The Social Dilemma
thesocialdilemma.com
thesocialdilemma.com
He refined it to, (rough quote), "Changes to your behavior and actions are the product"
That distinction made the insidiousness much more clear than the former statement.
Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services.
There are plenty of paid services that are riddled with ads as well. Movies, Cable TV, airline flights, etc. The fact is that people and organizations are _constantly_ trying to influence your behavior. It's not obvious that's only a bad thing.
At least in Portuguese and Spanish, both advertisement and propaganda are simply "propaganda".
I once read an original edition of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) with its title in a jaunty typeface on the cover, before the word had a negative connotation.
Pic of its cover here: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/edward--bernays/p...
"It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
So all it really does is sell the promise.
They’re services, and, even more so, should be a service bound by a medical code of ethics, which, since the healing professions go way back, imho makes therapy and counseling distinct from many other services.
:)
Even with my parents, we always arrange a time via messaging first.
I don't have social media, barely text (my plan has 100 texts per month), and hardly talk by phone (100 minutes per month). However, I have multiple friends and family that can claim that I'm the only one to have ever come to visit them at their house. This is either so strange or such a positive impact on them that I somehow hear it from other friends/family even though I'm surrounded by ether. The moral of the story, the ether isn't as thick as you think and the vast majority of people's "social interactions" are so shallow that showing up to a friend's door to drop off a bottle of wine will be a highlight of their year.
Probably not uncommon as Whatsapp was at first widely used outside the US or for folks living in the US to be in touch with family abroad.
Very often one person is not able to change an entire family dynamic. Sure, they could not use WhatsApp, but then they’d rarely talk with their family!
Point being, we don’t know the poster’s specific circumstances enough to offer any sort of informed critique.
That said, the question of generalizing from the poster’s experience is, imho, a valid one.
If we want to get all analytical about it, that’s my two cents ;).
Which is to say, my opinion is barely worth the paper it’s written on.
And since this is all on a screen ... ;)
These days, in many worlds countries, especially in Asia. In those places, WhatsApp is also a primary venue for business communication and vital human interaction like setting up job interviews, doctors' appointments and pretty much any other communication with other humans.
Sorry, but your point comes across as horribly oblivious - criticizing usage of WhatsApp is one thing, but acting like it hasn't become a critical part of society structure just shows a major failure of looking outside your bubble.
I live pretty well without any personal social media. I call friends and family often, while being mindful of their time. Voice calls are wonderful.
I use email and messages as well, but the voice call is the big component. Generation-wise, it is from 7yrs old (nieces) to 90yrs old (no surprise there; oldies love to chat).
This is a very real behavioral mechanism which was essential to human survival as early as the paleolithicum and the emergence of the first hominid species. Not belonging to a tribe meant being exposed to hardships that you might not survive.
Feeling lonely is part of that mechanism. That's your subconscious kicking you into high gear and go seek companionship in order to ensure your chances to survive as an individual.
Kurz Gesagt explains this dynamic in more detail. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Xv_g3g-mA
Modern technology, industrialisation and social advancements in healthcare, politics, law enforcement and agriculture have created circumstances in which you don't need to physically belong to a tribe 24/7 in order to survive. You can perfectly live alone and have your basic needs covered.
However, that drive for social connection is still there. That's hard wired into us. And that's what social media companies are exploiting.
Fear of missing out is exactly that. You don't want to be "out of the loop", you don't want to miss out on what's going on, you don't want to find yourself "outside" of a group. Think about how it was when you were in school, and you found out your friends had a get-together over the weekend and you weren't invited: it totally sucked. Well, that's basically that primitive part of your brain kicking into high gear, warning you that your survival may be at stake.
12 years ago, few people were on social media. And the vast majority of your friends contacted each other via cell phones, e-mail or MSN and such. You were less likely to miss out because you knew that the available channels didn't cater to 24/7 real time action with video and audio, plugging you in the middle of the action remotely.
Today, that's totally different. Modern communication is literally that: 24/7 high intense social contacts with video/photo/audio fragmented across dozens of group chats, group calls,.. and dozens of channels to keep track off.
Net result? Studies indicate an increased prevalence in anxiety, depression, loneliness, suicide, self harm and so on. There's a clear correlation between the two. As is shown in the documentary.
The trade off of weaning off from all of that, for many, is having to battle with and against those engrained behavioural changes that make one grasp for their smartphone every other minute. And that's, basically, the very definition of addiction.
Moreover, unlike other addictions, there's a very real chance that if you don't look at your smartphone for a day that, yes, you will miss out on information the in-crowd - peers at school, friends, co-workers with watercooler talk,... - deems important to know.
But if so, being enlightened about the failures and limits of human psychology certainly would constitute a tribe of its own, no? Because it seems to be en vogue to have simple explanations. FOMO is more connected to the fear of the unknown and fear of loss in my opinion. A "tribe" would shield you of course, but it is mostly a sign of other needs not being met. Advertisers use it to their advantage for decades. Some appeal to their audiences to be the source of other peoples FOMOs. "think different" instead of "stay connected".
There are less suicides than in the 90s. That there is a suicide epidemic is a media scare. The main factor reducing the numbers seem to be economic perspectives, not some facebook group where taste was made illegal.
A much worse effect is that social media seems to push questionable characters in focus. Naive viewers and exploitative "influencers" can do quite some damage.
Well, kurzgesagt back their statements with references to academic research:
https://sites.google.com/view/sourcesloneliness/startseite
They also vet their videos with experts and are transparent in their methodology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtUAAXe_0VI&vl=ar
> Yes, there are factors or mechanisms that drive your desire for belonging, but it is a pretty unconvincing observation. It doesn't have to be tribalism to prefer being around people you trust.
Why would you assume that I didn't consider other explanations?
> FOMO is more connected to the fear of the unknown and fear of loss in my opinion.
In what way wouldn't "the fear of the unkown" or "the fear of loss" be less connected with the fear of likely missing crucial parts of the conversations your social network is having?
e.g. you might miss out hearing about a party, where someone makes an personal announcement (e.g. getting married, moving to another country,...). So, now your friends have a shared experience of having heard the news first hand that you aren't part of.
> A "tribe" would shield you of course, but it is mostly a sign of other needs not being met. Advertisers use it to their advantage for decades. Some appeal to their audiences to be the source of other peoples FOMOs. "think different" instead of "stay connected".
What "other needs" are these?
> There are less suicides than in the 90s.
How is the number of suicides 30 years ago relevant to a dynamic observed over the course of the past 15 years?
> That there is a suicide epidemic is a media scare.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db362.htm [2] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml [3] https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/
The exaggerating wording you're using here hints towards minimizing the issue, rather then a willingness on your part to acknowledge that social media usage and mental health are a public health concern.
> The main factor reducing the numbers seem to be economic perspectives, not some facebook group where taste was made illegal.
... but also seems to correlate with social media usage. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Look, we both know that establishing definitive observations on something as sensitive as suicide is hard. It's widely understood that suicide is underreported, and in many cases it's quite hard to establish exactly what compelled individuals to commit suicide.
The documentary equally stated that there's a correlation between increased social media usage after 2007 and an increase in suicide rate. But that's as far as it goes. In and of itself, I think that's compelling enough to warrant paying attention to.
Finally, this is touching upon a serious mental health issue, there was absolutely no need to make your comment sound as dismissive as it did.
https://ourworldindata.org/suicide
I didn't say social media usage isn't a public health concern, there are many things that drive addiction. Social media use is convenient and it doesn't expose you to risks. Perfect for any form of escapism.
I doubt suicide is underreported. There are certainly cases misattributed, cases of attempts are excluded perhaps, but concluding something on that assumption seems premature.
I still remain convinced that a lack of perspectives in life is probably a main cause. Maybe social media paints a wrong or a more realistic light, but it is probably not the source of increased suicide.
I specifically criticized the explanation about tribalism. It seems wrong and isn't underlined anywhere.
> In what way wouldn't "the fear of the unkown" or "the fear of loss" [...]
People have the fear that people are bonding while they are absent. Mostly the same sources that are the foundations of envy.
> What "other needs" are these?
Fulfilling companionship or friendship for example.
I think this is a case where the conclusion "social media sucks" was determined before the analysis of issues.
> How is the number of suicides 30 years ago relevant to a dynamic observed over the course of the past 15 years?
To have a reference. Especially if we only have social media for 15 years, it is self evident to lock back a few more years.
This is not a credible source for suicide data.
> I doubt suicide is underreported. There are certainly cases misattributed, cases of attempts are excluded perhaps, but concluding something on that assumption seems premature.
There are lots of complicated reasons why suicide may be under-reported.
In the US the work to get standard definitions, in the NVDRS, to be used across the country is relatively recent. This document is from 2011.
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/Self-Directed-Vio...
> Despite the large volume of data on certain types of SDV, the utility and reproducibility of the resulting information is sometimes questionable. Mortality data are problematic for several reasons: geographical differences in the definition of suicide and how equivocal cases are classified; jurisdictional differences in the requirements for the office of coroner or medical examiner affecting the standard of proof required to classify a death as a suicide; and differences in terms of the extent to which potential suicides are investigated to accurately determine cause of death.18 The quality of the data on nonfatal suicidal behavior is even more problematic than that of suicides. The concerns about discrepancies in nomenclature19-23 and accurate reporting11,24 apply here even more than with suicides. Also, except for rare exceptions there is neither systematic nor mandatory reporting of nonfatal suicidal behavior in the United States at the state or local level, nor is there routine systematic collection of non-suicidal intentional self harm data.
> These “system” problems with data collection have been discussed for more than a generation. Over 35 years ago, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) convened a conference on suicide prevention at which a committee was charged with recommending a system for defining and communicating about suicidal behaviors.25 More recently, two scientific reviews that addressed the state of suicide-related research also remarked on the need for consistent definitions. The Institute of Medicine issued a report entitled Reducing Suicide: A National Imperative.4 This report states ”Research on suicide is plagued by many methodological problems... definitions lack uniformity,...reporting of suicide is inaccurate.” “There is a need for researchers and clinicians in suicidology to use a common language or set of terms in describing suicidal phenomena.” The World Health Organization issued the World Report on Violence and Health.2 In the chapter addressing self-directed violence the authors note “Data on suicide and attempted suicide should be valid and up to date. There should be a set of uniform criteria and definitions and – once established – these should be consistently applied and continually reviewed.”
It's difficult to compare suicide over time because the method of counting changes, sometimes drastically.
- This is human to human communication, not an optimised algorithm.
- People here are not sending you 10 comments and looking at the one which you engaged the most time, because they don't have the metrics. Social media knows how many seconds you looked at a post and classify it with AI, they can make a profile of your current sentiment.
- The poster probably didn't analyse your whole past discussion history with algorithms before answering in a way that would be best calibrated for your way of thinking.
Interactions, discussions between people, even conflictual (not violent), are fine. Communication is fine. Mass communication is mostly fine (traditional advertising, broadcast...). What's not fine is manipulating people by mass-communicating while adjusting the message given metadata that those people are not even aware about.
I think for Facebook to be more effective than humans at influencing behavior, they have to implement theory of mind, which might require AGI.
That's the scary thing. Facebook is good enough at influencing someone, but they do it for half the population of the world simultaneously.
As a person, you can get better at convincing people of course, and masses of people even - humanity has gone through that with ups and downs. Now we have a system that's working totally differently. From example, I remind reading that many conspiracists build distance with their friends and family as they close themselves to in-person discussion or any argumentation not fitting their views.
- I can suggest you're biased
- I can try to change the subject
- I can decide you're a bad person for holding the "wrong" views
- I can directly argue against your point
- I can attack the structure of your argument
- I can make an emotional appeal regarding why I must hold my point of view
- etc ....
In these and other ways, I can push back and modify how much I'm influenced by a one-to-one argument. I won't always be successful, for sure. But sometimes as well the persuasion go will go the other way, and I will influence you.
This is not true on social media because another power is dictating which one-to-one conversations may happen in the first place, and then loading the deck with idea before those one-to-one conversations even happen. Further, social media changes the scale of communications. If we worked together, and saw each other regularly, we could mediate each other's influence, place boundaries, etc. With social media, there is always a crowd of strangers: too many people converse with, know, and set boundaries with.
There are obviously other distinctions between one-to-one conversation and social media, but I particularly wanted to talk about the key differences here: lack of real back and forth, and scale.
Also, what about books? Ideas? Film.
IMHO people are too complicated, and situations too situation specific to be able to generalize about how someone is influenced.
Sometimes people ignore the advice of those close to them, sometimes they don't, and, it probably depends on the subject being discussed, the particular relationship between the people, the state of mind of the person in question, and so on.
Put another way: if your friend came to you and started manipulating and pressuring you the way ads do, for the reason ads do, they'd very quickly stop being your friend.
Apple trying to sell me an iPhone claiming it's more secure and more privacy respecting might be true so if buy one it's a win-win if (a) it is true and (b) I actually wanted those features.
> Advertising beyond the point of informing that a product exists is exploitative
Okay, so, Apple showing silhouettes dancing was exploitative? The should only say "we made a device, it plays music, it's this size, the batteries last this long"?
Was the 1984 ad exploitive? I'm just trying to think of famous ads. Is the Ikea add "Time To Leave Home" ad exploitive?
I guess I don't see them as win-lose.
c) you need a phone in the first palce d) you need a USD1200 phone in the first place
Sure, it's a win-win if the features match your needs. And a win-win would be Apple making the claim, listing the privacy features of their new iPhone, along with honest arguments why these features protect your privacy better than competition. I absolutely do not mind things like that - it's the socially-useful purpose of advertising: informing people about products and their features, so that individuals can pick the best solution to their problems.
It's only when advertising tries to override individual's agency when I consider them bad. And note that purposefully and covertly overriding someone's decision making capability is a malicious behavior, and very rarely justifiable.
> The should only say "we made a device, it plays music, it's this size, the batteries last this long"?
Would it be bad if they did only that?
> Was the 1984 ad exploitive?
Of course. While it's nothing compared to today's ads, it still tried to sell you a computer by tricking your mind with completely irrelevant references to 1984 and the feelings it evoked. It tried to override your capability for thinking, by sneaking in an emotional payload.
> Is the Ikea add "Time To Leave Home" ad exploitive?
It's a fun comedy sketch, but again: it tries to use an emotional payload to get you into the market for furniture and think of IKEA in particular (and make it a first association in your mind, over competitors).
Look at it from this point of view: imagine you live in a small town, and there are two small-time shops building and selling farming widgets. Would you want them to spend all their energy and innovation capacity one-upping each other in comedy stand-ups on the storefront, or would you prefer them to focus on designing better farming widgets?
Context and details matter. As does intent. Saying that all discussion is really "influencing", isn't useful, imho.
In the context of our discussion about Facebook, IMHO these are the defining qualities specific to Facebook:
1. Massive, global scale and scope - behavior via Facebook can influence culture, politics, etc.
2. An algorithm driving the bus, as opposed to people (albeit people choose what the algorithm does or doesn't do).
3. Facebook's primary motivation in influencing is to profit via increased user engagement - they currently have no financial incentive to care about the particular nature of said engagement.
4. Facebook's poor track record when it comes to acknowledging critique or concerns around the power its platform has, and Facebook's denial that it should exercise a degree of responsiblity (or be legally held accountable in some way) for said power.
5. The somewhat covert nature of how Facebook functions; as this documentary shows, while how Facebook functions may have been "in the open", it's not something most non-tech folk are aware of, and it's not something Facebook has been, in good faith, forthright and transparent about.
6. The particular power and impact of computers/the internet as a medium of mass communication, which we are still learning about.
6.5 As a subsection of item 6, the viral nature of the internet/social media which means stuff spreads very quickly, unlike other modes or media of human communication.
So sure, a parent "influences" their child, a teacher influences a student, newspapers influence people, and so do Coca-Cola commercials, but not the same way that Facebook has "influence", which I've attempted to describe above.
There is a difference between someone telling you Band A is good, and someone hooking you on drugs and promising more drugs if you buy Band B.
But to compare it to what has been proven to be possible via social media is absurd.
They want you perpetually in the state of looking into a rabbit hole rather than feeling that you are satisfied with your knowledge of something and ready to move on with your life.
The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications, and that we interact with other people (often friends) makes it fundamentally different from a TV or a magazine.
How is this different than any other kind of media like TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.? All of them are trying to make their product engaging so that you consume more of their media and more of their ads. Just because those services also charge a subscription fee, doesn't change the dynamics of what they're trying to do. Social media has maybe just been more successful in doing so, partially because
> The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications
So the dynamics have always existed in previous platforms, it's just been ratcheted up to a higher level with social media.
And things change a lot with scale. Even if the intent or the principle is the same, dynamics are different if it is in a scale orders of magnitude larger.
I don’t think we should be dismissing new understandings of how social media affect our lives on the grounds that other media in the past tried to do the same.
With broadcast media, you can turn off the TV, radio, or put down the magazine. The social punishment cost of this is limited - If someone asked you about current affairs or the latest show etc, you might have to deal with being out of the loop.
But with smartphones and social media, everyone's a content publisher and it's all intertwined. Stepping back/checking out has a much higher social cost as you're not reachable and you're gonna miss those life updates from friends and family if you're not sitting on the same communication channels as them.
Imagine two villages. In one of them, it is customary to drink a glass of wine with dinner. On holidays, two.
The other village has a habit of drinking themselves stupid every single evening with gin.
Now: this is really only a difference in quantity. Both are consuming alcohol for pleasure. But the first village will probably be OK; there are tons of such villages in France, Spain and Greece, where people live to be 90.
The second village has a huge, deadly problem.
I remember a friend saying the "optimization is killing us". The whole economy is getting better at what it does and as it happens there are many side effects.
Those with no ethics will manage to harvest the social media technology for their profit and not for society. It applies also to taxes where companies are getting master at dodging them. Liers are getting masters at lying and we have to fight to rebuke the lies (the documentary has a quote about how much more effort is required to fight disinformation than to create it)
He also argues that optimization is poison to yourself ! But that's off subject.
So most companies aren't optimizing for a goal of "maximize our pockets AND maximize world happiness AND maximize the value our users get from us" with a proviso to not optimize too hard, so that unknown but desirable values that aren't expressed in the goal function don't get optimized away. No, they just optimize for "maximize our pockets", and do it hard. And when they do it like this, any sense of ethics or dignity is one of the first to fly out of the window.
Similarly, the optimization being "poison to yourself" is not as much a danger of optimization per se - wanting to improve yourself is a useful and noble desire! The problems usually start when you focus on a narrow goal too hard, to the exclusion of everything else in your life.
As for the market and how things are: my belief is that we're in a tipping point where the market, as an optimizer, is getting out of control and needs to be reined in. It's worth remembering that the main force behind market optimization is competition - I'll find a new trick to undercut you, you'll find a new trick to undercut me further, etc. until we reach diminishing returns, and the price of goods/services settles at barely above costs. Here are things I strongly believe to be true (and rather self-evident) about competition:
1) In a competitive environment, once one party figures out a trick that gives them advantage, everyone else has to do the same or risk getting outcompeted.
2) You don't have to compete only on production efficiency - you can also compete on quality (in the direction of getting away with lower quality for the same, or slightly lower, price), on business models, on ethics (any ethical principle you can skirt will open up new avenues for free profit), on advertising, on adherence to laws, etc.
So over the past centuries, the market had a lot of low-hanging fruits to pick. New materials, new processes, economies of scale, innovations in transport - all allowed to provide better goods for less. But now, I believe, we've run out of these easy wins - most competition happens on the grounds of lowering quality, business models (Everything as a Service, DRM, razor-and-blades, etc.), ethics (see e.g. social media companies), advertising (better RoI than making marginally better product), legality (Ubers and AirBnBs of the world running on a "break laws, and use VC money to keep regulators at bay until the market is cornered and competitors are destroyed").
The market is no longer optimizing us for giving us best possible goods at lowest possible price. Instead, it gives us worst sellable crap at highest possible price, by tacking on hidden and indirect costs.
That's why I'm increasingly in favor of regulating some business models out of existence - particularly the ad-subsidized everything, razor-and-blades everything, and "move fast and break laws" ones. The market's role in society is to make our lives better. The market has optimized past that. So the easy and socially destructive tricks need to be cut off, so that the market can return to optimizing for betterment of consumers.
That's not the case.
Consider the purest examples: Google routinely incorporates factors beyond short term profit into their ranking functions. For instance they ranked SSL using websites higher than non-SSL using websites, to encourage use of encryption. The ads "quality score" system penalises advertisers whose ads appear to be low quality, defined by users not finding them useful. The constant shovelling of social justice themes into the search engine homepage.
The biggest problem these firms have is that they are not focused exclusively on maximising profit. Profit is an excellent metric! It is the sum of all the happiness and utility you are creating across all your customer and userbase, minus effort expended, in a single quantifiable number. Think of all the happiness created by Apple, Amazon, Google and yes even Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of millions of people use the services of these firms, often for free, and they use it because they like it.
The problem big tech firms have is they explicitly got on board with "let's maximize world happiness" as a goal. Dumb dumb dumb. Nobody agrees what world happiness is, but there sure are a lot of activists who will always be convinced you're not doing enough about it. Once you go down that path you'll never stop walking, and the further you walk, the more abusive the activists get. It's so subjective and unquantifiable you can never tell if you've done enough.
my belief is that we're in a tipping point where the market, as an optimizer, is getting out of control and needs to be reined in
Isn't that just a classical Marxist or Malthusian collapse proposal? People have been predicting that capitalism will somehow collapse in on itself for hundreds of years, it never has because it's a fundamentally natural, evolved and stable system. The alternatives, not so much.
In many countries, TV is highly regulated: can't advertise for alcohol or cigarettes, political speech time is measured to make sure each "camp" get the same exposure, etc.
There's no such thing on social media.
Same goes for Uber, Airbnb & co, by the way, although this is easier to regulate.
I think this trivializes the problem. The issue isn't that these things have existed for ages and are simply getting better, the problem is that we have gone from mass-marketing designed to appeal to a broad audience to personalized marketing designed to appeal to just you. With that in place, the more data that gets collected about you, the more precise the message delivery can be. The more sophisticated the algorithms that input all that data get, the more susceptible you'll be to their messaging because they are designed to capitalize on human psychological weaknesses.
In sum, the "users" are the ones paying for the costs of this particular advertising vector (the internet and web).
1. In most cases. There are exceptions where original authors can get a cut of Google/Facebook's take.
Now when tech similar to GPT-3 gets out there it’s going to be like hunting rifle vs atomic weapons. Pretty soon we will have what I am calling “mechanized con artistry.” We are almost literally inventing the medieval demon whispering into everyone’s ear. Mass surveillance plus big data plus generative AI will be like the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3
Unsettling indeed.
Yes its benign taken out of that context.
In the context of social media and tech, this is no longer the case, or it is the case that people are not comfortable with its untrammeled evolution and utilization.
> Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services.
I believe it was "the product is the 'ability' to change your behavior"
So the difference here is that not only the sell it but it actually works because it can adapt to the people in realtime. This is probable what is scary..
Standard advertisement is already manipulation but it's more easy to know when it is advertisement (though it's arguable that there are also tricks to get around this for TV).
In my view it is indeed the advertisement industry going too far and being allowed anything. Social Media just build a product for its client and none of them have any doubt and limits when it comes to choosing between profits and ethics.
Advertisement is ok when it is honest and not manipulative.
In addition the product is sold for politics which is even more scary.
There are regulation in many countries about what's allowed or not in advertisement. In some cases it's not allowed to blatantly lie. Or it is not allowed to hide advertisement as content, etc...
It is possible to forbid micro-targetting and manipulative AI algorithms or other methods. Users & Regulators need to understand what is being done, and how the effects are harmful to society.
https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/history
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...
"that we are the product being sold to advertisers is too simplistic. It is the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product."
Yes manipulation is also the goal of all advertising, however the power to manipulate is not mostly in the hands of advertisers. The platform owners wield tremendous power and can decide what gets shown when and what gets priority over what. It means their political leanings influence people whether or not those advertise on the platform. We've never had this kind of concentration of power over the collective mind I think.
That's true of all media. Doesn't matter if you pay for it or not. Even netflix. Even this post.
What is the "documentary" trying to achieve? Change behavior.
Who is behind the social media campaign?
"Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468533
> That distinction made the insidiousness much more clear than the former statement.
Just as insidious are "documentaries". They are just as sneaky and agenda driven as facebook algorithms.
But will the filmmakers profit if they succeed? They don't make any money by successfully changing your mind.
What is Instagram? Is it a tool for sharing photos, or is a social engineering experiment intended to increase competitive anxiety and narcissism?
What is Facebook? Is it a way to stay in touch with friends and family, or is it a social engineering experiment designed to promote "engagement" through ever-increasing political and emotional extremism?
If I want to make a documentary I can use the camera in my cellphone and maybe a cheap lapel microphone, buy some cheap studio lights, and edit it with cheap software. The research would be harder to buy, but still not impossible for someone with good basic journalism skills.
If it's not defamatory I can post it on YouTube. If it's solid journalism with an original and interesting angle there's even a fair chance I'll be able to sell it a media network.
If I want to create my own global social network - that's a slightly more challenging project.
But you could describe this as propaganda with anti social media agenda. I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but this argument can easily be flipped and feels a bit like going no true Scotsman [0] since there very much are documentations (as listed) with doubtful or undefined intent.
Except that the masses believe "documentaries" = truth. I know I did when I was younger. No documentary claims to be "agenda ridden 'movie' from biased individuals funded by even more biased individuals".
> If it's not defamatory I can post it on YouTube. If it's solid journalism with an original and interesting angle there's even a fair chance I'll be able to sell it a media network.
Except that you still depend on social media. You depend on youtube or netflix to give you preferential treatment.
> If I want to create my own global social network - that's a slightly more challenging project.
It's also challenging to get the money, not only produce the film, but get netflix to it special treatment and of course buy the "ad" push we see on social media ( ironically enough ).
"The Social Dilemma" isn't just a "documentary". It's a part of a well funded propaganda campaign. There is obviously political and financial backing for this behind the scenes. Not that I'm against the sentiment because social media monopolies or any monopolies are a threat to society. And I also include netflix as a monopoly threat.
http://www.jaronlanier.com/ if you're interested in more. He was an early pioneer in VR tech, and is a person with generally interesting ideas. He is more known today for his critiques of the tech industry and Silicon Valley culture.
Is there an industry anywhere that is not in the business of influencing behavior or actions? Why do you think that doesn't apply to news, education, healthcare, whatever?
When I go to the doctor I understand the scope and goals of my healthcare provider. I'm not surprised when my behaviors are changed to enhance my health.
When the average person uses social media to connect with friends they aren't informed on the scope or goals of the social media provider. When I RSVP to a birthday party I only expect that my response will be sent -- I don't expect that I'll have birthday gifts suggested to me or have my relationships tracked by surveillance organizations.
Are you sure about that? The fact that I have to sometimes argue for a test, and their counter argument isn't "the test isn't useful or even worse", but rather "the test is expensive" makes me wonder what their goal is. I'm paying for the test (or my insurance is), aren't I? It seems they're trying to optimize for something, but I'm not sure if its my health.
Many people struggle to make ends meet, so it makes sense to avoid superfluous medical costs. If you tell your healthcare provider that money is no object I'd imagine that they'd be able to weigh the financial aspect more accurately.
From an evidence-based medicine standpoint, how likely are those tests to actually optimize your health?
Customers of social media are showing up for pictures of grandkids and are receiving disinformation & outrage, because that content hacks the brain & will ensure the eyeballs come back more reliably, and for longer.
I feel like it seems worthwhile to have an angle that doesn't dichotomize your actions into product/non-product ones; maybe you just act in a space orthogonal to it and/or use your understanding of it to inform yourself but aren't driven by needing to be product or non-product. Capitalizing on that last desire is I think how the language ends up becoming too much ends and not means.
This may or may not be related, because I'm finding it difficult to parse your comment.
> there are pork chops futures, oil futures, and now human futures.
This is so full of sense in all degrees.
Well worth reading stuff he wrote, of recordings of his past speeches, if you haven't done so already.
The doc was not awful, it's good to get people talking, but it was more one-sided than a facebook feed, which I found very ironic. Every well lit talking head had the same point of view, they presented their mic drop line and then there was no discussion, no counterpoint, no follow up.
> In any case, the basic dynamic is interesting: the less you pay for things directly, the more power you give up to those who do. The abstraction is largely symbolic for ads (consumers pay advertisers in higher product costs), but apparently where and when money exchanges hands matters to who ultimately has influence.
Perhaps in the US time zone :). I read and comment mostly when EU is awake, and I assure you, I haven't seen a place more deeply cynical and reserved about tech startups than HN (and having the reasons and reasoning to back the cynicism up) :).
I wonder if anyone did an analysis of how HN sentiments change during the day, as people from different parts of the world are participating?
- startup founders, that could apply to YC
- investors, that could invest in YC companies
- potential customers for YC companies
- potential employees for YC companies
HN brings all of these people into a YC controlled community, and gets them thinking about YC frequently. It’s outstanding marketing, and like all great content marketing, it also provides value to the people being marketed to.
An apartment building I once lived in had free candy in the lobby sometimes. I rather doubt it was driven by any measurable profits for them by doing it.
Why can't we just have a frank discussion about advertising and privacy without this kind of manipulative language?
I'm not sure why saying to people that their attention and subsequent changes in behaviours were the fundamental parts of entire markets would be conspiratorial, but I might be misunderstanding you.
1. Nielsen boxes were and are opt-in.
2. You were and are compensated for keeping one.
2. You are compensated by accessing an incredibly complex system and network for free where otherwise you would have to maintain or pay for some kind of infrastructure.
(I am playing the devil's advocate here because it is interesting to me to understand in what way other than granularity this would be any different from the way the media has been communicated to us for a long time)
This sounds like fluff: appreciating the art, style, aesthetic of the work/entity we are talking to should be #1 goal.
Engaging in the appreciation of art is to jettison our judgement of the subject to focus on the choices “why” and “how.”
I don’t know if this groks with anyone else....that’s kinda part of it too.
The prospect of work being judged by peers negatively is the pain amplifier on all our hands.
There are some of us out there - good people that are just broken.
Their path has made them feel it as if it’s on all the time, and they are as unstable and judgemental as they arw talented.
I have no idea how to fix the broken - I am just trying to paint myself whole again, one human interaction at a time.
The key difference between network TV in the 80s and social media now is the former had content to offer. As such, you could call the ads supplemental. TV also has dual income streams: subscriptions and advertising.
A social media platform has no content to offer, except the content provided by its users. If you provide content for free and the company benefits through increased eyeballs and therefore ad revenue, in a sense you're an unpaid employee. That makes you the product as shorthand for you providing the product.
Based on main revenue streams, network TV is either in the entertainment or advertising sector (I haven't looked up the numbers), but social media are squarely in the advertising sector. That makes the user's data the product, and "you are the product" a totum pro parte.
To be honest, "Even if you're paying you are the product too".[0,1]
[0] https://time.com/5596033/lawsuit-apple-selling-itunes-listen...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/28/its-mid...
It’s something I would have likely never met in my my career, but there is an amazing amount of social engineering going on a these places. 20 years ago if you got the odd group of students who did anything gaming related, it would typically be very nerdy, terribly executed and often a very socially awkward exam even for CS standards. These days it feels like I’m very likely examining a group of people out of which two or three are likely to be my executives in a decade if they chose to pursue a career in the public sector.
It’s really interesting how the humanities have crept in and in some way taken over, isn’t it? And all because we didn’t want to pay a coffees worth of money to have the online yellow pages. It’ll be even more interesting to see what happens to this sale of social engineering once legislation eventually catches on.
What we need is precisely the thing so many of us do not want: we need subscriptions. Subscriptions provide a buffer. They give a publisher room to breathe: he can predict what his next month will look like; he can model what his next year will look like; and he can allocate his resources appropriately. The problem is that subscriptions are high-friction, and cannot compete with ad-driven ‘free’ content and services.
The sort of ads that make the big bucks for companies like Google and even Facebook are niche or local firms buying very simple ads that let people know they exist. Brand advertising on publisher websites is not the biggest source of value, and these tech firms started out by trying to get rid of it entirely. AdSense's entire reason for existence was to chip away at the terrible brand ads that littered the web beforehand, and of course, those are the only kind of ads that you get on other media so they above all others have done more to rid the world of that kind of thing.
Publishers can use subscriptions today if they want to. That's no solution to psychological manipulation. Look at how many cable or satellite TV news channels there are which spend all day trying to create as much outrage and hate as possible, all paid for by subscription.
I haven't watched it but the documentary is probably junk. Seeing the Sundance Festival logo and reading the blurb is enough to get the gist of what it'll be like - a bunch of social activists who want you to feel weak, useless, sheep-like and filled with hate towards people who dare to make and give you useful services. No thanks.
Watch the film. The speakers are mostly ex-employees of the big tech firms.
Your take is completely incorrect, unsurprisingly, given you haven’t even seen it.
I have a strong bias against any sort of automatically recurring charge. In some ways I'm very illogical about it--yearly subscriptions like Amazon Prime or my VPN aren't too bad because I can see the cost and not worry about it for a while. But I've just been trained through experience to see anything monthly (or less) as a way to disguise the real cost through stretching it out (even if I can easily do the arithmetic and see the annual cost.
Regardless, knowing about the potential for abusing the data compiled on my behavior is enough to make me feel a bit "icky" or mildly uneasy. It's enough to make me avoid using anything from Facebook, for example. But it's not enough to keep me from checking my subs on YouTube or using Google navigation when I drive somewhere new.
If it was as simple as paying $100/year to use Google services without data collection it would be easy, but then what stuff would stop working? A good bit of the usefulness of Google nav or whatever comes from how it collects usage data or ties in with my calendar to remind me when I need to leave to make it to an appointment on time.
And then what about all of the other things I interact with that collect data? Do I need to figure out what they all are and pay them a yearly fee as well? What about the ones who decide it's still easier and more profitable to skip the whole thing and keep making their money by profiling my behavior?
Instead, I end up avoiding Facebook properties, blocking ads, never using rewards cards, trying to ignore the OG offenders (credit card companies), and still feeling uneasy about all the info being analyzed about me daily.
God, this is when the lawyers get involved! YUCK!
Simple economics tells you that this will never happen. Companies simply have much more money to spend than consumers do.
Indeed, if you ban “ads”, companies will simply invest in “non-ads” to influence your behaviour - fake news, real news (more-or-less thinly veiled PR disguised as news, a la Paul Graham’s “submarine”) or buying whole news outfits (hint hint Bezos).
The only way to stop competition in marketing is to (re-)start competition in product / technology - but that seems a very difficult problem (we’re in the midst of a physics/tech stagnation).
We tend to underestimate the influence advertising (and media, etc.) have on us, but are relatively objective in observing the effects of advertising on other people, society, and such. Being influenced by advertising reads as being duped to most people, and we resist this conclusion.
This is a little different to many subjects, where we tend to empathize more with examples that have us as the object.
Mine was seeing the AI / algorithm visualized as 3 humans trying to figure out what the best plan of action was to make you engage.
That really made me think about how it's another group of humans out there trying to take time away from me for the sole purpose of making their company more money. That's a much stronger mental image than a vague algorithm that we all knew existed.
That concept of the documentary alone made it worth watching.
I do question whether it's a problem. No one likes the idea of being manipulated, but... Aren't we being influenced by others all the time? What is really genuine and what is external influence?
Here is one thing that I have a hard time explaining to people. Fun is the enemy. Or at least the enemy is disguised as. When you share a meme, it's because it's fun. No harm there. But memes are fuel that keep the system going. People are not being misinformed (only) because the media is spewing conspiracies. They are misinformed because they are getting their news from facebook memes. You know those low quality screenshot of a news article? Or the set of 3 pictures that shows an exaggerated reaction to some news? Or worse, the twitter screenshot with no context?
It is funny. That's why we share it. But when you realize what is happening in the background, it is not funny anymore.
Edit: I wish they had added some metric to the little bell on top: https://i.imgur.com/WNFThds.png . it would have shown how much the little red circle entices you to click.
If you believed that pharaoh was a God, well there was no way to know otherwise. Not only you didn't know how to read, but if you did, all the writing did confirm he was, in fact, a God.
Today, information about counter arguments is available for any claim. If it sounds suspicious, you can use the discretion of your mobile device and look up 2 or 3 different opinions. You can read the study. You can listen to experts in the field. You can do all that before the king finishes his speech.
Flat earthers don't just read one article and suddenly they believe it. They spend a lot of time going down rabbit holes reading and watching all sorts of stuff.
There's good information out there, but there's also a swamp of bullshit pretending not to be that you have to wade through.
I think the challenge for defeating those theories is providing the poor, undereducated and marginalized a more wholesome way to spend their time among other people. That is a hard challenge when community centers and churches are no longer a significant thing in many locations, and now the COVID lockdown means even less real-life socializing.
> I think the challenge for defeating those theories is providing the poor, undereducated and marginalized a more wholesome way to spend their time among other people.
Why do you think it's the poor who buy into these theories? I live in a relatively well to do neighborhood (not in the US) and I've seen plenty of anti-5G banners hanging from balconies, there are plenty of anti vaxxers, plenty of people who think COVID19 is a hoax, and I know some people tangentially related to flat earthers (via some new age beliefs). These are all educated people.
It is not solely the poor and uneducated who buy into these theories. However, for several extreme movements in recent years, sociologists have noted that they mainly tend to attract people who are socially marginalized in some way. While the educated and even some elected politicians can become visible proponents of the given conspiracy theory, they are arising on top of a mass of less privileged supporters.
These conspiracies don’t start with much, but if one gains a bit of traction there’s suddenly a bunch of “influencers” peddling it for more influence (fuck society, I need those subs and likes!... right?). More influence, more ad dollars. Next thing you know a 4chan meme is political propaganda on the national stage.
I really don’t think this is hard to follow. Anyone who’s been in tech or marketing for a while either knows this, or they’re incentivized to pretend they don’t.
The vectors we have to spread misinformation nowadays are far more powerful and readily available than ever before. What was once a (literal) walk from one village to the next is now an express line straight into the brains of thousands to millions.
It's easier to destroy truth and reality than it ever has been.
In my experience I can safely say that Social Media impact on our information ecosystem is a huge step change from anything we have seen before, to the point that it is effectively new.
That the current problems build on human neuronal frailties that have existed since the dawn of time, is also true.
So it is natural this conversational junction will come up repeatedly in future conversations.
How do we answer it and settle the issue comprehensively? Hence the question.
One could argue that there's plenty of other reliable news sources, but for many reasons the trust in official news sources is collapsing. One reason is that social media has flooded the world with so much content that it's hard to figure out what's factual and what not.
Not nearly as misinformed as during the communist/nazi eras you mentioned above.
No. HN does not get it at all. You never see coherent explanations on HN.
This movie got it pretty well. Far better than HN.
I think people on HN can see there are problems with Social Media, they are smarter than the general population, and technical, so know alternatives.
They see the smoke and can act correctly be they don't get the problem at all.
You just get all the shitty parts of living your life with 1000 fake friends(I mean fans) like a hero complex, or an influence complex, or hyper sensitivity to judgement, or addiction to others opinions, or addiction, or suicide, or an inability to communicate with people different than you, or an inability to determine fact from scam, or a permanent state of social one-up-manship, or a constant stream of unending judgement for all your actions in a public forum, or shit tons of fake friends, or complete social isolation in a room of people, or an advocate complex.
All for the pretend reason of "communication" or "connecting the world".
Humans are not built to have close social bonds with 50+ people, it breaks down something about what grounds us. It is why there is a cliché for the famous person with all the bad parts above.
That is, early humans were intelligent animals, but limited in our sophistication by Dunbar's number, so to speak. That is our range of social behaviour (and therefore most behaviour) was biologically limited to small social groups.
The Palaeolithic revolution circa 50kya-100kya was (according to YNH) the invention of language and "fiction" sophistication which enabled cooperation and in larger groups. The concept of a "tribe" with ancestors, shared traditions and social cooperation in much larger groups. Much larger groups allow for much more sophistication.
In some sense, he defines human progress as the quality of cooperation in larger groups. Basically culture takes over from biology, in determining effective human social group size.
Social networks are just another advancement in this trend. All these advancements are somewhat pathological, because they're at odds with our innate (noncultural) limitations. Consider how bad we are at "politics" and how "politics" is a bad word. The contrast is decision making in small, tight knit groups.
I follow Paul Graham on Twitter. I don't think he is my friend (if only because he doesn't know I exist).
Since 2008-2009 and the mainstreaming of social media, the US has seen a 40% increase in suicide rate for 15-24 year old's.
The "good" does not out way the bad.
The website explicitly states that their site allows cookies "set through our site by our advertising partners and may be used to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant ads on other sites."
Since visiting I received two ads for “Moment” in instagram, and one for Asana on YouTube.
Crazy hypocritical, opt-in or not.
We don’t live in a world that can break free of these atrocities.
The point of the movie (per the website as well) is literally a call to, “rebuild the system.”
Not saying I'd expect them to damage their own brand, but it's still very, very close to shooting yourself in your own foot.
The difference being neither run a social network. Well, LinkedIn is one, I suppose.
Sure, it is in Facebook's best interest to keep you on the site for as long as possible so that they can drive ads. But the same issues with social media existed before Facebook had ads. People would still be checking their feed constantly, checking if their post had new likes, seeking the approval of their peers.
One of the interviewees said he was addicted to his email... what bad practices does Gmail employ and how exactly are advertisers to blame for this as well? Gmail has a couple of ads but that's about it? It also said Whatsapp was one of the apps responsible for the spread of fake news, this is simply a texting client with the ability to send messages to groups.
Maybe it turns out that if you put technology and instant messaging in the hands of social circles, messages, whether fake news or not, spreads faster than ever.
If Facebook had no financial incentive, sure, maybe they would have realised the negative effect it is having on people and shut the whole thing down. But then another site would have come along doing exactly the same thing. Maybe the issue is that people don't cope well when being connected with hundreds of "friends", constantly seeing updates from their lives and feeling compelled to also share updates of their own.
WhatsApp has large groups anyone can join. SMS doesn't.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-first-ever-ad-sale...
Remember when the Flappy Bird guy removed the game from the store because it was too addictive for his liking? It goes to show how the addictiveness of tech can easily be accidental. And then people complained that he did. Even when a creator says "please, stop, this is harmful" it will go unheard. So putting all the blame on evil corporate decisions is an incomplete picture, but it sells better I guess.
I just rewatched some of it and got to the bit on A/B testing and how it is mind control and we are all guinea pigs being manipulated... apparently every marketing department in every business, and every advertising company is now some evil puppet master controlling people without their consent!
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
But this also makes them the most effective people to talk about it. I've had so many non-tech people in my life be blown away by this movie. Nothing in it was new to me or anyone here, but most people don't hear/see these things.
Most people in this movie were early employees, before we knew how bad it could get. Back then, social media was connecting people in new ways. Facebook in the early days was fucking magical. It had the potential to change the world for good. And then... it didn't. For example, the inventor of the Like button talked about how the goal was to spread love and appreciation. I believe him that he didn't for-see it would someday cause a rise in suicides among young women. How could anyone? And that's why they're speaking up now.
I agree with the criticisms. Lack of diversity, culpable people trying to save grace, Netflix making money off it and not being mentioned, etc.
But it's not for you or me. It's the most succinct, visual description of what's happening right now, made for the average person, on a streaming platform people respect. And the voices they used mean a lot more when the ideas are coming from previous true believers.
no, before facebook, there was myspace and friendster (and more primitive social networks before that). we all knew exactly how bad it could get. facebook was not fucking magical. it was a psychological exploit for profit's sake. zuck said as much when he let his guard down. he and facebook are not to be venerated nor absolved for this bare-naked blight on humanity.
MySpace and Friendster and message boards and IRC were all pretty benign. I don't think MySpace had a single "algorithm". There was no newsfeed; it was just a personal Geocities basically. How were they "bad"?
Facebook WAS magical for anyone who was in college around the time it started. All of a sudden, you could connect with thousands of people around you. You could organize events, stay in touch with friends, share pictures and talk about your life. Back then, it was a very different site than it is now.
If you told me in 2005, when I signed up for Facebook, that someday the election would be swayed by it? I would have laughed at you. The biggest fear back then was a drunken picture costing someone a job someday. Now governments are being crippled.
I'm not venerating anyone. I'm talking about 15 years ago, not now. That was the whole point of the movie. Social media isn't inherently bad; human connection is a good thing. It's bad when it's fueled by a limitless need for growth and profit.
Are you sure you aren't conflating "it's obvious" with hindsight bias?
And all advertising has the goal of swaying some election - which car you buy, where you get your groceries, what clothes you choose. You think you made those choices without external influence when you didn't.
There was no realtime location collection (no iPhones), no sharing of articles, no commenting on posts, no groups, no minifeed, etc. There wasn't any mechanisms for all the data to be used for targeting. When I started using Facebook, you literally had to go to a person's page to check on them. There was no newsfeed or algorithm or ads. There definitely weren't bots.
It was pretty unimaginable that you could figure out who someone was voting for and influence them based on how FB was in 2006. Now, of course, it's different.
Facebook's original pitch deck from 2004 disagrees with you.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebooks-first-ever-ad-sale...
Look at the slide "Our Online Marketing Services" and the box labeled "Targeted Advertising"
> This site allows for targeted advertisement on the basis of any of the parameters listed below.
Then, of course, it lists gender, age, dating interests and... Political Views.
I vividly remember 2002-2005, and I even had a website once about disinformation. Fake news was a thing during the Bush administration.
no, i avoided facebook at the start because it was obvious what it was going to be. with google, it was 2005 or so (about a year after the gmail launch) that i started weaning myself off of google.
that folks wore blinders willingly doesn't mean it wasn't easy to connect the dots.
Plenty of people understood the implications.
You were very smart then, congratulations.
Back in 2006 there was no mention anywhere of "fake news", "bias bubbles" and such because there was almost no news sharing in Facebook, and your feed was not curated to only show you what you were most likely to like. There was no political advertising on Facebook for a long time, and even no ads at all until like 2007 or 2008.
User tracking was almost non existent as well until 2010 or so.
So sure, there was already some concern about privacy back then, it was mostly about people voluntarily over-sharing thins they shouldn't, not about being tracked and manipulated against your wish.
At some point in the documentary, I was expecting someone in front of the question: "what is the real problem here?", to answer: "people are horrible"
Nope nope nope. While tech people might have some insight into how some of the tech works, they're still lost in how to both define the problem [1] and describe how these technologies may shape society [2]. Nothing in their professional or personal experience has adequately prepared them to answer these questions.
The thing tech people can do now is listen carefully to people who study and understand the many areas tech touches in society, and work with them on solutions that are well-vetted and considered. Tech people need to open their minds and use their power to give voice to those who can more clearly see and explain what's wrong [3].
> I believe him that he didn't for-see it would someday cause a rise in suicides among young women. How could anyone?
There were, in fact, people who could have predicted this. They study things like... teens and mental health. Not things people in tech tend to study. Lets not assume what we don't know must not be known.
We got into this mess because of hubris. That same hubris will not get us out of it.
[1] you will note they struggled with this part in the documentary.
[2] beyond facile doom and gloom.
[3] Center for Humane Tech's podcast has some good interviews with experts, but those voices were largely absent in this doc, and the response I see to this doc still largely falls in the camp of 'techies should evangelize/solve it', which is what I'm responding to here.
I think it means a lot coming from people who created the technology. Maybe not to me or you, but it definitely does to non-tech people.
It's like how a thousand people can say K-Cups are bad for the environment, but it's way more shareable that the creator regrets it.
I like Tristan and Aza and CHT and think they're smart, well-meaning people who are doing their best, and I value what they bring. I especially like their focus on trying to explain some complex stuff in terms and ideas that are simple enough for people to grasp. I'd love to see more well-vetted solutions from them; screen time was a valuable concept they advocated for.
As far as whether tech people are the most effective people to talk about the problems they created, I don't agree. I'd prefer someone who has expertise in the implications of technologies, who can root what is happening in social dynamics, human psychology, etc. Someone whose voice in those areas is highly respected, not someone who read a few articles or a book and then translated it. We need more of a Carl Sagan of sociology/psychology/history who can integrate and explain these things.
Any sufficiently complex topic and area of power needs checks and balances, people with different perspectives and backgrounds who help define the boundaries for discussion and consideration. My concern is we're always hearing from tech people; by default they have a seat at the table because they're in the seat of power in this domain. Their voices need no further elevation nor does their lack of expertise in relevant fields warrant it. We need their counterbalance.
Until you or someone else that fits this personal preference of yours, I guess the problem is that we don't have a lot of choices in terms of interesting, enlightening, clear, and coherent documentaries that describe this problem.
So, yes, you may be right that someone else could describe this situation differently ... but absent that actually existing, this is (in my opinion) a pretty fine documentary, even if some of the talking heads are / were 'tech people'
Did they?
She was already well respected at that time and known to my team when I worked in Yahoo's online communities division in 2006 and went to her talks.
The relationship between suicide & social status has been well known for decades. It therefore would not have been a leap for someone in the know to conclude that a tool that conferred social status or approval (such as a like button, a list of friends, etc) would therefore have these social implications.
You can read her stuff here: https://www.danah.org/papers/
They might not be the best to talk about solutions tho, but I think the purpose of the movie is to make the problem known.
Every single thing in the world has upsides and downsides. Cars made transportation affordable to people but people die in car crashes. Farming is feeding billions of people but also polluting environment. Internet brings information to people but also disinformation. Medicine saved 100s millions of people, but also messed up with natural selection as a way of making our spice stronger.
You can (and should!) look for bad things about each technology and try to minimize it and make sure there’s right trade off. But trying to present something as pure evil, just because it’s also doing harm, is intellectually dishonest.
For me, privacy is the core issue, though "free" is part of the problem. A social network charging a dollar a year wouldn't be great for investors but would essentially pay for itself. (As a Brit, I'd be more inclined to pay that dollar than the BBC license fee at ~170x the expense for all the "soft power" it has.).
With the monetary dial removed, filter bubbles are still a problem. I'm thinking it would be good if more algorithms could be used to counterweight a persons predilections. Show me stuff based on my interactions/friends/groups I'm in/people like me/opinions I hold/mood I'm in, but counterweight it with things/people that are potentially opposite or more neutral. Perhaps associate with groups of ideas for this cause, i.e. political belief, people at my place of work, people that visit the same places I do. It could be totally transparent, viewed, and even possibly reset.
I think the documentary was good for the general public to me made aware of how Facebook/Google, pretty much all "big tech" is aggressively mining data, some more than others.
That'd probably shrink if they didn't need targeted advertising, but a lot of the complex friend graphs might result in some hefty computation at scale.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/05/16/186064/the-bigge...
Most conspiracy theories I never look into, but the 5G one made me wonder how stupid can you be. So when they thought they had enough evidence to convince a judge and sued the Dutch government, I opened the evidence they supplied and read through it.
I've spent hours and hours trying to figure it out but there just isn't logic to it. It's all misreadings, misinterpretations, misconceptions, etc. Their references were false as well (saying the WHO claimed X in a paper from year Y, complete with a link that leads to a blog post about it but doesn't link the source, and the WHO site has no publications on that topic in the given year; turns out they had a paper about that topic one year later but it doesn't support the claim at all).
Yesterday I was looking something climate related up and came across a Belgian site, seemed like a newspaper, that denies the whole thing. Confused, I opened it and read a bit to make sure they were really calling it a hoax and I hadn't misunderstood. Yep, they did. They pointed to 500 scientists from around the world who signed something saying we should be less political about it and base it more on science, and then that science should include the uncertainties in their reports because all the climate models are super uncertain, and that it turns out the heating is going much less fast than previously claimed. I mean, all proper papers disclose uncertainties. And yes, we should be more science based and get the fuck on with decarbonizing. Then as for it not being so bad (it not going as fast), it's going super fast, I don't know where they got this.
No, I'm really not interested in this kinda garbage. For me the Youtube recommendations are straightforward: I click a video about maps, next I get more geographic analysis videos recommended to me. I'd rather not that someone feels obliged to make it insert opposite content (what's opposite to maps, flat earther stuff? Or just unscientific blabbering when what I'm mainly watching is objective/sciency stuff?).
Or do we want to only insert opposite viewpoints to those who believe in conspiracy theories? Who decides what's real and what's not? Why have the conspiracy theory content on the site at all if we know it's false? Can we not find the root of the problem: the people who make these videos, where do they get their info and misconceptions from?
I just think if content is factionalised there should be a means to de-factionalise it.
I'm sure with these engines the scoring is multi-dimensional anyways so the concept of opposite is a bit more fuzzy than "recommend the opposite of stuff I search for and interact with"
I think in your example that any (say YT) algo would flag flat earth videos as more conspiratorial and less scientific. Even though the content is about the same "thing", there'd be more facets/dimensions to that thing than it simply being the geometry of the Earth, i.e. the profiles of people who watch such things. There's the history of the Earth's geometry, alternative projections, people who have travelled it, etc etc.
I'm more at peace , I no longer getting into stupid Facebook arguments. Online you aren't interacting with whole people, so being absurdly mean is easy.
Most people online are just their for validation( or are bots , see the Ashley Madison hack and the FTC complaint against the Match Group). At this point in my life I'm no longer seeking that. Plus , as the movie points out constant validation seeking will wreck your mental health.
I was having an amazing time meeting folks pre Covid and I have a plan to become more active whenever this ends. I'm thinking I'll try improv. Being around people does something for you that internet interactions simply can't.
You're posting this comment on social media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
> I'm more at peace , I no longer getting into stupid Facebook arguments. Online you aren't interacting with whole people, so being absurdly mean is easy.
What makes HN different?
That's the one thing I absolutely loathe about Facebook. There's no constructive dialogue going on. Everyone is so full of themselves that any kind of argument derails pretty fast. And then there is the fact that the platform doesn't provide the structure for long conversations. After a couple of replies all text has the same indentation so it's hard to see who's responding to what comment. I've been online for twenty years, and I've never seen a environment more hostile to conversation than Facebook.
Online communities like reddit and, yes, HN, are echo chambers to varying degrees. They can also elicit a sort of inhumane treatment of others by depersonalizing them, sort of like what happens when people get behind the wheel of a vehicle.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Mostly for this golden quote which I have saved:
>Cats have done the seemingly impossible: They’ve integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up. They are still in charge. There is no worry that some stealthy meme crafted by algorithms and paid for by a creepy, hidden oligarch has taken over your cat. No one has taken over your cat; not you, not anyone.
For now I don't see talking on hacker news as stressful, but I definitely will stop using this site if it becomes so.
Yes, it's still just wasting time away but it can be somewhat more mentally stimulating than FB drama.
Better than not!
One of the most interesting observations about not having a smart phone was not how my behavior changed, but how others behavior changed. As my friends became painfully aware that I don't have a smart phone, I'm not checking my email 24/7, their texts don't get read-receipts, and they don't see the ellipses as I type text replies... they became less demanding/insistent of my time (except for the urgent things, of course). It was really freeing.
I only got a smartphone again when I lost my Nokia 6 hours before I had to catch a plane for a week long trip -- I pulled an old smartphone out of my junk drawer, threw a SIM card in it real fast, and headed to the airport. I have hardly any apps on it now, and it's great.
By not mentioning that Netflix’s goal is to get consumers to watch nonsense all day, it appears so...
Netflix would love people to log off of Facebook and log on Netflix :)
I'm sure there will be a day when they do, but right now I think they make a flat subscription fee from me. Maybe they can sell more of my viewing habits the longer I watch? Maybe they have content which they're paid to serve? I don't know. I think that, right now, Netflix really isn't in the same category as the big social media companies.
All the engagement tricks played by social media would have only gotten so far without smartphones. On the contrary, people might have been addicted to smartphones even without social media apps.
I’m not trying to be negative. I’m just strongly of the opinion that making this happen will take much more than saying “we should make a better social media”, and I’m wondering if you’ve got that far.
Summarizing: the people interviewed were not the one who should have been interviewed. People from in house policy temas and others are much more knowledgeable about this and have been raising these types of issues all along. It would also have helped to show a much more diverse picture than a bunch of repented tech bros.
At the end of the thread, two additional posts reinforce and expand the message:
https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/social-dilemma-netflix-...
https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/flamethr...
I hope we all, as HN commenters, take a moment to consider our participation in social media, including this site. Please be aware that your online communities are not the real world, that people are human, and those upvotes do not validate your opinions. I apologize for all the pointless, angry arguments I've participated in, and hope you do as well. Let your humanity shine through everything you do.
Also, is there a common denominator among people here who have stopped using social media? I mean, other than self awareness, retrospective ect. which people here generally have more than the average population.
What was the "I need to reduce or stop looking at facebook so often moment?" Mine was the fact that I became aware that I'm essentially a dog from Pavlovs experiment where instead of a bell I have a notification sound/buzz and instead of a biscuit I get a little dopamin shot. Second was the trackers, especially as they got better and faster. I started feeling 'cheap', as I feel in reality when a merchant uses obviously exaggerated claims while acting as a friend to try to convince me to buy something. (Like last time I went to a car dealership, yuck) Third is that the connection to people I care about, close family and friends, is much better served via private group messaging apps and news via HN and others.
I will say the big thing for me that made me put my mobile device down (of which I now barely use) was the sheer quantity of hours a day I was wasting away looking at it - this was being amplified by Covid. My thing was getting worked up by stupidity or hateful opinions on Twitter or Reddit (obviously the platforms helped out). The more I looked the more I got annoyed, seeking out arguments if you will. It wasn't until I just stepped back and realised that I'm seeking the opinions of a tiny tiny fraction of a global population that I realised how stupid it was. There are 7 billion people in the world, you can find any opinion you want - it's foolish to spend your day hunting these down and what's worse is that it starts to warp your own personal view away from who you really are. I think the catalyst was Covid for making me realise this, I think more people will start waking up to the same reality.
As we have been living with it for a while, the poisoning effects of social media have become more obvious to more people, but if so many are already in social media and public spaces are half dead, it's not easy to escape. Though I actually believe we can use technology to revert this back. We can use technology to get people who is geographically close to interact with other people, in more local networks. It's not about driving people out from X, it's about giving them better spaces. We are not completely unaware of the poisoning, so we just need to offer people better alternatives. And even if local governments have no vision, we can educate them and build spaces on our own, even if the first ones need to be half-digital for the bootstrapping. I was working on something like this, and while I've had to stop for a while both for personal and global pandemic reasons (and the best ideas are still not clear to me and I'm still improving my skills on web development and other areas), I'll keep working on this kind of projects. People likes to be with people if they have a decent place to stay and something to interact around. And everyone has very different preferences, but it's just a matter of working on it.
Nothing short of a regressive global regulatory crackdown can change the new reality.
I think it's worth for people to examine what it is and how it's different. But an alarmist and hostile tone isn't too conductive to that.
"Hating the biggest companies behind it" will change things. Hatred, skepticism, cynicism, and distrust will change things. In a world where "regulatory capture" is almost complete, only neo-Luddism (properly understood) can hope to change things.
We should be raising alarms, and we should be hostile to those institutions which siphon away our agency.
Just like old media.
The jury is still out on that one, I believe.
and i actually think it did a very poor job at explaining things to people completely unfamiliar with the issues. i wonder if it will change a single mind or just preach to the choir
I also suggested it to a friend who was pretty addicted to Facebook and believed a lot of conspiracy theories. It's made him realise how FB has given him (and others) a distorted picture of reality. He's now disconnected from Facebook and only keeping in contact via messages.
Many people might have a creeping feeling that something is wrong in the world of social media, but almost none understands the actual mechanics of an algorithm and what it can do when applied on a global scale. This film is made for them, and judging by the reactions to the movie from non-tech people around me, it has had a profound effect and made them reflect deeply about their use of social media.
This docudrama explains hard-to-understand concepts by telling emotional stories that most people can relate to, which frankly should be done more often for technical stuff affecting society in not so obvious ways. Again, this film is not for developers and engineers who mostly prefer dry facts. It's for everyone else.
```thesocialdilemma.com``` ```www.thesocialdilemma.com``` ```doubleclick.net``` ```googleads.g.doubleclick.net``` ```static.doubleclick.net``` ```fonts.googleapis.com``` ```youtube.com``` ```www.youtube.com```
if they truly have virtue, they could have used some other open sources to build the site
There is one consideration no one seriously thinks about when it comes to social media companies, in particular Facebook and Twitter. They cannot be fixed. They are failed experiments and need to end. The whole premise of the companies is to guide people's emotions for profit whether where they guide is good for society or not.
There is no way they will be ended due to the money they make and the fact they do some good, but there is also no way they can be fixed. Regulations, corporate leadership or a set of ethics won't do the trick. The framework is diseased and is a net negative on society.
If I'm understanding this correctly you're basically calling for them to be shut down. Wouldn't everyone just migrate to alternatives based in other countries? (Perhaps those less friendly to western values)
Would you prefer to have TikTok to Facebook? If so, why?
It's not realistic to think that these large social networks can be put back into the box. Ultimately, consumers like them, even if they aren't good for us. In a democracy, it's very tough to implement measures that destroy something that people actually like.
I think that social networks should be regulated in the same way as other harmful, yet enjoyable vices such as cigarettes and alcohol. A first pass would be to create a tax on social network data harvesting that starts to recognize the value they extract from us. The revenue from this tax could be invested into research that helps to understand the impact the social networks have on our lives and on democracy itself.
As with cigarettes, while we did not at first realize they were harmful, once it became clear through research that they caused harm, additional funding into high quality research allowed governments to eventually create science-guided policies that have largely put a lid on the problem. We are in the 1950s of social networking: i.e. doctors still recommend it. That needs to change.
They kind of stared loosing credibility with me after that. I wish the movie would stay on a single message/issue. It would have been more powerful, at least for me.
We shouldn’t discount the people speaking out because they created it.
We should criticize them if all they do this time is continue to make money on the problem versus resolving it with the same greed and passion they put into creating it
If Toyota fell off the edge of the disc, next year the world has less capacity to produce cars. A lot of capital will need to be obtained, and that will need to be turned into factories over several years before the world's productive capacity is restored. Meanwhile, people will have fewer new cars.
If Facebook, Twitter, or even (many parts of) Google disappear... Alternatives will emerge almost immediately. Social networking is not expensive to provide, and certainly not capital intensive. It'll be via a different UI, but none of us will lack for social media, messaging and such.
This is a crucial difference, economically. Social media is worth literal trillions, yet the industry could disappear without any consumer shortages.
Something to consider, as the power of these giants starts to resemble the old colonial trading companies'. This may be the least necessary industry ever.
For a bottom-up argument, consider mostly text based media like twitter or whatsapp. If you're involved in similar tech, I think it's quite easy to roughly estimate both the development and infrastructure requirements for something like this. It isn't too different from an email service or another text-centric media. Also (like email) it lends well to a distributed architecture, so may not even need a centralized infrastructure.
Hosting and serving video is costlier. Again, distributed architecture can make this irrelevant, or a much smaller. Even assuming a Facebook clone though, hard costs like video streaming are a small fraction of facebook revenue.
Re: distributed architecture. Remember that this is what the internet/web is fundamentally designed to do. It's not radical, and there are working examples out there that will work at massive scale. The www itself is such an example, but there are also more explicit examples that work more like Facebook does.
For a comparative argument, consider FB or Twitter when they were much (revenue-wise) smaller. Consider minor social networks (like HN). These might have 1/100th of FB or Twitter's usage, but generally operate on orders of magnitude less revenue user-for-user.
Basically, there are enough demonstrative examples to convince me that it is possible, even trivial.
I think there may be a lot more aspects to it that need attention than one anticipates at first.
>The filmmakers attempt to manipulate people into fearing technology that the filmmakers say is manipulating them.
I mean there are real problems with fake news stories getting promoted for example. On the other hand I'm quite happy to have a facebook account which I glance at occasionally to see what friends are up to. Or an HN account which is fun if a bit of a time sink.
But sometimes (most of the time, really) truth just doesn't fit this structure, so to make it engaging, you have to deform and twist it a bit. And if reality is really, actually, mundane, there's not much you can do to make it engaging, whereas it's extremely easy to make engaging, convincing falsehoods about nearly any subject.
its just that the 7 sins always win hands down. even for someone who's aware of their corrupting influence.
But while watching this I realized that wouldn’t be the entire solution. Social platforms would seemingly still be incentivized to drive up engagement and to keep users addicted to their platforms vs other platforms.
So what are some other solutions? Do we need to turn them into publishers to make them responsible for the content the spread? Or regulate algorithms and like buttons?
For example, I would quit Facebook if "events" were public, and I could easily see which events my friends go to without logging in to Facebook, perhaps through some open protocol.
I think universities should be more active in inventing secure, open protocols.
I wrote a detailed comment about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24006703
Worst part is the primary demographic is younger kids/teens.
It has nice episodes with deeper discussion of the social network social problem.
Check it out here: https://www.kontxt.io/proxy/https://www.theverge.com/interfa...
Or here's a streamlined summary: https://www.kontxt.io/document/d/JdE8ujfZmPy3bIAiv-tZQXVWfVf...
Check it out here: https://www.kontxt.io/proxy/https://www.theverge.com/interfa...
Or here's a streamlined summary: https://www.kontxt.io/document/d/JdE8ujfZmPy3bIAiv-tZQXVWfVf...
If the platform nudges us toward radical right-wing conspiracies, so be it. Similarly, if it helps us become a fervent Democrat, so long as we're on the platform, that's all that matters.
I deleted Facebook and Instagram Friday night after watching, and I suspect many of you will as well. I've had a great weekend with so much free time...
I haven't seen it, but I'm somewhat confused. FB and Instagram just show me posts from friends and family? Most youth sports, social events (weddings, dinners), babies, etc... FB does have some political posting, but IG very little.
And YouTube has virtually nothing political. I never go to the News channel. Its just all sports highlights recommended to me.
All of the platforms you mentioned can be profoundly political and filled with extreme content, depending on which rabbit whole you have been exposed to and captivated by.
EDIT: I forgot to attempt to answer your actual question, sorry. It's not that the platforms intentionally tries to radicalize you. The algorithms are programed to keep your attention for as long as possible, to keep you engaged and scrolling through your feed. The more time you spend on their platform, there more ads they can show you and the more money they make.
The radicalization is largely (I believe) an unintended consequence caused by the fact that recommending and showing you content that engages you emotionally makes you spend more time with them. This can also be exploited by people, groups or even nations who want to propagate a certain message or worldview.
The answer is sort of yes, in the sense that they provide you with more succinct explanations and analogies. This is useful if you want to explain this stuff to other people (who are not on HN).
However, there were so many amazing ways they articulated things for non-technical audiences, in a cohesive way, that you'll get a ton out of it.
I especially recommend watching it with non-tech friends or family! Led to a ton of great discussions for me.
The fact that many of the voices in the film had a hand in developing the technologies they raise the alarm about also adds an intriguing edge--especially since it's easy to interpret their participation in either a positive or negative light.
This and how they are eroding the attention spans of the consumers of their product.
Now more than ever it is important that thought workers develop their attentional skills, they're in short supply and getting shorter and shorter!
What if Wikipedia shows everyone a different page rather than the same? That's manipulation. And it's not good in that context.
In fact, with the exception of one scene, I don't think a computer was even shown – all the interactions were apps on phones.
(They did mention, at the end, extensions for blocking recommendations.)
https://www.wired.com/story/tech-needs-to-listen-to-actual-r...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/03/why-silicon-val...
That aside, the insidious thing about this movie is that many of the issues in brings up are real. There are real problems with social media addiction, ad tech, and filter bubbles. Changes do need to be made. Some might even need to be forced onto the big tech companies. However, these problems are not the root of all evil, as The Social Dilemma would have us believe.
They are certainly not the primary cause of societal upheaval we've been seeing. Political polarization in the US has been rising since the 90s, well before social media became dominant. Racism and police violence have never really gone away. Blaming tech for everything both makes it harder to fix the real problems with tech and easier to ignore the problems that exist elsewhere in society.
Off the top of my head, some things that deserve just as much blame for the problems this movie pins on technology:
1. The death of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine)
People can see distorted views of the world without the help of social media. One can argue that even now, Fox News and other mainstream media have a greater role in shaping public opinion than social media does. Not to mention the conglomerization of local news (driven by capital rather than tech) and the nationalization of media (enabled by tech, but driven by the MSM).
2. The slow death of the middle class, in the US and elsewhere.
An underlying assumption of The Social Dilemma and its line of argument is that people are dumb and easily manipulated. I suspect the educated elite, well-represented in the movie and over-represented here on HN, are particularly succeptible to this kind of thinking, myself included. But I think the reality is that most people care about their livelihoods more than anything else, and the polarization and upheaval we've been seeing (from Brexit to Trump) can largely be attributed to different reactions to this erosion of the middle class. The left might attribute it to unregulated capitalism and a failing social safety net. The right might attribute it to globalization, immigration, etc. The underlying phenomenon is the same, and has very little to do with tech, unless you're talking about factories and shipping costs.
3. Some problems have always been around - social media just makes everything more visible.
The last century saw two world wars, plenty of revolutions and armed conflict outside of that (which seems like a gross understatement, but there are too many to list), the death of the British Empire and the rise of many new nations, lots of social upheaval in the US... the list goes on. There's plenty to say about the 21st century as well, but looking back on history, I don't know if things have really gotten that much worse.
To put it differently, many on HN (myself included) love to tinker with tooling - editors, note-taking apps, what have you. But at the end of the day, we have to get back to the real work, and use those tools to accomplish meaningful things. If you look at social media and Internet technologies as tools for society, then yes, it's valuable to scrutinize them and see how they can be improved. But at the end of the day, we also need to get out into society and get to work, with whatever tools we have at hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...
"Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?"
I think people are talking about it here because it's been a popular topic on HN forever, and this movie brought it mainstream. It's "controversial" to tech people for a lot of reasons (diversity, "apology tour", etc). And it's also the first time a lot of our friends and family are talking about these issues.
[EDIT] I had the top comment... I've changed my mind, definitely a conspiracy!
People who realize their past actions caused harm should be praised not denigrated.
If these very intelligent people are going to claim they didn't understand what they they were doing, my only response is: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
When you engage with a company, any company, you can be sure your incentives are not completely aligned. In the case of social networks, the misalignments are particularly troubling.
Oh whoops, you better tell Big Goog so they can stop paying all those expensive software engineers.
I'm sorry but the apologist arguments on this thread are really laughable: "Nobody could have known!", "It's not software!", "Young teens can just voluntarily not use the software (sorry--"service") that all their friends are on!"
Are any of those true of Facebook's software? Do you think these cloud companies could get away with the abuses that they do if users did have these key freedoms?
The problem of software that works for its owners, rather than its users, is not a new one. It's disingenuous to pretend you only built an exploitative panopticon by accident.
The software doesn't run on the user's computer. You don't run Facebook - Facebook does, on their computers.
The option rests with the users not to engage with their software. Being exploited by a corporation is not a universal right.
But just to summarize:
- "Nobody could have foreseen people getting sick when we fed them these poisoned cakes! Oh if only I hadn't made these millions of dollars making people sick!"
- "Actually, many people over decades have argued that people should be able to see and modify the recipes that go into their food."
- "No, that's completely different because, you see, these days Facebook is baking the poison cake in their own oven. It's not even a cake. It's a service that offers cake slices, and you're free to not eat them. (ps we also put little bits of our cake in 90% of the other food in the grocery store)"
Besides that, the four freedoms include the freedom to use the software (Facebook's proprietary software, after all, runs on top of free software) for anything the user seems fit, including serving poisoned cakes and make billions of dollars out of that.
I am not engaging with your argument because it doesn't make sense. Facebook (and Google, and Twitter, and Hacker News) are services provided to us. We don't have a natural right to inspect the source of their software because the license it's under doesn't give us that right. Would it be better if we could? That's unclear, since a lot of the behavior is tied to the data that is collected and we can't inspect more than the data we have the right to see (our own).
a) This isn't strictly true. The Facebook app runs on users phones.
b) I don't know why you think this is a compelling argument. Why shouldn't we demand ethical behaviour from software accessed over a network? I can't tell if you're just a fatalist who can't even imagine expecting better, or if you really believe doing shitty things to your users doesn't count if you do it over TCP.