cokeandsympathy

> Were kind of seeing a kind of trend where every new media invention goes though a cycle of hype and fear towards a new normal and usually a new political and cultural structure. And i suspect that a lot of the "fear" is at least partially a part of that process.

That doesn't make this fear unjustified. The radio made Nazism more powerful. Trump doesn't become president without the current 24-hours news culture. ISIS doesn't gain nearly as much influence without social media.

Also, where exactly are you getting "decentralized authority free media landscape" from?

Get out of here with that both sides the same bullshit. Wheeler was an industry man, but the the Obama administration fought to preserve net neutrality and Obama supported classifying ISPs as utilities.

Campaign donations and lobbying are a systematic problem, but laying the blame there and only there ignores the fact that there there are degrees of complicitness within a corrupt system, as well as degrees of the impact imposed by the corruption itself. Ultimately only one side of the aisle seems so eager to get in bed with ISPs to destroy the internet, to deny climate change in support of their fossil fuel benefactors, and to dismantle the healthcare system for the benefit of the rich.

Also, ask yourself which party supports citizen United, and which party obstructed any progress on legislative efforts to address it?

While there's a good amount of outrage in some online niches, I don't think Net Neutrality has been on the radar of the general public. A lot of friends and family I've spoken to over the past few weeks don't understand the power that repealing net neutrality will give to ISPs.

Also, I think people are so emotionally worn out by the mass distraction machine that is the Trump presidency, the over-saturation of outrage in the media, and the fact that so many democratic and political institutions are under attack that people either can't keep track of each one, feel hopeless, or have just tuned it all out for their own sanity.

What do you do then when millions of others fail to take that responsibility? Do we have a responsibility to build a system that encourages people to take responsibility for themselves and others or that eliminates means by which some are led to act irresponsibly?

Take drug addiction as an example. Sure, we can tell addicts 'well you shouldn't have done drugs' or 'just quit' to an addict. Do we then ignore those who have engineered a system to get people hooked? Many health experts point to the over-prescription of opiate painkillers led in part by a medical industry hoping to maximize profits. All the while their dependence creates negative externalities to others in society through crime and poor decision-making.

At the end of the day rationality is an abstraction of actual human behavior. We can make decisions that are 'rational' in a neo-liberal economic sense, but that we ultimately regret. When profit rules all else, businesses will exploit this discrepancy.

You might want to check out some of the criticism advanced by people such as Tristan Harris on the tension between the user behaviors that tech companies optimize their product design, and the goals users hope to accomplish through their use. I do in some ways support Nir in that we should learn how to harness these types of technologies for our own good, to 'supercharge' our ability to accomplish what we want, but I do not trust any company dependent on ad-revenue (or backed by Wall Street in general) to help with that.

I'd also recommend checking out The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu and Addiction by Design by Natasha Schull for background on the history of the commodification of attention and of the

The point though is that companies act to maximize 'user engagement', a goal which may be at odds with what users actually want to get out of a product or service. Whatever they can do to get just 5% more views or clicks or time on sight is 5% more ad revenue for their investors. Nevermind if that 5% comes from time I'd rather been spending elsewhere and will end up regretting. They incorporate design choices that cause this, whether by autoplaying the next video, implementing a continuous feed, all while controlling exactly how much content they need to show before you finally get sick of it. They are stealing the surplus the promised you.

And suppose you are of psychological steel. Should those who aren't still be exploited? There are entire industries and schools of design whose goal it is to extract as much money as possible from users, take slot machine design for example. (I'd definitely recommend looking up the work of Natasha Schull). Do you consider that practice immoral? Nir's existence is a testament to the fact that product designers use similar techniques

The current aim at Facebook book is to harvest as much of the world's attention as possible to resell to advertisers. Users are not it's customers, the businesses that pay it to advertise are. It's primary goal is to suck you in and keep you using it by any means necessary, ethics be damned

It's turning a game into a skinner box designed to extract as much money as possible from those who buy the game. It operates on the same basic principles as slot machines.

What did them in for me was the insistence on creating usernames which could not be hid. It ruined the localized aspect of the anonymity by focusing on the person, creating a power-user shit-posting environment instead of letting content arise organically from a faceless localized mass.

Is the problem posed to the environment from plastics greater than the human benefit from their use?

A difference though is that the time limit between pixel placing introduced opportunity cost and provided a means of testing strength of preference.

People were forced to make trade-offs between creating the things they wanted to see and censoring the things they didn't want to see, and could not do both simultaneously. This is unlike political systems in which people can vote on a referendum on gay marriage and zoning laws on the same ballot (or US congressmen voting on multiple laws in one session).

Of course there are still elements of this in politics when it comes to enacting complex legislation (can't do healthcare and tax reform at the same time) but that that has more to do with the time and political capital trade-offs it takes to build coalitions which can then act unilaterally, while in reddit the cost is downstream, as coalitions must divide their power if they want to pursue simultaneous goals.

Also, the time limit measured takes into account strength of preference since the ability of an individual to affect the outcome of the canvas depends on how much time they're willing to devote to their effort. Consider the example of LGBT laws. Those who are LGBT tend to have much stronger preferences regarding such laws compared to the general population who may be for or against them (though some on the religious right probably feel very strongly as well). In politics, this can lead to persecution, as a majority of people that don't care strongly but vote no can hold back those who care strongly and vote yes. On the reddit platform, since people with greater conviction are likely to devote more time than those who do not care strongly, it makes it more likely for them to get their message out.