I haven’t been on Facebook for four years now and my life has been more liberating and happier. Facebook never made me happy. It made me have OCD to post random things all the time. Everyone I had on it was always posting how amazing their lives were, when it’s all just fake.
But I was reading somewhere how social media as a whole is really bad for people’s mental health and I wonder how people here feel about it ?
23 comments
The only social media I follow is Reddit
It doesn’t make me happy or unhappy, it’s just a tool I use to stay in light contact with a number of friends. I’ve moved around a lot and so there are quite a lot of people that I wouldn’t necessarily go and visit or have a long phone call with, but if they have a baby or get a new job or something I’m interested to know that and congratulate them.
The ads and news articles with inane comments are annoying but I’ve learned to just scroll past and not engage.
Can’t believe how much time I used to spend on it. Stopped everything for ages now I just have Reddit (which I never did before)
I don’t use any personal social media. I have a Facebook account (not under my real name) solely for buying and selling rare merchandise for a Swedish rock/metal band. If the selling didn’t happen on Facebook I wouldn’t have an account.
I help run a Twitter page for a football fanzine which I edit. It’s a cesspool and I keep my time on there to the absolute minimum.
I only have a Reddit page because it is anonymous.
I more use it for messenger than anything these days. I don’t find myself scrolling through it particularly often but my feed isn’t that bad even when i do.
Yeah. I never post anything. I also use the block feature to block people who bore me or post irritating things to my wall. I use it to see and keep up with people I like and find interesting.
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It’s good to see the people answering you so far are mainly people who don’t use it. How helpful.
Its useful for feeling like i’m in touch with people!
I rarely post & mostly pet/nature pics
I do ‘like’ posts from family & try to do little comments
I don’t mind Facebook. I’m not super active on it, mostly use it to look for stuff on Facebook Marketplace, post some photos of my family so my overseas relatives can see how we’re getting on, wish friends happy birthday (the ones I don’t regularly talk to) and see some life updates from those same friends.
I’ve been pretty militant about “unfollowing” people I just don’t really care about so my feed is mostly food pics from my Chinese relatives (always food pics) and family pics for my friends who now have kids, both of which I don’t mind.
I just think “good for them” when I see a Facebook post that shows someone is happy in life.
I can’t post there because you’re parents, grand parents, aunties, uncles, cousins and everyone from your school can see what you write.
It’s just so fake for that reason. It was only when I found this site like 10 days ago that it felt for the first time I have freedom to actually say what I’m thinking
Also I sometimes don’t think anyone realises that people my age have all left and it’s mostly just grannies sharing wordle
Feel much better since coming off it mid 2020. Also, fuck Facebook/Meta so came off Insta and Whatsapp too. No problems.
No lol. I’ve joined so many groups my news feed is filled with posts from those and I swear every single one is full of drama. Sometimes it’s fun to drop in with a random controversial comment, turn off notifications and go back later to go through all the wound up replies.
I rarely post anything these days. The percentage of my friends list that posts is also pretty small now.
I mainly use it to pick up on articles on things I’ve liked in the past and checking on smaller local businesses.
It used to be a laugh, but then everyone else got there. It hasn’t been the same since.
Facebook is a data stealing tool sold to us under the guise of ‘connectivity’. It’s the most vacuous and superficial platform which really doesn’t benefit us whatsoever. So in short – no it absolutely doesn’t make me happy!
Reddit is social media, and far worse IMO and IME.
My fb is very curated, though. I interact a lot (posts, comments, reacts) and deliberately follow wholesome or constructive accounts, while muting or blocking what I don’t want to see, including advertisers. The algorithm learns, and provides more of the stuff you tend to interact with.
Nope, it had the opposite effect on me.
I’ve never got along with facebook. I deleted my account ages ago (hardly used it anyway), meant to set up a new one to join a couple of groups and to use FB marketplace – and never really bothered. I found it annoying and kind of stressful anyway, and I don’t miss it in the slightest. I don’t miss the constant bombardment of rubbish and I don’t miss the drama.
At least it seems less unusual now for more people to feel that way. I used to get a lot of negative reactions when I said I wasn’t on facebook, or that it’s not my cup of tea.
These days I use Facebook like a community message board, my village has an active group page which is super handy for finding out about things that are going on.
I do use Instagram though, I like to keep up with what my friends are up to and see their pretty pictures. I’ve also curated my feed so I get recipes and restaurants, cool interior design, embroidery inspo and cute cats. Nothing that’s going to negatively impact my mental health.
I’m just going to say it: It depends on your sex. Social media taps into women’s nature so the negative effects are far more common for them.
Men don’t tend to get affected by much of it, but it can still happen. Also it’s not necessarily all fake, that’s kind of a cope in my opinion. It’s not like every single person on your FB friends list has an equally average life. Some will be destitute with drug habits – others will be wealthy and happy.
Messenger is very useful to me for group chats as a lot of my friends haven’t moved to WhatsApp yet. Facebook itself I may browse once a week, but it’s now ad infested anyway and the algorithm of what you see is utter wank.
I put the Facebook app on my phone once a year to say “thank you nana” on her happy birthday message to me. I then swiftly delete it for another year
I used to use it all the time but now i use it just for the messenger app which is an easy way of having group convos as well as private ones.
I’m 33 and I noticed a few years back that it didn’t seem for me anymore. There was a sudden influx of older people (like my parents age and older) and this seemed to coincide with younger people leaving for Instagram and Tiktok. I felt like suddenly I was too old for the newer SM sites and too young for FB. I stopped using it and haven’t looked back.
Before I left I was finding it a bit of a mixture of people trying to outdo each other by showing their perfect lives and lots of subtle bragging and trying to one up each other. It’s not good for mental health to compare yourself especially when none of this is real. I also used to find the bitching quite school like with the people making comments without naming who they were on about but knowing someone will tell them. Also found it disgusting the amount of people posting inappropriate pictures and videos of their children and Facebook repeatedly saying there was nothing wrong with photos of kids in baths or naked on the potty.
100% my mental health is better, Infact it was a bit of a surprise, I hadn’t actually realised that Faceache had affected me at all in myself, but it sapped my time and ebbed away at how I viewed myself, after I deleted it was a pleasant surprise how much better I felt.
I came off faceache about 3 years ago, and no surprise but I’ve never looked back. I definitely don’t feel like I’m missing out, I still see my friends or we message privately or in small WhatsApp groups.
I don’t care what people I don’t know are up to, friends of friends or even the people I only casually know, I also don’t care if all these people don’t know what I’m up to. I don’t feel like seeing their fab lives and I don’t feel like advertising my fab life to the masses.
let’s be honest it’s mostly all bollocks in the vague hope someone’s impressed, the sooner you stop comparing yourself and your life against Sarah’s up the rd, than the more a peace you feel with yourself.
Another plus is not being subject to all the utter crap that’s posted, I’m talking about all the memes and the misinformation and all the ‘debates’ and nonsense opinions people have. What a negative mental drain those awful Faceache groups are, the local area ones with there dog poo rants and masked racism.
No, I still have an account but I deleted the app and never login to the website, it’s just full of spam and adverts