this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
346 points (95.5% liked)
Technology
69347 readers
3424 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Anecdotal, but I can see this. Last year, I took a 2-3 months off of what I now call recreational internet use (e.g. keeping up with the news, forums, etc.), because my mental health and cognitive abilities have deteriorated a lot. The result wasn't just improved mood but also regaining cognitive skills that I thought I had lost forever. Brain fog also lessened. A year later now, and the improvements are stable and still there, even though I do use the internet recreationally again. It's still not where I used to be before, but it's a work-in-progress anyway.
I have a very similar experience as you, using the internet less as recreation and more as a tool definitely helped my mental health
How did you even do that, assuming you didn't prevent your usage of computers and smartphones altogether? Just sheer willpower?
Yeah, it was prevention - to my knowledge there wasn't a comparable internet-blocking feature in Android at the time. I have a dumb phone from way back that I switched to, and I shut off my smartphone. For desktop, it was primarily site blocking extensions like Block Site, and willpower to develop a habit. I'd still use the internet for things like banking and - since I was re-studying CLRS - SO and reference collections, but I trained myself to a hard cutoff of not using it besides the purposes I switch it back on for. The rest is on paper: my books are physically with me or loaded on an e-reader.
I should clarify that I had taken last year off to recover from burnout, and I was freelancing. I think that helped a lot with being able to detach for that long.
Shoutout reddit for banning me, they accidentally helped me pull myself out of a cycle of looking at news that pissed me off and arguing with strangers. Lemmys a lot better with it, reddits just filled with controversy algorithim and bot posts. It got me to delete X too, same problem since musk took over, miss the old agorithim, but its never coming back. (old reddit is dead too, gotta accept it, was fun af while it lasted)
When you get paid more based off engagement ofc mfs are going to be controversial, and ofc thats what they want since it keeps ppl on the app
That's good to hear since rage-baiting was becoming common on the platform. I didn't know Reddit banned people though. Do you mean banned form certain subreddits or from the whole platform?
The public freakout sub apparently, commented on an alt on a post with thousands of comments, and it was an auto perm ban for my 3 accounts for evading a ban, I was someone who liked commenting into the void, not getting replys on front page posts felt weirdly good. The comment that got me banned wasn't controversial, it was automatic and instant.
👀 that's insane. I guess moderation has become stricter for some reason.