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For a big enough digital product, "hacking psychology" happens by default, more than intentionally. First, it happens through competition. Good psychology hack

For a big enough digital product, "hacking psychology" happens by default, more than intentionally. First, it happens through competition. Good psychology hacks are things like tinder's fast paced swiping. Out of the squillions of dating apps, the one with a good hack won. I think Facebook used an identical hack for its first version, the hot-or-not version. Twitter's basic concept. Snapchat's. Lots of examples. All good "psych-hacks" that formed a core of successful products, arrived at through a sort of natural selection process. I suspect that almost any app which does not "solve a problem" leverages some hack instead. Second, psych-hackers FB actually employ are not psychlogists. They're data scientists doing split tests. If this works like that, will you like more posts. A/B testing is really behavioural psychology expirementation, weaponized. I think both of these are quasi-inevitable. But, constant optimization towards viral drek is not. Where I think FB should be sheepish about is allowing the optimization to go on directionless. The only goals are quantitive. Quality is a foreign concept. No one has asked the question "what should FB be." The answer is simply "popular." This isn't inevitable. Applied to businesses as a whole, you could replace "popular" with profitable. All businesses are under this imperative. But, that doesn't mean directionless. Businesses can strive to be all sorts of things in addition to (or preferebly as a path to) profitable. FB is itself an example of this. What I want from FB (and Google) is a recognition that they are media companies, the biggest media companies. After that, they need to start dealing in quality. If you only optimize for quantity of reactions, shares and such while disregarding quality you become a shitty tabloid. No taste. No integrity. Just clickbait. FB need to ask themselves "is the content (eg news) on FB of good quality?"

splittingTimes 9y ago
> For a big enough digital product, "hacking psychology" happens by default, more than intentionally... Totally agree. > ..arrived at through a sort of natural selection process. I am not so sure. This all well-known stuff and employed methodically. There is an interesting article where a Google design ethicist explains how technology hijacks your mind [1]. TL;DR: Hijack 1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices. Ask yourself: What’s not on the menu?, Why am I being given these options and not others? Do I know the menu provider’s goals? Is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction? Hijack 2: Make apps behave like Slot Machines - give a variable reward. If you want to maximize addictiveness, link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable. Hijack 3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI). If I convince you that I’m a channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual opportunities — it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because there is a 1% chance you could be missing something important. Hijack 4: Social Approval. When you get tagged by my friend, you think s/he made a conscious choice to tag you, when actually s/he just responds to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice. Thus Facebook controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience their social approval on the line. Hijack 5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat). You follow me — it’s rude not to follow you back. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested c ontacts. Hijack 6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay Hijack 7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery. Messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously. Hijack 8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons. When you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), so Facebook converts every reason you have for using it, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things. In an ideal world, apps would always give you a direct way to get what you want separately from what they want. Hijack 9: Inconvenient Choices. Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder. NYTimes.com claims to give you “a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they force you to call a phone number that’s only open at certain times. Hijack 10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies. People don’t intuitively forecast the true time cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click”), and escalating from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick. === [1] http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds%E2%80%8A-%E2%80%8Afrom-a-magician-and-googles-design-ethicist/ http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-...
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  Excellent comment. I remember psychologists talking about the addictiveness of certain games (most notably MMOs) and identifying similar design elements.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    In college I thought I might want to make games but got a dose of reality from MMOs and realized I wanted no part in building those traps for other people.
    - avenius 9y ago
      It's funny - my group of friends used to be hardcore MMO gamers, but after a while the skinner box effect became so obvious to everyone that we could no longer bring ourselves to play them. We've been discussing whether the addictiveness of games such as WoW actually spelled out the death of MMOs.
      - hinkley 9y ago
        WoW has actually toned down the Skinner box effect. People would get stuck trying to repeat an event 10 times with a 20% success rate per try. If you have a lot of players then the number of people screwed over by getting the long statistical tail resembles the participant count of your forums. Bad press. So you get credit for effort. Your odds go up with each attempt until you succeed. Rare items though, still Skinner boxes.
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  > When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested contacts. There's a worse version here: some companies will mine various sources of information to get a strong indication that A knows B, suggest to B that they should connect to A in a way that sounds like an invitation from A but isn't, and if B takes the suggestion, send an invitation to A saying that B wants to connect.
intended 9y ago
No of course it is inevitable - All firms, are in competition. Media firms must get attention to succeed. There is more media than any human can consume in a life time. Therefore, to succeed, you must be the media consumed, instead of someone else. THis means you want to get peoples attention - at all costs. This is sufficient to create the situation we have. You can always add some twist to the whole thing, but this is sufficient.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  > THis means you want to get peoples attention - at all costs. But that is a very narrow view. The New York Times could claim they have proof Trump is an Alien from outer space. For the day, they would win the attention of the world. But the cost would be their credibility, which would lessen the share of attention they would receive on every day afterward. So the NYT pursues a strategy of building a customer relationship. And trying to get as much sustained attention as they can over the course of a relationship. They don't purse getting attention AT ALL COSTS on each individual day, and neither should Facebook.
  - pixl97 9y ago
    Eh, unless attention is worth far more than credibility. If the user base doesn't value credibility, then seeking it is a poor monetization strategy.
    - tspike 9y ago
      In the short-term or the long-term?
    - anonemouse145 9y ago
      This happens all the time. The New York Times has become an incredibly biased source. New York City is an incredibly Democrat-leaning echo chamber (I don't care what party it is, I care that a major news source is biased). New York State at large isn't. For anyone who thinks this isn't the case it isn't aware of the extent because the paper is paywalled so you can't see how had it is, page back to the debacle where the editorial staff were asking whether it was their job to question politicians' statements, or just "we report, you decide". A lot of people dropped their subscriptions because that's literally the only thing they were subscribing to the NYT for, and the editorial staff were announcing it didn't fit their profit model. The only readers they have left, are ones who don't mind tuning in to get the DNC agenda for the day. More or less. I got a free trial, and called to cancel it early (I had to call!), because it's just another tabloid. The only major news source I can stand to read anymore is maybe Reuters? I have to get my news from citizens who comb social media and investigate independently.
retailbuyout 9y ago
I din’t see tinder winning so much as creating a new (and very psychologically exploitable) app market. It was not inevitable; many still don’t use tinder style dating at all.
- wernercd 9y ago
  I think you are focused on the style of dating (Quick hookups) where the person you are responding too is focused on the unique app feature that made tinder "Stand out" from the crowd (Swipe left/right). It's that app feature which plays into the "exploitation" part of quick, responsive, immediate.
  - retailbuyout 9y ago
    Right, but the feature only makes sense if the risk is low (quick hookups). There aren’t any meaningful signals; just photos.
- empath75 9y ago
  Okcupid was there first. Tinder was just more exploitative.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Tinder is a "hookup" app isn't it, ie a way to find someone to have sex with; whilst OKcupid is aimed at "dating" ie people to have a longer term relationship [I know it has options for use in several scenarios, spouse seeking, dating, hookups, etc.].
  - alexanat 9y ago
    I think that is the way it is framed, but as the OKCupid user base bleeds out those users are most likely turning to Tinder as it has more people. OKCupid has actually lifted some features off of Tinder which makes no sense as they're owned by the same parent company which is kind of shooting itself in the foot with this approach. Anecdatally, I know people who have had long term relationships off of Tinder, some still together. I imagine that people will continue migrating over to Tinder from OKCupid.
TallGuyShort 9y ago
>> FB need to ask themselves "is the content (eg news) on FB of good quality?" I think this is a general problem. If Facebook is optimizing for whatever users "Like", as you suggest with the data scientists, it is analagous to a business given customers whatever they ask for. As Henry Ford is said to have said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse" (or something). You have to find a balance between "the customer is always right" and the fact that you are in a better position to be a domain expert. They have to balance "what gets people engaged" with "what's good for everybody" and hopefully find an optimal solution for both. Not sure how accurate it is, but the way Facebook's founding ideas are portrayed in The Social Network definitely screams "exploiting human psychology".
- mtberatwork 9y ago
  For Facebook, the customers are the ad buyers and the users are the product. Their only focus is to keep the product on the platform diligently submitting personal information and viewing ads.
  - chc 9y ago
    This seems like a simplistic take, and I don't think it accurately reflects the view of many people who actually work at Facebook. In online games like League of Legends, we do not say that whales are the customers and the players are the product, even though it's true in much the same way — the whales wouldn't give you money to play with the other users if the other users didn't exist. In both cases, the product is the product, non-paying users bring value to the product, and paying users turn that value into money.
    - zaccus 9y ago
      >>In online games like League of Legends, we do not say that whales are the customers and the players are the product We don't? Seems accurate to me.
      - chc 9y ago
indigochill 9y ago
I'd dispute the notion that Facebook is optimizing directionlessly. It just turns out when your entire business model is "sell ads", then profitability and popularity become synonymous. I'm very curious if you have a proposal for how to gauge content quality at scale. Back when I majored in journalism, "community engagement" was a massive topic. People wanted to create content that wasn't just "good" in a vacuum, but actually motivated society towards positive change. The theory went that if we reported on social issues in a certain way, perhaps we could influence society for the better. This was even the topic of my capstone project. In the end, I became disillusioned. My observations contradicted the notion that content quality (news content in my case) matters in either a commercial or social sense when conducted at scale. In my capstone project, some people volunteered to be interviewed about their volunteer work and their motivations. It was really interesting talking to all of them, but what I found in every case was that these people were motivated by life experiences, not media. I talked to an ex-con who had his life turned around by a books program, so he volunteered with the program when he got out. I also talked to a soccer mom who organized community events for her kids. This was admittedly a qualitative study on personal anecdotes with a small sample set so it's not hard science. But the hypothesis that content quality is irrelevant at a mass scale seems to hold up in practice. This also tangentially ties into a hypothesis I have on US presidential elections, which is that once it's down to two candidates, name recognition is all that matters. Every time (I'm aware of) that a president dominated the mass media of the time, he won the election. From FDR on radio to Kennedy on TV to Obama on social media and now Trump who rode on the public obsession with gossiping about every stupid thing he did or said. Okay, rant over. I am legitimately interested, though, in any ideas for determining content quality at scale just because it seems like an interesting project.
- amoorthy 9y ago
  We've written an algorithm that scores news for quality. It's a work-in-progress but you may be interested in checking out our chrome extension at http://www.civikowl.com/ http://www.civikowl.com/
  - hackerfromthefu 9y ago
dredmorbius 9y ago
The inevitable quality decline of popularity is much noted. "A Theory of Mass Culture", Dwight Macdonald. First Published June 1, 1953 https://doi.org/10.1177/039219215300100301 https://doi.org/10.1177/039219215300100301 (Available via Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.ac/10.1177/039219215300100301 https://sci-hub.ac/10.1177/039219215300100301)
wpietri 9y ago
> For a big enough digital product, "hacking psychology" happens by default, more than intentionally. Sure. But I think it's analogous to the days of patent medicines. Coca-Cola really did contain cocaine at some point; opium and heroin were also popular ingredients. [1] Did the people making those medicines intentionally set out to sell dangerously addictive substances? I doubt it. They just tried to make their sales graphs go up and to the right, experimenting and copying what worked in other patent medicines. The only reason things changed is that there was a national outcry. People came to recognize the dangers of addiction. When Coca Cola was created in 1885, it was made from coca leaves and kola nuts. By 1891, they cut the coca content by 90%. They cut it again in 1904, and by 1922 went entirely without. [1, 2] And it wasn't until 1983 that they offered a version without the other addictive stimulant. [3] I think we're starting to see the beginnings of a similar outcry today. I hope we'll see more of it. But if we want it to have an effect, it will have to happen at a societal level (e.g., the threat of regulation) and an individual level (with more people refusing digital time-sucks like Facebook and Candy Crush). I also think it needs to happen at an interpersonal one; people working on addictive digital products should face social questions, just like somebody making cigarettes would. Because as you say, many of the individuals creating things like Facebook just aren't thinking about these broader issues. [1] See, e.g. https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-todays-illegal-drugs-were-marketed-as-medicines-510258499 https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-todays-illegal-drugs-were-market... [2] https://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cocaine.asp https://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cocaine.asp [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine-Free_Coca-Cola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine-Free_Coca-Cola
- buckminster 9y ago
  That Snopes article is just wrong. Coca Cola still contains coca leaf extract. Coca leaf extract is not cocaine.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    One coca leaf extract is indeed cocaine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_New_Organic_Base_in_the_Coca_Leaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_New_Organic_Base_in_the_C... So I believe my comment above is still correct.
ryandrake 9y ago
> Where I think FB should be sheepish about is allowing the optimization to go on directionless. The only goals are quantitive. Quality is a foreign concept. No one has asked the question "what should FB be." The answer is simply "popular." Problem is: Quality itself is defined by quantitative measurements. It's not some separate product attribute. If something increases your business KPIs, it is ipso facto higher quality. Motivated only by the imperative to optimize these KPIs, a company will do so, believing that it is continually making the product better. Allowed to run its course, you end up with a Paperclip Maximizer [1]. 1: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
ben_jones 9y ago
Reminds me of the dystopian conclusion of AI that to protect humans you have to enslave them in some manner to protect them from themselves. Facebook's endless psychology games and A/B testing will ultimately create the most profitable product - which will be the most manipulative product possible.
dougmccune 9y ago
Just a minor point but I know actual psychologists (PhDs in clinical psychology) employed by Facebook, so it's definitely not just data scientists running a/b tests.
- shmageggy 9y ago
  Not a minor point at all. Gaming companies hire psychologists too. Corporations are doing this sort of thing very deliberately and have been for a while.
amigoingtodie 9y ago
You are what you measure.
dxbydt 9y ago
> constant optimization towards viral dreck Classifying a topic as/as-not viral dreck is, I posit, quite hard. Indulge me a bit here - I primarily come to HN to read about ML/AI/DNN. I mark the ones I like with the favorites button. During my work downtime, I go back to my favorites folder and re-read the topic. For some of the topics such as Word Embeddings, I must have re-read that paper a dozen times. I have actually used the material I learnt from my HN favorites list at my workplace, built it into products, gotten $$ off of it. So stuff like JIT compiler, LibHTTP, Bitcoin Bubble, Nintendo (all the topics trending right now) are viral dreck to me. I don't want this viral dreck. Get it off of HN! You can see how quickly this sort of reasoning becomes vacuous. I have an FB account mostly to interact with my extended family. Most of them are in their 70s and 80s. Every single topic they interact with on FB qualifies in my mind as viral dreck. However, by the nature of their comments, they seem to derive much pleasure in engaging with it. Given their age, who am I to deny them their cup of poison. Its not like they are going to get wise on word embeddings at the age of 75. Let them have their viral dreck.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  ..Indulge me a bit here - oh don’t encourage me. :) On the “this is hard” point. Yes it is. I’m asserting that every business have a handful of core, hard problems. One of journalism’s is maintaining good quality standards, traditionally using subjective yet fairly well established definitions and methods, like an editor with good taste, formal fact checking, etc.. One of Apple’s hard problems is making consumer tech elegantly simple. The rhetorical click-wheel iPod. Again, there’s a lot of subjective elements that go into this. How does a FB tackle this? Judging by your favourite HN article, I will forward a guess that you immediately jump to an ML or an algorithmic way of classifying things. On that front, I think FB could get some wins. Is dreck classification all that different from spam classification? Does PG’s “plan for spam” apply here? I would guess that it does for some dreck types. I actually think FB is currently deploying some spam-filter like system to deal with the most onerous “fake news.” Google’s starting point was page rank, a relevance ranking system. Fairly quickly, they added in “quality” ranking to supplement that. This is probably the least monolithic of their core systems. At the same time, SEO came into being and anti-spam became the third plank to google search. Taken together, this is quality classification. The inverse of dreck classification. I don’t want to overemphasise these things though. FB is one of the best positioned to use “computer science-ish” solutions. But, I think the bigger choices are not at that level. They’re not a choice of technological approaches. It’s more mundane, values, priorities, product culture. Defining what they are and making good content a part of that definition. HN already has quality built into it. When a feature is released (rarely, after all HN is not even a commercial product) someone makes a decision. Does nesting comments like this encourage dreck, in HN’s case flame wars and quips? Does changing something about moderation improve the quality of discussion? Are the really good, but slower, harder and more technical topics being buried? How do we unbury them? This speaks to your ideal HN. No one has ever asked and answered such a question about youtube comments, we see the results. I don’t think FB has done enough of this, especially as relates to the high exposure. “viral” content. The best articulation of the approach (IMO) is Spolsky’s “social UI^” and the early podcasts with him and Atwood. When they were making Stackoverflow, a lot of attention was paid to the type of content/behaviour encouraged by certain product/UI choices. They had an idea of what a good comment, question or answer looks like. They built the product to produce these. It wasn’t just about “more stuff.” They had an opinion about what stuff is valuable. FB will need to be more programmable, but that’s easier if you start from the Spolsky mentality. Instead of “dreck classifier,” you just need to recognise flame wars, thought bubbles, divisive headlines. You need to decide that a comment by someone who has read an article is more valuable than a comment by someone who has not. The components become more achievable sounding, IMO. ^I wonder if this falls into your “dreck” category, for a little bit of extra irony. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/09/06/its-not-just-usability/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/09/06/its-not-just-usabi...
sfifs 9y ago
Well "shitty tabloids" tend to survive financially. The media companies that don't work that way tend to require a rich benefactor who doesn't mind making little money or losing money to keep it alive. So it's no surprise FB etc value survival.
real-hacker 9y ago
Cannot agree more. The Internet has a natural selection mechanism that rewards the product that captures the most attention, for the longest time. As long as this mechanism is at play, there will always be mind hacks that get people hooked. So it's not that people are evil, it's the system, the ad-driven business model.

splittingTimes 9y ago

> For a big enough digital product, "hacking psychology" happens by default, more than intentionally... Totally agree. > ..arrived at through a sort of natural selection process. I am not so sure. This all well-known stuff and employed methodically. There is an interesting article where a Google design ethicist explains how technology hijacks your mind [1]. TL;DR: Hijack 1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices. Ask yourself: What’s not on the menu?, Why am I being given these options and not others? Do I know the menu provider’s goals? Is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction? Hijack 2: Make apps behave like Slot Machines - give a variable reward. If you want to maximize addictiveness, link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable. Hijack 3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI). If I convince you that I’m a channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual opportunities — it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because there is a 1% chance you could be missing something important. Hijack 4: Social Approval. When you get tagged by my friend, you think s/he made a conscious choice to tag you, when actually s/he just responds to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice. Thus Facebook controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience their social approval on the line. Hijack 5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat). You follow me — it’s rude not to follow you back. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested c ontacts. Hijack 6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay Hijack 7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery. Messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously. Hijack 8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons. When you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), so Facebook converts every reason you have for using it, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things. In an ideal world, apps would always give you a direct way to get what you want separately from what they want. Hijack 9: Inconvenient Choices. Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder. NYTimes.com claims to give you “a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they force you to call a phone number that’s only open at certain times. Hijack 10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies. People don’t intuitively forecast the true time cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click”), and escalating from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick. === [1] http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds%E2%80%8A-%E2%80%8Afrom-a-magician-and-googles-design-ethicist/ http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-...

enraged_camel 9y ago
Excellent comment. I remember psychologists talking about the addictiveness of certain games (most notably MMOs) and identifying similar design elements.
- hinkley 9y ago
  In college I thought I might want to make games but got a dose of reality from MMOs and realized I wanted no part in building those traps for other people.
  - avenius 9y ago
    It's funny - my group of friends used to be hardcore MMO gamers, but after a while the skinner box effect became so obvious to everyone that we could no longer bring ourselves to play them. We've been discussing whether the addictiveness of games such as WoW actually spelled out the death of MMOs.
    - hinkley 9y ago
      WoW has actually toned down the Skinner box effect. People would get stuck trying to repeat an event 10 times with a 20% success rate per try. If you have a lot of players then the number of people screwed over by getting the long statistical tail resembles the participant count of your forums. Bad press. So you get credit for effort. Your odds go up with each attempt until you succeed. Rare items though, still Skinner boxes.
JoshTriplett 9y ago
> When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested contacts. There's a worse version here: some companies will mine various sources of information to get a strong indication that A knows B, suggest to B that they should connect to A in a way that sounds like an invitation from A but isn't, and if B takes the suggestion, send an invitation to A saying that B wants to connect.

intended 9y ago

No of course it is inevitable - All firms, are in competition. Media firms must get attention to succeed. There is more media than any human can consume in a life time. Therefore, to succeed, you must be the media consumed, instead of someone else. THis means you want to get peoples attention - at all costs. This is sufficient to create the situation we have. You can always add some twist to the whole thing, but this is sufficient.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
> THis means you want to get peoples attention - at all costs. But that is a very narrow view. The New York Times could claim they have proof Trump is an Alien from outer space. For the day, they would win the attention of the world. But the cost would be their credibility, which would lessen the share of attention they would receive on every day afterward. So the NYT pursues a strategy of building a customer relationship. And trying to get as much sustained attention as they can over the course of a relationship. They don't purse getting attention AT ALL COSTS on each individual day, and neither should Facebook.
- pixl97 9y ago
  Eh, unless attention is worth far more than credibility. If the user base doesn't value credibility, then seeking it is a poor monetization strategy.
  - tspike 9y ago
    In the short-term or the long-term?
  - anonemouse145 9y ago
    This happens all the time. The New York Times has become an incredibly biased source. New York City is an incredibly Democrat-leaning echo chamber (I don't care what party it is, I care that a major news source is biased). New York State at large isn't. For anyone who thinks this isn't the case it isn't aware of the extent because the paper is paywalled so you can't see how had it is, page back to the debacle where the editorial staff were asking whether it was their job to question politicians' statements, or just "we report, you decide". A lot of people dropped their subscriptions because that's literally the only thing they were subscribing to the NYT for, and the editorial staff were announcing it didn't fit their profit model. The only readers they have left, are ones who don't mind tuning in to get the DNC agenda for the day. More or less. I got a free trial, and called to cancel it early (I had to call!), because it's just another tabloid. The only major news source I can stand to read anymore is maybe Reuters? I have to get my news from citizens who comb social media and investigate independently.

retailbuyout 9y ago

I din’t see tinder winning so much as creating a new (and very psychologically exploitable) app market. It was not inevitable; many still don’t use tinder style dating at all.

wernercd 9y ago
I think you are focused on the style of dating (Quick hookups) where the person you are responding too is focused on the unique app feature that made tinder "Stand out" from the crowd (Swipe left/right). It's that app feature which plays into the "exploitation" part of quick, responsive, immediate.
- retailbuyout 9y ago
  Right, but the feature only makes sense if the risk is low (quick hookups). There aren’t any meaningful signals; just photos.
empath75 9y ago
Okcupid was there first. Tinder was just more exploitative.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Tinder is a "hookup" app isn't it, ie a way to find someone to have sex with; whilst OKcupid is aimed at "dating" ie people to have a longer term relationship [I know it has options for use in several scenarios, spouse seeking, dating, hookups, etc.].
- alexanat 9y ago
  I think that is the way it is framed, but as the OKCupid user base bleeds out those users are most likely turning to Tinder as it has more people. OKCupid has actually lifted some features off of Tinder which makes no sense as they're owned by the same parent company which is kind of shooting itself in the foot with this approach. Anecdatally, I know people who have had long term relationships off of Tinder, some still together. I imagine that people will continue migrating over to Tinder from OKCupid.

TallGuyShort 9y ago

>> FB need to ask themselves "is the content (eg news) on FB of good quality?" I think this is a general problem. If Facebook is optimizing for whatever users "Like", as you suggest with the data scientists, it is analagous to a business given customers whatever they ask for. As Henry Ford is said to have said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse" (or something). You have to find a balance between "the customer is always right" and the fact that you are in a better position to be a domain expert. They have to balance "what gets people engaged" with "what's good for everybody" and hopefully find an optimal solution for both. Not sure how accurate it is, but the way Facebook's founding ideas are portrayed in The Social Network definitely screams "exploiting human psychology".

mtberatwork 9y ago
For Facebook, the customers are the ad buyers and the users are the product. Their only focus is to keep the product on the platform diligently submitting personal information and viewing ads.
- chc 9y ago
  This seems like a simplistic take, and I don't think it accurately reflects the view of many people who actually work at Facebook. In online games like League of Legends, we do not say that whales are the customers and the players are the product, even though it's true in much the same way — the whales wouldn't give you money to play with the other users if the other users didn't exist. In both cases, the product is the product, non-paying users bring value to the product, and paying users turn that value into money.
  - zaccus 9y ago
    >>In online games like League of Legends, we do not say that whales are the customers and the players are the product We don't? Seems accurate to me.
    - chc 9y ago

indigochill 9y ago

I'd dispute the notion that Facebook is optimizing directionlessly. It just turns out when your entire business model is "sell ads", then profitability and popularity become synonymous. I'm very curious if you have a proposal for how to gauge content quality at scale. Back when I majored in journalism, "community engagement" was a massive topic. People wanted to create content that wasn't just "good" in a vacuum, but actually motivated society towards positive change. The theory went that if we reported on social issues in a certain way, perhaps we could influence society for the better. This was even the topic of my capstone project. In the end, I became disillusioned. My observations contradicted the notion that content quality (news content in my case) matters in either a commercial or social sense when conducted at scale. In my capstone project, some people volunteered to be interviewed about their volunteer work and their motivations. It was really interesting talking to all of them, but what I found in every case was that these people were motivated by life experiences, not media. I talked to an ex-con who had his life turned around by a books program, so he volunteered with the program when he got out. I also talked to a soccer mom who organized community events for her kids. This was admittedly a qualitative study on personal anecdotes with a small sample set so it's not hard science. But the hypothesis that content quality is irrelevant at a mass scale seems to hold up in practice. This also tangentially ties into a hypothesis I have on US presidential elections, which is that once it's down to two candidates, name recognition is all that matters. Every time (I'm aware of) that a president dominated the mass media of the time, he won the election. From FDR on radio to Kennedy on TV to Obama on social media and now Trump who rode on the public obsession with gossiping about every stupid thing he did or said. Okay, rant over. I am legitimately interested, though, in any ideas for determining content quality at scale just because it seems like an interesting project.

amoorthy 9y ago
We've written an algorithm that scores news for quality. It's a work-in-progress but you may be interested in checking out our chrome extension at http://www.civikowl.com/ http://www.civikowl.com/
- hackerfromthefu 9y ago

dredmorbius 9y ago

The inevitable quality decline of popularity is much noted. "A Theory of Mass Culture", Dwight Macdonald. First Published June 1, 1953 https://doi.org/10.1177/039219215300100301 https://doi.org/10.1177/039219215300100301 (Available via Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.ac/10.1177/039219215300100301 https://sci-hub.ac/10.1177/039219215300100301)

wpietri 9y ago

> For a big enough digital product, "hacking psychology" happens by default, more than intentionally. Sure. But I think it's analogous to the days of patent medicines. Coca-Cola really did contain cocaine at some point; opium and heroin were also popular ingredients. [1] Did the people making those medicines intentionally set out to sell dangerously addictive substances? I doubt it. They just tried to make their sales graphs go up and to the right, experimenting and copying what worked in other patent medicines. The only reason things changed is that there was a national outcry. People came to recognize the dangers of addiction. When Coca Cola was created in 1885, it was made from coca leaves and kola nuts. By 1891, they cut the coca content by 90%. They cut it again in 1904, and by 1922 went entirely without. [1, 2] And it wasn't until 1983 that they offered a version without the other addictive stimulant. [3] I think we're starting to see the beginnings of a similar outcry today. I hope we'll see more of it. But if we want it to have an effect, it will have to happen at a societal level (e.g., the threat of regulation) and an individual level (with more people refusing digital time-sucks like Facebook and Candy Crush). I also think it needs to happen at an interpersonal one; people working on addictive digital products should face social questions, just like somebody making cigarettes would. Because as you say, many of the individuals creating things like Facebook just aren't thinking about these broader issues. [1] See, e.g. https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-todays-illegal-drugs-were-marketed-as-medicines-510258499 https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-todays-illegal-drugs-were-market... [2] https://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cocaine.asp https://www.snopes.com/cokelore/cocaine.asp [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine-Free_Coca-Cola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine-Free_Coca-Cola

buckminster 9y ago
That Snopes article is just wrong. Coca Cola still contains coca leaf extract. Coca leaf extract is not cocaine.
- wpietri 9y ago
  One coca leaf extract is indeed cocaine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_New_Organic_Base_in_the_Coca_Leaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_a_New_Organic_Base_in_the_C... So I believe my comment above is still correct.

ryandrake 9y ago

> Where I think FB should be sheepish about is allowing the optimization to go on directionless. The only goals are quantitive. Quality is a foreign concept. No one has asked the question "what should FB be." The answer is simply "popular." Problem is: Quality itself is defined by quantitative measurements. It's not some separate product attribute. If something increases your business KPIs, it is ipso facto higher quality. Motivated only by the imperative to optimize these KPIs, a company will do so, believing that it is continually making the product better. Allowed to run its course, you end up with a Paperclip Maximizer [1]. 1: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

ben_jones 9y ago

Reminds me of the dystopian conclusion of AI that to protect humans you have to enslave them in some manner to protect them from themselves. Facebook's endless psychology games and A/B testing will ultimately create the most profitable product - which will be the most manipulative product possible.

dougmccune 9y ago

Just a minor point but I know actual psychologists (PhDs in clinical psychology) employed by Facebook, so it's definitely not just data scientists running a/b tests.

shmageggy 9y ago
Not a minor point at all. Gaming companies hire psychologists too. Corporations are doing this sort of thing very deliberately and have been for a while.

amigoingtodie 9y ago

You are what you measure.

dxbydt 9y ago

> constant optimization towards viral dreck Classifying a topic as/as-not viral dreck is, I posit, quite hard. Indulge me a bit here - I primarily come to HN to read about ML/AI/DNN. I mark the ones I like with the favorites button. During my work downtime, I go back to my favorites folder and re-read the topic. For some of the topics such as Word Embeddings, I must have re-read that paper a dozen times. I have actually used the material I learnt from my HN favorites list at my workplace, built it into products, gotten $$ off of it. So stuff like JIT compiler, LibHTTP, Bitcoin Bubble, Nintendo (all the topics trending right now) are viral dreck to me. I don't want this viral dreck. Get it off of HN! You can see how quickly this sort of reasoning becomes vacuous. I have an FB account mostly to interact with my extended family. Most of them are in their 70s and 80s. Every single topic they interact with on FB qualifies in my mind as viral dreck. However, by the nature of their comments, they seem to derive much pleasure in engaging with it. Given their age, who am I to deny them their cup of poison. Its not like they are going to get wise on word embeddings at the age of 75. Let them have their viral dreck.

dalbasal 9y ago
..Indulge me a bit here - oh don’t encourage me. :) On the “this is hard” point. Yes it is. I’m asserting that every business have a handful of core, hard problems. One of journalism’s is maintaining good quality standards, traditionally using subjective yet fairly well established definitions and methods, like an editor with good taste, formal fact checking, etc.. One of Apple’s hard problems is making consumer tech elegantly simple. The rhetorical click-wheel iPod. Again, there’s a lot of subjective elements that go into this. How does a FB tackle this? Judging by your favourite HN article, I will forward a guess that you immediately jump to an ML or an algorithmic way of classifying things. On that front, I think FB could get some wins. Is dreck classification all that different from spam classification? Does PG’s “plan for spam” apply here? I would guess that it does for some dreck types. I actually think FB is currently deploying some spam-filter like system to deal with the most onerous “fake news.” Google’s starting point was page rank, a relevance ranking system. Fairly quickly, they added in “quality” ranking to supplement that. This is probably the least monolithic of their core systems. At the same time, SEO came into being and anti-spam became the third plank to google search. Taken together, this is quality classification. The inverse of dreck classification. I don’t want to overemphasise these things though. FB is one of the best positioned to use “computer science-ish” solutions. But, I think the bigger choices are not at that level. They’re not a choice of technological approaches. It’s more mundane, values, priorities, product culture. Defining what they are and making good content a part of that definition. HN already has quality built into it. When a feature is released (rarely, after all HN is not even a commercial product) someone makes a decision. Does nesting comments like this encourage dreck, in HN’s case flame wars and quips? Does changing something about moderation improve the quality of discussion? Are the really good, but slower, harder and more technical topics being buried? How do we unbury them? This speaks to your ideal HN. No one has ever asked and answered such a question about youtube comments, we see the results. I don’t think FB has done enough of this, especially as relates to the high exposure. “viral” content. The best articulation of the approach (IMO) is Spolsky’s “social UI^” and the early podcasts with him and Atwood. When they were making Stackoverflow, a lot of attention was paid to the type of content/behaviour encouraged by certain product/UI choices. They had an idea of what a good comment, question or answer looks like. They built the product to produce these. It wasn’t just about “more stuff.” They had an opinion about what stuff is valuable. FB will need to be more programmable, but that’s easier if you start from the Spolsky mentality. Instead of “dreck classifier,” you just need to recognise flame wars, thought bubbles, divisive headlines. You need to decide that a comment by someone who has read an article is more valuable than a comment by someone who has not. The components become more achievable sounding, IMO. ^I wonder if this falls into your “dreck” category, for a little bit of extra irony. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/09/06/its-not-just-usability/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/09/06/its-not-just-usabi...

sfifs 9y ago

Well "shitty tabloids" tend to survive financially. The media companies that don't work that way tend to require a rich benefactor who doesn't mind making little money or losing money to keep it alive. So it's no surprise FB etc value survival.

real-hacker 9y ago

Cannot agree more. The Internet has a natural selection mechanism that rewards the product that captures the most attention, for the longest time. As long as this mechanism is at play, there will always be mind hacks that get people hooked. So it's not that people are evil, it's the system, the ad-driven business model.