Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.
Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.
I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets less depressed about it. But it's fake. It's all fake.
In real life, it took me a whole year to figure out that the people at one particular local pub actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around. I only figured out why they were so hostile because the people at my other pub told me. (It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family. Ironically, the nice people at the other pub who told me are Lebanese. We get along a lot better than I do with my old antifa "friends") This was a hard-to-get real world experience in how fucked up people can be for no reason. It's not something you can understand properly, ever, on any kind of social media. The media format just gets in the way of understanding other people as people; of understanding truth and factual reality; of differentiating between opinion and fact.
Feeds are garbage, optimized for chaos.
This is spot on. Facebook proper has supplanted private email chains for a lot of older people. This is ironic because they are moving in the opposite direction as everyone else. Everyone else is moving into private communities, older people are leaving the safety of email chains and, often unknowingly, posting publicly. Facebook (probably intentionally) upholds the illusion that they are posting for their friends. I've seen Facebook actually provide a compelling service to my older dad who keeps in touch with a lot of his old friends on there. It's a much more active community of seniors than you'd guess.
Of course, they are subject to all the ills of Facebook at the same time. Overall I'd rate it as a net loss for society because of that.
No LinkedIn, not you, you boring Ted Talk humblebrag.
Old school social networks used to be this noncommital, low-threshold way to connect with others around you. It was really great if you were a socially awkward teen or twenty-something. It's no big deal to friend somebody on facebook (or MySpace, or your universities gamified campus management system or whatever) and see what they are doing, or strike up a conversation. I really miss that kind of network.
Don't forget FB marketplace. I know a few younger coworkers who have FB just for market place.
So, it’s a pretty shit tool for a business to share what it’s about.
But sometimes I do, because saying something to one person feels like I'm demanding a response from them, but saying it to a broad circle of friends allows those interested to reply, and others to leave it. Back when I used Facebook, I was more likely to gripe (or brag) on the Facebook wall than in a personal text conversation with a friend.
(Friends in person are the best option, of course.)
I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.
This is what Facebook was when we all signed up almost two decades ago. No one ever wanted a feed of people they didn't know. Free social media is inherently corrupt as they chase profits abusing the user base.
Facebook was refocusing on friend and family content before TikTok came along. But they had to adjust to the TikTok trend otherwise they would have lost market share or potentially lost the entire market.
You might think you want friend and family content, but actually you don’t. Not as much as you want engaging content.
VC-backed corporations masquerading as public services to gain user networks they can later monetize is the problem.
Unfortunately, some of my family post insane political views, usually about now in the early AM. Being told that a King of the USA and the elimination of due process are good things doesn't help my mental health.
Would they still if any such poster's feed would strictly only be viewable by families and friends?
(I have no idea)
I quit Facebook over a decade ago, because others used it to go “look at my shiny car/wife/house”, and I would use it to lose friends and alienate people.
These online environments do not foster any kind of human connection.
Imagine there's a toggle you can flip in the Settings of Instagram that was labeled "free oxy", and every morning and evening Meta would FedEx an oxy pill into your mailbox. Everyone would tell eachother about it, and few would be able to resist the temptation.
Plenty of people like and enjoy "algorithmic feeds". I can enjoy occasionally scrolling through a feed. Banning it is like banning alcohol because there are alcoholics in society.
If you can't handle it, switch it off.
I’ve stopped using FB regularly, because I don’t like their feed algorithm. I don’t like the ads or the content, and I had curated it by joining local groups and BOFS. The only thing that brings me back now is the _possibility_ of a friends update.
That said, the _frequency_ of updates from friends and family will be vastly different for different people. The feed (if it speaks to you) works to regularize or smooth the frequency. I see FB’s problem and I don’t envy them. The vitality of the platform becomes precarious, and can be supplanted by some other platform with better engagement (ie TickTock).
I’m not a designer or researcher of Social Media, but I’m an emigre of sorts and not many people have that experience. The only platform all of my friends and family use are group private messages using our phones, and the most engaging chats we have are few and far between.
Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement.
The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff).
The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.
I’m not sure if that’s actually a “shortcut” to the reptile brain and it’s just about “I have to scroll more to get stuff I’m interested in. At least for me it feels like that and it causes me to use these social media things far less.
For me it feels more like intermittent rewards vs full rewards at once. Obviously for the ad-industry the intermittent rewards are more useful, that’s why we can’t have nice things
Isn’t this just WhatsApp now though? The addition of Statuses, Following and now Communities almost confirms this. People are dropping Facebook and IG, but can’t give up WhatsApp (yet).
I've got a personal policy: No websites that have an infinite scroll. That means no new Reddit, mobile Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, or similar. This also means I can't use food delivery services, since those tend to be infinite as well.
If they're paginated that's fine, even if they're infinitely so. Infinite scrolling is just a very good touchstone as to the quality and addictiveness of a site, and I'll avoid anything that has it.
For this reason I get my news through RSS and like using Discord -- both have finite ends (even if there may be a lot of content in bursts.)
I rue the amount of damage caused, before people and society began resisting and arresting its deleterious effects.
But perhaps this is the same process being followed here. New shiny for the reptile brain, eventually the costs are made clear and people decide they would rather not become statistics and instead find joy in other formats and tools.
Then People make those formats or invent ways of engaging with our tools that includes self care and leads to more happiness. We grow older and we eventually get tired of all the online health fads and become crotchety older humans.
Get off my lawn, in advance.
I use FB only because I'm member of a couple of groups relevant to my hobby, and the stuff posted in those is worth following. Unfortunately there is currently no alternative for those, otherwise I would happily ditch FB.
I don't even care about posts from family and friends anymore because nowadays those are mostly about bragging about their fancy dinner/holiday/social life etc.
Any marketplace that is privately owned, is not a free market place. And, the elephant in the room, these social media marketplaces are owned by parties with very particular interests. As long as don't recognise that, we will let ourselves be distracted by details that are always the result of this private control.
Something social must be public, or it isn't social, and it isn't what you and I really want.
And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the bottom of the page:
> You're all caught up on Most Recent posts
> Check back later for more updates
And any page you follow, including anything that tries to convince you to click through to their website via clickbait, anxiety-inducing headlines, etc.. It also shows FB groups you're in, which are often full of their own unnecessary drama.
A social network is no better than the sum of its parts, and to create something really worthwhile, you have to limit what people are allowed to post (original content only, for example).
Doing that at scale I think is very hard.
In the meantime, maybe I should just share more photos in the group chat instead...
I think this goes beyond social media to all kinds of media.
Of course there are other Chinese apps that operate entirely based on feeds. What I found interesting is that on Rednote it tried to suppress your posts from what it infers to be your friends in real life.
I think it is a great approach. There are sometimes I just want to see updates from friends and family. There are other times when I only want to see something interesting to me without necessarily telling all my friends what I'm interested in. These are two entirely different categories of social media and it is a good thing to require users to switch apps.
So either we train all our friends to use it sensibly -- and convince them to agree with us on what's sensible -- or we sort through cruft to find the value.
This is called "email" (and/or "text messaging" i.e. iMessage or SMS).
I think that’s the tough reality—over time, people gradually become accustomed to consuming random content from random accounts or pages, to the point where the original idea of interacting with friends and family on social media starts to fade away. That said, messaging apps might still bridge that gap through groups.
Friends and family more or less stopped posting a long time ago, when everyone became worried about what happens when others have their personal information/drunk party photos. Which is why "the feed" started seeking content from outside content creators so that the services could give you... something.
Facebook, at least, has maintained the "friends and family" feed like you describe, but who uses it? I expect asymptotically nobody.
elswhr.app
Would love to hear your feedback and any feature requests you might have.
This sort of longing for a cozy social media circles exists a lot in tech adjacent circles. However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company, which in other words simply means that users pay for the pay for the product, this is not gonna happen. While you may be willing to do so, I'm sure many people would simply stop communicating with you because of the additional friction caused, especially when a free alternative exists.
Additionally, the "viral content" you speak of exists for two reasons, which I'm not sure it could be entirely solved even if you had users pay for the product.
Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. This is where viral content, such as posts from politicians and celebrities, gain their initial spread.
I would also like to note that someone may want to follow a politician or celebrity because they think what they're doing is generally useful or entertaining, respectively.
This leads me to my second point, where even if you self-opted to not interact with viral content, I'm not sure your social circles would also follow through with the same choice. This ultimately means the platform has to take specific measures to suppress some posts based on its content or not show any of your friends' activity, both of which has disadvantages. Further, the former is in itself controversial depending upon which politician is in power and the current Overton window[1].
(Re downvotes: I'd like to know what part of all of this people disagree with.)
I’m reading this as: The corporate internet is unable to fulfill the actual social needs of its users.
>Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped.
And this translates to: Our economic system drains us of so much of our energy that living a fulfilling life is no longer possible, and so we fill our valuable time with the slop that same system serves us.
I think you’re being downvoted because your comment speaks to an uncomfortable truth, namely that none of this is working to advance quality of life but rather to advance the contents of a few wallets.
The addictive properties are the reason for the prevalence of the product.
On Twitter, don't follow anyone, put everyone in a list, only read that list - you get a feed of chronological posts from only the people on the list, no algorithmic bullshit.
Or use Nostr. Definitely zero algorithm nonsense over there.
You want nourishment instead of toxins! ^_^
The thing called "social media" is mostly a US export. It craves monetisation — at the expense of all else, including factual information.
What it has done to US society and public discourse is plain to see.
This was my biggest source of joy on the modern internet.
When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers to 500 but by X's own metrics no one sees my tweets. I would estimate between 13 and 20 is my average view count. When I do post, I am lucky a single person interacts, and it is almost always someone I know in the real world.
I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens. I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that ponders technology questions". I tweet like it's 2010 and no one cares anymore.
This was the death of social media for me. This was the last place I was really "social" on the internet and it died.
Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me, the only somewhat of a silver lining is that I now have these conversations with ChatGPT. It's not as much fun though.
Instagram is just brainrot these days. I'd used it for years to post my absolute best photos as a sort of curated gallery. No one cares anymore. Nothing I post ever gets seen. Why bother.
That sums up my general opinion of all social media these days, why bother.
It functions more as a platform for blogs, but if you use the app there are blog-specific group chats, you can follow people, and the home page contains 'notes' that are pretty tweet-like in format. Once you have a collection of say 15-20 blogs that your subscribed to I found that the notes I got recommended were quite good and could spark some interesting conversations.
A few tech related ones I like are The Pragmatic Engineer, ByteByteGo, Bad Software Advice, and Exponential View.
The first thing they show you is a feed, a never ending scroller.
I don’t get an intro to any channel - it seems like Twitter for writers. Half the stuff I subscribed to (you can’t peek in the onboarding) was absolutely written by ChatGPT, emoji headers and all.
I’m sure there’s interesting stuff happening on there, but it’s a scroller just like Reddit, and it’s pretty disappointing how much apps like these don’t respect a single user need - only the needs of the platform to engage engage engage.
Also holy shit, there’s no option to not send emails - only “prefer push”. You can’t turn it off. There’s zero respect for users, their inboxes, or their attention here whatsoever.
Never engaged with the political stuff.
Yeah, that was the case for me. I used Twitter quite a bit from about 2012 through 2020, but I was already phasing it out when the takeover happened, so it was an easy call to just close my account. While I do have an IG and Bsky account, I rarely use them. So Twitter's death basically meant the end of my mainstream social media usage.
It wasn't without consequences though. I'd made some IRL connections through twitter that I thought would last for years - they migrated to bluesky and IG but I didn't. Suddenly they were not interested in speaking with me.
Lose your clout, don't be surprised if you get shunned by the clout obsessed.
Funny how things shift like that. Also never engaged with political stuff.
I think that's an issue. I totally see why you were negatively impacted but I think we tend to forget it is not real life and in 99% of cases not important conversations/debates we are having with random people on the internet - they could be fun to have (or not) but important they are not. We treat social media popularity as if it is part of our identity, as if its almost as important as actual family and friends - and it really isn't.
We didn’t need social media, we had everything we needed with the old PHP forums
I've been a member of one of the internet's longer-running web forums for two decades, and nothing I've seen from the big social media corps comes close to providing the same level of usability and community health.
I've been on Bluesky for a few months.
Around 300 followers, mostly generic female names being caricatures of progressive or traditional values, often "looking for true love".
I can post almost anything I want and no one reacts.
It was the same for reddit, and honestly even 4chan in the early 2000s.
Hacker news kinda fills that gap now.
This has been my experience as well. I was a heavy lurker during peak Twitter phase, but I still got lots of value from it.
I tried posting about tech and stuff and there’s absolute silence. No one cares anymore as if there are only tumbleweeds out there.
I logged out of all my social media accounts (except HN) and moved them to hidden apps category. As a result I managed to read 3 lovely books and finished my side project ever since.
Twitter is dead, and its grave is marked with nothing more than an X.
What do you mean? Aren't you looking at it right now?
PixelFed reminds me a bit of the old Instagram. Not many users, but people are there to post their pictures. You kinda have to rely on tags and trending content to find accounts/content, but that's not always a bad thing.
Fortunately, Mastodon has completely taken its place for me, and it actually affords me a good degree of agency over what I see. It's a linear feed of posts by the people I follow, with comprehensive filtering (and even better, people voluntarily put content warnings on their posts about potentially-difficult topics). It's actually pretty badass, even if it isn't perfect.
You can certainly keep having cool conversations with people on Mastodon, like the good old days of Twitter. That's all I do. I follow people who post about neat stuff, and they follow me cuz I post about stuff I (and apparently they) find interesting. Just people hanging out, basically. You don't need to worry about growing an audience or whatever (though I'm sure you already knew that heh :))
people move to new platform that is nice for socializing. The cycle begins anew.
I for one dont have the energy for it anymore. Im done. Im burnt out. If it isnt a real human in front of me it can fuck off and burn in hell. I make an exception for hacker news, because it doesnt seem trashed to shit by bots astroturfing just about every post to sway public opinion, but the moment it starts I will unplug from the public net for good, and nothing of value will be lost.
So, you miss having access to experts in fields you’re a layman to. That makes sense.
I wonder though if the experts miss your random guesses about their work? If they miss the compulsion to correct your assumptions before misinformation takes hold?
> I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens
So we all agree that follower count != engagement. You pointed that out in the first quote. It's a trueism we all claim to understand. But then you immediately jump to low followers on Mastodon or Bluesky being equivalent to low engagement, when that isn't necessarily the case.
But I've got to say, it's getting harder and harder to keep that up. As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joining, minimally there's a WhatsApp group. My wife has reluctantly joined WhatsApp and if it wasn't for that, it feels like we would pretty much be destined to become social outcasts.
In one recent instance, we weren't even aware of a parent group for one of our children's school class until someone asked us (in person!) why we didn't come bowling the previous night. We had no idea, and no-one sees the necessity to include someone who - for whatever reason - is not on WhatsApp.
I can see the argument that we are inconveniencing others by not wanting to be reachable to what has now become a standard means of being in touch, and that we cannot expect others to jump through hoops just to include us. But a few years back, I was quite deeply involved in privacy research and I definitely feel no inclination to share all of my communications (and pictures) with Meta.
I don't know where you're based, but in general these days at least one "chat app" of some kind is the de facto standard in most countries. For a lot of the world, that's WhatsApp.
The US is an outlier in still relying majorly on SMS as the communications platform.
And since a lot of people do keep in contact via WhatsApp group chats, it’s hard to ignore the social implications of WhatsApp too. It’s as much a social platform as the others albeit with a different broadcast model.
As a parent, I have to monitor my child’s WhatsApp groups to check they’re safe, just like I would their YouTube and Instagram feeds. And I have to check they’re also being safe with the stuff that they share on WhatsApp, just like you would on any other social network.
That is by design. To privatize public spaces and control what is said in that spaces to monetize it is the goal. No individual parent can fight the power of the corporations that push us in that direction.
The public discourse of TV and other media is dying, while the private echo chambers owned by corporations are increasing. That is not good either.
What I think the study is missing is the impact of social media on society, and impact on society on individuals wellbeing. I see an increase in paranoia, extremism, pessimism, etc. caused directly by that closed communities that spin out of control and create the perfect dish plate to grow the most paranoid people. For kids and teenagers it will be worse, as they are still growing and learning.
Even the device platform you choose segregates you. There are a few neighbor families our family is close to. They(neighbors and my family) all talk on iMessage. I've got an Android/eOS device so I am excluded from the chats. At least my wife shares them with me.
There was a time that people set standards for (landline) telephone communications for the sake of interoperability. We need the same for other technologies. I'm sick of trying to be social in corporate controlled gated communities surrounded by impassible walls.
Tbh I have a feeling it's the kids' fault. They call everything social media now. No separate names for FB and WhatsApp even though they do totally different things.
Taking part in group events also becomes a headache if you don't join the related WhatsApp group.
I find it appalling that basic features of human social functions are subject to the whims and profiteering of a quasi-monopolist company. There should be heavy regulations, at the very least.
As for the really attention grabbing social media like Instagram and TikTok, if your kids want to get on there I'd say provide a good alternative. Something they can use or open if boredom strikes, because there definitely are those moments when that happens and one just grabs the phone. For me it's mostly been HN and books, some YouTube channels with NewPipe and some podcasts.
You don't have to share your messages or pictures with Meta to fix the problems you laid out in your post. Certainly not all of them.
For example with the bowling situation, all you had to do was listen passively to times/events being posted.
I actually took the time to sign up for WhatsApp just now to see how it works nowadays, and it’s still the same as it was before: nags you to no end to enable full Contacts access (no, Meta, I’m not letting you dump my entire contacts database into your app so that you can data mine it). iOS lets you select a minimal set of contacts to give it, but if you do this, it still shows you a full screen saying to enable full contacts access before it will let you contact anyone. No thanks. (I deleted my account immediately again, maybe I’ll try again in another 5 years.)
No smartphones allowed at school, strict usage limits for older kids at home, etc.
I guess proper education on the real aspects of the social media phenomenon would be the real deal. For example, explaining how/why the companies use their algorithms to keep you in there; influencers only want to sell you a product; why posts/stories don’t reflect reality at all, etc.
But understanding all that would require quite some amount of emotional maturity from both the kids and parents themselves. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the reality at all, there are adults that still can’t see through the cracks..
WhatsApp is E2E encrypted, right? Can you go into more detail about what you suspect Meta is doing or will do?
Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")
It would follow logically that whatever kind of brain rot social media causes, would affect 1% of the population very dramatically, another 9% somewhat more noticeably, and then there would be this vast ocean of people who are only marginally aware/affected. From the perspective of online activity they appear to not even exist.
This always seems counterintuitive to the 9% or the 1% (and just by commenting we're already in one of those demogs). But there's lots of data out there supporting these skewed distributions in online activity.
The business model of the casinos and the drug dealers and the alcohol venders is the same - you need a huge pool of unproblematic recreational users to find the problematic users who generate the bulk of your profits.
The same model works for video games and social media.
Page 7 of the PDF shows the following:
"This project is part of the U.S. 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study (Gonz´alez-Bail´on et al. 2023; Guess et al. 2023a,b; Nyhan et al. 2023; Allcott et al. 2024), a partnership between Meta researchers and unpaid independent academics. Under the terms of the collaboration, the independent academic authors had final authority over the pre-analysis plan, data analysis, and manuscript text, and Meta could not block any results from being published."
Personally I’ve been mentally in a better place since getting rid of my social media accounts during COVID, but it does cause problems because Facebook has become a utility as well (schools and real-life social groups use it for co-ordinating activities).
For example, if you deactivate Facebook but still doom scroll the NY Times et al homepages. Your happiness wouldn’t necessarily change because almost ALL media has adopted the addictive techniques of social media.
In any case I didn't like the amplification - unamplified life is hard enough - so I got rid of it a long time ago and don't regret it at all.
The self selection bias in these ad based invitation studies is just out of whack.
I suspect that those who participate were already considering quitting.
If you were depressed because of divisive politics on social media, then you leave social media during elections where divisive politics is everywhere in the real world anyway.. self-reported depression seems like it would not change much. So the results might make sense as long as they are targeting people that are old enough to be depressed by politics in the first place, and assuming politics rather than body-image issues etc is the main driver.
Some follow up questions.. does social media make divisive political issues in the real world worse? Seems like it! How old is old enough to be depressed by politics? Probably everyone now, which phenomenon is also likely caused by social media. Honestly regardless of elections, you can't actually leave social media by leaving social media anymore, it's kinda in the very fabric of things.
> my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")
Same, I mean this seems to be going against most of the other research on this. For what it's worth, here's a paper with some of the same authors on digital addiction ( https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936 ). Abstract states that
> Looking at these facts through the lens of our model suggests that self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media use.
So.. not necessarily painting social media as wonderful. Social media companies would be interested in research about social media addiction for obvious reasons, but probably do not in general want that research public. Unless of course it hurts competitors more than it hurts them, and this paper is in the middle of drama about a tiktok ban. Maybe the authors just say what people in power want to hear at the time?
If a significant part of someone's Social life is run through Facebook, it's surprising that there's even a net positive in the end.
It also took a lot more than 6 weeks to get acclimated to it. You get psychological withdrawal. It took months for it to feel normal. My income went up a lot in the years after as well (in part due to more time to focus on finding a new job), so that also contributed to my happiness.
But perhaps the study shows that the effect works in the right direction even if small and even when replaced by any other behaviours that cause unhappiness, depression and anxiety.
Politics, relationships, those are not things to talk about. But being able to respond to major FOSS contributors, that I'll do.
And I would have these disputes, of course, over utterly trivial things, like how to spell something or where to place the apostrophe, or some manual-of-style nitpick in an infobox. And the disputes would drag on for weeks and we could utterly stall the editing process by disputing on talk pages. And yet we could edit-war over it, usually in slow-motion. And often the dispute would be couched in quite polite language but I would hate the guys' guts.
And the tipping point came when I began to have dreams about Wikipedia, and I would wake up angry. I would wake up fighting. I would wake up and immediately tear into the web browser and catch-up on the discussion, or not, just to post my next riposte, because I'd composed it in my sleep, in my dreamless dreams.
And I woke up angry more often than waking up in any other mood. And I was telling my psychiatrist this, and she said I should probably stop looking at blue light before bedtime. And I was incredulous that she would think if I turned my arguments red-hued that they would anger me less, or cause me to wake up happy and agreeable or something?
And I know I wasn't taking enough medication to make anyone happy, but these guys on Wikipedia really knew how to piss me off, and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger anyone with a hot temper, and that triggered person would forget their ethics and commit a fatal error, and get banned, and the brinker would go on to live another day and cause others to fall into similar traps. And many of us do that, if we have the volatile temperament. I lasted about 17 years on Wikipedia without a single block and with some low-grade warnings, but generally a clean discipline record, but finally it got to me.
And a lot of time on Wikipedia I had spent fighting trolls and vandals and very disruptive editors. And I made sure a lot of them were banned. I filed a lot of reports. I was a petty bureaucrat there, filing reports and compiling evidence and arguing cases. There was no shortage of "wikilawyering". From the very beginning I was finding disputes and diving into them. Especially when they didn't concern me, didn't concern any topic I cared about. Just to have the disputes.
And I kept waking up angry. And finally I got control of that. Nowadays I wake up frightened. I wake up traumatized. I wake up scared of something I dreamed about. It's spiritual torment, and it's attributable to nothing I did the night before. Perhaps the F.U.D. of Hacker News gets to me. But not on that level. At least I don't go on crusades or jihads against Wikipedia editors anymore.
Social media only seems to have psychological side effects which aren't as openly visible to our eyes.
I think the only way out is cold turkey. The number of conversations my wife starts with telling me about some distant acquaintances recent vacation (as seen thru IG) is distressing.
My "social" internet use is more hobby based - forum/reddit hobby focussed content.
In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it all.
No phones in the bedroom. No phones at meals. No phones at the park. (Something like that)
Or even a "let's go out for dinner without our phones!"
I also made a little "Phone jail." It is essentially a shoebox on top of the fridge. I announce when I am putting my phone in "jail" as a way to show my kids that I am trying to have a healthy relationship with screens.
My wife and I have both reduced our screen time (though ew aren't perfect.)
I was never on Instagram or TikTok, but neither seems to be "social" media as much as a communal fire hose anyway.
I was on Bluesky for a minute, but it was 99.9% people trying to one-up each other with witty or ironic one-liners for clout, with most of the rest being ex-Twitter people trying to keep Twitter combat alive in an arena (blessedly) free of the people who have made Twitter unbearable. I got tired of witnessing a neverending improv open mic while being randomly assaulted by people I agreed with.
So now I'm just living my life, aware of the challenges of the world, but not bathing in them.
Aside from Reddit, my only social media is Instagram. On my Instagram, I only follow people I personally know or national-park/state-park/non-profit conservation accounts. I only like posts of people I personally know and nothing else, and I never comment on anything. I only post pretty pictures of nature with no people visible in a recognizable way. My feed is almost exclusively nature and animals (lots of seals and sea lions) with a lot of scuba diving mixed in. I also get a lot of xennial humor posts too, which I send to my wife and a buddy.
It's a very limited level of engagement, and I'm very happy with it. I don't need anything more.
Can anyone translate? Random web search find suggests multiplying by 37 to get a percentage, which sounds very questionable, but even then these improvements seem negligible.
This doesn't really line up with my lived experience. Getting myself out of shitty platforms and community spaces improved my mental state significantly (although the damage that's been done remains).
> We estimate that users in the Facebook deactivation group reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, anxiety, and depression, relative to control users. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p < 0.01 level, both when considered individually and after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the full set of political outcomes considered in Allcott et al. (2024). Non-preregistered subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of Facebook on people over 35, undecided voters, and people without a college degree.
> We estimate that users in the Instagram deactivation group reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement in the emotional state index relative to control. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p = 0.016 level when considered individually, and at the p = 0.14 level after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the outcomes in Allcott et al. (2024). The latter estimate does not meet our pre-registered p = 0.05 significance threshold. Substitution analyses imply this improvement is achieved without shifts to offline activities. Non-preregistered subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of Instagram on women aged 1824.
Like have one nice meal or a one walk in the woods 2 months ago and rate your mood today kind of effect size.
0.06 std deviation is not anything to write home about and really doubtfully real, given the general quality of psychological science.
Perhaps, how much better of a day would you have if you found a dollar on the ground.
Of course, this study only considered normative people, not marginalized or those who were experiencing active harm from exposure to social media - your personal results may vary and it's important to remember that science is imperfect and social sciences are doubly so.
If going off Facebook improves your life - you do you.
Alternatively, you'll want to grasp the meaning of "standard deviation" (you're right that you can't multiply all standard deviations by a number and get a percentage - and a percentage of what?), and then find the "index of happiness, depression, and anxiety" they use and grasp its meaning.
True. I've experienced it too
Even though I am rationally aware that people work in better environments and get paid while I'm job searching for the past 6 months, it feels like seeing any sort of announcement regarding other people's successes hits a subconscious chord my brain hates. It felt like I'm being actively intimidated, making my already depressed and sad state of job searching worse. The "highlights reel effect" on LinkedIn is deliberate and I'd argue inevitable, because everyone is trying their best to show how good they are as candidates and workers.
Now that I closed it, and I'm sticking to the usual communities (Discord, etc.) may be running into better engineers than me but I see it either as a neutral event or a positive one, because they share their code and insights which I can learn from.
It's been a bliss. I don't over consume, I have more time to get things done now, and it's sort of obvious but everything feels better with bigger screens and keyboard and mouse.
Look at HN as an example, if I see a post on here that is related to some programming thing, I have my terminal right here where I can play with the concept. Even things like youtube are much nicer on a big screen.
My only pet-peeve is with web front-end designers insisting on wasting screen real-estate at the left and right margins. I wish there was a button on every such site where you can "maximize" the content div so that it takes up 100% width.
Using the Youtube app on my phone shocks me every time. I'm so used to an add blocker on my pc's big screen.
Didn't matter if it was news, social or whatever, it messed with my dopamine apparatus, as Gabor Mate calls it.
I do limit my self to the first page or two of the HN feed though, to keep up on tech developments for my career, which I still have to be careful about.
It's feeds in general. It leads to abnormal dopamine release which affects motivation.
I started deleting Instagram every Sunday evening and installing every Friday.
I had this hypothesis that it’s the weekends that people have the best stuff to share and when it makes sense for me to still exist to everyone. And then nobody notices me disappear over the week. It’s a lot more enjoyable to be engaging with others’ content when you’re posting your own.
But the surprising result, after a few months, is that I’ve started missing weekends. The memory of all those people has faded and so has the urge to share.
Which brings me to a point: on one hand I do feel better day to day, but I’ve also felt a bit of a mourning period not being reminded about acquaintances’ lives. Kind of like a smoker who’s now missing out on social smoke breaks.
We don't need to be reminded of acquaintances lives - what people I barely know do in their free time has zero bearing on my life. They're acquaintances, not friends, so their actual importance/impact to my life is next to nil.
I never smoked but often hung out with smokers outside on their lunch breaks. If an acquaintance is truly important to us, we can be reminded of our acquaintances lives by making an effort to turn them into real friendships that interact with each other in meatspace.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33697/w336...
Possibly relevant that the 6 week trial period occurred in the 6 weeks leading up to the American election in 2020.
But I know that once I create an account, I'll get hooked to the feed, to uploading pictures, etc. because I know myself.
I don't know if the positive social aspect (meeting people, or creating a lasting connection with people that I meet once IRL) is going to offset that addiction and the general anxiety that comes with having an account.
If you hate Instagram and the anxiety it gives you, the people you meet on there will never be really on your level, or you on theirs. You will waste your time and effort on shallower relationships that can't get deep because you want to engage with life differently and not be on social media.
Dig deep into the hobbies that give you joy, and go to as many meetups and social occasions around them as you can. Leverage your friend and family network - the people who know you, and get you - and build on it.
The only reason I had it, in the first place, was so I could participate in a technical forum for an infrastructure platform that I authored.
That platform has long since left the nest, and is in very capable hands. Like a spent first-stage booster, I am no longer relevant.
Before completely walking away from Facebook, I had turned off all notifications, and never doomscrolled. Made walking away, much easier.
I miss it like it like I miss a painful boil on my arse. It was just old white people, screaming at each other.
* Who died this week
* Spammers liking your posts and asking for friend adds
* Gofundme's for ppl who will now spend the rest of their lives in medical debt
* Interesting articles maybe twice a week or so.
Nobody I know in town is on Mastodon or BSky.
The silence is deafening.
I found that for social media, platforms like Mastodon feel more comfy and less commercialized, whereas for chatting with other people either 1:1 or group chats across various apps feel nicer without being directly tied to a social media platform. At the same time, platforms that are more focused on a particular set of topics/activities like Reddit/Discord/HN/... instead of people just trying to advertise their lives or build a brand in a sense (the likes of LinkedIn as well) or whatever are more meaningful to me.
To some degree, it probably has something to do with the size of those communities: Mastodon is niche enough not to get spammed with as many bots or adverts or people trying to push a certain narrative, it going under that radar is one of the best things about it, instead it's more organic content.
I do have an Instagram account, and use that to follow the Slackwyrm comic (and ignore people asking me to give them my "desirable" id.)
I did try Blind, but quickly gave up on that mess of an app. 1 day of using it and it just was rage bait after rage bait. Maybe next time I'm job hunting - a friend stated that it was very useful for her negotiations.
Most of my WA group chats are archived & no notifications - no pressure to read them immediately. Left every group chat except close friends and family anyway.
Since then, only tried reddit, but it has a different problem - it's an echo chamber where no real discussion is possible on any topic as anyone who disagrees with even minute details in dominating dogma of every subreddit, gets downvoted to invisibility. Plus too many subreddits are merely karma mills that people use to boost their karma to allow themselves at least some actual voice in other subreddits - and those useless-by-design subreddits dominate the whole thing because you need to do a lot of those "filler" posts to allow oneself one real one, thus SNR on the platform is ridiculously low - but it's not some evil bots who's creating noise, but actual live people, and not even dumb ones, just because they HAVE to. And going through this - for what? To get a chance to participate in one more "someone on the internet is wrong" debate?
Meaningful talk is possible in groups where people are united by at least something and where is at least some real barrier of entry. These are not the social media. They can't afford filtering who gets in because that way they'll lose viewership and leave a lot of money on the table. I wonder why that comes as a surprise to anyone.
Hypothesis: people who regularly use social media score higher then the average population in narcissic personality trait.
> Facebook and Instagram deactivation improved emotional state index by 0.060 standard deviations (p < 0.001)
The link didn't click through to the appendix. This seems off, as small effects (the small number of standard deviations) tend to be associated with undesirable high p-values, not low ones. Though also, the 0.060 itself seems lower than the visual graphs indicate.
Yesterday, I blocked it completely at home and partially at work - I might still need to read some posts from time to time, but I don’t want to be able to browse it.
It’s been a bit hard to come up with things to fill my time with again. Kinda scary.
For Instagram with you needing to log in to view pages, you find that you can’t find opening times for restaurants etc because many places use it to advertise that they’re open/closed at short notice.
You could offer to help the people who do all that posting to get it onto an email list or some other platform away from Facebook. A small indie website somewhere, even a blog.
I know this sounds like work, and you just want to enjoy your running club, but if it gets sticky, the people who are currently posting everything on FB will eventually realise there's value elsewhere and they'll keep it ticking over.
I went and found forums for the hobbies I'm into, rather than social media groups. Thankfully, most of the underground music I'm into also maintain their own websites, while some of the more hush-hush groups maintain members-only email lists. If they don't do either? Well, nearly all of them sell tickets online via mainstream ticket vendors regardless of how underground they try to be, so I'll see the info eventually (and, hell - I know the event's coming up and I've put it on my calendar, I don't need to see an IG story about it every single day for two months reminding me). For backpacking, forums are fantastic compared to the oft-repeated and overrun social media groups.
For restaurants? Meh. So what if I show up and a place is closed on short notice? Worse things can happen than wasting a little bit of time. Do they only share their menu on social media but my friends swear it's amazing? Fine, I'll experience it O'Reilly-style ("We'll do it live! Fuck it!").
I don't need to know everything all the time, that's part of the adventure! And if I really do need to know something about a place that only posts on social media, I've found that I can usually find that info elsewhere if I dig hard enough.
People have been demanding 'please just let me see what my friends post' for YEARS
It's (probably) not going to change
I also use a browser plugin that blocks LinkedIn feed. This is because I can't stand seeing the nonsense that seemingly serious people post there.
www.elswhr.app
Additionally, assuming growth comes your way, how do you plan to support your platform/company from a financial perspective? Targeted ads, or...? What do you intend to do with user data?
Also cats.
I just scroll for like 10min before going to bed.
Been using it for about 6 months now.
Then life got busy and somewhat difficult, and I had no more time for this. Still, I'd occasionally go on Facebook and get really down. I'd see all my "friends" living it up, having fun etc while I was stuck in my rut. Very depressing.
But then, a few things happened. One, I understood it's really all fake. Two, all my real human friends stopped using Facebook, basically. And anyway, Facebook now just shows me AI slop that is nothing to do with anything - weird videos, people definitely shutting down a 5000 year old family business, you-wont-believe-what-she-did videos etc. Not that I use it much, just some friends for whatever reason are still on Messenger.
Yes, we can live without social media. I know it is possible from my own experience. And when everyone has a phone and e-mail address, you can stay connected without FB or other account.
It will require more effort, but valuable things rarely come without it.
So if by "plausible" you mean that, yes, you can imagine someone doing that, then you're right. If "plausible" means that you think it's justified, then that's another issue.
Someone that doesn't notice that he is "hated" might also be susceptible to such low key social manipulation to be made believe he is hated.
But ye, as I am not in clique A or B there is a lot of guesswork on my part and I cam't argue against someone else's story. I am just trying to bring up the possibility of bad mouthing.
Many people prefer having anxiety about drama to being bored.
You know it is not good for you but your executive function and ability to plan long term are compromised (whether chronically or acutely), so you do it anyway, and regret it later.
Over and over the most stressed out anxious people I meet are the underemployed/nonworking spouse in very wealthy couples. Especially the childless ones.
