Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression

Re:Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression by eric_h on Saturday November 10, 2018 @02:17PM (#18422959)

If I hadn’t gotten mildly addicted to Twitter (with my fairly well curated list of people I’m following) I’d not have spent the ~700 bucks to start my naturalization process so that I will finally have the right to vote after 34 years living here as a permanent resident (well it’ll be 35 since naturalization takes a while).

I realized that my running joke of the last 18 years: “I can’t vote, but at least I don’t have to do jury duty” is recklessly irresponsible and I will do the research and be an informed voter in every election for the rest of my life.

[edit: admittedly this was largely inspired by indisputable things that happened a little more than 2 years ago and the following aftermath, but my twitter feed was my window to them - I do not watch cable news]

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Re:Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression by rtpg on Saturday November 10, 2018 @10:41PM (#18424914)

Yeah I think that Twitter has been a major gateway drug to remember that Politics Matter.

But after you've reached that point, Twitter becomes the place where you read the same take 20 times over. Then you get the push notification from whatever news app you have installed on your phone.

There's a huge amount of diminishing returns to following journalists on Twitter if you're already convinced that stuff is important. But it sure helped to establish the feeling that everything is on fire (and.... kind of always have been but right now's not great)

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