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Sorry, I'm simply not convinced that monetizing and marketing people's attention is all that much of a social ill. There is nothing about Facebook that's in any

Sorry, I'm simply not convinced that monetizing and marketing people's attention is all that much of a social ill. There is nothing about Facebook that's in any way worse than the old ways companies used to do this. Does nobody remember the 80s? TV was turning people into fricken' zombies. People would sit on the boob tube for days at a time, stopping only to go to work to mindlessly knock out chores for a shift, then get back to their vapid entertainment. People would make a game out of who could play the longest in the arcade on one quarter. With $5, a savvy gamer could spend all day staring at lights and hearing beeps. The world survived, thrived, and devised ever more devious and insidious ways to hook your mind. We weathered Everquest and the MMORPGs. Psychedelic drugs. Outrage didn't stop those from spreading long and wide. My uncle lost years to Everquest. When he came up for air he found the world just as he left it. Now he manages his gaming habits just like everyone else. Out of all the pseudo-addictive things people want to complain about, we're picking on Facebook? The thing that actually holds old friendships together and provides endless opportunities to interact with other people that you would have never done otherwise? Or is the argument that every time someone gets the urge to play Scrabble, they need to coordinate a face-to-face game instead of just loading up Words with Friends? C'mon. I guess bombastic apocalyptic bullshit will never go out of style.

deleted 9y ago
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tabeth 9y ago
Do you honestly think your examples are even in the same league as Facebook? Were TV ads ever as granular in its tracking as Facebook is today?
- jnordwick 9y ago
  tv is exactly in the same league as Facebook. Video games is pretty close too. Neither one are recognized as addictions.
  - tabeth 9y ago
    What? Does TV track what you're doing when you're not watching and change the ads when you return? You're being silly.
    - carlmcqueen 9y ago
      Marketing has had focus groups, and user use/studies for years. They have always had ways of knowing exactly what their content does without having to track millions of clicks. We have had sampling methods that makes the need to examine census pointless, it is just cool that today computing can handle the whole data set and scary that we are. Still, today, some of the best ways to truly examine massive swaths of data is deducing to what is missing. Who turns their phones off from 10pm-2am and turns them back on at 2am? Who wasn't looking at facebook and watching netflix all night while everyone else was?
    - aylmao 9y ago
      It did something worse: it severed everyone the same ads and propaganda. The phrase "Television rules the Nation" didn't just occur to Daft Punk because it sounded cool. It was a broadcasting-only service with a high cost of entry. You need big money to put your thoughts on TV. As someone from a country where the big media conglomerates and the government are helplessly colluded, social media comes as a very welcome break and counter-force.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - Brakenshire 9y ago
    There's a lot of discussion about video game addiction in fact.
  - bpchaps 9y ago
    Video game addiction is recognized in DSM-V.
    - jnordwick 9y ago
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  It's got approximately the mass reach and appeal that television did. It doesn't have nearly the impact that TV did. I wonder what makes you think that Facebook is in any way the same league as TV. TV transformed society. Facebook just makes it easier for people to argue with each other.
  - tabeth 9y ago
    Your gross simplification of the issue is unfortunate. TV has never been able to track you and change its programming to the extent Facebook can.
    - vinceguidry 9y ago
      Who cares? Would TV have been that worse if it did the same thing?
      - samastur 9y ago
        Yes.
        vinceguidry 9y ago
        How? You spend less time channel surfing trying to find what you're into?
        nrhk 9y ago
        You spend more time watching the TV because the extra information provided tells them exactly how to extract that extra attention. I think the best example are little kids with no self control watching endless amount of dopamine hitting videos like kinder eggs. People realized little kids loved these simple toy opening videos and the algorithm was more than happy enough to increase engagement by feeding kids these videos.
        paulcole 9y ago
- InternetUser 9y ago
  It's not about the content matter itself, it's about the activity: staring silently and passively at a screen for many hours every day, and the fundamental difference that Facebook makes people feel they are carrying on relationships, when actually the online relationship takes over the real-life relationship. You were watching your friends and relatives (their personal lives or otherwise) on TV.
smohare 9y ago
Care to cite all the research showing the interactions social media provide are in fact so salubrious?
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Facebook is unprecedented. Never before has any of these attention-monetizing things known you so personally and abused their position in ways that causes this degree of social harm. When has TV ever been so personallized that every single show and ad you see is curated to your exact interests and designed to push exactly which buttons make YOU, the individual, emotional - serving to polarize people on an incredibly personal level?
- aylmao 9y ago
  Was the alternative, TV as an homogenizing force that entertained and dumbed people down to what big-money publishers wanted them to believe a better alternative? I'm from a country where the TV and state are highly colluded and social media has come as a welcome alternative. Moreover, are these "polarization issues" the USA currently experiencing a product of social media, or its own cultural problems, surfaced by social media? You're not the only country on Facebook, remember that.
  - InternetUser 9y ago
    Excellent, excellent points. What country are you from, if I may ask? Also, I'd rewrite your opening rhetorical question for clarity: Was TV, as a homogenizing force that entertained and dumbed people down to what big-money publishers wanted them to believe, a better alternative?
    - aylmao 9y ago
      Oh yeah, that makes more sense! I'm from Mexico. A good example to look at is Carmen Aristegui. She's an award winning journalist, most recently named one of the world's greatest leaders by Forbes, but she's been shunned from most traditional media outlets. After she reported on a corruption scandal involving the president she was fired from the broadcaster she worked for, and has since relied on web/social media to keep doing her job. Meanwhile Televisa (biggest TV network in Mexico) reports memes [1], random crazy people [2], and is known to be very politically biased [3]. No award-winning journalists on TV. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl1XceNu-LE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl1XceNu-LE (this girl's XV birthday became a big meme in Mexico) [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObV9XDBLRUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObV9XDBLRUk [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Televisa#Criticisms_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Televisa#Criticisms_and_contro...
twostoned 9y ago
lol nice try, Facebook. Seriously though good points. I understand the hate and fear (if you would call it that) of old FB, however, and am among the group who is definitely Social Media averse. I'm not convinced Facebook actually holds old friendships together (anecdotal: I don't have FB and have lots of old friends. The same can be said for my parents and grandparents...). I also don't expect 100% of my waking hours to be spent productively (whee MUGEN and IRC, or whatever your drug is.) However, with all that being considered, there is something very weird about the asymmetry of Facebook. They collect and store all this data, know a lot of intimate details and personal information about people, control the medium in which many people use exclusively for digital communication, and aren't really answerable to anyone except their Executives, Board of Directors and Shareholders (Wealthy people? I don't know anyone who owns a significant share of this big corporation). So yeah, weird. "Hi, please use your free time to tell me a lot of intimate and personal detail about yourself so that I can do whatever I want with this information and you have no say in how its used. Kthx" Yeah, um, no.
agumonkey 9y ago
I find the social network interactions to be very mild quite often. It has value, but it's not the paradise of human existence it's said to be.
losteric 9y ago
Is it possible TV did make society marginally worse, and each new dopamine trap captures an increasing fraction of society? This statement is laughable: > The thing that actually holds old friendships together and provides endless opportunities to interact with other people that you would have never done otherwise Facebook's innovation was trapping users in a walled garden with omnipresent surveillance and advertising, perfectly timed with mass adoption of social media.
- _jal 9y ago
  > Facebook's innovation was trapping users in a walled garden with omnipresent surveillance and advertising That isn't an innovation. They're AOL 2.0.
  - rbranson 9y ago
    Even if you don’t think the product itself is novel, the technology infrastructure behind Facebook is absolutely novel, from the news feed to TAO, their massive graph database. I’d wager to say TAO is the highest throughout OLTP database in the world. They were able to get ahead of MySpace, the market leader, because their technology was vastly more nimble and reliable.
- freehunter 9y ago
  >a walled garden with omnipresent surveillance and advertising So... a shopping mall? A school? Any corporate job? A walk through downtown? "In-network" minutes and long distance charges on your phone? Religious institutions? Whatever Facebook is doing wrong for society, they are standing on the backs of giants. Walled garden or not, surveillance or not, advertising or not, people have never been as free to socialize as they are today. If there is something negative on your Facebook feed, you are solely responsible for it being there. It takes two clicks to make it go away forever.
  - AlexandrB 9y ago
    > If there is something negative on your Facebook feed, you are solely responsible for it being there. It takes two clicks to make it go away forever. What do I click on to make the stuff Facebook decided I shouldn't see show up?
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
>Sorry, I'm simply not convinced that monetizing and marketing people's attention is all that much of a social ill. What about monetizing and marketing people's affection? The dowry would be the classic example, I'd be curious why you (presumably) are against dowries. To me it's basically the same, certain things are corrupted by their commodification, affection, attention, others. Besides when you say: >The world survived, thrived You're not exactly speaking to the people hooked on video games or TV or Facebook. Your uncle lost years to a game but because what, he doesn't do it anymore it's magically fine? Are you also okay with advertising cigarettes to children? Cigarette breaks provide great opportunities for social gathering and let you interact with other people you never would have otherwise. A smoker may lose a lot of time to smoking but when they come up for air the world will be exactly as they left it. They'll manage their enjoyment of tobacco just like everyone else. Is it disgusting when a casino calls up a gambler who's trying to quit and offers them a credit to come back and play? I happen to believe that's a huge social ill and in many cases basically equivalent to what Facebook is doing, just that it costs time instead of money.
- wbl 9y ago
  There is a way to get on the ban list of a casino to fight your addiction.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  We are still talking about a website, right? A totally optional website, in a browser with a close button? This isn’t a chemical addiction or gambling.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    What makes it different from gambling?
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      Facebook addiction is not recognized by the pros as a mental disorder and gambling addiction is?
bsder 9y ago
The bigger problem for me is all the passive invasiveness these companies represent. Even if I don't have a Facebook account, I am tagged in so many pictures that Facebook can identify me. I find that problematic. Even if I don't have a Gmail account, so many people do that Google has a significant number of my email conversations. There are many things Facebook/Google/Amazon can do, and I cannot prevent them even if I never interacted or wished to interact with them. What is MY recourse against Facebook/Google/Amazon if I wish them not to be in my life?
- InternetUser 9y ago
  This was the major revelation that hundreds of millions of people made when the Snowden stuff was released years ago. Not to imply that the "FAANGs" are pure-minded and fair entities, but you are already required to be identified, documented, tracked, and known, year to year, by many large powerful entities: the company you work for, your bank, the IRS, the Social Security Administration, MasterCard or Visa (I would assume you have at least one credit card), your phone company, the DMV, the judicial system (whether you were the culprit or victim of a crime), and so on. As for what you can do to avoid being known to Facebook, Google, and so on, well, you could move to another country, but then you'd just end up tracked by their services (e.g. VK.com is the #1 site in Russia,[0] and Baidu and WeChat are respectively the #1 search and social network in China, with 980 million MAUs[1][2], and they are now requiring gov't IDs[3]). [0] https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/RU https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/RU [1] https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/CN https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/CN [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat [3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16721230/wechat-china-app-mini-programs-messaging-electronic-id-system https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16721230/wechat-china-app-... But an answer to your specific question, as far as specifically avoiding Facebook, Google, and Amazon, is to only visit websites that don't have any link to those sites (e.g. no Facebook link, no Google Analytics script and make sure no one you know uses Google Voice, and not built on AWS), and don't use email anymore, just text messaging and phone calls.
yakitori 9y ago
> Sorry, I'm simply not convinced that monetizing and marketing people's attention is all that much of a social ill. There is nothing about Facebook that's in any way worse than the old ways companies used to do this. There is one thing about facebook and social media that is different. It allows people to interact in their own manner rather than being controlled by people with influence. Before, you pretty much had to watch or accept what a handful of companies told you. It was a top down approach. Social media has flipped it upside down. > C'mon. I guess bombastic apocalyptic bullshit will never go out of style. It's a media propaganda campaign funded by some of the elites. We had apocalyptic scaremongering before. But this one is very different. Some of the media would talk about the "TV aka idiot box" for a day and move on. This facebook/social media propaganda campaign has been going on for years. Everyday for the past few months, we had a story about facebook. Every single day. That isn't "news". That's propaganda.
CandidlyFake 9y ago
Has nothing to do with monetizing or social ill. Otherwise, soda, food, gambling, movies, etc wouldn't be allowed to advertise. And we'd ban most newspapers and cable news for being toxic for the masses. The war on social media is simply about who gets control over people's minds. Social media sites like Reddit, Google and even HN gave in to the elite. Facebook is holding out.
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  > Social media sites like Reddit, Google and even HN gave in to the elite. Facebook is holding out. You're kidding, right? Facebook sells ad space to "the elite" at bargain basement prices. Never in history has micro-targeted propaganda been this cheap for someone looking to manipulate public opinion.
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vanderZwan 9y ago
Suppose you are right, what does that prove? You can be morbidly obese for decades before dying of the consequences. It's still not good to be morbidly obese. That this is a social illness that has been with us since before the Internet does not excuse its continued existence. It's a waste of what Clay Shirky has dubbed "Cognitive Surplus": > It represents the ability of the world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects. Cognitive surplus is made up of two things. [First,] the world's free time and talents. The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects. Now, that free time existed in the 20th century. [However, the media landscape in the 20th century was mainly very good] at helping people consume, and we got, as a result, very good at consuming. > [That is the second part of cognitive surplus. Now that] we've been given media tools -- the Internet, mobile phones -- that let us do more than consume, what we're seeing is that people weren't couch potatoes because we liked to be. We were couch potatoes because that was the only opportunity given to us. We still like to consume, of course. But it turns out we also like to create, and we like to share. And it's those two things together -- ancient human motivation and the modern tools to allow that motivation to be joined up in large-scale efforts -- that are the new design resource. And using cognitive surplus, we're starting to see truly incredible experiments in scientific, literary, artistic, political efforts. That people wasted their lives in front of TV does not mean that we should have to keep accepting business models based on "zombification", especially when the media of the 21st century has so much potential for individual empowerment compared to television before it. But I do agree that Facebook should not receive all the blame. You know which product is not criticised nearly enough in this context? The iPhone. Because at its core, what differentiated the iPhone from the other smartphones when it was introduced, was that is was a portable, always-online computer optimised for consumption. And it definitely had a large role in the rise of the current form of social media, compared to the internet communities that existed before it. The attention economy is the equivalent of bitcoin mining, except with human brain cycles: its economy is fundamentally based on wasting resources, revealing an utterly cynical view of the worth of human life. On an individual level the attention economy is a waste of human life. On a societal level it is a waste of cognitive surplus. On a global level, whether or not we waste that cognitive surplus will mean the difference between collectively being able to get out of the mess we dug ourselves into in the last century, or racing ever harder towards collapse with then having to try to recover after that. How is that for apocalyptic bombast? [0] https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_...
AlexandrB 9y ago
This just seems like "whataboutism". The only argument I see here is: > There is nothing about Facebook that's in any way worse than the old ways companies used to do this. Even if that were true - and I don't think it is - I'm not sure why we should just accept the idea that it's OK for us to be lied to and manipulated. I remember TV in the 90s, and the ads were fucking horrible - many would try to capitalize on the same basic motivations: sex, greed, vanity. Why is it OK that Facebook is going down the same path? Why should we not expect a better society than this same garbage repeated at us using every new medium? If AR becomes a big thing, are we going to have to live in a world filled with virtual Viagra billboards everywhere we walk?
elipsey 9y ago
I think the pervasive availability and highly engineered and data driven optimization for engagement that are possible with phones and social media create a novel condition. You couldn’t play Everquest on the bus, in the toilet, in class, and in bed, but it’s now possible to basically never not be on Facebook. Also, Everquest and TV didn’t have anything like the degree of user data and monitoring that we have now. It seems too soon to tell whether excessive social media use, as such, is a big problem and I will admit that I sometimes perceive a whiff of moral panic but I don’t think it’s reasonable to say there is nothing new here. What I think is interesting about the events in the article is the way the that politicians and media express concern without proposing anything. Could this kind of talk be reasonably interpreted as a negotiation between Facebook and the political class relating to Facebook’s add sales practices and political influence? People are certainly talking about excessive social media use whether FB likes it or not. I have seen tons of articles and prominent quotes on the subject of social media harm to health. I just searched for “excessive social media use” and got articles from Forbes, The Telegraph, Time, BBC, HuffPo, thetimes.co.uk, Vancouver University, and a large pile of high impact journal articles that seem to contain related language, like “impact of social media use on children.” So lots of people are upset but neither Soros nor the author proposed any particular remedy, and the problem sounds awfully hard to clearly understand, let alone to effectively regulate. The economics of social media seem to necessitate maximizing user engagement, and wining at network effect. If Facebook didn’t do it this way, would whoever did have won the space instead? How do we incentivize social media companies to make products that are somewhat compelling, but not too much? Is it cynical to suppose that politicians are using the implicit threat of regulation and bad press to compel FB to limit it’s add sales and suppress “fake news”, while actually having little appetite to intervene in the interest of public health? Also, are conventional media outlets afraid of Facebook because it threatens their revenue model, and undermines their credibility?
- current_call 9y ago
  People are certainly talking about excessive social media use whether FB likes it or not. The goal of propaganda is not to make people think a certain way; it's to get people to act a certain way. Entertainment is centered around consumption, not interaction. If I can get people who dislike something to read entertaining articles about how it's bad instead of going out and protesting or canceling accounts, then I've successfully suppressed dissent. The solution to Facebook was already spelled out in the article. There just wasn't a call to action. Facebook’s revenue, for example, is almost entirely a function of the number of minutes the average user spends per week engaging with the service. Reducing this by even 5 to 10% — by tamping down or eliminating some of Facebook’s most addictive features — would have a disastrous impact on the quarterly earnings of this $500 billion company. Just stop using it and it will die. I don't. Why can't you?
r_sreeram 9y ago
> Does nobody remember the 80s? TV was turning people into fricken' zombies. You may be right that cries of "society is being ruined" are nothing new. However, I think Facebook is different enough from what came before (such as TV) in a few ways that matter, that we should take this more seriously. * FB is _interactive_. The effects of somebody responding to you, liking your posts, etc., are much deeper than you passively consuming some content on a screen. * FB is _intrusive_. It sends you notifications on your phone, reminder emails, inserts calls-to-action in your news feed, etc. It's really hard to ignore. * FB is a lot more _personalized_. It knows a lot about you. Ads are personalized. Content is specifically targeted towards your interests. Stuff is "recommended by <your-friend>". This makes it a much harder addiction to kick. FWIW, I don't think FB is _that_ bad. Many mobile "free to play" games, on the other hand, ... They use so many dark patterns and insidious techniques to purposely capture people's (and especially kids') attention and time, while simultaneously trying to get them to spend real money. Geez. I hate them with a passion.
sizzle 9y ago
Let's not forget about the pornography epidemic that is alive and rampant, altering young minds and numbing the seasoned viewers.
- berbec 9y ago
  Won't somebody please think of the children?!
brokenbyclouds 9y ago
I can't tell if this is poes law or not. It's blindingly stupid to say that arcades are in any way equivalent to Facebook.
deleted 9y ago
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ace_of_spades 9y ago
The difference between all the alternatives and FB is... that FB is intelligent and learning about you through your interactions, which on scale can make FB a lot more intelligent and powerful then the rest of us. Everything that raises fears of superintelligence also applies to a lesser degree to a company like FB. I recommend to have a look at Nick Bostroms book Superintelligence for a good overview why you should care about that.

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tabeth 9y ago

Do you honestly think your examples are even in the same league as Facebook? Were TV ads ever as granular in its tracking as Facebook is today?

jnordwick 9y ago
tv is exactly in the same league as Facebook. Video games is pretty close too. Neither one are recognized as addictions.
- tabeth 9y ago
  What? Does TV track what you're doing when you're not watching and change the ads when you return? You're being silly.
  - carlmcqueen 9y ago
    Marketing has had focus groups, and user use/studies for years. They have always had ways of knowing exactly what their content does without having to track millions of clicks. We have had sampling methods that makes the need to examine census pointless, it is just cool that today computing can handle the whole data set and scary that we are. Still, today, some of the best ways to truly examine massive swaths of data is deducing to what is missing. Who turns their phones off from 10pm-2am and turns them back on at 2am? Who wasn't looking at facebook and watching netflix all night while everyone else was?
  - aylmao 9y ago
    It did something worse: it severed everyone the same ads and propaganda. The phrase "Television rules the Nation" didn't just occur to Daft Punk because it sounded cool. It was a broadcasting-only service with a high cost of entry. You need big money to put your thoughts on TV. As someone from a country where the big media conglomerates and the government are helplessly colluded, social media comes as a very welcome break and counter-force.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Brakenshire 9y ago
  There's a lot of discussion about video game addiction in fact.
- bpchaps 9y ago
  Video game addiction is recognized in DSM-V.
  - jnordwick 9y ago
vinceguidry 9y ago
It's got approximately the mass reach and appeal that television did. It doesn't have nearly the impact that TV did. I wonder what makes you think that Facebook is in any way the same league as TV. TV transformed society. Facebook just makes it easier for people to argue with each other.
- tabeth 9y ago
  Your gross simplification of the issue is unfortunate. TV has never been able to track you and change its programming to the extent Facebook can.
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    Who cares? Would TV have been that worse if it did the same thing?
    - samastur 9y ago
      Yes.
      - vinceguidry 9y ago
        How? You spend less time channel surfing trying to find what you're into?
        nrhk 9y ago
        You spend more time watching the TV because the extra information provided tells them exactly how to extract that extra attention. I think the best example are little kids with no self control watching endless amount of dopamine hitting videos like kinder eggs. People realized little kids loved these simple toy opening videos and the algorithm was more than happy enough to increase engagement by feeding kids these videos.
        paulcole 9y ago
InternetUser 9y ago
It's not about the content matter itself, it's about the activity: staring silently and passively at a screen for many hours every day, and the fundamental difference that Facebook makes people feel they are carrying on relationships, when actually the online relationship takes over the real-life relationship. You were watching your friends and relatives (their personal lives or otherwise) on TV.

smohare 9y ago

Care to cite all the research showing the interactions social media provide are in fact so salubrious?

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Facebook is unprecedented. Never before has any of these attention-monetizing things known you so personally and abused their position in ways that causes this degree of social harm. When has TV ever been so personallized that every single show and ad you see is curated to your exact interests and designed to push exactly which buttons make YOU, the individual, emotional - serving to polarize people on an incredibly personal level?

aylmao 9y ago
Was the alternative, TV as an homogenizing force that entertained and dumbed people down to what big-money publishers wanted them to believe a better alternative? I'm from a country where the TV and state are highly colluded and social media has come as a welcome alternative. Moreover, are these "polarization issues" the USA currently experiencing a product of social media, or its own cultural problems, surfaced by social media? You're not the only country on Facebook, remember that.
- InternetUser 9y ago
  Excellent, excellent points. What country are you from, if I may ask? Also, I'd rewrite your opening rhetorical question for clarity: Was TV, as a homogenizing force that entertained and dumbed people down to what big-money publishers wanted them to believe, a better alternative?
  - aylmao 9y ago
    Oh yeah, that makes more sense! I'm from Mexico. A good example to look at is Carmen Aristegui. She's an award winning journalist, most recently named one of the world's greatest leaders by Forbes, but she's been shunned from most traditional media outlets. After she reported on a corruption scandal involving the president she was fired from the broadcaster she worked for, and has since relied on web/social media to keep doing her job. Meanwhile Televisa (biggest TV network in Mexico) reports memes [1], random crazy people [2], and is known to be very politically biased [3]. No award-winning journalists on TV. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl1XceNu-LE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl1XceNu-LE (this girl's XV birthday became a big meme in Mexico) [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObV9XDBLRUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObV9XDBLRUk [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Televisa#Criticisms_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Televisa#Criticisms_and_contro...

twostoned 9y ago

lol nice try, Facebook. Seriously though good points. I understand the hate and fear (if you would call it that) of old FB, however, and am among the group who is definitely Social Media averse. I'm not convinced Facebook actually holds old friendships together (anecdotal: I don't have FB and have lots of old friends. The same can be said for my parents and grandparents...). I also don't expect 100% of my waking hours to be spent productively (whee MUGEN and IRC, or whatever your drug is.) However, with all that being considered, there is something very weird about the asymmetry of Facebook. They collect and store all this data, know a lot of intimate details and personal information about people, control the medium in which many people use exclusively for digital communication, and aren't really answerable to anyone except their Executives, Board of Directors and Shareholders (Wealthy people? I don't know anyone who owns a significant share of this big corporation). So yeah, weird. "Hi, please use your free time to tell me a lot of intimate and personal detail about yourself so that I can do whatever I want with this information and you have no say in how its used. Kthx" Yeah, um, no.

agumonkey 9y ago

I find the social network interactions to be very mild quite often. It has value, but it's not the paradise of human existence it's said to be.

losteric 9y ago

Is it possible TV did make society marginally worse, and each new dopamine trap captures an increasing fraction of society? This statement is laughable: > The thing that actually holds old friendships together and provides endless opportunities to interact with other people that you would have never done otherwise Facebook's innovation was trapping users in a walled garden with omnipresent surveillance and advertising, perfectly timed with mass adoption of social media.

_jal 9y ago
> Facebook's innovation was trapping users in a walled garden with omnipresent surveillance and advertising That isn't an innovation. They're AOL 2.0.
- rbranson 9y ago
  Even if you don’t think the product itself is novel, the technology infrastructure behind Facebook is absolutely novel, from the news feed to TAO, their massive graph database. I’d wager to say TAO is the highest throughout OLTP database in the world. They were able to get ahead of MySpace, the market leader, because their technology was vastly more nimble and reliable.
freehunter 9y ago
>a walled garden with omnipresent surveillance and advertising So... a shopping mall? A school? Any corporate job? A walk through downtown? "In-network" minutes and long distance charges on your phone? Religious institutions? Whatever Facebook is doing wrong for society, they are standing on the backs of giants. Walled garden or not, surveillance or not, advertising or not, people have never been as free to socialize as they are today. If there is something negative on your Facebook feed, you are solely responsible for it being there. It takes two clicks to make it go away forever.
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  > If there is something negative on your Facebook feed, you are solely responsible for it being there. It takes two clicks to make it go away forever. What do I click on to make the stuff Facebook decided I shouldn't see show up?

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago

>Sorry, I'm simply not convinced that monetizing and marketing people's attention is all that much of a social ill. What about monetizing and marketing people's affection? The dowry would be the classic example, I'd be curious why you (presumably) are against dowries. To me it's basically the same, certain things are corrupted by their commodification, affection, attention, others. Besides when you say: >The world survived, thrived You're not exactly speaking to the people hooked on video games or TV or Facebook. Your uncle lost years to a game but because what, he doesn't do it anymore it's magically fine? Are you also okay with advertising cigarettes to children? Cigarette breaks provide great opportunities for social gathering and let you interact with other people you never would have otherwise. A smoker may lose a lot of time to smoking but when they come up for air the world will be exactly as they left it. They'll manage their enjoyment of tobacco just like everyone else. Is it disgusting when a casino calls up a gambler who's trying to quit and offers them a credit to come back and play? I happen to believe that's a huge social ill and in many cases basically equivalent to what Facebook is doing, just that it costs time instead of money.

wbl 9y ago
There is a way to get on the ban list of a casino to fight your addiction.
ryandrake 9y ago
We are still talking about a website, right? A totally optional website, in a browser with a close button? This isn’t a chemical addiction or gambling.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  What makes it different from gambling?
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Facebook addiction is not recognized by the pros as a mental disorder and gambling addiction is?

bsder 9y ago

The bigger problem for me is all the passive invasiveness these companies represent. Even if I don't have a Facebook account, I am tagged in so many pictures that Facebook can identify me. I find that problematic. Even if I don't have a Gmail account, so many people do that Google has a significant number of my email conversations. There are many things Facebook/Google/Amazon can do, and I cannot prevent them even if I never interacted or wished to interact with them. What is MY recourse against Facebook/Google/Amazon if I wish them not to be in my life?

InternetUser 9y ago
This was the major revelation that hundreds of millions of people made when the Snowden stuff was released years ago. Not to imply that the "FAANGs" are pure-minded and fair entities, but you are already required to be identified, documented, tracked, and known, year to year, by many large powerful entities: the company you work for, your bank, the IRS, the Social Security Administration, MasterCard or Visa (I would assume you have at least one credit card), your phone company, the DMV, the judicial system (whether you were the culprit or victim of a crime), and so on. As for what you can do to avoid being known to Facebook, Google, and so on, well, you could move to another country, but then you'd just end up tracked by their services (e.g. VK.com is the #1 site in Russia,[0] and Baidu and WeChat are respectively the #1 search and social network in China, with 980 million MAUs[1][2], and they are now requiring gov't IDs[3]). [0] https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/RU https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/RU [1] https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/CN https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/CN [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat [3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16721230/wechat-china-app-mini-programs-messaging-electronic-id-system https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16721230/wechat-china-app-... But an answer to your specific question, as far as specifically avoiding Facebook, Google, and Amazon, is to only visit websites that don't have any link to those sites (e.g. no Facebook link, no Google Analytics script and make sure no one you know uses Google Voice, and not built on AWS), and don't use email anymore, just text messaging and phone calls.

yakitori 9y ago

> Sorry, I'm simply not convinced that monetizing and marketing people's attention is all that much of a social ill. There is nothing about Facebook that's in any way worse than the old ways companies used to do this. There is one thing about facebook and social media that is different. It allows people to interact in their own manner rather than being controlled by people with influence. Before, you pretty much had to watch or accept what a handful of companies told you. It was a top down approach. Social media has flipped it upside down. > C'mon. I guess bombastic apocalyptic bullshit will never go out of style. It's a media propaganda campaign funded by some of the elites. We had apocalyptic scaremongering before. But this one is very different. Some of the media would talk about the "TV aka idiot box" for a day and move on. This facebook/social media propaganda campaign has been going on for years. Everyday for the past few months, we had a story about facebook. Every single day. That isn't "news". That's propaganda.

CandidlyFake 9y ago

Has nothing to do with monetizing or social ill. Otherwise, soda, food, gambling, movies, etc wouldn't be allowed to advertise. And we'd ban most newspapers and cable news for being toxic for the masses. The war on social media is simply about who gets control over people's minds. Social media sites like Reddit, Google and even HN gave in to the elite. Facebook is holding out.

AlexandrB 9y ago
> Social media sites like Reddit, Google and even HN gave in to the elite. Facebook is holding out. You're kidding, right? Facebook sells ad space to "the elite" at bargain basement prices. Never in history has micro-targeted propaganda been this cheap for someone looking to manipulate public opinion.

deleted 9y ago

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vanderZwan 9y ago

Suppose you are right, what does that prove? You can be morbidly obese for decades before dying of the consequences. It's still not good to be morbidly obese. That this is a social illness that has been with us since before the Internet does not excuse its continued existence. It's a waste of what Clay Shirky has dubbed "Cognitive Surplus": > It represents the ability of the world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects. Cognitive surplus is made up of two things. [First,] the world's free time and talents. The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects. Now, that free time existed in the 20th century. [However, the media landscape in the 20th century was mainly very good] at helping people consume, and we got, as a result, very good at consuming. > [That is the second part of cognitive surplus. Now that] we've been given media tools -- the Internet, mobile phones -- that let us do more than consume, what we're seeing is that people weren't couch potatoes because we liked to be. We were couch potatoes because that was the only opportunity given to us. We still like to consume, of course. But it turns out we also like to create, and we like to share. And it's those two things together -- ancient human motivation and the modern tools to allow that motivation to be joined up in large-scale efforts -- that are the new design resource. And using cognitive surplus, we're starting to see truly incredible experiments in scientific, literary, artistic, political efforts. That people wasted their lives in front of TV does not mean that we should have to keep accepting business models based on "zombification", especially when the media of the 21st century has so much potential for individual empowerment compared to television before it. But I do agree that Facebook should not receive all the blame. You know which product is not criticised nearly enough in this context? The iPhone. Because at its core, what differentiated the iPhone from the other smartphones when it was introduced, was that is was a portable, always-online computer optimised for consumption. And it definitely had a large role in the rise of the current form of social media, compared to the internet communities that existed before it. The attention economy is the equivalent of bitcoin mining, except with human brain cycles: its economy is fundamentally based on wasting resources, revealing an utterly cynical view of the worth of human life. On an individual level the attention economy is a waste of human life. On a societal level it is a waste of cognitive surplus. On a global level, whether or not we waste that cognitive surplus will mean the difference between collectively being able to get out of the mess we dug ourselves into in the last century, or racing ever harder towards collapse with then having to try to recover after that. How is that for apocalyptic bombast? [0] https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_change_the_world/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_...

AlexandrB 9y ago

This just seems like "whataboutism". The only argument I see here is: > There is nothing about Facebook that's in any way worse than the old ways companies used to do this. Even if that were true - and I don't think it is - I'm not sure why we should just accept the idea that it's OK for us to be lied to and manipulated. I remember TV in the 90s, and the ads were fucking horrible - many would try to capitalize on the same basic motivations: sex, greed, vanity. Why is it OK that Facebook is going down the same path? Why should we not expect a better society than this same garbage repeated at us using every new medium? If AR becomes a big thing, are we going to have to live in a world filled with virtual Viagra billboards everywhere we walk?

elipsey 9y ago

I think the pervasive availability and highly engineered and data driven optimization for engagement that are possible with phones and social media create a novel condition. You couldn’t play Everquest on the bus, in the toilet, in class, and in bed, but it’s now possible to basically never not be on Facebook. Also, Everquest and TV didn’t have anything like the degree of user data and monitoring that we have now. It seems too soon to tell whether excessive social media use, as such, is a big problem and I will admit that I sometimes perceive a whiff of moral panic but I don’t think it’s reasonable to say there is nothing new here. What I think is interesting about the events in the article is the way the that politicians and media express concern without proposing anything. Could this kind of talk be reasonably interpreted as a negotiation between Facebook and the political class relating to Facebook’s add sales practices and political influence? People are certainly talking about excessive social media use whether FB likes it or not. I have seen tons of articles and prominent quotes on the subject of social media harm to health. I just searched for “excessive social media use” and got articles from Forbes, The Telegraph, Time, BBC, HuffPo, thetimes.co.uk, Vancouver University, and a large pile of high impact journal articles that seem to contain related language, like “impact of social media use on children.” So lots of people are upset but neither Soros nor the author proposed any particular remedy, and the problem sounds awfully hard to clearly understand, let alone to effectively regulate. The economics of social media seem to necessitate maximizing user engagement, and wining at network effect. If Facebook didn’t do it this way, would whoever did have won the space instead? How do we incentivize social media companies to make products that are somewhat compelling, but not too much? Is it cynical to suppose that politicians are using the implicit threat of regulation and bad press to compel FB to limit it’s add sales and suppress “fake news”, while actually having little appetite to intervene in the interest of public health? Also, are conventional media outlets afraid of Facebook because it threatens their revenue model, and undermines their credibility?

current_call 9y ago
People are certainly talking about excessive social media use whether FB likes it or not. The goal of propaganda is not to make people think a certain way; it's to get people to act a certain way. Entertainment is centered around consumption, not interaction. If I can get people who dislike something to read entertaining articles about how it's bad instead of going out and protesting or canceling accounts, then I've successfully suppressed dissent. The solution to Facebook was already spelled out in the article. There just wasn't a call to action. Facebook’s revenue, for example, is almost entirely a function of the number of minutes the average user spends per week engaging with the service. Reducing this by even 5 to 10% — by tamping down or eliminating some of Facebook’s most addictive features — would have a disastrous impact on the quarterly earnings of this $500 billion company. Just stop using it and it will die. I don't. Why can't you?

r_sreeram 9y ago

> Does nobody remember the 80s? TV was turning people into fricken' zombies. You may be right that cries of "society is being ruined" are nothing new. However, I think Facebook is different enough from what came before (such as TV) in a few ways that matter, that we should take this more seriously. * FB is _interactive_. The effects of somebody responding to you, liking your posts, etc., are much deeper than you passively consuming some content on a screen. * FB is _intrusive_. It sends you notifications on your phone, reminder emails, inserts calls-to-action in your news feed, etc. It's really hard to ignore. * FB is a lot more _personalized_. It knows a lot about you. Ads are personalized. Content is specifically targeted towards your interests. Stuff is "recommended by <your-friend>". This makes it a much harder addiction to kick. FWIW, I don't think FB is _that_ bad. Many mobile "free to play" games, on the other hand, ... They use so many dark patterns and insidious techniques to purposely capture people's (and especially kids') attention and time, while simultaneously trying to get them to spend real money. Geez. I hate them with a passion.

sizzle 9y ago

Let's not forget about the pornography epidemic that is alive and rampant, altering young minds and numbing the seasoned viewers.

berbec 9y ago
Won't somebody please think of the children?!

brokenbyclouds 9y ago

I can't tell if this is poes law or not. It's blindingly stupid to say that arcades are in any way equivalent to Facebook.

deleted 9y ago

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ace_of_spades 9y ago

The difference between all the alternatives and FB is... that FB is intelligent and learning about you through your interactions, which on scale can make FB a lot more intelligent and powerful then the rest of us. Everything that raises fears of superintelligence also applies to a lesser degree to a company like FB. I recommend to have a look at Nick Bostroms book Superintelligence for a good overview why you should care about that.