I'm going to help you quit Facebook with some science

[-]Qiaochu_Yuan7y150

So, first of all, most people aren't unfollowing anywhere near as many people as they could be on Facebook, so if anyone hasn't tried just unfollowing anyone who posts a single thing that isn't worth your time I would highly recommend it.

But if you'd rather whitelist than blacklist, and also you're annoyed at how inscrutable the newsfeed algorithm is, consider the following alternative from Robby Bensinger: create a custom friends list of all the people whose Facebook posts you actually want to see, and look at that friends list instead of your newsfeed. This will display all of your friends-who-are-on-the-list's posts, in chronological order. You get way more control over what you see this way.

[-]Error7y70

I don't use Facebook, but I should try something similar with my RSS feeds.

I find it interesting that facebook responds to commenting by showing you more of the same. IIRC, posts that aggravate people are also the most likely to inspire them to comment. That suggests Facebook is effectively rigged to piss you off.

Does that match people's experience? It matches my priors, but they're weak priors, since I won't touch the service with a ten foot pole.

[-]clone of saturn7y60

That suggests Facebook is effectively rigged to piss you off.

Facebook is rigged to keep you checking Facebook as often as possible, regardless of the emotions that may give you.

[-]namespace7y40

I actually organize my RSS feed by signal:noise ratio. So I do basically this process with each feed, or perhaps just rough-estimate it from the first 10 items or so. Once I have the rough signal:noise I put it in the appropriate folder. I found that this pretty much corrected the "giant wall of crap" problem immediately, so that it was easy to find the things which were important and leave the high volume slim pickings feeds for last. (Or better yet, in many cases not at all.)

[-]Elo7y20

Facebook is effectively rigged to piss you off.

Facebook is agnostic towards content. So yes. Sometimes it can be an outrage machine, sometimes it can be a happy-joy machine. I suspect the extra Emojis help to classify and filter posts too. If you angry emoji something you can react in a way that maybe it will show you less of that. But I am unsure if that's actually what happens.

[-]ChristianKl7y60

If you actually decide to use Facebook I think it's key to use your powers to shape it to be the way you want it to be.

1) Unfollow people who write posts that you don't find valuable to read.

2) Use plugins to remove elements from the side you don't find valuable to see. I use Facebook usability suite and remove further content with UBlock.

3) I find the Lite app to be more to my preferences than the regular Facebook app.

[-]a-question-of-balance7y50

My good:bad ratio was 1:2.75, which is a reason to use Facebook less for me (1:3 was "I'd rather not put up with that", 1:1 was "would be okay"). This is after unfollowing lots of people. (In this exercise I also found two more people to unfollow.) I've hidden my newsfeed using F.B. Purity for now.

[-]Elo7y20

Great! Well done. Now you have a tool to use any time you want to check in on those mixed feelings and compare qualities of the inputs you are getting.

[-]Adam Zerner7y40

1. I think this technique can, and probably should be applied to lots of other stuff.

2. I wonder how much of the benefit comes from just writing down the tallies, versus from looking back at the tallies and using that data to think "I enjoy Facebook more/less than I thought".

3. From what I understand, in the field of positive psychology, they have the subjects do stuff like this, rather than asking them to think back and answer questions like "How happy are you when you're using Facebook?". From that, I assume that if positive psychologists value this technique, there must be something different and useful about in the moment data versus looking back and thinking about your past feelings data.

[-]Elo7y20

I think this technique can, and probably should be applied to lots of other stuff.

Yes definitely. Any kind of feed or regular sequence of events. For example details of your work day. A birthday party event. running an event.

.2. I wonder how much of the benefit comes from just writing down the tallies, versus from looking back at the tallies and using that data to think “I enjoy Facebook more/less than I thought”.

yes. There is a lot of benefit to being able to be clear on what was a cloudy feeling before.

.3. in the field of positive psychology, they have the subjects do stuff like this, rather than asking them to think back and answer questions

subjective ongoing experience is often recorded differently to retrospectives. Dan Arieli has a lot of work on how to manipulate people into remembering slightly more positive experience.

[-]Venusian5y*30

Like someone else mentioned, this technique could work for other things. I don't use Facebook. I used a slightly modified version of this technique on my Youtube watch history and came to a ratio of about 1:20 (bad videos do tend to be shorter, so time wise it's probably 1:10 or so).

I've been trying to reduce my usage for a while, with moderate success. According to RescueTime I spend 32 hours on youtube.com in the past 30 days, and 49 hours in the 30 days before that. I'll keep in mind the poor good:bad ratio from now on and I'll report back in another 30 days with the new figure from RescueTime.

If it's under 25 hours I consider it a moderate success, under 20 a huge success.

EDIT:

Results are in, just 15 hours for the past 30 days. It seems to have worked quite well for me.

How does this work? What happened? What did you do to me?

The trouble with feelings is that they are based in System 1. I have a hunch that Facebook is boring. But I don't always naturally know what to do with that hunch. The task above takes the feeling and brings that into System 2. We can count and measure the exact quantity of the feeling. Then maybe we can be better informed to act. And act you can.

Depending on what you uncover, you can choose what to do next. You now know exactly how good or bad your news feed was today. Take this information and choose to look at Facebook less, or choose to look at Facebook more. Maybe it's where you find all the good ideas! And any time you like - retest. See how your intuition for the site, mismatches or matches to reality.

Another interesting thing I noticed on Facebook:

If I hit the "like" button, Facebook tries it's valiant and hardest to show me more of that same thing. That means if it's pictures, Facebook will deliver slightly more pictures. If it's from a group, posts from that group. If it's from a friend, I'd be hearing more from that friend over the next week. I kind of stopped hitting the like buttons. Facebook doesn't need to know my likes. I also hate like notifications so much that I got a browser add-on that hides them from view and notification.

Now I wasn't hitting the like button so much. But I would still comment occasionally. I would watch flame wars as they happened. And I started getting interested in arguments. I tried to work out where they started. It seemed that they always started earlier than I expected. Well before a flame war, people are getting aggravated. But while that was interesting to learn, I wasn't commenting - I didn't want to interrupt the arguments that I was seeing, I was trying to be an objective observer. When I would make the occasional comment, same as likes, Facebook would deliver content that was similar to my future browsing.

if you are curious how the news feed will change, you can follow me in stopping likes and commenting. Try it. Also try other experiments. Science is fun!

Meta: I did this 6+ months ago and the results stuck. I spend a lot less time on Facebook than I used to. But the amazing thing is that the effect was almost overnight. It was obvious. My ratio was worse than 1:20. That was unacceptable to me.

When you try this, make sure you put down some predictions. Part of the scientific method is to make predictions and then test those predictions. In the process of modelling the world, predicting the future and generally being awesome, it’s okay to be wrong, it’s okay to be right - that’s why we test. It’s not okay to fake the results and lie to yourself. Wouldn’t it be something if you were surprised. Or confused. Or you changed your mind in response to the evidence you found.

Facebook and social media are becoming an entrenched part of our lives. Hopefully you ask the question about who's in control. Facebook is out to get you after all.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

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I'm going to help you quit Facebook with some science

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How does this work? What happened? What did you do to me?