
The Welfare Effects of Social Media [pdf] - endofcapital
http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf
======
o10449366
One takeaway from the study that's often ignored on Hacker News, likely
because most users here don't use Facebook or have a negative view towards the
company, is that _the majority of FB users place a real value on its service._
Instagram and FB and Whatsapp may be useless to _you_ , but that doesn't mean
they don't contribute very real (and even positive) utility to the majority of
their users.

"Our participants’ answers in free response questions and follow-up interviews
make clear the diverse ways in which Facebook can improve people’s lives,
whether as a source of entertainment, a means to organize a charity or an
activist group, or a vital social lifeline for those who are otherwise
isolated. Any discussion of social media’s downsides should not obscure the
basic fact that it fulfills deep and widespread needs"

This is a point often left out of discussions on this website, unfortunately.

~~~
nugget
What are the best replacements (products, services, or just best practices)
for Facebook's core utility of sharing photos and updates, and generally
staying in touch with family and friends in your network? I agree with you
that there's real value there, but for me it became overshadowed by the deluge
of unwanted features and content.

~~~
o10449366
Personally, I don't use FB anymore even though I still have an account. I use
Messenger to keep up with my closest friends and I use Instagram for photo
sharing and general life updates. I don't follow anyone who I don't actually
consider a friend and my profile is on private. I further restrict my circle
with Instagram's "Close Friends" feature when I want to share something on my
story with only a select few.

Prior to that, though, I just made extensive use of Facebook's unfollow
feature and a few key uBlock Origin filters (that block out any posts
containing the words "____ was tagged in a post" or such).

Also, for what it's worth, I only follow ~200 people on Instagram so maybe I
don't have enough feed content to generate any, but I have NEVER seen an
advertisement on Instagram and all of the posts also appear in chronological
order for me. I get the feeling that most of the people who have a bad time
with FB or Instagram are the people who don't use the unfollow feature for
their uncle that spends all day posting inflammatory political rants or who
follow spammy Instagram accounts that are just promotion bots.

If you use FB and FB's apps and services to keep up with your friends, your
_real_ friends, I think they're pretty great.

Edit: For those interested, these are my uBlock filters for facebook.com:

[https://pastebin.com/GHwpM9bY](https://pastebin.com/GHwpM9bY)

If you're tired of the noise in your feed I recommend trying these out. They
aren't particularly well organized, when I first started using uBlock Origin I
wasn't all too familiar with the syntax, but they do a pretty good job (for
me).

~~~
tenebrisalietum
I notice a lot of junk from Facebook comes from "re-shares"; people sharing
stuff from these crappy third-party groups that exist simply to make things
viral.

I tend to block on sight, but wish there was a way to say "Automatically block
shared posts containing videos/photos that don't originate from the poster or
people in my Friends."

I'm sure there are people that save these meme/viral pictures on their phone
and re-post it, rather than just blindly share from these stupid groups, but
not very many from what I've seen.

~~~
o10449366
I agree. That's why I specifically implemented the uBlock filter for any posts
containing "your friend was tagged in ___" or "your friend commented on ____".
99.9% of those posts were meme posts I had no interest in. I recommend you
look at my filter list and see if that one helps, if you happen to use uBlock
Origin. It did wonders for my feed.

------
erickhill
I deleted my personal account and created an anonymous one purely for FB
Groups.

The first 3 days took a lot of getting used to - like quitting smoking. I
realized I had a hand-fixation of pulling out my phone, hitting the home
button and going to the app. With no social connections, it became only for
reading new posts in the Groups I'm attached to now (retro computing) which
are not nearly as frequent nor as acidic.

It's sort of the new version of Forums, really. And since they are moderated,
the conversation is very interesting/helpful and on point.

I'll never hook up the personal social graph again.

And yeah, after about 2-3 weeks of being unplugged I wasn't twitchy about it
anymore. I thought I'd have a giant gaping hole after using it for 10 years. I
was wrong.

Life is better without it.

~~~
mcculley
I went through and unfollowed every person (except for a few close family
members) and disabled notifications on almost all pages. Now when I accept a
new friend request, I immediately unfollow that person. I have almost no
notifications and very little reason to browse Facebook, but I can still use
it to contact people and respond to event invitations. I find this to be a
good compromise.

------
elpakal
Anecdotally, the hardest part for me when I deleted FB entirely was the first
two weeks. The amount of times I was itching to check an update, see what was
liked or browse some new posts was shocking to me. Get through the first two
weeks and you realize how much of an addiction this can be.

Replace _deleted_FB_ above with any other addiction and similarities appear.

------
andrew_
My own anecdotal experience echos a similar result to the findings. Though I
didn't remove Facebook altogether, I did unfollow and clear my timeline
permanently, removed all media, and use it exclusively for receiving Event
invitations and notifications. Still, I do not miss a single thing about the
rest of that network.

Sadly I admit that my Twitter use has gone up as a result. It seems I've got
some more work to do to kick the social media habit.

------
chrispeel
_" We use participants’ pre-experiment and post-experiment Facebook valuations
to quantify the extent to which factors such as projection bias might cause
people to overvalue Facebook, finding that the magnitude of any such biases is
likely minor relative to the large consumer surplus that Facebook generates."_

What is "consumer surplus"? By this do the authors mean the total benefit to
FB users?

~~~
nickles
> What is "consumer surplus"? By this do the authors mean the total benefit to
> FB users?

It's a concept from welfare economics (economic benefit at an aggregate
level). Consumer surplus is the excess benefit a consumer receives from
purchasing a good (willingness to pay - price paid). For example, if you're
willing to pay $100 annually to use Facebook, and you actually pay $0, then
the consumer surplus would be $100.

