tsapree

In #git we trust

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford economist paid 2,743 Facebook users to delete the app for a month and the people who took the money came back happier, less anxious, less angry at the other political party, and quietly valuing Facebook 14% less than they did before they left.

The lead names on the paper are Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow.

Gentzkow had already won the John Bates Clark Medal, which is given to the most important American economist under 40 and is considered a stronger predictor of future Nobel Prizes than almost any other award in the field.

He spent years studying media, persuasion, and political polarization. In 2018, he and his coauthors set out to do something nobody at this scale had ever done. Run a real randomized controlled trial on Facebook itself.

Most research on social media is correlational. It looks at people who use Facebook a lot and people who use it less, and tries to figure out which way the arrow points. The problem is obvious.

Unhappy people might use Facebook more. Lonely people might use Facebook more. You cannot pull cause and effect apart by watching from the outside.

So they ran the experiment the right way.

They recruited 2,743 active Facebook users through Facebook ads. They asked each person the smallest amount of money they would accept to deactivate their account for four weeks.

The four weeks were timed to end just after the November 2018 US midterm election, which mattered because it was the most politically charged month of the year. Then a computer randomly assigned the 1,661 people who valued Facebook at less than $102 to one of two groups. The Treatment group was paid $102 to deactivate. The Control group was paid nothing and kept using Facebook normally.

The team verified compliance by pinging each participant's public profile URL multiple times a day for the entire four weeks. Compliance in the Treatment group exceeded 90%. Less than two percent of the sample failed to complete the endline survey.

This is one of the cleanest natural experiments ever run on a tech platform.

Then they measured everything.

Time use first. The people who quit Facebook freed up 60 minutes a day on average. They did not spend that time on other social media. They spent it on television alone, and they spent it socializing with family and friends in person. Both went up. The narrative that Facebook substitutes for real human contact was not a vibe. It showed up in the time diaries.

News next. The deactivated group knew less about current events. Their score on a 15-question news quiz dropped by 0.19 standard deviations. They were less likely to follow politics closely and less able to identify what was actually in the headlines. Facebook is, for a meaningful slice of American adults, the primary place they encounter news. Take it away and the news disappears with it.

Then the part that started to get uncomfortable for Silicon Valley.

The deactivated group became less politically polarized. Their views on policy issues drifted closer to the middle. Their exposure to the kind of news content that makes people angrier at the other side dropped. The overall polarization index fell by 0.16 standard deviations in four weeks.

For context, a separate index of American political polarization rose by 0.38 standard deviations over the 22 years between 1996 and 2018. The experiment moved people in four weeks by a meaningful fraction of what an entire generation of political drift had done.

Then the part the researchers were most careful about.

Subjective well-being improved. The deactivated group reported higher happiness, higher life satisfaction, lower depression, and lower anxiety. The overall index moved by 0.09 standard deviations. That sounds small until you compare it to the benchmark.

It is roughly 25 to 40% of the effect size of professional interventions like self-help therapy, group training, and individual psychotherapy. Four weeks of not opening one app produced a fraction of the mental health benefit that a course of therapy produces. That is not a fraction to dismiss. That is a fraction to look at twice.

And then the finding that closes the case.

The experiment was supposed to end. The Treatment group was free to reactivate their accounts the moment the four weeks were over. The researchers kept watching. 9 weeks after the experiment ended, 5% of the people who had been paid to leave had still not come back.

The group as a whole was using the Facebook mobile app 22% less than the control group, an average of 11 minutes a day less. They had not just survived four weeks without Facebook. They had quietly decided they did not need as much of it as they had before.

The economists ran one more test. Before the experiment, they had asked each participant the smallest amount of money they would now need to deactivate again for four weeks.

After the experiment ended, they asked the Treatment group the same question. The valuation had dropped by 14%. People who had been paid to leave Facebook came back valuing Facebook less than they did before they left.

That is the sentence that ends the argument. If Facebook were worth what users said it was worth, the price would not move after a four-week break. The fact that it moves means a meaningful slice of what users were paying for, in time and attention, was the dependence itself. They were not buying connection. They were buying the habit of checking the connection. And once the habit broke, the price they were willing to pay for it dropped.

The standard calculation, the one tech companies love to quote, takes the average user's stated valuation and multiplies it by the number of users.

By that math, Facebook generates roughly $31 billion in consumer welfare every four weeks for American adults alone.

The Stanford team's data suggests that number is overstated, because part of what users say Facebook is worth is the cost of the dependence Facebook has already built in them.

The paper was published in March 2020 in the American Economic Review, the most cited economics journal in the world. It became one of the most discussed social media studies of the decade.

Inside the company, employees read it. Inside policy circles, regulators cite it. Inside academic departments, it is the reference point for every randomized trial on a tech platform that has followed.

80% of the people who were paid to leave Facebook said the four weeks were good for them.

The platform is still running. The trial is still on the public record. The single cleanest test ever run on what social media costs a human life found that the people who stopped paying that cost were happier, calmer, more connected to the people in front of them, and worth less to the platform afterward.

The price of Facebook was never the time. It was the version of you that started to need it.

And the study proved that version of you was never the one you would have chosen if anyone had asked.

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

Kindness isn’t just a human trait

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

"You should allow yourself to meet new people"

Me on my off days

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

At an aquarium after closing time some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes.

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

"Taking a cold shower will reduce anxiety."

[Оруэлл и Замятин @MelissaBrillian]

Я в шоке, конечно, от того, что ты можешь месяцами заставлять себя что-то делать, винить себя за лень, корить себя за то, что быстро устаёшь, ходить по врачам, а потом chatGPT настойчиво тебе советует сдать ферритин, b12 и витамин d, всё оказывается ближе к 0, ⬇️

[JER @lifeof_jer]

https://t.co/ofucbVgkLV

[Gabe Nicholson @gabe_mohit]

Support Walter White

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

How it started vs how it’s going after 20 years 🥹❤️

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

Cat owner in Oregon had to put up a sign for neighbors to reclaim the things their cat kept stealing

[Zelenyikot @Zelenyikoteyka]

Подписал видимые объекты на снимке солнечного затмения от NASA Artemis II

[Zelenyikot @Zelenyikoteyka]

Для тех, кто не разобрался в географии ночного снимка Земли с Orion

[Zelenyikot @Zelenyikoteyka]

Если вы не знали, но стеснялись спросить

[Scott Manley @DJSnM]

I was pretty sure I left an SLS here, did anyone see where it went?

[Кукуруза как у томакруза 🌽 @KYKYPY3A_B]

Сильная аура

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

I wish I still had a friendship like this

[Гылкой в глаз @ValeryGilka]

Как имитировать бурную деятельность. Гайд для офиса.

[Constantine K @Semper_Viventem]

Так выглядит один кадр с 70mm IMAX пленки. Это продакшн пленка которую используют в кинотеатрах для показов. Я попробую собрать в тред что такое вообще IMAX и почему это круто и почему Нолан — гений.