
This is Your Brain Off Facebook - study offers glimpse of unplugging - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psychology-health.html
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echevil
> Expect the consequences to be fairly immediate: More in-person time with
> friends and family. Less political knowledge, but also less partisan fever.

Well, since lots of my friends and all of my family live in different
countries, I'm sure the consequences for me would not be more in-person time
with friends and family at all. In fact I may lose the connection to lots of
friends forever. I'm sure I'm not the only one in that situation.

~~~
soneil
I'm in a similar position, and actually found I had more interaction with
family once I got off facebook.

It turned out I wasn't actually interacting with them at all. It felt like I
was, having consumed what felt like a few thousand baby photos daily - but we
weren't actually communicating, just congrats, happy birthday, like.

Chats, messages and the odd skype call seem to work out much better - if I
stop responding, so do they, and it's noticeable. Facebook's bucket of noise
approach tricked me into feeling like I was interacting with family when I was
actually just scrolling past them.

~~~
lowercased
can those people afford to have that much 'connection' time one on one with
more than you?

i never feel i'm interacting with someone on fb if i 'scroll past' or 'like'
something. i do feel like that when i actually post a response and have a
back-and-forth, much like in person conversations go.

~~~
bunderbunder
For personal, 1:1 contact, a little goes a long way. On a couple levels.

First off, it really takes very little 1:1 contact to maintain a deep
relationship - no more than 10 minutes a month on the phone for some of my
most meaningful and long-lasting friendships, sometimes less.

It's true that, without the Facebook feed, I don't get a play-by-play of every
single even that happens in their life via the Facebook news feed. I see that
as a positive thing - it leaves us with something to talk about when we do
make time for each other.

Second, I definitely am in contact with fewer people than when I was on
Facebook. The relationships that I have maintained since then have been more
fulfilling, though, so, at least as far as I'm concerned, it's still a net
positive. (Think of it as giving your social life the Marie Kondo treatment.)
I'd like to think that's a two way street - if I'm getting more out of the
interaction, then that means I'm probably giving more back, too.

So the end result is that my friends are not, overall, spending _that_ much
time interacting with me without Facebook. I can't speak for them, but, I at
least view it as an enjoyable way that we can spend some time together, if not
physically in the same space. I'd like to think they do the same. It'd be
really weird if they thought of me as a friend but didn't actually enjoy
having conversations with me.

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ratsimihah
Quit like a year ago, it's great. So much less attention drain. Then I quit
Twitter not long after. But now there's Instagram, a bit tricky as my whole
yoga community hangs there. Back to square one.

~~~
Humdeee
I'm always curious when I hear this. How did a social media platform get to
the point where you can't use self-control and discipline to simply use it
less and within moderation? Why does it have to either be nothing at all, or
total immersion?

I see a lot of friends juggle with some sort of internal battle between being
off and on with this stuff, and then there are friends who just slowly
"cruise" with it without affecting them.

~~~
deadbunny
Because social media companies hire people to make them addicting. They are
literally programmed to make you come back for more constantly.

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asadkn
This won't be very HN favorite view, but I will say it anyways, I enjoy using
Facebook and don't find it affecting my productivity.

Not everyone uses Facebook the same way though. I have no family on Facebook,
very few friends. I use it mainly for the Groups I participate in - some of
them quite useful. The Facebook groups are more personal than sub-reddits and
people generally seem to behave better.

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ranchpredictor
I mean, a lot of relatively smart people I know these days have gotten over fb
and I don’t see many of people in fb or social media that much. Fb gets old
after college and then it takes people a few years in their mid twenties to
grow out of it. By late twenties I’d say the majority of smart folks know to
keep their distance from fb and such ilk.

~~~
polskibus
Does it really matter what social network it is, FB, Reddit, HN, etc.? The
effects are similar - people immerse in the digital while at the same time
being absent from the physical.

~~~
grumdan
I think one of the things that makes HN and Reddit very different, is that the
content is not personalized and tailored to maximize user engagement. Facebook
seems to constantly show me things that make me more upset or concerned or
outraged about something. I remember reading articles documenting this effect,
but I can't seem to find them now.

The other type of posts I tend to see are about friends bragging about how
many km they ran today or how great their vacation was. Not that it's that bad
to post these things, but I wouldn't be surprised if exposing yourself to them
constantly increased feelings of jealous and reinforce one's need to compare
oneself to others.

On the other hand, I've discovered a lot of interesting books and projects
through HN and learned about different topics, since there seem to be a lot of
knowledgeable people here that comment on topics I know nothing about. The
only type of posts that may be prone to making others feel worse are the ones
about salaries / financial issues, but they are not that common.

~~~
friendlybus
>I think one of the things that makes HN and Reddit very different, is that
the content is not personalized and tailored to maximize user engagement.
Facebook seems to constantly show me things that make me more upset or
concerned or outraged about something.

This really depends on whether or not you set up your own account with
subreddits in reddit. It is just as personalized and outrage generating as
Facebook if you self-subscribe to it.

~~~
grumdan
Fair enough, though the separation into categories possibly helps somewhat. If
someone is reading r/some-topic-they-are-interested in, it wouldn't also show
them stories about, say, cops shooting unarmed civilians in the back 67 times,
in between the topic-specific content.

This is probably different on the main page though.

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r3vrse
Ironic that participants were initially contacted via FB ads.

In light of the recent "Research" app disclosure, and that in both cases a fee
was paid for participation, it makes me wonder what people _won 't_ do for a
few extra dollars in their bank account given a similar scenario.

The NYT article is almost apologetic about its inconclusiveness. I might
wonder - should I happen to be wearing my tinfoil hat - that it is designed as
a means of placation, an ode to the status quo, rather than a deterrent for
the average consumer.

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chrisweekly
See also Cal Newport's terrific book "Deep Work".

~~~
keyle
The problem today, is to even be able to achieve "Deep work".

~~~
ehnto
That responsibility is on us though. We must be the masters of our own minds.
That isn't to say it's not challenging, and some companies seem hell bent on
making sure their workers are as ineffective as possible.

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waplot
> Less political knowledge

If you got your political knowledge from facebook, you should probably get off
of it right away.

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vhost-
I really hate the use of "unplugging" lately because it implies that Facebook
IS the internet.

~~~
ehnto
I know you probably hear this all the time too, but for a lot of people
Facebook is functionally "the whole internet". It's incredible how effectively
phones and apps have siloed the internet.

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rblion
Amazing, I made some of these same points last night on reddit and tried to
discuss it here as well. Amazing.

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wtmt
I dislike Facebook and rarely use it, but this article and the study were a
refreshing change in that they showed both what was and what wasn't for the
study participants, without being one sided or appearing to be biased. I hope
more such studies are done on a larger scale (payment would be an issue if
this same model is followed) and across age groups.

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systematical
"Less political knowledge" right....

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throwaway415415
Does someone have an agenda against Facebook on HN? I see four stories a day
on the front page.

~~~
rleigh
If facebook wasn't continually mired in controversy, then maybe it wouldn't
feature so frequently and so prominently.

Today, I've just read a paper copy of the Daily Telegraph (UK). The front page
is a story about how a depressed 14 year girl committed suicide after being
led into a downward spiral of despair by being fed a continual stream of self-
harm images by a facebook property. Those lovely algorithms could have been
made to make positive contributions to people in need of help. Instead, they
caused a vulnerable teenager to end their life by making a bad situation even
worse.

I do feel that companies like Facebook should have a social and moral
responsibility to their users. They are in a position of great power and
responsibility. And yet, they have shown scant evidence of any care in this
regard, and they do have a case to answer. Not just for the single story I
highlighted, but many years of utter callousness and greed in defiance of what
most of us would consider acceptable ethical conduct.

~~~
officemonkey
Let's generalize:

I do feel that companies should have a social and moral responsibility to
their users.

Sadly, companies only have a social and moral responsibility to their
shareholders. It's one of the reasons why corporations are not people, they're
more often immortal sociopaths.

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Puer
I wonder what the NYT will write about when FB and Trump finally stop being
newsworthy?

