31 ms·
Browsing negative content online makes mental health struggles worse: Study
- topato 2y agoResearchers have developed a web plug-in to help make better/informed online decisions
- analog31 2y agoAd blocker?
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y agohttps://affectivebrain.com/?page_id=7596 https://affectivebrain.com/?page_id=7596 (Which the authors are attempting to patent?)
- AIFounder 2y ago[dead]
- paulpauper 2y agosounds obvious, yes?
- bee_rider 2y agoThey also made a tool. Anyway, lots of things sound obvious, but are in fact wrong. So, it is good for academics to formally study things that sound obvious at first.
- stevenAthompson 2y agoIt's obvious to anyone with eyes that the world is flat. I'm glad someone checked anyhow.
- smitelli 2y agoIf the world were flat, cats would’ve knocked everything off the edge by now.
- BoxedEmpathy 2y agoIf the world was flat imagine the 5 star hotel on the edge. It would be awesome.
- dylan604 2y agoEvery hotel I visit in town is a 5 star hotel in that you can at most see 5 stars from the hotel. A hotel at the edge would hopefully have many more stars visible
- tbrownaw 2y agoIt's really not, since if there aren't any hills you can watch distant things come into view over the horizon. I believe the standard example is ships.
- srslyskptcl 2y agoSo impressive the way MIT adds to the depth and breadth of human knowledge.
- purple-leafy 2y agoI just created a regex-based content blocker that literally blacks out text content on any webpage. Chrome extension. 2 modes - block only matches, or, block surrounding text (too). Create as many rules as you like, it will block anything. I entered it into Google Built-in AI hackathon the other day. Uses local LLM to scan blocked content to determine if regex was too trigger happy, then lets user unblock.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y agoWhat local LLM? What kind of prompt? That seems like a lot for what sounds like sentiment analysis?
- purple-leafy 2y agoGoogle Gemini Nano Not really sentiment analysis purely, though thats something I want to add. When I'm on hackernews, I'm tired of coming across comments about: - Donald Trump, Xi, Zelensky, Putin, Musk (Other people) - China / Russia / Ukraine / USA etc - Alcohol/drugs/gambling etc So I basically block all that content
- esperent 2y agoDid it block your own comment after you made it? More seriously, any plans to share it? I've been waiting for someone to build a tool like this, although I expected to use sentiment analysis directly rather than regex. Personally I'd love to block nitpicking comments here on HN, not sure if that could be done with regex though. Edit: just saw you shared it in another reply.
- purple-leafy 2y agoYep shared in other comment, keep an eye on repo - will have updates in new year post hackathon judging
- theaussiestew 2y agoCould you share? I'm looking to use something like this.
- quaintdev 2y agoI have found myself worrying about global politics, climate change, microplastics and whole lot of other things. Things that I have no control over. Don’t get me wrong it’s good to be informed about these things but constant influx of such information is not helping anyone. It’s critical to regulate what we consume on web because our brains have a tendency to think about what we consume. Our thoughts get influenced by what information we are consuming. Seriously ditch the feed that someone else is curating for you! RSS is all you need https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-rss/ https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/why-rss/ P.S. I haven't been able to ditch hacker news like I wanted to.
- telman17 2y agoThank you, I think I’ll be looking into this.
- HPsquared 2y agoYou are what you ingest. Both food and information!
- firecall 2y agoBased on your comment, I remembered I used Feedly when Google Reader went away. Logging into Feedly was like going back in time! I must have imported all my Google Reader feeds into Feedly. It's a Time Capsule of a bygone age! :-D
- stevenAthompson 2y ago> it’s good to be informed about these things That's an interesting assumption. Is it really? I suspect that informed citizens are better for society, but it might be worse for the the individuals.
- galleywest200 2y agoIn regards to things like microplastics, knowing which products to avoid may be useful to the individual.
- 2y ago
- khushy 2y ago[flagged]
- donatj 2y agoI'd heard Kevin Rose was trying to get Digg back. Is that happening?
- khushy 2y agoAbsolutely..check Kevin rose's X account and Digg X account.
- quaintdev 2y agoIt's not the platform. It's the time. When Digg was active time was different, there were few people online. I'm afraid the new Digg will suffer same pitfalls as other social networks. The time has change and the crowd online has changed.
- khushy 2y agoIt is this toxic platform and the people it attracts. So many down votes and flagged posts because of the type of people here. Drives all the successful happy people away and keeps the negative tone alive here.
- slimebot80 2y agoAny articles or blog posts about the digg reboot?
- khushy 2y agoYes, and even a few new diggnation YouTube videos. They're coming back!
- BoxedEmpathy 2y agoI'm ready to migrate back to digg, after coming from digg to reddit so many years ago..
- m3kw9 2y agoGotta learn to filter the news on various ways. Climate change? You gonna make the earth temp decrease? Then stop worrying. Microplastics? Just drink more from glass and less junk which come from plastic containers. Lots of violence on the news? It’s been like that ever since man has evolved from cells. Stop worrying
- BoxedEmpathy 2y agoFor me, none of that stuff bothers me. What gives me the social media heartbreak is seeing the hate. Seeing commenters get so upset with each other over misunderstandings and miscommunications. I've tried completely avoiding comments, and I admit it makes my life less stressful, but it feels like closing your eyes to solve littering. So now what I do is try to assume every positive commenter is a human and every negative commenter is maybe a LLM/hatebot. This has given me just enough magical thinking to avoid the stress but not so much as to distort my world view... hopefully..
- irjustin 2y agoHnews is the only thing I read lately. I had to remove reddit, CNN, nytimes, fnews, fb. And honestly I'm a lot happier. I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion but part of gaining that opinion I would get materially angry at the otherside that they were "being so stupid, obviously you shouldn't think like that". It got bad enough it was affecting me personally and how I interacted with my family. I'll start up again eventually because it matters to me but for now I need to stay happier.
- MrGinkgo 2y agoFunny enough, Hacker News is the only place I've been going to get my news for about a year now, and ever since I started experiencing anxiety bad enough to where I needed to start limiting my exposure to it. But like you said, focusing on family, friends, and local things happening in your immediate community definitely help, and only recently have I realized that. A friend and I were discussing this recently, and he put it very succinctly: "the view from high above is great, but it's hard to not worry about falling."
- jader201 2y ago> I'm sad because I no longer an doing my civic duty to stay informed and have an educated opinion To me, and I know not everyone agrees, but I feel nearly all forms of news media (particularly the ones you listed) are way too biased and have agendas to consider the information you consume from them helping you "stay informed and have an educated opinion". Rather, they're opinion is forming your opinion. I think it's nearly impossible to stay truly informed these days, unfortunately. I've seen some comments in this thread talk about consuming only boring facts, and I think this is our best bet. Because most of the time, the truth is boring. So if you find yourself being negatively impacted, ask yourself if you're hearing unbiased facts, or if you're actually just hearing opinionated agenda. I also think this is a large root of "the otherside being so stupid". Except it happens to all sides.
- beej71 2y ago> To me, and I know not everyone agrees, but I feel nearly all forms of news media (particularly the ones you listed) are way too biased and have agendas to consider the information you consume from them helping you "stay informed and have an educated opinion". Strong agree. The goal is to make money by keeping your eyeballs on the ads. And they keep you coming back with all this shocking stuff. What I would like, and probably with the GP would like, was a news source that just stuck to the facts. It could be consumed in a very short time, and if you wanted to know more, you can go find it. Such a news source is bound to fail in the face of the grab-your-eyeballs news sources. It's just going to be boring because it doesn't hit your brain in the same way. One thing I noticed when I switched to Mastodon was that it was actually kind of "dull", for lack of a better word. I follow tons of hashtags I'm interested in, and the feed has good stuff in it. But after scrolling for 10 minutes, I kind of feel like doing something else. I still use Mastodon. That's how I'like my news to be, as well. The closest I found is wikipedia, like some people have said, and the raw news feeds from news syndicates (I'm not sure if anyone hosts these anymore). Another thing to make news less insane is to just go to the local news. In my town of 100,000, it's news that actually impacts me, isn't sensationalistic, and is low traffic. I have a deep link to get there that just bypasses the front page of the news site. Also their comment section is horrible, so I've turned off JavaScript for it.
- slimebot80 2y agoI notice a lot of tabloid news websites surface negative local content from across the globe. They make headlines out of "YOUNG/OLD PERSON ASSAULTED IN RISING TENSIONS" and it takes a few paragraphs for me to realise it's in a different country. Every societal imbalance is being trumpeted into every suburb, until it becomes a reality there.
- slowhadoken 2y agoOn the flip side I’m often horrified by what people think “positive” content is.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoA few years back I was looking for science fiction novels that weren't depressing and dystopian. Turns out I'm not the only one looking and there are novels and short stories that cater to this desire but it's all lip service. The stories were all about a particular ideology fighting against the (strawman) system and eventually winning to become the system itself. That's it. The only positive concept that scifi can come up with now is one's ideology winning over all others and suffocating everything else out.
- trescenzi 2y agoI don’t know what sort of not depressing you’re looking for but I’d recommend Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. It’s a fun short read. If you want harder sci-fi I’d recommend the Revelation Space series. It’s far future, somewhat negative in that there is war and conflict, but I wouldn’t at all describe it as dystopian.
- slowhadoken 2y agoI find the best uplifting sci-fi deals with high context observations and stories that illustrate how to think not what to think. ST:NG and Futurama are good examples on TV. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a good example in print.
- slowhadoken 2y agoYeah utopian sci-fi always reminds me of the Dr. Manhattan quote “they claim their labours are to build a heaven yet their heaven is populated with horrors.”
- tpmoney 2y agoSome recommendations if you're still looking: The Liaden Universe series by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, the best description for this I've heard is "regency fiction in space", which is a reasonable descriptor but the series covers a pretty wide range. The Honor Harrington series by David Webber. "Horatio Hornblower in Space". Can be a little trite in the latter books as he has to keep Honor alive and advancing while still in a the stories, but eventually picks up enough threads with other interesting characters. Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia. A very "B-Movie" series of books, with horror monsters being real, and a secret society fighting them. They're not deep literature by any stretch of the imagination, but they're fun, even if the main character can be a bit too "perfect in every way".
- BadHumans 2y agoEverything is designed to invoke negative emotions because negative emotions are engaging and engagement is money. Be less informed on international affairs and more involved in your own communities.
- Dalewyn 2y agoOne of the best things someone can do to improve their mental health is to ignore and refuse media, particularly news/"journalism" and "influencers". Life is short, are you really going to spend it worrying about some guys on the other side of the world you'll never meet in a country you'll never so much as visit just so the Sensation Industrial Complex can make money?
- card_zero 2y agoI like knowing what's going on, and I'm not chronically anxious. I'm especially interested in new historic events and new ideas (including bad ideas). I want to know what people around the world are up to. The news stories I avoid are human interest stories, local news, and "fluff" pieces. Except when they involve actual fluffy animals, I read those. But generally if something has already happened a million times before, like some murders, an explosion, some pollution, I don't care. Noticing these doesn't make me feel bad, though, unless my time was wasted by clickbait. Shit happens. A lot of commenters here are saying "if it doesn't affect you, why read about it," but I think that should be understood only as a message for anxious people who are going to feel affected by things they ought to feel blasé about. And often these are stories about the same old grind anyway. I'm going to flip the message around: "since it doesn't affect me, and I know it, and yet it's globally significant, I'm going to have a cosy time reading about it."
- BadHumans 2y agoEmpathy usually stops people from reading about thousands dying in war and feeling snug beneath the fireplace while doing it.
- 2y ago
- lakomen 2y agoAnd what about all those murder movies, the horror movies, the gun shooting movies, the extortion murder rape kidnapping etc, crime in general, intrigue, blackmail, scheming? We have a subscription to a package that has a lot of US content. HBO, Fox aka Star Channels. 80s & 90s movies were better, happier. The mood is mostly dark and dire nowadays. And then there's "news", if you can even call it that anymore. Mostly political propaganda, hate mongering and FUD. I'm in a good mood, then I read "the news". I had a time where I completely ignored them, that was after 9/11 and my mental health was superb. But nowadays the planet is on fire and everyone in power is just starting more fires. But "the news" are also pushing a certain mindset, at least in Germany, although there isn't much difference between the outlets. They all just more or less copy paste the same sources. Paranoid schizophrenic mindset mixed with some Russian hate and foreign hate and radical right normalization.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoDon't know how it is in Germany but in the US, it's hard to escape the reach of "the news". You can choose to not go to news sites and not turn on news channels but news feeds are everywhere and tv are in public places blasting out the fear or outrage of the moment. It's difficult to not end up passively consuming it against your will. Even setting up a new Windows Server box will end up with MSNBC in your face because the first time you open a browser, that news feed is going to be featured on the default home page. You might have been trying to set up a new document server for the accounting department but now your brain is hijacked by the latest details of fighting in Syria. It really is pervasive.
- throwaway2037 2y ago> Paranoid schizophrenic mindset mixed with some Russian hate and foreign hate and radical right normalization. Are you seeing that in Der Spiegel? I find that hard to believe. It it the gold standard for domestic affairs in Germany. How about trying Swiss NZZ?
- MantisShrimp90 2y agoIdk what the point of research like is. I mean like, duh? I would be surprised if they claimed negative news DIDNT affect mental health struggles. Instead the far more interesting questions seems to be: in a world where negative news is becoming more common and prevalent, how do we face the reality of the world without destroying our own mental health in the process. The naive takeaway from this article would be "just stay away from negative news" which is even reinforced by this little plugin they made. But this simply accelerates the fragmentation we have seen in society, for how can you ever have empathy with others if you refuse to appreciate the suffering of anybody but yourself and what immediately affects you? Maybe instead of sticking our heads in the sand, we should be taking this as a wakeup call that us trying to solve these problems will help not just our planet, but our own mental health and will be necessary to have a healthy populace going into the future.
- techfeathers 2y agoI mean most research is trying to figure out things we think are intuitive, but I actually find it somewhat interestingly. It says negative content, not news, so I wonder how this compares to say heavy metal or horror movies where people may use negative offline content in a way that may help process negative emotions.
- MantisShrimp90 2y agoI mean, fair enough, I'll give you the point. Your point about the horror movies is a good perspective as well and as a philosophy graduate I love your reframing. But I also think we both know how most people are going to take this so it feels hard to revel in these fun, but small little questions.
- techfeathers 2y agoI’m actually sort of interested in the contrast. I think you’re right, that it is sort of obvious that doomscrolling news is bad for mental health, and it’s a sad change.
- 2y ago
- runnr_az 2y agoSpoiler: it's all negative content on social media. That's why we all think we're doomed, even though, objectively, we're incredibly lucky to be alive when we are Related: "I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom" by Jason Pargin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203578812-i-m-starting-to-worry-about-this-black-box-of-doom https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203578812-i-m-starting-t...
- AlienRobot 2y agoInformation is a virus. The cure is censorship. This may sound odd, but it's the truth. When you read a negative word, even passingly, imagine all sorts of complex interactions that happen with the neurons inside your brain. Ban the words. Block everything. Keep your mouth shut. Create a chamber insulated from negativity. Negativity is spam. Nobody asks for it and nobody wants it, yet people can't stop themselves from sharing it, forcing negative thoughts onto others' sight. This has to stop. I don't go to the Internet to hear about the world's problems. The world doesn't have a right to waste my bandwidth to force me to see its propaganda. All I want is cat pictures. If it isn't a cat picture, I don't want to see it. I don't care how many countries are at war right now. I'll learn about it at my pace, when I want to. Who gave war the right to invade the privacy of my feed? To appear there, unsolicited? To demand my attention, constantly, as if it were entitled to it? It truly doesn't make any sense when you think about it. I can't do anything about the world's problems. Go bother someone else.
- Bjorkbat 2y agoA tangent perhaps, but I've felt this with AI, albeit with nuanced differences. In a nutshell, there's this weird tension between being kind of dismissive of it due to failed personal expectations, but also a desire to be as objective about it as possible, a "fear of missing out" if you will. As such I consume news about AI and engage with the "community" online about it, but I struggle constantly between separating noise from signal, "truth" and bullshit. It's not so much that bad news gets me down so much as the fact that sensationalist hype and bullshit makes me irrationally upset. The whole OpenAI strawberry thing is kind of a great example. There was vague hype and speculation about it months before it was actually released, and in the end we got a model that is objectively impressive when it comes to benchmarks and is objectively better at certain tasks, but otherwise in my mind fell way short of the expectations being set by more "enthusiastic" commentators. Now, normally if someone is prone to hype and sensationalism on the internet one would typically learn to ignore them and preserve your mental health, problem is that sometimes OpenAI employees (and other employees of frontier labs) can't resist making sensationalist claims themselves, i.e. claiming that we're a couple of years away from AGI or whatever. On the one hand, it's a smart and reasonable thing to bet on expert advice, on the other hand, the experts are making very bold claims that I just struggle to see coming to fruition. The idea that you could simply scale an LLM until we achieved AGI always felt a little suspect to me. Curious to see how others have felt about this.
- neoconomist 2y agoThe experts are often the ones most likely to be paid to lie. It's because we think they are experts that we believe their claims.
- throwaway2037 2y agoThere is a grain of truth to this, but, if not the experts, who to trust? Your grumpy auntie/uncle? It seems equally bad for different reasons.
- gatane 2y agoI do agree that sometimes you have to consume less negative content or else you can become pretty doomy after reading about it. But dont forget that sometimes you need to feel bad to understand that you are sick. If you were sick without feeling bad, you could die, because you did not take action! Dont sugar coat the world! If you feel shitty, maybe there is a reason for it, a reason within or outside you!!
- em-bee 2y agothe next step is to look for causes of the sickness that you can actually do something about. you probably can't solve global problems but you can help with local ones like racism or other forms of prejudice and intolerance, and you can make small contributions towards some of the global ones, like climate change. once you have an idea for which kind of problems you would like to work on you can focus your news reading on that and ignore everything else.
- tap-snap-or-nap 2y agoSocial media is dead for me already, if there is an ad, I leave. That is all, I am a simple man.
- cat_plus_plus 2y agoStudy: Studying obvious things wastes time and money Here is another recent one: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-cause-homelessness/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-cause...
- illiac786 2y ago100% agree. “Study finds Jumping off roofs is bad for your legs” “Study finds looking at the sun is bad for eyesight”
- purple-leafy 2y agoI blacklist all news sites, reddit, all social media sites etc. Completely blocked on my device. I have switched away from using Google as a search engine entirely. That still wasn't enough, so I ditched the smart phone for a brick phone. So on that I can only message/call and play Tetris. That still wasn't enough so I also sold my TV. That still wasn't enough so I also built an internet content blocker extension to further block mentions of certain words/phrases/patterns (think drugs/war/alcohol/gambling/porn/religion/politics etc). I'm thinking of building an image blocker next, somehow without "AI". All this + site blacklisting + ad-blockers + no social media + no TV + no news seems to do the trick!
- throwaway2037 2y agoFinancial Times (newspaper) is excellent, but very expensive for an annual subscription. I only need to ignore the opinion section, and that is a good enough filter for click bait. The rest is outstanding.
- jimjimjim 2y agoBest thing I ever did was to quit twitter, even before all the changes. Because everybody, good or bad, was concerned by things and they posted or shared them. A million voices talking is a million problems voiced The real secret to life is... You really don't need to know.
- throwaway2037 2y ago> You really don't need to know. What do you need to know to have a satisfying life?
- 752963e64 2y ago[dead]
- trallnag 2y agoMaybe watching extremely negative content like gory cartel videos from South America could help with desensitization?
- hollerith 2y ago>Maybe watching extremely negative content like gory cartel videos from South America could help with desensitization? Wow, is that a bad idea! Watching even one "gore" (people or animals getting killed or hurt severely) clip can change you forever. Specifically, it can traumatize you, and psychological trauma disorder can be hard to treat, so that even if you can afford to pay $300 an hour for psychotherapy, you might try 6 different psychotherapists and none of them are able to help you, so you are stuck with the trauma disorder for years. Also, the clip might unlock what is essentially a fetish for gore with the result that you cannot stop yourself from continuing to search for it and watch it. Then maybe just watching it is no longer enough: you develop a compulsion to act it out.
- deadbabe 2y agoI think I’ve finally cut out Reddit and Threads from my life. I actively ignore looking at anything from those sites unless I’m looking for a product review or something on Reddit. Reddit constantly had me feeling like life was hopeless, and that I was never gonna be enough, and I could never get excited about anything because I was conditioned to see things through a cynical lens. Sometimes HN does that for me too though, just more intellectually, maybe eventually I’ll quit this place too but it’s a decent news source.
- pech0rin 2y agothis is like the study about water making you hydrated. quite possibly the most obvious outcome of all time.
- mythrwy 2y agoMaybe with the vast amount of upcoming AI generated content people will finally be forced to realize a thing that was true all along but we seem to have forgotten over the past 25 years. Nothing on the screen is real. It's just pixels on a screen.
- veunes 2y agoDigital Diet tool sounds promising, but I wonder how effective it will be in the wild. Will people actively choose to use it, or will the tendency to seek negative content override the desire for help?
- OneLeggedCat 2y agoIgnorance is bliss. My therapist hated it when I said it that way, but it's undeniably true.
- NoPicklez 2y agoNow that LLMs are so readily available it would be interesting to see if there were any browser extensions that could rewrite news articles in a more positive light Being able to read your normal news website but have the topic being discussed written in a more positive light Or generate the articles with a balanced view instead of negatively one sided
- cylemons 2y ago"Fire accident kills local woman and 2 children" ==> "Community Rallies Together After Tragic Fire Claims Three Lives" Chatgpt is amazing.