A world that's designed to make you sad and angry

I deleted my Facebook account years ago. I stayed with Instagram and Twitter, thinking I could just follow people in tech or other interesting people that would expose me to interesting news, etc, but I always found myself getting sucked back in to political news and other negativity. There is so much negativity on Twitter. It feels like the one-liners cause more contention because we can just make a quip about the other tribe - take that! - and receive quick praise from our tribe. I can sincerely say that not visiting Twitter or Instagram anymore makes me happier. I never gained much of value from it, at least not anything I can't find elsewhere.

I can easily guess that the author and most of the commenters here are from USA. The reason is, to my experience, in &quot;governmentally undeveloped&#x2F;developing countries&quot;[1] like USA, Russia, Turkey and China, news mostly consist of bad things. However that&#x27;s not necessarily true for some European countries, especially Northern Europe.<p>I live in Estonia and most of the news here bear positive news, since we have proper social government and a good social justice here. For an example you can go to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.err.ee" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.err.ee</a> (English, although less news) and see for yourself. One other thing that are in these countries is that the top news are about politics, entertainment and sports and does not include much culture value.<p>In a distant past news could be good or bad, but now (in many countries) it feels like it&#x27;s usually either bad or distraction.<p>[1]: I just made that up, sorry.

&gt; I’m gonna stop reading the news, it’s too much stress for me.<p>While in college, I read the newspaper each and every day, cover to cover... from 100 years ago. (Microfiche... those were the days.)<p>Anyway, I found that all the same issues (drugs, abortion, corruption, race relations, etc) were discussed. With the same arguments on both sides.<p>It gave me a lot of perspective that my contemporaries didn’t have.<p>Highly recommend it.

These companies have such breathtaking contempt for human beings. Mind you that&#x27;s not that unusual for business.

I completely agree with you on almost all points (I don&#x27;t have a social media account either for the exact reasons you mentioned; dropped all of them like a hot potato when I read some of those social media experiment papers) except for this:<p>&gt; I’m gonna stop reading the news, it’s too much stress for me.<p>This I feel is actively dangerous. You _need_ to know what is going on out there. While I agree that most of the news counts as opinion (and is marked as such sometimes), you need to develop a skill which parses through the fluff and take just the facts into account. This might not be easy, but it is worth it.

IMO the saturation of ads in traditional media &#x2F; means dwarfs the scale of the current majors of social media. Not that I wish this to be a minimalization of their role of despair in modern society.<p>But the current standards of beauty, happiness, and success are a product of decades of tailoring by the traditional ad media and the businesses that use them to sell their kewpie dolls.<p>Needing things is central to producing consumer demand, and therefore drives GDP and the economy.

I only use Twitter and only follow a handful of researchers, not many of them are friends or coworkers. I also occasionally mute or unfollow people who share venomous content, no matter whether it&#x27;s right, left, or center-leaning. I also don&#x27;t consume too much news. Just a quick glance at the headlines and stay away from comments which are mostly hate-filled and idiotic.

Anybody remembers the tv series Columbo? Maybe this explains why he was always snooping around in beautiful mansions.

I had high hopes for WT Social (Wikimedia&#x27;s news &amp; social networking website), but from my experience it doesn&#x27;t work really well (yet). The concept looked good, though. They claim to have solved the issues (by design) mentioned in the article.

Very short, but I can appreciate a succinct and no-nonsense blog post.

i frankly cant live without social media, so i just try to balance my feed so i can see both side&#x27;s bullshit