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The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

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Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#391

Post by projectazorian »

ay wrote: post #154
madaxe_again wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know how much of a difference it would make, as then we just become the algorithm. I quit Facebook over a decade ago, because others used it to go “look at my shiny car/wife/house”, and I would use it to lose friends and alienate people. These online environments do not foster any kind of human connection.

Blue sky allows you to have many different kinds of feeds and I can say the difference in adrenaline level and mood is palpable depending on the feed I use. News items - frustration at the state the world is in. Urban bicycle feed: annoyance at the atrocities of the inept drivers. Feed with cycle side trip pictures: fun. Rust projects, Electronics: the curiosity of learning. Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing fe…

> Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is you can subscribe to someone else’s block lists. That changes the experience quite a lot, to the better.

Oh yeah I remember how this worked on Twitter. Make a post that annoys some anonymous blocklist maintainer, and suddenly you're blocked by a whole swath of accounts. Sometimes just following the wrong person or liking the wrong post is enough. No accountability for these decisions and no way to reverse them, or even figure out whom to approach to reverse them.

Sounds awfully exclusionary for a service that purports to be inclusive. It encourages the formation of authoritarian cliques, as tends to happen in any left-wing group sooner or later.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#392

Post by 9rx »

LtWorf wrote: post #269
blitzar wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got shot 7 times in the head rather than 10.

When I got on it I'd just see local events and stuff people I knew posted. Now it's "science" pages and shorts, which spread disinformation.

The "Friends" tab (sometimes "Feed" instead; the A/B testing on this one seems strong) only shows the posts of people you know. Events is still there as well. But in both cases the rate of creation has dropped dramatically since the time you remember, making these nearly useless. That's why the social media services have had to focus on content created by professional content creators instead.

The outcome was inevitable. People had fun posting posts and photos when it was a novelty, but once the novelty wore off they were back to not wanting to put in the effort. You can only post so many photos of your cat before you grow tired of it.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#394

Post by rambambram »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #126
Kozmik1 wrote: post #73

Weird. There is little that depresses me more than watching my wife sit at the table for hours a day slowly scrolling Facebook while ignoring me and the kids. We have talked about it and she's tried to reduce it to no avail.

You're enabling it by being kind. Stop being so nice.

Indeed. Take the kids out to do something active or just kick a ball or look at the squirrels.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#395

Post by jjulius »

sullivantrevor wrote: post #357

If you are sick of current social media and long for what we had in the past, check out what I am building. www.elswhr.app

After ditching social media, I've come to greatly value close connections with my friends and family. Meeting up and hanging out, or calling them regularly if they live far away, have proved far more fruitful than any value I thought I got out of using even tools such as AIM or MySpace (as referenced on your site). What does this provide that could improve upon these high-quality connections?

Additionally, assuming growth comes your way, how do you plan to support your platform/company from a financial perspective? Targeted ads, or...? What do you intend to do with user data?

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#396

Post by daveslash »

flkiwi wrote: post #371

I'm distinctly happier since I ditched Facebook and Twitter. It's not a radical change, because the world kinda sucks in general. And I'm a little sad that a few of my older family members are effectively invisible since they only communicate on Facebook, but, honestly, I didn't talk to my mother's first cousins pre-Facebook anyway so, net, I haven't actually lost very much. I was never on Instagram or TikTok, but ne…

Just speaking for myself. Facebook was fun when it was the underdog to MySpace. But I closed me account just a few years later and haven't looked back. Was never engaged on twitter, but have an account just so I can verify "yes, they actually posted that"

Aside from Reddit, my only social media is Instagram. On my Instagram, I only follow people I personally know or national-park/state-park/non-profit conservation accounts. I only like posts of people I personally know and nothing else, and I never comment on anything. I only post pretty pictures of nature with no people visible in a recognizable way. My feed is almost exclusively nature and animals (lots of seals and sea lions) with a lot of scuba diving mixed in. I also get a lot of xennial humor posts too, which I send to my wife and a buddy.

It's a very limited level of engagement, and I'm very happy with it. I don't need anything more.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#397

Post by gretch »

kleiba wrote: post #166

I'm certainly an anomaly but since to me the downsides of social media have always been quite prominent and seemed to outweigh the benefits by a margin, I never jumped on the social media train. But I've got to say, it's getting harder and harder to keep that up. As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joinin…

> I definitely feel no inclination to share all of my communications (and pictures) with Meta.

You don't have to share your messages or pictures with Meta to fix the problems you laid out in your post. Certainly not all of them.

For example with the bowling situation, all you had to do was listen passively to times/events being posted.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#398

Post by hammock »

perching_aix wrote: post #18
SamvitJ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Multiply by .37 to get PERCENTILE change, not percent.

If you were average happiness, and you improve that by 1 stdev, you are now happier than 87% of your peers (when you were at 50%ile before). 0.6 stdev improvement would be vs 72% of your peers.

So to put it colloquially, if you have 7 friends, and you were in the middle of them (4th happiest), by quitting Facebook you are now happier than all but 1 one them.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#399

Post by projectazorian »

ghaff wrote: post #121
donatj wrote: post #111

Before its fall, I had over 700 followers on Twitter. I could post any random thought and within minutes be having an interesting conversation with some rando about it. For example I pondered why phone manufacturers didn't use a p2p protocol for distributing updates and had an enlightening conversation with a person who worked for a major telco chiming in as to why that would be problematic for their infrastructure.…

My sense is that Twitter’s fall was an opportunity for a lot of people to just drop out. I know for me it’s become a very occasional thing and neither Bluesky nor Mastodon ever achieved critical mass. As far as I’m concerned the format is largely done. Never engaged with the political stuff.

Same. Thanks Elon!

It wasn't without consequences though. I'd made some IRL connections through twitter that I thought would last for years - they migrated to bluesky and IG but I didn't. Suddenly they were not interested in speaking with me.

Lose your clout, don't be surprised if you get shunned by the clout obsessed.

Re: The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

#400

Post by CGMthrowaway »

perching_aix wrote: post #18
SamvitJ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Multiply by .37 to get PERCENTILE ranking change, not percent. If you were average happiness, and you improve that by 1 stdev, you are now happier than 87% of your peers (when you were at 50%ile before). 0.6 stdev improvement would be vs 72% of your peers.

So to put it colloquially, if you have 4 friends, and you were in the middle of them (3rd happiest aka happier than 2 of them), by quitting Facebook you are now happier than all but 1 one them (aka happier than 3 of them).

AKA for every 4 friends you have you can jump ahead of 1 of them in the happiness race by quitting facebook.

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