It was time well spent by Mark Zuckerberg. In a move that appears to coincide with Facebook/Meta reporting slowing growth, photo-sharing appInstagram has quietly removed the ability for mobile users to set a lower daily time limit reminder than 30 minutes.
The design of the app encourages people to choose three hours.
This daily time limit setting pops up a notification to the user once their app activity hits their preferred limit, reminding them to be conscious of how much time they are spending on the app, and maybe making it easier for them to quit out of the app voluntarily.
The daily time limit setting puts 3 hours in the top slot.
When it was making a big PR push, the company used to support a user defined limit of 15 minutes per day.
The attention-loving adtech giant now wants users of the photo- and video-sharing platform to spend more time looking at their content feeds in order to make more money by targeting them with ads. It could be a result of pressure from the business side.
Meta reported flat quarter-over-quarter usage for its eponymous app, and near flat growth for its other apps, which it wraps into a family of apps. Monthly active users rose from 3.58 billion in Q3 to 23.59 billion in Q4 but daily active users fell from 2.81 billion in Q3 to 2.82 billion in Q4.
The disappointing Q4 results wiped 20% off the company's value when they hit, which may be why the growth teams are seeing what levers they can change to drive engagement from existing users.
The company nudging them to set a new value for their daily limit is what was shown in the pictures below. Meta received a full mark for writing a sentence that failed to contain any meaningful explanation of why it was making arbitrary changes to limit users.
A 10 minute daily limit was previously specified by this user. The 10 minute option is no longer available, and users who had not yet specified a daily limit or had picked a higher limit would be unlikely to even know that.
The notification to the user of this change to daily limits does state that they can retain their current 10 minute limit, but the app uses dark patterns to get them to change it. All of which is designed to make them think they have to switch to a higher limit.
My choice has gone away, and if I try and change it, my old minimum of 10 minutes will triple to 30 minutes.
The source, who preferred to remain anonymous, likened this silent switch to a tobacco company saying you can limit your packs a day, as it takes away smaller packs.
They don't force the change, but if you go into the edit screen, you have to quit the app.
We've recently seen Facebook/Meta use a similar tactic when trying to push a policy update onWhatsApp in the face of a major T&Cs backlash, which has led to an ongoing consumer protection probe. The company has a bad history of this sort of stuff. This is not surprising. That doesn't make it okay.
It is getting harder for companies like Meta to pull wool. Oversight bodies are looking at dark patterns. Lawmakers in the European Union recently overwhelmingly backed putting explicit restrictions on such tactics into upcoming rules that will apply to digital platforms.
The scope for platforms to profit off of cynically self-serving defaults looks to be decreasing.
European parliament backs big limits on tracking ads
They told us that the 10 minute option had been discontinued and that the app had been pressing them for a couple of weeks.
We looked at what we could see ourselves to confirm that 30 minutes seems to be the new norm for app users.
The app only offers 30 minutes as the lowest daily limit, according to a US-based reporter.
The option they were most likely to notice was the one presented in the list of available times.
Another person from the UK who checked their app could only select 30 minutes as the lowest daily limit for the notification on their IG.
The picture on the mobile app looked different. There were options for a reporter based in France, but they did not work when selected. It looks like the 30 minute minimum may not have been applied to the Facebook mobile app because they were able to select a 5 minute limit.
We were able to confirm that a UK-based user of the Facebook mobile app could select a 5 minute minimum.
We asked Meta to confirm any changes it has made to the daily limits of the photo sharing service, but the company had not responded by the time of writing.
When it was announced that it was giving new time management tools to its users, Facebook received a lot of press.
Users would be able to see a daily average of time spent on the mobile app.
Ameet Ranadive, product management director at Instagram and David Ginsberg, director of research at Facebook wrote as they introduced the bundle of time management.
Our hope is that these tools give people more control over the time they spend on our platforms and also foster conversations between parents and teens about the online habits that are right for them.
The launch of the feature was linked to a wider company push, which began around the year of 2017: when it appeared to engage publicly with concerns about the negative impacts of social media. Facebook tried to change the narrative by suggesting that any problems with usage are manageable, just so long as the user has tools.
To address concerns about social media with the aim of preventing users actually stopping, Facebook/Meta went on to announce fixes.
If ever, these controls actually put users in control.
In hours of detailed testimony to lawmakers last year, it was revealed that the underlying content ranking algorithms actively undermine user autonomy byOptimizing for profit-maximizing.
The daily time limit feature of the app was more of a show than control, since users just got a notification if they reached their desired daily time, rather than the app locking them out until they reach their desired daily time.
Facebook has demonstrated a systematic willingness to give up little slices of profitability in service of a greater good, up to and including, the 10 minute soft limit on the photo sharing service. It would allow for fewer ads to be served, which would result in less profit for Meta.
The company's claim of trying to deliver time well spent on its platforms looks to have been a hollow publicity stunt to buy time on Facebook.
The creator of Wordle suggested that the game should only be played for three minutes a day, while the app itself is hard to use.
Tech giants like Meta are facing the prospect of hard limits on how they can operate, due to incoming regulation such as the EU's Digital Markets Act. The UK's Age Appropriate Design Code seeks to safeguard the welfare of children by imposing strict privacy defaults and standards, and imposing other restrictions such as time limits on when platforms can message child users.
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