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So tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers

So tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers to go f themselves for: Content that would demean people Lying to or misleading customers *Hosing over my fellow engineers ... among other things I don't think it's that special of a thing to do but reading these things makes it seem like it is.

_vertigo 7y ago
So, had you been in his position about to join Twitter or working for Twitter and about to build the RT button, you believe you would have foreseen its effects and refused to participate on it based on your conscience? Did anyone actually predict in Twitter’s early days that adding an RT button would lead to it being an “anger-based platform”? What makes you think you would have?
Jach 7y ago
I would just like to understand the mental process that evolves a conscience from "This is probably fine" to "That’s what I think we actually did [just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon]". In my moral calculus giving a 4-year-old a loaded weapon is pretty damn distinct from implementing a social media button for teens and older which among its negative aspects facilitates cyber bullying or other negative social behavior. With people equating the two it's probably not even that facetious to write a cliche that goes like "first they came for my retweet button, then they came for my 2nd amendment". (Edit: I did think of one mental process that's not just the easy "say whatever in front of the media" reason, but I don't think the guy is making a more interesting consequentialist dust-specks vs. torture type of claim.)
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  Have to normalize that into utilitons first. :) Giving one 4 y/o a gun is pretty bad. Giving one teen a retweet button is much less bad. Giving _all_ teens and teen-minded people retweet buttons is as bad as a sum of all negative (and positive) consequences. Once you do that you might reasonably arrive at equivalence.
derekdahmer 7y ago
How could you have known in 2009 how the dynamics of twitter would evolve over the next decade? There's no way. I've used twitter since 2008 and if you told me then that 7 years later that the US presidents would be using it as their primary communication platform with the public I wouldn't believe you.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
thomascgalvin 7y ago
When Twitter was first becoming big, the most important story was how Twitter was empowering the Arab Spring and giving a voice to the voiceless. The retweet button was a part of that; it allowed people to quickly and easily share vital information. The world was kind of taken off-guard by the fact that this relatively tiny, fail-whale-laden platform could enable freedom and resistance against totalitarian governments. We, and by "we" I mean the collective internet, didn't really foresee that same platform becoming a platform for hatred and disinformation, or a tool of those same totalitarian governments. Maybe we should have, but there's a problem with that: hindsight is easy, but proactively thinking like a shithead is difficult. Creating the retweet button isn't a matter of conscience, it's a matter of not foreseeing the shitty things shitty people would do with that tool.
moosey 7y ago
I wonder if social media is a level one or a level two chaotic system, ideas that are separated based on how the system responds to prediction. Level two means that the system responds, but level one, the weather as an example, doesn't respond to prediction. I don't think that it requires a lack of conscience to end up creating a dangerous behemoth in a level two chaotic system. We couldn't have necessarily have known that social media would lead to the ecosystem that we have today. When I look at social media and the advertising ecosystem around it, I feel like the major flaw is the fact that social media companies must get eyes on the page, that they must supply value, and one of the requirements to meet this is that you simply cannot accomplish what is required if information is supplied as a 'dumb pipe' to the users. Users must be convinced that they are part of specific communities while online in order to keep them on site, so the dumb pipe is replaced with a 'feed' of some sort, which is nothing less than human experimentation. I think that twitter does this by building large emotional groups via these quick sharing mechanisms, which isn't necessarily bad, but the fact that everyone is informed of them as they are going on is, again, human experimentation. I think that the social media fix is to reduce all of them to dumb pipes, because anything more than that is a huge risk. They should probably have things that fight spam, but that's a security issue, not a human experimentation one.
amiantos 7y ago
The problem is idealism. > “I was very excited about the opportunity that Twitter represented,” Wetherell said, noting that he initially felt the retweet button would elevate voices from underrepresented communities. The problem is that it didn't register to him, or anyone, that "racists" were an "underrepresented community", as were sexists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-intellectuals, quacks, and so on. When attempting to give a voice to minorities, they gave a voice to all "minorities", including people who had minority opinions. The idealism came in the form of expecting that these tools will, by default, be used for good... it wouldn't surprise me that people in the tech community, who have often come from privilege or at the very least live within privileged bubbles, are naive about what people are really capable of. "A rising tide lifts all boats..." unfortunately some of those ships are full of pirates and disease. It's sad, but you really need think about these things from a jaded and cynical perspective when building them, it's unfortunate that there's been a long crusade against cynicism. Being optimistic and feeling optimism about the world and humanity leads to problems like this.
- svachalek 7y ago
  I would go less with blaming optimism and more the mirrored bubble of the internet itself. Everyone out there is just like me, right?
- redwards510 7y ago
  Well said. In addition to simply being naive, I think there is also the self-delusion that everyone subscribes to when they convince themselves that their job (no matter what it is) is somehow helping contribute something good to the world. I had a relative that worked as a telemarketer selling predatory debt consolidation packages to people on the verge of bankruptcy and when he described what he was doing, he enthusiastically framed it like he was helping the people from going bankrupt, even though he was just helping them dig a bigger hole. If your company is a public corporation, your only purpose is to maximize shareholder value.
luma 7y ago
I feel like this article covered that fairly well. The developers had no idea that this simple feature addition (which did nothing more than formalize what users were already doing) would result in what we have today. Maybe you see further than others, but the rest of us are subject to the law of unintended consequences.
wutbrodo 7y ago
As someone who's neither a heavy social media user[1] nor an engineer on one of these projects, I think this perspective doesn't really make a lot of sense in context. The consensus that social media is a horribly damaging drug that's destroying our democracy is quite recent. Someone, a decade ago, decided to slightly lower the friction of the already-existing practice of retweeting by formalizing it as a feature. Expecting them to have the clairvoyance necessary to interpret that as an unethical act is beyond insane. The same is true of pretty much everything else on the product side of social media companies: you'd have to have a much keener, more cynical sense than average of how deeply horrible most people are in order to predict that social media would've evolved the way it has. "Not internalizing the fact that most people are mostly shitty people" isn't really a reasonable bar to tar people in knowingly being unethical. The new public square and its ability to unleash unfiltered humanity is _sui generis_, so nobody has a schema for how to handle this. The closest you come to people who've grappled with this question are people like The Founding Fathers. (and to be clear, I'm no fan of these companies: I explicitly avoiding applying to Facebook and Twitter out of college because I either didn't agree with their ethics or thought itthey were shit at product. My opinion hasn't changed, but I don't think it's valuable to look back and place unreasonable standards of clairvoyance onto employees). [1] I suppose depending on how broad your definition is, I use HN fairly regularly, but the frequency and level of interaction on a site like this seems categorically different to the kinds of social media usage you're talking about when you say "grow a conscience before building them".
thinkingemote 7y ago
Ironically it's things like Twitter that has popularised these types of public displays of confession of guilt in the court of public opinion. Maybe it's sensible to forsee the mob attacking you by apologizing before they get you.

_vertigo 7y ago

So, had you been in his position about to join Twitter or working for Twitter and about to build the RT button, you believe you would have foreseen its effects and refused to participate on it based on your conscience? Did anyone actually predict in Twitter’s early days that adding an RT button would lead to it being an “anger-based platform”? What makes you think you would have?

Jach 7y ago

I would just like to understand the mental process that evolves a conscience from "This is probably fine" to "That’s what I think we actually did [just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon]". In my moral calculus giving a 4-year-old a loaded weapon is pretty damn distinct from implementing a social media button for teens and older which among its negative aspects facilitates cyber bullying or other negative social behavior. With people equating the two it's probably not even that facetious to write a cliche that goes like "first they came for my retweet button, then they came for my 2nd amendment". (Edit: I did think of one mental process that's not just the easy "say whatever in front of the media" reason, but I don't think the guy is making a more interesting consequentialist dust-specks vs. torture type of claim.)

UnFleshedOne 7y ago
Have to normalize that into utilitons first. :) Giving one 4 y/o a gun is pretty bad. Giving one teen a retweet button is much less bad. Giving _all_ teens and teen-minded people retweet buttons is as bad as a sum of all negative (and positive) consequences. Once you do that you might reasonably arrive at equivalence.

derekdahmer 7y ago

How could you have known in 2009 how the dynamics of twitter would evolve over the next decade? There's no way. I've used twitter since 2008 and if you told me then that 7 years later that the US presidents would be using it as their primary communication platform with the public I wouldn't believe you.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

thomascgalvin 7y ago

When Twitter was first becoming big, the most important story was how Twitter was empowering the Arab Spring and giving a voice to the voiceless. The retweet button was a part of that; it allowed people to quickly and easily share vital information. The world was kind of taken off-guard by the fact that this relatively tiny, fail-whale-laden platform could enable freedom and resistance against totalitarian governments. We, and by "we" I mean the collective internet, didn't really foresee that same platform becoming a platform for hatred and disinformation, or a tool of those same totalitarian governments. Maybe we should have, but there's a problem with that: hindsight is easy, but proactively thinking like a shithead is difficult. Creating the retweet button isn't a matter of conscience, it's a matter of not foreseeing the shitty things shitty people would do with that tool.

moosey 7y ago

I wonder if social media is a level one or a level two chaotic system, ideas that are separated based on how the system responds to prediction. Level two means that the system responds, but level one, the weather as an example, doesn't respond to prediction. I don't think that it requires a lack of conscience to end up creating a dangerous behemoth in a level two chaotic system. We couldn't have necessarily have known that social media would lead to the ecosystem that we have today. When I look at social media and the advertising ecosystem around it, I feel like the major flaw is the fact that social media companies must get eyes on the page, that they must supply value, and one of the requirements to meet this is that you simply cannot accomplish what is required if information is supplied as a 'dumb pipe' to the users. Users must be convinced that they are part of specific communities while online in order to keep them on site, so the dumb pipe is replaced with a 'feed' of some sort, which is nothing less than human experimentation. I think that twitter does this by building large emotional groups via these quick sharing mechanisms, which isn't necessarily bad, but the fact that everyone is informed of them as they are going on is, again, human experimentation. I think that the social media fix is to reduce all of them to dumb pipes, because anything more than that is a huge risk. They should probably have things that fight spam, but that's a security issue, not a human experimentation one.

amiantos 7y ago

The problem is idealism. > “I was very excited about the opportunity that Twitter represented,” Wetherell said, noting that he initially felt the retweet button would elevate voices from underrepresented communities. The problem is that it didn't register to him, or anyone, that "racists" were an "underrepresented community", as were sexists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-intellectuals, quacks, and so on. When attempting to give a voice to minorities, they gave a voice to all "minorities", including people who had minority opinions. The idealism came in the form of expecting that these tools will, by default, be used for good... it wouldn't surprise me that people in the tech community, who have often come from privilege or at the very least live within privileged bubbles, are naive about what people are really capable of. "A rising tide lifts all boats..." unfortunately some of those ships are full of pirates and disease. It's sad, but you really need think about these things from a jaded and cynical perspective when building them, it's unfortunate that there's been a long crusade against cynicism. Being optimistic and feeling optimism about the world and humanity leads to problems like this.

svachalek 7y ago
I would go less with blaming optimism and more the mirrored bubble of the internet itself. Everyone out there is just like me, right?
redwards510 7y ago
Well said. In addition to simply being naive, I think there is also the self-delusion that everyone subscribes to when they convince themselves that their job (no matter what it is) is somehow helping contribute something good to the world. I had a relative that worked as a telemarketer selling predatory debt consolidation packages to people on the verge of bankruptcy and when he described what he was doing, he enthusiastically framed it like he was helping the people from going bankrupt, even though he was just helping them dig a bigger hole. If your company is a public corporation, your only purpose is to maximize shareholder value.

luma 7y ago

I feel like this article covered that fairly well. The developers had no idea that this simple feature addition (which did nothing more than formalize what users were already doing) would result in what we have today. Maybe you see further than others, but the rest of us are subject to the law of unintended consequences.

wutbrodo 7y ago

As someone who's neither a heavy social media user[1] nor an engineer on one of these projects, I think this perspective doesn't really make a lot of sense in context. The consensus that social media is a horribly damaging drug that's destroying our democracy is quite recent. Someone, a decade ago, decided to slightly lower the friction of the already-existing practice of retweeting by formalizing it as a feature. Expecting them to have the clairvoyance necessary to interpret that as an unethical act is beyond insane. The same is true of pretty much everything else on the product side of social media companies: you'd have to have a much keener, more cynical sense than average of how deeply horrible most people are in order to predict that social media would've evolved the way it has. "Not internalizing the fact that most people are mostly shitty people" isn't really a reasonable bar to tar people in knowingly being unethical. The new public square and its ability to unleash unfiltered humanity is _sui generis_, so nobody has a schema for how to handle this. The closest you come to people who've grappled with this question are people like The Founding Fathers. (and to be clear, I'm no fan of these companies: I explicitly avoiding applying to Facebook and Twitter out of college because I either didn't agree with their ethics or thought itthey were shit at product. My opinion hasn't changed, but I don't think it's valuable to look back and place unreasonable standards of clairvoyance onto employees). [1] I suppose depending on how broad your definition is, I use HN fairly regularly, but the frequency and level of interaction on a site like this seems categorically different to the kinds of social media usage you're talking about when you say "grow a conscience before building them".

thinkingemote 7y ago

Ironically it's things like Twitter that has popularised these types of public displays of confession of guilt in the court of public opinion. Maybe it's sensible to forsee the mob attacking you by apologizing before they get you.