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.
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 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
You don't have to quit Facebook to get the mental health benefits.
All you have to do is unfollow everyone! Literally everyone. Your feed will be blank and peaceful, but you will still be able to maintain a presence on messenger and maintain your profile for people to reach you. You can also still interact with private Facebook groups and things, if you want.
This is what I did, and it curbed my addiction to checking facebook.
After a while, I slowly started following specific people again (mainly just the people I interact with on a daily basis, and the few family members that I can actually stand).
The moment someone starts stressing me out by posting nonsense or clutter, they get unfollowed.
It's very zen, and my mental health has drastically improved from it.
P.S. If you Google "Facebook Unfollow All", there are multiple tools and things like browser extensions which make this as simple as one button press to accomplish. It can be pretty tedious to do manually by hand if you have a lot of friends.
This was my approach as well, and I can highly vouch for it. I found myself checking facebook at a party, or with friends. And caught myself doing it and felt really, really stupid because of it. But I have a lot of friends that schedule events purely on facebook or only contact me on messenger. So I unfollowed everyone
I sometimes check specific pages of my friends, but I am more prone to just contacting them and asking them how they are doing specifically. As a result, some people have been pushed away, others have been pulled closer, and I've found who I genuinely wanted to hear from and communicate with.
Though this plus restricting who can see my profile in the first place does sometimes make it a bit difficult for people who I've casually met to reconnect with me. Maybe I'll loosen that up a bit.
I did this also. Most successful "be on facebook but not sucked in" method I've ever done.
I started just by unfollowing literally everyone. I have since readded my immediate family and a couple close friends. I find this doesn't change things, and it's more automatic than remembering to check their pages. They don't post much.
Finally, when visiting Munich I joined a local group. Didn't unsubscribe, so I still see posts. This is sort of handy: if you have nothing followed, facebook will dresge up random stuff such as suggested friends.
With a single group you auto ignore, facebook is content and just shows that. (But beneath family, if there are any posts from them)
Yeah, I ended up with something similar, where I only had Facebook friends if I thought I had a chance of talking to them directly sometime soon. It's been way better for me since then (although occasionally people that don't understand this policy seem to be confused / unhappy that I'm not their Facebook friend).
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?
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.
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.
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?"
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).
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.
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.
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..)
I am prepared for this to be a minority opinion, but I liked FB when I joined and I still really like it. There may be many alternatives, but as someone who grew up with an acoustic coupler modem and an Apple //+, I do not take for granted the fact that I can video chat with friends around the world for free with Messenger. In a time of political and social conflict I am soothed by daily stories of the mundane: a kid doing better than expected on a spelling test, or scoring a goal in soccer; an unexpected meetup with an old classmate; or a selfie of someone going on a hike. I get great recipes on FB.
Many friends have quit FB and reported that they feel better, and almost everyone on this thread is reporting the same thing, so there must be something to it. Honestly though, I have a hard time understanding why looking at a FB feed would bother someone. If it is anxiety over privacy, then absolutely, leaving FB absolutely makes sense. I get the feeling that it agitates people for other reasons though, but I am not sure what those are.
> In a time of political and social conflict I am soothed by daily stories of the mundane
I think this is one of the reasons; instead of accepting hardships exist and dealing with them, some people use social media as a filter for life. As such, since they avoid hardships, they never trained on dealing with hardships. I've spoken about it in my comment history, but I think some people lack perseverance/grit in this regard. A gas station cashier may be less motivated to get out of their job for a better career because they are busy getting entertained on their phone rather while than being bored during dead times.
I still have Facebook mostly for planning things with groups, but have all notifications disabled. Now, I only check it once a week to see plans change or if I was tagged in a picture. I just don't care about the rest.
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.
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.
It's funny that a study is now required to show this. I remember before Facebook was even a thing. Back then, it was just common knowledge that an obsession with one's social life would lead to shallowness and a sense that one's life lacked meaning as well as all sorts of other problems. It took me a while to even get a Facebook account because of this. I think before Facebook people used to have stronger intuitions about the negative sides of popularity contests, the dynamics of group think, and the pressures of conformity.
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.
”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.
[+] [-] nindalf|7 years ago|reply
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.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psycholog...
[+] [-] shmageggy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottlocklin|7 years ago|reply
http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf
[+] [-] Brigadirk|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RankingMember|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] have_faith|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] marviel|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astazangasta|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naravara|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] t0mbstone|7 years ago|reply
All you have to do is unfollow everyone! Literally everyone. Your feed will be blank and peaceful, but you will still be able to maintain a presence on messenger and maintain your profile for people to reach you. You can also still interact with private Facebook groups and things, if you want.
This is what I did, and it curbed my addiction to checking facebook.
After a while, I slowly started following specific people again (mainly just the people I interact with on a daily basis, and the few family members that I can actually stand).
The moment someone starts stressing me out by posting nonsense or clutter, they get unfollowed.
It's very zen, and my mental health has drastically improved from it.
P.S. If you Google "Facebook Unfollow All", there are multiple tools and things like browser extensions which make this as simple as one button press to accomplish. It can be pretty tedious to do manually by hand if you have a lot of friends.
[+] [-] JimiofEden|7 years ago|reply
I sometimes check specific pages of my friends, but I am more prone to just contacting them and asking them how they are doing specifically. As a result, some people have been pushed away, others have been pulled closer, and I've found who I genuinely wanted to hear from and communicate with.
Though this plus restricting who can see my profile in the first place does sometimes make it a bit difficult for people who I've casually met to reconnect with me. Maybe I'll loosen that up a bit.
[+] [-] graeme|7 years ago|reply
I started just by unfollowing literally everyone. I have since readded my immediate family and a couple close friends. I find this doesn't change things, and it's more automatic than remembering to check their pages. They don't post much.
Finally, when visiting Munich I joined a local group. Didn't unsubscribe, so I still see posts. This is sort of handy: if you have nothing followed, facebook will dresge up random stuff such as suggested friends.
With a single group you auto ignore, facebook is content and just shows that. (But beneath family, if there are any posts from them)
[+] [-] enedil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lenocinor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newsgremlin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiveoak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smokeyj|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] BeetleB|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marricks|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ip26|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brightball|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wccrawford|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddtaylor|7 years ago|reply
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?"
[+] [-] rchaud|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danpalmer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cntlzw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PretzelFisch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpchaps|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vxxzy|7 years ago|reply
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..)
[+] [-] owens99|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eeZah7Ux|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobochan|7 years ago|reply
Many friends have quit FB and reported that they feel better, and almost everyone on this thread is reporting the same thing, so there must be something to it. Honestly though, I have a hard time understanding why looking at a FB feed would bother someone. If it is anxiety over privacy, then absolutely, leaving FB absolutely makes sense. I get the feeling that it agitates people for other reasons though, but I am not sure what those are.
[+] [-] tsumnia|7 years ago|reply
I think this is one of the reasons; instead of accepting hardships exist and dealing with them, some people use social media as a filter for life. As such, since they avoid hardships, they never trained on dealing with hardships. I've spoken about it in my comment history, but I think some people lack perseverance/grit in this regard. A gas station cashier may be less motivated to get out of their job for a better career because they are busy getting entertained on their phone rather while than being bored during dead times.
I still have Facebook mostly for planning things with groups, but have all notifications disabled. Now, I only check it once a week to see plans change or if I was tagged in a picture. I just don't care about the rest.
[+] [-] insickness|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davesque|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yotamoron|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamblor956|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malvosenior|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] twoquestions|7 years ago|reply