7 ms·

Study: emotional support from social media found to reduce anxiety

80 points by giuliomagnifico 9mo ago

andrewmutz 9mo ago
Social media: the solution to, and source of, all your anxiety!
unsupp0rted 9mo ago
In men? The study claims half the participants were guys age 18-30.
- Fnoord 9mo ago
  How fantastic. That means from age 18 we can allow men on social media! Nobody denies all the effects of social media are negative. After all, if they were, nobody would use them. So there are benefits to it. It also isn't news, really. The Dutch 'MIND Hulplijn' [1] in their former carnation 'Stichting Korrelatie' had a pilot with an online forum where people with mental issues could connect with each other. It eventually decided to close the forum because of users talking each other down in regard to the subject of suicide (edit: and automutilation). However, the effect of a support group was also clearly there which was also a reason why they were reluctant to close it down. What I'd like to know is how the effect would be compared to a forum or real-life support group. Because comparing social media with 'no help' or 'loneliness' obviously isn't fair. [1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIND_Hulplijn https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIND_Hulplijn
- regenschutz 9mo ago
  No, in both genders. You have to click on the link to the paper [0]: >Gender was approximately equal, with 50.8% being female. If anything, the data is more accurate for females, since there are 1.6pp more females. [0]: https://www.mdpi.com/3679792 https://www.mdpi.com/3679792
alistairSH 9mo ago
Anxiety is the second leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide. Uh, what? That's a patently ridiculous assertion to lead with (and not support).
- Etheryte 9mo ago
  If you take anxiety to include everything from stress to a bunch of disorders, I'd believe it. Our bodies were not made to handle the permanent stress we see in modern life. The first place I imagine goes to cardiovascular issues?
  - dlisboa 9mo ago
    It either is the "second leading cause of disability and mortality" or it isn't, there's nothing to believe. I very much agree with GP that the claim is completely unsupported. I found the study that the article bases this on[1]. It doesn't make this claim and instead associates a higher mortality rate to sufferers of all mental disorders, 67% of which are deaths by natural causes. That these natural causes are directly associated with the mental disorder isn't even something the study says. Anxiety is just one of the many disorders analyzed. This is similar to attributing a lower life expectancy to all people with endocrine diseases (e.g. diabetes) and later saying hyperthyroidism (another endocrine disease) is the sole cause of death in that group. - [1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2110027 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
    - Etheryte 9mo ago
      There is space to suspend your belief/disbelief before you look it up and entertain an idea as plausible to consider what it might say about the discussion at hand. This doesn't mean blindly believing make believe, rather it means deferring coming to a conclusion, to quote the site guidelines, to converse curiously. Of course you can look it up and resolve it after the fact, but that doesn't mean the rest of the surrounding context can't be interesting without the resolution.
  - stopwatch4619 9mo ago
srameshc 9mo ago
It does I am sure in small instances, but isn't it established that it causes more anxiety in general ? I read a linkedin post about this guy on Linkedin asking a lady to "fix her hair" as a comment to something he probably found offending and to that another guy was asking the lady to shut up and that she was wrong to call out this man in the first place. I wanted to add my comment to this other guy and I could instantly feel all adverse emotions and eventually had to calm myself down and stay out. So when someone supported her , she definetly found her support and courage but many still find the anxiety in all kinds of social network, even with a verified person.
golol 9mo ago
Giving an addict a hit also reduces anxiety.
- nitwit005 9mo ago
  All these cruel supportive comments feeding your addiction.
- ymsodev 9mo ago
  This was literally my first thought
- raunaqvaisoha 9mo ago
  beautifully said :)
- saberience 9mo ago
  Bingo!! I mean it’s the same with most ads, creating an anxiety that can only be assuaged by buying the actual product.
- academic_84572 9mo ago
  Exactly. The problem is timescale - short-term calming effect -> long-term increase in baseline anxiety and craving. And thus the cycle repeats.
samtheprogram 9mo ago
This is the equivalent of saying that a cigarette reduces anxiety. The overall habit absolutely does not reduce anxiety.
starkeeper 9mo ago
Yep, when I see those 12 ads in 5 minutes of browsing it sure lowers my anxiety! When I comment on something disturbing that I don't think I want to see again they think I love it and give me more. This is great for my emitional well being too!!!
- zxcvasd 9mo ago
  [dead]
WhatIsDukkha 9mo ago
Social media is a Dunning Krueger support network.
elliottkember 9mo ago
Maybe social media is like cigarettes, in that it cures the anxiety it causes. A powerfully addictive cycle.
- jwoods19 9mo ago
  I think of social media as the fast food of the information landscape. It’s okay to have it a time or two a week but if it’s your entire information and entertainment “diet”, you’re going to feel sick. Our brains aren’t designed to be lit up with dopamine every 5 seconds for hours on end nor are they designed for foods that are high in sugars, fats, and salts every day.
mjburgess 9mo ago
I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces. I wonder if much of what it does is surface our neuroses and issues into public, and thus here we are only shooting the messenger. This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction. I think there are deeper long term trends causing psychological problems in the west: move away from physical to cognitive labour; increasing community isolation and lack of social institutions; various failures of the state; lack of meaningful wage growth in key brackets, and failure of the "aspiration engine" to create opportunities; lack of time for parenting, moving to dual working-parent households; helicopter parenting caused by breakdown of social trust; lack of infrastructure and provision of environments where children can be known safe in public. etc. etc. The major forces here are: move to a services economy; dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision; state infrastructure moving away from providing for the young to paying for the old. This means much of how children grow up in the world is unphysical, disconnected, time-poor, risk adverse, overly demanding, etc.
- everdrive 9mo ago
  >dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision; These two feel interrelated :) > I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces. Do you know if there are countries where the causes you laid out are not the case? (given demographics, I'm not sure if there are too many strict counter examples)
- whiplash451 9mo ago
  > if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited We gave social media 20 years to impact the world, why give it only 5 for a rollback? It feels like long term effects would take much longer to surface.
- dmje 9mo ago
  Here's my take: the bigger picture is one of "lessening humanity" - and it's death by a million paper cuts. Social media is one of the bigger cuts, but it's an awful lot of other things as well. Being on screens all the time - especially when out and about (and whether it's social media or maps, it doesn't really matter) - means less casual conversation, less "hello, how you doing", less banter, less touch points with real people. It means toddlers look up out of their prams and can't meet their parents' eyes, it means you don't smile at strangers, or exchange a common glance about something trivial. It means kids don't get to sit in pubs with their parents and have to "do adult conversation". It means if you're in a situation as a teen and you're uncomfortable, you just reach for your phone instead of reaching out to the next awkward teen, who might just end up being your lifetime friend. And then beyond that there are infinitely many takes-away-the-humanity cuts. Even something like this: once upon in our country you could buy a parking ticket for a space in a car park, then what typically happened when you got back to your car with time to spare is you then pulled up next to someone and offered them your ticket for free. This shit doesn't happen now - spaces are tied to number plates (because: profit), and so another little touchpoint with other humans is eroded. Getting hold of many of the companies you use is becoming harder, through profit motives / AI chat / whatever - high street banks disappear, and immediately there's a whole source of contact that disappears. We got a deal on our post-wedding train journey 25 years ago because we did it face to face with a guy in the station, and when we got chatting about the occasion and he discovered it was our wedding, he upped our ticket to 1st class. No such luck now, when you order all your tickets online, and the customer support is outsourced to somewhere a thousand miles away. Real people are for the most part lovely people, and their motives are 95% aligned with each other - love your family, help people, be generous, be kind - but the more time we spend slipping behind digital facades, being taken away from human contact through these many papercuts, the worse things are likely to get. IMO.
sheepscreek 9mo ago
Haven’t read the article (wouldn’t load for me) but what type of content you watch makes a difference too. I watch funny cats and dogs videos with my daughter all the time and they 100% make us feel better. But finding those said videos on social media is a “process” - it’s like going through a pile of rotting fruits to find something to feed your kid. I can give an hour long monologue on YouTube’s continued exploitation of children. Their half assed attempts to fix this (by some well intentioned Googler’s, who I’m sure must have had a lot of pushback) aren’t enough. Just try unblocking a channel for your kid’s account (you can’t - the only option is to unblock EVERYTHING).
coderintherye 9mo ago
I took my own break from social media a couple months ago due to anxiety and made a side project BebopLoop [1] in order to try out having positive supportive social media. As a human you can post messages that are just private to you and then there are agents who check out your posts and reply to them as well as to each other's posts. I found it to be emotionally supportive. [1] Beboploop.com if you want to try it out, invite codes below: LJC37CPD89 SP8CMRQJQA VUEOSASRHR 2FSCBYX4NE FBBIQMYRCX
- regenschutz 9mo ago
  So this is like a more closed-down and friendlier version of moltbook?
  - coderintherye 9mo ago
    Yeah! Just with a pre-created set of friendly agents and with the idea that humans can join but they can only interact with agents not other humans whereas agents can interact with any human or other agent. Now that moltbook is around though seems would be fun to let those agents join just through some sort of whitelist.
b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
A product that is both the cause and solution to your problem. An MBA's wet-dream
munchler 9mo ago
> Anxiety is the second leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide. I think this comes from WHO, but isn't consistent with other information from WHO, so it's pretty debatable. I believe the source is this[0], which says "Mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression are highly prevalent in all countries and communities, affecting people of all ages and income levels. They represent the second biggest reason for long-term disability, contributing to loss of healthy life." However, elsewhere on their site[1], WHO lists the top 3 global causes of death and disability in 2021 as heart disease, COVID-19, and stroke. [0] https://www.who.int/news/item/02-09-2025-over-a-billion-people-living-with-mental-health-conditions-services-require-urgent-scale-up https://www.who.int/news/item/02-09-2025-over-a-billion-peop... [1] https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/theme-details/GHO/mortality-and-global-health-estimates https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/theme-details/GHO/m...
- austin-cheney 9mo ago
  No, its very reliable after consideration for how anxiety works from a physiological perspective and what does to a person's health and how modifies their decisions and behaviors. When all these factors are taken into account anxiety alone may account for most other more directly measured mortality conditions. The other side of that coin is that anxiety is also most prominently the result of social conditioning as opposed to diagnosed illness. This results in anti-anxiety medications that are vastly over-prescribed for individuals that receive less than ideal benefits.
jllyhill 9mo ago
Is this another part of this third? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682534
anoplus 9mo ago
I am determined to find real life local connections. No doom scrolling, no “social” media no hacker news
- flatline 9mo ago
  You and me both. No dating sites either, if I'm not crossing paths with someone in the wild through the course of my everyday activity, we are probably not a fit. I have found social media tremendously helpful at connecting people to real-life local activities, but I also had to move to a place that actually had enough of those for it to matter. There are plenty of places that never had much going on, and what social fabric did exist has been worn thin by social media, which offers a poor replacement.
csours 9mo ago
1. (Big one) For virtually EVERY study, and especially human science studies like psychology, sociology, health; The Headline of the Press Release will imply things that the study does not claim, and especially that the study does not provide evidence for. This headline seems to imply quite a lot for a relatively small study based on survey responses. 2. For the mass market social media platforms, it's pretty easy to get emotional support inside your bubble, at the cost of ... everything else. I feel like the huge and obvious problems with social media hide a small and subtle, but insidious problem: How do I show that I care about you? I feel like there is a range that might be described: I don't care very much about you one way or another. (Small/no signal on social media, very unlikely to be boosted) I care enough to fight for you. (Big Signal on social media, likely to be boosted) I care enough to calmly discuss the problem. (Small signal on social media, unlikely to be boosted, likely to be trolled, unsatisfying in the face of active fighting words) To be explicit: because fights are boosted, fights are expected. People are prepared to fight about things offline.
ohrus 9mo ago
I skimmed the important parts of the paper. This is akin to finding that cigarettes reduce stress. Any smoker/former smoker will tell you this is true (in the immediate sense). Does that give any weight to the stance that smoking is good for you and society at large? No. We are right to panic about social media.
xlaacid 9mo ago
The journal Psychiatry International, it is part of the MDPI publisher, which sometimes faces scrutiny regarding rapid, high-volume, and sometimes inconsistent peer-review processes. Be skeptical of its contents.
jl6 9mo ago
Social media use can be fine for people who are well-grounded grass-touchers in their everyday life, but this grounding comes with maturity and typically isn’t found in younger people, for whom abstract online spaces can be powerfully dissociating and are very unlikely to be healthy. We are starting to understand the impact of ultra-processed food. When will we clue up to ultra-mediated social interaction?
tsoukase 9mo ago
When a single correlation of social media use with a positive outcome is found, it immediately becomes headline, while hundreds of other evidence are discarded because they are 'boring'. Well, even this correlation is of little benefit. Anxious people cover their stress while engaging online and postpone their improvement while they are distracted from building real, healthy interpersonal relationships that will help them. Smoking is correlated with lower risk of Parkinson's disease but it's not suggested in any setting.
boondongle 9mo ago
The intersection of dark patterns, addiction, and support networks really creates probably more variability than this study is accounting for. Youtube, Reddit, and a few other networks I could name off the top of my head were pro-support networks, pro-identity building at once time. It seems impossible to keep the profit motive from transitioning to an addictive/neuroticism-feeding paradigm. You end up with the weird reality that some types of websites just need to be user-supported/run because any other motive ultimately breaks them and seems to make them toxic. I'd also add the reality that neurotic/polemic content seems to spike any sort of algorithm based on engagement. Basically our closest metric for monetization is inherently toxic.
ZenoArrow 9mo ago
Research supported by the Fine Foundation, that has a mission statement that includes "works to sustain Jewish life by combating antisemitism"... Funny how the timing of this "research" coinciding with the new owners of TikTok indicating their new stance on censorship of criticism of Israel.
- kittikitti 9mo ago
  Cause IQ describes the funders of this research as, "The Melvin and Betty Fine Foundation promotes Zionism, Jewish education, and the US-Israel relationship through various programs that work towards these goals." https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/melvin-and-betty-fine-foundation,521762806/ https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/melvin-and-betty-fine-... I think it's warranted to be skeptical of the research.
hansmayer 9mo ago
Why does this "study" feel like those "studies" from the 50s about the benefits of smoking, which were later discovered to have been (surprise!) financed by the nicotin industry ?
bluebxrry 9mo ago
Breaking news: MMORPGs are less fun when doctors keep calling mom to ask how the MMORPG is because it kicks you off of the dial up. News at 9: is my iPhone actually an iPod with a cellular dial up modem glued inside. Late night: Stick around to watch an old man yelling at clouds.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 9mo ago
I thought HN truncated the title removing the trialing 'caused by social media'
senorqa 9mo ago
I think that the whole discussion about the impact of social media on people, especially the young ones, would change if people started calling social media what it should have been called from the beginning, namely anti-social media.
deafpolygon 9mo ago
In related news: Smoking cigarettes when trying to quit nicotine has been found to reduce anxiety.

andrewmutz 9mo ago

Social media: the solution to, and source of, all your anxiety!

unsupp0rted 9mo ago

In men? The study claims half the participants were guys age 18-30.

Fnoord 9mo ago
How fantastic. That means from age 18 we can allow men on social media! Nobody denies all the effects of social media are negative. After all, if they were, nobody would use them. So there are benefits to it. It also isn't news, really. The Dutch 'MIND Hulplijn' [1] in their former carnation 'Stichting Korrelatie' had a pilot with an online forum where people with mental issues could connect with each other. It eventually decided to close the forum because of users talking each other down in regard to the subject of suicide (edit: and automutilation). However, the effect of a support group was also clearly there which was also a reason why they were reluctant to close it down. What I'd like to know is how the effect would be compared to a forum or real-life support group. Because comparing social media with 'no help' or 'loneliness' obviously isn't fair. [1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIND_Hulplijn https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIND_Hulplijn
regenschutz 9mo ago
No, in both genders. You have to click on the link to the paper [0]: >Gender was approximately equal, with 50.8% being female. If anything, the data is more accurate for females, since there are 1.6pp more females. [0]: https://www.mdpi.com/3679792 https://www.mdpi.com/3679792

alistairSH 9mo ago

Anxiety is the second leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide. Uh, what? That's a patently ridiculous assertion to lead with (and not support).

Etheryte 9mo ago
If you take anxiety to include everything from stress to a bunch of disorders, I'd believe it. Our bodies were not made to handle the permanent stress we see in modern life. The first place I imagine goes to cardiovascular issues?
- dlisboa 9mo ago
  It either is the "second leading cause of disability and mortality" or it isn't, there's nothing to believe. I very much agree with GP that the claim is completely unsupported. I found the study that the article bases this on[1]. It doesn't make this claim and instead associates a higher mortality rate to sufferers of all mental disorders, 67% of which are deaths by natural causes. That these natural causes are directly associated with the mental disorder isn't even something the study says. Anxiety is just one of the many disorders analyzed. This is similar to attributing a lower life expectancy to all people with endocrine diseases (e.g. diabetes) and later saying hyperthyroidism (another endocrine disease) is the sole cause of death in that group. - [1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2110027 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
  - Etheryte 9mo ago
    There is space to suspend your belief/disbelief before you look it up and entertain an idea as plausible to consider what it might say about the discussion at hand. This doesn't mean blindly believing make believe, rather it means deferring coming to a conclusion, to quote the site guidelines, to converse curiously. Of course you can look it up and resolve it after the fact, but that doesn't mean the rest of the surrounding context can't be interesting without the resolution.
- stopwatch4619 9mo ago

srameshc 9mo ago

It does I am sure in small instances, but isn't it established that it causes more anxiety in general ? I read a linkedin post about this guy on Linkedin asking a lady to "fix her hair" as a comment to something he probably found offending and to that another guy was asking the lady to shut up and that she was wrong to call out this man in the first place. I wanted to add my comment to this other guy and I could instantly feel all adverse emotions and eventually had to calm myself down and stay out. So when someone supported her , she definetly found her support and courage but many still find the anxiety in all kinds of social network, even with a verified person.

golol 9mo ago

Giving an addict a hit also reduces anxiety.

nitwit005 9mo ago
All these cruel supportive comments feeding your addiction.
ymsodev 9mo ago
This was literally my first thought
raunaqvaisoha 9mo ago
beautifully said :)
saberience 9mo ago
Bingo!! I mean it’s the same with most ads, creating an anxiety that can only be assuaged by buying the actual product.
academic_84572 9mo ago
Exactly. The problem is timescale - short-term calming effect -> long-term increase in baseline anxiety and craving. And thus the cycle repeats.

samtheprogram 9mo ago

This is the equivalent of saying that a cigarette reduces anxiety. The overall habit absolutely does not reduce anxiety.

starkeeper 9mo ago

Yep, when I see those 12 ads in 5 minutes of browsing it sure lowers my anxiety! When I comment on something disturbing that I don't think I want to see again they think I love it and give me more. This is great for my emitional well being too!!!

zxcvasd 9mo ago
[dead]

WhatIsDukkha 9mo ago

Social media is a Dunning Krueger support network.

elliottkember 9mo ago

Maybe social media is like cigarettes, in that it cures the anxiety it causes. A powerfully addictive cycle.

jwoods19 9mo ago
I think of social media as the fast food of the information landscape. It’s okay to have it a time or two a week but if it’s your entire information and entertainment “diet”, you’re going to feel sick. Our brains aren’t designed to be lit up with dopamine every 5 seconds for hours on end nor are they designed for foods that are high in sugars, fats, and salts every day.

mjburgess 9mo ago

I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces. I wonder if much of what it does is surface our neuroses and issues into public, and thus here we are only shooting the messenger. This may prove out if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited, nothing changes in the youth (et al.) -- that would be my prediction. I think there are deeper long term trends causing psychological problems in the west: move away from physical to cognitive labour; increasing community isolation and lack of social institutions; various failures of the state; lack of meaningful wage growth in key brackets, and failure of the "aspiration engine" to create opportunities; lack of time for parenting, moving to dual working-parent households; helicopter parenting caused by breakdown of social trust; lack of infrastructure and provision of environments where children can be known safe in public. etc. etc. The major forces here are: move to a services economy; dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision; state infrastructure moving away from providing for the young to paying for the old. This means much of how children grow up in the world is unphysical, disconnected, time-poor, risk adverse, overly demanding, etc.

everdrive 9mo ago
>dual parent working households; lack of social services in state provision; These two feel interrelated :) > I think there's a non-trivial probability that concern over social media is a moral panic, and it's being used as a scapegoat for larger social forces. Do you know if there are countries where the causes you laid out are not the case? (given demographics, I'm not sure if there are too many strict counter examples)
whiplash451 9mo ago
> if after 5yr+ of it being banned or limited We gave social media 20 years to impact the world, why give it only 5 for a rollback? It feels like long term effects would take much longer to surface.
dmje 9mo ago
Here's my take: the bigger picture is one of "lessening humanity" - and it's death by a million paper cuts. Social media is one of the bigger cuts, but it's an awful lot of other things as well. Being on screens all the time - especially when out and about (and whether it's social media or maps, it doesn't really matter) - means less casual conversation, less "hello, how you doing", less banter, less touch points with real people. It means toddlers look up out of their prams and can't meet their parents' eyes, it means you don't smile at strangers, or exchange a common glance about something trivial. It means kids don't get to sit in pubs with their parents and have to "do adult conversation". It means if you're in a situation as a teen and you're uncomfortable, you just reach for your phone instead of reaching out to the next awkward teen, who might just end up being your lifetime friend. And then beyond that there are infinitely many takes-away-the-humanity cuts. Even something like this: once upon in our country you could buy a parking ticket for a space in a car park, then what typically happened when you got back to your car with time to spare is you then pulled up next to someone and offered them your ticket for free. This shit doesn't happen now - spaces are tied to number plates (because: profit), and so another little touchpoint with other humans is eroded. Getting hold of many of the companies you use is becoming harder, through profit motives / AI chat / whatever - high street banks disappear, and immediately there's a whole source of contact that disappears. We got a deal on our post-wedding train journey 25 years ago because we did it face to face with a guy in the station, and when we got chatting about the occasion and he discovered it was our wedding, he upped our ticket to 1st class. No such luck now, when you order all your tickets online, and the customer support is outsourced to somewhere a thousand miles away. Real people are for the most part lovely people, and their motives are 95% aligned with each other - love your family, help people, be generous, be kind - but the more time we spend slipping behind digital facades, being taken away from human contact through these many papercuts, the worse things are likely to get. IMO.

sheepscreek 9mo ago

Haven’t read the article (wouldn’t load for me) but what type of content you watch makes a difference too. I watch funny cats and dogs videos with my daughter all the time and they 100% make us feel better. But finding those said videos on social media is a “process” - it’s like going through a pile of rotting fruits to find something to feed your kid. I can give an hour long monologue on YouTube’s continued exploitation of children. Their half assed attempts to fix this (by some well intentioned Googler’s, who I’m sure must have had a lot of pushback) aren’t enough. Just try unblocking a channel for your kid’s account (you can’t - the only option is to unblock EVERYTHING).

coderintherye 9mo ago

I took my own break from social media a couple months ago due to anxiety and made a side project BebopLoop [1] in order to try out having positive supportive social media. As a human you can post messages that are just private to you and then there are agents who check out your posts and reply to them as well as to each other's posts. I found it to be emotionally supportive. [1] Beboploop.com if you want to try it out, invite codes below: LJC37CPD89 SP8CMRQJQA VUEOSASRHR 2FSCBYX4NE FBBIQMYRCX

regenschutz 9mo ago
So this is like a more closed-down and friendlier version of moltbook?
- coderintherye 9mo ago
  Yeah! Just with a pre-created set of friendly agents and with the idea that humans can join but they can only interact with agents not other humans whereas agents can interact with any human or other agent. Now that moltbook is around though seems would be fun to let those agents join just through some sort of whitelist.

b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago

A product that is both the cause and solution to your problem. An MBA's wet-dream

munchler 9mo ago

> Anxiety is the second leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide. I think this comes from WHO, but isn't consistent with other information from WHO, so it's pretty debatable. I believe the source is this[0], which says "Mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression are highly prevalent in all countries and communities, affecting people of all ages and income levels. They represent the second biggest reason for long-term disability, contributing to loss of healthy life." However, elsewhere on their site[1], WHO lists the top 3 global causes of death and disability in 2021 as heart disease, COVID-19, and stroke. [0] https://www.who.int/news/item/02-09-2025-over-a-billion-people-living-with-mental-health-conditions-services-require-urgent-scale-up https://www.who.int/news/item/02-09-2025-over-a-billion-peop... [1] https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/theme-details/GHO/mortality-and-global-health-estimates https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/theme-details/GHO/m...

austin-cheney 9mo ago
No, its very reliable after consideration for how anxiety works from a physiological perspective and what does to a person's health and how modifies their decisions and behaviors. When all these factors are taken into account anxiety alone may account for most other more directly measured mortality conditions. The other side of that coin is that anxiety is also most prominently the result of social conditioning as opposed to diagnosed illness. This results in anti-anxiety medications that are vastly over-prescribed for individuals that receive less than ideal benefits.

jllyhill 9mo ago

Is this another part of this third? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682534

anoplus 9mo ago

I am determined to find real life local connections. No doom scrolling, no “social” media no hacker news

flatline 9mo ago
You and me both. No dating sites either, if I'm not crossing paths with someone in the wild through the course of my everyday activity, we are probably not a fit. I have found social media tremendously helpful at connecting people to real-life local activities, but I also had to move to a place that actually had enough of those for it to matter. There are plenty of places that never had much going on, and what social fabric did exist has been worn thin by social media, which offers a poor replacement.

csours 9mo ago

1. (Big one) For virtually EVERY study, and especially human science studies like psychology, sociology, health; The Headline of the Press Release will imply things that the study does not claim, and especially that the study does not provide evidence for. This headline seems to imply quite a lot for a relatively small study based on survey responses. 2. For the mass market social media platforms, it's pretty easy to get emotional support inside your bubble, at the cost of ... everything else. I feel like the huge and obvious problems with social media hide a small and subtle, but insidious problem: How do I show that I care about you? I feel like there is a range that might be described: I don't care very much about you one way or another. (Small/no signal on social media, very unlikely to be boosted) I care enough to fight for you. (Big Signal on social media, likely to be boosted) I care enough to calmly discuss the problem. (Small signal on social media, unlikely to be boosted, likely to be trolled, unsatisfying in the face of active fighting words) To be explicit: because fights are boosted, fights are expected. People are prepared to fight about things offline.

ohrus 9mo ago

I skimmed the important parts of the paper. This is akin to finding that cigarettes reduce stress. Any smoker/former smoker will tell you this is true (in the immediate sense). Does that give any weight to the stance that smoking is good for you and society at large? No. We are right to panic about social media.

xlaacid 9mo ago

The journal Psychiatry International, it is part of the MDPI publisher, which sometimes faces scrutiny regarding rapid, high-volume, and sometimes inconsistent peer-review processes. Be skeptical of its contents.

jl6 9mo ago

Social media use can be fine for people who are well-grounded grass-touchers in their everyday life, but this grounding comes with maturity and typically isn’t found in younger people, for whom abstract online spaces can be powerfully dissociating and are very unlikely to be healthy. We are starting to understand the impact of ultra-processed food. When will we clue up to ultra-mediated social interaction?

tsoukase 9mo ago

When a single correlation of social media use with a positive outcome is found, it immediately becomes headline, while hundreds of other evidence are discarded because they are 'boring'. Well, even this correlation is of little benefit. Anxious people cover their stress while engaging online and postpone their improvement while they are distracted from building real, healthy interpersonal relationships that will help them. Smoking is correlated with lower risk of Parkinson's disease but it's not suggested in any setting.

boondongle 9mo ago

The intersection of dark patterns, addiction, and support networks really creates probably more variability than this study is accounting for. Youtube, Reddit, and a few other networks I could name off the top of my head were pro-support networks, pro-identity building at once time. It seems impossible to keep the profit motive from transitioning to an addictive/neuroticism-feeding paradigm. You end up with the weird reality that some types of websites just need to be user-supported/run because any other motive ultimately breaks them and seems to make them toxic. I'd also add the reality that neurotic/polemic content seems to spike any sort of algorithm based on engagement. Basically our closest metric for monetization is inherently toxic.

ZenoArrow 9mo ago

Research supported by the Fine Foundation, that has a mission statement that includes "works to sustain Jewish life by combating antisemitism"... Funny how the timing of this "research" coinciding with the new owners of TikTok indicating their new stance on censorship of criticism of Israel.

kittikitti 9mo ago
Cause IQ describes the funders of this research as, "The Melvin and Betty Fine Foundation promotes Zionism, Jewish education, and the US-Israel relationship through various programs that work towards these goals." https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/melvin-and-betty-fine-foundation,521762806/ https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/melvin-and-betty-fine-... I think it's warranted to be skeptical of the research.

hansmayer 9mo ago

Why does this "study" feel like those "studies" from the 50s about the benefits of smoking, which were later discovered to have been (surprise!) financed by the nicotin industry ?

bluebxrry 9mo ago

Breaking news: MMORPGs are less fun when doctors keep calling mom to ask how the MMORPG is because it kicks you off of the dial up. News at 9: is my iPhone actually an iPod with a cellular dial up modem glued inside. Late night: Stick around to watch an old man yelling at clouds.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 9mo ago

I thought HN truncated the title removing the trialing 'caused by social media'

senorqa 9mo ago

I think that the whole discussion about the impact of social media on people, especially the young ones, would change if people started calling social media what it should have been called from the beginning, namely anti-social media.

deafpolygon 9mo ago

In related news: Smoking cigarettes when trying to quit nicotine has been found to reduce anxiety.