Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

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As I said in another comment this is about consent.

It's not that the testing the conversion rates of button a versus button b is in and of itself immoral, it's that experimenting on people without their informed consent, under any circumstances, is. I'm intimately familiar with FBs platform as a developer and a user and its my intuition that 9/10 people aren't aware of the degree to which they are being experimented on via multivariate testing and I think a reasonable person would say they have a right to be informed of this.

Another note is that after years of using the platform I can tell that when non-technical people DO become aware of the fact that their experience using the application is sometimes fundamentally different from others because they're in a non-control bucket they generally react pretty negatively to the notion. Sure, some of this is the standard "users always hate every UI change no matter what it is" syndrome but I've noted a lot of "this is creepy and i wonder how much it's been happening before" which is, imo, a super legitimate response, and shouldn't be disregarded because its inconvenient for fb to get consent.

Consent only applies for things you wouldn't be allowed to do without consent in the first place. What if Walmart decided to have the greeters at half of their stores be rude to customers and compare sales numbers? Would that require advance consent? Clearly it wouldn't because there is no law against bad service. The fact that the click whores who call themselves journalists (who are also competitors of FB) call it "psychological experiments" to scare non-technical people is irrelevant.

"What if Walmart decided to have the greeters at half of their stores be rude to customers and compare sales numbers? Would that require advance consent? "

To me, this could definitely qualify as "psychological experiments" if it were intentional as you describe. Most likely a failed and useless experiment though, but that's due to the medium and the difficulty to implement correctly (how would you guarantee none of your greeters step out of line? What if you wanted to quickly evolve and modify the experiment?).

The fact is that it's much easier to run these sort of experiments on a web site than it is in meat space. It can also be much subtler and far more specific. It would be impossible to manipulate the variations in the real world as efficiently (or at all) like you can online.

The ability to actually do this stuff efficiently and at scale is pretty recent, and we ought to consider and deliberate over the consequences.

Feature experiments are also a thing that exists. I want to deploy a new widget, and need to check that it works, and hasn't done something unexpected that drives users away. Experiments are how you do it.

How about these: Are corner stores allowed to experiment with pricing? Are restaurants allowed to experiment with new menus? These are experiments involving humans. Are you just asking for poorly designed experiments?

What you're asking for is companies to launch once and never know if it worked. And indeed, software used to be like that, and it sucked...

> Feature experiments are also a thing that exists. I want to deploy a new widget, and need to check that it works, and hasn't done something unexpected that drives users away. Experiments are how you do it.

Experiments and experiments on live non-consenting users are two different things.

> How about these: Are corner stores allowed to experiment with pricing? Are restaurants allowed to experiment with new menus? These are experiments involving humans. Are you just asking for poorly designed experiments?

Let a corner store charge different people different prices and let me know how far you get. The also have to deal with consequences fro their experiments, if a customer sees the price of an item has double in an experiment they're unlikely to come back, there's an asymmetry issue and not coming back is often not an option you have in an environment with lock-in and network effects.

> What you're asking for is companies to launch once and never know if it worked. And indeed, software used to be like that, and it sucked...

Yes, developers had to think through design decisions, stick to well defined HIG's and use controlled test groups, truly a dark age.

> Let a corner store charge different people different prices and let me know how far you get.

Well, under your proposal they can’t know how far they’ll get.

> Yes, developers had to think through design decisions, stick to well defined HIG's and use controlled test groups

Well, did they? To a greater extent than today?

Explicit consent is already given for feature changes just by using the site. How does the act of gathering scientifically valid information on those features substantively change the dynamic such that extra consent is required? It doesn't seem to me that it does.

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