I have to say, I'm surprised by this post and appreciate it. I think the research presented explains a lot of the issues I've had with Facebook over the last few months--when I hit a point where I didn't have anything to say, but kept visiting the site's endless scroll and grew more dissatisfied with it in the process. I even resorted to using StayFocusd to restrict the time I could sink there each day.
I miss the days of the blogosphere. When I would write long, thoughtful well-researched articles instead of throwaway one-liners and photos. I find the experiment mentioned in the article enlightening, where people reviewed their own profile pages versus those of others and the difference in "self-affirmation" this caused. I recently went back and looked over my 10 years of blogging and I got a huge self-worth boost that inspired me to start writing again. Social media gets characterized as narcissistic, but it sounds like maybe we should be paying more attention to ourselves and our accomplishments for our own sense of self-worth.
That seems odd. It feels to me that Twitter is vastly more oriented towards one-liners. Though different people use different mediums to different ends, and I understand that.
But that's actually true. Maybe the world would have been better if we'd encouraged smoking in moderation instead of banning, banning, banning: deaths would be far fewer, and freedom would be much stronger.
Yeah I know but packs of twenty are optimized to keep you smoking not in moderation. Even if they sold you loosies it would still be hard for most people to smoke in moderation. That’s why smoking coughFacebookcough is so insidious. Sorry I’ve been smoking too much ;)
Smoking wasn't banned until very recently, after tremendous damage was done. Even now, smoking is only banned in places where it harms other people. You can smoke at home as much as you like.
I can understand people's criticisms that this analysis came from Facebook itself.
I'd like to point out that one of the authors (Moira Burke) was a PhD student in our department at Carnegie Mellon University (the Human Computer Interaction Institute) and she did research of the highest caliber with a high level of rigor and integrity.
She and her doctoral adviser (Robert Kraut) also published a very good peer-reviewed paper in the Communications of the ACM entitled Internet Use and Psychological Well-Being: Effects of Activity and Audience (https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/12/194633-internet-use-a...) which summarizes about 20 years of research in the area, and the post from Facebook echoes a lot of the same themes. The Facebook post also mentions a lot of other very well-executed and highly regarded scientific research in understanding how social media affects us.
So I'd really like to ask folks to please differentiate between the science side of the post (which I'd say is very good) from any of the associated policy or business issues (which is fair game).
It looks like your post got downvoted, and I don't think that was fair. I completely agree with you that there is some very insightful science in this post that didn't convince me to go back to facebook, but did give me insights into how to interact with all social media in a manner conducive to my emotional well-being.
> "On the other hand, actively interacting with people — especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions — is linked to improvements in well-being"
Seems sort of self serving that the solution is to generate more content for facebook. The next article is going to conclude disabling ad blockers and making microtransactions will finally make you happy.
Just because the presented solution serves facebook positively doesn't mean it's bad in some way. It's good to be wary of the bias, but don't dismiss the claim because of it.
Depends on the research method. If it was only backwards-looking, you'd be correct. However, it sounds like there was an experiment with a control group and a treatment group.
Something this decade told me. Everything has limits, even casual "tech" like social networking and internet. To each his own but remember to be curious about subtle changes.
Huh, the rare case where Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn't apply.
The focus on tiny incremental changes is not surprising from Facebook. Great, you made a tool for people to avoid their ex's, but that doesn't fix the core conceit of your service.
I appreciate that they're making an effort at looking into it. However, my newsfeed will still remain blocked/removed until I have more control over what I can see. The snooze functionality is a step in the right direction.
My Facebook account will remain deleted from now until forever. Although I may have to open a business ads account because my attempts to replace it with AdWords aren't going very well so far
They are not looking into it, well they are as much as tobacco companies looked into the ill effects of smoking. This is a PR move in response to recent ex-FB employees talking about how social media is not good for society.
- Is it bad for us that Facebook is aggressively monopolizing the social media/interaction space by:
* Abusing its data collection (including through its purchase of Onavo) to eliminate/buy out competition
* Storing our social data in a closed garden with no easy way to migrate it out into a different platform or even provide an API so that other social platforms can interact with Facebook
thus limiting our options for exploring different options for online social interaction?
- Is profit taken into account in Facebook's feed algorithm, or is it just our well-being (encouraging active social interaction, as the article describes) that's being considered?
> Is profit taken into account in Facebook's feed algorithm, or is it just our well-being (encouraging active social interaction, as the article describes) that's being considered?
THIS. That's exactly why this "feel good" pseudoscientific bullshit Facebook spits out from time to time sounds so disingenuous: they never take their profit - which is their main motive - into account. Pathetic.
>We want Facebook to be a place for meaningful interactions with your friends and family — enhancing your relationships offline, not detracting from them. After all, that’s what Facebook has always been about.
I recently spent a day deleting every "friend" (600 or so) on facebook.
FB sometimes reminds me of that scene where John Coffee gets all teary eyed about how the child-rapist-murderer used the little girl's love for eachother against eachother.
the longer I stayed friends with those people, the longer I was doing them harm by providing them engaging tidbits about my life, or liking their posts. it's not just good for me not to use FB, it's bad for my friends to use it to see me.
Presumably things are discussed in those terms at the shareholder meetings. The "feel good pseudoscientific bullshit" is of course PR and should be ignored.
This isn't a trick question. Staring at a screen consuming mindless content...whether its from entertainment companies or your friends...is bad. Bad compared to exercising, studying, taking a walk, being out with friends.
Is it worse than being stuck on the couch watching TV? I'm sure you can argue both ways, but I would say its about the same.
When people use Facebook in ways that reproduce interactions through technology that existed before Facebook, the results are positive (e.g. texts between close friends, IMs, emails, etc). When people use the core features that social media introduced, the results are negative (e.g. status updates to your 1000+ "friends", "likes", etc).
Is this an accurate summary of the findings discussed in the article?
I think that meaningful communication brings people together, but many people default away from meaningful communication for a number of reasons.
If you are broadcasting your communication to a group rather than having a one-on-one conversation, that communication is likely to become more impersonal. Being able to efficiently communicate with the family as a group is one of the things that makes something like Facebook seem worthwhile, but if you engage less with family members one-on-one as a result then you may water down the relationships.
If the method of communication is frustrating to you in some way, you may be less likely to fully invest yourself into the communication. You're on a phonecall and you could multitask, but you're having to hold the phone. Someone posts a message of substance that you have a lot of thoughts about, but you've always been bad at typing. You're good at typing, but you've never been great at expressing yourself in writing, etc.
With Facebook not everyone has the choice or convenience of communicating in the way that is most comfortable to them or best captures their personality, yet they may use it anyway. They might use Facebook for the efficiency of the many rather than best expressing themselves.
Sometimes there are workarounds, like recording your voice, a video or taking a photo of an event that may truly capture you. There are times where these work really well and are great communication, but many people aren't professionals at this and you get these staged or dry communications that don't come across as natural. A photo of someone standing there and smiling? A video of people that all know they're being recorded?
Just like when a performance feels off in a movie, something can feel off about all communication on Facebook.
To make matters worse, Facebook is not a private place. It is not a safe place. It is not the warmth of a home or the mistrusted ethereal privacy of a phonecall. Google, Facebook and others have repeatedly been in the news and featured in private conversations between people about how safe their information is online. Many people filter themselves online when it's attached to their identity and we are talking about identified relationships rather than anonymous users here.
Cell phones are terrible communication devices that are so convenient that it's respectful of people's time to have worse communication with them by using it. Voice quality we should be ashamed of in 2017 and text messaging where characters take so long to input that messages with real substance are rare is a sad reality.
These services and devices are better in addition to personal contact rather than as a replacement, but many people are slowly tricked into feeling that going through the effort of meeting in person is now very inefficient. There's that nagging idea in the back of the mind that, well if you're going to go through that trouble you could just Skype or Facetime, but of course you don't for some reason you find hard to define.
An exception is parties or gatherings. That feels efficient, because enough people will be present that you would feel left out or it would be disrespectful not to go due to some special occasion. Unfortunately, it can be harder to have quality one-on-one time at parties. Maybe you want to say things to someone, but you don't want it to be overheard. Maybe the party is too loud, so it's not a good environment for a good conversation.
When you watch a movie with someone, you might have seen them pull out their tablet or their phone and suddenly the movie feels less meaningful. Part of the idea of watching that movie with them, was that it was an experience you were sharing. Every second was something you had in common, but now it is fractured. Part of you is glad, that if they aren't enjoying the movie then they have a quiet alternative. Another part of you is annoyed that surely they know it's rude or distracting, but they d...
This article reminds me of the scientific articles on the health benefits of smoking. Big tobacco had to pay to place the articles where they were guaranteed to get lots of eyeballs, though.
Obviously someone saying "This thing I profit from you doing is not bad!" is not credible, but the fact that they even had to say this is progress. I think the takeaway here is to hold people/companies accountable and they have to start paying attention to what they're doing. Good stuff.
Signed out from facebook a few days ago. Did not even have a single temptation to sign back in. Amazing what simply signing out can achieve. So far, it feels like facebook was a massive waste of time.
The question isn't "if spending time is good or bad". The question is "is it needed for one or not". You know, like that choc bar one just grabs at the till right before paying for shopping or paying for the gasoline. I never had any satisfaction from it to begin with, mindless content consumption, sometimes leading to spending hours on youtube sucked in by someone posting something "interesting".
Another aspect is, the views presented by the people on my timeline most often simply aggravated me. Once I unfollowed those people, all that was left was just brands and channels serving content I can live without.
The concept of a news feed is the worst. I stopped using instagram when they switched their algorithim from most recent to AI-curated (or whatever it is). I unfollowed everything on Facebook so my news feed is empty. I still use FB groups, Hacker News, and Subreddits as they seem to have replaced forums for many of my interests. I still use Snapchat to communicate with close friends.
> The good: On the other hand, actively interacting with people — especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions — is linked to improvements in well-being. This ability to connect with relatives, classmates, and colleagues is what drew many of us to Facebook in the first place, and it’s no surprise that staying in touch with these friends and loved ones brings us joy and strengthens our sense of community.
SERIOUSLY? Such a surprise that engagement, which incidentally is what's most valuable for Facebook's data collection and monetization efforts, is good for you!
How are these people hoping to be taken seriously on a scientific level?
This is a level of corporate bullshit and denial I've hardly seen before. Wow.
Dismissing it simply because it is Facebook isn't really helpful. The article linked to several independent studies to back up their claims.
It also doesn't just say engagement is the answer, people clicking on clickbait are engaged but the article calls that out as bad engagement despite the fact that clickbait is incredibly profitable for Facebook.
The interesting part of the article is that it actually calls out some of the biggest problems with how people interact with Facebook. It shouldn't all be taken at face value but it is an interesting well documented article.
Spending precious time reading corporate propaganda disguised as objective scientific evaluation is also not helping.
The truth is that Facebook has exploited something in our human psychology that was never available before. It fucks up with our heads in a way we can't even recognize because we don't really have "bad mental state" receptors wired in.
I want to be lenient on Zuckerberg and his fellows: they created a Leviathan that started making more money they could ever imagine. Now they're captive in a system that for no reason whatsoever would let them scale back such monstrosity. It's not on them anymore.
> That’s why we recently pledged $1 million toward research to better understand the relationship between media technologies, youth development and well-being.
Funny that they do their research _after_ they launched Messenger Kids. I would expect someone with good intentions to have swapped the order on that one.
119 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadI miss the days of the blogosphere. When I would write long, thoughtful well-researched articles instead of throwaway one-liners and photos. I find the experiment mentioned in the article enlightening, where people reviewed their own profile pages versus those of others and the difference in "self-affirmation" this caused. I recently went back and looked over my 10 years of blogging and I got a huge self-worth boost that inspired me to start writing again. Social media gets characterized as narcissistic, but it sounds like maybe we should be paying more attention to ourselves and our accomplishments for our own sense of self-worth.
Oddly enough, this is part of why I quit Facebook and moved to Twitter based on how I personally communicate and consume others' communication.
I'd like to point out that one of the authors (Moira Burke) was a PhD student in our department at Carnegie Mellon University (the Human Computer Interaction Institute) and she did research of the highest caliber with a high level of rigor and integrity.
She and her doctoral adviser (Robert Kraut) also published a very good peer-reviewed paper in the Communications of the ACM entitled Internet Use and Psychological Well-Being: Effects of Activity and Audience (https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/12/194633-internet-use-a...) which summarizes about 20 years of research in the area, and the post from Facebook echoes a lot of the same themes. The Facebook post also mentions a lot of other very well-executed and highly regarded scientific research in understanding how social media affects us.
So I'd really like to ask folks to please differentiate between the science side of the post (which I'd say is very good) from any of the associated policy or business issues (which is fair game).
Seems sort of self serving that the solution is to generate more content for facebook. The next article is going to conclude disabling ad blockers and making microtransactions will finally make you happy.
> Simply broadcasting status updates wasn’t enough; people had to interact one-on-one with others in their network.
--Sebastian Junger (Anthropologist, journalist, documentary filmmaker)
Joe Rogan's podcast with him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-ZieLlKXYs
http://www.openculture.com/2013/05/philosopher_daniel_dennet...
The focus on tiny incremental changes is not surprising from Facebook. Great, you made a tool for people to avoid their ex's, but that doesn't fix the core conceit of your service.
- Is it bad for us that Facebook is aggressively monopolizing the social media/interaction space by: * Abusing its data collection (including through its purchase of Onavo) to eliminate/buy out competition * Storing our social data in a closed garden with no easy way to migrate it out into a different platform or even provide an API so that other social platforms can interact with Facebook
thus limiting our options for exploring different options for online social interaction?
- Is profit taken into account in Facebook's feed algorithm, or is it just our well-being (encouraging active social interaction, as the article describes) that's being considered?
THIS. That's exactly why this "feel good" pseudoscientific bullshit Facebook spits out from time to time sounds so disingenuous: they never take their profit - which is their main motive - into account. Pathetic.
>We want Facebook to be a place for meaningful interactions with your friends and family — enhancing your relationships offline, not detracting from them. After all, that’s what Facebook has always been about.
Everything I do on FB is related to my real life friendships, activities, events, etc.
FB sometimes reminds me of that scene where John Coffee gets all teary eyed about how the child-rapist-murderer used the little girl's love for eachother against eachother.
the longer I stayed friends with those people, the longer I was doing them harm by providing them engaging tidbits about my life, or liking their posts. it's not just good for me not to use FB, it's bad for my friends to use it to see me.
Very well said. You just convinced me to deactivate.
Is it worse than being stuck on the couch watching TV? I'm sure you can argue both ways, but I would say its about the same.
When people use Facebook in ways that reproduce interactions through technology that existed before Facebook, the results are positive (e.g. texts between close friends, IMs, emails, etc). When people use the core features that social media introduced, the results are negative (e.g. status updates to your 1000+ "friends", "likes", etc).
Is this an accurate summary of the findings discussed in the article?
The current Social Media business model is to push us to extremes to lure us into staying on their site. This is great for profits, bad for society.
The irony was that Social Media was supposed to bring us together, now we could not be further apart from each other.
If you are broadcasting your communication to a group rather than having a one-on-one conversation, that communication is likely to become more impersonal. Being able to efficiently communicate with the family as a group is one of the things that makes something like Facebook seem worthwhile, but if you engage less with family members one-on-one as a result then you may water down the relationships.
If the method of communication is frustrating to you in some way, you may be less likely to fully invest yourself into the communication. You're on a phonecall and you could multitask, but you're having to hold the phone. Someone posts a message of substance that you have a lot of thoughts about, but you've always been bad at typing. You're good at typing, but you've never been great at expressing yourself in writing, etc.
With Facebook not everyone has the choice or convenience of communicating in the way that is most comfortable to them or best captures their personality, yet they may use it anyway. They might use Facebook for the efficiency of the many rather than best expressing themselves.
Sometimes there are workarounds, like recording your voice, a video or taking a photo of an event that may truly capture you. There are times where these work really well and are great communication, but many people aren't professionals at this and you get these staged or dry communications that don't come across as natural. A photo of someone standing there and smiling? A video of people that all know they're being recorded?
Just like when a performance feels off in a movie, something can feel off about all communication on Facebook.
To make matters worse, Facebook is not a private place. It is not a safe place. It is not the warmth of a home or the mistrusted ethereal privacy of a phonecall. Google, Facebook and others have repeatedly been in the news and featured in private conversations between people about how safe their information is online. Many people filter themselves online when it's attached to their identity and we are talking about identified relationships rather than anonymous users here.
Cell phones are terrible communication devices that are so convenient that it's respectful of people's time to have worse communication with them by using it. Voice quality we should be ashamed of in 2017 and text messaging where characters take so long to input that messages with real substance are rare is a sad reality.
These services and devices are better in addition to personal contact rather than as a replacement, but many people are slowly tricked into feeling that going through the effort of meeting in person is now very inefficient. There's that nagging idea in the back of the mind that, well if you're going to go through that trouble you could just Skype or Facetime, but of course you don't for some reason you find hard to define.
An exception is parties or gatherings. That feels efficient, because enough people will be present that you would feel left out or it would be disrespectful not to go due to some special occasion. Unfortunately, it can be harder to have quality one-on-one time at parties. Maybe you want to say things to someone, but you don't want it to be overheard. Maybe the party is too loud, so it's not a good environment for a good conversation.
When you watch a movie with someone, you might have seen them pull out their tablet or their phone and suddenly the movie feels less meaningful. Part of the idea of watching that movie with them, was that it was an experience you were sharing. Every second was something you had in common, but now it is fractured. Part of you is glad, that if they aren't enjoying the movie then they have a quiet alternative. Another part of you is annoyed that surely they know it's rude or distracting, but they d...
Neat, next we should ask Comcast if Net Neutrality is good for us. Oh wait...
The question isn't "if spending time is good or bad". The question is "is it needed for one or not". You know, like that choc bar one just grabs at the till right before paying for shopping or paying for the gasoline. I never had any satisfaction from it to begin with, mindless content consumption, sometimes leading to spending hours on youtube sucked in by someone posting something "interesting".
http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5898a9203149a12d008... Thanks, but no.
Another aspect is, the views presented by the people on my timeline most often simply aggravated me. Once I unfollowed those people, all that was left was just brands and channels serving content I can live without.
SERIOUSLY? Such a surprise that engagement, which incidentally is what's most valuable for Facebook's data collection and monetization efforts, is good for you! How are these people hoping to be taken seriously on a scientific level?
This is a level of corporate bullshit and denial I've hardly seen before. Wow.
It also doesn't just say engagement is the answer, people clicking on clickbait are engaged but the article calls that out as bad engagement despite the fact that clickbait is incredibly profitable for Facebook.
The interesting part of the article is that it actually calls out some of the biggest problems with how people interact with Facebook. It shouldn't all be taken at face value but it is an interesting well documented article.
The truth is that Facebook has exploited something in our human psychology that was never available before. It fucks up with our heads in a way we can't even recognize because we don't really have "bad mental state" receptors wired in.
I want to be lenient on Zuckerberg and his fellows: they created a Leviathan that started making more money they could ever imagine. Now they're captive in a system that for no reason whatsoever would let them scale back such monstrosity. It's not on them anymore.
Funny that they do their research _after_ they launched Messenger Kids. I would expect someone with good intentions to have swapped the order on that one.