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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 Me

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.

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.