Facebook’s tools to curb use are washing nose
Facebook and Instagram have a new function in the dashboard as of this week. ‘Your activity’ and ‘your time on Facebook’ shows you how much time you spend on both platforms. You can do that as well as average, but you can also see which day of the week you spend most of the time in the apps. If you are the type who might prefer not to see those figures, it is also possible to get a memory after a certain time, be it minutes or hours, that it might be time to do something different with your time.
You can also ‘snooze’ the notifications of the apps for up to eight hours, so that you are not reminded, for example, that Facebook exists. The new features are all in line with many American tech companies that attempt to make the addictive factor of social media and smartphones visible in any case.
Nice but pointless
The joke is of course that nobody really does something about the problem, because all psychological tricks that the apps in question use (and that is certainly the case for Facebook) to make them addictive. making are still there. Apple and Google are also working on this kind of measures, but at least they have the option to lock the apps after a certain time after the time limit has been reached. Facebook does not do that for its own platform and Instagram and so you only get the figures behind your app use without too many handles to do something about it.
It also goes against Facebook’s own interest to do this: their entire business model revolves around user interaction as much as possible with the platform, so why would you knowingly reduce it? It goes without saying that Facebook still has something to do with it, and all other major players are doing something similar. The fact that Facebook does not automatically turn on the functions now that they are there, but leaves it up to users to set them up, says enough.
The few people who are worried about their own use may have been helped with this, because they now have possibilities in any case. The people who are too interested in the apps probably do not want to know that and they are therefore dependent on their own will to not do that. Not easy, especially because Facebook makes it very simple to be able to immediately undo every blocked block. In addition, the vast majority of users will hardly know that these options have been added and therefore do nothing with it. And that’s fine Facebook.