5 ms·

Idea against HN-induced smartphone addiction

Inspired by yesterday's article on smartphone addiction, I would like to propose one idea and ask for other ideas about making HN in particular, and the thinkpiece/newspaper WWW in general, more useful to the persons reading them. I feel like I spent a large amount of time reading texts on the internet in a way that didn't serve me, or by extension any community I want to be part of. I can imagine many people here feel the same. I think I can understand the reason: The interest of any person writing a text online is not to contribute to a view of the world that is accurate and useful to the reader, but to make the text being paid attention and/or money to. This is often accomplished by making readers outraged about things that don't concern them and that they won't change anything about. Of course, making this attempt transparent to the reader would be counterproductive, so an excuse with some level of subtility will be used (as an example, "a 20 page slatestarcodex article about studies into in how far the gender pay gap is caused/not caused by women's choices"). This is adapted to the target group. But in general, if a professional journalist (or political advocate) tries to do this against someone with a different career (like me or you), they can probably win. And unsurprisingly, such a discussion isn't contained e.g. in New York Times articles about smartphone addiction. I feel HN (and the WWW in general) is useful to me, but the use is diminished by articles of this form. I want to ask for ideas helping to change this. One idea would be the following: A reader on HN can not only upvote articles for quality, but, if they have a suspicion that the author makes (significant) use of such a trick, they can upvote for outrageousness as well. Then we could set to hide articles above a certain outrageousness level. What do you think will happen if such a proposal is implemented?

wrongonthenet 8y ago
In one sentence: Let users vote on outrageousness separately from quality, and give the option to hide articles with a too-high outrageousness voting.
- fosco 8y ago
  interesting thought, or to provide a shared 'community-driven' extension/plugin where people can tag items as clickbait etc. the only issue is taking care of bots or bad actors tagging inappropriately/incorrectly/trolling. having a long debate out this I am confident a good group of minds can come up with a more solid solution... to finish, the plugin would auto-hide specific parts of web pages that were marked as clickbait or otherwise
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - wrongonthenet 8y ago
    Update: Sorry, I somehow wanted to edit my text and couldn't. Hi, I think a plug-in that gives an opportunity to give feedback about emotional manipulation is a good idea as well. As you said, such a plugin could hide content in non-cooperative websites directly, like an adblocker. Some thoughts on what I think can increase the probability that something like this will be successful: 1. I think it is useful to have a "voting system for manipulation", instead of just trying to flag "clickbait" vs. "non-clickbait". With apologies: "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously writing clickbait, and it were necessary only to separate their articles from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing emotional manipulation and value cuts through the heart of every internet discussion. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" Every person who ever said or wrote something, online or offline, tried to use emotional manipulation (unconsciously) to be paid attention to (of course, you can find this in any of the messages written here). This doesn't mean the texts don't provide value to the readers or the world, just that the distribution of incentives is never the same for writer and reader. So I think the problem is not so much "articles that are obviously useless to everyone" (because if that was clear in the first place, they wouldn't appear on HN and noone would read them), but "articles that are useful to some people, but read by more people than that because they successfully manipulate their readers into acting against their own best interests". The realistic goal is not "identify and eliminate clickbait/people writing evil things once and for all", but "shift the balance of power towards readers in our community" in the short term, and "improve alignment of the incentives of writers and readers" in the longer term. At the end of the day, all social progress (hunter-gatherer tribes, kingdoms, free speech, free press, separation of powers, democracy...) comes from (social or material) technologies that improve alignment of incentives between people. Internet communities had upvotes/karma for some time, but I think right now that these can be improved upon. 2. Such a system should initially be focussed on some adversarial (i.e. existing in order to make money/get attention for something else) website that is relatively small (more research/deliberation needed to actually determine a good place to start) and expand from there. This is for the same reason that Facebook was initially restricted to specific universities: If someone writes such a plugin and releases it with the immediate stated intent that the whole world uses it, noone will actually be concerned and sign up and no network effect can be achieved. If one first advertises it to a very specific community, people become more convinced that a network effect can be achieved, and are driven to sign up themselves. Once one has achieved success for some community, one could take -feedback on improving the system, -social status of the idea, and go on to fry bigger fish. And conversely, if one fails to get a network effect, one has "burnt" the basic idea and makes it less likely that such a project will be started/succeed in the near future. 3. I think it could be useful if the system allows users to organize into groups as well, and see only votes by people in their group. As in 1, articles are always useful or useless relative to the person potentially reading them. And all online communities degrade towards the lowest common denominator among their members, so it is desirable for the readers to keep that denominator high by encouraging separation into reasonable subgroups. 4. I am actually not all that concerned about people really behaving "obviously badly" - basically the only people who might be motivated enough to pay a sufficient amount of attention would be those working for the website directly, and for these, the risk to their reputation if they get caught is quite high. So giving users profiles (with the opportunity to convince other users of their humanity by a unique profile text etc.) and allowing to "downvote users" for suspicions of voting behaviour not in the interests of the group might be enough. Furthermore, I guess if this problem occurs, it will actually be a sign that the project was somewhat successful, so it is better not to be too worried about it right now. So to conclude: Doing what you propose is not in contradiction to doing something specific to HN. In fact, if we come up with something new, and convince pg to implement it, and it turns out to be a success, this will gain information about whether/what/how such ideas work, and status for them, and actually increase the success chances of a larger project.
skrebbel 8y ago
I like this a lot. Hell, I'd even return to Twitter if it had that feature.
- wrongonthenet 8y ago
  Unfortunately, I don't think this can happen on twitter right now because it is not in the interests of the twitter execs to calm down (i.e. reduce) the discussion there. But for this website (whose stated goal is exactly what I hope to work towards), I have hope that the tradeoffs can be different and we can improve on the status quo.

wrongonthenet 8y ago

In one sentence: Let users vote on outrageousness separately from quality, and give the option to hide articles with a too-high outrageousness voting.

fosco 8y ago
interesting thought, or to provide a shared 'community-driven' extension/plugin where people can tag items as clickbait etc. the only issue is taking care of bots or bad actors tagging inappropriately/incorrectly/trolling. having a long debate out this I am confident a good group of minds can come up with a more solid solution... to finish, the plugin would auto-hide specific parts of web pages that were marked as clickbait or otherwise
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- wrongonthenet 8y ago
  Update: Sorry, I somehow wanted to edit my text and couldn't. Hi, I think a plug-in that gives an opportunity to give feedback about emotional manipulation is a good idea as well. As you said, such a plugin could hide content in non-cooperative websites directly, like an adblocker. Some thoughts on what I think can increase the probability that something like this will be successful: 1. I think it is useful to have a "voting system for manipulation", instead of just trying to flag "clickbait" vs. "non-clickbait". With apologies: "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously writing clickbait, and it were necessary only to separate their articles from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing emotional manipulation and value cuts through the heart of every internet discussion. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" Every person who ever said or wrote something, online or offline, tried to use emotional manipulation (unconsciously) to be paid attention to (of course, you can find this in any of the messages written here). This doesn't mean the texts don't provide value to the readers or the world, just that the distribution of incentives is never the same for writer and reader. So I think the problem is not so much "articles that are obviously useless to everyone" (because if that was clear in the first place, they wouldn't appear on HN and noone would read them), but "articles that are useful to some people, but read by more people than that because they successfully manipulate their readers into acting against their own best interests". The realistic goal is not "identify and eliminate clickbait/people writing evil things once and for all", but "shift the balance of power towards readers in our community" in the short term, and "improve alignment of the incentives of writers and readers" in the longer term. At the end of the day, all social progress (hunter-gatherer tribes, kingdoms, free speech, free press, separation of powers, democracy...) comes from (social or material) technologies that improve alignment of incentives between people. Internet communities had upvotes/karma for some time, but I think right now that these can be improved upon. 2. Such a system should initially be focussed on some adversarial (i.e. existing in order to make money/get attention for something else) website that is relatively small (more research/deliberation needed to actually determine a good place to start) and expand from there. This is for the same reason that Facebook was initially restricted to specific universities: If someone writes such a plugin and releases it with the immediate stated intent that the whole world uses it, noone will actually be concerned and sign up and no network effect can be achieved. If one first advertises it to a very specific community, people become more convinced that a network effect can be achieved, and are driven to sign up themselves. Once one has achieved success for some community, one could take -feedback on improving the system, -social status of the idea, and go on to fry bigger fish. And conversely, if one fails to get a network effect, one has "burnt" the basic idea and makes it less likely that such a project will be started/succeed in the near future. 3. I think it could be useful if the system allows users to organize into groups as well, and see only votes by people in their group. As in 1, articles are always useful or useless relative to the person potentially reading them. And all online communities degrade towards the lowest common denominator among their members, so it is desirable for the readers to keep that denominator high by encouraging separation into reasonable subgroups. 4. I am actually not all that concerned about people really behaving "obviously badly" - basically the only people who might be motivated enough to pay a sufficient amount of attention would be those working for the website directly, and for these, the risk to their reputation if they get caught is quite high. So giving users profiles (with the opportunity to convince other users of their humanity by a unique profile text etc.) and allowing to "downvote users" for suspicions of voting behaviour not in the interests of the group might be enough. Furthermore, I guess if this problem occurs, it will actually be a sign that the project was somewhat successful, so it is better not to be too worried about it right now. So to conclude: Doing what you propose is not in contradiction to doing something specific to HN. In fact, if we come up with something new, and convince pg to implement it, and it turns out to be a success, this will gain information about whether/what/how such ideas work, and status for them, and actually increase the success chances of a larger project.

skrebbel 8y ago

I like this a lot. Hell, I'd even return to Twitter if it had that feature.

wrongonthenet 8y ago
Unfortunately, I don't think this can happen on twitter right now because it is not in the interests of the twitter execs to calm down (i.e. reduce) the discussion there. But for this website (whose stated goal is exactly what I hope to work towards), I have hope that the tradeoffs can be different and we can improve on the status quo.