We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video] | Hacker News Reader

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

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Without sounding pedantic, I think it's fair to say that the mass media put out a LOT of material into the public domain merely to acquire the largest market share of attention.

It is very rare that I read a story in a newspaper or hear one on television that isn't some form of salacious gossip or eye catching spectacle.

Though I haven't read most of it, Chris Hedges' book: Empire of Illusion, speaks to this with much greater acuity than I can.

I wish we could all just take a breath of fresh air (whoops, there is an allusion to another, though admittedly fairly neutral, piece of media) and remember that we are often much better off without the media dictating what we think should be important. I fear that the fractionism that George Washington cautioned us against in his farewell address is driving most of what we consume from the mass media.

I hesitate even to post this for fear of sounding too alarmist, and for the possible repercussions on myself from the powers that be in their never ending fight to be 'right', but I do think that this is a subject that is important enough to stand up and say "enough is enough". I know I sound paranoid, but as we become ever more connected, it is not as far fetched as it might seem that such things transpire. It is imperative that the power remain in the purview of the public and not those with access to what information money can buy, or cookies can acquire.

Thank you for your service :)

Paranoid? Just look at the last few years. Insane.

> I fear that the fractionism that George Washington cautioned us against in his farewell address is driving most of what we consume from the mass media.

If you have a significant part of people's attention, then people will give you campaign funds when running for office. So what do you do as a media company? Say everything you can to get people to talk about politics. You don't even need to sell advertising anymore once you can collect campaign contributions directly by selling airtime. It doesn't matter who runs for office, all that matters is that everybody hates them enough to run counter-campaigns, and that nobody wins who has to the power to restrict campaign spending.

All of this is why we had campaign spending limits in the first place.

That's why the two party system used in the US, while in the surface looks democratic, engenders quite the opposite result. The nature of US politics is that everything a party will support (like global warming) will be bashed or denied by the other. Republican call this, quite accurately, wedge issues. Very soon, the only way to do anything is to get more and more money to be able to win enough support to maintain power (for a limited amount of time). It is clear that such a political system will benefit the owners of capital and restrict the voices of everyone else. We are just looking at the disfunction of a two-party system unfolding before our own eyes.

Let me allay your concerns - 2pp as exercised by the USA doesn't look like democracy to anyone else. Even 'common' party politics, as seen in most other western societies, are mislabelled as democracies.

> I read a story in a newspaper or hear one on television that isn't some form of salacious gossip or eye catching spectacle.

I am not American and can't comment on all of the stations but I know PBS has neither of those. Likewise similar public broadcasters do tend to be more serious and moderate in their reporting: BBC (UK), Deutsche Welle (Germany), ABC/SBS (Australia) etc

Unfortunately in a competitive media landscape you need viewers. And humans are just wired to respond to gossip and spectacles.

> And humans are just wired to respond to gossip and spectacles.

A lot of the more worrying things happen as a result of our evolutionary background I think. We evolved to trust one another ("Was there really a lion over there, Bob?"), and that trust can easily be manipulated if you leave your ethics/morals at the door.

I think there should be laws/regulations against anything that manipulates people based on our evolutionary "upbringing".

Thanks for making my point for me.

Every one of your statements is in some way a defense of the current mass media structure. Even your counterexamples of public news sources maintain a sufficiently small enough market share as would be counted as noise in a t-test.

I don't think AI signed our death warrant, it just made for better plausible deniability. I think being able to measure effectiveness fairly concretely even on the micro level is what did it.

What if you couldn't run JavaScript code on a webpage, track every movement and send it to a server? What if you couldn't even tell if someone viewed your webpage? Would AI seem so scary then?

We're giving away too much for too little in return. Better ad tracking isn't worth losing almost all of our privacy on the most important and influential information platform of our time.

I remember a story in Wired back in the 99-00 time frame about two guys that were diamond retailers in Canada. They were enticed by venture capitalists to move to California to dotcom their business.

After a year or so they shut it down and went back to Canada to return to the business they'd built over generations. I forget all the details but there is one detail I remember. They owners were disenchanted with the whole affair and their take was the internet was nothing more than a massive direct marketing platform.

If you want to stop ad-related problems, change the incentives. Consider using AdNauseam (https://adnauseam.io/), which not only hides ads like a traditional adblocker, but also clicks them for you. If enough people use it, it lowers the value of an ad click, and thus lowers the incentive to optimize for them.

The title reminded me of a quote from an early Facebook employee [0] :

> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads [1]

There's the transcript of the video here btw: https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...

[0]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/

[1]: The quote itself is a reference to the first line of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl

> I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

I'd say since he or she worked at Facebook they already had a skewed idea about just what defines a "best mind" and what the goals of that best mind should be.

Maybe, but if I think of the five or so people I know who are truly brilliant two work at Google, a couple work in finance and one is getting a PhD in math. A lot of people would consider at least two of those fields not worthwhile for such talented people.

But to be honest, the whole "best minds" thing is sort of silly because the actual hard problems that we have to deal with aren't hard because smart people aren't working on them. They're hard because they touch on human issues and have a lot of tradeoffs and no solution that is satisfying to everyone.

And now it's being weaponized.

I remember thinking the same thing in gradschool. There was a lab partnered with Microsoft, and all their research was focused on ranking search results. That's it. I felt so bad for the grad students there, who had big dreams about changing the world, but instead were optimizing ways to get people to click search results.

Ranking search results is not the same as clicking ads - it's about organizing information.

> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads

I've worked in the industry for a few years now and worked with hundreds of data scientists and for me this is not true. They are smart, no doubt, but they are on par with programmers. Majority aren't doing pure research but just applying the knowledge of others to new problems.

The best minds for me are still those in universities doing pure research. And that hasn't changed.

A generation ago the best minds were working on ways if killing the maximum number of people at minimum cost. Maybe this is progress.

Who is "we"?

Because this is what really matters, what makes a difference: are you deliberately creating what makes people click to get money, without any consideration of consequences, or are you creating something beneficial for others - they find it beneficial and that's the reason they click? Unfortunately, most content creators, especially on YT, belong to the first category.

It's comical how hn always thinks they're above the lowly YouTube famous content. That type of content exists because people like it. When Jon doe gets off his 12 hour shift at the factory he's not interest in hn style content, he wants some mindless slapstick comedy.

When I’m done with a 10 hour day working on infrastructure and code, I have no interest in HN style content. I want mindless slapstick comedy, mostly because I have no mind left after 10 hours in the office.

sad truth...

My hope if we will adapt and improve own heuristics and filers to get better at information processing. It used to be if you saw someone credible looking on TV tell you something, you mostly filed it away as 'true'. We are learning that 'truth' isn't really a thing you are told. Someone can tell you something but they have motives and even with the best of intentions, they're conveying one perspective or approximation of a complex and chaotic reality. We learn to be suspicious of entertainment masquerading as news or to catch ourselves when we begin slipping into a pattern of mindless consumption. In some respects this is a good thing - we're becoming more cognizant and critical of our reality.

We need a better way to automate that filtering. I'm about as good as one can get at epistemological filtering and it consumes way too much of my mental effort. I'd like to just ignore the news and concentrate on artistic activities but that's irresponsible at this juncture.

It's even better: we're building massive surveillance so a few amoral people can pay poor people to pretend to be rich people clicking on ads. When that bubble implodes, the holders of the surveillance data will find worse ways to make money from it.

Can you elaborate? Are you referring to "advertising fraud", where these amoral people host ads and hire poor people to click them, getting a penny from the advertiser each time? And the poor people are incentivized to pretend to be rich people because ad impressions on a rich person's eyes are more valuable?

Or are you saying that the advertising networks themselves train their users to act like rich people because an ad network with rich people is more valuable to advertisers (although in this case, the networks aren't paying the poor people)?

The former: surveillance companies don't have much incentive to stamp out click-farms, even when they don't run them themselves. See e.g. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530961/the-hidden-world-o...

Certainly this is a waste of human potential. I can see that one could argue that the platforms may be acting unethically by not stomping these like farms out, or by misleading advertisers by including these unauthentic ad impressions in their reports, but how are the rich people operating these like farms acting immorally?

Side note: I'm not convinced that the people operating the like farms are wealthy by western standards. Having at one point been involved in the business side of paid captcha solving, this type of business attracts a lot of entrepreneurs with little experience who just want to make a quick buck.

> Side note: I'm not convinced that the people operating the like farms are wealthy by western standards.

I completely agree -- click farming is a way for second-world people to make a living using third-world labor. In the short term, this benefits the surveillance companies at the expense of their clients. In the medium to long term, it probably costs their investors and helps inflate another tech bubble. Seriously shady folks (think Experian, but completely unregulated, at best) will buy the data when it bursts.

Is the whole "Facebook records what you type, even if you don't hit post" real, or just an urban legend?

I've seen Facebook offer me to save a draft of the wall post so I can continue in case I switch devices, in that case of course it would store my draft server-side; but I feel like that reiterated claim is an urban legend.

Yep, they even released a study based on the data they collected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831574

Yeah we told you this would happen 15 years ago.

The following is a conversation between Sam Harris and Zeynep Tufekci, where they further explore the topic: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/persuasion-and-contro...

utopians building dystopia? more empty alarmist sedation.

bad ideas should be pushed to the front, so they can be viewed and scrutinized by all.

If Facebook gave a damn about any of this, they would stop selling ads and start charging users for their services. Simple as that. Your move Zuck.

Facebook is a publicly traded company, with a duty to its shareholders to m̶a̶x̶i̶m̶i̶z̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶f̶i̶t̶s̶serve their best interests. If Zuck decided to he probably would get thrown out.

He can't be thrown out. Facebook issues special classes of share so that Zuckerberg can never lose control of the company.

https://www.economist.com/news/business/21729813-multiple-cl...

What crap. First, Zuck owns the company. Second, you didn’t actually point out how multiple forms of income don’t serve shareholder interests.

People like ads because they get rich without having to make a product people will spend cash on. It’s so much easier to milk views on existing content rather than convince people to pay for, well, anything.

Zuck is a leech on capitalism’s neck.

Facebook has an ARPU of over $21 in the U.S. I'm sure a large amount of people would not spend this much.

Woah, no shit??

(One google later...)

Daaaaaamn. Makes sense, but seeing it called out is very striking.

Essentially the moment our society had food, housing and basic necessities guaranteed pretty much by default. The optimal way for people to make money is advertising. If we can automate it so that we increase clicks (a measure for demand) even artificially then of course that is what will be done until we discover that has no long term use.

If food and housing were guaranteed, there would be no homelessness and losing your job wouldn't be stressful. It's true that we can have more now but we still always have to worry about falling down to nothing again.

Let me clarify. I mean for all intents and purposes we don’t have a vast majority of the population working in industries that would be essential for life and well being but rather producing goods which are not really needed but wanted and thus need to be marketed for people to want them.

Mea culpa for a lack of clarity.

It’s great that you have food, housing and basic necessities, but that is not the “default” experience and we have a lot of work to do before it is.

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