For other readers: this seems to be an internal google presentation made public to tell engineers to respect users' attention.
I guess as a user of the website it didn't respect my attention enough to make me want to click through the whole thing. I dropped out after twenty or so clicks, having read less and less stuff after a few slides.
Agreed. Ironically, the slideshow format is extremely 'low density', and frustrates my ability to quickly read what they have to say. I didn't get all the way through it either.
It's meant to be clicked through quickly in a live presentation, like a tv show, not the 'book page' style that most people have a harder time with absorbing. It's not a blog article.
Amen. For more on that, see Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint". It's no wonder Jeff Bezos insists on his subordinates bringing 2-3 page length essays, not slides, to decision meetings.
Regarding the first link, which (perhaps ironically) I've only skim-read: much of it seems to be attacking bad slideshows, rather than inherent problems with the format.
A slideshow isn't meant to be read in the absence of a speaker giving a presentation. It exists to support the speaker in their presentation. If the intent is to offer a resource which can act as a substitute for attending a presentation, a slideshow is an inappropriate choice.
A good lecture typically makes effective use of a slideshow. Lectures are mostly non-interactive, but this needs no apology, contrary to what the article seems to imply. Perhaps other kinds of presentations should be more interactive, but I don't see that non-interactivity is always a failing.
Similarly, a good slideshow can make effective use of bullet-points. Bullet-points don't always mean you're skipping over important detail, or that you've failed to properly structure the content.
> The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA
Right. A slideshow is not a substitute for a proper write-up, it's just a presentation aid.
In some contexts you might get away with not doing a formal write-up, but certainly not in a life-and-death context like the one mentioned in the article.
> For serious presentations, it will be useful to replace PowerPoint slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, images together.
I can see that might work well, but I can see this might degrade into just rewriting a technical paper to fit the flow of the presentation. It might make more sense to just say For more detail, see the formal paper. Certainly a slideshow is not a substitute for a proper paper, but even a handout will presumably lose some of what the full paper has to say. If the full information is already there in the paper, why not refer people to it?
Education, for around two thousand years, used to focus around training rhetorical excellence in all students. Relatively recently, it's become more affordable and practical than ever before to supplement rhetoric with written text.
Bullet points and visual aids are crutches that detract from the quality of a speech. However, our culture has this habit of sending adults completely unprepared into high pressure environments armed with what would have been seen as baby level waste-of-time education by any generation before the boomers.
PPTs are water wings for adults who would otherwise drown from the rational terror that they have about public speaking in a professional context. The problem is less related to the format and more related to the notion that it is kind to throw people into the deep end without training them how to swim. It's not a coincidence that most people are terrified of public speaking: it's hard, it's high stakes, and it requires a lot of practice to become comfortable with.
Weird, how does that work? Is the mobile browser simulating the click and then noticing the next image to be loaded? Maybe the js is simple enough to prove that it's safe to do so, but wow.
There isn't a fixed 500ms loading time. It advances slides by changing the background image of the central "pic" element. This is the JS to advance the slide:
The reason you see a flicker is because it takes time to load the next image, and until it loads you're going to see the black background. As you mentioned, the preloading images would solve this.
I resorted to holding the up-arrow key to trigger loading of a bunch of slides, then holding down-arrow to get back to where I was, and finally getting a smooth transition experience.
That was my reaction. Terrible UI with grainy graphics, took a long time to get to the point. Talk about wasting time! I gave up about 20 slides in too.
"Terrible UI", is that a concern for you ? this world should go to shit, that man put himself in a uncomfortable situation to give the world a preview.
>"A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users’ Attention."
>"by Tristan Harris."
>"I’m concerned about how we’re making the world more distracted. And my goal with this presentation is to create a movement at Google to create a new design ethic that aims to minimise distraction and I’d like to get your help."
That is so much better. Slide shows like this are an annoyingly distracting waste of people's time and attention!
Like a simple list of 10 items which is made into ten web pages that you have to click through individually - wasting your time and attention to trick you into viewing more advertising.
This is great and all of it true, but the needs of these companies are counter to the goals presented here.
Ad funded products need to steal time and attention to be profitable. Apple might be in a position to do something, but Facebook, Twitter, and Google depend on ad revenue. Even subscription companies like Netflix are hyper focused on engagement.
I was daydreaming yesterday about a national mandate to shut down social media on the first of every month. (Phone calls and texting are okay, but absolutely nothing else.) Something like that will never happen, but I think the world would collectively realize what this stuff is doing to us if we had to step away.
Yeah to be honest this feels like a Googler trying to deal with their guilty conscience by starting a "movement" that fundamentally cannot go anywhere because it runs entirely counter to the economic incentives that animate ad tech companies.
I agree with your overall point, but I believe that this could (and hopefully will) change without any top-down mandate. I think we just need a minority group of people who are unbreakable in their intolerance of ad-funded services, much like RMS and the first FOSS developers were intolerant of running any type of proprietary software.
It dawned on me with the whole WhatsApp thing of fucking around with the privacy policy: I didn't mind using it before, but that was the final nail in the coffin. I uninstalled it and I told my friends/family that whoever wanted to reach me could do with Matrix, phone or plain email. I also would gladly help set an account for them on my communick group plan. Of course not all of them did, but the ones who did realized that it was not the end of the world to use a new app and were glad to be able to say that they were not enslaved to whatever Facebook had to offer. Some of these friends even signed up for their own plan, so they could invite more people on their own, etc...
Ouch! Nothing changed and it got worse, dare I say. He mentions a point, I have had for years, and that is, that these 25-35 year old nerds from the Bay area define too much of out every day's culture.
Just look what happened to HTML: once a document system, manageable by everyone, now a more and more complex app system, dare I say WASM, etc.?
I kind of like it. No complex UI showing forward/back, how many slides deep you are, etc. Just the slides themselves.
It reminds me of "minimal" UIs in video games that remove health bars, stats, etc. so that the content is front and center. Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, etc.
It's pretty easy to just force the browser to preload images a few early, which would eliminate all of the variable, ~2-500ms delay between frames. This would increase the impact of this presentation.
function preload(n)
var preloader = $('<img style="display:none;" />');
preloader.attr("src","img/vrg_google_doc_final_vrs03-"+n+".jpg');
$('body').prepend(preloader);
}
Very nice document, speaks from my heart. But the document's format sucks! I do not even get an address in the addressbar in Vivaldi. I would love to download this as PDF or in any other presentation format, but it seems to be impossible, without going through the code.
This presentation is wonderful for its PR value "people here care" but naïve bordering on malicious in its approach and understanding of Google's business.
11 years ago PG called the iPad the "hip flask" of the internet (1) and it's 10x worse today than it was then.
The incentives of every major ad-supported tech platform are the same - maximize engagement to maximize profit.
Every dollar of profit, every promotion, every individual incentive is tied to that metric outside of some lip-service like this to keep HRs job manageable.
If you don't like it, quit and work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement.
Oh I agree that there are companies selling pickaxes and not doing business realm of Facebook and Google (if we are sticking to the subject of ads). However, hopefully anecdotally, just go take a look a metrics and sentiments from tech employees on Blind.
If Google is paying more than Twilio, there will be droves of people grinding to get in.
Not optimizing for profit is a very privileged position to be in.
Are people with poor backgrounds supposed to think that selling some ads is worse than having your family suffer? I can make a third as much and maybe do something better for society, but what happens then if the industry collapses?
I'm not coding killer drones. I'm working for an ad company.
At the dawn of my career I made myself two commitments:
1. Only projects/companies you enjoy
2. Only projects/companies where users are the customers
So far so good. It’s amazing the cool stuff you can build when engagement-at-all-cost is the opposite of your goal. When the goal is “Provide so much value users are beyond delighted to pay”.
B2B companies are an obvious example. Find expensive problem, solve it, add sales team. Iterate.
DDOG comes to mind as a recent very successful example. Salesforce as well. AWS falls into this category. As does Twilio. Huge huge space :)
Personally I like working on B2C SaaS. That path is harder.
B2C usually takes the shape of a freemium model. Strava is a good example here, as is Robinhood. Uber and Lyft are here also.
There’s also the indie/freelance market that sits between B2B and B2C – consumers who think of themselves as a business.
Examples here include ConvetKit, the Adobe suite, Quickbooks, Shopify, Teachable, etc. Again you’re charging users for value provided, based on the revenue they can generate using your platform.
I used to work for an EdTech company, that was nice. We had almost a gym membership model where we wanted you to use the app as little as possible to increase margins. Currently working with a health care startup and that’s taking off like a rocket.
> work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement.
Reddit is a YC company. Amplitude is a YC company. Segment. Mixpanel. Optimizely. The list goes on. All of these companies in some way benefit from maximizing "engagement". I wonder if PG has a smart phone now.
Your comments make no sense to me in relation to Google. Google of all companies seems to follow this rule of no distractions. which of their apps/services does anything to distract and waste your time? At least for me gmail, photos, docs, Android, maps, are all good stewards of not distracting me.
Compare to Twitter that's always trying to get me to follow people they want me to follow ans giving me no way to opt out of types of tweets I don't care about like "so-and-so liked:"
Same with Facebook. My feed is full of stuff I don't care about like "so-and-so commented:"
Instagram is the worst in that sometime in the last 12 months my feed switched from only posts by my friends to just th newest posts by my friends followed by Instagram shovelling popular crap at me in an attept to get me waste more time on the app
Other apps like Uber, Lyft send me notification ads I can't opt out of except to turn off all notifications at an OS level.
Dating apps like Tinder waste my time everyday sending me a notification to "Plese Use the app today". I can't turn that off and turning off notifications at an OS level effective makes the app useless.
The only Google property that might arguably be a distraction would be YouTube with it's ads but unlike all the other services YouTube actually provides a "pay for no ads" option which lots of HNers wish other services provided
AFAICT this presentation or at least its ideal has been upheld by Google
I don't really understand how YouTube distracts people, or maybe my viewing habits are just weird. I go to YouTube to watch exactly what I want to - usually either a livestream or a VOD from the handful of streamers that I follow - and then I leave. That's it.
Maybe this is easy for me because my watch history is already so tailored that all the videos YouTube throws at me are things I've already seen (and decided to watch/not watch).
If iPad is the hip flask, the smartphone is the needle and TikTok the heroin.
I sometimes wish I had gone without the internet the past 10 years. Emotionally I can no longer quite feel it due to many small increments of change, but intellectually I know the culture shock would be massive today.
So much activity is generated and has converged on so few platforms, most of it passive consumption. Communication is quick and fleeting, the feeds reign. The search engines full of subtle forms of (blog)spam I'm increasingly having trouble identifying. No distinction between off- and online anymore. (There's always exceptions)
The knowledge of who does what when is centralized in black box institutions with massive conflict of interest to reveal anything about it, so nobody outside really knows what's going on. All we can see are the shadows on the wall.
Business is failing to self-align with (what I and apparently this Googler think are) civic/enlightenment values and societies were hit by this like a truck out of nowhere and they're still playing catch-up, trying to make sense of it.
And meanwhile so many brains will be rewired.. We haven't seen the end of whatever this is yet.
BTW check out this comment saying this specific presentation was a leak, not a PR move: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764710 (doesn't preclude other posturing around this issue of course)
Being made to nibble little bites of text one at a time is a distraction. Images depicting clumsy or irrelevant metaphors of easily understood things are a distraction.
Watching "Social Dilemma" on Netflix (a movie made by Netflix) was quite an irony. Most people "waste" more time on Netflix than all other social platforms combined.
Yet, "Social Dilemma" covered/blamed every company except Netflix :)
This presentation is from 2013. It's a historical artifact that helped kick off the movement to fight distraction in its early days, not the state of the art thinking of the current day.
Obviously, a lot of the concerns it expresses are still very relevant.
What is the state of thinking currently? What's changed? The presentation was created eight years ago and leaked three years ago, but it has never appeared on HN before. What progress has been made?
Oh, a notification that tells me a distracting device has been distracting me for too long, and that I should take a break. That's effectively nothing: it hasn't challenged the attention model itself. It's like if a casino had scantily-clad women wandering the floor offering men at the slot machines a free drink. They aren't doing that to help the gentlemen, they are just adjusting the incentives.
Oh wow, that's from 8 years ago. And then it got leaked outside of Google 3 years ago it seems -- this article [1] provides a ton more context.
Just for context, and before people start accusing Google of hypocrisy or anything -- these slides never represented an official (or unofficial) Google position or anything. They're not PR. They're just a single employee's opinion in slideshow form, an opinion he was trying to build support for internally.
Whether you think it made any kind of impact is a fun thought question though.
I don't see how calling out the demographics of the designers making the decisions has anything to do with the larger implications of societal impact. There are terrible things done by people of every demographic to millions of people, as well as great things. It's also less and less true (tho probably more so in 2013 when this was created), yet the problems still exist because the incentives are there (the real issue).
Why shouldn't that be part of the discussion? The actions of a few people with a certain common worldview having an impact on billions of peoples and the effects of that worldview ought to be examined, what's the objection to that?
> the problems still exist because the incentives are there
Yes, and who determines the incentives and provides the rewards?
It’s worthwhile to note the impact that few people have, but I don’t see how calling out demographics has any impact on YouTube video recommendations as a design pattern. Are we to believe a team of elderly Pacific Islander females wouldn’t make such choices, when the high level business goal is to retain people’s attention for as long as possible?
The incentives and rewards are provided by the market in the form of capital returns on clicks and viewership… globally across all demographics.
> Are we to believe a team of elderly Pacific Islander females wouldn’t make such choices, when the high level business goal is to retain people’s attention for as long as possible?
The business goals were defined by the people in question. Your hypothetical group of Polynesian women might not even entertain that goal. The people who started Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon all had a common worldview which informed the goals they set. The attention economy model is just an expression of that.
> The incentives and rewards are provided by the market in the form of capital returns on clicks and viewership… globally across all demographics.
That particular formulation is part of the neoliberal economic consensus. It has nothing to do with how a group of people with no particular fealty to that world view would act.
I wish. I feel like this is the epitome of a specific type of slide-based presentation. This information could be covered in a single page of text, but ironically no one has the attention span to actually read... so instead we get low-density presentations with memes and cliches.
Make junk mail and spam e-mail illegal to start with.
Then start doing something about regulating advertising.
In an ideal world intrusive advertising would be banned and we'd have to go looking for ads to find them instead of them constantly demanding that we pay attention to them.
But that'd entirely blow up Google's whole business model.
> Make junk mail and spam e-mail illegal to start with.
CAN-SPAM[0] does exactly that for US businesses. Any email from a US business that is for advertisement or otherwise promotional (as distinct from transactional[1]) then it:
* Must not have false or misleading from/to/reply-to
* Must not have a deceptive subject
* Must be labeled an ad
* Must include a valid physical postal address
* Must have a clear and conspicuous[2] way to opt-out
* Must have a working opt-out process within 10 business days of the user opting-out
* Must follow all these rules, even if the business contracts out their email marketing
Obviously, fly-by-night businesses and scams aren't going to follow these rules, but by-and-large all legitimate businesses do because each individual email that violates this rule can incur a $40,000+ fine
The FTC has a site[3] for reporting fraud violations, and CAN-SPAM violations fall under the "something else" category in the generic fraud violation report form according to the FTC's FAQ[4]
I remember when the CAN-SPAM act was in Congress. All of us who were following the issue looked at it and said, "this just legitimizes spam, puts a nice picket fence around it, and make sure that any company that wants to spam you knows exactly where the boundaries are so they can do so with impunity". As we expected, it didn't reduce spam at all, but now we have and industry and entire companies dedicated to mass unsolicited email. But they aren't breaking any laws.
I rarely get any mail from legitimate companies that I'm not genuinely interested in, because if I ever end up on their list because I signed up or bought something, I just click the unsubscribe link in the email, and then I stop getting them.
If you get a bunch of mail you don't want, but don't click unaubscribe, you shouldn't be surprised when they keep aending you mail.
There are few exceptions where a legit business will continue to mail you after unsubscribing.
All that said, it did take a few months of diligently clicking unsubscribe on every promotional email I got to actually clean up my inbox, but since then it's been very smooth sailing.
CAN-SPAM is a law. If you violate it, you are penalized by the legal code. That's fulfills my definition of "illegal", but clearly not yours. Mind sharing your definition so we're on the same page?
Don't send any marketing e-mail to anyone. Everyone is opted-out immediately and permanently. End the right that businesses think they have to endlessly distract people.
Due to dark patterns, I'd prefer to have it all banned. If you give corporations any kind of loophole they have shown that they're bad actors and will exploit it.
CAN-SPAM does not make spam (unsolicited email) illegal, it simply sets parameters for what's allowed and not. That's why, back in the day, we called it the "yes companies CAN go ahead and SPAM everyone" law, playing on the double meaning of 'can'.
Junk e-mail is not an issue at all (at least in GMail, not sure about other providers): they go by default into "Promotions" folder (not visible by default), and it's not hard to go to that folder once a day to click "report spam" on those which are not important, and that's enough for train Google classifier to send them to spam next time.
Unfortunately then you and everyone you email are sucked into google's ecosystem. I've never had great success when self-hosting email to filter out the junk mail anywhere nearly as successful as google can.
Started great, but then veered off into attacking the identity of the purported perpetrators. Might be cool at a conference, but in the real world you're losing lots of people.
What specifically is the objection? The companies mentioned are the key players, the people that run them determined, and still influence, the product direction. Why shouldn't that be part of the discussion?
It's funny how almost all the comments are about technical aspects of the presentation or how he said it, and not what he said.
He's right, FWIW. How many times have I had to yell "Hel-LO!" at some bozo staring at his phone & not watching where he's walking?
However, how would you regulate this? If you created a metric of "attention-sucking" and set a legal limit on it, the web giants would immediately game it.
Everyone is doing it. At the pub after work. They take turns being right about politics, being right about sports, being right about their boss, being right about the state of society and Susan the receptionist. They're spot-on right about her.
And if they skip the pub, they take out their phones and go being right online on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Hacker News.
Assuming it's possible to fix this through government action, it'd probably be by enforcing education that teaches values and mindful decision-making. Right now I think what we get is a collective mindset of enduring education, enduring the workday, and then distracting ourselves into oblivion. The things that suck our attention are the best pastimes because we can do them morning to night and never stop to deal with how sucky life and being self-aware are!
I don't think you can regulate how engagement is turned into dollars. But that engagement is addictive, and we are weak to it. So can it really be solved?
Let's contrast two addictive and harmful phenomena in order to see what's controlled them and what hasn't:
1) Cigarette smoking: In the last 50 years, the % of adults who smoke has fallen dramatically. WIN.
2) Slot machines: I don't have revenue numbers, but I'd be surprised if the $$ figures have fallen by anything like smoking's. LOSS.
Internet addiction (and smartphone addiction) IS harmful. If you disagree with that, you can probably stop reading.
If you're still here, we can agree it would be very good to decrease addiction, even if it'll never disappear entirely. How?
For smartphone addiction, we can publish a few articles like OPs, or make fun of addicts, but it'll probably turn out like slot machines. The addicts don't care what we think of them.
For smoking: cigarettes were never actually outlawed -- adults can still buy them. So what worked and how could it be replicated?
1) Massive public pressure and education, so smoking became uncool. This has barely started on smartphone addiction, so bring it on.
2) Outlawing smoking in all public places. Covered below.
3) Restricting for youths. Also covered below.
4) Taxes: a pack of cigarettes is massively taxed.
5) Lawsuits, like the state attorneys general filed against the tobacco companies.
Now, for public places: it's possible that certain apps could be rated by some agency, public or private, as "addictive" or "distracting." The app makers would fight it like hell, but too bad. The literature on how they're addictive is pretty voluminous now.
Once we have a legal designation of Instagram or TikTok as "addictive" the way is open for indoor spots or schools to prohibit them, make them illegal to use while driving, or for the app makers to restrict them for children.
Would this work on its own? Pretty imperfectly, but the effect of social apps being rated "addictive" even if some are not rated yet, combined with the education program, would be large.
I haven't covered (4) and (5) yet, but this posting is already pretty long!
Aren't you using a somewhat circular definition? The trick is to differentiate smartphone usage from addiction, which is determined by whether it's harmful.
I don't think it's circular. There are articles (I can't point to them now, sorry) about the effect on the brain of intermittent rewards, and how that IS addiction.
Although certainly not identical to that of heroin, which is well-studied.
So no, I don't agree that "the trick is to differentiate smartphone usage from addiction." It's to define a (probably) new type of addiction.
Good question. "Sugar addiction" has some serious scientific attention [1].
If "gambling addiction" is a real thing (just search the web for it), then "social media addiction" can be, too. Casinos don't let kids under 18 gamble.
I just recently learned this, but in Taiwan it's a fineable offense to use your cellphone while walking on the street. It doesn't seem to be widely enforced, but I was very surprised that it's on the books at least.
282 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadI guess as a user of the website it didn't respect my attention enough to make me want to click through the whole thing. I dropped out after twenty or so clicks, having read less and less stuff after a few slides.
https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/...
https://mondaynote.com/bezos-a-ceo-who-can-write-2f368ee3659...
A slideshow isn't meant to be read in the absence of a speaker giving a presentation. It exists to support the speaker in their presentation. If the intent is to offer a resource which can act as a substitute for attending a presentation, a slideshow is an inappropriate choice.
A good lecture typically makes effective use of a slideshow. Lectures are mostly non-interactive, but this needs no apology, contrary to what the article seems to imply. Perhaps other kinds of presentations should be more interactive, but I don't see that non-interactivity is always a failing.
Similarly, a good slideshow can make effective use of bullet-points. Bullet-points don't always mean you're skipping over important detail, or that you've failed to properly structure the content.
> The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA
Right. A slideshow is not a substitute for a proper write-up, it's just a presentation aid.
In some contexts you might get away with not doing a formal write-up, but certainly not in a life-and-death context like the one mentioned in the article.
> For serious presentations, it will be useful to replace PowerPoint slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, images together.
I can see that might work well, but I can see this might degrade into just rewriting a technical paper to fit the flow of the presentation. It might make more sense to just say For more detail, see the formal paper. Certainly a slideshow is not a substitute for a proper paper, but even a handout will presumably lose some of what the full paper has to say. If the full information is already there in the paper, why not refer people to it?
Bullet points and visual aids are crutches that detract from the quality of a speech. However, our culture has this habit of sending adults completely unprepared into high pressure environments armed with what would have been seen as baby level waste-of-time education by any generation before the boomers.
PPTs are water wings for adults who would otherwise drown from the rational terror that they have about public speaking in a professional context. The problem is less related to the format and more related to the notion that it is kind to throw people into the deep end without training them how to swim. It's not a coincidence that most people are terrified of public speaking: it's hard, it's high stakes, and it requires a lot of practice to become comfortable with.
Ryzen 7 2700X, 32GB, 300/300 mbps connection.
https://digitalwellbeing.org/googles-internal-digital-wellbe...
>"A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users’ Attention."
>"by Tristan Harris."
>"I’m concerned about how we’re making the world more distracted. And my goal with this presentation is to create a movement at Google to create a new design ethic that aims to minimise distraction and I’d like to get your help."
Like a simple list of 10 items which is made into ten web pages that you have to click through individually - wasting your time and attention to trick you into viewing more advertising.
He's one of the stars of the Social Dilemma, right?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Harris
FYI the way to advance it on mobile is to click the slides. It took me a few seconds to figure that out.
Ad funded products need to steal time and attention to be profitable. Apple might be in a position to do something, but Facebook, Twitter, and Google depend on ad revenue. Even subscription companies like Netflix are hyper focused on engagement.
I was daydreaming yesterday about a national mandate to shut down social media on the first of every month. (Phone calls and texting are okay, but absolutely nothing else.) Something like that will never happen, but I think the world would collectively realize what this stuff is doing to us if we had to step away.
We're all addicted and distracted.
I guess it didn't work.
It dawned on me with the whole WhatsApp thing of fucking around with the privacy policy: I didn't mind using it before, but that was the final nail in the coffin. I uninstalled it and I told my friends/family that whoever wanted to reach me could do with Matrix, phone or plain email. I also would gladly help set an account for them on my communick group plan. Of course not all of them did, but the ones who did realized that it was not the end of the world to use a new app and were glad to be able to say that they were not enslaved to whatever Facebook had to offer. Some of these friends even signed up for their own plan, so they could invite more people on their own, etc...
Just look what happened to HTML: once a document system, manageable by everyone, now a more and more complex app system, dare I say WASM, etc.?
It reminds me of "minimal" UIs in video games that remove health bars, stats, etc. so that the content is front and center. Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, etc.
Almost cinematic.
Very easy to find since it only took 5 sec to load up the console and bam it is right there.
11 years ago PG called the iPad the "hip flask" of the internet (1) and it's 10x worse today than it was then.
The incentives of every major ad-supported tech platform are the same - maximize engagement to maximize profit.
Every dollar of profit, every promotion, every individual incentive is tied to that metric outside of some lip-service like this to keep HRs job manageable.
If you don't like it, quit and work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement.
Full stop.
(1) http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
Google is the ad company. Don't work for ad conpany.
Twilio, for example, doesn’t need engagement. Last I heard they were swimming in money.
If Google is paying more than Twilio, there will be droves of people grinding to get in.
How far are you not afraid to look?
Are people with poor backgrounds supposed to think that selling some ads is worse than having your family suffer? I can make a third as much and maybe do something better for society, but what happens then if the industry collapses?
I'm not coding killer drones. I'm working for an ad company.
The incentives just so happen to end up supporting features like the ones this post refers to.
1. Only projects/companies you enjoy
2. Only projects/companies where users are the customers
So far so good. It’s amazing the cool stuff you can build when engagement-at-all-cost is the opposite of your goal. When the goal is “Provide so much value users are beyond delighted to pay”.
Feels nice to be aligned
DDOG comes to mind as a recent very successful example. Salesforce as well. AWS falls into this category. As does Twilio. Huge huge space :)
Personally I like working on B2C SaaS. That path is harder.
B2C usually takes the shape of a freemium model. Strava is a good example here, as is Robinhood. Uber and Lyft are here also.
There’s also the indie/freelance market that sits between B2B and B2C – consumers who think of themselves as a business.
Examples here include ConvetKit, the Adobe suite, Quickbooks, Shopify, Teachable, etc. Again you’re charging users for value provided, based on the revenue they can generate using your platform.
I used to work for an EdTech company, that was nice. We had almost a gym membership model where we wanted you to use the app as little as possible to increase margins. Currently working with a health care startup and that’s taking off like a rocket.
...
> work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement.
Reddit is a YC company. Amplitude is a YC company. Segment. Mixpanel. Optimizely. The list goes on. All of these companies in some way benefit from maximizing "engagement". I wonder if PG has a smart phone now.
Compare to Twitter that's always trying to get me to follow people they want me to follow ans giving me no way to opt out of types of tweets I don't care about like "so-and-so liked:"
Same with Facebook. My feed is full of stuff I don't care about like "so-and-so commented:"
Instagram is the worst in that sometime in the last 12 months my feed switched from only posts by my friends to just th newest posts by my friends followed by Instagram shovelling popular crap at me in an attept to get me waste more time on the app
Other apps like Uber, Lyft send me notification ads I can't opt out of except to turn off all notifications at an OS level.
Dating apps like Tinder waste my time everyday sending me a notification to "Plese Use the app today". I can't turn that off and turning off notifications at an OS level effective makes the app useless.
The only Google property that might arguably be a distraction would be YouTube with it's ads but unlike all the other services YouTube actually provides a "pay for no ads" option which lots of HNers wish other services provided
AFAICT this presentation or at least its ideal has been upheld by Google
Maybe this is easy for me because my watch history is already so tailored that all the videos YouTube throws at me are things I've already seen (and decided to watch/not watch).
I sometimes wish I had gone without the internet the past 10 years. Emotionally I can no longer quite feel it due to many small increments of change, but intellectually I know the culture shock would be massive today.
So much activity is generated and has converged on so few platforms, most of it passive consumption. Communication is quick and fleeting, the feeds reign. The search engines full of subtle forms of (blog)spam I'm increasingly having trouble identifying. No distinction between off- and online anymore. (There's always exceptions)
The knowledge of who does what when is centralized in black box institutions with massive conflict of interest to reveal anything about it, so nobody outside really knows what's going on. All we can see are the shadows on the wall.
Business is failing to self-align with (what I and apparently this Googler think are) civic/enlightenment values and societies were hit by this like a truck out of nowhere and they're still playing catch-up, trying to make sense of it.
And meanwhile so many brains will be rewired.. We haven't seen the end of whatever this is yet.
BTW check out this comment saying this specific presentation was a leak, not a PR move: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764710 (doesn't preclude other posturing around this issue of course)
But perhaps the author wanted to drive the point home :-)
That's what I take away from "Google Confidential and Proprietary" in the bottom right.
Some more context over what this is and who wrote it would be immensely valuable.
Edit- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764579
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27671055
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27585602
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27535584
Yet, "Social Dilemma" covered/blamed every company except Netflix :)
Obviously, a lot of the concerns it expresses are still very relevant.
Just for context, and before people start accusing Google of hypocrisy or anything -- these slides never represented an official (or unofficial) Google position or anything. They're not PR. They're just a single employee's opinion in slideshow form, an opinion he was trying to build support for internally.
Whether you think it made any kind of impact is a fun thought question though.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/10/17333574/google-android-p...
> the problems still exist because the incentives are there
Yes, and who determines the incentives and provides the rewards?
The incentives and rewards are provided by the market in the form of capital returns on clicks and viewership… globally across all demographics.
The business goals were defined by the people in question. Your hypothetical group of Polynesian women might not even entertain that goal. The people who started Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon all had a common worldview which informed the goals they set. The attention economy model is just an expression of that.
> The incentives and rewards are provided by the market in the form of capital returns on clicks and viewership… globally across all demographics.
That particular formulation is part of the neoliberal economic consensus. It has nothing to do with how a group of people with no particular fealty to that world view would act.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Then start doing something about regulating advertising.
In an ideal world intrusive advertising would be banned and we'd have to go looking for ads to find them instead of them constantly demanding that we pay attention to them.
But that'd entirely blow up Google's whole business model.
CAN-SPAM[0] does exactly that for US businesses. Any email from a US business that is for advertisement or otherwise promotional (as distinct from transactional[1]) then it:
* Must not have false or misleading from/to/reply-to
* Must not have a deceptive subject
* Must be labeled an ad
* Must include a valid physical postal address
* Must have a clear and conspicuous[2] way to opt-out
* Must have a working opt-out process within 10 business days of the user opting-out
* Must follow all these rules, even if the business contracts out their email marketing
Obviously, fly-by-night businesses and scams aren't going to follow these rules, but by-and-large all legitimate businesses do because each individual email that violates this rule can incur a $40,000+ fine
The FTC has a site[3] for reporting fraud violations, and CAN-SPAM violations fall under the "something else" category in the generic fraud violation report form according to the FTC's FAQ[4]
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
[1] i.e. it's not to inform you a something happened in the app/site e.g. you have a notification or some action you initiated has completed
[2] in practice, a link with text "Unsubscribe" at the bottom of the email is sufficient.
[3] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
[4] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/faq/faq-search/spam
If you get a bunch of mail you don't want, but don't click unaubscribe, you shouldn't be surprised when they keep aending you mail.
There are few exceptions where a legit business will continue to mail you after unsubscribing.
All that said, it did take a few months of diligently clicking unsubscribe on every promotional email I got to actually clean up my inbox, but since then it's been very smooth sailing.
No, I said make it illegal, and I meant exactly that.
He's right, FWIW. How many times have I had to yell "Hel-LO!" at some bozo staring at his phone & not watching where he's walking?
However, how would you regulate this? If you created a metric of "attention-sucking" and set a legal limit on it, the web giants would immediately game it.
Maybe you have a useful idea on regulating attention-sucking? Please share.
And if they skip the pub, they take out their phones and go being right online on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Hacker News.
Assuming it's possible to fix this through government action, it'd probably be by enforcing education that teaches values and mindful decision-making. Right now I think what we get is a collective mindset of enduring education, enduring the workday, and then distracting ourselves into oblivion. The things that suck our attention are the best pastimes because we can do them morning to night and never stop to deal with how sucky life and being self-aware are!
I don't think you can regulate how engagement is turned into dollars. But that engagement is addictive, and we are weak to it. So can it really be solved?
1) Cigarette smoking: In the last 50 years, the % of adults who smoke has fallen dramatically. WIN.
2) Slot machines: I don't have revenue numbers, but I'd be surprised if the $$ figures have fallen by anything like smoking's. LOSS.
Internet addiction (and smartphone addiction) IS harmful. If you disagree with that, you can probably stop reading.
If you're still here, we can agree it would be very good to decrease addiction, even if it'll never disappear entirely. How?
For smartphone addiction, we can publish a few articles like OPs, or make fun of addicts, but it'll probably turn out like slot machines. The addicts don't care what we think of them.
For smoking: cigarettes were never actually outlawed -- adults can still buy them. So what worked and how could it be replicated?
1) Massive public pressure and education, so smoking became uncool. This has barely started on smartphone addiction, so bring it on.
2) Outlawing smoking in all public places. Covered below.
3) Restricting for youths. Also covered below.
4) Taxes: a pack of cigarettes is massively taxed.
5) Lawsuits, like the state attorneys general filed against the tobacco companies.
Now, for public places: it's possible that certain apps could be rated by some agency, public or private, as "addictive" or "distracting." The app makers would fight it like hell, but too bad. The literature on how they're addictive is pretty voluminous now.
Once we have a legal designation of Instagram or TikTok as "addictive" the way is open for indoor spots or schools to prohibit them, make them illegal to use while driving, or for the app makers to restrict them for children.
Would this work on its own? Pretty imperfectly, but the effect of social apps being rated "addictive" even if some are not rated yet, combined with the education program, would be large.
I haven't covered (4) and (5) yet, but this posting is already pretty long!
Although certainly not identical to that of heroin, which is well-studied.
So no, I don't agree that "the trick is to differentiate smartphone usage from addiction." It's to define a (probably) new type of addiction.
If "gambling addiction" is a real thing (just search the web for it), then "social media addiction" can be, too. Casinos don't let kids under 18 gamble.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28835408/