"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.
That we all think of those as Facebook's "core utility" says a lot.
I once spoke with a Facebook engineer and learned their primary development area was supporting how certain business owners in certain developing countries use Facebook: as their primary means of being paid for their services. In some places it's common to order delivery via Messenger, then as proof that payment is on the way take a picture of the money transfer receipt and share that picture via Messenger too.
That this use of Facebook had never crossed my mind served as a big reminder to me that as an a) first-worlder and b) affluent techie I probably can't fathom 90% of the use that the rest of the world gets out of services that seem to me to be worthless.
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:
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).
The best replacement is tons of time, mental-energy, and the regimen of actually keeping in touch. Before Facebook, this honestly never happened for me. This is why I'm disappointed Facebook is where it is -- because they provided a service that made keeping in touch automatic and I think they have messed it up, possibly permanently.
There are a core of ~10 family members I stay in touch with always, regardless of tools. Same for about ~10 friends. Beyond that, life got in the way. Facebook made it easy to up those numbers to ~30, and ~200. There are people I like, enjoy interacting with, but just aren't so important that i'd be able to schedule a bi-monthly call to catch up with them, or email them, etc.
In programmer speak, Facebook is like subscribing to a bunch of topics on a message bus. Could you poll and do message exchange?...yes, you could...but it is too hard and that is why you use async and subscriptions.
It doesn't matter if they are too busy sometimes - just do this diligently.
I'd wager a majority of users here also have FB accounts and likely use FB at least weekly. There's a strong positive correlation between the people who did legitimately boycott or quit FB and the likelihood that they'll tell you about when the topic comes up.
Suppose I said to you that there was a thing I used regularly, that I knew was bad for my health, but I felt compelled to keep using it. And the thought of abstaining from it was so difficult that I would give up hundreds or thousands of dollars to keep using it.
What does that sound like?
You could describe a drug addiction with exactly the same words.
I'm not saying Facebook provides no value whatsoever. But I think the measurement in dollars is not purely a measure of value; it's part value and part compulsion.
I think that these few modifications have introduced a number of dark patterns of how we interact with each other, and it differs from person to person based on their personality and perceived social needs. I don't know that it's positive for anyone other than those interested in marketing themselves. Otherwise, the 'feed' is a totally useless piece of advertising - either the people I know throwing that stuff at the wall, or companies trying to get me to buy more trash. These dark patterns are so pervasive that I think it's difficult to see these negative effects, and many people like the various responses that they feel when they see things on facebook, and assume that the dopamine hit is something useful, rather than an addiction. Studies have regularly pointed out the negative effects that these have.
Personally, I think that the solution is just going back a step. We don't all need to be marketing ourselves to our friends and the world. The way to get back is to just return to email, IMO, or interest based forums.
I use FB for chatting with my friends around the world, i.e. most of my closest friends. I don't look at the news feed. Never see ads on FB. I chat with the people I want to, look at their recent pics when I want to, usually while chatting with them, so I can ask questions. The last few years, I don't share/post pics on FB, I just send in the chat to people when I want to.
So your criticism doesn't hit me, indeed my use of FB sounds like your solution. And yet people assume FB can't be used like that, for some reason.
p.s. Hacker News is infinitely more addictive..I'm not sure why! Maybe because muh internet points.
Facebook users can select exactly which friends they want to share a post with. So the available functionality is the same as email in that way.
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.
There's also some cost to facebook. In the first world it's probably just whatever you perceive to be the impact on you from reduced privacy. In the third world, well, I seem to remember Facebook actually provides internet to people solely for the purpose of using Facebook so in such a case the cost might be tangible. In any case, call it C. Then consumer surplus is V - C, summed over all consumers.
Consumer surplus is the difference between the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay and the actual price they do pay. If a consumer would be willing to pay more than the current asking price, then they are getting more benefit from the purchased product than they initially paid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus#Consumer_surp...
What would consumers actually pay out of pocket for an ad-free FB?
Alternatively: imagine there was a job that required you to type in your sensitive personal information and then a business took that information, sold (or accidentally gave) it to other businesses, used it to target ads at you, and leaked it to hackers.
Imagine also that this business exposed your sensitive personal information to other people who might use it to your economic and social benefit and/or to your detriment (though you cannot predict how or to what extent).
How much should you be paid to do that job? Can it be argued that FB actually offers consumers a deficit instead of a surplus?
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.
Replace _deleted_FB_ above with any other addiction and similarities appear.
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.
