INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
It passive zombie feed scrolling, not active communication with friends that hurts our health, according to studies Facebook has been
pointing to for the last seven months
Yet it treating all our social networking the same with today launch of its digital wellbeing screentime management dashboards for Facebook
and Instagram in the US before rolling them out to everyone in the coming weeks.
Giving users a raw count of the minutesyou&ve spent in
their apps each day in the last week plus your average across the week is a good start to making users more mindful
But by burying them largely out of sight, giving them no real way to compel less usage, and not distinguishing between passive and active
behavior, they seem destined to be ignored while missing the point the company itself stresses.
TechCrunch scooped the designs of the two
separate but identical Instagramand Facebook tools over the past few months thanks to screenshots generated from the apps& code by Jane
What launching today is what we saw, with the dashboards located in Facebook &Settings& -> &Your Time On Facebook& and Instagram &Settings&
-> &Your Activity&.
Beyond the daily and average minute counts, you can set a daily &limit& in minutes after which either app will send
you a reminder that you&ve crossed your self-imposed threshold
But they won''t stop you from browsing and liking, or force you to dig into the settings menu to extend your limit
You&ll need the willpower to cut yourself off
The tools also let you mute push notifications (you&ll still see in-app alerts), but only for as much as 8 hours
If you want anything more permanent, you&ll have to dig into their separate push notification options menu or your phone settings.
The
announcement follows Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom comments about our original scoop, where he tweeted &It true
.We&re building tools that will help the IG community know more about the time they spend on Instagram & any time should be positive and
Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and it the responsibility of all companies to be honest about this
We want to be part of the solution
I take that responsibility seriously.
Users got their first taste of Instagram trying to curtail overuse with its &You&re All Caught Up&
notices that show when you&ve seen all your feed posts from the past two days
Both apps will now provide callouts to users teaching them about the new activity monitoring tools
Facebook says it has no plans to use whether you open the tools or set daily limits to target ads
It will track how people use the tools to tweak the designs, but it sounds like that more about what time increments to show in the Daily
Reminder and Mute Notifications options than drastic strengthenings of their muscle
Facebook will quietly keep a tiny fraction of users from getting the features to measure if the launch impacts behavior.
Instagram CEO
confirms upcoming ''time spent& Usage Insights
It really important for people who use Instagram and Facebook that the time they spend with
us is time well spent&Ameet Ranadive, Instagram Product Director of Well-Being, told reporters on a conference call
&There may be some tradeoff with other metrics for the company and that a tradeoff we&re willing to live with, because in the longer term we
think this is important to the community and we&re willing to invest in it.
Facebook Needs Stronger Screen Time Tools That Deter Passive
Browsing
Facebook has already felt some of the brunt of that tradeoff
It been trying to improve digital wellbeing by showing fewer low quality viral videos and clickbait news stories, and more from your friends
since a big algorithm change in January
That contributed to a flatlining of its growth in North America, and even a temporary drop of 700,000 users early this year while it also
lost 1 million users in Europe this past quarter
That led to Facebook slowest user growth rates in history, triggering a 20 percent, $120 billion market cap drop in its share price
&The changes to the News Feed back in January were one step
giving people a sense of their time so they&re more mindful of it is the second step& saysRanadive.
The fact that Facebook is willing to
put its finances on the line for digital wellbeing is a great step
It a smart long-term business decision too
If we feel good about our overall usage, we won''t ditch the apps entirely and could keep seeing their ads for another decade
But it likely to be changes to the Facebook and Instagram feeds that prioritize content you&ll comment on rather than look at and silently
scroll past that will contribute more to healthy social networking than today toothless tools.
While iOS 12 Screen Time and Android new
Digital Wellbeing features both count your minutes on different apps too, theyoffer more drastic ways to enforce your own good intentions
iOS will deliver a weekly usage report to remind you the features exist
Android is best-in-class because it grays out an app icon and requires you to open your settings to unlock an app after you exceed your
daily limit.
iOS Screen Time (left) and Android Digital Wellbeing (right)
To live up to the responsibility Systrom promised, Facebook and
Instagram will have to do more to actually keep us mindful of the time we spend in their apps and help us help ourselves
Let us actually lock ourselves out of the apps, turn them grayscale, fade their app icons, or persistently show our minute count onscreen
once we pass our limit.Anything to make being healthy on their apps something you can''t just ignore like any other push notification.
Or
follow the research and have the dashboards actually divide our sharing, commenting, and messaging time from our feed scrolling, Stories
tapping, video watching, and photo stalking
