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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

#71

Post by rimeice »

rimeice wrote: post #69

Bad time to do it during what turned out to be very emotionally charged election where traditional news turns in to social media style instantaneous reporting and is inescapable. I’d also suggest 6 weeks is not long enough to fully recover. In fact in that time frame you may still be experiencing FOMO type symptoms. Would have been interesting to see how the participants faired after a year/two years.

Also fb and instagram are just two of many social media platforms, so this study doesn’t sound like a full cold turkey test.

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

#72

Post by NitpickLawyer »

999900000999 wrote: post #55
countWSS wrote: post #13

Anecdotal: 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.

Depends on what you do on Reddit. Politics, relationships, those are not things to talk about. But being able to respond to major FOSS contributors, that I'll do.

> Depends on what you do on Reddit.

I agree to some extent, but even highly specialised / niche topics on dedicated subs are getting slammed by the "hivemind". I guess it's more apparent for non-us users, as we're not the target audience, but the political brigading is showing even on subs like space and ML related. Reddit is now very similar to ~2015-16 reddit when the-donald and other subs really peaked, just the other way around. 10/25 posts on all are bad orange man and bad space man related. The technology sub is a mess of weaponised autism. And then you get the same political bs coming from weird subs, like the cute pics sub, or the knitting sub suddenly having political submissions w/ 3k-6k upvotes, all saying the same thing.

It doesn't help that it is still the easiest "social network" to create accounts on, and bot on. With the advances in LLMs I sometimes truly can't say if an account is real or a bot. And I work in this space...

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

#74

Post by safety1st »

nomilk wrote: post #56

The surprise here is how little of an effect it has. Deactivating facebook makes you only 1/16th of one standard deviation happier. And instagram even less. And this was measured during elections, when the effect is likely to be greatest. Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")

I think this is an important and often overlooked phenomenon actually. Studies of Internet engagement are filled with these skewed distributions that follow something like a Pareto principle, or I've heard it termed the 90-9-1 distribution in engagement where 90% of users just lurk a bit, 9% contribute casually, and then 1% are contributing like half of the content on the platform.

It would follow logically that whatever kind of brain rot social media causes, would affect 1% of the population very dramatically, another 9% somewhat more noticeably, and then there would be this vast ocean of people who are only marginally aware/affected. From the perspective of online activity they appear to not even exist.

This always seems counterintuitive to the 9% or the 1% (and just by commenting we're already in one of those demogs). But there's lots of data out there supporting these skewed distributions in online activity.

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

#75

Post by supriyo-biswas »

8s2ngy wrote: post #41

I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can…

> This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media... Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends

This sort of longing for a cozy social media circles exists a lot in tech adjacent circles. However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company, which in other words simply means that users pay for the pay for the product, this is not gonna happen. While you may be willing to do so, I'm sure many people would simply stop communicating with you because of the additional friction caused, especially when a free alternative exists.

Additionally, the "viral content" you speak of exists for two reasons, which I'm not sure it could be entirely solved even if you had users pay for the product.

Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. This is where viral content, such as posts from politicians and celebrities, gain their initial spread.

I would also like to note that someone may want to follow a politician or celebrity because they think what they're doing is generally useful or entertaining, respectively.

This leads me to my second point, where even if you self-opted to not interact with viral content, I'm not sure your social circles would also follow through with the same choice. This ultimately means the platform has to take specific measures to suppress some posts based on its content or not show any of your friends' activity, both of which has disadvantages. Further, the former is in itself controversial depending upon which politician is in power and the current Overton window[1].

(Re downvotes: I'd like to know what part of all of this people disagree with.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window#

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

#76

Post by kalkaran »

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).

The best thing you can do is compare it to another study, since turning 0.06 standard deviations into a percentage of happiness isn’t going to be that telling.

In general, 0.2 is considered a small effect. So 0.06 is quite small — likely not a practically noticeable change in well-being. But impressive to me when I compare it to effect sizes of therapy interventions which can lie around 0.3 for 12 weeks.

Quote:

> “50 randomized controlled trials that were published in 51 articles between 1998 and August 2018. We found standardized mean differences of Hedges’ g = 0.34 for subjective well-being, Hedges’ g = 0.39 for psychological well-being, indicating small to moderate effects, and Hedges’ g = 0.29 for depression, and Hedges’ g = 0.35 for anxiety and stress, indicating small effects.”

(Source: The efficacy of multi-component positive psychology interventions, 2019 — https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331028589_The_Effic...)

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

#77

Post by mentalgear »

nomilk wrote: post #56

The surprise here is how little of an effect it has. Deactivating facebook makes you only 1/16th of one standard deviation happier. And instagram even less. And this was measured during elections, when the effect is likely to be greatest. Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")

follow the money ...

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

#78

Post by thinkingemote »

nomilk wrote: post #56

The surprise here is how little of an effect it has. Deactivating facebook makes you only 1/16th of one standard deviation happier. And instagram even less. And this was measured during elections, when the effect is likely to be greatest. Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is "who funded this?")

Removing one dopamine addicting and cortisol antagonising source might just be replaced by more of all the other sources that are being consumed. Perhaps they just watched TV news more, for example?

But perhaps the study shows that the effect works in the right direction even if small and even when replaced by any other behaviours that cause unhappiness, depression and anxiety.

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

#79

Post by designerarvid »

8s2ngy wrote: post #41

I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can…

Intellectually many want this. But the feed shortcuts our reptile brain and gains more engagement minutes / day. As you say, the algorithmic feed is superior for creators wanting reach, and more importantly, advertisers who want eyeballs on their ads. Due to network effects, it is likely impossible to get friends and family to join a boring and non-profit alternative.

Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement.

The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff).

The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.

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

#80

Post by thinkingemote »

noncoml wrote: post #15
countWSS wrote: post #13

Anecdotal: 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.

Procrastination Mode on HN (see links in footer) helps significantly. I wish I enabled it earlier, I just kept putting it off.
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