Quitting social media and the news are some of the best lifestyle changes I've made in my life. Both present constant feeds of "stuff" in ways that make the consumer think it's important. As a result, the consumer does what corporations and businesses want most: they just keep consuming and looking for more to consume. For me, 99% of stuff on social media and the news is simply not worth any time, so while I never had issues with depression or anxiety or things like that, it was a pointless waste of my time and focus. Nowadays I do way more interesting things and enjoy the moment way more. I imagine for people who _do_ suffer from anxiety, etc due to social media, the effects would be even more significant.
Exactly how I feel. Social media is robbing people blind (of their time). I also enjoy knowing that I'm not a free marketing resource for companies. Maybe I'm just one potential data point, but it feels good to know I'm not "feeding the machine".
Not the OP, but I don't consider HN to be in the same category as say, facebook, CNN, twitter, anything with a feed for a few reasons. One is the lack of algorithms and dark patterns shoveling engagement-bait towards our way. Upvoted content, while not always pristine, tends to be better quality on average. Two, while HN is a great spot for "tech news", it pretty rarely has the "if it bleeds it leads" shock-bait type of articles that the alphabet networks do.
Lastly, this is a little of a life hack, but in the mornings I tend to glance once at the top 3 HN headlines; if there's no major "news-news" (ie not tech news) in the top three slots, then it's pretty safe to say that nothing historic like September 11th happened that day. It's a pretty peaceful way of checking that the world's continuing to keep on spinning. :)
I also don’t consider HN to be in the same category as Twitter and Facebook. Another reason for this, on top of those you mention, is because identity is very weak here. I don’t have any persistent relationship with any HN commenters - I have no idea who you are or if I’ve replied to you before! That cuts out a lot of social dynamics that breed long-term feuding behaviour on other platforms.
> One is the lack of algorithms and dark patterns shoveling engagement-bait towards our way
HN front-page is certainly algorithm driven, it might not be individualized, but stories that displease the algorithm are down-weighted which, in effect, is a tacit promotion of stories the algorithm chooses not to penalize.
> it pretty rarely has the "if it bleeds it leads" shock-bait type of articles that the alphabet networks do.
I don't agree. HN stories are often baity, inflammatory, and contentious, it is not uncommon to see dang warning the comment section to keep things civil. The type of stories that hit HN aren't always the type we see in the wider media, but the level of toxicity is on par with every other social media site, if only mitigated by careful and rigorous moderation.
I don't, nor do I consider it social media. I'm aware that we're socially interacting through the medium of HN, but when I say social media I mean things like twitter or instagram; I hope the meaning is clear. The reason I don't consider HN news is because I just see HN as just a link aggregator. By news I mean things like Fox News
> If you could help me quit the news I would appreciate it.
Move to an authoritarian country, like China. Seriously.
If you live in a democracy, news is pretty important for informing you for performing your civic responsibilities and exerting your influence on the political system. If your influence is literally zero, then there's no point. In places like that, there's even a self-preservation incentive for disengagement, because engagement can be dangerous if it conflicts with the authorities.
I don't want to speak for silicon2401, but at least for me, cold turkey worked fine. But we need to be clear about what needs to be quit. It's any and all news. Consumption of information is important for various reasons, if for nothing else then to satisfy basic intellectual curiosity. But you need to be judicious about where it is coming from and how often you spend your time consuming it, along with the extent to which that consumption is interactive.
So no 24 hour cable news channels. No algorithmic content feeds. No consuming news through Facebook or Google. I've never been on Twitter, but I imagine it isn't much better and you should quit it if you currently have an account there. Don't just try to stay away or use an app to block it based on time of day. Delete your account and put the site on your home firewall if you have.
Then proceed to consume from healthier. The most obvious is books. Read as many and as often as you can. After that, I still think YouTube channels or something similar on an equivalent platform can still be useful, but you have to be careful. Turn off auto-play. Turn off watch and search history. Don't use the algorithmic suggestion feeds. Block them via custom uBlock rules if necessary. Just ignore them if you can. Subscribe to your trusted channels and let them make word of mouth recommendations for other channels. That is a perfectly adequate level of discoverability. For me, I stick to DIY home improvement, PC and homelab building, car detailing, weight lifting, and some animal information channels. That's it. No current events or culture war topics. Nobody that yells or gets emotional in their videos. After that, blogs.
There is where Hacker News is still useful. You can discover quality blogs. They'll be repeatedly linked to here, rise to the top, and not be causing long arguments and flame wars. Facebook honestly used to be useful for the same purpose. But there is always a balance between discovering useful sources of new information and time spent getting sucked into long arguments and rabbit-holing yourself with outrage bait. At some point, Facebook became not enough of the former and too much of the latter. Hacker News hasn't reached that point yet, at least for me. When it does, I will leave Hacker News as well. Meanwhile, since I bookmarked the highest-quality blogs that consistently show up here, I'll just start going straight to the source.
A few key reasons I don't think Hacker News is that bad yet include the comparatively small user base, somewhat of an industry focus, active and consistent moderation that is fair and well-explained, and no personalization. Everyone sees the same list of links. The list is still algorithmically sorted, but since the algorithm is largely just upvote count and recency and isn't personalized, I don't find it that bad. At least not yet.
But now it seems that hacker news is shadow banning me so I’m just going to stop hacker news as well. (I am posting too fast????)
What’s worse than having an addiction then having someone else control your addiction? So that’s just not useful to my well-being. And I think also it enables a fear of missing out.
> What’s worse than having an addiction then having someone else control your addiction?
That's actually a great way to summarize my views on social media/news. It's letting yourself have an addiction, which only corporation XYZ can satisfy at the cost of at least your time, but often even money, energy, or well-being as well.
Here's one more tip from my experience: if you think you need to know something, go out and do your own research based on action. Don't just watch Yahoo Finance videos every day. Question your lifestyle, and if you're not sure of your financial habits, do some research. Maybe learn how to invest for retirement, or check in on how your investments are doing if you've already started. If you hear bad things about the economy, what change is that going to make on your life? Are you concerned that you're spending too much? If so, then take a look at your budget, do some research on the current state of the economy, and then assess what your budget should be starting tomorrow. Don't just passively sit there endlessly consuming news. Leave it alone, and just come back to it if you have a specific use case that it serves.
> I don't want to speak for silicon2401, but at least for me, cold turkey worked fine. But we need to be clear about what needs to be quit. It's any and all news. Consumption of information is important for various reasons, if for nothing else then to satisfy basic intellectual curiosity. But you need to be judicious about where it is coming from and how often you spend your time consuming it, along with the extent to which that consumption is interactive.
Funny enough, I couldn't have expressed my own opinion better myself. I couldn't agree more.
> So no 24 hour cable news channels. No algorithmic content feeds. No consuming news through Facebook or Google. I've never been on Twitter, but I imagine it isn't much better and you should quit it if you currently have an account there. Don't just try to stay away or use an app to block it based on time of day. Delete your account and put the site on your home firewall if you have.
I agree this is necessary if one can't stop myself. My approach is (I use hckrnews.com for HN) if I want to see whether there's anything interesting on HN, I load it up and scan the current page. I click whatever's interesting, maybe check for replies if I've commented recently. That's it. No scrolling or going to previous pages. With this approach I can still benefit from the genuinely useful info and discussions that sometimes get posted here, without falling into the trap of scrolling forever. Otherwise I do completely avoid news
> Then proceed to consume from healthier. The most obvious is books. Read as many and as often as you can. After that, I still think YouTube channels or something similar on an equivalent platform can still be useful, but you have to be careful. Turn off auto-play. Turn off watch and search history. Don't use the algorithmic suggestion feeds. Block them via custom uBlock rules if necessary. Just ignore them if you can. Subscribe to your trusted channels and let them make word of mouth recommendations for other channels. That is a perfectly adequate level of discoverability. For me, I stick to DIY home improvement, PC and homelab building, car detailing, weight lifting, and some animal information channels. That's it. No current events or culture war topics. Nobody that yells or gets emotional in their videos. After that, blogs.
Also agree with this. It's actually crazy that once I put effort into consuming content with purpose, I realized how painfully boring most content is. Most of Netflix is boring, most of youtube is boring, most of reddit is boring. After years of too much social media, watching too much youtube, reading too much reddit, reading a book or watching a movie that I found through looking for specific things I enjoy (rather than what a feed or algorithm suggests) was unbelievably engrossing. I thought I didn't enjoy reading or movies anymore, but it was actually that I developed a terrible habit of scrolling and hoping something good would eventually come my way, much like gambling. I actually read a great article on HN sometime in the past year (actually 2y ago, how time flies) that fits perfectly here:
> My understanding is it’s the little thrill your brain gets from the possibility of finding something super interesting. That’s the addicting piece. The gambling piece of it.
> I read (or more likely heard on a podcast) about an experiment with mice and a food dispensing button. In one case, the button reliably dispensed food every time it was pressed. In the other case, sometimes the button wouldn’t work. The mice with the reliable button didn’t do anything odd. Whenever they were hungry, they would hit the button for some food. The mice with the unreliable button however would repeatedly hit the button, and they ended up being overweight.
> My feeling is that if EVERYTHING on something like HN was super interesting, we’d only be here when we were up for some interesting reads. But the fact is, not everything is. But the possi...
> If you could help me quit the news I would appreciate it.
If you find yourself actively consuming news, do something else. Physically get up and go for a walk, watch a movie, cook something, do some sit ups, take a nap, whatever. One thing I did when I was breaking my social media habit is to literally just do nothing. Very likely you'll feel bored or not know what else to do with yourself, which is good. That's where you start putting in the work to build a new, healthier habit, like a hobby or exercise or something.
> But here you are on HackerNEWS so maybe I am asking the wrong person for help?
I comment based on my own definitions, and I don't consider HN to be news. By news I mean newspapers, news companies like NBC, etc. HN is just a well-curated link aggregator, and I check it for interesting links or useful information, not with the intention of learning some latest update (which is part of what I consider to be news)
The tide on mental health seems to have turned to the extent that it's gone from being something we don't speak about, to being used as a catchall for, well, just having a reasonable and balanced life.
Doomscrolling is just not that useful when you compare it to like, basically anything else you could be doing with the time, like exercising, reading a book, tidying around the house, just relaxing with your thoughts, etc.
The logical extension of constantly doing stupid stuff (like eating bad food, not exercising, not having a fulfilling life) is indeed physical or mental health problems.
The answer is just to take a step back and examine your life. Are you spending your time doing things you want to do, or are you being driven around on autopilot?
Heroin isn't that useful for people not in acute physical pain, but it's addictive.
> The answer is just to take a step back and examine your life. Are you spending your time doing things you want to do, or are you being driven around on autopilot?
You can say things like this to heroin addicts, but the first important thing is keeping them from leaving to get more heroin. After they're clean, they might find this sort of introspection to be a reasonable substitute.
There's acute mental pain, heroin numbs that too, but you're right.
That kinda thinking, the new "you're wasting your time on Facebook, go read a book" is just the old puritan "get to work loser". Literally, one of the oldest scripts in the docs to get you to work harder for the man. Damn him.
If you're brain is too tired to do anything but watch cartoons or play video games, or just fart around and not do anything, then that's your god-given right and you don't even have to be tired to do that.
Facebook gives us social connections and those are critical for humans. Far more important than reading a book or going for a walk.
From the perspective of the pharma industry, one good outcome of the public consumption of more of this corporate social media is increased sales of antidepressants.
I do recognize that shutting off the news and events of the world can definitely increase one's emotional well being. Part of being a social citizen is being aware of, learning, and acting on knowledge.
My main issue with this and many similar articles is the use of the generic term 'social media'. The corporate, government, AI manipulated social media platforms mentioned in the article are very different from the human focused free social media many of us have moved to. I regularly tell people that I love social media but not most of the platform social media most people are only aware of.
The news though, how much and how far? The news is just gossip if you think about it. So isn't talking to your neighbor the same thing as the news? Do I really need to know about a flood in Pakistan who I live in the United States?
You are right. You are here on HN because you probably are discerning of the kind of news that might actually be useful to enhancing your understanding of our world to help you navigate it.
This is true for me. HackerNews seems to combine both of these triggers in a subversive way to keep me coming back. It is not about the points for me, but the interaction. I do not care about down votes, just any human interaction is fine with me. Disturbing, sad.
Definitely. In the same way Twitter/Facebook/Instagram's algorithms catches regular people's attention (celebrities pictures here and there, clickbait titles, etc.), HN does it in an equivalent way (as a developer I don't like superfluous BS, HN gives none; I like clean design, HN provides that; etc.).
The "HN algorithm" (or even the lack of it) does catch my attention.
As well as being depressing, social media is a total time suck that provides zero productivity. It is a dumpster of dross that should be set alight. The most terrible organization for this is clearly Facebook or whatever their latest name they try to hide under is. Zuck has a lot to answer for. A lot.
Disclaimer: Meta employee but speaking only for myself.
I like to think of media to the brain like food to the body.
Most of us don't have the resources to gather our own raw news/info so we outsource this to others, just like most of us don't grow our own food but outsource to others.
Good stimulating media is mentally nourishing like good food is physically nourishing. But a lot of the media out there, social and otherwise is junk. Like junk food, occasionally good for fun but not a constant diet.
Many know how to evaluate the healthiness of food. But many don't have the critical thinking and evaluation skills needed to evaluate the healthiness of media and to ensure a "balanced diet", and developing or teaching these skills something we should be doing more of.
I hear ya, and use the same analogy myself when talking about media, specifically social media. But quantity of media consumed doesn't necessarily make it junk. The quality makes it junk. An athlete needs a lot of calories and tend to obtain those calories from high quality sources. A business executive needs a lot of information. A principal investigator needs a lot of information. Both tend to obtain high quality information. The problem I have with social media compared to other forms, is the slew of low (very low) quality of information. This junk info isn't just present - it is directed towards individuals for the sake of increased user interaction. The revenue model of social media requires gluttony, and its easiest to overindulge on junk.
As for the "many people" aspect... That's very subjective and in the context of social media junk food, it is far too many. A balanced media diet, in my opinion, is composed of very little social media.
>But many don't have the critical thinking and evaluation skills needed to evaluate the healthiness of media and to ensure a "balanced diet", and developing or teaching these skills something we should be doing more of.
It sure doesn't help when it's not in the interest of junk food and social media companies (I'm looking at your employer) to engage in these practices. That sentiment is in stark contrast of the need to convince people to use a product, and then keep them hooked once they're in/eating.
> Like junk food, occasionally good for fun but not a constant diet.
I think that's correct, but in this case Facebook is McDonald's. It's possible to "eat" reasonably well at each, but it's very difficult to go to either multiple times a day and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
A reminder that taking your daily dose of digital drugs like Facebook™, Twitter™, Instagram™, TikTok™, etc is not very good for the mind and only gives you symptoms such as being addicted to infinite doom-scrolling as designed by the creators, involved 24/7 with the outrage machine with brainless parrots reposting or retweeting the same manufactured content and manipulating the discussion and also demoralises what is real and unreal; especially when all of them have an algorithm dictating what is seen and unseen.
I know what you are thinking and I get it. It's extremely difficult to leave for good and delete your account(s). The second best way to avoid it is to delete the app(s) or turn off notifications and log out of all of them.
If you can handle a week away from it all, then you are on your way to your first step to changing and breaking the addiction.
This is purely anecdotal, but recently I switched from the official Twitter app to a third party offering (Tweetbot specifically) because I was starting to feel like the algorithmic offerings were overtaking the people I actually follow. Third-party apps are, in most cases, just a reverse chronological list of tweets. New tweets load in, you scroll to the top of the list, and that’s it: you’ve read all the tweets.
The first thing I noticed was that I would open the app after a few hours away and have 1000+ new tweets, which made me realise I was following far too many accounts. Why am I following my network provider on Twitter?
Now I feel I have a much healthier relationship with Twitter. I open it a few times per day, I see if anything interesting has happened, and then I close the app. There are no tricks to keep me scrolling.
I think the main difference is that scrolling up to view newer content has an end, while scrolling down to view older content essentially doesn’t. I would like to see that approach tried in more third-party clients—primarily Reddit.
I only use Twitter on the web, so no experience in the app. I have it set to display my feed in chronological order. Recently it reverted to the default algorithm feed without me knowing. I was seeing all sorts of toxic and hateful posts. Most were from followers of followers without the tweet being liked or retweeted.
I hated it. It took me a while to realize I was no longer in chronological mode. Once I switched back, all the bullshit disappeared. This confirmed for me that algorithms on social media are slowly destroying society.
I use the Choqok client[0] which also just does reverse chronological. The killer feature to me though, is that it remembers what tweets you've read. So I usually just scroll down to where I was up to last time and start reading up[1] - clicking on anything interesting to investigate further in my browser[2]. It's the only client I've found with that feature. It's a bit clunky in places otherwise, but that alone keeps me with it.
[1] I don't follow a huge number of people, and also shy away from "prolific" tweeters so my number of tweets per day is not huge. I really treat it like an RSS feel TBH.
[2] I also use the Invidition browser add-on to redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance - so much cleaner.
That's been my strategy as well, smaller focused subreddit's and instagram only following a few accounts and hashtag's I'm interested in. No influencers or celeb's. I've been FAR healthier since I started that 5 months ago. I'll likely never go back.
Another purely anecdotal comment, but I came off (as in just stopped opening) Facebook about 4 years ago. I missed it for about 2 weeks; it was very habitual to just open Facebook when you think you need something to do. But honestly, it was such a great decision. I found it so hard not to get sucked in to stupid arguments and comments ("hey look! here's actual evidence that disproves this" - followed by a 15 comment argument...) which I then kept coming back to and ended up really draining. I can't imagine how horrendous it's been over the last few years (politics, pandemic, etc).
I mostly dialled out of Twitter as well - I'll still check some accounts occasionally, but I gave up on the timeline. I'd be excited to try a Twitter without bot amplification and (perhaps?!) some poster accountability.
I still enjoy Instagram. It's easy to tailor that to things I want to see - cats, watches, denim - and I can avoid the comments. I'd hate to been a teen with instagram though. I can imagine you could end up feeling very inadequate pretty quickly.
Man, the Internet is a funny thing. On one hand it's so great. On the other- what a disaster. I guess it's like everything, you gotta find the balance that works for you and just keep an eye that it stays balanced.
People who get into arguments on Facebook seem to have lower EQ. They feel impossibly itchy, and they have to scratch that itch. They cannot hold back emotionally. They have to do something.
These people are at the disadvantage in the modern world and need EQ training asap.
Honestly, I can same the same thing for Hacker News, or whatever website you find yourself habitually visiting. If you are sitting at a computer or phone with nothing in particular to do, do you immediately start to go to certain sites? It's worth taking a week or two off from those sites (or relegating them to one day a week) and seeing what changes. Sometimes it's like a mental fog lifting. When you don't have something you're reflexively doing, you start to think about what you actually want to be doing.
To take this further, it is worth taking time off from habitual actions in general. In my case: taking time off of alcohol lead to now only having a drink a few times a year; even taking a day off from a videogame helps break the dopamine cycle and I am then more-free to make decisions about my time; and going longer without food helps me eat healthier, feel better (reducing inflammation and acid reflux, notably), and not waste food.
> I still enjoy Instagram. It's easy to tailor that to things I want to see
I was 100% with you on this up until a few months ago. When they made their big push for Reels, everything went to shit. Now my feed is full of barely dressed women dancing despite me following no accounts of that nature; I guess for not much reason other than being an 18-34 yo male? I’m not morally opposed by any stretch, but it does make me sort of scared to open the app on the train.
I’ve tried following a few hashtags for stuff I’m interesting in (pixel/other digital art, architecture, fancy food), and while some good stuff is surfaced there’s so much hashtag stuffing going on that many of the posts are just unrelated self-promotion.
Like Twitter, every few posts there’s an algorithmically suggested post from someone I don’t follow. There’s seemingly no option to turn this off; only opt out for 30 days.
In the space of this year Instagram has gone from being the only social network I felt I had a reasonable amount of control over to the one I like using second least (least of course being Facebook itself).
I have a friend who quit facebook, so our mutual friends start writing me on facebook instead to "tell him this and that" and now I'm his secretary that has to relay all information back and forth.
IMO it's not just break from social media, but break from digital exposure really improves mental health. I can't do it often, but love spending days without it.
We see that social media negatively affects mental health, at the same time there is a movement to enshrine social media into our lives as public utilities and a human right. How do we resolve this incongruity? Certainly, there is a lot of money at stake in this question.
The assumption seems to be that not the social media in itself is causing this, but rather the way that they are run. Fostering "engagement" (read: addiction) and "providing shareholder value" (read: constant exposure to ads in some form or another) are both things that a public utility wouldn't have incentives to do.
I'm not saying I fully agree with this (I partially do, but I'm skeptic that it would "magically" just work) but that seems to be the assumption.
Another anecdote: I felt my mental health declining from being sucked into "academic Twitter", which frequently devolves into unnecessary soapboxing in response to preprints or journal articles. I unfollowed all humans and now only follow institutional accounts. It really helped me.
Sure, at this point we all know social media is like any other drug. And we love drugs and keep doing them, the wars on drugs continue to be spectacular failures. I don't think legislating or shaming the companies themselves will help. What's needed is finding something else to fill our lives and that's difficult, much easier to complain about your drugs killing you.
Don't stop at social media. Start to really look to moderate all of your screen time. Honestly everything in your life, but screens is a good start.
The average American spends 11 hours on a screen. That's 65% of their life not including sleeping (although we're fighting for that too). We're in the attention economy.
The messages you're seeing about how to live your life, the ads being implanted in your head, the mindless entertainment keeping you from living your life.
Not to say don't participate in these, because they are fun. But do moderate everything you do that includes a screen.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadLastly, this is a little of a life hack, but in the mornings I tend to glance once at the top 3 HN headlines; if there's no major "news-news" (ie not tech news) in the top three slots, then it's pretty safe to say that nothing historic like September 11th happened that day. It's a pretty peaceful way of checking that the world's continuing to keep on spinning. :)
HN front-page is certainly algorithm driven, it might not be individualized, but stories that displease the algorithm are down-weighted which, in effect, is a tacit promotion of stories the algorithm chooses not to penalize.
> it pretty rarely has the "if it bleeds it leads" shock-bait type of articles that the alphabet networks do.
I don't agree. HN stories are often baity, inflammatory, and contentious, it is not uncommon to see dang warning the comment section to keep things civil. The type of stories that hit HN aren't always the type we see in the wider media, but the level of toxicity is on par with every other social media site, if only mitigated by careful and rigorous moderation.
Very inspiring
But here you are on HackerNEWS so maybe I am asking the wrong person for help?
Move to an authoritarian country, like China. Seriously.
If you live in a democracy, news is pretty important for informing you for performing your civic responsibilities and exerting your influence on the political system. If your influence is literally zero, then there's no point. In places like that, there's even a self-preservation incentive for disengagement, because engagement can be dangerous if it conflicts with the authorities.
So no 24 hour cable news channels. No algorithmic content feeds. No consuming news through Facebook or Google. I've never been on Twitter, but I imagine it isn't much better and you should quit it if you currently have an account there. Don't just try to stay away or use an app to block it based on time of day. Delete your account and put the site on your home firewall if you have.
Then proceed to consume from healthier. The most obvious is books. Read as many and as often as you can. After that, I still think YouTube channels or something similar on an equivalent platform can still be useful, but you have to be careful. Turn off auto-play. Turn off watch and search history. Don't use the algorithmic suggestion feeds. Block them via custom uBlock rules if necessary. Just ignore them if you can. Subscribe to your trusted channels and let them make word of mouth recommendations for other channels. That is a perfectly adequate level of discoverability. For me, I stick to DIY home improvement, PC and homelab building, car detailing, weight lifting, and some animal information channels. That's it. No current events or culture war topics. Nobody that yells or gets emotional in their videos. After that, blogs.
There is where Hacker News is still useful. You can discover quality blogs. They'll be repeatedly linked to here, rise to the top, and not be causing long arguments and flame wars. Facebook honestly used to be useful for the same purpose. But there is always a balance between discovering useful sources of new information and time spent getting sucked into long arguments and rabbit-holing yourself with outrage bait. At some point, Facebook became not enough of the former and too much of the latter. Hacker News hasn't reached that point yet, at least for me. When it does, I will leave Hacker News as well. Meanwhile, since I bookmarked the highest-quality blogs that consistently show up here, I'll just start going straight to the source.
A few key reasons I don't think Hacker News is that bad yet include the comparatively small user base, somewhat of an industry focus, active and consistent moderation that is fair and well-explained, and no personalization. Everyone sees the same list of links. The list is still algorithmically sorted, but since the algorithm is largely just upvote count and recency and isn't personalized, I don't find it that bad. At least not yet.
But now it seems that hacker news is shadow banning me so I’m just going to stop hacker news as well. (I am posting too fast????)
What’s worse than having an addiction then having someone else control your addiction? So that’s just not useful to my well-being. And I think also it enables a fear of missing out.
That's actually a great way to summarize my views on social media/news. It's letting yourself have an addiction, which only corporation XYZ can satisfy at the cost of at least your time, but often even money, energy, or well-being as well.
Here's one more tip from my experience: if you think you need to know something, go out and do your own research based on action. Don't just watch Yahoo Finance videos every day. Question your lifestyle, and if you're not sure of your financial habits, do some research. Maybe learn how to invest for retirement, or check in on how your investments are doing if you've already started. If you hear bad things about the economy, what change is that going to make on your life? Are you concerned that you're spending too much? If so, then take a look at your budget, do some research on the current state of the economy, and then assess what your budget should be starting tomorrow. Don't just passively sit there endlessly consuming news. Leave it alone, and just come back to it if you have a specific use case that it serves.
Funny enough, I couldn't have expressed my own opinion better myself. I couldn't agree more.
> So no 24 hour cable news channels. No algorithmic content feeds. No consuming news through Facebook or Google. I've never been on Twitter, but I imagine it isn't much better and you should quit it if you currently have an account there. Don't just try to stay away or use an app to block it based on time of day. Delete your account and put the site on your home firewall if you have.
I agree this is necessary if one can't stop myself. My approach is (I use hckrnews.com for HN) if I want to see whether there's anything interesting on HN, I load it up and scan the current page. I click whatever's interesting, maybe check for replies if I've commented recently. That's it. No scrolling or going to previous pages. With this approach I can still benefit from the genuinely useful info and discussions that sometimes get posted here, without falling into the trap of scrolling forever. Otherwise I do completely avoid news
> Then proceed to consume from healthier. The most obvious is books. Read as many and as often as you can. After that, I still think YouTube channels or something similar on an equivalent platform can still be useful, but you have to be careful. Turn off auto-play. Turn off watch and search history. Don't use the algorithmic suggestion feeds. Block them via custom uBlock rules if necessary. Just ignore them if you can. Subscribe to your trusted channels and let them make word of mouth recommendations for other channels. That is a perfectly adequate level of discoverability. For me, I stick to DIY home improvement, PC and homelab building, car detailing, weight lifting, and some animal information channels. That's it. No current events or culture war topics. Nobody that yells or gets emotional in their videos. After that, blogs.
Also agree with this. It's actually crazy that once I put effort into consuming content with purpose, I realized how painfully boring most content is. Most of Netflix is boring, most of youtube is boring, most of reddit is boring. After years of too much social media, watching too much youtube, reading too much reddit, reading a book or watching a movie that I found through looking for specific things I enjoy (rather than what a feed or algorithm suggests) was unbelievably engrossing. I thought I didn't enjoy reading or movies anymore, but it was actually that I developed a terrible habit of scrolling and hoping something good would eventually come my way, much like gambling. I actually read a great article on HN sometime in the past year (actually 2y ago, how time flies) that fits perfectly here:
> My understanding is it’s the little thrill your brain gets from the possibility of finding something super interesting. That’s the addicting piece. The gambling piece of it.
> I read (or more likely heard on a podcast) about an experiment with mice and a food dispensing button. In one case, the button reliably dispensed food every time it was pressed. In the other case, sometimes the button wouldn’t work. The mice with the reliable button didn’t do anything odd. Whenever they were hungry, they would hit the button for some food. The mice with the unreliable button however would repeatedly hit the button, and they ended up being overweight.
> My feeling is that if EVERYTHING on something like HN was super interesting, we’d only be here when we were up for some interesting reads. But the fact is, not everything is. But the possi...
If you find yourself actively consuming news, do something else. Physically get up and go for a walk, watch a movie, cook something, do some sit ups, take a nap, whatever. One thing I did when I was breaking my social media habit is to literally just do nothing. Very likely you'll feel bored or not know what else to do with yourself, which is good. That's where you start putting in the work to build a new, healthier habit, like a hobby or exercise or something.
> But here you are on HackerNEWS so maybe I am asking the wrong person for help?
I comment based on my own definitions, and I don't consider HN to be news. By news I mean newspapers, news companies like NBC, etc. HN is just a well-curated link aggregator, and I check it for interesting links or useful information, not with the intention of learning some latest update (which is part of what I consider to be news)
Doomscrolling is just not that useful when you compare it to like, basically anything else you could be doing with the time, like exercising, reading a book, tidying around the house, just relaxing with your thoughts, etc.
The logical extension of constantly doing stupid stuff (like eating bad food, not exercising, not having a fulfilling life) is indeed physical or mental health problems.
The answer is just to take a step back and examine your life. Are you spending your time doing things you want to do, or are you being driven around on autopilot?
> The answer is just to take a step back and examine your life. Are you spending your time doing things you want to do, or are you being driven around on autopilot?
You can say things like this to heroin addicts, but the first important thing is keeping them from leaving to get more heroin. After they're clean, they might find this sort of introspection to be a reasonable substitute.
That kinda thinking, the new "you're wasting your time on Facebook, go read a book" is just the old puritan "get to work loser". Literally, one of the oldest scripts in the docs to get you to work harder for the man. Damn him.
If you're brain is too tired to do anything but watch cartoons or play video games, or just fart around and not do anything, then that's your god-given right and you don't even have to be tired to do that.
Facebook gives us social connections and those are critical for humans. Far more important than reading a book or going for a walk.
A rather basic take, I'd wager, or if you prefer it, a really superficial analysis, but ok.
The developed world is facing a real mental health crisis and still failing to address it.
My main issue with this and many similar articles is the use of the generic term 'social media'. The corporate, government, AI manipulated social media platforms mentioned in the article are very different from the human focused free social media many of us have moved to. I regularly tell people that I love social media but not most of the platform social media most people are only aware of.
I got mostly addicted to it to gain 15k karma points in one year.
The "HN algorithm" (or even the lack of it) does catch my attention.
I like to think of media to the brain like food to the body.
Most of us don't have the resources to gather our own raw news/info so we outsource this to others, just like most of us don't grow our own food but outsource to others.
Good stimulating media is mentally nourishing like good food is physically nourishing. But a lot of the media out there, social and otherwise is junk. Like junk food, occasionally good for fun but not a constant diet.
Many know how to evaluate the healthiness of food. But many don't have the critical thinking and evaluation skills needed to evaluate the healthiness of media and to ensure a "balanced diet", and developing or teaching these skills something we should be doing more of.
As for the "many people" aspect... That's very subjective and in the context of social media junk food, it is far too many. A balanced media diet, in my opinion, is composed of very little social media.
And yes it's impossible to be substantial in a meme or short video or tweet. Like fast food -- the medium is inherently limiting.
It sure doesn't help when it's not in the interest of junk food and social media companies (I'm looking at your employer) to engage in these practices. That sentiment is in stark contrast of the need to convince people to use a product, and then keep them hooked once they're in/eating.
I think that's correct, but in this case Facebook is McDonald's. It's possible to "eat" reasonably well at each, but it's very difficult to go to either multiple times a day and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
A reminder that taking your daily dose of digital drugs like Facebook™, Twitter™, Instagram™, TikTok™, etc is not very good for the mind and only gives you symptoms such as being addicted to infinite doom-scrolling as designed by the creators, involved 24/7 with the outrage machine with brainless parrots reposting or retweeting the same manufactured content and manipulating the discussion and also demoralises what is real and unreal; especially when all of them have an algorithm dictating what is seen and unseen.
I know what you are thinking and I get it. It's extremely difficult to leave for good and delete your account(s). The second best way to avoid it is to delete the app(s) or turn off notifications and log out of all of them.
If you can handle a week away from it all, then you are on your way to your first step to changing and breaking the addiction.
The first thing I noticed was that I would open the app after a few hours away and have 1000+ new tweets, which made me realise I was following far too many accounts. Why am I following my network provider on Twitter?
Now I feel I have a much healthier relationship with Twitter. I open it a few times per day, I see if anything interesting has happened, and then I close the app. There are no tricks to keep me scrolling.
I think the main difference is that scrolling up to view newer content has an end, while scrolling down to view older content essentially doesn’t. I would like to see that approach tried in more third-party clients—primarily Reddit.
I hated it. It took me a while to realize I was no longer in chronological mode. Once I switched back, all the bullshit disappeared. This confirmed for me that algorithms on social media are slowly destroying society.
[0] https://choqok.kde.org/
[1] I don't follow a huge number of people, and also shy away from "prolific" tweeters so my number of tweets per day is not huge. I really treat it like an RSS feel TBH.
[2] I also use the Invidition browser add-on to redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance - so much cleaner.
Now I'm not constantly bombarded with awful news at every opportunity. Just visit smaller subreddits more relevant to my interests.
I mostly dialled out of Twitter as well - I'll still check some accounts occasionally, but I gave up on the timeline. I'd be excited to try a Twitter without bot amplification and (perhaps?!) some poster accountability.
I still enjoy Instagram. It's easy to tailor that to things I want to see - cats, watches, denim - and I can avoid the comments. I'd hate to been a teen with instagram though. I can imagine you could end up feeling very inadequate pretty quickly.
Man, the Internet is a funny thing. On one hand it's so great. On the other- what a disaster. I guess it's like everything, you gotta find the balance that works for you and just keep an eye that it stays balanced.
These people are at the disadvantage in the modern world and need EQ training asap.
I was 100% with you on this up until a few months ago. When they made their big push for Reels, everything went to shit. Now my feed is full of barely dressed women dancing despite me following no accounts of that nature; I guess for not much reason other than being an 18-34 yo male? I’m not morally opposed by any stretch, but it does make me sort of scared to open the app on the train.
I’ve tried following a few hashtags for stuff I’m interesting in (pixel/other digital art, architecture, fancy food), and while some good stuff is surfaced there’s so much hashtag stuffing going on that many of the posts are just unrelated self-promotion.
Like Twitter, every few posts there’s an algorithmically suggested post from someone I don’t follow. There’s seemingly no option to turn this off; only opt out for 30 days.
In the space of this year Instagram has gone from being the only social network I felt I had a reasonable amount of control over to the one I like using second least (least of course being Facebook itself).
Using whatsapp, telegram or any other messaging app is also an option
I'm not saying I fully agree with this (I partially do, but I'm skeptic that it would "magically" just work) but that seems to be the assumption.
The average American spends 11 hours on a screen. That's 65% of their life not including sleeping (although we're fighting for that too). We're in the attention economy.
The messages you're seeing about how to live your life, the ads being implanted in your head, the mindless entertainment keeping you from living your life.
Not to say don't participate in these, because they are fun. But do moderate everything you do that includes a screen.