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My humble, personal opinion that I have been reluctant to share: I am embarrassed by what has become of some parts of the industry I love. For as much as Silic

My humble, personal opinion that I have been reluctant to share: I am embarrassed by what has become of some parts of the industry I love. For as much as Silicon Valley professes that it wants to "make the world a better place", you can also find - social media websites that feed on people's addictions, almost forcing them to post and share as much as they can instead of simply enjoying moments in their lives. - the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting propagated throughout all these social networks. - big tech companies where employees are sold on "making the world a better place" but instead become completely dependent on attaining fake labels like "senior engineer" - and yet have never actually talked to a single user. - games that are no longer fun, but are now environments deliberately set up to trap users in their own Skinner Boxes, pulling levers and pushing buttons to open loot boxes that slowly drain out their bank accounts - the outright denial of many people in the tech industry that any of the above is a problem. Simply read through the comments on this HN page. Identifying that any of these things are problems is the first step in fixing them.

haberman 9y ago
I can say that I'm much more receptive to hearing this from someone in the industry (like you) than to hear one industry pointing fingers at another. The news industry invented the 24 hour news cycle, and the exploiting people's fear and outrage to keep their attention fixed on all of the worst, link-baity events that happen every day. The article talks about Eighth Graders and how 10 hours a week online makes them less happy; what about people who spend that much time watching the news? I'd wager that a lot of the negative feelings people get from spending too much time online come from reading too much news (and social media reactions to news). This creates an unfounded feeling that the world is falling apart compared to how it was 10 or 20 years ago, when by most objective measures the world is getting better. So I can acknowledge that there are problems, while simultaneously feeling a bit unwilling to be demonized in this way by the New York Times.
- chickenfries 9y ago
  > I can say that I'm much more receptive to hearing this from someone in the industry (like you) than to hear one industry pointing fingers at another. This is a good way to only hear opinions you like. Maybe try to work on feeling less personally demonized by people talking about an entire industry and it's effects on society? Also, we in tech throw stones at literally every other industry all the time. We're out to disrupt everyone else's industries, remember? We can dish it out but can't take it?
  - haberman 9y ago
    This article has the word "evil" in the title. It is explicitly painting the industry as malevolent. To me, disruption is about trying to find better and more efficient ways of doing things. Not disparaging or scapegoating the people already in that industry.
    - falcolas 9y ago
      Tell that to taxi drivers, or hotel managers, or newspapers angry at Google's scraping and re-presentation of their data.
      - haberman 9y ago
        How does the tech industry disparage those people?
        falcolas 9y ago
        On HN, the disparagement tends to start with "Good, <sector> deserves to be disrupted" and continues with anecdotes and stereotypes.
        chickenfries 9y ago
        I hear techies disparage the industries they're trying to disrupt all the time. There's a certain "schadenfreude" that some people have for the industries that tech disrupts. I don't have any evidence for you off-hand but this is so incredibly common in my start-up experience that I hope you'll understand that even if you don't think so, lots of people do.
chickenfries 9y ago
> the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting propagated throughout all these social networks. This is the most disillusioning thing about being a web developer, for me. I remember it was so recently that during the Arab Spring I thought Twitter was a meaningfully democratizing force. Now I just see it as a vehicle for brands, a source for lazy journalists to find poorly worded quotes for any sort of viewpoint they want to write about. And of course we know that Twitter is full of sock puppets, paid trolls and bots. We know that Russia and China will continue to use paid trolls to drive wedge issues right to the heart of the culture warriors. And honestly we should've seen it coming the whole time. People like Richard Stallman did. I've been a naive apologist. No more.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  >We know that Russia and China will continue to use paid trolls to drive wedge issues right to the heart of the culture warriors. US based corporations are definitely guilty of astroturfing as well.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    And some of those astroturfers are probably working for the tech industry as well. See: positive review bombing of metacritic for Star Wars: Battlefront for one single example.
  - 3131s 9y ago
    Yes, and the US government. The US military contracted out the development of "online persona management" software to Ntrepid, as revealed by the HBGary hack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid HBGary was not awarded that particular contract, but does create its own astroturfing software anyway. I have no doubt it's common among US companies and I find it incredibly grating when Americans call this a Russian or Chinese phenomenon. From an attachment in an email by then HBGary CEO Aaron Barr: > "Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use. > To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter,‭ ‬blogs,‭ ‬forums,‭ ‬buzz,‭ ‬and myspace under created names that fit the profile‭ (‬satellitejockey,‭ ‬hack3rman,‭ ‬etc‭)‬.‭ ‬These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds,‭ ‬retweets,‭ ‬and linking together social media commenting between platforms.‭ ‬With a pool of these accounts to choose from,‭ ‬once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name,‭ ‬lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected‭ ‬#‭ ‬of previously created social media accounts,‭ ‬automatically pre-aging the real accounts." > Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas" https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails//fileid/2142/726 https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails//fileid/2142/726
Arainach 9y ago
Don't forget: - Companies that flagrantly violate the law while claiming that it's OK because they're offering benefits to users - meanwhile trying to develop a monopoly in a previously regulated space.
kekimusmaximus 9y ago
- companies actively trying to avoid paying taxes
- platinumrad 9y ago
  Not sure how this is at all exclusive to ""tech"".
  - gaius 9y ago
    But the big tech names are the most egregious offenders: Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber... how does that mesh with a brand that claims to be about saving the world, community, yadda yadda?
    - platinumrad 9y ago
      Is Uber really a more egregious offender than Exxon-Mobil? I am not at all defending large "tech" companies but to pretend that they are the first (or the worst) when it comes to dodging taxed is rather silly. Exploiting every last tax loophole possible is something common to all sufficiently wealthy individuals/corporations—even the queen herself is in on it.
      - musage 9y ago
        > to pretend that they are the first (or the worst) when it comes to dodging taxed is rather silly. Who did? Name one actual instance where one actual person did claim they're the first to ever do that.
        platinumrad 9y ago
        Sure, many more people think they're the worst than the first so maybe i should have swapped the order and the parentheses. However, the entire present conversation around "tech" is rooted in an implicit waryness of the novelty of the whole enterprise.
  - 9y ago
smsm42 9y ago
How SV is to blame for fake news? This has nothing to do with either SV or tech in general, it's like blaming car makers for Al Capone because he used them to get away from the police. Internet is still incredible learning tool. If you want to learn. Much better actually than it was 10 years ago. You have free university-level courses, you have Duolingo where you can learn two dozen languages or so, you have Wikipedia, you have SciHub, you have enormous quantity of scientific and scolarly content available absolutely free... But of course if you insist on going to sites with fake news, nobody can prevent it. Same for games - which tech industry doesn't design, or careerism - which sure as heck tech industry did not invent, it existed way before Hero of Alexandria invented world's first steam engine. Of course, the grass was greener, the sky was bluer and the internet was interneter when we're young. Everything was better when we're young. That has also been invented sometime between wheel and fire. But tech companies have nothing to do with all those faults of human nature - they are not free from them, of course, but they did not create them and did not change them in any substantial way. They did, however, make many things cheaper, faster, easier, more accessible and more affordable.
- nl 9y ago
  This has nothing to do with either SV or tech in general, it's like blaming car makers for Al Capone because he used them to get away from the police. It's more like blaming Ford for the Pinto ("unsafe at any speed"). Deliberate design choices are what made fake news effective. Think of Fake News as spam email: Gmail (and others) mostly solved spam email because they decided to. Apple made a deliberate decision to manually review apps in the AppStore. Twitter made the deliberate decision not to ban spam bots in its ToS(!). Facebook made a deliberate decision to reward engagement on links.
  - jaredklewis 9y ago
    Fake news is a much, much harder problem than spam. Spam is simply marketing emails that a user never asked to receive. If you ask users themselves for a definition of spam, you’ll get some variation on the above. If users were asked to mark emails they considered to be spam, they would generally mark the same kind of emails as spam. Some would mark more, some less, but all around a common center. Users and companies are basically in agreement about what spam is. Compare with fake news. If you asked users to mark stories they considered fake, some would mark info wars and some would mark huff post. And those groups would rarely overlap. Given that users and companies fundamentally disagree on what fake news even is, I can’t see how any piece of technology can solve this.
arximboldi 9y ago
I agree! And the list could be so much longer... It seems also that precisely the privacy-destroying centralizing ad-selling machine companies, are the ones that occupy all our mind-space and have the money and technically interesting challenges. (Oh, and there is also fintech!) I now am doing ok freelancing (mostly for my previous employer and some other small music software companies from Berlin) and doing some open-source on the side. But it is often hard to motivate myself to get out there and network or find stuff to earn money. Sometimes I consider going back to academia, but my feeling is that over the last years the attempts at quantifying academic output have risen competition to completely unhealthy levels (as my academic friend says: if he has to think in 6-month/project/paper timelines, where is the "long-term" in publicly funded research?). At least it is easy to find a job that pays decent, which is a very good position to be in compared most of my friends of my generation. And I love software engineering itself. Yet I often wish I could just go on UBI and do open-source stuff all day.
- platinumrad 9y ago
  I'm glad someone's bringing up fintech. I'm not at all convinced that HFT, etc. provide any social benefit whatsorver. At least cryptocurrencies have interesting applications with regard to decentralization and autonomy.
- erezsh 9y ago
  I'm in a very similar position. Grew up excited for the tech revolution, and became extremely disappointed when I realized it meant people tweeting their lunch and sharing fakebook news. I'm now a freelancer because I can't stand the thought of contributing my expertise to an employer who only cares about his bottom line (99% of workplaces, as far as I can tell), but unfortunately it feels more like escapism than activism. I wish there was a place for retro-techies to band together and try to figure out a way out of this mess. I know there are groups who are trying to create alternatives (for example, scuttlebutt is a nice community), but their interactions are mostly project-driven, and not necessarily pragmatic. I feel like if enough talented developers (and designers, managers, etc.) group together for a good cause, we can make a difference. More difference than just creating a better browser, or a better twitter. Well, anyway, back to reality..
ssijak 9y ago
Look, that is all fine and dandy but I am much more angry at the actual users. Who forces to use anything that you mentioned? And in that way. I know it is not easy to be against all that money poured into researching how to trick your psychology to make you do what they want, but you can. Mine example (just for examples sake) : - Never read local news both online and offline because in my country, Serbia, all newspapers are so bad and just use click baits and target human emotions without real reporting. Fake news everywhere. I only open news when I hear from the social circle about something important and want to read more about it. - Deleted facebook from the phone, use it once daily on the PC for a few minutes. There is still value in it if used sparingly. My wife also use it to promote her fitness business. - Be very mindful of what you install on your phone or PC. Every app is potential time waster even if it seems useful at the beginning. - I call my self just Software Engineer from the day one (have more than 10 years of experience now) - Related to games, I do not have much time to play them now but when I do I only buy games with good single player story. Never buy games that just require too much grind/time wasting/money sinking. Only multiplayer games that I play are casual in person ones (PES, FIFA). - I eat unprocessed food as much as I can, me and my wife prepare it. We both train regularly in the gym, go on occasional hike in the nature, party or whatever. Trying to enjoy life on our terms in general. All in all. I know it is hard and I am far from perfect, just wanted to say that users can vote what they want by their actions. But I really can`t explain to myself why it seems to be so hard for many.
- wellboy 9y ago
  Because most people (80%+) struggle to maintain their job, health or family and dont have the focus to worry about things like that and are easy victims for addictive social media. Those products are built to exploit human nature and it takes a lot of effort and mindset to withstand those. Most people don't have the ability or the focus to do that.
  - ssijak 9y ago
    I understand all of that. But still, majority of my friends complain how news are bad and facebook is bad and tv is bad and they spend large amount of their time consuming it. I was doing that too, but as soon as I realized that it was bad for me, I stopped. And yes, it was not 100% easy, they do provide dopamine fix or some other fake/empty entertainment for the brain that you need to fill with something else. But it is doable.
azangru 9y ago
> the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. My take on this is that the internet users who wish to learn need to learn how to learn, which sources to trust, which claims to discard. I do not have a clear understanding of what "fake news" is (the term is so derogatory and loosely applied), but I would imagine that it is in some respect similar to the infamous Nigerian spam, to which many internet users have been exposed and whom they learned to recognize and ignore (as they did with most of the spam). You are free to choose or ignore whatever sources of information (or misinformation) that you wish. For me, that's a glorious thing. Complaining about fake news is, to my ear, similar to complaining about religions or mysticism — it may be misinformation but some people like it for some reason.
replicatorblog 9y ago
My humble, personal opinion that I have been reluctant to share: This tech backlash is a projection of people's larger frustrations onto big tech. - Social Media Addiction: You can passively use Twitter to follow "history in pictures" and "baby kitten of the day" photos. People choose to follow 500 politically charged accounts and then get surprised that the environment turns toxic. Unfriend everyone on Facebook who isn't a close friend, family member and revel in a stream of baby pics and holiday greetings. Or if your family insists on talking politics, create a second account to serve as your primary. Or just don't use it. - Fake News: There used to be a publication called the Weekly World News at almost every check-out in the US that made claims that the Clintons were romantically involved with space aliens (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-clintons-aliens/#)—somehow http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c..., the Republic withstood this rash of Fake News. That some people can't work out that conspiracy theories promulgated by "EaglePatriotNewz.PL" or "GMOTruthNow.us" aren't likely to be accurate isn't the fault of Facebook. It's a problem to be sure, but not a tech problem. - Out-of-Touch Tech Co's: No amount of user research will protect a company from groups who are determined to take offense. Google recently added a calorie counter to its walking maps feature and was presented as an attack on people with eating disorders (https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/google-maps-ditches-automatic-calorie-estimates-after-users-say-its-not-helpful-and-even-potentially-harmful/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/google-maps-ditches-automa...). They angered others by promoting civil rights pioneer, who happened to have complimented Osama Bin Laden supporter on their homepage (https://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11713686/yuri-kochiyama https://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11713686/yuri-kochiyama). I don't know if these are examples of Google being out of touch, or just so large that any decision is likely to anger some subset of the user base. - No-fun Games: Imagine a title from the golden age of gaming and you can probably find a free port on the App Store. There are orders of magnitudes more titles available today. - Denial: I agree that tech as an industry could do many things better, but in my personal, humble estimation of the world's top problems it doesn't rank in the top 50. I don't think it's among the top ten most evil industries, but it seems I'm increasingly in the minority.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  > Social Media Addiction: You can passively use Twitter to follow "history in pictures" and "baby kitten of the day" photos. People choose to follow 500 politically charged accounts and then get surprised that the environment turns toxic. The "evil" part of this is that they encourage you to do exactly this. They'll go out of their way to find entities for you to subscribe to, regardless of how tangential the relationship is. Unlike your bartender or waitress, they never cut you off when you're in too deep-- they just keep shoving more down your throat. An alcoholic should be able to call it quits after just one drink, too. Like the rhythm method, not everybody has the willpower to just pull out once engaged. This mechanism capitalizes on human frailty to keep users engaged. > Fake News: There used to be a publication called the Weekly World News at almost every check-out in the US that made claims that the Clintons were romantically involved with space aliens (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c... http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c..., the Republic withstood this rash of Fake News. That some people can't work out that conspiracy theories promulgated by "EaglePatriotNewz.PL" or "GMOTruthNow.us" aren't likely to be accurate isn't the fault of Facebook. It's a problem to be sure, but not a tech problem. Fantastic claims about lizards in politics are on the level with comic books-- recognizable as fiction without even needing to think about it, and diminished by the fact that nobody else but that single tabloid is making such claims. You can safely evaluate it based on number of claims alone. "If this were true, everybody would be reporting on it!" Well, enter social media. Thanks to the algorithms and the circles you're part of, you're bombarded with variants of this story about lesbian leisure suit lizards from a virtually unlimited number of sources, legit or not. Suddenly, it looks like everybody is reporting on this lizard thing. "You should just know better" doesn't work when the more you're exposed to it, the more you're desensitized, and the more real it becomes. That is the corruptive influence of social media and fake news. We've all had that one crazy relative who insists some crazy conspiracy is true, but these lies can only achieve this scale of influence because of tech.
ewjordan 9y ago
> games that are no longer fun, but are now environments deliberately set up to trap users in their own Skinner Boxes, pulling levers and pushing buttons to open loot boxes that slowly drain out their bank accounts Gamers will hate me for this, but I actually very much prefer some of the simple "Skinner box" puzzle and collection games that are out now to the shitty, twitchy, time-sink "hardcore" ones that came before that everyone loved so much. Give me Tsum Tsum, Yokai Watch Wibble Wobble, and Puzzle and Dragons any day over Counterstrike, WoW (though I spent plenty of time on both of those), or any of the FPS crapshows on the market right now that are basically just Counterstrike with better graphics. I'll happily spend my $60 over time while enjoying casual bite-sized gameplay on my schedule, rather than the intensity and practice that "real gamer" games require. I also fail to see WTF games have to do with the tech industry at all, it's a minuscule portion of the sector.
- skybrian 9y ago
  I agree with you about AAA games, but there are interesting indy games out there like Kerbal Space Program, Factorio, and Rimworld that (unfortunately) take some time to get into compared to casual games.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Kerbal Space Program doesn't take that much time. You can be smearing green goo over the launch pad in less than 4 minutes and basically everything after that is just an extension to "smear green goo over [thing in space]". Maybe even flying back home too.
- openfuture 9y ago
  I'd consider gamified things like facebook as 'games', the patterns employed are the same as those skinner box things.
- exDM69 9y ago
  I don't see the argument above as casual vs. hardcore or indie vs. AAA. It's about designing games primarily to empty your wallet with microtransactions rather than providing you with fun. Games that encourage addictive, even compulsive behavior that may seem fun for a while but will quickly turn you into a dopamine rat seeking for your next fix. If you're an addictive nature, which is whom the games industry are targeting with predatory practices. The whales that pay the bills.
thesmallestcat 9y ago
> fake labels like "senior engineer" - and yet have never actually talked to a single user. You lost me there. What about that title is "fake"? To be clear, people pursue titles because they come with raises. Or rather, the title change is used to justify the raise. What does talking to a user have to do with anything? Is it important that a pharmaceutical chemist talk to prospective patients? Most software businesses have job functions that specifically deal with the user (design, UX, product, support, sales). As an engineer, nobody would oppose me pursuing interviews with users, it's just not a good use of my time when people I rely on (UX, etc.) already are doing it.
marcosdumay 9y ago
I mostly agree, but fake news is what people do. When you create a new communication channel, the one thing you can be assured is that when it gets popular, fake news will come to it. It was not created by the Internet, it will not go away. People communicate mostly gossip and propaganda, the only way out is changing people.
nerdponx 9y ago
I am mostly just disappointed and disgusted with so many of my peers going off to work in exploitative industries (attention-tech being one of them), making huge gobs of money, gentrifying Brooklyn, and pretending like they are still socially conscious. Just like their closet-racist parents back in the suburbs.
m-i-l 9y ago
You are not alone. I suspect some of the strongest opponents of "technology" are now "technologists", i.e. people who work in technology can be the most opposed to what the general public see as technology. In my view it isn't the technology that is "evil", it is the monetisation of the technology, or more specifically the people behind the monetisation of it. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying how disappointed I am with how the internet has turned out, for example. From the initial optimism around things like "information want to be free" and "disintermediation" we have moved to "When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive" and the "reintermediation" of the big internet giants. And I have a terrible feeling that in a decade or two we'll see something similar with some of the new technologies we're getting excited about now. For example, blockchain and cryptocurrrencies facilitate an "the internet of money" with e.g. frictionless cross border transactions, but could in future end up allowing authorities to track every transaction by every person. So what can we do about it?
- tboyd47 9y ago
  I'm a web developer and I agree with all that's been said here, especially the "reintermediation" bit. It has become clear to me as well that the web is no longer what it used to be and will probably never return to what it was, because of these monetization practices. I am interested in finding out what the "next" web will be. Maybe it will be built on existing protocols, and maybe something else entirely? There are also certain web-focused techs and companies I see as being bastions of the "old way," such as Wordpress and Ruby on Rails, and I'd like to get more involved in preserving and promoting those techs in a professional setting. I'm also interested in walking back some of these misguided monetization tactics you speak of. Programmatic CPM-based ad networks are one of those I'd like to see reversed. I feel that we as developers often underestimate the collective influence we have as technology experts. We are the creators of tech; our culture is essentially tech culture. Do Google and Facebook have the power they have because we give them that power? If so, what do we get in return?
  - chickenfries 9y ago
    > I feel that we as developers often underestimate the collective influence we have as technology experts. We are the creators of tech; our culture is essentially tech culture. Do Google and Facebook have the power they have because we give them that power? If so, what do we get in return? They have the power precisely because they have the capital. If all of the rich people who don't need to work banded together to work on open source and federated technologies that would be great. But the rest of us need to work and can't challenge our employers politics in any meaningful way.
pmoriarty 9y ago
I have a different set of gripes, regarding people in tech who are: 1 - Working for and enabling makers of spyware and other privacy-defeating technologies (including companies like Google and Facebook who make it their business to spy on their users). 2 - Working for the military and "defense" contractors or on technology which is intended to kill or enable more efficient killing of people. 3 - Working for advertisers who lie and manipulate people in to buying shit they don't need. 4 - Working for or as spammers, malware purveyors, and various other blackhats. 5 - Exploiting people who work for them by underpaying them, overworking them, manipulating them, or lying to them. 6 - Lack education outside of STEM -- particularly lacking knowledge of history, ethics, literature, and art that makes for a myopic narrow-mindedness. 7 - When the above lack of education is combined with arrogance and a darwinian, survival of the fittest, might makes right, "look out for number one and fuck everybody else" attitude without any sort of social conscience or desire to improve the world beyond making it easier for the rich to get richer.

haberman 9y ago

I can say that I'm much more receptive to hearing this from someone in the industry (like you) than to hear one industry pointing fingers at another. The news industry invented the 24 hour news cycle, and the exploiting people's fear and outrage to keep their attention fixed on all of the worst, link-baity events that happen every day. The article talks about Eighth Graders and how 10 hours a week online makes them less happy; what about people who spend that much time watching the news? I'd wager that a lot of the negative feelings people get from spending too much time online come from reading too much news (and social media reactions to news). This creates an unfounded feeling that the world is falling apart compared to how it was 10 or 20 years ago, when by most objective measures the world is getting better. So I can acknowledge that there are problems, while simultaneously feeling a bit unwilling to be demonized in this way by the New York Times.

chickenfries 9y ago
> I can say that I'm much more receptive to hearing this from someone in the industry (like you) than to hear one industry pointing fingers at another. This is a good way to only hear opinions you like. Maybe try to work on feeling less personally demonized by people talking about an entire industry and it's effects on society? Also, we in tech throw stones at literally every other industry all the time. We're out to disrupt everyone else's industries, remember? We can dish it out but can't take it?
- haberman 9y ago
  This article has the word "evil" in the title. It is explicitly painting the industry as malevolent. To me, disruption is about trying to find better and more efficient ways of doing things. Not disparaging or scapegoating the people already in that industry.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    Tell that to taxi drivers, or hotel managers, or newspapers angry at Google's scraping and re-presentation of their data.
    - haberman 9y ago
      How does the tech industry disparage those people?
      - falcolas 9y ago
        On HN, the disparagement tends to start with "Good, <sector> deserves to be disrupted" and continues with anecdotes and stereotypes.
      - chickenfries 9y ago
        I hear techies disparage the industries they're trying to disrupt all the time. There's a certain "schadenfreude" that some people have for the industries that tech disrupts. I don't have any evidence for you off-hand but this is so incredibly common in my start-up experience that I hope you'll understand that even if you don't think so, lots of people do.

chickenfries 9y ago

> the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting propagated throughout all these social networks. This is the most disillusioning thing about being a web developer, for me. I remember it was so recently that during the Arab Spring I thought Twitter was a meaningfully democratizing force. Now I just see it as a vehicle for brands, a source for lazy journalists to find poorly worded quotes for any sort of viewpoint they want to write about. And of course we know that Twitter is full of sock puppets, paid trolls and bots. We know that Russia and China will continue to use paid trolls to drive wedge issues right to the heart of the culture warriors. And honestly we should've seen it coming the whole time. People like Richard Stallman did. I've been a naive apologist. No more.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
>We know that Russia and China will continue to use paid trolls to drive wedge issues right to the heart of the culture warriors. US based corporations are definitely guilty of astroturfing as well.
- falcolas 9y ago
  And some of those astroturfers are probably working for the tech industry as well. See: positive review bombing of metacritic for Star Wars: Battlefront for one single example.
- 3131s 9y ago
  Yes, and the US government. The US military contracted out the development of "online persona management" software to Ntrepid, as revealed by the HBGary hack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid HBGary was not awarded that particular contract, but does create its own astroturfing software anyway. I have no doubt it's common among US companies and I find it incredibly grating when Americans call this a Russian or Chinese phenomenon. From an attachment in an email by then HBGary CEO Aaron Barr: > "Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use. > To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter,‭ ‬blogs,‭ ‬forums,‭ ‬buzz,‭ ‬and myspace under created names that fit the profile‭ (‬satellitejockey,‭ ‬hack3rman,‭ ‬etc‭)‬.‭ ‬These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds,‭ ‬retweets,‭ ‬and linking together social media commenting between platforms.‭ ‬With a pool of these accounts to choose from,‭ ‬once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name,‭ ‬lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected‭ ‬#‭ ‬of previously created social media accounts,‭ ‬automatically pre-aging the real accounts." > Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas" https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails//fileid/2142/726 https://wikileaks.org/hbgary-emails//fileid/2142/726

Arainach 9y ago

Don't forget: - Companies that flagrantly violate the law while claiming that it's OK because they're offering benefits to users - meanwhile trying to develop a monopoly in a previously regulated space.

kekimusmaximus 9y ago

- companies actively trying to avoid paying taxes

platinumrad 9y ago
Not sure how this is at all exclusive to ""tech"".
- gaius 9y ago
  But the big tech names are the most egregious offenders: Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber... how does that mesh with a brand that claims to be about saving the world, community, yadda yadda?
  - platinumrad 9y ago
    Is Uber really a more egregious offender than Exxon-Mobil? I am not at all defending large "tech" companies but to pretend that they are the first (or the worst) when it comes to dodging taxed is rather silly. Exploiting every last tax loophole possible is something common to all sufficiently wealthy individuals/corporations—even the queen herself is in on it.
    - musage 9y ago
      > to pretend that they are the first (or the worst) when it comes to dodging taxed is rather silly. Who did? Name one actual instance where one actual person did claim they're the first to ever do that.
      - platinumrad 9y ago
        Sure, many more people think they're the worst than the first so maybe i should have swapped the order and the parentheses. However, the entire present conversation around "tech" is rooted in an implicit waryness of the novelty of the whole enterprise.
- 9y ago

smsm42 9y ago

How SV is to blame for fake news? This has nothing to do with either SV or tech in general, it's like blaming car makers for Al Capone because he used them to get away from the police. Internet is still incredible learning tool. If you want to learn. Much better actually than it was 10 years ago. You have free university-level courses, you have Duolingo where you can learn two dozen languages or so, you have Wikipedia, you have SciHub, you have enormous quantity of scientific and scolarly content available absolutely free... But of course if you insist on going to sites with fake news, nobody can prevent it. Same for games - which tech industry doesn't design, or careerism - which sure as heck tech industry did not invent, it existed way before Hero of Alexandria invented world's first steam engine. Of course, the grass was greener, the sky was bluer and the internet was interneter when we're young. Everything was better when we're young. That has also been invented sometime between wheel and fire. But tech companies have nothing to do with all those faults of human nature - they are not free from them, of course, but they did not create them and did not change them in any substantial way. They did, however, make many things cheaper, faster, easier, more accessible and more affordable.

nl 9y ago
This has nothing to do with either SV or tech in general, it's like blaming car makers for Al Capone because he used them to get away from the police. It's more like blaming Ford for the Pinto ("unsafe at any speed"). Deliberate design choices are what made fake news effective. Think of Fake News as spam email: Gmail (and others) mostly solved spam email because they decided to. Apple made a deliberate decision to manually review apps in the AppStore. Twitter made the deliberate decision not to ban spam bots in its ToS(!). Facebook made a deliberate decision to reward engagement on links.
- jaredklewis 9y ago
  Fake news is a much, much harder problem than spam. Spam is simply marketing emails that a user never asked to receive. If you ask users themselves for a definition of spam, you’ll get some variation on the above. If users were asked to mark emails they considered to be spam, they would generally mark the same kind of emails as spam. Some would mark more, some less, but all around a common center. Users and companies are basically in agreement about what spam is. Compare with fake news. If you asked users to mark stories they considered fake, some would mark info wars and some would mark huff post. And those groups would rarely overlap. Given that users and companies fundamentally disagree on what fake news even is, I can’t see how any piece of technology can solve this.

arximboldi 9y ago

I agree! And the list could be so much longer... It seems also that precisely the privacy-destroying centralizing ad-selling machine companies, are the ones that occupy all our mind-space and have the money and technically interesting challenges. (Oh, and there is also fintech!) I now am doing ok freelancing (mostly for my previous employer and some other small music software companies from Berlin) and doing some open-source on the side. But it is often hard to motivate myself to get out there and network or find stuff to earn money. Sometimes I consider going back to academia, but my feeling is that over the last years the attempts at quantifying academic output have risen competition to completely unhealthy levels (as my academic friend says: if he has to think in 6-month/project/paper timelines, where is the "long-term" in publicly funded research?). At least it is easy to find a job that pays decent, which is a very good position to be in compared most of my friends of my generation. And I love software engineering itself. Yet I often wish I could just go on UBI and do open-source stuff all day.

platinumrad 9y ago
I'm glad someone's bringing up fintech. I'm not at all convinced that HFT, etc. provide any social benefit whatsorver. At least cryptocurrencies have interesting applications with regard to decentralization and autonomy.
erezsh 9y ago
I'm in a very similar position. Grew up excited for the tech revolution, and became extremely disappointed when I realized it meant people tweeting their lunch and sharing fakebook news. I'm now a freelancer because I can't stand the thought of contributing my expertise to an employer who only cares about his bottom line (99% of workplaces, as far as I can tell), but unfortunately it feels more like escapism than activism. I wish there was a place for retro-techies to band together and try to figure out a way out of this mess. I know there are groups who are trying to create alternatives (for example, scuttlebutt is a nice community), but their interactions are mostly project-driven, and not necessarily pragmatic. I feel like if enough talented developers (and designers, managers, etc.) group together for a good cause, we can make a difference. More difference than just creating a better browser, or a better twitter. Well, anyway, back to reality..

ssijak 9y ago

Look, that is all fine and dandy but I am much more angry at the actual users. Who forces to use anything that you mentioned? And in that way. I know it is not easy to be against all that money poured into researching how to trick your psychology to make you do what they want, but you can. Mine example (just for examples sake) : - Never read local news both online and offline because in my country, Serbia, all newspapers are so bad and just use click baits and target human emotions without real reporting. Fake news everywhere. I only open news when I hear from the social circle about something important and want to read more about it. - Deleted facebook from the phone, use it once daily on the PC for a few minutes. There is still value in it if used sparingly. My wife also use it to promote her fitness business. - Be very mindful of what you install on your phone or PC. Every app is potential time waster even if it seems useful at the beginning. - I call my self just Software Engineer from the day one (have more than 10 years of experience now) - Related to games, I do not have much time to play them now but when I do I only buy games with good single player story. Never buy games that just require too much grind/time wasting/money sinking. Only multiplayer games that I play are casual in person ones (PES, FIFA). - I eat unprocessed food as much as I can, me and my wife prepare it. We both train regularly in the gym, go on occasional hike in the nature, party or whatever. Trying to enjoy life on our terms in general. All in all. I know it is hard and I am far from perfect, just wanted to say that users can vote what they want by their actions. But I really can`t explain to myself why it seems to be so hard for many.

wellboy 9y ago
Because most people (80%+) struggle to maintain their job, health or family and dont have the focus to worry about things like that and are easy victims for addictive social media. Those products are built to exploit human nature and it takes a lot of effort and mindset to withstand those. Most people don't have the ability or the focus to do that.
- ssijak 9y ago
  I understand all of that. But still, majority of my friends complain how news are bad and facebook is bad and tv is bad and they spend large amount of their time consuming it. I was doing that too, but as soon as I realized that it was bad for me, I stopped. And yes, it was not 100% easy, they do provide dopamine fix or some other fake/empty entertainment for the brain that you need to fill with something else. But it is doable.

azangru 9y ago

> the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. My take on this is that the internet users who wish to learn need to learn how to learn, which sources to trust, which claims to discard. I do not have a clear understanding of what "fake news" is (the term is so derogatory and loosely applied), but I would imagine that it is in some respect similar to the infamous Nigerian spam, to which many internet users have been exposed and whom they learned to recognize and ignore (as they did with most of the spam). You are free to choose or ignore whatever sources of information (or misinformation) that you wish. For me, that's a glorious thing. Complaining about fake news is, to my ear, similar to complaining about religions or mysticism — it may be misinformation but some people like it for some reason.

replicatorblog 9y ago

My humble, personal opinion that I have been reluctant to share: This tech backlash is a projection of people's larger frustrations onto big tech. - Social Media Addiction: You can passively use Twitter to follow "history in pictures" and "baby kitten of the day" photos. People choose to follow 500 politically charged accounts and then get surprised that the environment turns toxic. Unfriend everyone on Facebook who isn't a close friend, family member and revel in a stream of baby pics and holiday greetings. Or if your family insists on talking politics, create a second account to serve as your primary. Or just don't use it. - Fake News: There used to be a publication called the Weekly World News at almost every check-out in the US that made claims that the Clintons were romantically involved with space aliens (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-clintons-aliens/#)—somehow http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c..., the Republic withstood this rash of Fake News. That some people can't work out that conspiracy theories promulgated by "EaglePatriotNewz.PL" or "GMOTruthNow.us" aren't likely to be accurate isn't the fault of Facebook. It's a problem to be sure, but not a tech problem. - Out-of-Touch Tech Co's: No amount of user research will protect a company from groups who are determined to take offense. Google recently added a calorie counter to its walking maps feature and was presented as an attack on people with eating disorders (https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/google-maps-ditches-automatic-calorie-estimates-after-users-say-its-not-helpful-and-even-potentially-harmful/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/google-maps-ditches-automa...). They angered others by promoting civil rights pioneer, who happened to have complimented Osama Bin Laden supporter on their homepage (https://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11713686/yuri-kochiyama https://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11713686/yuri-kochiyama). I don't know if these are examples of Google being out of touch, or just so large that any decision is likely to anger some subset of the user base. - No-fun Games: Imagine a title from the golden age of gaming and you can probably find a free port on the App Store. There are orders of magnitudes more titles available today. - Denial: I agree that tech as an industry could do many things better, but in my personal, humble estimation of the world's top problems it doesn't rank in the top 50. I don't think it's among the top ten most evil industries, but it seems I'm increasingly in the minority.

jstarfish 9y ago
> Social Media Addiction: You can passively use Twitter to follow "history in pictures" and "baby kitten of the day" photos. People choose to follow 500 politically charged accounts and then get surprised that the environment turns toxic. The "evil" part of this is that they encourage you to do exactly this. They'll go out of their way to find entities for you to subscribe to, regardless of how tangential the relationship is. Unlike your bartender or waitress, they never cut you off when you're in too deep-- they just keep shoving more down your throat. An alcoholic should be able to call it quits after just one drink, too. Like the rhythm method, not everybody has the willpower to just pull out once engaged. This mechanism capitalizes on human frailty to keep users engaged. > Fake News: There used to be a publication called the Weekly World News at almost every check-out in the US that made claims that the Clintons were romantically involved with space aliens (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c... http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c..., the Republic withstood this rash of Fake News. That some people can't work out that conspiracy theories promulgated by "EaglePatriotNewz.PL" or "GMOTruthNow.us" aren't likely to be accurate isn't the fault of Facebook. It's a problem to be sure, but not a tech problem. Fantastic claims about lizards in politics are on the level with comic books-- recognizable as fiction without even needing to think about it, and diminished by the fact that nobody else but that single tabloid is making such claims. You can safely evaluate it based on number of claims alone. "If this were true, everybody would be reporting on it!" Well, enter social media. Thanks to the algorithms and the circles you're part of, you're bombarded with variants of this story about lesbian leisure suit lizards from a virtually unlimited number of sources, legit or not. Suddenly, it looks like everybody is reporting on this lizard thing. "You should just know better" doesn't work when the more you're exposed to it, the more you're desensitized, and the more real it becomes. That is the corruptive influence of social media and fake news. We've all had that one crazy relative who insists some crazy conspiracy is true, but these lies can only achieve this scale of influence because of tech.

ewjordan 9y ago

> games that are no longer fun, but are now environments deliberately set up to trap users in their own Skinner Boxes, pulling levers and pushing buttons to open loot boxes that slowly drain out their bank accounts Gamers will hate me for this, but I actually very much prefer some of the simple "Skinner box" puzzle and collection games that are out now to the shitty, twitchy, time-sink "hardcore" ones that came before that everyone loved so much. Give me Tsum Tsum, Yokai Watch Wibble Wobble, and Puzzle and Dragons any day over Counterstrike, WoW (though I spent plenty of time on both of those), or any of the FPS crapshows on the market right now that are basically just Counterstrike with better graphics. I'll happily spend my $60 over time while enjoying casual bite-sized gameplay on my schedule, rather than the intensity and practice that "real gamer" games require. I also fail to see WTF games have to do with the tech industry at all, it's a minuscule portion of the sector.

skybrian 9y ago
I agree with you about AAA games, but there are interesting indy games out there like Kerbal Space Program, Factorio, and Rimworld that (unfortunately) take some time to get into compared to casual games.
- zaarn 9y ago
  Kerbal Space Program doesn't take that much time. You can be smearing green goo over the launch pad in less than 4 minutes and basically everything after that is just an extension to "smear green goo over [thing in space]". Maybe even flying back home too.
openfuture 9y ago
I'd consider gamified things like facebook as 'games', the patterns employed are the same as those skinner box things.
exDM69 9y ago
I don't see the argument above as casual vs. hardcore or indie vs. AAA. It's about designing games primarily to empty your wallet with microtransactions rather than providing you with fun. Games that encourage addictive, even compulsive behavior that may seem fun for a while but will quickly turn you into a dopamine rat seeking for your next fix. If you're an addictive nature, which is whom the games industry are targeting with predatory practices. The whales that pay the bills.

thesmallestcat 9y ago

> fake labels like "senior engineer" - and yet have never actually talked to a single user. You lost me there. What about that title is "fake"? To be clear, people pursue titles because they come with raises. Or rather, the title change is used to justify the raise. What does talking to a user have to do with anything? Is it important that a pharmaceutical chemist talk to prospective patients? Most software businesses have job functions that specifically deal with the user (design, UX, product, support, sales). As an engineer, nobody would oppose me pursuing interviews with users, it's just not a good use of my time when people I rely on (UX, etc.) already are doing it.

marcosdumay 9y ago

I mostly agree, but fake news is what people do. When you create a new communication channel, the one thing you can be assured is that when it gets popular, fake news will come to it. It was not created by the Internet, it will not go away. People communicate mostly gossip and propaganda, the only way out is changing people.

nerdponx 9y ago

I am mostly just disappointed and disgusted with so many of my peers going off to work in exploitative industries (attention-tech being one of them), making huge gobs of money, gentrifying Brooklyn, and pretending like they are still socially conscious. Just like their closet-racist parents back in the suburbs.

m-i-l 9y ago

You are not alone. I suspect some of the strongest opponents of "technology" are now "technologists", i.e. people who work in technology can be the most opposed to what the general public see as technology. In my view it isn't the technology that is "evil", it is the monetisation of the technology, or more specifically the people behind the monetisation of it. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying how disappointed I am with how the internet has turned out, for example. From the initial optimism around things like "information want to be free" and "disintermediation" we have moved to "When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive" and the "reintermediation" of the big internet giants. And I have a terrible feeling that in a decade or two we'll see something similar with some of the new technologies we're getting excited about now. For example, blockchain and cryptocurrrencies facilitate an "the internet of money" with e.g. frictionless cross border transactions, but could in future end up allowing authorities to track every transaction by every person. So what can we do about it?

tboyd47 9y ago
I'm a web developer and I agree with all that's been said here, especially the "reintermediation" bit. It has become clear to me as well that the web is no longer what it used to be and will probably never return to what it was, because of these monetization practices. I am interested in finding out what the "next" web will be. Maybe it will be built on existing protocols, and maybe something else entirely? There are also certain web-focused techs and companies I see as being bastions of the "old way," such as Wordpress and Ruby on Rails, and I'd like to get more involved in preserving and promoting those techs in a professional setting. I'm also interested in walking back some of these misguided monetization tactics you speak of. Programmatic CPM-based ad networks are one of those I'd like to see reversed. I feel that we as developers often underestimate the collective influence we have as technology experts. We are the creators of tech; our culture is essentially tech culture. Do Google and Facebook have the power they have because we give them that power? If so, what do we get in return?
- chickenfries 9y ago
  > I feel that we as developers often underestimate the collective influence we have as technology experts. We are the creators of tech; our culture is essentially tech culture. Do Google and Facebook have the power they have because we give them that power? If so, what do we get in return? They have the power precisely because they have the capital. If all of the rich people who don't need to work banded together to work on open source and federated technologies that would be great. But the rest of us need to work and can't challenge our employers politics in any meaningful way.

pmoriarty 9y ago

I have a different set of gripes, regarding people in tech who are: 1 - Working for and enabling makers of spyware and other privacy-defeating technologies (including companies like Google and Facebook who make it their business to spy on their users). 2 - Working for the military and "defense" contractors or on technology which is intended to kill or enable more efficient killing of people. 3 - Working for advertisers who lie and manipulate people in to buying shit they don't need. 4 - Working for or as spammers, malware purveyors, and various other blackhats. 5 - Exploiting people who work for them by underpaying them, overworking them, manipulating them, or lying to them. 6 - Lack education outside of STEM -- particularly lacking knowledge of history, ethics, literature, and art that makes for a myopic narrow-mindedness. 7 - When the above lack of education is combined with arrogance and a darwinian, survival of the fittest, might makes right, "look out for number one and fuck everybody else" attitude without any sort of social conscience or desire to improve the world beyond making it easier for the rich to get richer.