With ai, i hope the feed is more useful to me.
You can hope, but certainly you don’t expect it?
The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
11–20 of 527 posts
Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
#12[flagged]
Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
#13Anecdotal: Stopping commenting on reddit reduced
emotional stress significantly.
Reddit is one of those "social" anti-social circles where
you can't afford to be on the "wrong side of argument" and
every discussion can quickly spiral out.
Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
#14> People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Can anyone translate? Random web search find sugge…
From the paper PDF (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33697/w336...):
> We estimate that users in the Facebook deactivation group reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, anxiety, and depression, relative to control users. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p > We estimate that users in the Instagram deactivation group reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement in the emotional state index relative to control. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p = 0.016 level when considered individually, and at the p = 0.14 level after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing along with the outcomes in Allcott et al. (2024). The latter estimate does not meet our pre-registered p = 0.05 significance threshold. Substitution analyses imply this improvement is achieved without shifts to offline activities. Non-preregistered subgroup analyses suggest larger effects of Instagram on women aged 1824.
Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
#15Anecdotal: Stopping commenting on reddit reduced emotional stress significantly. Reddit is one of those "social" anti-social circles where you can't afford to be on the "wrong side of argument" and every discussion can quickly spiral out.
Same with stopping replyhing to HN. I just downvote and upvote. Emotional stress significantly reduced.
Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
#16With ai, i hope the feed is more useful to me.
Remember when the feed was just a reverse chronological list of stuff you told Facebook you wanted to see? That was the peak. Once they started engagement farming using recommendation algorithms the site lost all of its appeal.
Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
#17[deleted]
Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
#18> People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Can anyone translate? Random web search find sugge…
From the paper PDF ( https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33697/w336... ): > We estimate that users in the Facebook deactivation group reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, anxiety, and depression, relative to control users. The effect is statistically distinguishable from zero at the p > We estimate that users in the Instagram deactivation group reported a 0.041 stand…
Perhaps it wasn't clear what I meant. When I said significantly, I meant it in the colloquial sense, not in the statistical significance sense.
I was looking for a more digestable figure describing the extent of improvements, not whether the study found them confidently distinguishable (which I just assumed they did based on the wording, good to know they didn't for Instagram).
Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
#19Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state
#20With ai, i hope the feed is more useful to me.
The ML model exists to benefit Facebook, not you. It maximizes for your engagement with the platform, not your happiness or usefulness.