HN Explorer

Poll: Facebook usage (monday morning crowd)

19 points by veyron ↗ HN
I originally asked http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034871 but r00fus (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034988) pointed out issues with selection bias (since it was posted on a saturday night). Hence I am asking again on a monday morning. I am specifically asking in a separate poll because I want to see how the distribution changes in the monday morning crowd.

Watching the news or reading HN, I get the impression that FB has become an essential part of people's lives. However, no one in my immediate circle, myself included, used facebook since college. I'm wondering if I'm living in a bubble or if others are hyping the effect of facebook ...

Let me add one carveout: for those who work at startups that write facebook apps, that time is NOT counted.

One thing which came up in the last poll was that people felt they were spending "5 minutes per day". I would humbly request that you actually try timing how long you actually spend. I found that, with all services (from aim to slashdot to facebook to HN) that people who claim to spend 5 minutes really end up spending about an hour a day.

36 comments

[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] thread
the-kenny
I don't think any of the answers fit for me. I keep facebook open all the time, but don't really check very often. Only periodically when checking rss and such stuff or when I'm really bored.
the-kenny
To clarify this a bit: I use Facebook as a passive notification platform where people can contact me when they don't want or can't use another channel.
veyron
That's exactly what people say about AIM and gchat :P

I'd recommend, over the next week, that you check how much time was spent with facebook (even if its passive, you may be checking into the screen every half hour) I'm not trying to be negative, but I suspect that number may be higher than you think.

nmcfarl
This actually brings up a good question.

I checked `1 hour per week` but actually I have my Facebook IM hooked up to my Adium IM client (along with 8 other services) - and I haven’t intentionally logged out of that in years. Heck I leave that on when I go on vacation and won’t be checking it for 2 weeks.

So is this poll about Facebook service usage, or personal time knowingly interacting with Facebook? The answers for me are quite different.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
itg
As a mid 20 something in a major city, facebook is still important when it comes to knowing about any events/parties/shows/gatherings coming up, sharing pics and catching up with people you don't get to meet up with too often. Pretty much everyone I know of uses it actively, some more than others. A few did try google+ but with the exception of a small handful of friends who work in the tech industry, all of them stopped using it already.

As an aside, I feel as if hn is a giant echo chamber when it comes to facebook complaints, especially the past few days. Most people don't know or don't care about these issues.

andyking
That's interesting. I work at a radio station in a small town, and in the past week, two colleagues have said they're giving up Facebook (and have moved over to Twitter, rather than Google+).

It's the first time I've seen non-tech people consciously making the decision to bin Facebook (rather than just drifting away without realising).

Could it be some kind of turning point? I don't know.

Mizza
As a mid 20 something in a major city without a facebook, I don't actually have any trouble finding info about events/parties/shows/gatherings. I have real life friends and they let me know the old fashioned way if something good is coming up.

I left Facebook a year ago and don't feel like I've missed a thing at all.

bhickey
Facebook and the related CDN domains are all in my hosts file.
jamiecurle
Mine as well and I also serve up my own little icon to let me know that I've thwarted them one more time.
veyron
Can you post a list of the other domains facebook uses?
icebraining
I use this, not sure if that's all.

    # Block Facebook
    0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com
    0.0.0.0 facebook.com
    0.0.0.0 static.ak.fbcdn.net
    0.0.0.0 www.static.ak.fbcdn.net
    0.0.0.0 login.facebook.com
    0.0.0.0 www.login.facebook.com
    0.0.0.0 fbcdn.net
    0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.net
    0.0.0.0 fbcdn.com
    0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.com
    0.0.0.0 static.ak.connect.facebook.com
    0.0.0.0 www.static.ak.connect.facebook.com
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
sek
> I found that, with all services (from aim to slashdot to facebook to HN) that people who claim to spend 5 minutes really end up spending about an hour a day.

How did you found that?

I don't have to track that, i am there just some seconds. If the message counter is not changed, i close it. I make this check 4 or 5 times a day and only when there is a message i spend time to answer it.

veyron
I actually did an empirical test with AIM (rigging a version of gaim -- now I think it's called pidgin -- to generate those statistics)
ljf
Same as you - check often but only to see headline and if I have a notification. Very rare that I am even on there for 2 minutes, let alone 5.
technoslut
I'm in my early 30s. I don't fit in the criteria described above. I only have a Facebook account so no one would use my name and I was interested in Turntable.fm access. I have friends there but I'm not really interested in checking their updates since I can just IM or speak to them.
ljf
Missing an important one for me: I spend mere seconds on it a few times a day, but check it every day via my phone and PC

So more than an hour a week, but WAY less than an hour a day.

flyosity
I chose "few hours per year" but that might be pushing it. I log into Facebook maybe once every few weeks, for about 30 seconds, just to see what's different. The main reason I don't use it is I was a very early user of Twitter so my "online social networking" is done over there. Also, I don't care about people I went to high school with.
VonLipwig
I fall into the group of those who hate Facebook but must have an account because some muppets in my social group only organise events via Facebook. A only pop on if I get a relevant email notification.

Its a bit sad how dependent some people are on Facebook. I mean seriously.. if it is important it will come up in conversation. As 95% of stuff posted on Facebook never comes up in conversation I can only assume 95% is just noise.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
durga
To many people, facebook is where conversation happens.
brudgers
>"no one in my immediate circle, myself included, used facebook since college."

That sounds like a pretty homogeneous circle given that it would almost exclusively be made up primarily consists of 20 somethings who joined when Facebook was another animal altogether than it is today.

To put it in perspective, I have a Facebook account in part for loose contact with people I have known since the 70's and as a means of seeing pictures of my nephews and nieces and 2nd cousins.

I use Facebook with the many of same reservations with which I use Google - although given its nature, it is easy to isolate its use to a dedicated virtual machine and therefore avoid a significant degree of its tracking and datamining.

aw3c2
I am outside the poll options, multiple times a day but nowhere near one hour.
tobtoh
I check FB every day - but I'm a somewhat reluctant user of it. Whilst both Google and FB track my personal usage of the web, I actually trust (in loose terms) Google more - mainly because I know they use it for advertising (which I'm fine with), but that others (general public, friends etc) can't see what I do.

I have a huge aversion to FB cos I'm never sure what info I have is private. Their 'privacy' measures are a joke when every update they make to FB means I have to double check what my settings are, and test to see what is being published that I'm unaware of.

As a result, whilst I still use FB to stay across what my friends are doing, I've stripped out all profile info on my account, any photos that I'm tagged in (by myself or others) become only viewable by my 'personal friends' group, and my privacy settings are set pretty high. I have also found that the frequency that I post status updates has dropped to almost zero. So the more FB tries to make 'frictionless sharing', the more I find I'm moving to other places like Google+ and Twitter - places I feel I have a degree of control.

wingerlang
Check it throughout the day since it is on my bookmarks-list. Most visits are a couple of seconds long and i never write status-updates. Comment once in a while.
garyrichardson
How about "I have facebook because some of my friends use it for party invites."?

I don't measure my fb usage in hours.. It's more like meetup.com for me -- I only go there when it pings me.

modoc
My family is spread all over the country and they all post on FB pretty often with photos/videos/updates that make it easy to keep up with what they've all been up to. If it wasn't for that, I'd be gone in a heartbeat. I've tried to pull them over to G+ but no luck:(
Tyrannosaurs
There's another question here which is what do you use FB for.

I don't trust FB with my personal data so they have very very little of it and my involvement with the site is largely passive consumption. This might add up by the time I've looked at pictures and read a bunch of stuff, but it's a very different level of engagement to those who post more - I could check it every day but it's far from an essential part of my life.

(BTW - your selection bias issue hasn't gone away, it's still a self selecting poll, time is just one tiny factor).

leepaulkennedy
Easily spend at least an hour a day - checking every hour for few a few minutes. I am 22 and its the main form of communication with my friends - I have different groups set up for different groups of friends, making it easy to have group conversation. The other major part I use Facebook is for the messages, writing long messages once every couple of days like e-mail, but on Facebook.
albertzeyer
I have written some small scripts in the past which capture more or less exactly what I do on my computer, i.e. every 10 seconds, it saves the related URL and other information of the application which is in the foreground.

https://github.com/albertz/timecapture

So far, I haven't really written any analysis scripts for the collected data. But just out of curiosity about my Facebook usage, I hacked together a small script (https://github.com/albertz/timecapture/blob/master/stats.py). The time varies a bit, mostly between a few seconds up to 20 minutes per day for me.

Feel free to fork and extend. :)

mstevens
I had facebook for a while, but I quit when I realised it was sharing more than I wanted to.
kariatx
I use Facebook to administer our business page on there. We have 70K+ users, and we get a lot of spam that is not automatically filtered out. I'm on there a lot cleaning things up.

Otherwise, I don't really add any content to Facebook much considering how often I log in. Most of my friends (professionals in their mid to late 30s) have more or less stopped using it, except for women with small children.

phamilton
I facebook about as much as I game on my computer (phone doesn't count...). It's an active "I'm bored, let's waste time" decision.