Asklemmy

44144 readers

1077 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What role does validation play in one's mental health, and what are the pros and cons of social media in this respect? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Just a mild passing thought and curiosity to mull over

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Validation is one of the things on maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's essential for people to feel belonging and connection with other humans. We're hardwired for it and the lack of it leads to poor outcomes almost always.

Social media is not a good source of validation. If social media were limited to just the people you knew and communicated with at least semi-regularly it would be very useful for receiving validation. However once you branch out to people you don't know, healthy validation becomes more difficult. It also introduces a number of unhelpful facsimiles of validation (parasocial relationships, internet points).

100,000 likes/views/upvotes/retweets does not replace respect and acceptance from your peers for your emotional wellbeing, it's not even a good substitute.

No social media platform has figured it out yet, but that doesn't mean it's not possible to build one that could be a good source of validation. It's unlikely though so long as roi is important to the people that build social networks.