The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

Anecdotal: Stopping commenting on reddit reduced emotional stress significantly. Reddit is one of those "social" anti-social circles where you can't afford to be on the "wrong side of argument" and every discussion can quickly spiral out.

Same with stopping replyhing to HN. I just downvote and upvote. Emotional stress significantly reduced.

but then.... how did you say this!?!?!! and how will you answer this question!?!???!???!

>Same with stopping replyhing to HN. I just downvote and upvote.

I can’t really put my finger on why, but I don’t think I believe you.

Your comment is proof to the contrary. You are thus lying and everything you say or do is now severely tainted. I will now produce a seven-pronged argument for why exactly this type of behavior is the hidden root cause of climate change and why you should feel bad. (/s)

Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

I know the feeling, but I have to admit that people being obtuse helped me to take them and myself less serious. That said, there are better ways to foster that kind of experience.

Bring out the pitchforks!!

I think the trap is that many social platforms were genuinely fun, but then became a disaster

There's a correlation between being really obnoxious and continuing threads on HN or anywhere else.

Occasionally there are good real conversations where people are generally interested and curious but the most common are either marginally interested or very interested in worthless conflict.

Depends on what you do on Reddit.

Politics, relationships, those are not things to talk about. But being able to respond to major FOSS contributors, that I'll do.

There’s a few things that help:

- do not engage with the technically correct but missing the point people

- don’t check your threads if you posted something that the groupthink disagrees with

- don’t try to win arguments if you know you’re right

The number of replies I cut & paste to my notes archive far exceeds the amount of posts I actually make. I still find it valuable to work through my own thoughts to better prepare myself to have the same conversations in more impactful circumstances, but there are some things I just don't care enough about persuading the other person - or believe the other person is actually going to consider the words as carefully as I put them together.

I 100% knew a reply like this was coming :). So I kind of thank you for saying this...

> Depends on what you do on Reddit.

I agree to some extent, but even highly specialised / niche topics on dedicated subs are getting slammed by the "hivemind". I guess it's more apparent for non-us users, as we're not the target audience, but the political brigading is showing even on subs like space and ML related. Reddit is now very similar to ~2015-16 reddit when the-donald and other subs really peaked, just the other way around. 10/25 posts on all are bad orange man and bad space man related. The technology sub is a mess of weaponised autism. And then you get the same political bs coming from weird subs, like the cute pics sub, or the knitting sub suddenly having political submissions w/ 3k-6k upvotes, all saying the same thing.

It doesn't help that it is still the easiest "social network" to create accounts on, and bot on. With the advances in LLMs I sometimes truly can't say if an account is real or a bot. And I work in this space...

Procrastination Mode on HN (see links in footer) helps significantly. I wish I enabled it earlier, I just kept putting it off.

I can’t help but notice how all those points are centered around you being the bearer of truth and others being the source of dismay.

While these may be easy ways to avoid exposing yourself to sources of discomfort it might also not be a bad idea to learn how to deal with confrontation and dissonance in a productive manner.

Besides being contrarian, I am nothing if not that, I honestly think our society at large will benefit from learning how to deal constructively with opposing perspectives and mindsets - assuming we ever get to that point.

I used to edit Wikipedia and I was heavily involved in many, many disputes. And in fact, I would seek out disputes, even ones outside my topic area; it's not difficult to do on Wikipedia because there are entire notice boards where people go to have public disputes. We called them "dramaboards", especially the admins' disciplinary ones.

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.

While I ostensibly agree about learning how to deal constructively with opposing perspectives, I also don't think online discourse (main stream avenues) will ever be the place to learn or partake in those sorts of conversations. Even in smaller subreddits, your comments will be viewed by thousands of people, some of whom are explicitly there to troll or to argue in bad faith or even people literally having mental breakdowns. You also end up in situations where every reply is to a new person, so you're not really having a discourse with anyone just an amorphous entity. Look at things like "Godwin's law" or "Poe's law", for some long running beliefs/commentary on internet discourse.

> 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

Didn't know there was a term for this, good to know it wasn't just me seeing things. Witnessed this happen countless times while assisting with moderation on Discord. The only worse thing than the rules defending these people's behavior is when fellow moderators decide to cover for them too.

I don't think the hivemind thing can be solved so long as people can see each others' comments. But then it's difficult to have a social media site without that.

I've done the same with HN, somewhat. I log out by default, just to add a barrier between reading something and responding to it. Has to be something I really feel I must reply to or worth adding more information to, to make me log in.

> don’t try to win arguments if you know you’re right

Caveats:

- I can be wrong (sometimes need some pointing out)

- it is ok to post for the benefit of lurkers (inform others of fake news and such)

Re: "brinkers", this is where it's very useful to have a certain amount of mod discretion so that people who probe the fences like velociraptors in Jurassic Park eventually get banned for that. The downside is that it looks even more cliquey than it is.

Leaving Reddit has significantly improved my quality of life. Would recommend it to anyone.

The biggest problem on reddit is having both up- and down-votes. That allows the majority to effectively eliminate dissenting opinions on any topic it cares about by down-voting them to oblivion, and then pat itself on the back for the fact that everyone apparently agrees with it. Since it's possible to do that, some see it as an obligation and go at it with gusto, making it hard to have a conversation that strays outside the current-year party line.

Systems which only have up-votes/likes have their own issues, but at least not that one.

Along with don't check your threads, don't check your votes. I'm always struck by people saying "I don't know why I was downvoted for such-and-such." Where do they find the time to go back and check the votes on comments they made? I say the things I say and move on.

HN also has both, but the score is only visible to the person who commented. I think it's an improvement in this regard, but then I rarely have hivemind issues. What do you think about this?

This is so true and cathartic, and it has me wondering if sites are collecting the angry data I type in to inputs but don't submit. I'd LOVEEE to know what the stats are on posts that almost got posted.

I strongly prefer chronological sorting for discussions (and thus no voting). At least it gives all views a fair shot at being represented, and it's also easier to join later on.

I can confirm that deleting Instagram/Facebook has improved my QoL.

But I have a hard time ditching Reddit, I canceled accounts multiple times, yet at some point I need to discuss something for which there's only a subreddit online and I'm back at square one.

Yeah, majority of my comments never get submitted. I’ll type a reply, edit, challenge/research my assumptions, and then ask myself this it’s adding material value to the conversation that doesn’t need to be further explained/elaborated. Most often I’m content with having refined my thoughts on a topic and close tab without submitting. Kinda like work email chains pre-slack.