People love Facebook so much they wouldn’t quit unless we paid them a lot | Hacker News Reader

People love Facebook so much they wouldn’t quit unless we paid them a lot

washingtonpost.com

23 pointsHillaryBriss20 comments

I think it's likely that most people value Facebook below $1000 for themselves, but try to maximize their return when offered money by someone else to give something up. I hardly use it and may stop anyday. But if you want to pay me to stop, I would certainly try to maximize what I can get.

...because we paid only the lowest bidder, there was no incentive for people to overstate what they would have to be paid to stop using Facebook.

Im not sure it does remove the incentive. I think people are still seeing a way to get free money and subsequently everyone bid higher than they would.

I think a better way to do this would be to randomize payouts and randomize people. Offer 200 to quit facebook to one person, 100 to another, 700 to another. The auction skews the results I believe

The participants knew that this was the rule, of course (if they had not, there would have been no basis at all for saying "there was no incentive for people to overstate..."), which changes how a rational person would play the game: they would want to give some consideration to how other participants might bid.

Perhaps the study should have had several rounds of bidding, with the distribution of bids (or at least the minimum) from the previous round being announced beforehand. You would then get information both from how low the bids went, and who dropped out at each stage, while also getting metadata, about the methodology, in the form of how much the participants changed their bids from one round to the next.

Love? Isn't it more about dependence?

Personally, I don't like the service, and hate the company, but I would've had to be paid a huge amount of money to close my account because there's tonnes of people I interact with and create plans to meet up with through messenger.

Move everyone I want to interact with to some other messaging service, like telegram or signal, and I'd jump on it in an instant.

Exactly. You would have to pay me to stop using Facebook, but I'd pay for Facebook to stop existing.

But how much would they be willing to pay to continue using it once they make it a part of their daily life?

They mention they got the students for the study from past studies/mailing list, but I wonder how they got the rest (80%) of the study group.

I'd definitely take much less than $1000 to deactivate facebook, and I feel like most of my friends would as well. The main reason I use facebook is to use messenger (if you consider that the same thing) and even then I'm been slowly convincing people to migrate to signal.

It's been possible for quite some time to delete your Facebook account but continue to use Facebook messenger under those previous credentials, if you didn't know.

I was aware you can deactivate your facebook account but keep using messenger. I wasn't aware that deleting your account was ever possible.

It’s a deliberate pig to delete but the pretence of deletion is there.

Do you have more information on this? My understanding was that you couldn't use the same credentials, instead registering a phone number for this.

All of the links I've conjured up are pointing to the same bit of information, will continue to hunt down more but I can say at least for my account I was able to fully delete my FB account, and login to the browser version of messenger.com using the same email/pass combo.

I've also been able to log into the Messenger mobile app without giving them a phone number (I was prompted, but not required at the time to enter a phone number). This all happened back in July of last year, so if the mechanism has changed since then, it's entirely possible you're correct that a phone number is now required instead of optional, as it was for me-and everyone else before the change and we just got 'grandfathered' in. Maybe?

That's why science is useful. "Hey, I'd personally have a different result than what is seen in the paper" is not evidence that the paper is wrong.

It's not just friends that Messenger is useful for: Facebook Marketplace has become a big competitor to Craigslist, so leaving FB means you'll have a harder time selling your junk. Say what you want about Facebook, but at least my FBM ads don't get me a ton of messages from scammers.

I value Facebook at zero. People who would only quit for a payoff might not see that they are the product and their personal details are fueling Facebook. To them I would say take control of your privacy and leave.

Saw that the other day, not bad... Finally a market based approach to measuring the value (many) users get from FB and quite refreshing compared to the usual "I know what's best for you" approach.

Edit: I don't use FB, but understand that it can be valuable to many users, just like any other platform or app out there.

I wouldn't read too much into it. If you asked the same question, but in reverse and made it about how much people would pay, it's going to be a very different outcome.

This. People just don't work the way economists think they do.

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