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You could take a year-long class on the psychological influence (some call it social engineering) of Facebook and you'd barely scratch the surface. One example

You could take a year-long class on the psychological influence (some call it social engineering) of Facebook and you'd barely scratch the surface. One example I find particularly interesting is how Facebook slowly expanded what would trigger a notification, keeping people fixated on that red box like rats to sugar water.

trendia 9y ago
It had the opposite effect for me -- now that everything gives me a notification, half the time I see the red dot on the corner I assune it's something stupid.
- jbreckmckye 9y ago
  I'm not sure, but I feel that the less I engage with Facebook the more trivial the notifications become - as though the threshold were being lowered to get me back on board. So if I have no posts garnering likes / reactions, I start seeing "Susan is interested in an event near London!" and "Alan is now on Instagram!!" - until I begin posting again.
- jasode 9y ago
  Yes. This recent thread and screenshot complained about 36 red notifications from Facebook instead of real human beings: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/6zjzge/not_one_of_the_facebook_notifications_is_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/6zjzge/n... Facebook is diluting its red alert into meaningless nagging.
- danmaz74 9y ago
  It's the same for me, but I'm sure they have all the analytics they need to know what increases engagement and what doesn't...
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    I suspect it's a question of goals. Facebook talks a lot about increasing usage time and interaction count. The changes drove me away, but I was a low-time, low-activity user to begin with. Trading me for expanding the value of a 'whale' is probably a sensible move for them.
- somewhatoff 9y ago
  The worst is if you turn off notifications from Messenger, it flashes up the red number to tell you you need to turn them back on. I found it very, very annoying at first... now it's just taught me to ignore the red numbers entirely.
- randcraw 9y ago
  Same problem at LinkedIn. Most notifications are "We've found someone you might know" or "We've found a job you might like". Cry wolf, why don't you.
deleted 9y ago
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rublev 9y ago
Disabled all that social media shit way back. Didn't look back once. People who mattered reached out, those who didn't, didn't. Life moved on. So much for all their "psychological influence".
- artursapek 9y ago
  Yeah, it seems like there's a thread on HN every week where half of us jump in to share our story. I haven't been on FB in over 5 years and am much happier without it. That said, I have other more tolerable addictions (like reddit).
  - pc86 9y ago
    Thankfully Reddit lets you tailor your subscriptions very narrowly, even allowing you to disable notifications altogether. Even if you take a machete to your friends list on a weekly basis, Facebook has a lot of noise.
    - artursapek 9y ago
      Yep. I'm worried that reddit is going to abandon that user-friendliness though, under the typical SV pressure to "grow". Fingers crossed it never happens.
      - millzlane 9y ago
        It's already beginning. They just introduced "Pages" and Just yesterday I saw a bunch of new users tagging their friends in the posts to "share" with them.
      - treehau5 9y ago
        Is reddit even in the black yet? At the end of it the day, we have to make money for our software. All of that infrastructure and developers aren't free or cheap. Let's be honest with ourselves, people are never going to pay for software again like they used to in the 90s and 00s. Kind of in a way, I miss that. I wish you could pop in a CD of "reddit" with your subscription and that would be it.
elevensies 9y ago
Hysterical notifications are why I deleted the app from my phone. I was getting notified about stuff that I didn't care about, that no sane person would ever care about, and I lost patience with their whack-a-mole settings system.
- deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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gnicholas 9y ago
James Hamblin at The Atlantic experimented with putting his phone in grayscale mode to combat the power of brightly-colored notifications. https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/480240/adventures-in-grayscale/ https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/480240/adventures-in...
jpalomaki 9y ago
Probably we (as in Facebook users) are part of the largest psychological experience in history. With the billion users and trillions of actions, the computers at Facebook have an unprecedented opportunity to make experiments on us to see what makes us tick. Take notifications as an example. Not that hard to think that there could be some machine learning system trying to find the best possible notification pattern to lure back a user who has not visited Facebook for a while. On Facebook scale you can run large number of tests in reasonable small time frame and still get pretty good number of observations for each test. Similar thing could be applied to quite many things on Facebook. Most of the things they want to optimize are easy to measure. Like how often we check the site, how much time we spend there, how many times we click ads and so on.
andrei_says_ 9y ago
I see a similarity between food corporations pouring money into making food addictive and cheap, and corporations competing for our attention by making their digital products addictive. I highly recommend this TED talk by Tristan Harriss on the topic: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention/up-next https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tr... It's a war for our attention and the first step of taking it back is admitting that we are easy to distract and persuad-able.
QAPereo 9y ago
Just avoid it... don't try to outsmart it, accept that it's poison and move on. The complexity of the issue is belied by the simplicity of the available solutions.

trendia 9y ago

It had the opposite effect for me -- now that everything gives me a notification, half the time I see the red dot on the corner I assune it's something stupid.

jbreckmckye 9y ago
I'm not sure, but I feel that the less I engage with Facebook the more trivial the notifications become - as though the threshold were being lowered to get me back on board. So if I have no posts garnering likes / reactions, I start seeing "Susan is interested in an event near London!" and "Alan is now on Instagram!!" - until I begin posting again.
jasode 9y ago
Yes. This recent thread and screenshot complained about 36 red notifications from Facebook instead of real human beings: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/6zjzge/not_one_of_the_facebook_notifications_is_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/6zjzge/n... Facebook is diluting its red alert into meaningless nagging.
danmaz74 9y ago
It's the same for me, but I'm sure they have all the analytics they need to know what increases engagement and what doesn't...
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I suspect it's a question of goals. Facebook talks a lot about increasing usage time and interaction count. The changes drove me away, but I was a low-time, low-activity user to begin with. Trading me for expanding the value of a 'whale' is probably a sensible move for them.
somewhatoff 9y ago
The worst is if you turn off notifications from Messenger, it flashes up the red number to tell you you need to turn them back on. I found it very, very annoying at first... now it's just taught me to ignore the red numbers entirely.
randcraw 9y ago
Same problem at LinkedIn. Most notifications are "We've found someone you might know" or "We've found a job you might like". Cry wolf, why don't you.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rublev 9y ago

Disabled all that social media shit way back. Didn't look back once. People who mattered reached out, those who didn't, didn't. Life moved on. So much for all their "psychological influence".

artursapek 9y ago
Yeah, it seems like there's a thread on HN every week where half of us jump in to share our story. I haven't been on FB in over 5 years and am much happier without it. That said, I have other more tolerable addictions (like reddit).
- pc86 9y ago
  Thankfully Reddit lets you tailor your subscriptions very narrowly, even allowing you to disable notifications altogether. Even if you take a machete to your friends list on a weekly basis, Facebook has a lot of noise.
  - artursapek 9y ago
    Yep. I'm worried that reddit is going to abandon that user-friendliness though, under the typical SV pressure to "grow". Fingers crossed it never happens.
    - millzlane 9y ago
      It's already beginning. They just introduced "Pages" and Just yesterday I saw a bunch of new users tagging their friends in the posts to "share" with them.
    - treehau5 9y ago
      Is reddit even in the black yet? At the end of it the day, we have to make money for our software. All of that infrastructure and developers aren't free or cheap. Let's be honest with ourselves, people are never going to pay for software again like they used to in the 90s and 00s. Kind of in a way, I miss that. I wish you could pop in a CD of "reddit" with your subscription and that would be it.

elevensies 9y ago

Hysterical notifications are why I deleted the app from my phone. I was getting notified about stuff that I didn't care about, that no sane person would ever care about, and I lost patience with their whack-a-mole settings system.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gnicholas 9y ago

James Hamblin at The Atlantic experimented with putting his phone in grayscale mode to combat the power of brightly-colored notifications. https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/480240/adventures-in-grayscale/ https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/480240/adventures-in...

jpalomaki 9y ago

Probably we (as in Facebook users) are part of the largest psychological experience in history. With the billion users and trillions of actions, the computers at Facebook have an unprecedented opportunity to make experiments on us to see what makes us tick. Take notifications as an example. Not that hard to think that there could be some machine learning system trying to find the best possible notification pattern to lure back a user who has not visited Facebook for a while. On Facebook scale you can run large number of tests in reasonable small time frame and still get pretty good number of observations for each test. Similar thing could be applied to quite many things on Facebook. Most of the things they want to optimize are easy to measure. Like how often we check the site, how much time we spend there, how many times we click ads and so on.

andrei_says_ 9y ago

I see a similarity between food corporations pouring money into making food addictive and cheap, and corporations competing for our attention by making their digital products addictive. I highly recommend this TED talk by Tristan Harriss on the topic: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention/up-next https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tr... It's a war for our attention and the first step of taking it back is admitting that we are easy to distract and persuad-able.

QAPereo 9y ago

Just avoid it... don't try to outsmart it, accept that it's poison and move on. The complexity of the issue is belied by the simplicity of the available solutions.