←back to thread

The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

(www.nber.org)
506 points imakwana | 6 comments | 21 Apr 25 04:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.019s | source | bottom
Show context
revskill ◴[21 Apr 25 04:58 UTC] No.43748606[source]▶
With ai, i hope the feed is more useful to me.
replies(6): >>43748617 #>>43748624 #>>43748627 #>>43748679 #>>43748705 #>>43748713 #
1. nehal3m ◴[21 Apr 25 05:23 UTC] No.43748705[source]▶
Remember when the feed was just a reverse chronological list of stuff you told Facebook you wanted to see? That was the peak. Once they started engagement farming using recommendation algorithms the site lost all of its appeal.
replies(2): >>43748733 #>>43748835 #
2. perching_aix ◴[21 Apr 25 05:31 UTC] No.43748733[source]▶
Append ?sk=h_chr at the end of its URL to get that. Can also be found by dumpster diving in the UI somewhere I'm sure. Be aware that they're very intent on redirecting you to the regular feed though.
replies(1): >>43748762 #
3. nehal3m ◴[21 Apr 25 05:37 UTC] No.43748762[source]▶
Thanks for the genuinely useful tip. I didn’t know that was a thing, but I can’t test it since I deleted my account almost a decade ago. I’m tired of adversarially wrestling usefulness out of a trillion dollar company.
replies(2): >>43748822 #>>43749008 #
4. snoman ◴[21 Apr 25 05:53 UTC] No.43748822{3}[source]▶
> I’m tired of adversarially wrestling usefulness out of a trillion dollar company.

Very well put.

5. tayo42 ◴[21 Apr 25 05:58 UTC] No.43748835[source]▶
I think the downfall was earlier then that. When businesses got on their. The first few times it was maybe clever, the Deli shop is my friend or what ever but I think that was the turning point for it's just friends connecting and the start of becoming ads and engagement.
6. photonthug ◴[21 Apr 25 06:41 UTC] No.43749008{3}[source]▶
> I’m tired of adversarially wrestling usefulness out of a trillion dollar company.

Hopefully people will learn to get tired of this sort of thing a LOT quicker, and this will be one good thing about out our new improved and now extremely shortened attention spans. Impatience could actually have an upside if it prevents decades of escalating arms racing with enshittification vs new-current-work-around. It’s like with stages of grief, right? Denial / bargaining. Whatever is broken in a trillion dollar corporation is broken on purpose, and it's getting worse, not better.. waiting around and hoping for improvement is a fools errand.

Up until now, boiling the frog/consumer slowly has been one tactic. Or corporations can leverage their size and simply make things so bad for so long that a new generation arrives on the scene and has no idea how bad the stuff on offer actually is. Enough completely ubiquitous impatience in consumers really does undermine both of those strategies.. if there's actually meaningful competition that's still left around to choose from