 2. Deactivation increased "well-being", by about 20-40% the amount you'd expect for someone getting therapy: "Deactivation caused small but significant improvements in well-being, and in particular in self-reported happiness, life satisfaction, depression, and anxiety. Effects on subjective well-being as measured by responses to brief daily text messages are positive but not significant. Our overall index of subjective well-being improved by 0.09 standard deviations. As a point of comparison, this is about 25-40 percent of the effect of psychological interventions including self-help therapy, group training, and individual therapy, as reported in a meta-analysis by Bolier et al. (2013). These results are consistent with prior studies." 3. After the experiment ended, people in the treatment group didn't feel like they needed to go back: "As the experiment ended, participants reported planning to use Facebook much less in the future." "About 80 percent of the Treatment group agreed that the deactivation was good for them."
• 4ec0755f5522 7y ago
  FB is mostly a tool for evil but it's got some amazing parenting resources. On the evil side you have the anti-vax nutters but you also have supportive parent groups for whatever weird disorder/issue/disease/problem your kid might have where the evidence-based stuff is winning out. Global scale organizing of these resources is a net benefit for sure. I suppose 10 years ago they would have been on yahoo groups. 10 years before that, mailing lists. Now they're on FB and I guess that's alright if you don't mind FB knowing everything about your kids problems. So yeah FB still evil warmongers against privacy but its power to organize moms does some little bit of good in this world.
  • WhompingWindows 7y ago
    Is that a net benefit, though? Couldn't those communities re-organize onto platforms that don't harm democracy and rationality? On the one hand, anti-vaxxers have caused a lot of damage, and FB aided in that; on the other hand, FB in general has taken revenue and power from those groups, and do we want FB to have more or less power?
• Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  I confirm. Facebook stopped properly working for me today: I use it mostly on a smartphone via a mobile Firefox, and it stopped showing more than 4 lines of text in every post, drawing a non-working 'more' link at the end of line four. So, I decided not to report the issue because I feel myself much happier without Facebook.
• partiallypro 7y ago
  Facebook is still the best way to get people to gather. I have recently started a fan club for a soccer group, and without Facebook it would have been impossible to organize. No other social media platform addresses that need, that I know of, that has a massive reach to get people with common interests. Organizing events and reaching people is made much easier.
• pmontra 7y ago
  I almost quit FB (almost only business) and I'm spending more time on HN :-) Basically I know less about my friends living far from me but they are second/third tier friends anyway: the time spent together in real life is what matters.
• adamwong246 7y ago
  FB FOMO is a such an issue for myself. I remind myself that no one has a perfect life but nonetheless, I find myself driven to inspect profiles of people I admire, only to be horrified when I realize how much younger, but still more successful, they are than myself, or they do more interesting work, or are paid more, or live in a more appealing city, or take nicer vacations or inhabit more attractive bodies. It's perfect recipe for feeling inadequate. I console myself by knowing someone is lurking my profile, thinking the same thing.
  • johnchristopher 7y ago
    I am glad you shared your personal experience. Quite refreshing to read (even if it's a negative experience) in a thread that usually gathers a gazillion of people who "don't understand what's wrong, I use it only in an healthy way: for events and keeping in touch with friends/family a continent away".
    • adamwong246 7y ago
      FB has 2 barbs which are quite painful when deployed together: 1) The cheap and easy social validation of the "like" and 2) The observation of other people's status-seeking, which invalidates our own. It's much like a drug- if you can use it responsibly, that's great. But we are just animals and all too often we gradually use FB more and more as a dopamine trigger. Often, this is in the form of edgy memes, angry politics, soft-core porn or just status-seeking. Add some FOMO to the mix and you will assuredly feel pretty crummy. The FB like button is such an insanely powerful feedback mechanism. I never would have thought, 15 years ago, that such a simple thing could take over people's minds so completely. But it's becoming abundantly clear that not only is FB playing to our weakness, they are playing us against each other. In the scramble for likes, we obsessively refresh our pages. Likes cost FB nothing but the chase for them leads its users to churn in circles, all the while generating ad revenue and which finally resolves itself as Zuckerberg's 18th mansion.
• jobseeker990 7y ago
  There are just a couple places using it to schedule stuff these day. I'm not sure how to get away from that. I can't believe none of my 200 friends post anything anymore.
• imartin2k 7y ago
  I deleted my Facebook account about 2 years ago (created a new Messenger-only account for a handful of ongoing chats). I have never regretted this step.
• cm2012 7y ago
  Could be an example of the Hawthorne effect - observing any behavior increases performance in that behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect. Also, it's amazing the kind of site HN will upvote if it confirms their priors. This site is the most spammy looking thing, and it does not link to the original study like it claims (both links lead to a totally separate article).
  • killerdhmo 7y ago
    Do.. you not know what Boing Boing is? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boing_Boing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boing_Boing
    • cm2012 7y ago
      I know its a three paragraph article with two broken links, on a page with 10 ads, and a spammy looking zoomed in photo of Mark Zuckerberg.
      • mygo 7y ago
        You take things at face value without pretense. Please have many offspring, it’s not a very common trait. If facebook as it is today was presented to people today for the first time, they also may have come to the same conclusion.
    • sithadmin 7y ago
      Boing Boing definitely has an issue with looking, and frankly, acting like blogspam these days. Still some interesting original content, but the site design is pretty garish, and it's not always clear what is or isn't an advertisement.
• ralmidani 7y ago
  I use FB almost exclusively for news about the Middle East, especially Syria where the Assad regime actively targets journalists who tell the truth about what is happening there and very few Western journalists are going into the areas the regime is bombing. I have vowed to not use FB once the regime is gone, people can gather freely, and real news media can operate openly. My FB feed is mostly depressing these days, as it is filled with images of (among other things) maimed and murdered children. I can see how avoiding that would probably make me happier and more productive, but FB also helps me stay up to date on amazing humanitarian work being done in liberated areas. I also feel that burying my head in the sand would be a betrayal of my fellow Syrians who have, and still are, sacrificing so that my children as well as theirs won’t have to fear state terrorism.
  • phyek 7y ago
    You got to be kidding me. You "exclusively" rely on FB for news? That's like trusting a Nigerian scammer with your money!
    • Seenso 7y ago
      > You got to be kidding me. You rely on FB "exclusively" for news? That's like trusting a Nigerian scammer with your money! Context is important. In this case, he actually has some pretty defensible reasons for using Facebook this way: active suppression of local independent journalists and low activity by independent Western journalists. My guess is his alternative to Facebook is probably some pro-Assad propaganda rag. As bad as Facebook is, that's worse. Your reaction would be more appropriate for someone chose to rely on FB for news about the US or Western Europe.
      • ljw1001 7y ago
        al jazeera is a perfectly good source of real middle east news. The economist isn't bad. Facebook is entirely unreliable as a news source because for every real post that shows you how things really are, you get two lies. As just one measure, FB themselves deleted over 3 Billion fake accounts between april and sept last year. These are accounts that provided a phone number for verification. The disinformation operations on that site are like nothing anyone has ever seen.
• tidology 7y ago
  I deleted my FB account like 2 years ago? Never looked back. Unfortunately, I still see way too many people around me still using it. Have little faith on masses quitting the service.
• M_bara 7y ago
  I am clocking about 10 years w/out FB. Not on whatsapp and all that other stuff. I'm quite happy & when folks ask me how to get in touch, My standard reply is SMS/Phone or Face2face :)
• beepboopbeep 7y ago
  I often forget I even had a facebook. There really is just zero value add to my life from that website.
  • mattrp 7y ago
    I used to subscribe to the idea that facebook helped you stay close to friends and family. But the issue is most of the friends and family who I want to hear from and wants to hear from me have too much going on to really be active. So the remainder of facebook is peripheral contacts who think that by posting someone's else content (a meme, a political thought, a call to action, whatever) it's somehow valuable to everyone else. I hear marketplace is useful and is supplanting craigslist. But when I look at it, it's full of off-site ads for products I have no interest in buying. Very little of it is actual neighbor to neighbor legitimate items for sale. I deleted the app from my phone over a year ago and haven't really missed it. More importantly, I really fail to see the value that facebook provides.. can you imagine if they'd really pitched to VC's what they've become they'd ever been funded in the first place? "Hi, we are going to attract users who used to forward email spam to all their contacts in the CC line and give them a place online to collect all their BS on one convenient place and then we're going to market all sorts of crap at them."
• gzu 7y ago
  The overwhelming theme of social media is propagating envy. Look at this amazing vacation, look at how handsome I am, look at this happy family with baby and wedding photos, look at all my money, look at me landing a great job, look we just bought a beautiful new house. How can one be content with your own life if you're constantly comparing yourself to everyone else. Removing images and video might go a long way.
  • medymed 7y ago
    Also, adding some degree of anonymity. It’s much easier to delight in a story/post where there’s less orientation of the story to an attention-hungry identity and less social pressure on friends to ‘like’ and so forth. Not that anonymous social forums are without problems.
• INTPenis 7y ago
  What gave me the most satisfaction is quitting the news. Incidentally I don't have or use any social media either. Except imgur and sometimes among the funny memes I get news. But I'm afraid for people I meet who always remind me of all the awful things they've seen in the news. I'm aware of none of this until someone tells me. And yet my life is the same as everyone elses. Not knowing what is going on, living in a country with a high standard of living and personal safety, doesn't affect me at all.
  • anderber 7y ago
    I absolutely understand what you're saying. But part of me feels an obligation to be informed to hold those in power accountable. If everyone follows the advice of avoiding the news, what effect would that have in our Govenment?
    • j-c-hewitt 7y ago
      You can delegate your concern to a political party, which is essentially all you are able to do as a citizen in a country like the US particularly if you live in a state that does not have a lot of referenda. If you want to learn more you can spend more time on researching the issues. Otherwise you could vote on a single issue, or just pick the party that is supposed to represent people like you with a similar hierarchy of values. The US also doesn't have mandatory voting, so declining to vote just signals that you have delegated concern over civic issues to other people who are willing to make that (sometimes significant) sacrifice of time, energy, and money.
      • daveFNbuck 7y ago
        The problem with the strategy you describe is that if too many people use it, politicians can just openly lie about what's happening in the world and what they're doing about it. A voter who has identified with a party and is no longer interested in learning the facts has no way to correct for this.
        • 7y ago
• hx2a 7y ago
  I'm considering quitting Facebook, and am currently using their feature that lets you temporarily deactivate your account. I'm trying it out for a few days to see how comfortable I am living without it. So far, no downsides. I'm going to keep using this feature until I am ready to pull the plug for good.
• mindcrime 7y ago
  I'm fairly well convinced that I'm going to quit FB soon'ish. The main thing stopping me is that either A. the replacement "thing" I want doesn't exist yet, or B. it does, and I'm just not aware of it. Given that I have some pretty specific ideas in mind regarding what I want to use instead of FB (think "self hosted blog" but with some very particular details) I don't know that the exact thing I want exists yet, and I don't really have time to create it myself. At least not unless it just natively "falls out" of work I'm doing anyway, which it may well do. I just don't know when that'll be.
  • yingw787 7y ago
    Have you considered just using FB messenger @ messenger.com? You can log in with your email address instead of your Facebook account. You can also use it while your Facebook account is deactivated (I deactivated mine). No news feed, no ads, just conversations. Not associated with Facebook, just a happy Messenger user.
    • mindcrime 7y ago
      Not really, because I have an ideological aversion to closed off / walled-garden protocols like that. Part of what my switch away from the whole FB/Twitter/Etc. thing is going to be going back to mainly using XMPP for chat. And anybody who can't, or won't, join an XMPP network and use an XMPP client is somebody I don't need to chat with.
      • veb 7y ago
        You might like PixelFed (https://pixelfed.social/ https://pixelfed.social/) it's a completely open sourced project based on federation.
        • mindcrime 7y ago
          I'll check that out. Something based around Fediverse integration / open standards / open protocols is definitely a big part of what I want.
• robomartin 7y ago
  It all started with being sick of being presented with walls of negative stuff (usually political, all sides) every time I went into FB. Not wanting to see that crap I started to put people on 30 day holds. I eventually decided that if I had to put someone on 30 day hold three times in a row I should unfriend them. And that is exactly what happened with a number of people. After several of those cycles I asked myself a very simple question: Why? That's when I unfriended everyone except close family (a little over a dozen people). I can now derive some value from FB. I have a long list of things FB should do to actually be more useful. One of the things that always bothered me was that they force you to toss everyone into one big pile and everyone on that pile is exposed to everything you say and do. Yes, sure, you can group friends and explicitly post to a limited subset. Frankly, the implementation absolutely sucks and is a pain in the ass to use. The model needs to change to everything being absolutely private and not farmed or captured by FB unless the user chooses to open doors beyond that. There is no reason for my friends from the gym should have any visibility into my family and my conversations with my family. The same applies to work friends or neighborhood friends. You can accomplish this today but the UX/UI are absolute garbage. A user needs to be able to put people into silos and the software needs to enforce privacy between silos by default. It should take work to pierce silo boundaries. Again, no reason for someone's bowling club members to ever see conversations with family. I had a case with a friend of a friend who would snap tons of pictures whenever he got invited to a gathering at my house. He would proceed to post all of these pictures publicly on FB --as in anyone in the world could see them. I am not paranoid, but I don't want pictures of my kids, home and family all over the internet for everyone to see. If you are not a parent (and, in particular, if you don't have daughters, you might not get this). I asked this guy twice, politely, not to do that. I explained that taking pictures of people in a private residence does not entitle him to post them for the world to see without permission. I eventually had to pay an attorney to give him a call and get it sorted. Another interesting issue with FB happens when your friends post stuff from publications you do not care to see on your timeline. They offer the ability to block some people and pages, but there are a few holes in that. I don't remember the details. All I know is that I kept being exposed to garbage from a couple of people and the only way to not see it was to suspend them for 30 days or unfriends them. I eventually just unfriended them. I reached out to FB with the issue. They could not care less. On the business side, they angered a lot of people with their approach to your audience in groups or pages. I have personally invested tens of thousands of dollars in the past aggregating people behind pages only to be slapped in the face by having to buy advertising to reach my entire audience. Imagine having a page with 100K people you spent money to aggregate and only being able to reach a few percent of them with your updates (unless you pay). I remember when brands used to advertise their FB pages in TV ads. I never understood why they subverted their amazing brands to FB. Well, eventually they all stopped. You don't see that kind of thing any more. Businesses want to own their audience not have to rent it every time they need to reach to them. For all the good FB does or can do it also has some dark patterns that they should address.
• thosakwe 7y ago
  Sounds like confirmation bias to me.
• oxymoran 7y ago
  This is only true if you quit all social media. I started using Twitter for 1 specific topic and now it’s all back.
• m0zg 7y ago
  Quitters of just about _any_ harmful habit will report all that. This doesn't mean that FB is harmful to everyone or even to a substantial fraction of its users. It's just that people who feel it is harmful for them are much more likely to "quit" it, and report improvement when they do. I bet people who just started to use FB also report more life satisfaction and less depression and anxiety. They made a change they felt they needed to make, in both cases.
• tempsy 7y ago
  Twitter is far more addictive for me, and makes me feel worse.
• krtong 7y ago
  Someone needs to come up with a single-player social media website that helps people be alone. At the very least it would be a hilarious social commentary.
• welly 7y ago
  "Facebook is designed to make you anxious, depressed and dissatisfied" Really? Designed? Come on.
  • smileysteve 7y ago
    Well, it's designed to capture eyeballs; and those are definitely mechanisms to capture eyeballs.
    • fwn 7y ago
      If I understood it correctly that's what our parent was implying. A dike is designed to keep water away and, as a side effect, blocks the ocean view. It would be misleading to say that a dike is designed to block the view, as it misrepresents the builders intention to fit a specific narrative. If we'd explain dikes that way to someone who does not know the concept, they would assume that dike builders have to be very evil. Which is pretty unfair, given that if we had better ways of building dikes that - everything else equal - don't block the view, everyone would probably build those instead. I think that such a deliberate misrepresentation reveals the authors agenda and their willingness to be intellectually dishonest.
• aikah 7y ago
  I mean there is no point quitting Facebook to spend all your time on Twitter or Instagram either... They are objectively as bad, especially Twitter which is 24/7 of nonsense and petty drama and people yelling at each other or organizing virtual lynch mobs... Facebook as a way to keep in touch with close friends, as a private family network is fine.
• codegeek 7y ago
  In my humble opinion, there are 2 types of people who use facebook: 1. The show offs who want to share every little detail about their every little thing in life. 2. People who want to keep tabs on their family/friends occasionally. I started as #1 back in 2004 when fb was still early on and slowly graduated to #2.
  • koonsolo 7y ago
    You forgot 1 other nasty group: those who feel better by judging others. You won't see them post or comment, but they will judge everyone behind their back. I've see several cases like this from up close, including one extravagant girl (who wasn't doing anything wrong, just posting a lot), that basically cut out her entire family so she could post without all the gossiping.
• cityzen 7y ago
  ITT lots of people justifying using Facebook.
• chakerb 7y ago
  Unfortunately I can't quit Facebook because it's the only way to know people from the other sex. I tried Tinder for a couple of months and it didn't work for me. My assumption is that people feel safer to interact with you if you have friends in common. That's said, I don't use Facebook that often, if I start talking with someone and we enjoy each other company, I kindly ask if we can use WhatsApp and if so, I will stop using Facebook for a period of time.
• deleted 7y ago
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• deleted 7y ago
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• giarc 7y ago
  I quit about a month or two ago. I'm not sure if I am happier or not, mostly because everyone around me is still on it (including my wife). So perhaps there is a bit of FOMO going on. I think I would be happier if everyone I knew quit.
• factsaresacred 7y ago
  Facebook kinda tops out as you get older and the rate of adding new friends declines. Turns out most people are doing variations of the same thing and it gets dull fast (admittedly maybe I need more interesting friends). Twitter is novelty and Instagram is aesthetics. Facebook is reruns of the same ol' show.
• chrysoprace 7y ago
  I'd really like to quit Facebook but I'm holding out for three reasons: a) Facebook Chat is a way to get a hold of friends or vice versa. SMS is often slow (less of a sense of urgency I guess), and not everyone has my number or even use SMS. b) The network effect. It's a great way for introverts such as myself to get in contact with someone without the "what's your number?" question. c) Events. If I didn't have Facebook I would probably not know about them. How do introverts who quit Facebook get over these obstacles?
  • RandallBrown 7y ago
    If you get value out of Facebook for those reasons, why do you want to quit?
  • victoriasun 7y ago
    I quit. I'm an introvert :) a) You can quit Facebook without quitting Messenger. I did this for a while before pulling the plug immediately. b) Honestly, quitting Facebook made it pretty clear to me what social circle I (and those within it) seriously wanted to maintain, and who didn't exist in that. This is not to shade on the people outside of this circle, by the way! We only have a limited number of seats at our proverbial table. My closest friends quickly switched to SMS for me. I have more time for them now that my Messenger list isn't filled with people for whom I only have a vague relationship with (this is also more of an indicator of the type of friends I had on Facebook, which may not apply to you). c) Depends on what kind of events you like, but I've found text/mailing lists/curated apps to be more helpful than Facebook's deluge of events. I do get invited to less birthday parties, but I've never enjoyed those anyways. I much prefer an intimate dinner over a large group gathering.
• war1025 7y ago
  Some steps for making Facebook more manageable: 1. Deliberately go through and prune your friends list down to people you actually interact with or care about updates from 2. Any time someone shares something you think is dumb, click on the corner of the post and select "Hide all from <page>". This lets you hide anything your friends share from various meme sites without blocking their legitimate posts 3. Any time you see an ad for a product you don't care about or don't want to see, click "Hide ad" then it will pop up a dialog and you can select "Hide all ads from <company>" 4. Go through your "liked" pages and unlike / unfollow any that are irrelevant to you. I do all of the above and Facebook often just stops loading content for me after the first 20 or so posts. My wife does none of the above and can easily scroll for an hour without reaching an end to the content.
• zelly 7y ago
  People who follow through with major decision report higher satisfaction, says new groundbreaking study.
• tanilama 7y ago
  Can verify. Human are weird animals. We get anxiety looking at others doing good. Maybe we are just really really mean. Though most of the doing good is just on the surface
• oblib 7y ago
  I think your experience with FB has a lot to do with whom you have on your "friends list". I only have about 200, most of whom don't post much. Of those who post a lot of political stuff I have a fairly good mix so I see a lot of that but I don't get all heated up over it. A lot of great and funny stuff comes up on my feed so I have a lot of fun with it.
• senderista 7y ago
  Even if Facebook/Twitter didn't make me less happy or turn me into a person I didn't want to be, I would have quit them for the sheer opportunity cost of time spent on them that my long-term self would rather be spending on other things. (Obviously could apply to HN as well haha.)
• cryptozeus 7y ago
  My problem is these are my escapes. If I don’t use them then I do not know what else to do with my time.
  • themodelplumber 7y ago
    A very good point. And we can't really say for sure if _you_ would have a better experience, should you decide to give it up. I like the idea of providing people with more contextual and appropriate psychological support than just "hey look, some evidence that it can be a good idea to quit."
• themagician 7y ago
  According to my phone I spend about 5-10 minutes a week on all social media combined (with YouTube being the big outlier, but I watch mostly on the TV now). FB, IG, Twitter, Snapchat… I check them once a week, if that. I think I only keep FB around for some SSO stuff and a few API integrations that I use for work. About two years ago I went all out and just turned off notifications for _everything_. Not just social media, but news, email, and even text messaging. I have a favorites list that has a few contacts on it that I let through and for emergencies and stuff like that, but in general my phone doesn't do _anything_ unless I receive a call from someone on my contact list. And I guess calendar reminders and bank notifications. It's awesome. I get a print version of The Economist once a week. I catch up on the news via podcasts on the weekend or when I feel like it. I probably spend a few hours a week between HN, reddit and The Verge but that's about it. Everything is on my terms and I'm never going back. You don't realize how terrible everything is for you until you get rid of it all and then you start to wonder why you even bothered with that shit in the first place. IMO notifications just need to go away completely. Unless it's an emergency of some kind there really is no reason why you need notifications in your life.
• _cerv 7y ago
  Yup. I hopped back on Facebook in 2012, and it quickly became the nexus of my online life. I started to get wrapped into how I maintained my presence, the kinds of witty things that would make it as posts, the banners and profile pics, and I was always hoping to see a double digit number in the red notification bubble. It all peaked in early 2017 where I was wrapped up in some political ideological battle and I just said "fuck it" and left. Deleted it and didn't think about it. There were a couple hours at first where I thought I was losing a connection to the world and my friends, but that cold feeling vanished a day later. I felt like I had gotten time back, I felt free. For all of that, I still putt around on Twitter but that scratches a different itch and I never seem to be consumed by it.
• appleshore 7y ago
  What happens in your real life is still 10-100x more influential in how you feel.
• MikeGale 7y ago
  I’ve recently withdrawn from email, Internet and TV for a while. I’m currently reconnecting. My main observation is that I’m happy getting back onto the things where I exert some control. Those with little control are harder to stomach: 1. TV news is one of the hardest. I can silence the adverts but the news itself is a horror. In most “items” I see blatant political manipulation, viciousness without apparent reason, ignorance and stupidity so deep that I’m dumbfounded. So much propaganda and disinformation. Can’t find any channel that is much good, not controllable. (Also newspapers, for them add plenty of hysteria.) 2. eMail has also proved surprisingly hard. The hard part is all the spam. (I don’t use surveillance capitalist mail servers, run my own.) I decided to go through my spam traps first. So much utter rubbish that it’s put me off. Outnumbers the good stuff even after automated pre-winnowing. Would be better if I could find a way to retaliate effectively against those who pay for spam. 3. Facebook is quite easy. I have a number of measures in place that put my content under my own control. Not that hard to get back into. (Though I find more people, a lot, are using it less and bailing out altogether as time goes on. It’s dying.) 4. Twitter is dead easy. You choose who you follow. That gives you a lot of control, so can be pleasant to use. 5. The Internet (WWW) in general is not too bad. I have a variety of tools to control and exclude those who want to watch everything I do. Gives me control. My take away: The media you can control can be rewarding and worthwhile.
• boopmaster 7y ago
  I am enjoying having my time and my headspace back from worries about anything transpiring therein, with a side helping of solace knowing that any data once ago provided is aging unto irrelevance.
• keenmaster 7y ago
  On Syria: "It's nuanced" is not the message people need to hear regarding Syria. Bashar Al Assad is committing a genocide with the help of Russia and Iran. People should hear the major news upfront (the genocide) followed right up with all the nuance. Telling people "there are many parties involved, here are the interests of all of them" is useful only after we make the primary story very, exceedingly clear. Half a million people have been slaughtered by the Syrian government. Kids have been gassed. Prisoners are being tortured, raped in front of their spouses, and arbitrarily executed. During WWII, NYT relegated the Holocaust to the back of its newspaper. We cannot make the same mistake again. There is a thread on Syria down below for anyone interested. Facebook and Google/YouTube employees especially need to read it, because their platforms are helping perpetrators of the genocide and deleting video evidence of the genocide, respectively.
  • sykick 7y ago
    People need to understand that the situation there is complicated before deciding that Obama was an idiot or that Trump’s decisions have been stupid. I submit that the situation is so complicated there that any action, no matter how reasonable or well thought out, will be subject to plausible sounding criticism. So detractors will always have something to decry about the actions of whomever is President. Very little reporting in the U.S. is about what sort outcome would be ideal and how to achieve. How to balance the conflicting desires of the regional powers. It’s a bit hypocritical to overthrow Assad on humanitarian grounds given the death and destruction wrought by U.S. forces in Iraq the past 17 years. The U.S. had no problem supporting Saddam Hussein while he used chemical weapons against Iran. When he used said weapons against Iraqi Kurds there was token pushback by the U.S. Just painting the picture of, “Assad is genocidal maniac” is overly reductionist. It’s a message that keeps the average American mired in the absurdly comical worldview of America being the shining light on the hilltop. I would welcome reporting on all these nuances. Maybe then Americans would start to question why we support regimes like Saudi Arabia while decrying regimes like Syria. Perhaps we’d come to the conclusion that we don’t need to intervene and control everything for the sake of short sighted goals of dubious benefit.
    • keenmaster 7y ago
• deleted 7y ago
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• leonardteo 7y ago
  Funny, I left Facebook yesterday. It got too much as I was connected with many of my customers/users and it was just mayhem. It was extremely complex for me to get off Facebook because our website "Login with Facebook", advertising, pages, etc all are connected to my account, so I couldn’t simply destroy the account itself or risk locking out hundreds of thousands of people from our platform and apps. I manually unfriended 2000 people (which surprisingly didn't take too long).
• chadwittman 7y ago
  FB is the new cigarette. But it's the 1940s & we're being told by big tobacco that maybe all of these symptoms aren't correlated. Narrator: They were. I'm trying to build something new from the ground up using a pull-based model + intimate groups of people you care about. Would love early beta testers that are parents of young ones: https://trypersona.com https://trypersona.com
• k__ 7y ago
  Knew a bunch of people who simply didn't hear about events anymore, after they left FB. If you don't inform yourself via other channels, this can get grimm pretty quick.
• rcurry 7y ago
  After a friend, who always posted on social media about how great their life was going, suddenly committed suicide, I quit all social media and never looked back. That was two years ago and I don’t miss any of it. On social media there is a sort of relentless peer pressure to come across as having a perfect life and I think that’s really unhealthy. I have found that having sincere relationships with a few good friends outweighs a bunch of vapid “likes” from a horde of casual acquaintances.
  • solinent 7y ago
    I'd say Facebook brings out the Narcissus in all of us. Narcissus was cursed by Nemesis to become a flower. from wikipedia: > One day Narcissus was walking in the woods when Echo, an Oread (mountain nymph) saw him, fell deeply in love, and followed him. Narcissus sensed he was being followed and shouted "Who's there?". Echo repeated "Who's there?" She eventually revealed her identity and attempted to embrace him. He stepped away and told her to leave him alone. She was heartbroken and spent the rest of her life in lonely glens until nothing but an echo sound remained of her. Nemesis (as an aspect of Aphrodite[4]), the goddess of revenge, noticed this behaviour after learning the story and decided to punish Narcissus. Once, during the summer, he was getting thirsty after hunting, and the goddess lured him to a pool where he leaned upon the water and saw himself in the bloom of youth. Narcissus did not realize it was merely his own reflection and fell deeply in love with it, as if it were somebody else. Unable to leave the allure of his image, he eventually realized that his love could not be reciprocated and he melted away from the fire of passion burning inside him, eventually turning into a gold and white flower.
• bigcohoneypot 7y ago
  I quit facebook and it improved my relations with my friends and my outlook on life. I also am in less of a bubble.
• manicdee 7y ago
  I, too, find my life is much less stressful when I bury my head in the sand and pay no attention to the corruption of government and progress of society towards capitalist fascism. Limit your social media feed to only people posting positive news. Cut off the people you don’t actually interact with. Remove all the bad news from your daily attention. Now you are in a better state of being: the state of denial. Goodbye depression and anxiety!
  • recursive 7y ago
    Not all bad news is actually true, useful, or even news.
  • theonemind 7y ago
    In general, I think of these sorts of things in terms of "circle of concern" and "sphere of influence". I would like the to have the latter larger than the former. Very few people, realistically, can exert much influence on corrupt government and progress of society towards capitalist fascism. For those that can and do, I applaud them and wish we had more of them. Realistically, I know I won't quit my job and become Ralph Nader. Perhaps a tragedy of the commons, but it does seem to make most sense for most individuals to just cut out their concern, since they won't do anything anyway.
• throwaway122378 7y ago
  Left Facebook 4 maybe 5 years ago now can’t remember. No instagram no snap no WhatsApp.
• jtlienwis 7y ago
  When Facebook pays me for my supplied content I would think about going back. But I am not interested in making someone else rich using my data.
• annadane 7y ago
  I think equating fb to other social media misses the point. It's specifically the privacy violations, whether indirect (people reporting they can no longer make their profiles unsearchable, or posts they thought were private suddenly surfacing) or direct (like "your friend just commented on this post"). None of this can be turned off. Do they not ever think? Use their heads?
• mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
  It’s shocking to see people call Reuters, NPR and NYTimes unbiased. They are biased.
• hurricanetc 7y ago
  You’re delusional or a sociopath if you think working for Facebook is doing anything positive for society. Facebook has to be the single worst thing to happen to humanity so far in the 21st century.
• abdullatifkatto 7y ago
  What is this?
• abdullatifkatto 7y ago
  About it plz
• mazone 7y ago
  Now i am addicted to hacker news instead.
• nojvek 7y ago
  I quit Facebook (+ hipstagram + Snapchat) 2 years ago and deffo report better life satisfaction. Well Snapchat was accidental quit. They made an app update and the app never launched again. I tried opening it several times and it crashed every time. Snapchat really needs to work on quality control and user experience. I use WhatsApp to stay in touch with my family groups which are located all over the world. I really wished WhatsApp didn’t sell to Facebook and remained independent.
• DannyDouglass 7y ago
  i'm waiting for my facebook account to be deleted in a week and the only anxiety i have now...is waiting for it to be gone. it's toxic. i'm much more at peace letting facebook go.
• gigatexal 7y ago
  I deleted my Facebook account and feel the same as the study: I wish I had done it years earlier.
• thescribbblr 7y ago
  The reverse happened to me. I got more depression and anxiety. So, I joined Facebook again after 3 months.
• karimmaassen 7y ago
  As a Facebook quitter, I can confirm.
• satysin 7y ago
  Quitting Facebook wasn't difficult. I had nothing of value from it by the end. Quitting Instagram also wasn't difficult. Sadly quitting WhatsApp is proving very difficult as it is used by so many (at least here in Europe). I use Signal with most family members now but when I meet someone new and we exchange contact details it is always "you're on WhatsApp yes?" and never anything else. To be fair WhatsApp does work well and as far as I know is still end-to-end encrypted so I do not think Facebook are mining my messages but I could be wrong. It does bring me to the question of how WhatsApp is making money for Facebook or how they plan to monetise it without destroying it. A secure messaging platform is quite different to a trashy public social media platform like facebook.com.
  • newscracker 7y ago
    WhatsApp shares some metadata about your conversations with Facebook, which is used by Facebook to show you ads or show your contacts on Facebook ads. There was a plan to shove ads into WhatsApp statuses, but that was abandoned (or maybe suspended for the near future) recently.
• an_outsider 7y ago
  I want to propose an idea for increasing competition in social networks, but I don't know what the downsides/unintended side-effects are. My idea: Governments around the world should block Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram on specific days of each week, say Saturday and Sunday. There should be fair warning - say the actual blocking starts happening only 1 month after the public announcement. Wouldn't people be inclined to use the next best thing, automatically creating more competition, and more importantly force their friends to use other social networks?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• OJFord 7y ago
  I haven't logged in to Facebook for about three years. When that 'off-Facebook data we have on you' page was released recently, I worked up the courage* to try to login, see it, and then finally 'delete' my account. (*I've been slightly concerned that it will be depressing one way or the other, either three years' messages and invitations to things I missed, or little of that! Since I just sort of stopped logging in, I never posted that I wasn't using it for example.) But I couldn't login. Facebook wanted me to prove my identity by contacting a set of my 'friends' that it chose, and I had no idea who they were. The only other option was to upload a scan of my passport, which felt a bit much considering my only aim was to get off properly and be appalled at the data it already has on me.
  • Zanneth 7y ago
    Completely insane to me that a social networking website wants to see your passport. If that isn’t some Gibson-esque cyberpunk dystopian elements creeping into our real world, then I don’t know what is.
  • mikelyons 7y ago
    That's how they prevent you from deleting the data, so they can keep it.
• RGgo 7y ago
  The most toxic platform out there is Twitter. Every time I log in I see series of hate tweets we all have for each other, policies,race, celebrities.
• 0027 7y ago
  Most people decide to quit because they feel Facebook is a threat to these. I know some people have left Facebook because of privacy concerns, but I feel that has a correlation with anxiety. I know anxiety encompasses more than just privacy as well. But if you feel your privacy is threatened, you will experience some degree of anxiety. So these results should come as no surprise. If they didn't experience any of these benefits, why would they not join Facebook again? What other reasons do people who have left Facebook remain off of Facebook without these reasons? This article feels tautological.
• christefano 7y ago
  Does anyone have a link to the study PDF? (Boing Boing’s PDF link erroneously points to the Bloomberg article.)
• koolhead17 7y ago
  Facebook and Instagram
• rblion 7y ago
  I deactivated my Facebook, don't use Messenger, barely use Instagram. Snapchat is just an archive for old photos/videos. Twitter is a few times a week. Reddit is a few times a day. Notice more contentment, more focus, less anxiety, less noise. Technology is great for creativity, productivity, learning and entertainment. I prefer to hang out with people, be out in nature or explore a new city.