Taking a break from social media makes you happier and less anxious

The problems I have with social media are that

- it steals a lot of time

- a lot of content gets me by evoking negative emotion

- it's taxing to get exposed to so many different ideas, clips, heated discussions, etc. Makes we wanna throw away my phone and live in the woods

They unknowingly pursue easily available emotion (even negative) to avoid emotional boredom. It's a bit like watching scary or sad movies.

You can't have prolonged and deeper thoughts about anything because you are bombarded with refined extreme opinions and events.

Just yesterday, I was getting ready to do some work I noticed a tweet from an antivaxxer retweeted by a cryptobro saying "they cannot hide it forever, data leaks" and it was about insurance companies claims. The data was legit, indeed there was a huge rise in young people claims for dying off from non-covid condition. Wow, are the antivaxxers right, is the vaccine causing young people to die off from heart attacks? Now I have to dig the data and as it turns the rise in deaths started way before the vaccine roll out, about the beginning of the pandemic and it looks like it is related to drugs.

Because I followed some cryptobro to keep the pulse of the cryptobroverse, I had to endure doubt about what I knew was true, I had to fear for my life and for the loved ones and I had to spend precious time and mental energy because someone used misrepresentation of statistics to push an agenda. I was too exhausted to do any work.

I don't see how this could healthy. I don't see how I simply assume that it was false and ignore it because it will end up me missing out on everything outside of my bubble. I don't see how I can spend that much energy to fight off every single bullshit that is cheap to produce and expensive to clean up.

I don't see how this is sustainable. In real life, bullshitters are ousted by the communities but in this artificial communities we don't have the tools fight back.

You meet your friend, he tells you about his new job, you congratulate him.

You meet your coworker and chat to him about politics, and it's kinda interesting.

You meet your neighbor after their trip and they show you the photos and you're fascinated.

You meet your cousin in real life, you see he looks better, you compliment him. You don't feel like you need to do something yourself.

What is it about doing it online that hurts?

But seriously, you can self-reflect about you constantly comparing yourself to to others and and some point you really should ask yourself what you want yourself. Even if you assume that the self-presentation of people on the net is honest, winning the social media competition is an illusion.

That other person who got that job put time into it and achieved it. Good for them.

Someone lost a shit ton of weight and looks ripped. That's motivation for me to lift too and eat better.

It comes down to you, are you using that as fuel to motivate you or are you seething inside and burning with envy?

I honestly believe that envy is the thief of joy and if you allow it to consume you it will destroy you.

The only people that turn me off are those folks who make political shit posts, but I don't follow them.

You should probably make it something you _choose_ to use. Too political rant? Skip it. Video of nothing relevant? Skip it. Your cousins photos? If you know they're not for you, why are you consuming them every time they drop?

You choose to take your hands of the wheel, of course your going to be taken for a ride.

> You continue browsing and see a video of your neighbour enjoying a fantastic tropical vacation.

> And now your cousin has uploaded a before and after photo that makes you want to hide your thighs for the rest of your life.

Sorry to say, but if a person shares a positive thing that's happened to them, and their "friend" makes that about themself in a negative way, the problem isn't really the delivery mechanism (social media)

I think there are also a lot of people for whom social media is a direct cause of anxiety, especially young women.

I figured I would fight fire with fire and last week got into a few particularly ridiculous flamewars on different platforms and... it worked.

I'm working on My Productive Homepage, a custom dynamic homepage you can set and customize the exact topics and goals that you care about. It will recommend unseen info/updates on only those things and display info in summary form (with links to sources).

No distracting or trending news unless they are highly relevant to the topics/goals you explicitly choose. We intend to maximize user productivity, rather than engagement.

I believe it can help people stay focused on what really matters to them while getting updates and stimulated, and discover useful info for work or serious hobbies.

(And in work mode, it'd be a homepage you can open without guilt while at work. ;))

What important features would you like to get on such a custom, dynamic homepage?

Comments about the project in general would also be appreciated, eg on how helpful or unhelpful you think the project will be to you or people you know.

American privilege? Each time a war flares up in my home country I am going into a pretty deep depression. And the only cure is to switch off the Telegram. Which is frankly rather hard to do, but possible. A third week going strong…

Oh, and I have a full time job and I need to exercise and I want to be in bed by 23:00.

I’m always in a hurry…

The people I want to talk to are on discord or signal, and we do actual activities together

That's key for creativity after all.

Not all news is designed for outrage. Several publications publish in-depth articles in a neutral way, where you can actually learn something. Investigations are also often genuinely useful for a better society. Zuckerberg's position therefore doesn't hold true for all news media.

Separately, depending on how your social media feed is set up, you can be feel jealous/lesser due to seeing the high points of the lives of people you know (depending on your personality type), seeing news on your feed, or seeing neither due to subscribing to accounts in niche fields.

Firstly, traditional news media’s intrusion is not as severe or wide ranging. To give one example, the surge in teenage mental health problems that Facebook and Instagram in particular seem likely to have caused.

Second, there is a very large qualitative difference between social media and traditional media. Social media is monitoring your every action, and adapting to it, and creates a tight feedback loop where you are manipulated into staying engaged and consuming more adverts. That personalised real-time feedback loop, based on giant datasets that are very invasive, is incomparable to traditional media.

Finally, the extent of attention capture by social media cannot be compared to traditional media. This can be observed by simply taking a walk down the high street and seeing how many people are staring at their phones. Traditional media do use apps as a medium, but there aren’t many people who would seriously argue that most of those glued to their screens are likely to be reading an online newspaper and not looking at Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok.

The only doubt I have is whether Zuckerberg actually believes what’s he saying, in order to have a clean conscience, or whether it’s a cynical argument used to reassure his staff.

The difference may be that it is better and more enlightening, or it may be that it is more addictive and intrusive. But, it is not the same.

Maybe urban life works for some people, but it definitely causes boredom to me, and social media & news are a distraction from that.

Most of us would have doom scrolled in one form or another, many do it regularly, which can be hugely detrimental to life satisfaction in the same way any addiction could be, and can also increase anxiety. It's also in the interest of app makers to encourage these mostly destructive habits.

I've spent a while thinking through "What makes social media evil?" - I've read a number of studies, I grew up with the first wave of what we might call "social media" (never used MySpace but was quite familiar with it from friends, extensively used LiveJournal, etc). And my conclusion is that once you go away from "global state" to "individualized algorithmic feeds," it's probably gone evil.

HN, as far as I can tell, has a global state. There may be some replication delays (if it's hosted on multiple servers, which I simply don't know - I can't imagine it requires much in terms of resources to host), but "I see what you see what a non-logged in user sees," with only very, very few differences (flagged/dead posts, mostly). It's not reordering the state based on what it knows about me - it's reordering, globally, for all users, based on the consensus. The same was true of LJ - you had your own feed, but outside permission related differences, if I looked at a community and you did, we both saw the same thing.

This global state also means that there's no "slot machine" behavior of "pull the slider and see what's new." You refresh. It's the same stuff. Maybe two things switched positions. Go away, because it's simply not going to change that fast for you.

HN also doesn't go with the endless scrolling. There's a bottom of the first page. You have to make a deliberate decision to see beyond it, and that's something that historically was just "how things worked," but has been replaced with the bottomless bowl approach. We know that people, given a bottomless bowl of soup, eat more. And given that every ad revenue based social media company has gone to that model, clearly people consume more.

Humans are vulnerable to "metricification" quirks, and you see that with a lot of social medias too. HN only shows your up/down votes, and you can't see anything else. There's a demetrificator extension for it, though I would like the option to turn the metrics off in my profile.

And, finally, HN is "pull" - I have to go to the site, vs it reaching out with notifications to try and drag me back in. Plus, there's the noprocrast setting. It gives you the tools to make it a nuisance to use too much.

So, while HN can be somewhat addictive if you let it, the lack of any "weaponization of psychology" tricks and the very active "No, really, you've been looking at it too long, go away" coding means that I don't consider it particularly toxic, and certainly not in the same style as FB/Twitter/etc.

Why it's a recurring obsession? Probably because a lot of us have been in the tech industry, have seen how it works, have (probably) been addicted at some point, have watched the whole concept go from "Huh, this is kind of a neat way to connect with people I'd never talk to otherwise!" to "Braaaaaaiiiiiinss... via eeeeeyyyyyeeebaaaallllssss!" in the past 10-15 years, and really want no part of it anymore, and want to help ensure other people see it for the vile, human-toxic trash it is.

It'll destroy your ability to focus, make you less emotionally unstable, warp your view of reality in one of a variety of ways, suck basically all the time you let it, try with every trick in the book to addict you. And in exchange, some tech billionaires get another couple feet on their yachts. Yay?

The topic is related to technology (and thus easier to justify as relevant to the forum) and has a low barrier of entry to discuss. A significant majority of people in Western countries use social media and it doesn't require technical knowledge, so it's easier to share opinions about it.

Reading HN threads on social media is almost like consuming junk food: the arguments are predictable but comfortable and easy to digest. It's enjoyable in a perverse way, though not a real source of growth as the ideas aren't as hard to struggle with (versus threads on more technical topics).

For me it includes HN.

HN has been a significant contributor to my cynicism. There have been enough submissions in the past where I already knew what to expect from the comments section, especially in cases where my stance on the matter is already firm/obvious (such as with tech regulation, climate change, complaints about Twitter threads being reposted to HN, articles about social media dooming us like this one).

My reaction to these cases is typically along the lines of "yes, we know this bad, but what's going to change? What does continuing to complain here accomplish?" It's largely the same mechanism as those other toxic media platforms, and yet HN often falls for it as well. The band of people who decry Twitter et al. at the usual opportunities has persisted for years at this point, and they are unlikely to ever exit this community for good. Yet it's trivial from force of habit to click through to the comments anyway and continue to expose oneself to the usual negativity.

And I don't even use Twitter anymore - it's not like I disagree with many of those negative opinions. But after years and years of reading the same tired arguments, that negativity seems to transcend its original context to worm its way into your thought process as a general, persistent haze.

HN is not constantly measuring your behaviour and trying to feed you more addictive and outrageous content.

HN does not advertise your karma to others as a measure of self esteem.

HN does not make money from advertising.

HN is not like social media in the ways that matter when discussing how damaging social media is.

I think that there are too related patterns on HN and both have to do with tech culture. First, complains about loneliness and seeing loneliness as major problem. Second, looking down on socialization or at least ways other people socialize - whether social media or young students partying and socializing. So, any bad news about social media is welcome.

There is ethos of not socializing the wrong way or not at all. And ethos of not wasting your time with fluff, doing side project or getting better in something instead (and some amount of this is absolutely good) and of working a lot. And combination then it leads to kind of magical thinking of "if only other people did not used these, everything would be better".

Being informed is not a universal good, more is not always better. Should have a personal cost/benefit calculation, “is it worth it to be this informed?” Etc.

The "fuck ignorance, face things" can be used to shove information down someone's throat that adds nothing to the person's life except maybe misery. Being informed about stuff you can do nothing about that won't cause any tangible behavioral change (except maybe adding stress and anxiety) is not novel for the sake of it.

A rock that can't move, act or communicate that know the truth of the world, or Kardashians family dynamics, is no better than a rock that don't.

Social media seems different in that increased feed engagement (read: revenue) for these companies can be to feed into insecurities. That’s not informational, that’s predatory.

The problem we have with social media (and to a degree traditional media as well) is that both the nature of the technology and the profit incentives of the platforms encourage shallow thinking and cognitive bias among users. Going from paper to screens was bad enough in terms of its documented effects on focus and comprehension. Add to that shrinking the screen down to the size of our palms, enforcing 280 character limits, amplifying the most outrageous voices etc. and I sometimes wonder how civilization is still intact!

I agree that people should maintain some form of awareness of social issues and participation in them, democracy doesn't work without this. But an information diet heavy on social media will promote a distorted awareness of the world. And time spent on social media feels significant but it doesn't actually effect change. Things that do include: voting, attending a protest, writing to your congressman, volunteering your time and labor, earning extra income which you can donate to a cause, etc.

There are a lot of ways to get informed, participate & influence society, social media is one of the worst. It's the junk food of activism.

1) The writer, Cal Newport, gets his news from reading a broadsheet newspaper cover to cover every morning. (Not in the link but he's written about it elsewhere). I think it would be hard to argue that he's less well informed than someone scrolling through reddit, let alone FB or Instagram.

2) He's also said, and I agree, that pre-2006 or so Twitter and FB were pretty benign social media and have a lot of positives. Critically, this is before they developed infinite scrolling style timelines which are setup to maximise engagement. They were just chronological feeds of things posted by people you chose to follow.

3) Similarly to (2), the way those algorithms are optimised is not to deliberately expose you to the views of a wider range of people than you affirmatively chose to follow (although they could be!) but to maximise eyeball-time regardless. It turns out that the way to do that is to let highly emotionally charged and extreme views rise to the top.

As a result, the things you see will be either things you violently agree with from your bubble or things likely to trigger an immediate counter-response from what I think of as your anti-bubble. The anti-bubble looks like diverse views but are actually just fully defined as the inverse of the bubble's views. This deadens the space for mutual political engagement.

I think that "social media" could do lots of great things if it worked differently but I just don't think that empirically it does.

Another difference is, while we disagree, we don't fight bona fide flame wars. A more civilized and skilled discussion is favored here, and this is a very good thing (TM).

Feeling a lot of completed projects or new things kindle the impostor syndrome sometimes, but it's not creating the same insecurity of image based social platforms or "free for all" comment platforms.

I've first deleted reddit back then, then removed Instagram from my phone. I can say that I'm much happier. However, HN is not creating same type of tension for me. I learn a lot of things, for a start.

It aggregates great things that others are doing along with other posts designed to elicit extreme emotions and feeds them to you with an algorithm designed to encourage engagement. (I had originally written "maximize", but HN's algorithm does at least try to prevent flamewars.)

I think users of this site disparage low effort/meme comments to the point that people typically stay on topic. Points of view are fairly nuanced and it seems effort is taken to understand and discuss.

(Not to detract entirely from your statement with my pendantics.)

Side note: I do the same when I (through force of habit) start a game of bullet chess, there's about 5 seconds before the game starts - just enough time to quickly cancel! (if I play 1 bullet chess game, I'll probably play 5 more right after, so quickly escaping when I shouldn't be playing is a huge benefit).

But I think its also easy to forget that people in social media (or in HN posts) usually just present the best parts of them. Nobody talks about his/hers bad sides or vices, so it's easy to think that all the other people are great and better than us. In reality most people - like you and me - are probably in the 80-90% of normal workers, be it IT or not, that achieve some successes in life and have some screw-ups as well. What we see in social media is a highly curate 5% of people that shine the spotlight on something great they did.

Also when I see US dev salaries posted I feel like as a European I'm missing out big time.

It makes me feel like I don't belong in the industry and seriously depresses me. It makes me think I really am an imposter.

Why do I keep coming back if that's what it does to me? I don't know.

Typically, the subreddits I like the best are splinters from the original. Typically these start after some sub-reddit drama happens and a moderate size group decides to go somewhere else.

Reducing toxicity online really is a hard problem.

[0] I can't tell from your comment if that's the sole purpose. If not: never mind.

The people I was in contact with before social media are still in contact with me via phone, text, chat, email, etc. Most of my social media "friends" were connections and acquaintances. I was never really in contact with those people so nothing was lost when I deleted my social media accounts.

If they don't make an effort to talk to you then they aren't that interested in a relation/friendship and not worth worrying about.

I would consider this place to be a social media site.

In the midst of an election a weekly (bi-weekly? monthly?) summary article of what happened, and what is important is more than sufficient for me.

AllSides helps me frame big events from multiple perspectives. I’ve always had a hard time seeing these perspectives, so having someone else do it for me helps.

The satirical site introduces me to assorted current events with a bit of lightheartedness. If it seems important enough, I’ll do a quick search to learn what the “real” news is.

With this setup, I am not as well-versed in all current events. However, it’s much less draining, and it also takes less time out of my day!

- [0] https://www.allsides.com/

But imagine saying to an alcoholic: "I can have a few beers on a Friday night and then stop, and so can the majority of my friends, so I dont see what the problem is."

The thought that I have overcome about this is that SM is different from the examples that you gave. In magazines or TV, you assume that is going to be filled with "non-real" people (esthetic surgeries...), but at the end of the day, you will be surrounded by people like you.

At parties, school, or at the beach, yes you can find some perfect people, but the vast majority are going to be just normal people like you.

SM is different for that, you are comparing every nuance of you with an adulterated version of normal people (just people like you, not famous people). Personally, SM makes me feel that everybody except me has an ideal life and I know that's not true.

I don't like the "social" aspect of social media, I like the "media" part though. I like to follow photographers, use to follow some type of hobby, but not to see people's life.

Edit: typo

As for Hacker News, there is https://hackernewsletter.com/ that sends you mail of the best articles on startups, technology, programming, and more. All links are curated by hand from Hacker News. Join 60,000+ other subscribers and don't miss another week.

They also offer daily mails, but I'd say avoid it.