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We’ve all completely lost perspective. The engine wants people to spend as much time as possible on YouTube. Netflix’s wants the same, even though it’s not ev

We’ve all completely lost perspective. The engine wants people to spend as much time as possible on YouTube. Netflix’s wants the same, even though it’s not even ad based! Facebook wants the same. As infinitum. This is just addiction peddling. Nothing more. I think we have no idea how much damage this is doing to us. It’s as if someone invented cocaine for the first time and we have no social norms or legal framework to confront it. One thing you can never get back is time. It runs one way and as of this writing, we all have a finite amount of it. Conspiracy videos are the least of the problem.

malvosenior 8y ago
Prior to YouTube, the internet and recommendation engines I used to spend hours in front of the TV. I could do this for days on end. I don't think I was alone. Now I spend the same amount of time in front of my computer only the content is 1,000X more informative and valuable (seriously, you don't want to know how many reruns of Facts of Life and Charles In Charge I've seen). Recommendations are simply a service that makes my life easier and potentially gives me something cool to watch (they don't usually work that good, but that's not the argument here).
- ggggtez 8y ago
  I think it's an interesting comment. I wonder if the average person spends less time watching reruns compared to the 70s/80s/90s. There certainly was a cultural push to not be a "couch potato", and I wonder if we'll see that again with internet entertainment.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- oriolid 8y ago
  Interesting. I used to have Netflix and discover some interesting Youtube content from related videos, but now Netflix only recommends me Marvel films I don't want to watch and removes all interesting content and Youtube has terrible crap in "recommended for you" videos. On plus side, learning to play guitar has been at least as satisfying.
  - HNLurker2 8y ago
    Just train the algorithm with "Not interest" tab. YouTube is high noise and low signal, and very biased medium. But you can train itm
djsumdog 8y ago
Netflix isn't ad based, but they still want to encourage time on it. Every new show you watch is a potential recommendation in a conversation with someone else. Eventually parents or roommates have too many devices on one account and people break down and purchase their own. It increases revenue, just in a different way.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  It also justifies the money you pay them. But it's not actually true that they're not ad based: They follow the great new strategy of native advertising.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    Native advertising, yep, explains also why browsing around the Netflix interface auto-plays everything and you cannot turn it off. That is Netflix’s internal ad space and it’s very valuable.
    - dorkwood 8y ago
      That’s actually the reason I stopped using Netflix. I’m the kind of person who avoids trailers and on-the-next-episode-of spoilers, and Netflix assaults you with both of these things. The only way to turn it off is to leave.
cellularmitosis 8y ago
Joe Edelman has a great video covering this idea https://vimeo.com/155525207 https://vimeo.com/155525207
lucasverra 8y ago
Capitalists will want your capital (attention). Up to you to defend it. My fellows : - ublock - firefox block all trackers - ghostery block all - remove all notifications - remove facebook - do not engage with social media except professionally - stick to long read forms of entretainment (HN enters this category with no video nor images) my only curse is whatsapp that i use both personally and professionally
- frabcus 8y ago
  Unfortunately, that doesn't help me against the consequences of others not using such defences.
- kakarot 8y ago
  Replace Ghostery with uBlock Origin + uMatrix, which are developed by the same person. Don't recommend Ghostery to others. Ghostery sells user data and shows ads. [0] > Remove all notifications Including email? There are plenty of legitimate uses for notifications. Otherwise, solid list and I especially like your last bullet point, but don't discount the amount of information that can be gained from a good video or infographic. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    privacy badger is a better drop-in replacement for ghostery anyway
  - fencepost 8y ago
    I find Ghostery (in combination with uBO and uM) useful for identifying the purpose of many of the things blocked so I can selectively unblock where appropriate.
    - kakarot 8y ago
      You missed the part where Ghostery is anti-user. They even went open source last March in an attempt to turn around the growing bad faith but the motives were very transparent.
freewilly1040 8y ago
Netflix’s optimization function is different though - they want you to keep paying for the subscription. So if you spend a smaller amount of time on the platform but it’s rewarding, they win. Ad supported platforms want you addicted.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  Not so sure. Netflix wants you to think at the end of the month that you got a good value for your subscription cost. So people often mentally calculate how much of their free time is consumed watching Netflix. A lot of people probably compare the Netflix cost and hours consumed to what those dollars would get on iTunes or at the movie theater. It’s why Netflix often goes for 10 hour programs instead of 1-2 hour movies. It’s why HBO is not even a serious competitor to Netflix, even though they tend to focus more on quality instead of quantity. It’s all about taking your time. Netflix even says their main competitor is something like Fortnite, which again, consumes a lot of your time.
  - freewilly1040 8y ago
    Time spent matters for Netflix, sure, but the decision at the end of the month is still also a function of whether the user thought it was time well spent. If I spent all day on Netflix but thought the content was trash I would unsubscribe. YouTube algo doesn’t care if the time on site makes you crazy, and the lack of a conscious decision to sign up for the service tips the scales much, much more for addiction peddling.
nyxxie 8y ago
I don’t think that design goal in and of itself is toxic enough to warrant the connotation of the label “addiction peddling”. In YouTube’s case, it sounds like their recommendation engine is designed to simply reccomend videos people might like. YouTube obviously wants people on the site, but no user is being fooled here; they want to watch cool videos, YouTube recommends cool videos to them. Everyone here is fully consenting and benefiting in this relationship. It’s the outliers who seem to be the problem, and considering YouTube reaches billions of people without incident I think our threshold for “this is a problem” should also change.
- aznumeric 8y ago
  In the article it clearly states: 'We designed YT’s AI to increase the time people spend online, because it leads to more ads'. They designed it to increase the time spent. It does not 'sound like' they designed it to 'recommend videos people might like', it clearly states 'time spent'. There is no room for speculation, unless you question the correctness of the author's statement.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    You can design for more than one thing, especially when complimentary. Why is there no room to speculate that they also designed for what people want? Why do I have to question the author's correctness to do so? Why mix all these words like this and tell other people what they can or can't speculate about?
    - aznumeric 8y ago
      Because the commenter did not add to the author's statement, but offered a different view on how YT's AI was designed. This particular comment section comments on the article, it is not a general discussion on YT's algorithm. Therefore if the author of the article, who is also one of the authors of the AI in question, writes a very clear statement on how the AI was designed, and the commenter then writes that it sounds like the AI is designed differently, then how can that mean anything else but questioning the correctness of the author's statement.
lubujackson 8y ago
I agree. A good comparison is how Coca-Cola used to have actual cocaine in it to keep people coming back for more. I think in the future we will look back on these unregulated times of loot boxes and Skinner boxes with the same sort of incredulity.
- Mtinie 8y ago
  Not exactly the same, though I get where you were going with the example. history/ “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca Nerve Tonic,” the precursor to Coca-Cola was a patent medicine and was proported to cure morphine addiction (of which Pemberton suffered from after the U.S. Civil War). The addictive affects of the coca leaf weren’t widely accepted at the time due to the limited concentration of active cocaine in the “wines” it was typically included with. That it had addictive qualities was a side-effect, not a conscious decision to aid with repeat business. /history
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  Cocaine was used in many medicines at the time. Coke was pretty good about getting it out of their product when people realized it had bad effects- before any serious public discontent over cocaine was popular
300bps 8y ago
This is just addiction peddling. I think humans spent the 20th Century learning how to live with the availability of unlimited sugar and fat. I could easily consume 10,000 empty calories per day. But instead I’m eating a bag of fresh organic vegetables as I write this because I learned to resist my biological urges to gorge myself on foods designed to trigger them like chips, cookies and soda. I think people in the 21st Century need to learn how live with the availability of unlimited information. To consume more of the mental equivalent of organic vegetables and less of the mental equivalent of soda.
- kakarot 8y ago
  Children don't usually magically learn things when not taught, especially if those things go against their biological programming. Adults are just children who grew up. There's still no reason to believe they will just "learn" on their own. Instead of favorably comparing yourself, with your bag of organic vegetables (my imagination is running wild picturing what that must look like) and your superior intelligence which led to self-learning how to escape sugar and fat, to the rest of the American populace who clearly need to learn, devote some of your time and expertise to actually making an attempt to educate and help those who don't know better or who are trapped in addiction.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Doing this in a way that doesn't just add to the large amount of noise about nutrition seems quite hard.
    - kakarot 8y ago
      If we don't get enough real information in the mix, then it will only be noise. That's why so many professionals are so adamant about sharing their theories on nutrition. It's just the unfortunate reality that there are also countless special interest groups with particular motives when it comes to spreading disinformation.
      - 8y ago
bad_user 8y ago
I’m hooked on HN even though the conversations here don’t give me any pleasure and I’m wasting valuable time. I’m clearly addicted, but does HN have any sort of algorithm designed to maximize my time on it? I’m sure these companies do everything in their power to make their services more addictive, however we have to consider that this is just looking for a scapegoat.
- rjf72 8y ago
  Yip! See those little triangles by this comment? Go look at something such as a phpbb site where topic ordering is driven solely by 'bumps' - the most recent topic to have a comment gets bumped to the top of the page listing. You'll find they rarely have any worse ordering of content than voting systems provide. In my opinion it tends to be simply superior. It also avoids the huge problem in point based systems of requiring some 'parallel universe' /new stream that only a tiny and biased minority ever view. But voting systems drive "engagement." One intuitively surprising discovery is that downvoting users tends to drive them to comment more, frequently with lower quality posts following. I say 'intuitively surprising' because it seems counter intuitive, yet if you've spent any time on point driven message boards, including here, you see the constant stream of little tit-for-tats as a downvoted user (or two) engage in an ever lower quality of 'debate' in some isolated thread. As for upvotes it goes without saying that that little micro-shot of dopamine is what's built, and arguably sustaining, the social platforms of today.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    Bump driven systems suffer from the problem that half the posts are simply people posting the word "bump" in order to drive the parent post higher up on the list.
  - mulmen 8y ago
    In my experience on forums posting bumps is frowned upon. The ordering is then based on activity and presumably interest.
  - kibwen 8y ago
    To its credit, HN actually has systems in place to deliberately discourage tit-for-tat commenting. First, it deliberately has no inbox to notify you of replies to your own comments, so you're much more likely to neglect to discover that someone has replied to your comment. Secondly, it disables the inline "reply" button for comments whose age is below a certain threshold, so that only power users who understand the workaround can actually reply to young comments. Thirdly, it has no support for navigating deep comments into dedicated subthreads like Reddit has, so instead successive comments will become narrower and narrower until eventually becoming literally unreadable (not actually sure if this one is deliberate, it could also be laziness, but the effect is the same). As for bump-ordering, I lost most of my youth to phpbb-like forums, and I'd say they foster a mindset of even more obsessive interaction because not only do non-nested threads become impossible to follow if you're away for long enough, but keeping your preferred topics on the front page requires frequent monitoring and carefully-timed comments.
cobbzilla 8y ago
In this case it doesn't seem like it was as simple as "time maximization", of course everyone tries to do that. The problem was that pathological/excessive users were overly skewing the recommendations algorithms. These users tend to watch things that might be unhealthy in various ways, which then tend to get over-promoted, and lead to the creation of more content in that vein. Not a good cycle to encourage. Netflix may have this problem, but FB, YT and other (relatively) open access platforms definitely suffer from it to varying degrees. Like the author, I do find it refreshing that at least some steps are being taken to identify and remediate. A lot more can be done.
chillee 8y ago
Interesting article on why this is a problem, some effects that this "attention sapping" has had on the labor force and how it alters the traditional labor-supply curve, and a somewhat fun proposal to "tax media companies for the hours of human attention they consume". > One view of the status quo is that media companies are aggregating human attention and selling it at a discount–far below minimum wage–to advertisers in a massive arbitrage on human capital.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  That sounds like reheated fallacies of the Victorians about the dangers of 'idleness'. The fact of the matter is that huamn attention isn't theirs to own in the first place no matter what they think on the matter. Despite the expectations and social pressure it isn't a continuous 'commodity' to be produced upon demand and it doesn't even map in a strictly increasing way to productivity. It brings to mind the greed and stupidity of a lord thinking that anything his subjects do which isn't earning him money is stealing from him.
scottlegrand2 8y ago
Agreed. At what point do people own their own decisions? I get these ridiculous YouTube conspiracy recommendations all the time. Sometimes they're hilariously entertaining. Most of the time they're so off the mark that I don't watch them. If Youtube really wanted to increase my engagement they would stop showing irrelevant ads and stop crippling the free YouTube app. I mostly go to YouTube for movie trailers and videos from Deep learning courses. That's it, the end. What YouTube appears to want is for me to pay to use it and it gets in my way and makes YouTube inconvenient in every possible way to try and persuade me to throw money at it. This will never happen but hey keep on trying.
- hokus 8y ago
  > Most of the time they're so off the mark that I don't watch them. I owned a book one time that had such a bad ending I didn't read it.
m0zg 8y ago
Seems like Netflix has a different goal: they want to release just enough stuff for customers not to stop paying, but don't particularly care how much they watch per day. Otherwise they'd be producing good shows. Right now Netflix 100% fails to hook me in. I watch it for exactly 30 minutes a day while doing cardio. If it wasn't for that, they'd have to pay _me_ to watch their drawn out, boring shows. The only reason why I watch Netflix is because Prime Video is even worse.
CamperBob2 8y ago
Netflix’s wants the same, even though it’s not even ad based! If Netflix wants people to spend more time on Netflix, they should probably stop adding forehead-slapping "features" like mandatory autoplaying previews that encourage people to stop spending so much time surfing through the back catalog. Of course, it's vitally important to Netflix's business model that you don't discover just how limited their catalog is. That's not an issue for YouTube, and it's interesting to consider how these requirements feed into UX engineering at the two companies.
kodablah 8y ago
> I think we have no idea how much damage this is doing to us. Definitely. Unfortunately the appeal to emotion and rare cases are parroted by those that feel they do know. > It’s as if someone invented cocaine for the first time and we have no social norms or legal framework to confront it. Or airplanes or telephones or the printed word.
cladari 8y ago
Why would Netflix want to maximize the time people are watching? It seems to me the ideal customer is one who pays the sub fee but never logs in.
- gggyyhh 8y ago
  If people don’t find value they will eventually cancel. And Netflix isn’t like gym memberships, it’s very easy to cancel
- marcodave 8y ago
  it was mentioned in this topic as well, that a person watching a lot of Netflix shows would as well recommend Netflix to others, and thus generating more subscriptions.
LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
Half the world history we spend time on reproducing for war or similar endavours. Not doing harm, is still quite a improvement. Not buying stuff while beeing alive, is even reducing the war on nature. In the 70s - as a reaction to the club of rome, they had this insane idea to freeze part of humanity, until the imminent crisis was over. This is what the internet is- a freezer- it freezes social interaction, it freezes your desires, your plans - it freezes everything. To become defrosted, does not by default improve the world. Its ultimatly a personal desicion.
robomartin 8y ago
Cuts both ways, right? For example, we are remodelling our house. It’s nice that YouTube presents me with more DIY videos on how to tile as I research the topic. The recommendation engine only turns evil when it takes the viewer down a never-ending path into dark, negative, useless material and misinformation.
mosselman 8y ago
The difference is that Netflix is not radicalising people. The algorithms used by YouTube do a huge amount of damage to the psychological health of millions of people and in turn countless societies, just to earn some advertisement revenue. You can't really accuse Netflix of the same. > This is just addiction peddling. In light of this problem of the radicalising of vulnerable people like is happening on YouTube, your use of the word 'just' in this way, shows that you are either ignorant to the problem or have an hidden agenda in trying to downplay it. I hope it is the former. Some sources: https://samharris.org/podcasts/persuasion-and-control/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/persuasion-and-control/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/hoe-youtube-rechtse-radicalisering-in-de-hand-werkt~b53830b9/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/hoe-youtube-rec... (Dutch) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...
- krageon 8y ago
  The "radicalisation" problem you refer to is a logical consequence of a system that optimises for maximum engagement. I don't see why the fact that someone else can see this means that they have some sort of hidden agenda.
  - mosselman 8y ago
    I was referring to the word 'just': > your use of the word 'just' in this way, When using 'just' in this way you down-play the problems. 'Hidden agenda' might have been a bit extreme on my part. What I had in mind was the down-playing of issues to seem smarter than others. In the context of the Cumex fraud you could say "It is just stealing". When doing this you project that we shouldn't be concerned, it is _just_ stealing, which it isn't. It becomes counter productive to solving the issues because when someone who doesn't know about the problems surrounding YouTube's algorithms and reads that 'it is just "addiction peddling"' they might conclude that people are overreacting. My issue here is that, in YouTube's case, this is not 'just' attention peddling. I also don't agree with you that this is 'a logical consequence of a system that optimises for maximum engagement'. Netflix, as we have established, also wants my attention, but that doesn't mean that I go from Rick and Morty to Nazi propaganda. On YouTube you can go from listening to music to getting lectured by White Supremacists without actively seeking this extreme content out. They have optimised their algorithm to make this transition very gradual in order for you to stay engaged along the way and in effect they have created a mechanic in which people slowly get radicalised. It is very easy to down-play this by saying this is logical and just attention peddling, but I'd say it is closer to psychological abuse of people in their most private and vulnerable moments. All this _just_ to make money from advertisement. The algorithms might not have started out this way, but there has been enough criticism on what is happening for YouTube to finally do something about it, yet they haven't. This means it is intentional.
ngold 8y ago
Education. I have learned a massive amount of history from carefully cultivated youtube videos. The messenger will always be shit. Look at a rack of magazines. The new yorker sits right next to penthouse or national enquirer. It comes down to what you want to know. Adults are citizens that have freedom to choose. That is what being an adult is about. That's why kids need to be harbored from certain things. They lack the experience and education to choose wisely. Putting that burden on the state or a website is losing the bigger picture. Any time I hear the word addiction it makes me sad people are saying they can't make an adult choice in their lives and need someone to stop them.

malvosenior 8y ago

Prior to YouTube, the internet and recommendation engines I used to spend hours in front of the TV. I could do this for days on end. I don't think I was alone. Now I spend the same amount of time in front of my computer only the content is 1,000X more informative and valuable (seriously, you don't want to know how many reruns of Facts of Life and Charles In Charge I've seen). Recommendations are simply a service that makes my life easier and potentially gives me something cool to watch (they don't usually work that good, but that's not the argument here).

ggggtez 8y ago
I think it's an interesting comment. I wonder if the average person spends less time watching reruns compared to the 70s/80s/90s. There certainly was a cultural push to not be a "couch potato", and I wonder if we'll see that again with internet entertainment.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
oriolid 8y ago
Interesting. I used to have Netflix and discover some interesting Youtube content from related videos, but now Netflix only recommends me Marvel films I don't want to watch and removes all interesting content and Youtube has terrible crap in "recommended for you" videos. On plus side, learning to play guitar has been at least as satisfying.
- HNLurker2 8y ago
  Just train the algorithm with "Not interest" tab. YouTube is high noise and low signal, and very biased medium. But you can train itm

djsumdog 8y ago

Netflix isn't ad based, but they still want to encourage time on it. Every new show you watch is a potential recommendation in a conversation with someone else. Eventually parents or roommates have too many devices on one account and people break down and purchase their own. It increases revenue, just in a different way.

solarkraft 8y ago
It also justifies the money you pay them. But it's not actually true that they're not ad based: They follow the great new strategy of native advertising.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  Native advertising, yep, explains also why browsing around the Netflix interface auto-plays everything and you cannot turn it off. That is Netflix’s internal ad space and it’s very valuable.
  - dorkwood 8y ago
    That’s actually the reason I stopped using Netflix. I’m the kind of person who avoids trailers and on-the-next-episode-of spoilers, and Netflix assaults you with both of these things. The only way to turn it off is to leave.

cellularmitosis 8y ago

Joe Edelman has a great video covering this idea https://vimeo.com/155525207 https://vimeo.com/155525207

lucasverra 8y ago

Capitalists will want your capital (attention). Up to you to defend it. My fellows : - ublock - firefox block all trackers - ghostery block all - remove all notifications - remove facebook - do not engage with social media except professionally - stick to long read forms of entretainment (HN enters this category with no video nor images) my only curse is whatsapp that i use both personally and professionally

frabcus 8y ago
Unfortunately, that doesn't help me against the consequences of others not using such defences.
kakarot 8y ago
Replace Ghostery with uBlock Origin + uMatrix, which are developed by the same person. Don't recommend Ghostery to others. Ghostery sells user data and shows ads. [0] > Remove all notifications Including email? There are plenty of legitimate uses for notifications. Otherwise, solid list and I especially like your last bullet point, but don't discount the amount of information that can be gained from a good video or infographic. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism
- nyolfen 8y ago
  privacy badger is a better drop-in replacement for ghostery anyway
- fencepost 8y ago
  I find Ghostery (in combination with uBO and uM) useful for identifying the purpose of many of the things blocked so I can selectively unblock where appropriate.
  - kakarot 8y ago
    You missed the part where Ghostery is anti-user. They even went open source last March in an attempt to turn around the growing bad faith but the motives were very transparent.

freewilly1040 8y ago

Netflix’s optimization function is different though - they want you to keep paying for the subscription. So if you spend a smaller amount of time on the platform but it’s rewarding, they win. Ad supported platforms want you addicted.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
Not so sure. Netflix wants you to think at the end of the month that you got a good value for your subscription cost. So people often mentally calculate how much of their free time is consumed watching Netflix. A lot of people probably compare the Netflix cost and hours consumed to what those dollars would get on iTunes or at the movie theater. It’s why Netflix often goes for 10 hour programs instead of 1-2 hour movies. It’s why HBO is not even a serious competitor to Netflix, even though they tend to focus more on quality instead of quantity. It’s all about taking your time. Netflix even says their main competitor is something like Fortnite, which again, consumes a lot of your time.
- freewilly1040 8y ago
  Time spent matters for Netflix, sure, but the decision at the end of the month is still also a function of whether the user thought it was time well spent. If I spent all day on Netflix but thought the content was trash I would unsubscribe. YouTube algo doesn’t care if the time on site makes you crazy, and the lack of a conscious decision to sign up for the service tips the scales much, much more for addiction peddling.

nyxxie 8y ago

I don’t think that design goal in and of itself is toxic enough to warrant the connotation of the label “addiction peddling”. In YouTube’s case, it sounds like their recommendation engine is designed to simply reccomend videos people might like. YouTube obviously wants people on the site, but no user is being fooled here; they want to watch cool videos, YouTube recommends cool videos to them. Everyone here is fully consenting and benefiting in this relationship. It’s the outliers who seem to be the problem, and considering YouTube reaches billions of people without incident I think our threshold for “this is a problem” should also change.

aznumeric 8y ago
In the article it clearly states: 'We designed YT’s AI to increase the time people spend online, because it leads to more ads'. They designed it to increase the time spent. It does not 'sound like' they designed it to 'recommend videos people might like', it clearly states 'time spent'. There is no room for speculation, unless you question the correctness of the author's statement.
- kodablah 8y ago
  You can design for more than one thing, especially when complimentary. Why is there no room to speculate that they also designed for what people want? Why do I have to question the author's correctness to do so? Why mix all these words like this and tell other people what they can or can't speculate about?
  - aznumeric 8y ago
    Because the commenter did not add to the author's statement, but offered a different view on how YT's AI was designed. This particular comment section comments on the article, it is not a general discussion on YT's algorithm. Therefore if the author of the article, who is also one of the authors of the AI in question, writes a very clear statement on how the AI was designed, and the commenter then writes that it sounds like the AI is designed differently, then how can that mean anything else but questioning the correctness of the author's statement.

lubujackson 8y ago

I agree. A good comparison is how Coca-Cola used to have actual cocaine in it to keep people coming back for more. I think in the future we will look back on these unregulated times of loot boxes and Skinner boxes with the same sort of incredulity.

Mtinie 8y ago
Not exactly the same, though I get where you were going with the example. history/ “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca Nerve Tonic,” the precursor to Coca-Cola was a patent medicine and was proported to cure morphine addiction (of which Pemberton suffered from after the U.S. Civil War). The addictive affects of the coca leaf weren’t widely accepted at the time due to the limited concentration of active cocaine in the “wines” it was typically included with. That it had addictive qualities was a side-effect, not a conscious decision to aid with repeat business. /history
b_tterc_p 8y ago
Cocaine was used in many medicines at the time. Coke was pretty good about getting it out of their product when people realized it had bad effects- before any serious public discontent over cocaine was popular

300bps 8y ago

This is just addiction peddling. I think humans spent the 20th Century learning how to live with the availability of unlimited sugar and fat. I could easily consume 10,000 empty calories per day. But instead I’m eating a bag of fresh organic vegetables as I write this because I learned to resist my biological urges to gorge myself on foods designed to trigger them like chips, cookies and soda. I think people in the 21st Century need to learn how live with the availability of unlimited information. To consume more of the mental equivalent of organic vegetables and less of the mental equivalent of soda.

kakarot 8y ago
Children don't usually magically learn things when not taught, especially if those things go against their biological programming. Adults are just children who grew up. There's still no reason to believe they will just "learn" on their own. Instead of favorably comparing yourself, with your bag of organic vegetables (my imagination is running wild picturing what that must look like) and your superior intelligence which led to self-learning how to escape sugar and fat, to the rest of the American populace who clearly need to learn, devote some of your time and expertise to actually making an attempt to educate and help those who don't know better or who are trapped in addiction.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Doing this in a way that doesn't just add to the large amount of noise about nutrition seems quite hard.
  - kakarot 8y ago
    If we don't get enough real information in the mix, then it will only be noise. That's why so many professionals are so adamant about sharing their theories on nutrition. It's just the unfortunate reality that there are also countless special interest groups with particular motives when it comes to spreading disinformation.
    - 8y ago

bad_user 8y ago

I’m hooked on HN even though the conversations here don’t give me any pleasure and I’m wasting valuable time. I’m clearly addicted, but does HN have any sort of algorithm designed to maximize my time on it? I’m sure these companies do everything in their power to make their services more addictive, however we have to consider that this is just looking for a scapegoat.

rjf72 8y ago
Yip! See those little triangles by this comment? Go look at something such as a phpbb site where topic ordering is driven solely by 'bumps' - the most recent topic to have a comment gets bumped to the top of the page listing. You'll find they rarely have any worse ordering of content than voting systems provide. In my opinion it tends to be simply superior. It also avoids the huge problem in point based systems of requiring some 'parallel universe' /new stream that only a tiny and biased minority ever view. But voting systems drive "engagement." One intuitively surprising discovery is that downvoting users tends to drive them to comment more, frequently with lower quality posts following. I say 'intuitively surprising' because it seems counter intuitive, yet if you've spent any time on point driven message boards, including here, you see the constant stream of little tit-for-tats as a downvoted user (or two) engage in an ever lower quality of 'debate' in some isolated thread. As for upvotes it goes without saying that that little micro-shot of dopamine is what's built, and arguably sustaining, the social platforms of today.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Bump driven systems suffer from the problem that half the posts are simply people posting the word "bump" in order to drive the parent post higher up on the list.
- mulmen 8y ago
  In my experience on forums posting bumps is frowned upon. The ordering is then based on activity and presumably interest.
- kibwen 8y ago
  To its credit, HN actually has systems in place to deliberately discourage tit-for-tat commenting. First, it deliberately has no inbox to notify you of replies to your own comments, so you're much more likely to neglect to discover that someone has replied to your comment. Secondly, it disables the inline "reply" button for comments whose age is below a certain threshold, so that only power users who understand the workaround can actually reply to young comments. Thirdly, it has no support for navigating deep comments into dedicated subthreads like Reddit has, so instead successive comments will become narrower and narrower until eventually becoming literally unreadable (not actually sure if this one is deliberate, it could also be laziness, but the effect is the same). As for bump-ordering, I lost most of my youth to phpbb-like forums, and I'd say they foster a mindset of even more obsessive interaction because not only do non-nested threads become impossible to follow if you're away for long enough, but keeping your preferred topics on the front page requires frequent monitoring and carefully-timed comments.

cobbzilla 8y ago

In this case it doesn't seem like it was as simple as "time maximization", of course everyone tries to do that. The problem was that pathological/excessive users were overly skewing the recommendations algorithms. These users tend to watch things that might be unhealthy in various ways, which then tend to get over-promoted, and lead to the creation of more content in that vein. Not a good cycle to encourage. Netflix may have this problem, but FB, YT and other (relatively) open access platforms definitely suffer from it to varying degrees. Like the author, I do find it refreshing that at least some steps are being taken to identify and remediate. A lot more can be done.

chillee 8y ago

Interesting article on why this is a problem, some effects that this "attention sapping" has had on the labor force and how it alters the traditional labor-supply curve, and a somewhat fun proposal to "tax media companies for the hours of human attention they consume". > One view of the status quo is that media companies are aggregating human attention and selling it at a discount–far below minimum wage–to advertisers in a massive arbitrage on human capital.

Nasrudith 8y ago
That sounds like reheated fallacies of the Victorians about the dangers of 'idleness'. The fact of the matter is that huamn attention isn't theirs to own in the first place no matter what they think on the matter. Despite the expectations and social pressure it isn't a continuous 'commodity' to be produced upon demand and it doesn't even map in a strictly increasing way to productivity. It brings to mind the greed and stupidity of a lord thinking that anything his subjects do which isn't earning him money is stealing from him.

scottlegrand2 8y ago

Agreed. At what point do people own their own decisions? I get these ridiculous YouTube conspiracy recommendations all the time. Sometimes they're hilariously entertaining. Most of the time they're so off the mark that I don't watch them. If Youtube really wanted to increase my engagement they would stop showing irrelevant ads and stop crippling the free YouTube app. I mostly go to YouTube for movie trailers and videos from Deep learning courses. That's it, the end. What YouTube appears to want is for me to pay to use it and it gets in my way and makes YouTube inconvenient in every possible way to try and persuade me to throw money at it. This will never happen but hey keep on trying.

hokus 8y ago
> Most of the time they're so off the mark that I don't watch them. I owned a book one time that had such a bad ending I didn't read it.

m0zg 8y ago

Seems like Netflix has a different goal: they want to release just enough stuff for customers not to stop paying, but don't particularly care how much they watch per day. Otherwise they'd be producing good shows. Right now Netflix 100% fails to hook me in. I watch it for exactly 30 minutes a day while doing cardio. If it wasn't for that, they'd have to pay _me_ to watch their drawn out, boring shows. The only reason why I watch Netflix is because Prime Video is even worse.

CamperBob2 8y ago

Netflix’s wants the same, even though it’s not even ad based! If Netflix wants people to spend more time on Netflix, they should probably stop adding forehead-slapping "features" like mandatory autoplaying previews that encourage people to stop spending so much time surfing through the back catalog. Of course, it's vitally important to Netflix's business model that you don't discover just how limited their catalog is. That's not an issue for YouTube, and it's interesting to consider how these requirements feed into UX engineering at the two companies.

kodablah 8y ago

> I think we have no idea how much damage this is doing to us. Definitely. Unfortunately the appeal to emotion and rare cases are parroted by those that feel they do know. > It’s as if someone invented cocaine for the first time and we have no social norms or legal framework to confront it. Or airplanes or telephones or the printed word.

cladari 8y ago

Why would Netflix want to maximize the time people are watching? It seems to me the ideal customer is one who pays the sub fee but never logs in.

gggyyhh 8y ago
If people don’t find value they will eventually cancel. And Netflix isn’t like gym memberships, it’s very easy to cancel
marcodave 8y ago
it was mentioned in this topic as well, that a person watching a lot of Netflix shows would as well recommend Netflix to others, and thus generating more subscriptions.

LifeLiverTransp 8y ago

Half the world history we spend time on reproducing for war or similar endavours. Not doing harm, is still quite a improvement. Not buying stuff while beeing alive, is even reducing the war on nature. In the 70s - as a reaction to the club of rome, they had this insane idea to freeze part of humanity, until the imminent crisis was over. This is what the internet is- a freezer- it freezes social interaction, it freezes your desires, your plans - it freezes everything. To become defrosted, does not by default improve the world. Its ultimatly a personal desicion.

robomartin 8y ago

Cuts both ways, right? For example, we are remodelling our house. It’s nice that YouTube presents me with more DIY videos on how to tile as I research the topic. The recommendation engine only turns evil when it takes the viewer down a never-ending path into dark, negative, useless material and misinformation.

mosselman 8y ago

The difference is that Netflix is not radicalising people. The algorithms used by YouTube do a huge amount of damage to the psychological health of millions of people and in turn countless societies, just to earn some advertisement revenue. You can't really accuse Netflix of the same. > This is just addiction peddling. In light of this problem of the radicalising of vulnerable people like is happening on YouTube, your use of the word 'just' in this way, shows that you are either ignorant to the problem or have an hidden agenda in trying to downplay it. I hope it is the former. Some sources: https://samharris.org/podcasts/persuasion-and-control/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/persuasion-and-control/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/hoe-youtube-rechtse-radicalisering-in-de-hand-werkt~b53830b9/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/hoe-youtube-rec... (Dutch) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...

krageon 8y ago
The "radicalisation" problem you refer to is a logical consequence of a system that optimises for maximum engagement. I don't see why the fact that someone else can see this means that they have some sort of hidden agenda.
- mosselman 8y ago
  I was referring to the word 'just': > your use of the word 'just' in this way, When using 'just' in this way you down-play the problems. 'Hidden agenda' might have been a bit extreme on my part. What I had in mind was the down-playing of issues to seem smarter than others. In the context of the Cumex fraud you could say "It is just stealing". When doing this you project that we shouldn't be concerned, it is _just_ stealing, which it isn't. It becomes counter productive to solving the issues because when someone who doesn't know about the problems surrounding YouTube's algorithms and reads that 'it is just "addiction peddling"' they might conclude that people are overreacting. My issue here is that, in YouTube's case, this is not 'just' attention peddling. I also don't agree with you that this is 'a logical consequence of a system that optimises for maximum engagement'. Netflix, as we have established, also wants my attention, but that doesn't mean that I go from Rick and Morty to Nazi propaganda. On YouTube you can go from listening to music to getting lectured by White Supremacists without actively seeking this extreme content out. They have optimised their algorithm to make this transition very gradual in order for you to stay engaged along the way and in effect they have created a mechanic in which people slowly get radicalised. It is very easy to down-play this by saying this is logical and just attention peddling, but I'd say it is closer to psychological abuse of people in their most private and vulnerable moments. All this _just_ to make money from advertisement. The algorithms might not have started out this way, but there has been enough criticism on what is happening for YouTube to finally do something about it, yet they haven't. This means it is intentional.

ngold 8y ago

Education. I have learned a massive amount of history from carefully cultivated youtube videos. The messenger will always be shit. Look at a rack of magazines. The new yorker sits right next to penthouse or national enquirer. It comes down to what you want to know. Adults are citizens that have freedom to choose. That is what being an adult is about. That's why kids need to be harbored from certain things. They lack the experience and education to choose wisely. Putting that burden on the state or a website is losing the bigger picture. Any time I hear the word addiction it makes me sad people are saying they can't make an adult choice in their lives and need someone to stop them.