Marc Zuckerberg is vouching that Facebook is set on a new course, one that will favor its billions of users’ well-being over the network’s business need to maximise screen time.
I am pretty excited about this statement. It almost feels like justice has been served at the end of a post-apocalyptic movie. We all surrendered our time and attention to mindless scrolling and now the one person who can remedy this is finally on our side.
I am also wondering if the choice of words is a nod to Tristan Harris, dubbed the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”, who co-founded the movement Time Well Spent.
Social media addiction has played a role in a number of ways, the most negative being fake news, depression, waste of time, losing perspective in echo chambers, etc. And in the basis of this addiction lies design — great design, based on mental models.
The question remains — is great design good? How much of what we do in front of a screen is aligned with our human values?
Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker has spoken up about the network’s exploitation of human vulnerability, saying that the objective at the beginning was “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”
In its 10+ years of social media dominion, Facebook has apparently found the answer to that and now they are changing the question.
“I’m changing the goal I give our product teams,” says Zuckerberg, “from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”
Zuckerberg is going after improving connections, putting the social back in social media and doing away with the endless brand posts and news updates.
We will have to wait and see if only the algorithm will change or the interaction and the visuals will, too.
Facebook will go back to showing you what your friends are doing. Research, according to Zuckerberg, shows that passive use of social media makes us feel lonely, and active use around communities improves our well-being. What public posts users see will also be determined based on whether they invoke meaningful interactions.
Zuckerberg also expects drop in the time spent on the network — and is ok with it.
“by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.”
Cheers to that, I hope so, too!
Numbers show the loss of screen time is already a fact. Facebook’s quarter earnings report shows a first-time drop of 50 millions of hours daily. Yet its revenues keep rising. Some might wonder. Does that mean that the new tweaks of the News Feed will only affect organic views? Is this change, under the guise of fostering the social element, just another push to raise ad revenue by only showing promoted brand posts?
I do hope not.
Still I am not convinced social interactions on Facebook are all held to the same standard of improving users’ well-being. Two notable examples:
The ‘Seen’ stamp in Messenger — it enforces immediate reaction that is interruptive and stressful. Ignoring a message comes with certain social implications.
Live videos — are they that great? I would like to see a Facebook that discourages people from ‘capturing’ the moment right away and giving them back the actual enjoyment of it. Live videos only instil urgency in an already widespread trend.
The will to shift the focus from quantity of time spent to quality is definitely a good sign.
An even better one would be if other tech giants get inspired by this widely publicized move and re-focus on designing interfaces and experiences with human values at their heart.
Photo by Tim Bennett on Unsplash
