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

I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends, college friends, and distant family without having to see irrelevant posts, like some stupid remark from a politician halfway around the world or influencers doing something outrageous just for attention.

Before its fall, I had over 700 followers on Twitter. I could post any random thought and within minutes be having an interesting conversation with some rando about it. For example I pondered why phone manufacturers didn&#x27;t use a p2p protocol for distributing updates and had an enlightening conversation with a person who worked for a major telco chiming in as to why that would be problematic for their infrastructure.<p>This was my biggest source of joy on the modern internet.<p>When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers to 500 but by X&#x27;s own metrics no one sees my tweets. I would estimate between 13 and 20 is my average view count. When I do post, I am lucky a single person interacts, and it is almost always someone I know in the real world.<p>I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens. I don&#x27;t think the market is there anymore for &quot;dude that ponders technology questions&quot;. I tweet like it&#x27;s 2010 and no one cares anymore.<p>This was the death of social media for me. This was the last place I was really &quot;social&quot; on the internet and it died.<p>Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me, the only somewhat of a silver lining is that I now have these conversations with ChatGPT. It&#x27;s not as much fun though.<p>Instagram is just brainrot these days. I&#x27;d used it for years to post my absolute best photos as a sort of curated gallery. No one cares anymore. Nothing I post ever gets seen. Why bother.<p>That sums up my general opinion of all social media these days, why bother.

I&#x27;m certainly an anomaly but since to me the downsides of social media have always been quite prominent and seemed to outweigh the benefits by a margin, I never jumped on the social media train.<p>But I&#x27;ve got to say, it&#x27;s getting harder and harder to keep that up. As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they&#x27;re joining, minimally there&#x27;s a WhatsApp group. My wife has reluctantly joined WhatsApp and if it wasn&#x27;t for that, it feels like we would pretty much be destined to become social outcasts.<p>In one recent instance, we weren&#x27;t even aware of a parent group for one of our children&#x27;s school class until someone asked us (in person!) why we didn&#x27;t come bowling the previous night. We had no idea, and no-one sees the necessity to include someone who - for whatever reason - is not on WhatsApp.<p>I can see the argument that <i>we</i> are inconveniencing <i>others</i> by not wanting to be reachable to what has now become a standard means of being in touch, and that we cannot expect others to jump through hoops just to include us. But a few years back, I was quite deeply involved in privacy research and I definitely feel no inclination to share all of my communications (and pictures) with Meta.

The surprise here is how <i>little</i> of an effect it has. Deactivating facebook makes you only 1&#x2F;16th of one standard deviation happier. And instagram even less. And this was measured during elections, when the effect is likely to be greatest.<p>Kinda crazy that the magnitude is so small! (my next [admittedly rather cynical] thought is &quot;who funded this?&quot;)

Anecdotal: Stopping commenting on reddit reduced emotional stress significantly. Reddit is one of those &quot;social&quot; anti-social circles where you can&#x27;t afford to be on the &quot;wrong side of argument&quot; and every discussion can quickly spiral out.

50 years from now, we are going to be looking back at Social Media and Smartphone addiction like we currently look at smoking. “How insane were we to have allowed it and allowed it to be promoted?” our grandchildren will rightly ask!

Weird. There is little that depresses me more than watching my wife sit at the table for hours a day slowly scrolling Facebook while ignoring me and the kids. We have talked about it and she&#x27;s tried to reduce it to no avail.

I&#x27;m distinctly happier since I ditched Facebook and Twitter. It&#x27;s not a radical change, because the world kinda sucks in general. And I&#x27;m a little sad that a few of my older family members are effectively invisible since they only communicate on Facebook, but, honestly, I didn&#x27;t talk to my mother&#x27;s first cousins pre-Facebook anyway so, net, I haven&#x27;t actually lost very much.<p>I was never on Instagram or TikTok, but neither seems to be &quot;social&quot; media as much as a communal fire hose anyway.<p>I was on Bluesky for a minute, but it was 99.9% people trying to one-up each other with witty or ironic one-liners for clout, with most of the rest being ex-Twitter people trying to keep Twitter combat alive in an arena (blessedly) free of the people who have made Twitter unbearable. I got tired of witnessing a neverending improv open mic while being randomly assaulted by people I agreed with.<p>So now I&#x27;m just living my life, aware of the challenges of the world, but not bathing in them.

&gt; 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.<p>Can anyone translate? Random web search find suggests multiplying by 37 to get a percentage, which sounds very questionable, but even then these improvements seem negligible.<p>This doesn&#x27;t really line up with my lived experience. Getting myself out of shitty platforms and community spaces improved my mental state significantly (although the damage that&#x27;s been done remains).

I know this post is for Facebook, but I&#x27;ve noticed my mood improving when I decided to leave LinkedIn.<p>Even though I am rationally aware that people work in better environments and get paid while I&#x27;m job searching for the past 6 months, it feels like seeing any sort of announcement regarding other people&#x27;s successes hits a subconscious chord my brain hates. It felt like I&#x27;m being actively intimidated, making my already depressed and sad state of job searching worse. The &quot;highlights reel effect&quot; on LinkedIn is deliberate and I&#x27;d argue inevitable, because everyone is trying their best to show how good they are as candidates and workers.<p>Now that I closed it, and I&#x27;m sticking to the usual communities (Discord, etc.) may be running into better engineers than me but I see it either as a neutral event or a positive one, because they share their code and insights which I can learn from.

I have been experimenting with using smartphones only for phone calls, SMS messaging and services like Uber or airbnb. No content consumption whatsoever.<p>It&#x27;s been a bliss. I don&#x27;t over consume, I have more time to get things done now, and it&#x27;s sort of obvious but everything feels better with bigger screens and keyboard and mouse.<p>Look at HN as an example, if I see a post on here that is related to some programming thing, I have my terminal right here where I can play with the concept. Even things like youtube are much nicer on a big screen.<p>My only pet-peeve is with web front-end designers insisting on wasting screen real-estate at the left and right margins. I wish there was a button on every such site where you can &quot;maximize&quot; the content div so that it takes up 100% width.

Deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts years ago and my inner peace increased immediately, my meditations became deeper, better within days. I never would have guessed how much negative energy these platforms created within me. People will post mostly how perfect their life is on these platforms. Distorting reality, inducing jealousy, guilt, and other forms of negative emotions. And finally a sense of depression.

Bad time to do it during what turned out to be very emotionally charged election where traditional news turns in to social media style instantaneous reporting and is inescapable. I’d also suggest 6 weeks is not long enough to fully recover. In fact in that time frame you may still be experiencing FOMO type symptoms. Would have been interesting to see how the participants faired after a year&#x2F;two years.

I&#x27;ve been &quot;feed free&quot; for over two years now. Took a while, but damn is it a better life!!!!<p>Didn&#x27;t matter if it was news, social or whatever, it messed with my dopamine apparatus, as Gabor Mate calls it.<p>I do limit my self to the first page or two of the HN feed though, to keep up on tech developments for my career, which I still have to be careful about.<p>It&#x27;s feeds in general. It leads to abnormal dopamine release which affects motivation.

I have a love&#x2F;hate thing with Instagram. I’ve been an avid user and it has been incredibly popular in my IRL social-circles over the last 5-10 years. Much has been said about the mechanics underpinning it but I’ve embarked on this experiment since the beginning of this year:<p>I started deleting Instagram every Sunday evening and installing every Friday.<p>I had this hypothesis that it’s the weekends that people have the best stuff to share and when it makes sense for me to still <i>exist</i> to everyone. And then nobody notices me disappear over the week. It’s a lot more enjoyable to be engaging with others’ content when you’re posting your own.<p>But the surprising result, after a few months, is that I’ve started missing weekends. The memory of all those people has faded and so has the urge to share.<p>Which brings me to a point: on one hand I do feel better day to day, but I’ve also felt a bit of a mourning period not being reminded about acquaintances’ lives. Kind of like a smoker who’s now missing out on social smoke breaks.

Direct PDF link:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;working_papers&#x2F;w33697&#x2F;w33697.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;working_papers&#x2F;w33697&#x2F;w336...</a><p>Possibly relevant that the 6 week trial period occurred in the 6 weeks leading up to the American election in 2020.

Recently, I&#x27;ve been thinking about creating an Instagram account. I&#x27;ve never used it before, and I dislike it in general, but because of recent circumstances in my life (a breakup that almost gave me depression, and some other things), I need to go out more and meet new people IRL, and Instagram is the de facto way to meet people in my country, at least for those of us under 30, to the point that you&#x27;re seen as weird if you don&#x27;t have one.<p>But I know that once I create an account, I&#x27;ll get hooked to the feed, to uploading pictures, etc. because I know myself.<p>I don&#x27;t know if the positive social aspect (meeting people, or creating a lasting connection with people that I meet once IRL) is going to offset that addiction and the general anxiety that comes with having an account.

I still have a Facebook account, but never log in. Haven’t done so, in months.<p>The only reason I had it, in the first place, was so I could participate in a technical forum for an infrastructure platform that I authored.<p>That platform has long since left the nest, and is in very capable hands. Like a spent first-stage booster, I am no longer relevant.<p>Before completely walking away from Facebook, I had turned off all notifications, and never doomscrolled. Made walking away, much easier.<p>I miss it like it like I miss a painful boil on my arse. It was just old white people, screaming at each other.

It&#x27;d be a privilege to be able to disconnect from the feeds, but trying to rebuild in-person social interactions when you&#x27;re old and have no family or local friends really sucks. Facebook&#x27;s become:<p>* Who died this week<p>* Spammers liking your posts and asking for friend adds<p>* Gofundme&#x27;s for ppl who will now spend the rest of their lives in medical debt<p>* Interesting articles maybe twice a week or so.<p>Nobody I know in town is on Mastodon or BSky.<p>The silence is deafening.

I deactivated my Facebook account because I wasn&#x27;t really using it for much and haven&#x27;t felt any sort of a downside at all.<p>I found that for social media, platforms like Mastodon feel more comfy and less commercialized, whereas for chatting with other people either 1:1 or group chats across various apps feel nicer without being directly tied to a social media platform. At the same time, platforms that are more focused on a particular set of topics&#x2F;activities like Reddit&#x2F;Discord&#x2F;HN&#x2F;... instead of people just trying to advertise their lives or build a brand in a sense (the likes of LinkedIn as well) or whatever are more meaningful to me.<p>To some degree, it probably has something to do with the size of those communities: Mastodon is niche enough not to get spammed with as many bots or adverts or people trying to push a certain narrative, it going under that radar is one of the best things about it, instead it&#x27;s more organic content.

Removing Instagram from my daily routine has been the best change I did, apart from adopting a cat. Just saw some stuff on my feed I had no desire to see apart from brainrot, and the algorithm kept shovelling some controversial figures too, which I had no interest in, so that also did not help its cause.

Left Facebook in 2015. Other than missing the death announcement of an old friend, I haven&#x27;t really been bothered. HN &amp; curated Reddit subs (basically Goretzky&#x27;s security sub list) are more than I need to keep up with things.<p>I do have an Instagram account, and use that to follow the Slackwyrm comic (and ignore people asking me to give them my &quot;desirable&quot; id.)<p>I did try Blind, but quickly gave up on that mess of an app. 1 day of using it and it just was rage bait after rage bait. Maybe next time I&#x27;m job hunting - a friend stated that it was very useful for her negotiations.<p>Most of my WA group chats are archived &amp; no notifications - no pressure to read them immediately. Left every group chat except close friends and family anyway.

Quit all social media 8 years ago, never missed it one bit. It was all good and i truly enjoyed it before ~2014 but then it started deteriorating so rapidly due to political polarisation and domination of &quot;influencers&quot; that kept peddling worthless trash, by about 2016 i no longer understood wtf i was doing there.<p>Since then, only tried reddit, but it has a different problem - it&#x27;s an echo chamber where no real discussion is possible on any topic as anyone who disagrees with even minute details in dominating dogma of every subreddit, gets downvoted to invisibility. Plus too many subreddits are merely karma mills that people use to boost their karma to allow themselves at least some actual voice in other subreddits - and those useless-by-design subreddits dominate the whole thing because you need to do a lot of those &quot;filler&quot; posts to allow oneself one real one, thus SNR on the platform is ridiculously low - but it&#x27;s not some evil bots who&#x27;s creating noise, but actual live people, and not even dumb ones, just because they HAVE to. And going through this - for what? To get a chance to participate in one more &quot;someone on the internet is wrong&quot; debate?<p>Meaningful talk is possible in groups where people are united by at least something and where is at least some real barrier of entry. These are not the social media. They can&#x27;t afford filtering who gets in because that way they&#x27;ll lose viewership and leave a lot of money on the table. I wonder why that comes as a surprise to anyone.

I remember having a conversation with my friend some 15 years ago when FB only allow .edu accounts. I argued that the incentives for the company cannot be to connect people because that in itself isn&#x27;t profitable. I signed up maybe 10 years ago for 6 months or so and never tried again. I think this has isolated me in some ways, but I&#x27;m quite comfortable with the friends I currently have.<p>Hypothesis: people who regularly use social media score higher then the average population in narcissic personality trait.

Well, let me tell you its far better. I had been using in collage upto 2013 i suppose. It use to make me sick in multiple ways. Now i use mastodon, almost same goes with it as well. But i just check things in mastodon which you can check without signing up as well. The Urge to check news multiple times a day is there. But i am getting hang of it. I didn&#x27;t knew that how these companies suck your brain. With adblock and using just few times the phone makes me feel better.

With all the recent developments in the US, I started doomscrolling reddit about a month ago. It’s clearly affected me emotionally.<p>Yesterday, I blocked it completely at home and partially at work - I might still need to read some posts from time to time, but I don’t want to be able to browse it.<p>It’s been a bit hard to come up with things to fill my time with again. Kinda scary.

I&#x27;d worry a bit about the summary of what is being reported.<p>&gt; Facebook and Instagram deactivation improved emotional state index by 0.060 standard deviations (p &lt; 0.001)<p>The link didn&#x27;t click through to the appendix. This seems off, as small effects (the small number of standard deviations) tend to be associated with undesirable high p-values, not low ones. Though also, the 0.060 itself seems lower than the visual graphs indicate.

Facebook can be hard to get rid of if you actually have hobbies and things because so much gets organised via it. I tried to get rid but my Running club exclusively posts stuff on Facebook.<p>For Instagram with you needing to log in to view pages, you find that you can’t find opening times for restaurants etc because many places use it to advertise that they’re open&#x2F;closed at short notice.

ITT: people deriding social media as a concept while also correctly pointing out the feeds on Zuckerberg owned products completely suck<p>People have been demanding &#x27;please just let me see what my friends post&#x27; for YEARS<p>It&#x27;s (probably) not going to change<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1692122">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1692122</a>

Hmm shameless plug but I recognised this specific phenomena a long time ago and I made a Chrome extension to selectively hide negative content on feeds and the general web. Because I still get value from feeds, just not certain types of content.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;filtrum-seven.vercel.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;filtrum-seven.vercel.app&#x2F;</a>

Surprised FB is even in this category anymore. Anecdotally, not many people post there anymore. I stay mostly for the groups not what people who I am connected to as a friend are doing. Status updates and check in’s seem like a thing of the past. It’s an easy way to share pictures with family. Group feature is very good. Our HOA has a group on there.

As someone who hasn&#x27;t used these things for a long time, I can say that my well-being is excellent. However, it might be easier for me due to my age (43) and the lack of need to please peers or friends.<p>I also use a browser plugin that blocks LinkedIn feed. This is because I can&#x27;t stand seeing the nonsense that seemingly serious people post there.

If you are sick of current social media and long for what we had in the past, check out what I am building.<p>www.elswhr.app

Direct link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;working_papers&#x2F;w33697&#x2F;w33697.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;working_papers&#x2F;w33697&#x2F;w336...</a>

Key finding: Social media breaks work, but asymmetrically. FB abstinence helps Gen X mental health (+0.06σ), IG detox aids young women (+0.04σ). Yet zero-sum platform switching remains unstudied.

I only watch standup bits, and Instagram keeps trying to show me other things, I skip them as often as I can.<p>Also cats.<p>I just scroll for like 10min before going to bed.<p>Been using it for about 6 months now.

0.061 standard deviations? Thats like almost nothing?

What I&#x27;d love to see next is whether the improvements last after reactivation, or if it&#x27;s just a temporary detox effect

The people who remain on social media deserve it. It&#x27;s social media darwinism.

First, I was an avid Facebook user. I cared about what photos I put up, my status updates, what groups I was in, the lot.<p>Then life got busy and somewhat difficult, and I had no more time for this. Still, I&#x27;d occasionally go on Facebook and get really down. I&#x27;d see all my &quot;friends&quot; living it up, having fun etc while I was stuck in my rut. Very depressing.<p>But then, a few things happened. One, I understood it&#x27;s really all fake. Two, all my real human friends stopped using Facebook, basically. And anyway, Facebook now just shows me AI slop that is nothing to do with anything - weird videos, people definitely shutting down a 5000 year old family business, you-wont-believe-what-she-did videos etc. Not that I use it much, just some friends for whatever reason are still on Messenger.

Give them a year, they’ll feel even better.

deactivating Facebook was a great move for me; i wish i could make the same with IG, but the FOMO is too big

Look, if your &quot;connections&quot; require you to engage in the social media slop, they are not worth it. If your family forces you to be on FB, your family is dysfunctional. If you have lost your friends after deleting your account, you had no friends in a first place.<p>Yes, we can live without social media. I know it is possible from my own experience. And when everyone has a phone and e-mail address, you can stay connected without FB or other account.<p>It will require more effort, but valuable things rarely come without it.

Wait till they study what happens when you stop reading (political) news as well. A complete game changer for mental health. You can&#x27;t really do anything about any of it, and most of it is fake either by omission or outright, yet over the past decade or so the media perfected the art of making you anxious, and getting you to constantly doom scroll so they show more ads. This isn&#x27;t harmless for your well being either.

My idea is that as long as there is a social idea, in the same small circle, there are also &quot;Internet celebrities&quot; who are considered by everyone to post some of their photos. It is essentially social. In WeChat&#x27;s circle of friends, people already need to make money by doing e-commerce in this private domain, not to mention that his friends may be the people around him, but his work forces him to...

They were provided with a quite plausible motivation. What is the plausible motivation in your scenario?

TLDR?

Imagine waking up every morning to go and work on something which objectively harms people and makes the world a more dangerous place to live.

With ai, i hope the feed is more useful to me.

If people didn’t like the way these apps make them feel, they would stop using them.<p>Many people prefer having anxiety about drama to being bored.