
Estimating Value of Facebook by Paying Users to Stop Using It - infodocket
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0207101
======
sonnyblarney
1) The $1000 is misleading because although it's an average, the median is
considerably lower, around $100 in that case.

2) This shouldn't be surprising as it tells us most people don't care that
much, and a few people 'really do' \- which is normal for most goods.

3) Since we're dealing with network externalizations, wherein the value goes
up when more people use it (the value of FB is the network, less so the
features) - then a lower price makes more sense. If all those people who bid
$100 or less (say 2/3 of the population) quit FB tommorow, than those in the
$1K range who 'really like FB' would probably leave as well, because their
friends would not be there.

This gives us a hint that in product wherein the consumer surplus is not very
evenly distributed - and there are strong network effects ... that the optimal
price should be low.

4) Getting paid to leave is simply a different metric than having to get out
your wallet to pay for something. Surely the authors know this but I didn't
see it mentioned. 'WTP != WTL' i.e. willingness to pay is not the same as
willingness to leave.

~~~
kmonad
At 100$ median valuation, wouldn't that mean that facebook's value is inflated
(the article states ~250$ per user)?

~~~
yellowstuff
Facebook is valued by the stock market mainly by the profit it's expected to
generate in the long run. (Other concerns move the stock price around in the
short term, but for most large companies most of the time the stock price will
be a good reflection on the consensus view on long term profits.) The value
users get from Facebook is almost totally unrelated to profits generated, and
therefore to the stock price.

~~~
sonnyblarney
"The value users get from Facebook is almost totally unrelated to profits
generated, and therefore to the stock price."

They are _definitely_ related.

FB creates some kind of value - some goes to them in terms of profit, some
goes to the user in consumer surplus.

As FB shows more ads, the consumer surplus goes down.

Obviously corps are the one paying, but value to consumers does matter.

------
marsrover
Pretty interesting. I bet if you took that same group and said Facebook now
costs 1000 a year to use they would all quit.

It’s easier to spend money that wasn’t in your wallet in the first place. It’s
when you start taking it out of the wallet that people react.

~~~
Tomminn
I suspect it'd depend entirely on whether facebook costs _everybody_
$1000/year, or _just them_.

If facebook costed _everybody_ $1000/year, I would definitely stop using it,
because the network would be immediately broken since everybody would know
everybody with any sense would stop using it.

If facebook only costed _only me_ $1000/year, I would know the network was
still intact, and I would consider it.

~~~
everdev
The latter is a true hypothetical as US law prevents charging different rates
to different users for the exact same product/service.

~~~
btgeekboy
It does? There's quite a few counterexamples to that, such as airline fares,
cars, etc.

~~~
everdev
The example above is Facebook charging a single person $1k/year while not
charging other people. That's called price discrimination:
[https://econsultancy.com/what-is-price-discrimination-and-
is...](https://econsultancy.com/what-is-price-discrimination-and-is-it-
ethical/)

It would be a slam dunk lawsuit.

You can still offer discounts (airline tickets, Adobe, etc.) or negotiate
pricing (cars, etc.) legally.

But, it is illegal to isolate someone and charge them more without
justification as in OC's example.

So yes, Facebook charging a single person $1k/year is a true hypothetical. It
couldn't happen legally in the US.

------
sarcasmic
I don't know the economics terminology, but perhaps average people are just
decent at exploiting opportunity? In this study a third party paid out the
second-lowest amount to the bidders who bid the lowest amounts in return for
deactivation. While no one competitor platform does everything of what
Facebook's apps do, there are plenty of competitors they could make use of
instead to replace particular single features or utilities of Facebook. The
auction then becomes a game to bid an amount that's high as possible, yet
still the lowest among the bidders, to actually win the bet. And instead, if
Facebook raised prices from $0 to $1000 overnight, people would quit in
droves, for the same reason: because dozens of comparable offerings exists at
low or no cost that can take over subsets of the functionality in people's
lives.

Given that airline overbookings use the same scheme to decide who flies and
who gets paid and bumped to a certain, yet hazy-on-details future flight,
perhaps this study simply tests humans' secret bidding strategies much more so
than it tests the value people place on Facebook's utility.

One way to continue along this line of research would be to make people bid on
giving up a much larger selection of social media services, with the exception
of one, which would be their choice. They'd have to name their choice to keep.
A second auction would then encourage them to name their price to give up that
last one as well.

~~~
jackcarter
The optimal strategy in a second-price auction is to bid the true amount
you're willing to pay (or be paid, in this case).

You can show that bidding higher or lower than this amount is dominated by
bidding the true amount. If you bid higher than your true amount, this can
only hurt you: You won't get any more money to stop using Facebook, because if
you win, you get the second-lowest bidder's bid amount. It only makes a
difference if you increase your bid _too far_ , and lose the auction.

If you bid lower than your true amount, you might win when you otherwise would
not have won... but you underbid! You're not getting enough money to
compensate you for the loss of Facebook.

See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction)

Now, I could imagine that there might be a systemic bias towards overbidding,
because people aren't good at valuing their cost of foregoing Facebook.

~~~
ineedasername
But given the lack of information, a person might reasonably try to make
educated guessed about other people's bids. And often enough there's not _one_
price a person has, it's more of a range. The combination complicates the
thought process: A person might think anything over $100 would put them out of
the running, but is willing to accept as little as $60. Their goal is to
maximize their price within that range. Then it's not as simple as choosing
your "true" price, the thought process is about choosing the highest price
within your range that you believe is less than someone else's. I guess you
might say any price within the range is a "true" price, but it does complicate
the optimal strategy to include a bit more thought than just a single value.

~~~
jackcarter
If I'm willing to accept as little as $60, then I should bid $60. If someone
else bids $1000, then I get $1000. I don't do any better by anticipating their
bid and inflating my own bid to $999. If they bid $61, I get $61, and because
I value not-having-Facebook at $60, that means I get $1 of surplus value.

Anyone bidding higher than their minimum price doesn't fully understand the
second-price auction. Probably lots of people don't understand it, which could
lead to inflated bids. (but that doesn't mean you, knowing better, should
inflate your own bid!)

~~~
ineedasername
ah, never mind then, I get it. I was thinking about backwards, or maybe
sideways, but either way not right side up. Thanks for the explanation.

------
MarkMc
> we consistently find the average Facebook user would require more than $1000
> to deactivate their account for one year

The Hackerati like to bemoan that most people don't value their privacy and
will happily give it up to Facebook and Google, even suggesting that such
people don't understand what they are giving up.

But maybe people _do_ value their privacy and _do_ understand what they are
giving up - it's just that Facebook and Google offer something that is even
more valuable than their privacy.

~~~
casefields
That's the same as the Liberty vs Security distinction for laws in society.
Time and again average people with prefer to sacrifice the former for the
latter.

~~~
Spivak
You make it sound irrational or somehow wrong. When driving on public roads I
give up a lot of liberty -- hundreds of rules, fees, mandatory insurance but
it's well worth it. Not just because driving itself provides a lot of value
but because driving is better for everyone, and in particular me being part of
that everyone, with less freedom.

Even in the extreme case like HOAs that enforce lawn height requirements. Yes
it's a little insane but it's what keeps the neighborhood valuable and your
property value appreciating.

The average person is pretty darn rational. Who wouldn't trade away liberty if
they're better off having done so?

~~~
kmlx
"but because driving is better for everyone"

maybe "driving with rules", but driving literally kills via exhaust fumes. if
you own a tesla, you've already dumped so much pollution into the air...

"it's what keeps the neighborhood valuable and your property value
appreciating"

some people don't care about this stuff. they realise their time on this earth
is too short to spend it on "lawn height requirements".

"The average person is pretty darn rational."

Humans aren't rational. At all. Reason is a rare tool. Case in point: the
current advertising complex.

------
BlackLotus89
Paying somebody to don't use something free doesn't equal the value of the
product.

If you would pay me each month to not listen to music on youtube, while being
at work, it would be far more than I would pay to keep using it. It would be a
damn shame if I couldn't do that anymore, but I would never pay the same
amount to keep using it.

Edit: structure

~~~
jakob223
Consider 2 scenarios:

A) I pay you $x per year not to listen to music on youtube.

B) I give you $x per year. Simoultaneously, Youtube starts charging $x per
year to listen to music.

Is there much of a difference between them?

~~~
equeny77
Yes, lots of differences: \- you can invest $10 for a month, get small profit
and than start listening music \- you can sign-up for Spotify for $7 a month
and get $3 back.

~~~
scarejunba
How are these differences? You can do this in either case.

------
berbec
There is a network effect to consider, too. The initial group may require $1k,
but the asking price would likely drop as the remaining number of users does.

~~~
kazinator
Obviously each little act of "stop using it" lowers the value of Facebook. If
nobody uses Facebook, it has no value.

This is supposed to be a tool to estimate the value, not to get everyone to
stop using Facebook: _how much do we need to pay a given user to stop using
Facebook, provided that nobody else stops using Facebook?_

If we put a thermometer on every cubic millimeter of an object, we will
probably significantly affect its temperature; but we don't do that; we use
one small thermometer against a much larger object, so the transfer of heat
between the two has a negligible effect on the temperature.

~~~
itronitron
>> If nobody uses Facebook, it has no value.

I wish that were true, but if everyone stopped using Facebook they could still
build shadow profiles for everyone, as they do for people that do not have
accounts, and they could just sell this data out.

~~~
chii
why would those shadow accounts be any useful (or accurate) if there's no
active users to corroborate or contribute any information on them?

Facebook's value is derived entirely from the information generated from its
user base.

------
mirimir
> Though the populations sampled and the auction design differ across the
> experiments, we consistently find the average Facebook user would require
> more than $1000 to deactivate their account for one year. While the
> measurable impact Facebook and other free online services have on the
> economy may be small, our results show that the benefits these services
> provide for their users are large.

That's pretty funny.

So I wonder what the average opioid addict would want in exchange for a year
of daily withdrawal? Or even tobacco addicts. I've read that, in Germany after
WWII, some people just about starved to death, because they'd traded too much
food for tobacco.

------
AYBABTME
I don't really care about eating ice cream, but I'd need to be paid a lot to
accept to not eat ice cream for a year.

Not because of the ice cream's value in my life, more because it's an
unsolicited offer to sell my rights away. I have little reasons to sell, and I
might want ice cream within a year, so you better pony up the cash to make it
worth my time and inconvenience. However, it really doesn't mean anything
about the value of ice cream.

~~~
sonnyblarney
"more because it's an unsolicited offer to sell my rights away."

Most people don't think in those terms.

Also, you're not giving up 'rights' you're willingly not doing something. You
don't have a 'right' to Facebook anyhow.

I think what you might be getting with ice cram is the 'optionality' value.

Sure, you ate ice cream 20 times last year, but this year, maybe you're at
your kids b-day party and want to eat with them! Or take a toor of some Irish
Cream place with great ice cream. There's a big variability and unknown
distribution of value, with a long tail in there that has to be accounted for.
Often by instinct :)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
From what I can tell the participants for the auctions came from:

>One hundred twenty-two Facebook users on the campus of a Midwestern liberal
arts college took part in Study 1

>A third sample was recruited online through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk),
an “open online marketplace for getting work done by others,” where workers
complete Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) [40].

Thus the study sample populations were college students and people on Amazon
Mechanical Turk who do Human Intelligence Tasks. I would guess that the Amazon
Mechanical Turk also had a high number of college students. Based on the
samples, I think that you can conclude that college students really like
Facebook. How that actually translates into the general population is a
different story.

------
quadrangle
> our results show that the benefits these services provide for their users
> are large.

Good god, you scientists can't tell the difference between value created
("provided") and value captured??

Put it a different way: how much would you have to pay people for them to miss
announcements of important local events, miss photos and personal notes from
their closest friends and family… of course, it's going to be a high amount.
But those things all existed pre-Facebook. Facebook has just CAPTURED the
value.

~~~
pavlov
Those things were not free before Facebook. If you wanted to advertise the
birthday of your two-year-old in the local newspaper with a picture and a cute
greeting, you paid money. (Yes, people regularly paid for that kind of notices
in newspapers.)

~~~
quadrangle
Bad analogy. Advertising your family update in the newspaper is more like
having a blog. It's a totally public-focused thing. While Facebook has a lot
public, it's really focused on direct stuff of interest to your connections.

People used to mail photos to one another or send letters. With digital
technology, that's emails. Facebook doesn't get credit for the switch to the
internet and digital formats.

By design, Facebook pushes people to share photos _only_ on Facebook and
forget to email others.

Want a test? What's your hypothesis for the following:

"How much would I have to pay you to cancel your Facebook account _if_ I made
sure that your closer family and friends and other communities you care about
all sent updates to you by email instead?"

~~~
pavlov
Personally I’d hate it if my cousin sent me her vacation pictures by email,
but I’m perfectly happy to take a quick glance at them while scrolling by in
the FB feed.

But that’s beside the point. There’s something you’re missing about the local
newspaper analogy: it’s that Facebook works great for communicating and
sharing within groups of similar size to “people in my small town community
who give a shit about my daughter’s birthday”.

~~~
quadrangle
Except that FB is actually tragically awful at these things because the way
the algorithm is a black box that always changes, you don't have anything
reliable about who sees what… and to really promote something so people see
it, you PAY for it to be boosted, so it's no better in that sense than the old
newspaper analogy!

Let me tell you a personal story: My sister is one of those people who just
throws stuff up on FB like anyone else. People not on FB miss it. A couple
years ago, someone inspired her to send a personal email to close family just
sharing updates about what's happening with her and inviting others to reply
the same way. It _immediately_ felt more personal and meaningful and brought
out different context and closer relationships compared to anything that
happens on Facebook. It died away after a little bit because we failed to keep
up a routine… but I predict that if your cousin sent you vacation pictures
_not_ in a just "email everyone" sense but in actually thinking of YOU, it
would actually feel good and bring you together in a more meaningful way… but
I don't know you or your cousin, of course.

------
maltalex
Loss aversion is probably a major factor [0]

It’s well known that people demand disproportionately larger compensation for
giving something up than they would pay to gain said thing.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion)

~~~
cepth
I think that the endowment effect may be the more relevant behavioral
economics concept here.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect)

------
floatingatoll
If people estimate the value of the benefit provided by Facebook to be $1000,
under US tax law are they required to declare that as a “gift” and pay taxes
on the net $1000 of service they received for $0?

~~~
patio11
Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: no.

The FMV of FaceBook access is zero, as evidenced by Facebook being routinely
available for free.

US tax law does not anticipate routinely taxing inchoate transfers of value
caused by operating things which distribute value broadly. For example, while
assigning the copyright to Harry Potter would likely be a taxable event,
holding a concert in public is not, even if the concert is of sufficient
quality level to charge for it. The general phrase for this is “de minimis non
curat lex”; specific instantiations of this of particular note are
intrafamilial payments for cleaning one’s room, which is de jure absolutely a
taxable event and which de facto would result in the IRS Commissioner being
asked to explain himself to Congress if it were ever enforced.

Additionally, if the IRS used people’s subjective self-assessments to value
things on one side of the ledger, they’d have to do it on another side of the
ledger, leading to people having the attack “be a utility monster [0]”
available against tax administration.

[0] Utility monsters have implausivly large but perhaps “legitimate”
weightings for things. The existence of them is problematic for systems which
do cost/benefits analyses and allow agents unconstrained choice of their
utility function.

~~~
floatingatoll
Thank you for the time you put into this reply.

------
imh
The raw averages are less interesting than the distributions here. Facebook is
the prototypical example of the importance of network effects. The mean bids
here are in the thousands, but the medians are $100-$200.

That means you could pay its users $100-200 to leave for a year, and it would
lose about half its users immediately. But after the first half of users
leave, it's probably worth a lot less to the remaining users than before the
first bunch left.

Even if 90% of their users are willing to pay some price to use it, charging
that price might lose them most or all of their users. I think that's super
interesting.

------
jaggednad
“ our results show that the benefits these services provide for their users
are large.” What someone is willing to pay and “benefits” they receive are not
the same thing. Someone already touched on it—people are willing to pay a lot
for heroin, but few would claim heroin is beneficial.

~~~
kolbe
Heroin is valuable, however.

------
hashkb
This is the same as saying that the value of cigarettes is the same as what it
would cost to pay a smoker to stop smoking.

With Facebook users, it can't be ignored that, in not all but many cases, we
are talking about behavior that ranges from slightly compulsive to downright
addicted.

~~~
izzydata
Do you believe it is not possible to alter the usage behavior of a person
addicted to a substance with money?

The cost might be unreasonably high to get them to stop, but it might be
possible.

~~~
carapace
That's beside the point: You cannot conclude that cigarettes are _beneficial_
by this method.

Right in the abstract they say:

> ... our results show that the benefits these services provide for their
> users are large.

...which is absurd.

~~~
rdiddly
I would, at the very least, say "perceived benefit."

~~~
quadrangle
even that is not fair, given the tobacco metaphor

------
AndyKelley
I didn't see the words "Endowment Effect" in the abstract or in these HN
comments, so here's a Wikipedia link:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect)

Just a little something to keep in mind, relevant to the discussion.

------
bitcoinbutter
Losing access to Facebook can be pretty brutal. Specifically messenger. I
actually had my Facebook temporarily suspended for 72h and I felt it.

It made it harder to contact with family ( we use group chat on messenger). I
was still able to see things on Facebook so it wasn't even as bad as a full
out ban. So many social events and communications are made through the
platform. It's tough, even if you don't like the way the company acts, if all
your friends and family use it to communicate you pay quite a price to protest
it.

------
move-on-by
This is a completely anecdotal story of how I found the price of my privacy
recently. I self identify as a privacy nut. I don’t Facebook, I don’t use
google. I’ll pay for privacy conscious services vs. using so called ‘free’
services, but I recently had an experience that gave me a bit of a different
viewpoint.

My wife also doesn’t have Facebook, for her it’s more of a time suck then
privacy reasons. For the most part she hears me talking about privacy, knows
it’s something I care a lot about, and is happy to go along with me. However,
she recently learned about a couple apps that give you money back. Walmart pay
and iboutta. Without a doubt these apps are tracking all sorts of things and
building profiles and selling our information. I’m totally against it... but
she loves getting the money back. “Oh you know that yogurt we got from
Walmart? Turns out Kroger had it on sell for 50 cents off and we got
reimbursed $5!” It really makes her happy. I’m thinking to myself that I would
have rather spent that $5 and had kept my privacy, but I end up keeping that
to myself. It’s something she really enjoys.

On the other side, it does get into a more devious side of privacy issues. You
don’t need everyone to give up their privacy rights- you just need a few to
give up the privacy of everyone they know.

------
decentralised
I think the experiment is fun but the principle is flawed imho. At best the
method will find the average _utility_ value of fb for the study population.

Another commenter remarks that it would be ok to pay 1k to access fb if there
is a promise of value (ie the "network" is still there) but projects that if
fb became a paid service, that most users would leave it so the risk of losing
utility value from fb would not be anywhere near 1k.

------
_ph_
Facebook for me is the means to keep contact with a larger group of my
friends. From this perspective, one would have to pay me a very significant
amount of money to drop the contact to my friends.

On the other side, this is mostly a thing of convenience and habit. The moment
there is another, may be even more convenient platform to keep my contacts, I
would drop Facebook for free and without heasitation. The value of Facebook
for me is purely in my current friend list.

------
Legogris
There is one thing that really stands out in the choice of words in this
article that makes me feel strange about it: Estimating the _value_ of
Facebook.

> [Facebook's] _benefits_ are hard to measure

The Introduction reads like Facebook was the first of its kind and invented
the social web. It's kind of like how mainstream media talk about Apple as the
inventor of the smartphone and the tabled. It's as if there was no Facebook or
Apple, there would never have been any other actor to take that space in the
market.

It's like these companies are deities in people's minds. Apple sure has its
prophets, but Facebook is probably felt as a more paternalistic and malevolent
superego god.

I mean, I would not be surprised to see this kind of narrative in some click-
driven blog. But in a peer-reviewed research article?

If this is really how most people think even in academic circles - that it is
Facebook or nothing - then there's a huge disconnect and I have grossly
underestimated the amount of awareness-spreading needed if we don't want to
fully lose the open web.

~~~
vasilipupkin
it's just that the study is surveying people who already have a Facebook
account. So the value they are talking about is not some abstract theoretical
concept of value - they are talking about value in the context of quite
literally - how much dollar value do people place on having a facebook
account.

~~~
Legogris
I get it, but to me that's like estimating the value of Honda by asking people
who drive a Honda how much they would have to be paid to not be able to drive
a car anymore.

The difference being that there are alternatives to cars while Facebook has a
monopoly on the social graph of many users. I think one could argue that
Facebook is a monopoly on online communication for large parts of the social
graph right now, especially as they also own WhatsApp and Instagram.

------
beefman
Even assuming only DAUs would pay $1000/year (Facebook has 1.5 billion of
them) and a P/S ratio of 1 (which is conservative), the company would be worth
$1.5T.

Edit: But we should consider something like Metcalfe's law, as pointed out by
berbec

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18720468](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18720468)

~~~
Eridrus
Companies cannot usually capture all the value they create.

~~~
quadrangle
And yet companies like Facebook capture many orders of magnitude MORE value
than they create.

------
kgwxd
If FB decided to start charging tomorrow, even $1, enough people would leave
that it would become useless for everyone that stayed.

------
xanderjanz
Isn't this sort of like estimating the value of Ford by paying users not to
use roads?

~~~
spuz
No, the roads are still free - the participants are still free to use other
services after deactivating their accounts.

~~~
xanderjanz
But other services don't connect to your friends. So I guess it's more like,
paying them not to use any intersecting public roads.

------
ada1981
What if it’s just a measure of the strength of addiction?

I imagine if you ran the same study and asked Heroin users or smokers how much
you’d have to pay them to stop it would have similar results.

------
piyh
I think you'd need to account for some behavioral economics in assigning
positive or negative dollar values to free services

------
byteofmydream
BTW, there are some pay-to-chat applications. i.e. WowApp
([https://www.wowapp.com/w/byteofmydream](https://www.wowapp.com/w/byteofmydream))
and also you can spend earned money to charity. Sorry for spam, I just think
it's a bit related to the topic

------
ineedasername
very important to keep in mind there's a world of difference between what
you'd have to pay a person to quit, and what they'd be willing to pay if
Facebook started charging.

I think the later would quickly approach $0 for most people, especially as
competitors rapidly entered the space to take advantage.

------
nsarafa
Does the study include WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram?

I'm curious to know how to figure changes when you include Facebook owned
services in addition to the primary Facebook platform.

------
ineedasername
I wonder if a freemium model would have worked for Facebook. Thoughts on what
that could looked like? Which featured might have been held back for paying
customers only?

------
ctdonath
Did they address how many have just quit FB? I did, $0.

~~~
cm2187
I would need to be paid to join FB again, and endure the continuous stream of
snarky memes and gregarious selfies.

~~~
stillworks
There is this very interesting stand-up comedian from India (Amit Tandon) on
YouTube. According to him ever since Fb become mainstream, people are under a
lot of pressure to enjoy their lives. He logs in every night even if it was
just to find out which of his friends were happier than him that day :D

------
mindgam3
I wonder how these results compare to Estimating Value of Fentanyl, Norco, and
Oxy by Paying Users to Stop Using Them.

------
ngcc_hk
Actually I find it more interesting to just use this site than reading fb feed
this day

------
emayljames
I'd deactivate for 5 bucks. I don't see or hold any value in it. I really
don't care about an old school friends meal, who I would only have a fake "hi,
how are you", then an awkward silence with if I met them anyway. Linkedin on
the other hand has a foundation of worth, as does HN.

~~~
marsrover
Please enlighten me on the worth of LinkedIn because I have yet to find it.
It’s basically become Facebook For Old People where said old people gripe
about Facebook and post absolutely stupid comments on Facebook-like videos.

~~~
WAthrowaway
If you keep your LI profile up to date and have in demand skills, people will
be knocking down your door to give you money. I've found all my best jobs from
LI contacts tbh.

It was a wasteland for a while but in my opinion has rebounded.

~~~
axaxs
As an anecdote/data point: I largely forgot about LinkedIn, and never really
heard much from them. One day I installed the app and decided to see what all
my old contacts were up to, just browsing around. Immediately after, my page
views went up and I was sent a few messages from recruiters. I'm wondering if
they don't 'reward' more active users in recruitment searches...

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rajacombinator
Did Facebook fund this study for positive PR? Or are the authors just trying
really hard to get hired there? $1k to shut down Facebook for a year is the
kind of result that should make one question one’s methods, not publish it.

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imhelpingu
Where can I donate?

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mbrumlow
I will do it for free... Wait, I already did...

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nextstep
Estimating value of heroin by paying user to stop using it.

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ironic_ali
Dopamine would be chemical in this case (probably? I'm not a neurologist..)

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bduerst
Here's my layman understanding:

\- Dopamine for that excited feeling that many people are liking what you had
said or posted, i.e. confirmation bias.

\- Serotonin for that lovey feeling of seeing something inspiring/cute/your
crush.

\- Adrenaline for internet arguments, insults, or conflict.

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emayljames
They also have the "punishment" factor, where the news feed completely
refreshes if your phone's screen goes off; like a brutal pimp.

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revskill
I prefer something like Yahoo blog 360 with some messaging features, not
current facebook. The main problem is that, the stupid feed is very annoying.

