The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users' Emotional State (nber.org) 35
Abstract of a paper on National Bureau of Economic Research: We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users' emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.
I can vouch for this (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd been mulling over deleting FB and Instagram for a while, and I finally pulled the plug [skoll.ca] back in January.
My motivation was partly to improve my mental health, but also partly to avoid enriching Silicon Valley tech bros like Zuckerberg.
The first couple of weeks were tough... not gonna lie. I missed updates from friends, funny little cat videos, etc. But after that, I started to feel much better. I reckon I've added an hour of time to my day that previously was wasted scrolling through FB and IG.
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Yep. Hung it up on December 1, 2024. Not easy at first, but now wouldn't change it. I also came back to /. So... hooray!
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Doing it myself and also helping family members (elderly, sadly victims of account hijacking or fraud, like the "any asshole can join an insta to someone else's FB and try to take it over without their knowledge" bug that FB has never fixed) do it: there's a bit of a "withdrawal" period, and then you realize you're not mourning the FB of today, you're mourning what FB was 15 years ago.
Meta as a company needs to just die. It's enshittified beyond the point it should be allowed to exist.
Re:I can vouch for this (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yep, I quit facebook in about 1005, about the time Farmville was all the rage. That stuff just didn't interest me, and most of the family updates I didn't want either. The ones that post, post ALL THE TIME, and I really didn't want to know what restaurant they ate in today. The ones I wanted to follow, didn't post. So nothing was lost. Never looked back.
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So what can you tell us about the Norman invasion? How was the news on it? Was it well received? Or were you too young to care about it?
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Joining the "me, too" branch, but I'll add some divergent anecdotal details and one extension area.
I was actually assassinated on Facebook at the end of 2022 and never found out who done it or what I was accused of doing wrong. Facebook is too evil to allow such questions? Or maybe my real crime was solving the waste-of-time problem by strictly limiting my Facebook time? Some years earlier I set a rule of five minutes/day and enforced it with two little timers. First one was the four-minute warning and I ha
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The first couple of weeks were tough... not gonna lie. I missed updates from friends, funny little cat videos, etc.
I haven't completely deactivated mine as I have a club page that I occasionally need to admin on - but I've stopped using it for myself for at least the past 18 months or so. The thing was that I wasn't missing "updates" from friends or family or anything - because almost no one actually posts updates about themselves or what's going on in their lives anymore (at least not in my circles).
Almost everything I was seeing was just sharing of generic memes and stories from the alphabet soup of "funny" Facebook p
0.06 Sigma is Tiny (Score:2)
For peop
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You anecdote is not consistent with the quoted data though. They are claiming a 0.06 sigma (standard deviation) improvement. That's an absolutely miniscule change on whatever scale of human happiness they are using. Indeed, it is so small that it would be hard to measure accurately and assuming someone of average happiness improved by 0.06 sigma it would only make them happier than just 2.4% of the population and, for someone in the tails of the distrubution the fractional change is even smaller.
For people to start feeling a lot happier, as you indicated, that suggests a much large change in where you are in the distribution that just 0.06 sigma.
That's not how statistics work though. For a poorly defined experiment on a poorly defined population you need to account for
1) the results are on the population level, and should be considered as a vector with the direction and velocity given. In this case we see that people trend towards happier, but it will not be a given result for everyone. Either a few people are enormously happy but most do not notice anything, or everyone is, as you said, just a tiny bit happier. In all likelihood it's somewhere in-
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My Achilles' heel is YouTube. There is so much content, and the algorithm is so good at figuring out what'll get you watching just ten minutes longer.
It doesn't matter how weird and eclectic your tastes are, YouTube will weaponize them. It doesn't even send you the stuff you enjoy most, it sends you the stuff that will suck you down a rabbit hole. Like for me it sends me videos of machining, chemical experiments, and maritime policy. It's not that maritime policy isn't interesting, but I'd never choose
Re:what exactly is the point? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are other sources of information besides Facebook and Instagram. And those other sources are less likely to harm one's mental health.
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There are other sources of information besides Facebook and Instagram. And those other sources are less likely to harm one's mental health.
I don't suppose you include Slashdot. Maybe it's just me, but I can find it quite distressing.
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I don't include Slashdot or any other sort of social media.
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So the point is that people should avoid all information immediately prior to an election?
So you got your info from Facebook? Explains a lot.
Happily out of Facebook since 2019 when Berkeley Brethed forgot that a cartoonist is supposed to scorch everyone, not just one side.
Never had IG, and I look upon people who use it as a curious breed of extreme narcissist. I don't care how cool your venti triple crappuchino that you got at some coffee-shop-du-jour.
Good thing Trump's making so we don't need to have elections anymore
Wow. Such fantasies. Much wow.
Listen, pendejo: Come the end of his term, he either leaves by his own two feet, or gets carried out.
All this t
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All this talk of "no more elections" is 100% Democrat fear-mongering to work up their base.
Hate to be a pedant here, but Trump actually stated there would be no more need for elections if people just voted for him "one more time." Yes, Democrats are using that for fear mongering, but it's not like they fabricated it out of thin air. I only mention it because I feel it's important we remind people that sometimes the guy actually does say some absolutely batshit outlandish things. And people inherently scared of everything are bound to grab hold of his most outlandish statements and blow them up in
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When the head of state says something, you should take it seriously. The rest of the world does.
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When the head of state says something, you should take it seriously. The rest of the world does.
He wasn't the head of state when he said that particularly outlandish thing.
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Calling himself king on the White House social media account is pretty much the same, and less ambiguous than his election promise (which should have also been taken seriously).
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In 2024, Trump called on Christians to support him, saying they could vote for him and then they wouldn't have to vote any more. He said later that he was just trying to get Christians to vote, because they tended not to. It's understandable that this could be interpreted as cancelling elections, but in all (uh, cringe) ... fairness to Trump, he didn't say he was going to cancel elections. He couldn't anyway, because of the Constitution.
That said, the guy has not exactly behaved like he respects elections.
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Like all authoritarian politicians he's a narcissist who thrives on attention, good or bad, and will say anything to get it. And like those other guys he's got this kidding/not kidding thing going where everything that comes out of his mouth is a trial balloon for something he *might* do that he'll distance himself from if it doesn't go over well -- as a joke or a misunderstanding.
The thing about trial balloons is that they're the politician figuring out what people will accept. Given his lack of loyalty
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Hate to be a pedant here, but Trump actually stated there would be no more need for elections if people just voted for him "one more time."
Well, he didn't actually say there would be no need for elections; he said to his "beautiful Christian" followers that they wouldn't need to vote any more, the implication being that he would fix all the things he and they consider broken, in a such manner that the fixes would be permanent and they could go back to praying, snake handling, and talkin' in tongues instead of worrying about domestic policy. Of course, he also said that if elected he'd end the war in Ukraine before he was even inaugurated, and
the only problem is (Score:2)
Best Thing I Ever Did (Score:2)
After seeing current events and politics bring out the absolute worst in my friends and family (people on both sides of the spectrum), I decided that I really didn't want to be exposed to it anymore s
Priceless (Score:3)
The effect of never having used any social media is priceless!
We need a no shit icon (Score:2)
Orly? (Score:1)
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I'm with you, kinda. I don't use Marketplace, but FB and IG are useful to keep in touch with my extremely small group of "friends". The main issue I have lately is the proliferation of absolute shit in my newsfeed, but I try to just scoll on by, pausing occasionally to click on the "don't show me any more like this" option, which either has no observable effect or can't keep up with the rate of proliferation.
Help me here! (Score:2)
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You'd learn what a standard deviation [wikipedia.org] is.
It probably isn't worth it to understand a throwaway paragraph on a backwater message board, but knowing a bit about stats is one of the more relevant bits of math you can learn for modern life. It takes surprisingly little to be useful.
Not only will you be able to read such summaries, you'll have the tools to take smarter risks and not fall for the statistical lies that permeate our culture.
ORLY (Score:1)