Very interesting to see the difference in tone in the headline alone between NYT and Salon.
* NYT - This Is Your Brain Off Facebook. Planning on quitting the social platform? A major new study offers a glimpse of what unplugging might do for your life. (Spoiler: It’s not so bad.)
* Salon - A "gold standard" study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health. A unique study praised for its rigor finds numerous upsides to deactivating your Facebook account.
Having read the Times article, which I found very informative and balanced, this highly editorialized headline makes me uneasy, especially because this one already has twice as many upvotes. I feel like we're living in a bizzaro-world where objectivity doesn't matter and all of reality is becoming a sleazy used car lot.
”Those who deactivated also observed a decrease in political polarization and news knowledge, and an increase in subjective well-being.”
Surely not reading Salon and its ilk would also result in this. Half of the toxic political posts on FB originate on sites like Salon, HuffPo... I think they’re more at fault for the political polarization of our society than FB which is mainly just a conduit.
FB also magnifies the worst posting from these outlets. You get the ultra incendiary stuff shared by everybody, while the more chill stuff doesn't get as much engagement and is ignored. I've been shown "Look at this awful thing!" stories more than once.
It’s true people will share the most toxic of the content. Still, I blame the source that created it more than any other party, and it’s rich to see one of those sources claim to take the high ground and not even mention their own outsized role in the situation.
The ultra incendiary stuff is really just playing to the human propensity to want a witch hunt. Mob rule. Squash what we don't understand and thus fear because our lizard brains are becoming more conditioned to govern our thought processes instead of our adult brain that can reason and think critically. Playing to our emotional brain just feeds this constant cycle of emotion.
Eventually we'll all wake up from our slumber and realize how we've been manipulated for so long, but until then it's just going to be witch hunt after witch hunt.
There's only so long we can succumb to this before we all begin to wonder what the fuck we're doing allowing the media to continually manipulate our own sense of well-being in order to keep the sentiment in favour of their stakeholders.
It's pretty sick, honestly, but eventually we will all wise up to it - it's inevitable. Let's just hope it's before we destroy our humanity.
I quite liked facebook. I don't have the urge to constantly check it, nor post much on it, but it was useful for events, casually keeping up with life events of acquaintances, and keeping a rolodex of semi-friends (e.g. people I met on holiday and would like to run into again).
I deleted it because the company seems thoroughly evil and doesn't respect my privacy. But if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alternative I'd be more than happy to become on of their first adopters.
> if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alternative
I'm working on something at the moment. More experiment than anything else for the time being but the purpose of it is to have a minimal "social network" for keeping in touch with people, and that's about it. Very little in the way of notifications and most facebook-like features. Just a way to keep in touch and keep contact details for people you care about.
Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?
You can monetise it the same way as facebook. I'd be more than happy for my data to be sold and analysed, as long as they were used according to strict ethical guidelines.
Perhaps worth giving DuckDuckGo a look, at how they're making money.
I think there are ways to monetize. Duck duck go manages to do it, so why not? A company like this was never supposed to be the most valuable company in the world.
>Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?
Sponsored ads and content is probably the only way, other than donations, to keep the service free. You can do ads without tracking, as long as you're transparent about what is or isn't an ad.
The other option is to segment the market with "premium tier" features that only finicky people care about. For example, everyone gets a standard page layout but you can pay to unlock custom style-sheets. Or you can pay extra to display higher resolution photos. Or you only hold onto posts and content for 3 years unless people pay for archival storage (at which point you're basically just running a backup service).
Alternatively, lots of community groups use facebook as a community forum. You can have moderators or forum administrators pay a hosting fee and that maintains the rest of the site.
> Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?
I've been doing something similar. If your network is decentralized, I've been thinking monetization can be in the form of easy VM reselling for the service. Find a provider w/ affiliate $, integrate it into setup. They are the owners of the AWS (or whatever) account and everything's transparent, but you make it easy to install/upgrade. Or could hide the host details and be the "server manager" for them, i.e. managed hosting.
If you are centralized, there are several other ways. You can do a simple one like "completely free to use for companies < $1m revenue/year, $100/month otherwise" (wild number guesses, would need research). Other options can get a bit more sketchy, ala freemium/addons, e.g. pay to style your page, etc.
You could give Hubzilla a shot. Though you have to opt-in to join the ActivityPub federation. And I'm sure the Events only works with users from other Hubzilla instances.
I keep it around solely because my parents / grandparents use it and it's a means for me to stay in their lives from far away. My social circles have totally dropped it.
Only accessing Facebook via mbasic.facebook.com works for me. I only really ever check it because I have local community forums that only post information on events there. Most of my friends have departed for Instagram at this point.
Which is probably why Facebook is trying to Facebookify Instagram and WhatsApp. Once they do I'm sure people will start to flee to knock-off services instead.
The problem with the alternatives is they don't have the budget and installed user base Facebook has. Sure, you'll get techie people to jump on board at first (remember Google+?), but all the family members who don't know a Twitter from an Amazon will stick with Facebook because the constant negative Facebook press isn't enough to get them to leave and no longer see pictures of their baby grandson. I'm not sure what the solution to this is.
I think the solution is for a photo sharing site to win over the tech crowd with well-thought-out, fine-grained privacy controls and a sustainable business model and then to make it dead easy for non-tech people to share their photos with other non-tech people.
ie. I create a single account and my friends each create a single account and I create groups out of those friends, and then I share my photos with a group, and my friends can see and perhaps comment on the photos that have been shared with them.
How much would it cost per user per month to make this sustainably ad-free?
The problem with Facebook isn't that some people can see some things you don't want them to. "Privacy controls" are just a distraction from the real problem which is that Facebook can see everything.
This. I'd rather like the advertising model turned inside out - like the old days if you will. Instead of targeting me, target the content. If I'm looking at an article about sleep show me a few limited mattress ads. It doesn't have to track me after/before. Nothing goes into my account that says I have a sleep disorder.
I hate ads in general and so provide me an option to pay for and remove it as well.
Facebook's solution was initial exclusivity to college students. This made it cool to high school students. Then once high school and college students were all on it, their parents eventually got on.
So maybe we could shamelessly copy that exact model for the new federated open-source Facebook replacement.
> If we could just copy their model to acquire customers then....
Then you would be competing with every other social media startup along with the social media sites that have pretty much limitless resources.
Say your website is a success however, you basically have two options: go public and turn into facebook eventually, because your duty is not to the site anymore, it is to the shareholder and to the dollar.
or
don't go public and never get off the ground, because you won't be able to keep your programmers or compete with the tech giants.
Your argument is a truism: that any competitors don't have the budget/user base. Well duh, FB is by far #1 in both of those categories. The only way for a competitor to beat them is to come up from nothing to build a SNS and prove this naysayer argument wrong (and for its founders to have the stones to not get bought out). Until then, every FB post on HN is going to have people pointing to the FB network/userbase and saying "IMPOSSIBLE!"
It was impossible for Facebook once upon a time too... until it wasn't. Once upon a time Mark Zuckerberg was just an idiot with an idea, and here's where we ended up.
Not having my parents on the platform was one of the things I liked about Facebook when I first started up my edu account in college. MySpace was still more popular, but Facebook was where all of my college friends could be found. For me, it all gets back to what people use social media for. I liked when it was more about how to connect with people to do something in real life, not when it was the only place that people were communicating.
What would be really cool would be a hidden social network app that can pull data from existing facebook/twitter/etc social data stores with various high and low tactics of stenography and obfuscated data. It could have side benefits like completely scrambling the tracking information on someone on the aggregator size, use useful stuff like image storage and video storage.
Of course that would get routinely disrupted by the base providers, since that is direct intrusion into their precious data silos.
But it would be cool.
Because I'm not super interested in outright encryption of all my thoughts and activity. That actually broadcasts you/marks you. At this point I have a lot of trackers that have SOME information on me.
So I'd like a lot of obfuscation and noise inserted around what companies know about "me".
I've been observing https://www.minds.com/ , which appears to be an interesting open-source competitor in the space.
It's based on blockchain, which makes me nervous, but it does allow you to purchase a version of the product which removes all promotion from the product entirely.
In general, many people waste time on internet. The internet and all of its available information is hard to resist (at-least in my case).
I've come up with a fix though! I simply have an addon in firefox that refreshes the web-page in 20 seconds! It is just enough annoyance to give up (especially after I am over halfway though an article..)
Anecdotally I use Facebook to coordinate social events with friends and find that it's been a helpful tool to easily keep in touch with friends. I've reconnected with friends through it too. I try and avoid political things and post a lot of cat pictures from a local cat shelter that I volunteer at, which people seem to enjoy. I dunno, I just try and keep my feed filled with mostly positive/upbeat things so maybe that helps?
One of my social groups made our own personal space for organising events and after 6 months we went back to Facebook because every other social group didn’t leave.
So you get a new platform, but if you only do one event every few months then there is no really no reason to check it, and then suddenly no one is doing events.
Like it or not, Facebook is the modern yellowpages and you need something everyone is on to replace it. I think that’s going to happen sooner or later.
It’s anecdotal of course, but very few people in my social circle use Facebook for anything but organising events, and you don’t need their app, messenger or even to log on more than once in a while to do that. If you couple that with the fact that everyone is tired of their bullshit, I think they seem ripe for disruption.
I can confirm. I deleted the FB app, and deactivated my account for months and it was pretty fantastic.
The problem for me now is that I'm a Clemson alum and Clemson is doing awesome right now...so I reactivated my Facebook just to celebrate everything with all my friends from college.
I ended up finding a fairly happy medium of unfollowing every person who posts anything even remotely political (even if I agree with it) and now my feed is essentially football trash talking + friends celebrating life events.
> So it was fantastic, right up until the point that it wasn't?
They seem to have found a happy medium with Facebook, which seems to be the key with social media - stay in contact, but don't let it rule your life. That, as well as pretty much everything else requires finding a balance.
Things that fit that "great until it's not" description:
- Eating Chocolate Cake
- Sex
- Programming
- Driving
- Fasting
- Being Awake
- Sleeping
- Not Working
I suggest people actually look at the plots in the paper. As an example, on P55, they show the effects on subjective well being for many metrics (life satisfaction, loneliness, etc). Note that a number of these metrics have a large enough standard deviation that it spans both the positive and negative range.
Most news outlets focus only on the mean (most of which are positive). But when your standard deviation is large enough to change the sign, don't put much stock in the outcome. If there's one thing that was hammered into my head when I took statistics, it's that a confidence interval of (-1, 5) does not mean the true value is more likely close to 2 (or positive, or whatever). There's no valid reason to focus on the positive values more, when your confidence interval crosses the zero point.
Can confirm. I tried deactivating and then cutting down but that just never works. Deleting is the way to go.
Old friends you want to connect with? There’s always email and a phone number. People actually reach out to me outside of that awful service to say “Hey Foo is in town” or “We’re having a reunion for Bar”.
Just delete it, notify people first, save the images you want, and torch it. Everything incremental just allows you joining it again later which Facebook is more than happy to facilitate.
It's a lot more difficult to do, but a deep cull of your friend list might replicate a lot of the value. Those acquaintances you met ten years ago and haven't spoken to since? Unfriend or at least unfollow. Get it down to the people you actually talk to & care about.
People reconnected with such acquaintances a couple decades ago without Facebook.
I find not having FB way better for those relationships anyways, instead of creepily knowing their life story since I stopped seeing them )because of FB) we have something to reconnect and talk about if I do run into them.
And I did manage my FB friends well, I deleted it when I realized FB facilitated those conversations in ways I hated and most of my feeds was ads anyways.
It would be interesting to see a study on general social media beyond facebook, such as reddit, instagram, hacker news, etc. I can waste hours on non-facebook social media. It's nice for those times I'm tired and just want to kick back and not think too hard. I'm fairly certain it lowers my attention span but I wonder if there are other negative effects.
Reddit is basically Twitter with a thin veneer of politeness. My guess would be that it's not good for mental health unless you go fishing for validation by towing the party line in every sub you visit.
For those not ready to completely delete their facebook account yet, I recommend:
1. deleting the app
2. Using a custom facebook style (like this one [1]) which deactivates the news feed. That way you can still use it to check your messages occasionally and have to actively make the decision to scroll through the news feed by deactivating the extension.
3. Deleting messenger once you have told all relevant people that you will be less reachable through facebook, more through email / signal whatever alternative you use.
I have been using facebook less and less that way and realized how often I was mindlessly scrolling through the feed.
I still keep my FB account for messages and events, since my friends and family won't all delete Facebook en masse, but this has removed a whole bunch of wasted time.
Can confirm. Deleted FB half a year ago. Nothing really happened. I still feel in the loop with all my friends and even remember their birthdays. Checking FB was just a noise that kept me distracted during the day.
Can confirm this is true. When other people deleted their Facebook accounts my mental health improved from no longer seeing their negativity in my feed.
Obviously one eccentric's anecdote doesn't mean anything for something in-any-way scientific, but I deleted my FB about four years ago after I realized that my primary usage of the platform was arguing with people. I spent hours at a time constructing (what I thought were) brilliant arguments for my obviously super-important viewpoints. Eventually it got bad enough to where I actually lost friends IRL because of it, and I figured it wasn't healthy to dedicate so much time to arguing, and I deleted my account.
I feel like a lot of my time suddenly became free, and I get am overall less stressed out. It could just be a placebo effect, but there's about a zero-percent likelihood that I'll reopen my account any time soon.
I despise facebook, but salon's article is ... clickbait. The results of the study are generally positive, but fairly small, and I wouldn't describe their stats as any kind of "gold standard." I don't think the study should be praised for its rigor either. It's extremely mooshy, and I'm certain someone FB friendly could do the same study and easily get a different result. Look at the plots of the data in the appendices; they're silly:
I read things like this and wonder how is my Facebook feed so different. For the most part I just see my friends and family posting about their day and photos of the kids.
It must be depressing working for Facebook knowing you make a negative impact in peoples lives. If their engineers had higher morals they would find a better place to work at
Here's my FB setup that has in fact been good for my MH:
My feed contains:
- Strongly moderated meme pages based on screenshots from a TV show. No political posts allowed. Everyone's here to partake in the shared enjoyment of a show.
- Nothing from friends; 1-on-1 is better, and most status updates are networking-style humblebrags anyway.
- Nothing from news sites; this should be obvious to anyone who's seen how the algorithm operates.
- Nothing from Events: my event invites (posted on FB) arrive via email notification.
Result? I almost never check my FB except when I actively think about wasting time with some dumb memes.
A big part of why it's hard to leave FB is because it's become a part of people's everyday ritual. I recommend starting to unfollow some pages and people, and see how that impacts your FB use. Slowly, you can taper it off more and more.
Would this setup be easier to achieve with Reddit? This is pretty much what I use Reddit for (and then WhatsApp for 1-1, BBC for news, and my calendar for events).
This is essentially a Reddit-like setup. I do use FB Messenger to talk to friends but aside from that, FB for me is basically Reddit with real names. I don't really make use of the "social" aspect, as I've had the account since 2005 or so and posting on people's walls became passe around 2010 or so.
Mine still seem pretty good even after stopping reading the News Feed completely years back. It's not quite deleting Facebook -- I still use Messenger a lot, and also the events now and then -- but it's in the same ballpark, and I don't miss it at all.
I unplugged from Facebook a few months ago. I haven't deleted my account because I have some contacts that I have no other way of getting in touch with, but I probably login to see if any important messages have been sent every 3 weeks and sometimes longer.
Nothing of any value was lost. When I login and see all the garbage spammed at me I ask myself "Why should I care about any of this?"
108 comments
[ 1263 ms ] story [ 1030 ms ] threadVery interesting to see the difference in tone in the headline alone between NYT and Salon.
* NYT - This Is Your Brain Off Facebook. Planning on quitting the social platform? A major new study offers a glimpse of what unplugging might do for your life. (Spoiler: It’s not so bad.)
* Salon - A "gold standard" study finds deleting Facebook is great for your mental health. A unique study praised for its rigor finds numerous upsides to deactivating your Facebook account.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psycholog...
Surely not reading Salon and its ilk would also result in this. Half of the toxic political posts on FB originate on sites like Salon, HuffPo... I think they’re more at fault for the political polarization of our society than FB which is mainly just a conduit.
Eventually we'll all wake up from our slumber and realize how we've been manipulated for so long, but until then it's just going to be witch hunt after witch hunt.
There's only so long we can succumb to this before we all begin to wonder what the fuck we're doing allowing the media to continually manipulate our own sense of well-being in order to keep the sentiment in favour of their stakeholders.
It's pretty sick, honestly, but eventually we will all wise up to it - it's inevitable. Let's just hope it's before we destroy our humanity.
I deleted it because the company seems thoroughly evil and doesn't respect my privacy. But if anyone comes up with a privacy-respecting alternative I'd be more than happy to become on of their first adopters.
I'm working on something at the moment. More experiment than anything else for the time being but the purpose of it is to have a minimal "social network" for keeping in touch with people, and that's about it. Very little in the way of notifications and most facebook-like features. Just a way to keep in touch and keep contact details for people you care about.
Question for anyone who would be interested in such a thing: How would you suggest monetising or funding such a project?
Perhaps worth giving DuckDuckGo a look, at how they're making money.
Sponsored ads and content is probably the only way, other than donations, to keep the service free. You can do ads without tracking, as long as you're transparent about what is or isn't an ad.
The other option is to segment the market with "premium tier" features that only finicky people care about. For example, everyone gets a standard page layout but you can pay to unlock custom style-sheets. Or you can pay extra to display higher resolution photos. Or you only hold onto posts and content for 3 years unless people pay for archival storage (at which point you're basically just running a backup service).
Alternatively, lots of community groups use facebook as a community forum. You can have moderators or forum administrators pay a hosting fee and that maintains the rest of the site.
I've been doing something similar. If your network is decentralized, I've been thinking monetization can be in the form of easy VM reselling for the service. Find a provider w/ affiliate $, integrate it into setup. They are the owners of the AWS (or whatever) account and everything's transparent, but you make it easy to install/upgrade. Or could hide the host details and be the "server manager" for them, i.e. managed hosting.
If you are centralized, there are several other ways. You can do a simple one like "completely free to use for companies < $1m revenue/year, $100/month otherwise" (wild number guesses, would need research). Other options can get a bit more sketchy, ala freemium/addons, e.g. pay to style your page, etc.
https://project.hubzilla.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project
Which is probably why Facebook is trying to Facebookify Instagram and WhatsApp. Once they do I'm sure people will start to flee to knock-off services instead.
ie. I create a single account and my friends each create a single account and I create groups out of those friends, and then I share my photos with a group, and my friends can see and perhaps comment on the photos that have been shared with them.
How much would it cost per user per month to make this sustainably ad-free?
The problem with Facebook isn't that some people can see some things you don't want them to. "Privacy controls" are just a distraction from the real problem which is that Facebook can see everything.
https://fourweekmba.com/duckduckgo-business-model/
I hate ads in general and so provide me an option to pay for and remove it as well.
So maybe we could shamelessly copy that exact model for the new federated open-source Facebook replacement.
Edit: also, are we the problem?
Then you would be competing with every other social media startup along with the social media sites that have pretty much limitless resources.
Say your website is a success however, you basically have two options: go public and turn into facebook eventually, because your duty is not to the site anymore, it is to the shareholder and to the dollar.
or
don't go public and never get off the ground, because you won't be able to keep your programmers or compete with the tech giants.
Of course that would get routinely disrupted by the base providers, since that is direct intrusion into their precious data silos.
But it would be cool.
Because I'm not super interested in outright encryption of all my thoughts and activity. That actually broadcasts you/marks you. At this point I have a lot of trackers that have SOME information on me.
So I'd like a lot of obfuscation and noise inserted around what companies know about "me".
It's based on blockchain, which makes me nervous, but it does allow you to purchase a version of the product which removes all promotion from the product entirely.
I've come up with a fix though! I simply have an addon in firefox that refreshes the web-page in 20 seconds! It is just enough annoyance to give up (especially after I am over halfway though an article..)
You know Zuck has experimented with making people’s feeds negative to see the impact on their usage?
I get Facebook works for you, but consider the company is run by a truly evil and insidious man. As an organizer consider helping people leave.
So you get a new platform, but if you only do one event every few months then there is no really no reason to check it, and then suddenly no one is doing events.
Like it or not, Facebook is the modern yellowpages and you need something everyone is on to replace it. I think that’s going to happen sooner or later.
It’s anecdotal of course, but very few people in my social circle use Facebook for anything but organising events, and you don’t need their app, messenger or even to log on more than once in a while to do that. If you couple that with the fact that everyone is tired of their bullshit, I think they seem ripe for disruption.
The problem for me now is that I'm a Clemson alum and Clemson is doing awesome right now...so I reactivated my Facebook just to celebrate everything with all my friends from college.
I ended up finding a fairly happy medium of unfollowing every person who posts anything even remotely political (even if I agree with it) and now my feed is essentially football trash talking + friends celebrating life events.
They seem to have found a happy medium with Facebook, which seems to be the key with social media - stay in contact, but don't let it rule your life. That, as well as pretty much everything else requires finding a balance. Things that fit that "great until it's not" description:
- Eating Chocolate Cake - Sex - Programming - Driving - Fasting - Being Awake - Sleeping - Not Working
Most news outlets focus only on the mean (most of which are positive). But when your standard deviation is large enough to change the sign, don't put much stock in the outcome. If there's one thing that was hammered into my head when I took statistics, it's that a confidence interval of (-1, 5) does not mean the true value is more likely close to 2 (or positive, or whatever). There's no valid reason to focus on the positive values more, when your confidence interval crosses the zero point.
Old friends you want to connect with? There’s always email and a phone number. People actually reach out to me outside of that awful service to say “Hey Foo is in town” or “We’re having a reunion for Bar”.
Just delete it, notify people first, save the images you want, and torch it. Everything incremental just allows you joining it again later which Facebook is more than happy to facilitate.
I find not having FB way better for those relationships anyways, instead of creepily knowing their life story since I stopped seeing them )because of FB) we have something to reconnect and talk about if I do run into them.
And I did manage my FB friends well, I deleted it when I realized FB facilitated those conversations in ways I hated and most of my feeds was ads anyways.
I pity you if fb is running your life.
Heck why do I have a smartphone?
:;)/-&@&)($&!
1. deleting the app
2. Using a custom facebook style (like this one [1]) which deactivates the news feed. That way you can still use it to check your messages occasionally and have to actively make the decision to scroll through the news feed by deactivating the extension.
3. Deleting messenger once you have told all relevant people that you will be less reachable through facebook, more through email / signal whatever alternative you use.
I have been using facebook less and less that way and realized how often I was mindlessly scrolling through the feed.
[1] https://userstyles.org/styles/128616/quiet-facebook-official
I still keep my FB account for messages and events, since my friends and family won't all delete Facebook en masse, but this has removed a whole bunch of wasted time.
I feel like a lot of my time suddenly became free, and I get am overall less stressed out. It could just be a placebo effect, but there's about a zero-percent likelihood that I'll reopen my account any time soon.
http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf
My feed contains:
- Strongly moderated meme pages based on screenshots from a TV show. No political posts allowed. Everyone's here to partake in the shared enjoyment of a show.
- Nothing from friends; 1-on-1 is better, and most status updates are networking-style humblebrags anyway.
- Nothing from news sites; this should be obvious to anyone who's seen how the algorithm operates.
- Nothing from Events: my event invites (posted on FB) arrive via email notification.
Result? I almost never check my FB except when I actively think about wasting time with some dumb memes.
A big part of why it's hard to leave FB is because it's become a part of people's everyday ritual. I recommend starting to unfollow some pages and people, and see how that impacts your FB use. Slowly, you can taper it off more and more.
Nothing of any value was lost. When I login and see all the garbage spammed at me I ask myself "Why should I care about any of this?"