4 ms·

I think it's things like this that will ultimately bring the downfall of the tech giants - the fact that even with "machine learning", the quality if the experi

I think it's things like this that will ultimately bring the downfall of the tech giants - the fact that even with "machine learning", the quality if the experience is still so low. They built an addictive product in the beginning, but now all of them are starting to make us feel nauseous, which is one of the fastest ways to break an addiction. It's true here for social media (in spades), but it's true with Amazon (sorting through all the junky products, never knowing if something is genuine), Netflix (all the junky content, barely curated), and many of the others as well. I think ultimately we will (re) learn that constant naive appeals to the lowest common denominator, while a fast way to make a buck, might not be the best long-term strategy.

pedrocr 8y ago
> I think ultimately we will (re) learn that constant naive appeals to the lowest common denominator, while a fast way to make a buck, might not be the best long-term strategy. That's the best case. The worst case is we've broken our attention spans and ability to interact without heavily optimized feel-good hits and get to keep both pieces. At least in politics we seem to have gone quite far down that path and I don't yet see a way out of re-learning proper discussion methods. Bright ideas are definitely needed here.
buboard 8y ago
Facebook in particular can easily fix this. Just use their friends to get the information.
colmvp 8y ago
I remain skeptical that it'll make a dent, honestly. People will still use Twitter, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc. because they provide enough convenience and positive experiences that outweigh the perceived negatives. I mean people know about the negatives of companies that use sweat shops, child labour, or who employ people in horrific working conditions, and yet these corporations are still very much the giants in their field. You have companies who source ingredients from companies that don't have great living conditions for livestock, and they're still in business. The tech giants will remain tech giants because as much as people will complain about it, they won't abstain. They won't stop using their phones, their websites, their apps, their search engines, their e-mail... because it's all too hard to give up.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > The tech giants will remain tech giants because as much as people will complain about it, they won't abstain. They won't stop using their phones, their websites, their apps, their search engines, their e-mail... because it's all too hard to give up. That's one reason why they like network effects so much. It's one of the ways to turn an "addiction" into actual necessity, by creating a coordination problem. You can easily ditch Instagram or Facebook up to the point when it would suddenly seriously handicap your social life. You could still do it if all your friends agreed to switch to something else at the same time, but those friends have friends too, and good luck coordinating all that. There are other ways to turn a choice into a necessity. In the western world, if you don't want or can't afford an iPhone, you generally can't ditch your Android phone, because there's nothing else available. And you can't just stop using smartphones either, as that makes functioning in the modern society much more difficult.
markus_orlandis 8y ago
I think that's pretty optimistic. Society seems to constantly drone on about "garbage" reality television and yet the networks keep pumping them out at an ever-increasing rate with more ridiculous plots all the time. For every person you hear complain, there are many more behind the scenes that you don't hear from who are the exact demographic that these companies are appealing to. These companies wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't working.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  A filter bubble. Or "dark matter people" - all evidence points to their existence, and yet you don't seem to meet any one of them. I had a huge realization about this when one day, I counted up how many distinct people I ever interacted with in meatspace, however briefly (say, by saying "hello", or even noticing their existence and thinking about them). I've added that up to _maybe_ 10 000 people. Which amounts to 1% of the population of my home town. It's less surprising to see the market (or politics) producing weird outcomes if you realize that your direct experience isn't even giving you a good statistical sample of the population.

pedrocr 8y ago

> I think ultimately we will (re) learn that constant naive appeals to the lowest common denominator, while a fast way to make a buck, might not be the best long-term strategy. That's the best case. The worst case is we've broken our attention spans and ability to interact without heavily optimized feel-good hits and get to keep both pieces. At least in politics we seem to have gone quite far down that path and I don't yet see a way out of re-learning proper discussion methods. Bright ideas are definitely needed here.

buboard 8y ago

Facebook in particular can easily fix this. Just use their friends to get the information.

colmvp 8y ago

I remain skeptical that it'll make a dent, honestly. People will still use Twitter, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc. because they provide enough convenience and positive experiences that outweigh the perceived negatives. I mean people know about the negatives of companies that use sweat shops, child labour, or who employ people in horrific working conditions, and yet these corporations are still very much the giants in their field. You have companies who source ingredients from companies that don't have great living conditions for livestock, and they're still in business. The tech giants will remain tech giants because as much as people will complain about it, they won't abstain. They won't stop using their phones, their websites, their apps, their search engines, their e-mail... because it's all too hard to give up.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> The tech giants will remain tech giants because as much as people will complain about it, they won't abstain. They won't stop using their phones, their websites, their apps, their search engines, their e-mail... because it's all too hard to give up. That's one reason why they like network effects so much. It's one of the ways to turn an "addiction" into actual necessity, by creating a coordination problem. You can easily ditch Instagram or Facebook up to the point when it would suddenly seriously handicap your social life. You could still do it if all your friends agreed to switch to something else at the same time, but those friends have friends too, and good luck coordinating all that. There are other ways to turn a choice into a necessity. In the western world, if you don't want or can't afford an iPhone, you generally can't ditch your Android phone, because there's nothing else available. And you can't just stop using smartphones either, as that makes functioning in the modern society much more difficult.

markus_orlandis 8y ago

I think that's pretty optimistic. Society seems to constantly drone on about "garbage" reality television and yet the networks keep pumping them out at an ever-increasing rate with more ridiculous plots all the time. For every person you hear complain, there are many more behind the scenes that you don't hear from who are the exact demographic that these companies are appealing to. These companies wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't working.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
A filter bubble. Or "dark matter people" - all evidence points to their existence, and yet you don't seem to meet any one of them. I had a huge realization about this when one day, I counted up how many distinct people I ever interacted with in meatspace, however briefly (say, by saying "hello", or even noticing their existence and thinking about them). I've added that up to _maybe_ 10 000 people. Which amounts to 1% of the population of my home town. It's less surprising to see the market (or politics) producing weird outcomes if you realize that your direct experience isn't even giving you a good statistical sample of the population.