Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?
For those who have seen the film on Netflix already; what are your thoughts? I am especially interested in hearing from people involved in any algorithm-driven platforms.
This is the first time I have seen such coherent, powerful and accessible explanation on the mechanics of algorithms and negative consequences of social media, and I wonder if this film can be the push that non-technical people need to take a step back and maybe even delete their accounts.
Anecdotally, it was my non-technical, Instagram-loving partner who saw this film first and recommended it to me. She re-watched it with me and is now asking serious questions about the platform and her continued use of it. She can't be the only one.
What will the cultural impact of this movie be?
265 comments
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So to me the whole thing simply doesn't make sense, who actually did buy something from an ad?
The only signal I value for trying out (buying) new things comes from real people.
The privacy implications of storing so much personal data is the other question and that can be used for some bad things that isn't just serving ads. Would be nice to have a law for mandatary differential privacy for ad based social networks.
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Perhaps I am losing out on ignoring all ads wholesale like that. I even sometimes put products that do 'a lot' of advertising in bad light and try to avoid them all together.
Also, even if you take away advertising, the problem remains of addictive apps and 'persuasive' design which will still remain. To tackle that is a whole different discussion altogether.
When it comes to online ads, if I get a very annoying ad or a pop up on stores website, I'm out and taking my money elsewhere. I also generally try to seek real world reviews but it is hard. So many youtube videos, bloggers and even comments are just paid advertisement, it sucks.
I remember early days of the internet when the information was decent before the MBAs figured out how much money could be made from it.
Here are some examples:
For mass consumer products. Let’s say a smartphone. If an ad is shown every day you may not click it but now that smart phone might be in the list of brands you’d subconsciously consider.
Other ads are more direct I see a lot of start business ads that are very compelling. I ignore them or watch them out of interest in HOW the ad persuades and I can see why people would click them. They often offer a free thing that seems quite valuable to prove themselves which is a marketing tactic as old as the hills.
There are probably lots of other examples. Ads are powerful and it’s not hard to understand how they work. The human brain is a great ad blocker in general but it’s imperfect enough that the EPM of ads makes it still worthwhile and evidenced by how hard it is to pay less than a $1 a click most places.
So know your enemy! ;)
I found the tips on https://www.humanetech.com/take-control very helpful to interrupt my addition to my phone (particularly the monotone one).
Other than that, I think that it brings to light what (possibly) happens behind the covers of those systems, as it's always trying to get you back on the platform. I remember that every time I get a notification about something.
This film and The Great Hack form a great duo, in my opinion.
Does anyone know of a good app/plugin that removes recommendations / the home screen feed from YouTube? I find that can be an attention-sink.
So though it should help parents navigate this better for their kids sake, I'm not sure it will impact everyone as much as we think it might.
In addition, even though most people will be back on Instagram in no-time, the movie offers a new reference point and some common ground to talk about the undeniable consequences linked to social media, without being instantly labeled a freak or conspiracy nut. Most people need time to digest information like this, and might come around further down the road.
Related: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html (I totally agree with all of it)
They have never done anything good.
If I need something, I can search for it. If I don't need it, I don't want an ad to try to instill some desire in my heart.
If something is really useful, word-of-mouth is a good way to learn about it.
What would it be like to live in an ad-free society (that still promotes healthy mutually beneficial capitalism)? Is it even possible?
1. People need to be educated on the manipulative and detrimental effects of ads, which is difficult because
2. There is a concerted effort by advertising companies to keep people in the dark in order to keep milking more money out of them.
Hopefully it won't take a generational mental health epidemic (as smoking was to lung cancer) for us to regulate Big Tech. We're already seeing depression/anxiety/suicide rates skyrocket, teen/young adult quality of life dropping, people of all ages addicted to dopamine gambling systems, etc.
As for the cultural impact of the movie, I don't think it's going to be much. Cambridge Analytica had so much news coverage during its time (along with public hearings by lawmakers and documentaries about it) and still did nothing material to the bottom line of these companies. They've actually grown bigger and become a lot richer since then.
1. Most people just wouldn't care enough to give up these platforms. While I've been enraged for a long time about these platforms, the big gap here is that there is no good answer to the question, "what are the better alternatives?" Don't tell me that Mastodon and Mastodon clones can be replacements for Twitter, Facebook, Facebook groups, Facebook events, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. Where are the nice(r) mobile apps (not just some website designed for desktops) for any replacements?
2. Governments will not regulate these platforms in meaningful ways that create fundamental changes. Regulatory capture is what's looming around, where the current biggies make the rules and ensure that nobody else can beat them.
I will keep pushing people to switch to better platforms (even if they seem deficient in comparison), but I'm sadly not very optimistic about big changes in the next decade or so.
What I really like about the ActivityPub protocol (though it is not perfect), is the way it makes permissionless innovation a thing again. People can build tools and communities to their liking and at the same time be a part of a much larger ecosystem. One example is a rather fresh project based on this protocol, trying to recreate reddit/HN's functionality, only federated: https://dev.narwhal.city/ (https://git.sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide)
This is exactly the same impression I had after watching the movie. There was little new information in this movie for me, other than the interviews with leading developers that now has turned on their own creation. That was quite powerful to watch.
> As for the cultural impact of the movie, I don't think it's going to be much.
The cynical part of me agrees with you. The hopeful part of me is encouraged by the fact that this movie communicates rather technical and boring information in a very human way, and that it shows how algorithm manipulates you, not some random folks that was targeted by Cambridge Analytica. This was much more relatable and personal than during the news coverage on how Facebook and Twitter was (ab)used during the last election, and that gives me hope.
The discussion has largely been relevant to political animals, nerds and idealistic people so far, and this movie feels like the first real brake out of that sphere and into the popular culture.
This assumes we want something to replace these platforms. I for one want no social media. I admit I can't prove they are damaging no matter the implementation but I challenge anybody to prove the contrary.
The original promise (a more convenient+reliable way to contact infrequent acquaintances, plan events, read/report local events, and broadcast personal updates) is certainly something worth having.
In the absence of a strong mechanism to actively, effectively keep them out or kick them out (what would that be? It's not easy) social media will become like that unless that's a niche platform that almost nobody uses, so all the influencers and political ads don't care because they are somewhere else - but they will follow the eyeballs wherever they go.
Of course not. Because Mastodon is a federated microblogging service. As that it is a good alternative for Twitter. My Mastodon client has a better UX than twitter, no algorithmic feed, no ads, no trackers, no distracting recommendations, and - importantly - breathing a friendly, open and largely non-toxic culture.
Sure, it only has a tiny number of users in comparison to twitter (about 4 million), but there is no reason this can be many many more. And hosted on a federation of 1,000's of servers. Much less risk to be de-platformed from your favorite walled-garden for obscure reasons.
The Fediverse is only at the start of its evolution, and things are becoming exciting for us devs. Diverse applications, PeerTube, PixelFed, write.as, Lemmy, many more, all start to be integrated together. A gradual process, as the underlying standards mature and new ones (content addressing, object capabilities, datashards) are being developed. Besides federated ActivityPub there's work ongoing to extend to full p2p contexts.
I'd say you should have Developer FOMO. To miss out on opportunities to stand out, and be part of a path that could be part of the solution to our social dilemma :)
Federation does absolutely nothing for this. The risk is probably even higher given how small most of these instances are. Much more likely to run into an admin/moderator.
That may or may not be better because your admin may respond "Well because I think you're a jerk and disagree with your political views" but at least you can migrate to a new instance still instead of just being banned for all eternity.
But yes, I guess you can start over somewhere else while on big ones you're out forever. So in that sense I guess it is a tiny improvement. But if most of your followers were concentrated on server[s] that don't like you, you may not be able to reach them anymore.
And I think that's great.
I had over 10 thousand and had many interactions with people but wouldn't feel like bothering them on other platforms (unless it was of the same nature).
And the few people who bothered to contact me personally felt a little awkward too. I don't necessarily want to be talking to these people directly.
The magic is you just publish whatever you want and people can look at it. They can comment but there's no obligation to respond. Having actual conversations with that many people would be a huge chore. The whole thing isn't about having relationships with people at all but about spreading information. It could be about yourself in which case there would be some implicit one way relationship but that's just one use case.
People are thinking of others as consumers while expecting to be treated as a friend?
This seems extremely unlikely. If the server admin doesn't like you enough to ban you, I strongly doubt you're going to have many followers there.
In any case, however likely or unlikely it is in practice, the incentives here seem exactly right to me. If you want the benefits of being part of a community, you have to respect its norms in your interactions with others in the community. The possibility of losing connections with people in that community if you are forced to leave it is part of the deal.
Would this scale if a given instance somehow gained the level of adoption people seem to value in a Twitter or a Facebook? It seems to me that the major draw and reason people stay on those services is the fact that they can communicate with essentially everyone in one place.
Also, to follow the first question, given that a major (if not the only) draw for most users is the ability to communicate with everyone, wouldn't that result in relatively few (or one) instance gaining dominance over time? You want to be connected to all of your friends and family, of course. But then all of them also want to be able to read what Beyonce or Trump or Biden or Bill Gates is saying. Their barbers and bartenders want to post the latest specials to all of their current and potential clients. If you all have to agree on an instance/sub-network/server/etc to use, why would people choose anything but the one everyone else is on?
I guess it might make it easier to migrate to a better-run or better-supported instance and add a bit of healthy competition to keep things in line, but from what I've seen of Facebook and Twitter, the near impossibility of getting people to switch to another competing service en masse always overpowers any individual's complaints about the current state of affairs. Facebook sucks? Well, why not swap over to that new ServiceX? Well...sure it's nicer but nobody is on it!
I can be in my local community instance and follow people on say a major software instance and also an art oriented instance. It doesn't really matter who is on what instance. Connecting instances up is trivial - you join into the feeds generally.
Your instance more dictates your general discovery patterns and local moderation. In picking a local instance, I'm going to generally see discovery material related to my local area. If I joined an art instance, it would be art material, etc.
Generally well behaved instances (ie not spammy) shouldn't have an issue with getting federated, even if they're relatively small.
Natural re-centralization is an issue, with mastodon.technology and mastodon.social being by far the largest instances. This could devolve to a situation like you have with email / Gmail.
Another challenge is that Mastodon as early adopter of ActivityPub has made a number of required implementation choices to fill in the blanks of the spec. They support a bunch of custom properties in the message format, plus they use the Mastodon client API instead of ActivityPub client-to-server. Their dominance wrt running Mastodon instances means they have a big say in how Fediverse evolves.
Luckily the project team is open-minded, and mostly on the same page to others wrt fediverse innovation.
Also interesting that you brought up Gmail/email. I've thought for a while (admittedly as someone far more on the "user" side than the "developer" one) about how email is an example of how things might work better. For as much as Gmail and a few others have captured the vast majority of the average userbase for personal email, it's still reasonably easy to choose a different provider (and can even roll your own if you really thought it worthwhile).
Switching email providers doesn't stop me from emailing people who use Hotmail or Gmail (ignoring for a minute any issues of overzealous filtering of uncommon mail servers). The individual services can implement their various extra features like spam blocking, auto sorting, etc. but for the most part, the common protocol means that an email from me@me.server can still be sent to a list of addresses at gmail.com, aol.com, hotmail.com, etc. If I want to send a message to people on Facebook, I need an active "valid" Facebook account that can be tied to their social graph.
This whole thing, social media, derives from 2 types of issues: Errors/Flaws in natural thinking, and malignant hacking of brains.
The second will always arise when you have more than 100 people in a group, and said group has some non trivial impact on voting patterns.
At that point, this group is like a unprotected bank account - which will be hacked.
The normal response is to protect this account and to target hackers - but current social thought (excluding China) has huge issues when it comes to censoring speech - and especially political speech.
Add to it layers of additional complexity, (political parties can abuse the laws and say they are being unfairly censored), and the distance between this solution and the underlying human problems seems equidistant as that of current Social media and the same problems.
If you look like someone who I'd be likely to kick off my instance, I won't let you on in the first place. It's a private garden that I let my friends hang out in, not a public park where I have to let some asshole who thinks me and my friends should all be dead come in and rant and rave all they like.
"Oh I am totally being de-platformed! Free Speech! Filter Bubble!", you cry.
And then you discover that the Fediverse is split into multiple parts, and that there are instances that are delighted to let you say anything and everything you want as long as it is not explicitly illegal. You can even run one yourself if you have a bit of spare change! You can say anything you like on your own instance, you can follow anyone your heart desires. And anyone on another instance can follow you if they like. But no other instance is obligated to listen to you.
So deleting DNS solves this for the Internet?
Reddit USED to be relatively federated - dont like the subreddit mods and behavior, make your own sub, release hundreds of posts announcing it to users, and then users chose which sub they preferred.
Automod came along and white lists/black lists of words killed that system whole.
Now people send laborious messages on reddit to let people know of which new, new subversive subreddit has opened up. With all the credibility of a guy selling illicit goods on a street corner.
Not sure how you can prevent botting, and thence white lists/black lists of words.
I just tried searching for "seattle" and it just gives me a list of my own posts that match it and users with seattle in their name. In the past search seemed to work differently (not sure what changed), but when I searched for "seattle" then, I mostly got back a list of prostitutes who were hashtagging their posts with city names—–not exactly what I'm looking for.
Perhaps your client hasn't, but how do you know that others don't track you through their clients (or perhaps even bots)?
This doc is way less dramatic, but when the Snowden leaks happened I responded to people with, "what parts of this could I have told you about that you would have believed if you hadn't seen it in the news?" Reality is, most people are more afraid of being thought of as an outsider than any conceivable consequence that befalls their perceived in-group.
This was basically the reaction my girlfriend had after watching it.
I think that very nicely sums up the problem. Very few people are willing to socially isolate themselves this way. I've been working on an open-source self-hosted private blogging platform[1] that I have visions of being a facebook replacement, but the truth is very few people want to tell their friends: "follow me on this website I built with these separate login credentials". Reminds me of stories I read on here about middle school kids being ostracized for sending text messages without iMessage and showing up as a "green bubble"
[1] https://simpleblogs.org
That does seem to be one of the biggest hurdles stopping migrations from inferior platforms to superior ones. (The other main hurdle being network effects / the lack of interoperability).
It's like the saying "If you can get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.", i.e. "If we had a single sign-on system that worked across the whole of the web, users would be halfway towards all the best sites."
It has been for me. But I am very aware that the fediverse is far from ready to capture the large masses currently using all the regular social networks. And that's fine, if the fediverse were growing at the same rate as VC-funded, growth-hacked social media platforms, that would worry me greatly. It takes time to build tools and communities that is made by and for the users of said tools.
I find Mastodon to be a much better experience to use both on the web and on the apps available for my Android phone, than Twitter. I have tried to use Twitter again a few times the last years, but it's not the same anymore. I used to be an active Twitter user. I prefer being a part of my Norwegian mastodon instance, in addition to one of the larger English-speaking instances.
> Where are the nice(r) mobile apps (not just some website designed for desktops) for any replacements?
I use Tusky (https://tusky.app/), but there are several other really nice apps to choose from. On my laptop I use Tootle (https://github.com/bleakgrey/tootle).
I personally find that slightly demoralising, but as someone already pointed out, there are fediverse platforms that are inches away from being usable (Lemmy, Mobilizon, Zap, Epicyon).
Yeah. I liked it a lot as well, even though there was nothing new.
This documentary is like walking into a crack house and saying "Hey guys! I've got this great PowerPoint presentation on how bad crack is for you!"
Nice idea, I guess, but there's no reason at all I would think it has a chance of accomplishing anything.
These efforts appear, make a splash, and then ... dissolve. I wish it weren't so, but there are some extremely powerful social forces at work here. A TV show ain't going to do much.
If nothing else, this makes for a great explainer video. Find somebody who needs to know it and show it to them. The key problem is that 99.9% of folks even when they understand the problem can't fix it.
Having said that, knowing beats not-knowing. There is good here.
Andrew Keen has the right answer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRbI-Ui9vEI) but nobody likes it. We're still all stuck in the John Barlow trap, thinking that if we just tweaked things here and there all will be right.
I'm just teasing. HN survives on a strong culture, and a moderator who appears to be inhuman, or at least doesn't need the kind of sleep and bathroom breaks we associate with human beings.
Losing pseudonymity would be a high price to pay, for a bunch of reasons. Moderation, on the other hand, doesn't scale.
Perhaps that's a feature, not a bug. Maybe the scales moderation can't reach aren't scales we benefit from having.
People will weaponize that power vacuum and not everyone is an engineer that just wants to build something. There are people with nationalist interests, theocratic interests, religious interests, and profit interests all in the way of that and this will never change. It's why the internet was way better when it was just engineers and smart people. Also why America on paper looks awesome but in practice doesn't live up to the hype. It's why the freedom of thought Internet got us nothing more than the degeneration into fascist, theocratic, and communist trends. You may agree with the theory that anonymity, no government involvement of any kind at all, anarchist self organizing systems, etc outweighs the bad, but I don't. Not when the central argument for such thing is turned on it's head and totalitarianism is the "fight against the man" which in this case would be liberal democracy.
For cultural impact: Nope. It's gonna stay in people's mind few days. Then again back to normal.
It reminds me of when I was working at a grocery store in Texas (HEB) and they experimented with hanging the cow's corpse that was being butchered in plain view. I guess in an effort to look fresh.
Well, people complained about it. They said that it was gross, and the store went back to butchering before opening. Just looking at meat as pink saran-wrapped blobs that appear on shelves lets people ignore inconvenient truths. And I think we have this type of preference in all parts of our lives from social media to ignoring death itself.
Trace the chain of incentivizes further upstream, and what do we find? What animates the system? It’s advertising revenue, of course. So let’s tax the living hell out of advertising revenue.
Fundamentally decreasing the profitability of a market is a sure way to disincentivize profiteering interests in it.
The is the only way out of this problem is to accept that governments and regulators are not going to be able to fix this, and create a new one that is owned by the people. And as you see from the movie, the chances of us hitting singularity with an AI coupled to an optimization function that domesticates humans for profit, is highly likely. It's probably one of the greatest challenges of our generation, and the hardest part is that over time the people you need to change the system are so addicted to the crack that it gives them, that they won't want to.
I do think movies like this are extremely important on getting the message out though, and hope that it enacts some changes. Me and a few engineers are working on a solution at social.network, let me know if you are interested in helping out.
We (society) need to know these things and act according.
I'm very glad to see this reaching the mainstream. Like most people in the tech industry with some understanding of how these things work, I've been increasingly worried about the harms it's doing to myself, others and society at large. Once you've seen the damage it's doing, you can't unsee it. It drives me crazy that others can't see the same things.
However I think this film did a great job at conveying to non-tech people how the systems work and take advantage of them. I think of it a bit like those documentaries that expose the worst of the meat industry, where it's not uncommon for viewers to become vegetarians.
My optimistic outlook is that more and more people will wake up and turn their backs on these harmful things, and the era of Facebook etc will, thankfully, be over.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
I put a bit of effort into finding extensions like this, and Distraction Free Youtube, Inbox when Ready, Amazon Lite, etc this year and I've been shocked and how much less "sticky" I'm finding the internet. Willpower and personal responsibility are great, but better yet is not even having to try.
When I use my phone, the difference is absolutely incredible, since I can't bring this huge suite of extensions with me. and as a result I've been uninstalling apps gradually over time -- you can disable surprisingly core functionality on Android, including the web browser.
> Willpower and personal responsibility are great, but better yet is not even having to try.
I think as humans we overestimate just how much power we have over our minds. Especially up against these algorithms that have been trained and honed with billions of compute hours by thousands of engineers, we just have no chance.
I don’t have a problem with Facebook knowing what content I interact with and using that to serve me ads, or content that I want to spend time consuming. I don’t agree with the characterization of publishing or volunteering information (likes, posting photos, profile details) as private information. Facebook makes clear what information is public, what is shared to friends, etc. I think most people are relatively aware their interactions determine ad selection, as it is intuitive. It’s really not scary to me that Facebook knows which city I live in to target ads.
I don’t agree with the characterization of engineering apps to provide entertainment or social value as “manipulation” in the harmful sense. The fact that something is enjoyable to use or is used a lot isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and is not necessarily an addiction. To use another example, I would want game developers to “manipulate” me to enjoy playing a game. That’s the point. The fact that people spend lots of time on social media just demonstrates that they derive something from it, not that it’s addictive or harmful. Is social media a worthwhile use of your time? Maybe not. Is it an intrinsically harmful activity? No.
I think the Internet in general allows for the more rapid, selective spread of information, and that it lowers the cost of publishing. It follows that ideas can spread quickly, including conspiracy theories. I don’t agree that belief in pseudoscience, rumor, or superstition is anymore prevalent than it was before social media. I think it’s just more visible to everyone how many people do believe wacky ideas. Regardless, social media isn’t going to suddenly make me believe the moon landing was fake, so I don’t see it as being harmful.
In short, I don’t think ad targeting is harmful or violating my privacy. I don’t think social media is harmful but that passive consumption of media is not the best use of time, like video games or watching TV.
I was totally with you until this moment. This is like arguing that people with alcoholism get something out of drinking too much.
It’s one thing to say that you’re comfortable with the amount of information that’s collected about you and how it’s used, but how can you ignore the fact that these companies hired experts in psychology and paid millions to keep people using their apps, just like child psychologists were deployed to TV advertising in the 80s and 90s? These apps are absolutely addictive because they were explicitly and intentionally designed to be.
Spending hours in an infinite scroll wormhole does not automatically mean you’ve derived something important or worthwhile. It just means you were entertained enough by the possibility something might be good if you just keep scrolling, and that’s a problem for some.
I commonly hear from alcoholics that the problem isn’t that they want 1 drink, the problem is that they want 10 drinks. They lack the ability to moderate consumption and be able to consciously stop.
Social media struggles from this exact same problem. It’s so easy to just keep scrolling, to just keep seeing what’s further down the feed. Maybe I missed a picture that I would like, or something. This FOMO is intentionally designed and baked into the apps to keep people from leaving them.
You can choose to put down the book whenever you want to or need to, and maybe you don’t have a problem putting down social media either. But many, many people do. Just because you don’t feel psychologically pulled in doesn’t mean that it’s not a real addiction.
There’s an easy way to test this out on yourself. Commit to going a whole day without checking your favorite social media apps and add the parental control time limit to those apps. If you find yourself unconsciously whipping out your phone and checking social media, you’ll see the prompt to input your parental control code. If you’re anywhere near the statistical average human, you’re gonna find yourself mindlessly checking social media multiple times that day. That’s what I’m talking about.
Anything can become addictive, really, if we use ASAM's official definition: «People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.»
The difference between books and feed-scrolling is stark. Books are linear, static and finite, while your feed is ever-changing and adapting to your patterns of behavior – and practically infinite. These differences are huge when it comes to the potential for "continued used despite harmful consequences".
But.. that has nothing to do with the premise that reading books can be compared to social media.
>And if influncing behavior is such a sin why are you speaking
Because I'm on a message board whose accepted purpose is to read and share thoughtful (your comment excluded) ideas and views.
Same goes with fast food, TV shows etc. It's your responsibility to not over-consume anything; and if you have children, teach them to not do that as well. The problem is not with FB, Google etc. The problem (which is over-consumption of everything) is cultural. Blaming some specific corporations is easy but it won't lead to any positive solutions. We desperately need stoicism in the west.
Why stop people from laying out the traps? They're just trying to make a living, it's perfectly fine!
This should of course not replace taking personal responsibility, but humans are way to easy to influence / hack to leave it entirely to market forces. Some common ground and basic rules is at the very core of any healthy society or community.
Speed limits, traffic lights and bike lanes creates great conditions for a healthy marketplace. An absence of regulations benefits only the biggest and meanest, and usually ends up creating unsustainable systems that is crushed under it's own weight.
Any specific ones? I personally can't think of any at all that would work.
The irony is that such regulations would ultimately benefit the companies that are currently being criticized, making long term survival more likely. Regular people would be better of too, and I would not need to discuss movies like The Social Dilemma on HN.
A large part of the problem is that social media companies algorithmically serve content to serve their purposes, but are not liable for the consequences of algorithmically served content.
To me, using an algorithm to select what content to show a user is exactly the same thing newspapers do: editorializing. I don't understand why its treated any differently.
The entire mutually exclusive division between platform and publisher is a zombie propaganda lie that won't stay dead.
1. That, because you are unable to think of rules and regulations that would work, there must not be any.
2. That, in order for anyone to legitimately suggest that something might be worth attempting, they must already have a working solution.
Is it one of those two, or something else?
This rhetorical technique is called 'poisoning the well,' preemptively injecting doubt into whatever follows. The GP gave several examples of regulatory mechanisms that already work to some degree, and an argument for why, but you chose to ignore that completely for some reason.
That is, what are traffic lights and safety lanes for social networks? How do we enforce those for private products when generally they are things why apply to our public spaces? A social network is much more of a mall than a public park, so what restraints are we willing to make towards a private property, and what will actually work? I think those are very valid questions, and while the argument from blueterminal may have gotten there in a roundabout way (and in a way that some consider not in good faith), I they are well worth considering in detail.
To me it's blatantly obvious something needs to be done, I'm just not sure what that is, and am slightly afraid we'll implement a fix that if not as bad as the problem, is still much worse than it needs to be unless we consider it carefully.
I would personally reduce the private property privileges substantially since a social network by definition derives its value from the number and variety of people that use it. I'd like if FB were at least as searchable to its users as to advertisers, for example; arguably FB knows more about many of its users than they know about themselves.
That does make sense, and also fits with how private property can't entirely be viewed in isolation if it has negative externalities. I.e. You should be able to pollute the air immediately above your land as much as you want because that doesn't just stay on your land.
> I'd like if FB were at least as searchable to its users as to advertisers, for example; arguably FB knows more about many of its users than they know about themselves.
That might help in some small amount (and as long as people people actually reviewed info and requested removal, and that had to be honored, it would help), but I'm not sure the companies in question wouldn't just turn their neuroscience divisions to the task of making people want to allow the data for some reason.
To me this feels more like a drunk driving type situation, or age of consent, or ability to sign away your rights. We believe some things should be disallowed because the combined cost to society pf allowing it is much greater than the sum of the individual costs for disallowing it added up. But even if that can be sold as a good idea for this, I'm not sure what specific things we would do to block it that aren't nebulous and can be gamed. Maybe disallowing advertising, but that seems to be targeting one industry, and I suspect something else with a similar negative and the same incentives might take its place for this area.
What kind of regulations would you impose? Any specifics?
I would purpose that Google in particular be broken into many different companies. The fact that they own such a large part of mobile, browser, search, video, email, news aggregation, online office products is hugely problematic. I believe one of the issues that was not highlighted is the overall reach of these companies, they focus in on the mobile aspect, but there are huge swathes of data being collected via other means. Search in particular should not have a bias in the autocomplete - search should be agnostic, like Wikipedia. When I search it should show the same results as when you search. Next there should be a requirement that these companies provide access to a users data back to them, along with the analytical output that creates their digital avatar. There should be the ability to FULLY delete the data per a request. Next there should be a requirement that the sites provide ability to utilize their services with browser anonymity enabled. Much of the data leakage is harvested automatically from the mobile device or browser, the ability to slow the trickle of information should be required by law. Perhaps a requirement that a price that an advertiser paid for each ad should show up, and an opportunity for the user to opt-out and pay for the service instead at the same rates in truly anonymized fashion. More extreme options - restrictions on access based on age, we do this for cigarettes and alcohol, perhaps this should be applied to social media as well. Perhaps there should be a throttle on data gathering or hard limits placed on how much data can be pulled in and kept. Require maximum data retention periods on this data to make the models dumber. We have data retention periods set for health data - why not restrict it for social media.
They are the ones acting in bad faith and trying to extract resources from you via subversion.
How do you fight that? With a bigger group of people. Since they are so large, that means a nation or state (if you're a big one, as if you're small they probably won't care, that's how big they are).
If there's a pride of man-eating lions roaming about, you don't set out by yourself to fix the problem. That's just an imaginative attempt at suicide. You get a large group of people. That's why regulation is what we need, because that's what it means when you get a really large group of people to impose their will in the modern age.
Never mind that you will have been exposed to tens of thousands of hours of literal behaviour modification programming. You should somehow magically still have the personal, emotional, and cultural resources to override it. And if you don't - it's your fault.
But curiously it's not the fault of the corporations, because there is no equivalent requirement on them to control themselves, or to take corporate-personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
Of course, different people deal with these kinds of issues differently, but it's also important to recognize the vast differences between consuming too much alcohol vs consuming too much tv. Firstly, if you've spent any significant amount of time around a recovering alcoholic and discussed the issue openly with them, you realize pretty quickly that it's usually not just a raw craving. A lot of alcoholics drink in response to trauma of various kinds, and your backstory as an alcoholic plays a fairly significant role in how to seek the best recovery strategy. There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution there.
TV is much different for several reasons. First, there's not a universal societal acknowledgement that TV is addictive like alcohol. The US went through prohibition because alcoholism was rampant in society, TV hasn't disrupted society in the same way. That's not to say that TV isn't addictive or capable of being abused, it's simply that TV is much more passive in terms of how it's consumed, and it's higher order effects on people who consume too much. This is also true of social media.
Social media and TV don't usually force people between feeding their families or consuming endlessly the way that alcohol did in the 19th century, but it does encourage us to spend more time on autopilot and less time consciously thinking and being present.
I highly recommend David Foster Wallace's talks on entertainment addiction[0]. He predicted the genesis of a lot of these issues 20 years ago, and his commentary is still so relevant today, years after his death.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoAME7gPBaw
Cigarettes might be a more apt analogy IMHO. It's extraordinarily hard to quit, but at least we've come to a point where there is enormous social pressure to do so. And not just for health reasons: it's widely considered an unattractive habit.
Contrast that with the 50's where it was not only accepted by society but considered "glamorous". That's (sort of) where social media is today. Its image needs to go from fun and youthful to gross and harmful in the popular perception (barring that, the entire model needs to be re-invented).
Educating people on the long-term harms is the primary (perhaps only?) way forward at this point. This movie does that very well but it will be a long slog.
I'm not even sure this war can be won, but we must try.
That's a distinct question from "How would you try to reduce the prevalence of alcoholism in your country?".
When considering a particular individual, yes you need to get them medical and therapeutic help, some kind of life coaching/counseling program etc.
When considering the whole population, you do need to think about regulation of selling, advertising, public health campaigns for prevention etc.
Similar with sugary junk food. You can tax it at higher levels, ban advertising to children etc. Be strict on forbidding misleading claims. Perhaps pub highly visible "high sugar content" warnings on the product etc.
Yes, all this stuff is very un-American and too "socialist" I guess, which leaves you with the other option of being the most obese developed nation and having a substantial proportion of people be obese at a level of it becoming a legit disability. Which is fine for most people I guess, because it's not themselves, so who cares about other people anyway.
I definitely understand your argument of "leave it to the parents" but why add to their ever growing pile of worries? What if they don't know any better b/c of technical illiteracy? This issue of an unregulated media line has been seen and dealt with before yet we're hesitant in doing anything about it.
Fuck the parents - they should be adults and taking responsibility for their life's direction if they have kids.
While "unregulated media" may have become leading edge in LGBT presentation in the years since, it's also become leading edge in reactionary backlash, from Fox to internet media to the right-wing propaganda pushed by Sinclair Broadcasting to their local TV stations -- which in many markets they wouldn't have been able to own if local TV markets were still more tightly regulated.
I'm not suggesting regulation is a failsafe panacea by any stretch -- I'm just suggesting that deregulation isn't, either. There is probably a balance to be struck, and it is not at all clear to me that the balance we have now is correct.
On the other end of the contact Internet contact is a later one and although nothing concrete it seems very non-coincidental that generations where straight people could watch gay or lesbian porn, and fanfics being ubiquitous enough that Draco and Harry ships were well known even among people who never read a single one due to lack of interestm
The "balance" is a golden mean fallacy. Best illustrated by a rhetorical question that sounds like a death threat: Is there a balance to be struck between you being alive and unharmed and stone dead?
So, to answer that last rhetorical question with the way I'm intending "balance" to be used: I'm not at all opposed to regulations in food safety, wiring standards, water treatment, etc., that shift the balance of likely outcomes for me toward "alive and unharmed" and away from "stone dead." :)
That being said, I believe that social responsibility also has to play a role. If companies were simply interested in making a product appealing, they would look at how well it is received. When companies start employing psychology, there is a strong possibility that they are doing so to override people's judgment (thus their ability to take personal responsibility).
Totally agree. Movies like these or like "That Sugar Film" are extremely important.
> That being said, I believe that social responsibility also has to play a role. If companies were simply interested in making a product appealing, they would look at how well it is received. When companies start employing psychology, there is a strong possibility that they are doing so to override people's judgment (thus their ability to take personal responsibility).
They are going to inevitably do that, and that's what we should expect them to do. I don't think there are any solutions to that except building some new services / protocols.
The trouble is interoperability. Creating open social media platforms has been tried before, yet the uptake seems to be those with strong ideological views. You would pretty much have to compel new and existing social media networks to support the services/protocols in order to give people a viable option. I'm not sure that many people are ready for that type of legislation, and I'm not even sure it is a good thing. At least existing social media services have some incentive, may that be the company's reputation or the value of the data itself, to offer some degree of privacy protection.
Stoicism will fix things in the west? I assume you mean the USA, but as a person in the USA, I have to say that we are about as stoic as you can get. We lean on personal responsibility for every little thing.
"Oh, you went bankrupt from cancer. Why didn't you plan for that? Don't you know around 50% of folks get that?"
"Oh, you went to college for a useless degree? Why didn't you have someone in your life teach you that was a mistake? Why didn't you reject the counselors in public schools who encouraged you down that path?"
"Oh, you eat too much sugar? Why didn't you reject the industry sponsored studies that downplayed their health effects?"
"Oh, you got covid? Why didn't you stay at home? What do you mean you're an essential worker? Why didn't you take care of your health so you weren't predisposed to it?"
It's not stoicism the west needs, but a dire injection of empathy and community.
Or the long list of fucking stupid moral panics oriented around children from people trying to get reelected and everything "satanic" which ironically enough many children could have told them was just plain dumb. While empathy would be good emotions alone aren't enough as even "a desire to protect one's offspring" may be twisted horrifically. Community I am deeply skeptical of as a value in itself given how often it winds up something deeply toxic and stupid from acting like dumb herd animals. Sure internal investment would be good but given their record community itself can piss off.
We do have regulatory protections around food. We don't think it's pragmatic for everyone to run their own home lab to determine if there's poison in their food. It may also not be pragmatic to expect everyone to check sources or even be able to locate the truth of a source (I sure can't most of the time!).
Additionally, we also know that it is possible to make something addictive by spacing out dopamine hits in such a way that can be designed to cause a person to pursue this over other necessary duties. Pairing this with people who are more vulnerable to addiction through no factors they could've possibly controlled essentially takes advantage of people.
People who mal-consume social media contribute to cancel culture, spreading lies and propaganda, and providing the fuel for negative power-seeking behavior in political and business realms. These have very real consequences for those innocent parties that don't mal-consume social media.
Aligning with your libertarian pattern, you can say "Well it's up to the people who can control themselves to defend themselves from the people who can't", and then that's precisely why we would introduce laws/regulations limiting things.
I can't tell you how many times I hear my wife say "I need to get off Facebook" but never does. There's very much an addiction.
I use Facebook, but I've found that I spend nearly all my time in specific groups (for me that's motorcycle related groups) because it's a great source of help for "who wants to go riding" or "how do I fix this" or "can I borrow a tool". When it's very topic specific, social media can be really awesome.
What my wife complains about is "friends" that are posting about politics. She just wants to hear about their personal lives but wants them to shut the hell up about politics.
Content discovery is a difficult challenge but I think it is hard when incentives aren't aligned.
My wife says that too. Then while watching this, she said wasn't that interested, got bored, and decided to use Facebook and Instagram next to me instead. It was surreal and disturbing to watch it in that situation. :/
The fine grained control over who you can show ads to is a problem in itself and a tool ripe for exploitation by anyone who wants to nudge certain demographics in any direction they want, political or otherwise. We have seen several examples on how wrong this can go already.
> I don’t agree that belief in pseudoscience, rumor, or superstition is anymore prevalent than it was before social media.
I have seen up close and personal how a combination of Facebook and Youtube's algorithms have cleverly identified and massively amplified certain tendencies in people I'm close to. That is a personal, political and societal problem we should not ignore.
I think the point of the movie is to show that it is addictive and harmful and it is built that way intentionally. And it gets worse for younger generations.
>Regardless, social media isn’t going to suddenly make me believe the moon landing was fake, so I don’t see it as being harmful.
Maybe not the moon landing, but it can make you believe many other things with out you even noticing.
We've seen examples of this already, there's nothing new here.
Case and point. This is false. This is fiction. You believe what you want to believe, you choose to believe the lie that there is anything outside of you that can make you or another do this that or another. That there exist some such authority that can be responsible vs everybody standing up and taking their personal responsibility only to realize that their whole identity is based on more lies and that no one on this planet is in control, that control, safety, security, certainty are as illusory as saying farts stink. All narratives, all stories, all fiction, untruth, the truth cannot be spoken nor written. "Please! Write me out of the Story of the Cave of Plato!" Sorry there bud, You're the one that's gonna have to write yourself out of Plato's cave, out of Plato's Mind, then out your own, if you dare.
> There's nothing new here.
Nothing is not new. Nothing has been around for a very long time. Even before Time came around. You know the Time Being, The Implication Being, the Reason Being, the The State of Being, the Very Being, the Difference Being, the Latter Being, The World Being--They all sit around and laugh at you, they know they're knot RA-EL, yet 'ere thy arrrr(prepping for talk like a pirate day soon, excuse me), "making" them as real as social media can make you believe many other things without you even noticing. ;)
People think they're making a difference when they come here, but nothing is happening. They get the dopamine hit of some karma, and replies, but they're in their trench and the other guy is in the other trench and the battle lines aren't moving.
HN is a pretty clever tool. It honeypots entrepreneurs who can't develop so they don't compete with the guys who can develop. The former category, instead of competing¹, talks here about how they can't finish their side projects and how they can't get motivation to work, and other unrelated stuff that is just addictive entrepreneur or tech porn.
This streamlines the experience for doers, who avoid the manipulative trap that is HN, and are busy building product.
¹ Competition is bad. cf. Zero to One
Fascists rose before with radio and newspapers once and there wasn't any meaningful changes preventing the usage for such and yet they didn't reoccur indefinitely in the same nation.
Stop blaming the tech and start blaming your countrymen for being awful people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1. Bolesaro is a fascist and only terrible people would support him. If supporters of genocidal fascists are terrible people the who is? 2. He won the election. 3. A plurality of votes is needed to win the election.
QED the voting plurality are terrible people. I said nothing of other nations by baseline and thought it was abundantly clear that it was a lesson of experience that assuming that a large number of your voting countrymen aren't terrible people is sadly a mistake.
Maybe the problem lies in a supposedly chronically underfunded healthcare system, by a number of previous administrations? This would then reflect, in an electoral democracy, of the citizenry’s misplaced priorities.
Mike Bloomberg spent like some 100Mn+ on FB ADs but still couldn't convince even a 1% of voters in the primary.
Blaming FB has become like very strawman, and indirectly insiuates that voters are stupid and gullible, which is never ever the case. This technique was used by Labour in UK as well, but turns out people just didn't like Labour at all, and blaming FB just backfired.
Every crack pot on top harms the structure, until eventually One Guy does break the system.
Now if people want this outcome, its great. If you don;t want this outcome, its not.
I think this is a key point. In particular I think educated people (for want of a better term) are often dangerously out of touch with how many people (particularly internationally) don't share their worldview. I remember the first time having dinner with a family and finding out I was the only person at the table who believed in Darwinian evolution. I was shocked because these people weren't even particularly religious. Up to that point, except for strict religious people I don't think I'd even spoken to someone who didn't believe in evolution. Or at least, it never came up.
And this is the point really - what social media does do is increase social friction on these topics. I worked with a guy who didn't believe dinosaurs existed (also not religious). After the initial debates it was fairly easy to just let it rest since he was a nice guy and completely sane on all other topics. But if this had been on social media if I had seen anti-dinosaur posts on a regular basis that would probably have got to me eventually and I would have blocked him. Even though, in social terms it doesn't matter if he believes in dinosaurs or not.
The other thing it does is make people feel less embarrassed of holding particular viewpoints. Lots more people than you might think believe in witches and curses but (quite rightly) think they'll be ridiculed if they discuss this too openly. But if you're on a Facebook group where everyone believes in witchcraft it starts to feel like a legitimate opinion. And then someone else sees one of your pro-witch posts and suddenly there's a discussion about where all this new belief in witches came from. This kind of conflict drives a shitload of activity and makes everyone involved feel bad one way or another.
Yes, I can choose not to bring up that topic. And I choose to ignore it because I don't know what else to do. But, I can't completely let go of the idea that a person who doesn't believe in dinosaurs is voting on things like whether or not schools teach about dinosaurs or whether or not kids should be vaccinated or whether or not masks will cause co2 poisoning.
I don't know exactly where to draw the line. I don't know how to put this without people reading something into it that's not there but, I'm perfectly ok with someone having arguable reasons for holding an opinion different than mine but I'm not so okay with them having nonsense reasons.
To give an example, for some reason my my dad stopped believing in evolution in his 40s and will spout nonsense reasons like claiming eyes are impossible because it's too big a step which is logically false. You can easily name the steps. I'm not saying I require him to believe in evolution, I only want him to give valid reasons. A valid reason could be "because god tells me so and to ignore all other input" but valid reason is not "because evolution can't make eyes"
What you call above a wacky idea - is actually not that wacky. I may believe dinosaur X existed but not dinosaur Y. That’s perfectly ok. Much of this stuff is not “settled science”. I work in academia, and mostly its a milder version of VC vacuousness. You occasionally throw stuff out & see what sticks. It’s plausible, but not proven one way or other. So you publish something - the goal is mostly signaling and mindshare acquisition. If everyone waited until we knew forsure with 100% consensus, then nothing would get published. That’s why a majority of academic research can’t be replicated, but it is still published and it is still legit.
I guess once you know how the sausage is made, you lose the craving.
Sitting with a friend rehashing what we studied about skinnerian conditioning and a diablo like game we thought of a frankenstinian game which knew exactly when to hit you for a transaction to let you level up/get new item and so on. Years later and micro transaction enabled mobile games came out.
Adding simple psych based analysis to systems isn't hard, you would just pick it up from gaming/other industries and recreate it as a best practice.
People are interested in this, and are doing great amounts of research to figure out how to do it better.
Although these algorithms are quite sophisticated, there is no universally accepted heuristic for what is ideal for somebody to see. For example, let's say your friends have broad political leanings but you lean left. Should the algorithm only show you left leaning political posts because that's what you like, or should it optimize for you engaging with a broader variety of content but maybe increase your dissatisfaction. I think these are very difficult questions to answer.
Another issue is that people are very biased towards believing what is put in front of them. If your mind sees a pattern, it starts attributing truth to that pattern. This idea that you should just see all the facts and then "you decide" is a cop-out in my opinion -- your mind will have decided before you were ever able to apply rational thought to something.
Most people are used to seeing filtered information that has been vetted (newspapers, textbooks, teachers, experts, etc.), and the age of social media presents a problem insofar as this filter does not exist or exists in the court of public perception or algorithms. You can see evidence of this in that there are otherwise rational people who are being easily tricked into believing these whacky conspiracy theories and fake news, as you point out. I think that's a pretty big problem with serious societal repercussions.
They should give that control to the user. Users should have the ability to select how much diversity they want and then provide feedback later to the content for the AIs to iteratively understand better, just like in Google news, Youtube. In addition to that, a report analysing the user's engagement with content and topics, for the user to reflect upon.
You also just hand wave away the real psychological manipulation that is available when bad actors have enough information on you. “I won’t be convinced the moon landing was fake.” Sure, that’s likely true, but you aren’t special or immune from manipulation. With enough data ANYONE can be surgically targeted and manipulated.
And the worst part of all of it is that you can’t opt out. You can upload a photo that I am in. Facebook can scan and get a ton of demographic information about me. Then they can continue to trace and build out my “invisible” profile, all without me needing an account.
It’s absurd.
Doesn't any engaging TV show (Game of Thrones) does something similar, keep you engaged by twist and turns, experimenting/testing with new characters? A/B testing on users is perceived as experiments on lab rats in the docudrama.
And why is the ad-based business model a bad thing? If the platform target specific customers without any misleading information, it can really help both the customers and the advertisers. Seems like a win-win.
I feel absolutely necessary for these platforms to understand us better, by capturing various data points and then manipulate/filter our feeds. There is so much content published every second, a genuine AI can really come handy. If I feel that my feed is getting polarised and I am in an echo chamber, I can consciously subscribe to alternate and diverse opinions and people. In reality, "You are average of the 5 people you surround yourself with"
On a side note, Netflix itself is a competitor to Facebook (content), Google (Youtube) and also engineering resources. Netflix is too "competing for user's attention" with these tech giants. Netflix too in a way was getting you hooked to the documentary by playing around with tempo and music frequency, that triggers some engaging chemical reaction.
Of course, back then, they targeted with much less data. For comparisons from half a century ago to now, consider https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html .
Yes, Netflix doesn’t advertise directly to me, but many of the effects are still present. The way I think and behave can be changed by programming I watch on Netflix. Netflix uses a recommendation engine to keep me engaged. Netflix has implemented several design patterns to keep people engaged, such as auto loading the next episode.
It was specifically ironic for them to attack YouTube for kids while Netflix has a children’s offering, and most of the known downsides about screen time for children applies wether or not advertisements are present.
Plus your last paragraph I just don't agree with at all, ads for kids definitely has a huge impact, it was not just moral panic that made that regulated in the TV space many years ago. Youtube is so full of ads and undeclared (not that it matters to kids if its declared, and doubtful it matters much for adults either) product placement.
Weird how a supermarket selling sugary cookies would criticize a man giving away speedballs in the park.
It’s hardly an unbiased position, considering Netflix is bidding on attention just like TikTok or YouTube is
I'm also much more cognizant of the time lost by committing to another 30-60 minute episode vs. a few minutes for another YT video.
But it does seem like some sort of regulation might be required to give consumers some control over dark patterns (i.e. force them to include settings to turn things like auto-play off).
Netflix is clearly addictive, and there businesses model is based on people spending large amounts of time watching their programming and talking about it.
I will admit that I have binge-watched episodes when I should have been doing something else, but I also believe Netflix provides a beneficial role in my life.
Also, it saves Netflix money if I don't bindge watch everything - as long as I still value the subscription and plan to come back - it doesn't matter to them how much I watch.
In fact, this might convince me to purchase Youtube Premium just to signal that I value ad-free paid-for-content and I believe we can build a world without ads.
The back end minions were well done as an explanation.
It did well to be bipartisan. "Extreme centre" was clever. Their examples were sometimes political but it's hard to know how to have bipartisan real world examples, but they seemed to try.
I think it'll have a far reach and it will affect people, but there's no solution, what would you protest and where?
"Gasland", "Waco: The Rules of Engagement", "Blackfish", "What the Bleep Do We Know!?" all seemed to be actionable for instance. It's easy to buy guns, or go to a protest or ditch your meds.
For "The Social Dilemma" it's hard to change everyday life and it's hard to legislate algorithms where no one knows how they work.
2 examples.
1) The new suggested answers on search results. As an example search for "is salt bad for you". The top results might be correct though I've seen other searched that I believe aren't (different searches). Under that is this new "People Also Ask" section listing all kinds of questions, each with a single answer. AFAIK the answers are just whatever Google's algorithms decided are the most popular. Given there is one answer for each question (and the one answer to the original search at the top), it all comes across as authoritative answers. I think if you try various search terms you'll quickly find lots of examples you vehemently disagree with the answers google is presenting.
I don't know why the previous style of results felt better but something about the previous style (the style below the "People Also Ask" section came across as "here's semi random answers from unknown sources so be aware" where as to me at least, the new top answers above that all come across as authoritative and that scares the crap out of me.
2) Basically the same issue but if you search for "<some phrase> in <some language>" google will give you one answer and in this case they will often claim "Community Verified" yet they are often flat wrong. Often the phrase is ambiguous so there can be no "one true answer" without more context and yet google presents the results as "this is the one true answer because it's community verified". This basically proves my point for #1 above. That fact that google shows these questions with just one answer seems like pure thought manipulation.
I think I mostly want Google to help me find things. If I search for "windows" I'm 99% more likely to be looking for Microsoft Windows where as some carpenter or interior decorator is probably looking for glass windows.
This new issue is google claiming to tell me the right answer about any topic and it's really Google's AI claiming to know the answer on any topic. I admit it might be me. The old presentation of webpage hits suggested to me that google was not taking responsibility for the answers themselves, only for "search results". The new presentation is that Google is making it appear this are official answers. I know somewhere in the fine print Google will claim no responsibility but the presentation suggests they are.