Time Well Spent
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Secret’s founder returns with anti-loneliness app Ikaria
“I don’t feel good about that. That sucks,” Chrys Bader-Wechseler reflects when asked about the bullying that went down on the anonymous app Secret he co-founded in 2013. After $35 million raised, 15 million users and a spectacular flame out two years later, the startup was dead. “Since I left Secret I feel alive and aligned with my values and my purpose again.”
But there was one bright side to Secret letting you post without a name or consequences. People opened up, got vulnerable and felt less alone when comments revealed they weren’t the only person dealing with a certain struggle. What Bader learned from watching Secret’s users “do this in the dark” was the realization that “actually, we need to learn to do this in the light, to have that same kind of dialogue, but do it openly with each other.”
So began the journey to Bader’s new startup Ikaria that’s exclusively revealing itself to the world today on TechCrunch. It’s a different kind of chat app, named after the Greek island where a close-knit community helps extend people’s lifespans. The six-person Santa Monica team is funded by a $1.5 million seed round led by Initialized Capital and Fuel Capital. People can sign up for early beta access here.
During a long interview about the startup, Bader and his co-founder Sean Dadashi were cagey about exactly how Ikaria works, as it’s still in development. Amidst all the philosophical context about the app’s intention, I was able to pull out a few details about what the product will actually look like.
“Basically, since 2004, technology has created this monumental shift in the human social experience. We’re more connected than ever technically but all the studies show we’re lonelier than ever,” Bader explains. “It’s like eating McDonald’s to get healthy. It’s not the right source of nutrition for our social well-being because true connection requires a level of vulnerability, presence, self-disclosure and reciprocity that you don’t really get on these platforms.”
Ikaria isn’t another feed. It’s a safe space where you can chat with close friends and family, or people going through similar life challenges. Members of these group chats will optionally go through guided experiences that help them reflect on and discuss what’s going on in their hearts and minds. This could become a whole new media format where outside creators or mental health professionals could produce and contribute their own guided experiences.
“Part of the reason we’re announcing this is that . . . it’s a call to action to involve all these practitioners and people who are doing these types of things and giving them a platform to allow them to facilitate these kind of group bonding experiences through a platform where they can extend their practices into the digital world,” Bader tells me. What Calm and Headspace did for making meditation more mainstream and accessible, Ikaria wants to do for mental health through online togetherness.
Ikaria already has a sizable closed beta going, which the startup plans to continue until it finds product fit, and it hopes to know its official release timeline by the end of the year. “We’re not going to launch this until we know 40% of people would be disappointed if they couldn’t use it.”
Rather than monetizing by exploiting people’s attention, Ikaria plans to develop a “customer relationship” with users, which could mean subscription access or in-app payments for buying content. Perhaps one user could act as the sponsor and purchase an experience for their whole group chat. Until then, it’s got its seed funding from Initialized, Fuel Capital, F7 Ventures, Ryan Hoover’s Weekend Fund, Backend Capital, Day One Ventures, Shrug, Todd Goldberg and Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra.
“The hope is that eventually this would be an app you use instead of iMessage, to increase your sense of presence,” Bader explains, revealing its grand ambitions. Why would we need to replace our core chat apps? Well for one thing, they don’t understand who really matters to you. If an app understood who your mom is, it could give her messages special prevalence or remind you to contact her.
Bader met Dadashi through an offline men’s group for discussing life, love and everything in the wake of Secret’s collapse and a rough romantic breakup. After just a few weeks of these meetups, they say they felt closer to each other than to most of their friends. Only later did Bader, a designer by trade, discover that Dadashi was a coder who’d been CTO of electronics company MHD Enterprises before starting a travel and lifestyle startup for mental wellness, called Somatic Studios. They tried working together on an app for sharing quotes from your friends but scrapped it.
Together, the pair went on to research the rapid rise of other vulnerability-focused meetup organizations like the one where they met, including Evryman, ManKind Project, Quilt, Authentic Relating, Circling, and T-Groups. Though they knew that to have a chance at impact at scale, they’d need to build a mobile app familiar enough to get people over the hurdle of starting a mindfulness practice. They laid out a few principles to build by: a focus on relationships instead of Likes and followers, conscious design that won’t exploit people’s attention or weaknesses, no ads, and keeping all data private and in control of the user.
There are other startups hoping to address the sad state of mental health from different angles. Talkspace offers a mobile connection to licensed therapists, though it can be pricey at $65 to $99 per week. 7 Cups and TalkLife makes peer-to-peer counseling from volunteers free, though these aren’t professionals. There are also plenty of journaling products, gratitude practice apps and wellness podcasts out there. But Ikaria’s approach, combining mental health content with group chats of people you trust, feels unique.
Having known Bader since the Secret days, it’s obvious that working with Dadashi has made him happier and more centered. Ikaria is an app he can wake up feeling good about each day. “You know, I don’t like to speak ill of David [Byttow, Secret’s CEO who sources say was verbally abusive to employees], but that relationship was very, very toxic and taxing for me. And this time around with Sean, as I’m sure you can tell, is the polar opposite.”
If Ikaria can help people develop the open and honest relationships with friends or peers like building it has done for Bader and Dadashi, it could be a beacon amidst a sea of time unwell spent.
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Instagram prototypes ‘Latest Posts’ feature
Instagram users who miss the reverse chronological feed might get a new way to see the most recent pics and videos from who they follow. Instagram has been spotted internally prototyping a “Latest Posts” feature. It appears as a pop-up over the main feed and brings users to a special area showing the newest content from their network.
Instagram Latest Posts
For now, this doesn’t look like a full-fledged “Most Recent” reverse-chronological feed option like what Facebook has for the News Feed. But if launched, Latest Posts could help satisfy users who want to make sure they haven’t missed anything or want to know what’s going on right now.
The prototype was discovered by Jane Manchun Wong, the master of reverse engineering who’s provided tips to TechCrunch on scores of new features in development by tech giants. She generated the screenshots above from the code of Instagram’s Android app. “Welcome Back! Get caught up on the posts from [names of people you follow] and 9 more” reads the pop-up that appears over the home screen. If users tap “See Posts” instead of “Not Now” they’re sent to a separate screen showing recent feed posts.
We’ve reached out to Instagram for a confirmation of the prototype, more details and clarification on how Latest Posts would work. The company did not respond before press time. However, it has often confirmed the authenticity of Wong’s findings and some of the features have gone on to officially launch months later.
[Update 2/14 7am pacific: Instagram has now confirmed the authenticity of the prototype with a spokesperson telling TechCrunch [and later tweeting] that “This early prototype is from a recent hackathon – it is not available to anyone publicly, and we have no plans to test or launch it at this time.” Typically a feature like this is first prototyped internally, then sometimes tested externally if it meshes with Instagram’s objectives, and only then launched officially if the test results are positive.]
Back in mid-2016, Instagram switched away from a reverse-chronological feed showing all the posts of people you follow in order of decency. Instead, it forced all users to scroll through an algorithmic feed of what it thinks you’ll like best, ranked based on who and what kind of content you interact with most. That triggered significant backlash. Some users thought they were missing posts or found the jumbled timestamps confusing. But since algorithmic feeds tend to increase engagement by ensuring the first posts you see are usually relevant, Instagram gave users no way to switch back.
Instagram previously tried to help users get assurance that they’d seen all the posts of their network with a “You’re All Caught Up” insert in the feed if you’d scrolled past everything from the past 48 hours. Latest Posts could be another way to let frequent Instagram users know that they’re totally up to date.
That might let people close the app in confidence and resume their lives.
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Yo Facebook & Instagram, stop showing Stories reruns
If I watch a Story cross-posted from Instagram to Facebook on either of the apps, it should appear as “watched” at the back of the Stories row on the other app. Why waste my time showing me Stories I already saw?
It’s been over two years since Instagram Stories launched cross-posting to Stories. Countless hours of each feature’s 500 million daily users have been squandered viewing repeats. Facebook and Messenger already synchronized the watched/unwatched state of Stories. It’s long past time that this was expanded to encompass Instagram.
I asked Facebook and Instagram if it had plans for this. A company spokesperson told me that it built cross-posting to make sharing easier to people’s different audiences on Facebook and Instagram, and it’s continuing to explore ways to simplify and improve Stories. But they gave no indication that Facebook realizes how annoying this is or that a solution is in the works.
The end result if this gets fixed? Users would spend more time watching new content, more creators would feel seen, and Facebook’s choice to jam Stories in all its apps would fee less redundant and invasive. If I send a reply to a Story on one app, I’m not going to send it or something different when I see the same Story on the other app a few minutes or hours later. Repeated content leads to more passive viewing and less interactive communication with friends, despite Facebook and Instagram stressing that its this zombie consumption that’s unhealthy.
The only possible downside to changing this could be fewer Stories ad impressions if secondary viewings of peoples’ best friends’ Stories keep them watching more than new content. But prioritizing making money over the user experience is again what Mark Zuckerberg has emphasized is not Facebook’s strategy.
There’s no need to belabor the point any further. Give us back our time. Stop the reruns.
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Camp Grounded Digital Detox returns after founder’s death
Summer camp for adults and beloved tech-free weekend getaway Camp Grounded ground to a halt in 2017. Its big-hearted founder, Levi Felix, who’d espoused the joys of trading screens for nature walks, was tragically killed by brain cancer at just age 32. Left in his wake was a mourning community that had lost their digital detox rally just as everyone was realizing the importance of looking up from their phones.
As an attendee, I’d been impressed by how the founder (known as Professor Fidget Wigglesworth at camp) used playfulness and presence to transport us back to childhood, before we got hooked on the internet. But he also broke people’s addiction to shame, mandating that anyone who screwed up in a sports game or talent show announce “I’m awesome,” and be met with a cheer from the crowd, “you’re awesome!”
Attendees compete in camp-wide games
Luckily, one of Felix’s elementary school friends, Forest Bronzan, wants to write a happier ending to this story. Almost three years after it went into hibernation following its creator’s death, Bronzan has acquired Camp Grounded and its parent company Digital Detox .
Camp Grounded will relaunch in May 2020 as two back-to-back weekend retreats at Northern California’s gorgeous Camp Mendocino. Attendees will again leave their devices in Tech Check lockers run by hazmat-suit wearing staffers, assume nicknames and stop the work talk. They’ll get to play in the woods like technology never existed, indulging in Camp Grounded favorites, from archery to arts & crafts to bonfire singalongs about enthusiastic consent. However, to simplify logistics, Camp Grounded will no longer hold sessions in New York, North Carolina or Texas.
The company will also organize more four-hour Unplugged Nights in cities around the country where partiers can switch off their phones and make new friends. The idea is to give a broader range of people a taste of the Grounded lifestyle in smaller doses. Those interested in early access to tickets for all of Digital Detox’s events can sign up here.
Camp Grounded’s Tech Check staffers confiscate attendees’ devices upon their arrival (Image Credit: Daniel N. Johnson)
Meanwhile, Digital Detox will start a new business of education and certifications for K-12 schools, coaching teachers and parents on how to gently reduce students’ screentime. Schools will pay per student like a Software-as-a-Service model. Through research by a few PhDs, the company will recommend proper rules for using tech in and out of the classroom to minimize distraction, and empathetic penalties for violations.
The obvious question to ask, though, is if Bronzan is just some business guy coming to coin off the anti-tech trend and Felix’s legacy. “I’m not Apple coming in and buying the company. This isn’t a tech acquisition,” Bronzan insists at a coffee shop in San Francisco. “I knew Levi before anyone else knew Levi. We went trick-or-treating and played in school band together. I went to the first Digital Detox summit, and brought my company year after year. I’ve been involved from the beginning, seeing Levi’s passion and inspiration.”
Levi Felix and Forest Bronzan (from left) in 1996
Fidget had an innately soothing camp counselor vibe to him that Bronzan doesn’t quite capture. He’d previously built and sold Email Aptitude, a CRM and email agency, not an event or education business. But he truly seems to mean well, and he’s earned the support of Digital Detox’s team.
“My mission was to find someone that was as excited and ferocious as Levi and I were when we started Digital Detox to further it as a movement,” says Brooke Dean, Felix’s wife and co-founder. “It was imperative that the person running DD and CG had actually experienced the magic. This person had to be more than a lover of camp and nature, they also needed the hard skills and successful track record of running a company. Forest is stable, business-minded and also finds value in that very unique magic.”
Brooke Dean and Levi Felix (foreground, from left) at Camp Grounded
Bronzan tells me the acquisition includes a cash component (“We’re not talking eight figures”) and a capital investment in the business, both funded by his email company’s exit. Two other individuals and one company had also expressed interest. Dean and Felix’s brother Zev will retain equity in the company, and she’ll stay on the board of directors. The trio are launching the Levi Felix Foundation that will donate money to brain cancer research.
While moving into education might seem like a left turn for Digital Detox after throwing events since 2012, Dean says, “Levi was planning on going back to school and was deeply interested in being an academic in this field. We always believed that there needed to be evidence in order to convince the masses that being outside and connecting with other human beings ‘IRL’ is critical to our health and longevity.”
Some alarming stats the organization has already uncovered include:
- 77% of people check or pretend to check their phone to avoid talking to others
- 38% feel less connected to their partner or close friend due to cell phone use
- Nearly 20% check their phone while having sex
“We want to eventually be the central source of tools on how tech is affecting lives and relationships at all age levels,” Bronzan tells me. It’s zeroing in on how compulsive behaviors like endless scrolling increase anxiety and depression, and how parents glued to their devices train children to not be present. The father of two kids under age five, Bronzan knows a weekend at camp in your 20s or 30s is too little too late to seriously address the crisis of fractured attention.
Digital Detox’s new CEO says he’s heartened by the progression of some of Felix’s ideals, as with the Time Well Spent movement. The screentime dashboards launched by tech companies don’t do enough to actually change people’s actions, he says, though, “They’re at least making some effort.” Digital Detox plans to launch a comprehensive quiz to determine how addicted you are to your phone, and Bronzan says he’d happily work with tech giants to integrate his company’s research.
On the camp for adults front, we’ve seen Burning Man go mainstream but lose some of what made it special, including a lack of cell phone reception. It’s now common to see people on the playa staring at their phones, talking about work, and stressed about the clock — all of which are prohibited at Camp Grounded. Festivals like Coachella seem to get more corporate and less mindful each year. That leaves plenty of open space for Digital Detox to fill with purposeful breaks from the default world.
Bronzan also wants to introduce more surprise and serendipity to the event calendar. Camp Grounded will experiment with a “Mystery Trip” where eight to 10 people sign up to be whisked away, only receiving a confidential briefing package the day before they show up. The point is to extract people from their routines where unhealthy habits manifest. Without connectivity, Camp Grounded hopes people will forge new connections in their minds, and with each other.
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Instagram tests hiding Like counts globally
Instagram is making Like counts private for some users everywhere. Instagram tells TechCrunch the hidden Likes test is expanding to a subset of people globally. Users will have to decide for themselves if something is worth Liking rather than judging by the herd. The change could make users more comfortable sharing what’s important to them without the fear of publicly receiving an embarrassingly small number of Likes.
Instagram began hiding Likes in April in Canada, then brought the test to Ireland, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand in July. Facebook started a similar experiment in Australia in September. Instagram said last week the test would expand to the U.S., but now it’s running everywhere to a small percentage of users in each country. Instagram tweets that feedback to the experiment so far has been positive, but it’s continuing to test because it’s such a fundamental change to the app.
Instagram wants its app to be a place people feel comfortable expressing themselves, and can focus on photos and videos they share rather than how many Likes they get, a spokesperson tells TechCrunch. Users can still see who Liked their own posts and a total count by tapping on the Likers list. Viewers of a post will only see a few names of mutual friends who Liked it. They can tap through to view the Likers list but would have to manually count them.
The expansion raises concerns that the test could hurt influencers and creators after a study by HypeAuditor found many of them of various levels of popularity lost 3% to 15% of their Likes in countries where Instagram hid the counts.
Instagram tells me it understands Like counts are important to many creators, and it’s actively working on ways that influencers will be able to communicate their value to partners. As Like counts won’t be public, influencer marketing agencies must rely on self-reported screenshots from creators that could be Photoshopped to score undue rewards.
Without even privately visible counts, agencies won’t be able verify a post got enough engagement to warrant payment. Instagram may need to offer some sort of private URL, partner dashboard or API creators can share with agencies that reveals Like counts.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said last week at Wired25 that “We will make decisions that hurt the business if they help people’s well-being and health.” Hidden Like counts might reduce overall ad spend on Instagram if businesses feel it’s less important to rack up engagement and look popular. But it might also shift spend from influencer marketing that goes directly into the pockets of creators toward official Instagram ads, thereby earning the company more money.
An Instagram spokesperson provided this statement to TechCrunch:
Starting today, we’re expanding our test of private like counts to the rest of the world beyond Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, and New Zealand. If you’re in the test, you’ll no longer see the total number of likes and views on photos and videos posted to Feed unless they’re your own. While the feedback from early testing has been positive, this is a fundamental change to Instagram, and so we’re continuing our test to learn more from our global community.
This is perhaps the final step of testing before Instagram might officially launch the change and hide Like counts for all users everywhere. It’s surely watching closely to determine how the test improves mental health, but also how it impacts usage of the app.
Hiding Likes is probably a win for the sanity of humanity, and a boon to creativity. Before, people often self-censored and declined to share posts they worried wouldn’t get enough Likes, or deleted posts that didn’t. They’d instinctually bend their public persona toward manicured selfies and images that made their life look glamorous, rather than what was authentic or that they wanted to communicate. Meanwhile, viewers would see high Like counts on friends’ or influencers’ posts, compare those to their own smaller Like counts and feel ashamed or inadequate.
Putting an end to the popularity contest might lead people to share more unconventional, silly or artsy posts regardless of their public reception. That could make Instagram’s content more diverse, surprising and alluring over time versus an increasingly stale aesthetic of perfection. Hidden counts might also decrease the need for “Finstagram” accounts, aka fake Insta profiles that users spin up to share what might not receive as many Likes.
While Facebook is credited for inventing the Like button, it’s Instagram that institutionalized the red heart icon that Twitter eventually adopted, and codified public approval into a concentrated dopamine hit. Instagram turning against Like counts could start a larger shift in the social media industry toward prioritizing more qualitative enjoyment of sharing, instead of obsessing over the quantification of validation.
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Facebook tries hiding Like counts to fight envy
If their post has lots of Likes, you feel jealous. If your post doesn’t get enough Likes, you feel embarrassed. And when you just chase Likes, you distort your life seeking moments that score them, or censor it fearing you won’t look popular without them.
That’s why Facebook is officially starting to hide Like counts on posts, first in Australia starting tomorrow, September 27th. A post’s author can still see the count, but it’s hidden from everyone else who will only be able to see who but now how many people gave a thumbs-up or other reaction.
The launch of the hidden Like counts test makes available what we reported Facebook was privately prototyping earlier this month, as spotted in its Android code by reverse engineering master Jane Manchun Wong. The test will run in parallel to Instagram’s own hidden Like count test we also scooped that first tested in Canada in April before expanding to six more countries in July.
“We are running a limited test where like, reaction, and video view counts are made private across Facebook” a Facebook spokesperson tells me. “We will gather feedback to understand whether this change will improve people’s experiences.” If the test improves people’s sense of well-being without tanking user engagement, it could expand to more countries or even roll out to everyone, but no further tests are currently scheduled.
Facebook’s goal here is to make people comfortable expressing themselves. It wants users to focus on the quality of what they share and how it connects them with people they care about, not just the number of people who hit the thumbs-up. The tests are being conducted by the News Feed team that falls under VP Fidji Simo’s jurisdiction over the main Facebook app. While the Instagram tests are starting to get data back, Facebook tells me it’s own tests are necessary since the apps are so different.
As you can see, the Like button itself remains visible to everyone. Comment counts will still be displayed, as will the most common types of reactions left on a post plus the faces and names of some people who Liked it. Technically viewers could go into the list of people who Liked a post and try to count, but the test stops Facebook from slapping people up front with insecurity.
Without a big number on friends’ posts that could make users feel insignificant, or a low number on their own posts announcing their poor reception, users might feel more carefree on Facebook. The removal could also reduce herd mentality, encouraging users to decide for themselves if they enjoyed a post rather than just blindly clicking to concur with everyone else.
As I wrote about 2 years ago, a collection of studies identify the harm Facebook can do. They found that while chatting with friends and comment threads on Facebook made people feel better, passively scrolling and Liking could lead to envy spiraling and declines in perception of well-being. Users would compare their seemingly boring life to the well-Liked glamorous moments shared by friends or celebrities and conclude they were lesser.
For example, Krasanova et al discovered that 20% of the envy-inducing moments users experienced in life were on Facebook, and that “intensity of passive following is likely to reduce users’ life satisfaction in the long-run, as it triggers upward social comparison and invidious emotions.”
One concern is that Facebook Pages that have large followings and often get more Likes than individual users’ posts could miss out on extra engagement and reach without that herd mentality. Some Canadian influencers have complained about reduced reach since the hidden Likes test launched their on Instagram, but there’s been no conclusive data to prove that and Facebook will still use the number of Likes as part of its ranking algorithm.
If Facebook wants to build a social network people continue using for another 15 years, it has to put their well-being first — above brands, above engagement, and above ad dollars. It also needs better controls for notifications and warnings when you’ve been passively scrolling for too long. But if the Like hiding works and eventually becomes standard, it could help Facebook get back to the off-the-cuff sharing that made it a hit at colleges so long ago. No one wants to be in a life-long popularity contest.
Snapchat never had Likes. Come see my interview with Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel at TechCrunch Disrupt SF (Oct 2nd-4th — tickets here) to learn more about how social networks are adapting to growing mental health concerns.
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Facebook may finally let you turn off those annoying notification dots
Sick of those anxiety-inducing red dots constantly appearing on the Groups, Watch, or other tabs in your Facebook app? Well the social network may be easing up a little in its unending war for your attention. Facebook is now testing a toggle to turn off the red in-app notification dots on its homescreen. Until now you had to manually open each of Facebook’s features to extinguishing the maddening flame of the notification badge. This could make Facebook feel more tranquil, and keep you focused on whatever you actually opened the app to do.
“It’s related to the work we’re doing with the well-being team. We’re thinking about how people spend their time in the app and making sure that it’s time well spent” a Facebook spokesperson tells me. Many people can’t feel settled if there are red dots begging to be tapped — a psychological quirk Facebook takes advantage of. The company seems to be realizing that its growth hacking can backfire if its pleas for engagement actually deter us from opening its app in the first place.
The Facebook Notification Dots setting was first spotted in its prototype form by reverse engineering specialist Jane Manchun Wong, hidden in the Android app’s code earlier this summer. Today, social media consultant Matt Navarra noticed the feature being publicly tested. Facebook now confirms to TechCrunch that this is a new global test that started recently on iOS and Android for a subset of users. “We are testing new ways to give people more control over the notifications they receive in the Facebook app” a spokesperson tells me.
Facebook plans to continue offering additional ways to personalize notifications so you don’t miss what’s important but aren’t drowned in noise. “People don’t necessarily want to see a notification on the badge [the in-app dots on tabs] if they’re already getting notifications in the jewel [the red counter on the Facebook app icon on your phone’s homescreen]” the spokesperson tells me. It considered a snooze option but went with an on/off switch that’s the least confusion. The Notification dots feature is likely to roll out to everyone unless it suddenly proves to decimate Facebook usage.
How To Turn Off Facebook Notification Dots
If you have access to this feature test, you’ll find the option in your Facebook app under the three-lined More/Menu tab -> Settings & Privacy -> Settings -> Notifications -> Notification Dots. There you can “Choose which shortcuts will show you notifications dots” with options for “Videos On Watch”, “Profile”, “Groups”, “Menu”.
One tab/shortcut where you can’t disable the dots is Notifications, which actually makes sense since that’s the main way the app alerts you to activity around your profile and content. But since you already get a heads-up about new Groups posts or when you’re tagged in a photo there, the notification dots on the other tabs are just redundant and distracting.
If you want to control which activities trigger alerts in your Notifications tab, you can go to More/Menu tab -> Settings & Privacy -> Settings -> Notifications -> Notification Settings -> Mobile. There you can see a list of your recent notifications and turn off ones like it in case you’re sick of hearing about friends starting fundraisers, reminders about upcoming events, or comments after yours on a Group post. The Notification Settings page also lets you turn off sound for Facebook notifications, axe them from specific groups or other apps, turn down the frequency of On This Day alerts, and choose what notifications get bumped up to email or text message.
Confusingly, there’s also a totally separate menu that’s accessible from the Notifications tab’s settings gear icon. There you can temporarily or permanently mute push notifications and choose where you receive each type. Obviously there should be a link between these two different spaces. A great next step for Facebook would be allowing user to batch notifications, Instead of either being constantly pestered or totally in the dark, it could let users opt for an occasional digest of notifications, like once per day or when they get to 10 alerts.
A year ago Facebook trumpeted how it launched a Time Well Spent dashboard in its app and Instagram for showing how long per day you use the apps with an option to set a reminder to stop after enough minutes. But buried inside Menu -> Settings & Privacy -> Your Time on Facebook, the toothless feature we’d previously scooped isn’t doing much good. If Facebook wants to be a principled citizen of our devices, it shouldn’t be so hard to say when we do or don’t want to be nagged for attention.
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Facebook and Instagram now show how many minutes you use them
It’s 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’s treating all our social networking the same with today’s launch of its digital well-being screen-time management dashboards for Facebook and Instagram in the U.S. before rolling them out to everyone in the coming weeks.
Giving users a raw count of the minutes they’ve spent in their apps each day in the last week plus their 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 Instagram and Facebook tools over the past few months thanks to screenshots from the apps’ code generated by Jane Manchun Wong. What’s launching today is what we saw, with the dashboards located in Facebook’s “Settings” -> “Your Time On Facebook” and Instagram’s “Settings” -> “Your Activity.”
Unfortunately, you’ll only see info about your usage on the mobile app on that device. It won’t include your minutes spent on desktop, where these features don’t appear, what you do on your tablet or info about your usage across the Facebook family of apps. There are no benchmarks about how long other people your age or in your country spend in the apps. All of these would make nice improvements to the dashboards.
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’s settings.
The announcement follows Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom’s comments about our original scoop, where he tweeted “It’s 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 intentional . . . Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and it’s 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’s more about what time increments to show in the Daily Reminder and Mute Notifications options than drastic strengthening of their muscle. Facebook will quietly keep a tiny fraction of users from getting the features to measure if the launch impacts behavior.
“It’s really important for people who use Instagram and Facebook that the time they spend with us is time well spent,” Ameet Ranadive, Instagram’s Product Director of Well-Being, told reporters on a conference call. “There may be some trade-off with other metrics for the company and that’s a trade-off 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 trade-off. It’s been trying to improve digital well-being by showing fewer low-quality viral videos and clickbait news stories, and more from your friends since a big algorithm change in January. That’s 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’s 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,” says Ranadive.
The fact that Facebook is willing to put its finances on the line for digital well-being is a great step. It’s 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’s 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’s toothless tools.
While iOS 12’s Screen Time and Android’s new Digital Wellbeing features both count your minutes on different apps too, they offer more drastic ways to enforce your own good intentions. iOS will deliver a weekly usage report to remind you the features exist. Android’s is best-in-class because it grays out an app’s 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. The whole point is that social networking isn’t all bad, but there are behaviors that hurt. Most of us aren’t going to give up Facebook and Instagram. Even just trying to spend less time on them is difficult. But by guiding us toward the activities that interconnect us rather than isolate us, Facebook could get us to shift our time in the right direction.
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Instagram’s Do Not Disturb and ‘Caught Up’ deter overgramming
Instagram is turning the Time Well Spent philosophy into features to help users avoid endless scrolling and distraction by notifications. Today, Instagram is rolling out its “You’re All Caught Up – You’ve seen all new posts from the past 2 days” warning in the feed, which TechCrunch broke the news about in May. Past that notice will only be posts that iOS and Android users have already seen or that were posted more than 48 hours ago. This will help Instagram’s 1 billion monthly users stop fiendishly scrolling in search of new posts scattered by the algorithm. While sorting the feed has made it much better at displaying the most interesting posts, it also can make people worry they’ve missed something. This warning should give them peace of mind.
Meanwhile, TechCrunch has learned that both Facebook and Instagram are prototyping Do Not Disturb features that let users shut off notifications from the apps for 30 minutes, one hour, two hours, eight hours, one day or until they’re turned back on manually. WhatsApp Beta and Matt Navarra spotted the Instagram and Facebook Do Not Disturb features. Facebook is also considering allowing users to turn off sound or vibration on its notifications. Both apps have these Do Not Disturb features buried in their code and may have begun testing them.
Both Facebook and Instagram declined to comment on building new Do Not Disturb features. “You’re All Caught Up” could prevent extra scrolling that doesn’t provide much value that could make Instagram show up atop your list of biggest time sinks. And an in-app Do Not Disturb mode with multiple temporary options could keep you from permanently disabling Instagram or Facebook.
We referenced Instagram Do Not Disturb in our scoop about Instagram building a Usage Insights dashboard detailing how much time you spent on the app. Both Facebook and Instagram are preparing these screens that show you how much time you’ve spent on their apps per day, in average over the past week and that let you set a daily limit after which you’ll get a notification reminding you to look up from your screen.
When we first reported on Usage Insights, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom tweeted a link to the article, confirming that Instagram was getting behind the Time Well Spent movement. “It’s 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 intentional . . . Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and it’s the responsibility of all companies to be honest about this. We want to be part of the solution. I take that responsibility seriously.”
Now we’re seeing this perspective manifest itself in Instagram’s product. Instagram’s interest conveniently comes just as Apple and Google are releasing screen time and digital well-being tools as part of the next versions of their mobile operating systems. These will show you which apps you’re spending the most time in, and set limits on their use. By self-policing now, Instagram and Facebook could avoid being outed by iOS and Android as the enemies of your attention.
In other recent Instagram news:
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Facebook prototypes tool to show how many minutes you spend on it
Are you ready for some scary numbers? After months of Mark Zuckerberg talking about how “Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits,” Facebook is preparing to turn that commitment into a Time Well Spent product.
Buried in Facebook’s Android app is an unreleased “Your Time on Facebook” feature. It shows the tally of how much time you spent on the Facebook app on your phone on each of the last seven days, and your average time spent per day. It lets you set a daily reminder that alerts you when you’ve reached your self-imposed limit, plus a shortcut to change your Facebook notification settings.
Facebook confirmed the feature development to TechCrunch, with a spokesperson telling us, “We’re always working on new ways to help make sure people’s time on Facebook is time well spent.”
The feature could help Facebook users stay mindful of how long they’re staring at the social network. This self-policing could be important since both iOS and Android are launching their own screen time monitoring dashboards that reveal which apps are dominating your attention and can alert you or lock you out of apps when you hit your time limit. When Apple demoed the feature at WWDC, it used Facebook as an example of an app you might use too much.
Images of Facebook’s digital wellbeing tool come courtesy of our favorite tipster and app investigator Jane Manchun Wong. She previously helped TechCrunch scoop the development of features like Facebook Avatars, Twitter encrypted DMs and Instagram Usage Insights — a Time Well Spent feature that looks very similar to this one on Facebook.
Our report on Instagram Usage Insights led the sub-company’s CEO Kevin Systrom to confirm the upcoming feature, saying “It’s 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 intentional . . . Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and it’s the responsibility of all companies to be honest about this. We want to be part of the solution. I take that responsibility seriously.”
Facebook has already made changes to its News Feed algorithm designed to reduce the presence of low-quality but eye-catching viral videos. That led to Facebook’s first-ever usage decline in North America in Q4 2017, with a loss of 700,000 daily active users in the region. Zuckerberg said on an earnings call that this change “reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day.”
Zuckerberg has been adamant that all time spent on Facebook isn’t bad. Instead, as we argued in our piece “The difference between good and bad Facebooking,” its asocial, zombie-like passive browsing and video watching that’s harmful to people’s wellbeing, while active sharing, commenting and chatting can make users feel more connected and supported.
But that distinction isn’t visible in this prototype of the “Your Time on Facebook” tool, which appears to treat all time spent the same. If Facebook was able to measure our active versus passive time on its app and impress the health difference, it could start to encourage us to either put down the app or use it to communicate directly with friends when we find ourselves mindlessly scrolling the feed or enviously viewing people’s photos.
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