Getting paid not to use Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Getting paid not to use Facebook

imgur.com

108 pointsSMAAART66 comments

I could see this data being used by Facebook to argue that they are providing $n per week of value to each user, based on that being the price users demand in exchange for not using Facebook.

Of course loss aversion being what it is, humans will ask for more money in exchange for losing access to something than they ever would have paid to gain access to that thing.

Is it just me or does it really boil down to the simple fact that the vast majority of people are likely to choose the largest amount of money? If I thought I was going to get paid for doing practically anything, even if it was a small chance, and I was presented with similar options, of course I would choose the largest amount. This is especially true of doing something as easy as not using Facebook.

As an aside, I haven’t used Facebook in years and I haven’t used any other mainstream social sites in months. I don’t really miss them. I wish I could ditch LinkedIn, but it’s proven to be a valuable job search tool more than once and frankly, the recruiter messages keep my mood up to some degree.

Offering options anchors the range. Most people will choose the middle of the range, because choosing the low end makes you look foolish, and choosing the high end makes you look greedy. The choice they make has very little to do with the actual value they would accept, more with how they think they will be perceived. The correct way to do it is to just offer an input field, not a multiple choice, because then there is no anchoring.

This is likely why they say the option you choose will not impact how much money you are given. If you choose $50/week, and are then offered $5/week and take it, they know you were overestimating. The study wants to learn empirically the relationship between perceived and actual willingness to abstain from Facebook at various price points.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-elections/facebo...

> Facebook Inc said on Monday it is partnering with external researchers to examine the impact of the social media site on society during the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

The initiative expands on its Social Science One project with academics who study political impacts of social media.

A group of 17 independent researchers from the fields of elections, democracy and social media will now work with internal Facebook data scientists to design the studies.

The company expects between 200,000 and 400,000 users to opt into the project, which will log what they see and how they behave on Facebook and Instagram.

> The company expects between 200,000 and 400,000 users to opt into the project, which will log what they see and how they behave on Facebook and Instagram.

> It will introduce targeted changes to some participants’ experiences, such as advertising or types of posts shown to them.

This doesn't seem to match the image posted here.

Thanks for the call out. That Reuters article was referencing the broader project that the opt-in survey is a part of.

More details about the specific researchers and their motivations can be seen in the FAQ of the official post:

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/08/research-impact-of-faceboo...

What an interesting idea. It's like an anti-advertisement. I can easily imagine how this could be replicated as a political campaign (and this does appear to be political -- why else end after Nov 3 election?).

I wonder how the economics (or outcomes) work out paying targeted, undecided, persuadable, but likely voters in key states to withdraw from the advertising blitz of the opponent, as opposed to continuing to compete for ads.

> Facebook says it will select scientific samples of Americans to participate in the study that will reflect the diversity of the nation’s adult population as well as Facebook and Instagram’s users. [0]

The timing on this seems really suspect. Will they release any sort of information on the breakdown of people that were offered / accepted a spot in this study, particularly their political leanings?

It’s pretty well accepted that the workforce in Silicon Valley leans a particular way politically. The suspicion will be that Facebook is encouraging those who lean the other way to mute themselves.

[0] https://nypost.com/2020/09/04/facebook-users-will-be-paid-to...

The group running this is extremely reputable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORC_at_the_University_of_Chic...

I'm a UChicago student studying computational social science. I have a couple friends working at the NORC and I can say that, as someone who spends every day reading and criticizing studies done over the internet or with machine learning, the NORC always amazes me with their quality. Every time I get frustrated with some vaguely racist/dehumanizing social science paper I go read whatever is on NORC's home page to calm down.

Why not just wait two months though? The timing makes it impossible to not be suspicious, after all “this is the most important election in the history of our nation.”

Because clearly the point of the study is to look for some sort of correlation between social media engagement and voting activity.

The timing is a feature, not a bug.

There is zero attempt to be coy here. Scroll down to the bottom section where they explicitly reference the election.

Whats worse is it could come off as paying specific users to stay silent during the elections and paying other users to stay in the dark from other things (some people treat Facebook as an actual newsfeed). Its definitely suspect. I think anytime a company does things like this or tries to arbitrate what truth is they should be considered a publisher and not a platform.

Now I'm doing the thought experiment "how much would they have to pay me to get back ON facebook"

There are any number of things I'd be very happy to be paid for not using. Even very small sums of money for each one would make me a very rich man. I would fully support over-funded startups deciding to burn their money more directly by simply giving it to me.

TBH I feel like I already get paid--temporally and emotionally--for staying away.

I suspect this would be a little like the cobra bounty?

The cobra bounty might be a small tool to have in your head, but you cant just bring it out an bang away.

I'm not even sure it's a useful tool. All over the world today people get rewarded for pest bounties, they work.

I would like to know if cobra deaths went up or down due the cobra bounty. People take to much glee in things failing, I'm not sure the story is trustworthy.

I closed my Facebook account in 2009 and stopped using all social media accounts since then. So I couldn't be eligible for being paid to deactivate an account that doesn't exist, but I wouldn't want to be paid to have account period. Countless hours of peoples life are wasted scrolling through feeds that amount to a pile of dirt sitting in your yard.

Yet here you are, on social media.

This isn’t social media. Nor is Reddit or other similar sites. The main criteria is “social”. That means human relationships, friendships, family, etc. I don’t have any sort of relationship with anyone on HN, Reddit, etc. We are all strangers passing in the night. Basically anti-social media.

But it’s not really. What we’re doing here is by definition social. It’s just a different flavor of social. It’s surprising to me that you think talking to other people on the internet is somehow anti-social.

It's not anti-social, but it is anti-"social media". HN has made a lot of wonderful design choices that prevent it from becoming Reddit or Twitter. Hiding points on comments, not showing indicators for replies (making it easier to move on), solid moderation that allows for diverse viewpoints while avoiding a lot of toxicity, etc.

This is not considered a social media site. Just because someone creates a definition of what they think a term should be defined as to group all social interaction together is bullshit. One could say because my program here makes bank transactions automatically for me would be deemed social media as well, because the media of a mass said so. Email and a password are grouped now as social media by your terms and the masses. This is merely a place to receive information based on links that people provide as news. I am just going to group you into the idiot group that thinks everything internet related is social media.

It's really gross to consider simple forums to be social media, but I guess you're right per the definition.

Usenet and IRC are social media. MUDs also social media.

What. My brain isn't liking this.

... and wasting time on hobbies, and tv, and video games, and religious meetings, and comicons, and hiking the same trail hundreds of thousands before you have, and possibly breathing. Why do people also let others know they dropped social media and are probably better human beings than the rest of us who use it in moderation...

I never said I was better than you. I was merely making a point that 95 percent of people waste their time on interacting with social media sites. I can't believe your comparing hobbies to this issue. I can understand TV and video games. I think its a good thing to let other people know your not using social media sites. Its really an addiction like using any other main stream drug.

Area Man Rejects Social Media, Prefers Discussing Topics With People on the Intern————

> stopped using all social media accounts

I keep wondering how I should describe this site to people, without using the term "anti-social media"...

These things were called forums before social media was a term. It is kind of a forum around aggregated articles.

This seems to fit better. HN is even on the list. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_news

A forum is not anything like social media. People think that any internet site where UGC is posible is social media? Not.

HN, for instance, is not based on finding friends, creating glamorous profiles, posting daily and weekly updates about one’s life, or reading other’s posts. It has no images, hashtags, auto playing videos, or your cousin and high school sweetheart arguing in the comments of your post about your luncheon at the Hilton if you should be even at the Hilton because of your or their political views.

No, HN is just a topical forum. The only shadow of social media on it is when people post links to YouTube, which I don’t get or understand why it’s allowed. Why not post all the links to YouTube every day? If O wanted to watch videos about Perl, I’d go to YouTube.

I suspect there may be two or three different definitions of “social media”. What happens in the comment threads on internet forums is definitely social and writing is a form of media. People receive karma for posting good content just like people get likes, shares, and retweets on other sites. We may not use our real names but we all still have an identity. It may be more similar than you realize. I totally agree we’re anything but the type of basic crap you describe. But we’re not anti-social, either.

I still have a facebook but I rarely check it now. The only reason I use it usually is for facebook messenger (I use the app, without checking facebook), and I find facebook marketplace to often have a decent selection of goods, seemingly better than craigslist now for some items.

Note however, I'm pretty young, just turned 24.

I wonder what the study is. I'm currently a grad student at UChicago, and although I work in a computational psychology lab, I have a few friends at NORC, and they're masters of side loading survey questions like this. I can guess this though: the amount you're willing to get paid is most certainly not the response variable. Even though they say "this won't effect your payment" I'm guessing what they're going to do is offer you some random amount of money, and then compare your response to this data.

I'll have to keep an eye on NORC's website c. October.

Just as an aside - what kind of data do you look at for computational psychology?

Ironically, if you submit the form the data gets sent to Facebook, among others.

FWIW, the study is being conducted by the NORC at the University of Chicago, a fairly well respected body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORC_at_the_University_of_Chic...

If they genuinely ran this experiment without a time bound, I'd easily have at least $3k by now.

Could this be targeted towards influencers who someone wants to shut up?

How many influencers can be convinced to give up a huge chunk of their income in exchange for $150?

Not every influencer is making income that way.

Facebook is surely able to identify people with significant influence who aren't all that famous and who don't make any money off of it. Approximately, take the top 2% but excluding the top 0.01% to get these users.

Together they have huge influence, but mostly they aren't well-known. Their absence would have a huge impact but might not be noticed by an outside observer.

If you're "not all that famous" then by definition you're not an influencer.

You can be, to a degree. There is a long tail.

Targeting the top influencers would be too obvious. There are a lot of minor influencers that add up to quite a lot, being in total very important. Facebook knows who they are.

Maybe they are also going to write a piece about what it was like to give up Facebook?

If Purdue Pharma said it was "partnering with external researchers to examine the impact of opiods on society" would you take the "research" seriously?

I believe this to be part of a move toward Facebook becoming a subscription service. Something they should have been from the very beginning.

I too received this message, but I didn't join the study. I'm concerned with how the results of the study will be used.

As I understand the study is measuring whether you can or cannot last 6 weeks without Facebook, or am I missing something?

I known some people that I'm curious if they could survive that.

The second image refers to the election several times so it makes me wonder if they are trying to see if FB has an effect on how you vote...pure speculation on my part based on their text, of course.

That would require them to record your vote which would probably be illegal.

They can ask you how you voted. Exit polls do it all of the time. This announcement mentions a survey as well.

If it is part of a survey that you are paid for then it's a pretty thin line to paying for actual votes, right?

No, it's not saying you should or shouldn't vote. It's saying that after election day, they will ask you to fill a survey, which is optional. That is literally all the invite is saying. In fact, choosing not to vote would be a valid & extremely valuable bit of information.

WHO you vote for is not public information.

THAT you voted, including in any (and if so which) primary, is.

Right, that'd still be an interesting study.

How to sign up?

From the image looks like the URL is https://2020erp.norc.org/ but you need a PIN to proceed, so looks like it is invite-only.

Interestingly enough, Facebook itself is listed as a partner.

How do I actually sign up? I created an account (with fake information) years ago for something that requires a Facebook account. It has been 5-10 years since I last visited it. I assume it is still active. I’d happily continue not using it for money.

You can’t sign up. They don’t have enough money to pay every willing volunteer, so they ask for volunteers only from a randomized sample to infer what would happen if everyone received this offer.

Addiction test? Checking to see what users most miss after a while?

Emotional health test obvi.

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers joke about getting paid more to not play music than to play. "How much to also have you not practice?" "You can't afford it."

Anyone else think this is going to be grade-A fodder for the Trump machinery?

- Facebook has largely been the go-to social media platform for his supporter base

- They are paying users to deactivate their facebook accounts for the election period AND

- It is not disclosed at all who they are targeting & results won't be available way until mid next year

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