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I gotta say this is terrifying. Not because Mozilla is trying to hold YouTube responsible for not doing a better job fine-tuning their addiction-machine (who ha

I gotta say this is terrifying. Not because Mozilla is trying to hold YouTube responsible for not doing a better job fine-tuning their addiction-machine (who hasn't found themselves sucked into the one-more-video vortex) but because we're now happy to blame some algorithm for our shortcomings and take no personal responsibility for our actions. I personally went through a 3-month journey starting from travel videos to getting sucked into the "look how awesome mirrorless cameras are and all the beautiful content I can create with them" and ended up spending about 15k on camera gear (body, lenses, gimbals, lights, etc). I eventually managed to reign myself in but I didn't think I can now turn around and blame Google or some algorithm for spending far more than I should have. Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions and lack of impulse control instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me?

sysbin 7y ago
Free will is an illusion but you can continue to postulate otherwise. You can feel like you’re responsible while not really being true in both situations.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Ok. How? And are we talking predestination or simply external locii of control lack of free will?
  - kayza 7y ago
    There is the narrating self and the experiencing self. The narrating self makes up stories from the information that the experiencing self feeds to it. The important thing being that the experiencing self cannot judge, it just... experiences. Takes in every bit of sensory information and let’s the narrating self make up the story it thinks matches the experience one goes through. Now, imagine the sensory overload you get when stuck on YouTube, showing those reviews, unboxing videos, whatever to you - or more precisely, to your experiencing self. At some point your narrating self will make up the story and then you end up paying 15k for camera equipment... of course, it’s your choice, right? EDIT: https://medium.theuxblog.com/the-peak-end-rule-ff7246115248 https://medium.theuxblog.com/the-peak-end-rule-ff7246115248
    - sysbin 7y ago
      This is a good explanation of the situation OP went through.
    - muxator 7y ago
      Thanks for this explanation and for the link. Once younlook at the ad-driven economy from this point of view, it becomes harder to be condescending.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  > Free will is an illusion but you can continue to postulate otherwise Aren't you implying free will by saying a person "can continue to postulate otherwise"?
  - sysbin 7y ago
    postulate: suggest or assume the existence, fact, or truth of (something) as a basis of reasoning.
    - unkulunkulu 7y ago
      The conundrum is in the word “can”
      - syssbin2 7y ago
        I guess "will" would have been better.
    - unkulunkulu 7y ago
      To really live up to your philosophy you seriously need to completely abandon modal verbs in your language
- ARandomerDude 7y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "free will." Natural liberty, moral liberty, ultimate sovereignty...
  - sysbin 7y ago
    You're not free in any of those situations.
    - ARandomerDude 7y ago
      Curious where you're coming from -- Materialistic determinism? Hyper-Calvinism? Something else?
      - syssbin2 7y ago
        Hard determinism
        ARandomerDude 7y ago
        Caused by?
- maratd 7y ago
  > Free will is an illusion but you can continue to postulate otherwise. Then you won't be mad at me for down-voting your comment? It wasn't my choice!
  - sysbin 7y ago
    I'm curious why you think I would care in the first place if that's your attitude.
    - unkulunkulu 7y ago
      This is the path of irresponsibility, leads to not caring, what denying it really accomplishes? You really will argue that you can’t even try acting otherwise? Reminds Ice T from rick and morty schwifty :)
      - syssbin2 7y ago
        Nope, a person with the childish attitude that the person exhibits is a clown in either mental capacities of understanding free will is an illusion or not. Understanding free will is an illusion increases analysing how you are as a person and in my opinion makes you become a pacifist.
        maratd 7y ago
        > analysing how you are as a person and in my opinion makes you become a pacifist This contradicts your argument. If there is no free will, you can't make yourself become anything.
        sysbin 7y ago
        That's not what I wrote. People who understand free will is an illusion become pacifists.
- kbutler 7y ago
  If free will is an illusion, then the influence of the algorithms is also illusory. Furthermore, Google had no choice but to create the algorithms as they have, therefore holding them (or anyone) accountable for any harm is meaningless. Much better to act as if free will is not illusory, and do what we can to improve things.
  - syssbin2 7y ago
    I disagree and that's very much a strawman argument. I still want to improve things and even when knowing free will is an illusion.
fortran77 7y ago
YouTube does have problems, but I'm not sure what Mozilla tries to accomplish by hosting this once-sided set of gripes. The first one I saw was from a father concerned that his daughter would watch dance videos and would want to become more physically fit. A healthy response would be to say "Great! Now let's find a gym or studio where you can do this safely, effectively, and work toward your goals." For my young children, I hand select videos for them. Videos I've watched or know about. Just like parents have done for kids for the past 30 years or more.
- michannne 7y ago
  It really isn't that difficult to spend an afternoon or a weekend curating playlists of content for your kids, the difficulty comes from the recommended feed, which can show things wholly unrelated to the video. It's trivial to set up a script to remove the feed on PC, but on mobile it's another story and I'm not sure many parents want to go through that mess. Sounds like there is a selling opportunity there.
- Swizec 7y ago
  We were raised by TV. Come home after school and watch re-runs of 90's American sitcoms, Discovery Channel, History Channel, some Cartoon Network. Watch TV, do your homework, snack around, then your parents come home 3 or 4 hours later and your freedom stops.[1] Today kids are raised by YouTube. The crucial difference is that when I was a kid there was common consensus that hey maybe we shouldn't play the goriest and sexiest things on TV between 2pm and 7pm when kids are watching. YouTube doesn't have that. Yet. I'm sure eventually it will have to. [1] I learned more than I care to admit about human interaction, personal relationships, and how the world works from American TV shows. But I also learned so much English that people often confuse me for a native speaker.
  - dathinab 7y ago
    The problem is that YouTube tries to have that and fails. For once kids I had been spoken with (~12y) where aware that there are thinks they don't want to see. But then we have that problem that it's no longer obvious what is "bad" and what isn't. For once youtube removes/age locks videos which are obvious not teen safe (gore, porn). But this mainly gives a illusion of safety. The problems are normally not the obvious "bad" videos but such which seem to be fine. Except that they aren't because they either change their stile/content midway or are bad in a more subtile way. EDIT: Just to be clear old TV also had manipulative content, but this was normally only about advertisements and politics due to curation. YT has manipulative content of cults of all kind, often with noticeable risks to mental and/or physical health. And the politically motivated manipulative content seems to have become much more wild/dangerous as it's practically way less restricted.
tick_tock_tick 7y ago
It's really embarrassing that Mozilla is pitching this as if people have no agency. The idea that we need to stand together and tell youtube that we are incapable of any kind of self controls is a bad joke.
deleted 7y ago
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save_ferris 7y ago
This came up in a TED talk about the ethics of online advertising a while back, but I can't recall who the speaker was. They talked about the transformation of advertising in the age of big data, and how marketing efforts have shifted from benign, widely-encompassing efforts in print and tv to highly-targeted, tailored initiatives to drive sales. The implication being that by using consumer data, we could be building systems that are capable of targeting those who struggle with impulsive behavior or are easily co-opted (think old people and scam callers) and not even know it. It really comes down to how you view things like addiction and impulsive behavior, and how those things impact free will. The fact that we don't really know with any kind of certainty that people who struggle with these things are protected when using the internet raises a lot of questions. Should people with these struggles just not use the internet?
felipemnoa 7y ago
>>getting sucked into the "look how awesome mirrorless camera It is definitely a double edge sword but being obsessed about something and pursing it to no end could lead to extraordinary results. Lots if not most of great accomplishments have been done by people that would just not let something go.
- somada141 7y ago
  I certainly agree that a 'healthy obsession' with a topic can yield amazing results! I sincerely doubt I'll now become a renowned photographer but even if I don't I hope to be able to own my decision to try (and potentially fail).
eganist 7y ago
> Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions and lack of impulse control instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me? Not every brain works the same way. In fact, every brain is certain to work differently. Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault. We believe we have agency, but this depends on the underlying inputs to our knowledge base. When the inputs are manipulated and result in new assumptions, the decisions we make are invariably influenced and often in ways we don't expect. This is also the root of concepts like unconscious bias. Tldr: probably not, because you cant control your inputs anymore.
- unkulunkulu 7y ago
  > Not every brain works the same way. In fact, every brain is certain to work differently. Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault. Impulse control is a skill, not everyone is the same or has equal level of abilities in anything, but we are ultimately choosing our reaction to an input and we have power to extend our influence on ourselves and world around us.
  - eganist 7y ago
    It's also a heritable trait, at least based on the slew of research I found when googling impulse control genes. That doesn't mean it can't be improved, but it does mean we should be respectful of people who may have a much harder time with it. Not everyone can meet a societal baseline that's challenging enough for people deemed to be normative; a person with one arm is plenty likely to be good at basketball, but imposing qualification rules based on their capability to do free throws might be a bit out of bounds... so to speak. That's what algorithm (self-)regulations (and gripes along what Mozilla published here) would aim to address.
- lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  > Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault. If someone with bad impulse control kills another person, is it not their fault? I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I'm just pointing out that this is the moral principle being debated here. I certainly don't know the answer, but we should think about this one a little bit before saying that no one is ever at "fault" for anything. Impulse control is just another facet of human personality, just like being aggressive, or being a bigot.
ocschwar 7y ago
> At the risk of being vehemently downvoted I gotta say this is terrifying. Not because Mozilla is trying to hold YouTube responsible for not doing a better job fine-tuning their addiction-machine (who hasn't found themselves sucked into the one-more-video vortex) but because we're now happy to blame some algorithm for our shortcomings and take no personal responsibility for our actions. Much as I am confident about my ability to keep Youtube from turning me into a hate-spewing misogynist who needs to be made persona non grata at Bass Pro for the common good, I have no confidence at my ability to dodge bullets from more mediocre minds who go that route by way of Youtube.
- michannne 7y ago
  There are a number of compromises you have to make when you decide to live alongside millions of other people with wildly different viewpoints.
  - ocschwar 7y ago
    And we can negotiate those compromises by calling on Youtube to change how they run their site.
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  FYI if you get flagged again: HN reacts harshly to mentioning misogyny because it believe it is a false concept invented by evil women that should have never left the kitchen.
uses 7y ago
> we're now happy to blame some algorithm for our shortcomings and take no personal responsibility for our actions Seems like a bit of a strawman? > Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions Certainly, and those using algorithms to direct human behavior have accountability as well, wouldn't you say? Are they not accountable for their behavior? Wouldn't it be rather opposed to the way we think about most products and services if those implementing algorithms were held exempt from all consequences or responsibilities of putting their product into the world? Surely you acknowledge that algorithms wield incredible power? Or else we wouldn't be having this discussion nor would the world's most powerful corporations be investing vast resources into using algorithms to further their goals?
kart23 7y ago
I think mostly it's scary because it's free and incredibly accessible: Anyone can get addicted, and you don't need money, a drug dealer, or any of those things to fall down a rabbit hole. Yes, you should be held accountable if you watch 2 hours of youtube a day, but I think that there's a difference between a legal obligation and the right thing to do. Yeah, google doesn't HAVE to do anything. But they really should. It's the right thing to do.
tunesmith 7y ago
Isn't it more complicated than that? We have great self control where we are choosing to exercise our will power, but will power is a limited-renewable resource. I mean, I can ride a bicycle down a hill and focus on it and do a great job, but if that hill has a ton of animated billboards that's got to affect me on some level, differently than if the street were bare, right? I think we as a society are going to have to get a lot more savvy about how easy it is to influence other people when they're not paying close attention.
rolph 7y ago
the neuropsychological mechanisms, being exploited are about as primative as a patellar reflex. You can be cognizant and keep a leash on it, but in the correct context you are guaranteed to give in, unconscious of the process.
Keloo 7y ago
This and some comments below is the extreme to one or the other end. The situation is as almost always grey (not white or black). If you are procrastinating on youtube or buy junk there is something you can do (you have some degree of control) also there is something Youtube can do (they also have some degree of control), why do we involve so much extremism into discussions around (ads, privacy, etc..) P.S. I spend <2h/day on youtube mostly on the shows or tutorials I wanted in advance. I spend <20min/day on fb (90% messenger, 10% groups that I "have to" follow). Very close to 0 social media activity for more than 2 years now. So it's definitely possible.
spion 7y ago
I can easily blame an algorithm if the company has provided no way to tweak or override its recommendation engine parameters, or at minimum allow curation or filtering companies picked by users (or responsible guardians) to override recommendation decisions. If YouTube doesn't want to be responsible for it, it should provide means for other companies to pick up the slack.
ogurechny 7y ago
This is insane. Not because of the campaign (pretty forgettable), or YouTube involvement (the more our favorite corporation is bashed, the better), but because of how people who have made it think. They see themselves (or people next to them) as some sci-fi blobs of flesh who are fed by the robots, and therefore feel the need to complain when the robots are not doing their work well enough. “Oh, no, bad things happen in the world! People die, people kill, people believe in things I consider stupid, people neglect their relatives, and blame it on modern technology! I want to revert myself to not knowing all of that. Please lobotomize me gently.” Also: clear cookies, don't login into any accounts when you don't need it, type your specific search terms in, don't click on those totally obvious clickbait ads/videos/whatever. Here, I solved your “recommendation problem”.
neilk 7y ago
I understand how you're struggling with this, but can I make an observation? You seem to have a personal experience that you are vulnerable to YouTube. However, you seem to be concluding that you are NOT vulnerable to YouTube. Not based on data, but because that is an unacceptable conclusion. Like a lot of people, you believe accountability is important for society to function. And it seems like you force blame on yourself, in order to rescue the notion of accountability. I think you see the problem, right? But what if this whole way of thinking isn't right? There are some people alive today who still believe that getting a disease is a sign of not praying enough. Like, living in the USA right now. We know they are wrong. What if being vulnerable to cognitive exploitation is similar? What if it's foolish to put this in the realm of "the victim needs moral strength" and it should be more in the realm of "the perpetrator needs to stop harming / the risk factors need to be reduced by collective actions".
- somada141 7y ago
  I may have oversimplified and have come across as saying "personal responsibility and self-control needs to be absolute and be treated as such". I was by no means trying to exonerate YouTube or any service that aims to manipulate its users. I was only trying to convey that a large campaign against exploitation should not be the other extreme where victims are automatically absolved while the perpetrator is entirely demonized. Surely there must be a middle-ground?
  - neilk 7y ago
    I don't see an inherent reason why the middle ground is correct when assessing blame. Or indeed why blame is a kind of conserved quantity and if we give more to one we must give less to another. Look, when I got up in the morning I had no intention of looking at videos from the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack, but I followed an urge and lost 15 minutes as it led me to viral videos about deleted scenes from Star Wars and then surprisingly well-made fan videos, and... you get the gist. On the other hand, many people at YouTube did wake up this morning with the intention of maximizing my viewing time. They are armed with supercomputers and artificial intelligences piloted by Ph.Ds. If in some future world, "conspiracy to steal time" was a crime, this would be an easy prosecution. That said, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't take any steps to defend myself. I should use something to block certain sites. But just because I have that responsibility doesn't diminish someone else's culpability for inflicting harms.
II2II 7y ago
The personal accountability argument is perfectly reasonable for most people, yet there are also vulnerable populations to consider. While we can usually assume that children are under the care of a responsible adult, there are cases where they are not. For other populations, that assumption cannot be made. Those with intellectual disabilities, psychological problems, and substance abuse problems are frequently left to their own devices as long as they are to some extent functional in society. That is before considering marginalized people. While they may be able to walk away from videos that marginalizes them, they are not always free to walk away from people who marginalize them. (These are people who may, or may not, be reinforcing their prejudices from those videos.) They may be enticed to view a video that appears to align with people like them, only to discover that it is attacking people like them. Then there are the sheer numbers. A message repeated often enough, even if it is only through thumbnails and titles, will have an impact upon a person's well being. It is also important to realize that this environment is the product of decisions made decades ago, when we decided that anyone can post anything with few consequences. Whether you view that as good or bad depends upon several factors, such as where you fall on the spectrum of free speech. Yet there was one clear consequence: anyone did post anything and making content discoverable became a problem. Given the bulk of data, it became effectively impossible for humans to categorize or recommend content, so algorithms entered the picture. Since the algorithms cannot do it properly, we should not be surprised by people blaming the algorithms or the creators of those algorithms. Is there a way to fix the problem? Short of scrapping YouTube, I doubt that there is a human solution. There is too much content and you cannot rely upon creators to do so accurately (too many motives, lack of understanding, or laziness to deal with). So the only real solution is to tackle the algorithms or face the consequences of the existing ones. EDIT: clarification on "creators".
jerry1979 7y ago
Individuals may have freewill, but general populations certainly do not. I think people are concerned because these algorithms are a population-level problem. Also, in your individual example, I think the 'blame' exists partially with you and partially with youtube. Your weakness for camera gear combined with the strength of the camera gear algorithm guided you to buy 15k worth of stuff.
- majewsky 7y ago
  > Individuals may have freewill, but general populations certainly do not. So free will is when we have not zoomed out enough to see patterns? That actually explains a lot.
zelly 7y ago
Everyone thinks they are the exception to Pavlovian incentives, brainwashing, dark patterns and social engineering. That can't possibly be the case. Everyone thinks $XX.99 doesn't work on them, but it still does. You wouldn't design security for a system on the premise that your users are too smart to mess up, so why make the distinction for yourself personally. The intellect is stronger than the will. Remember the story of Odysseus handcuffing himself to a pole to avoid the lure of the Sirens.
apostacy 7y ago
The common problem here is that people are not doing any emotional work, and are blaming YouTube for their personal failings. The first and only solution that these people come to is to try to restrict people's access. Stop blaming technology and just talk to your loved ones! > 02: “I Don’t Know How To Undo the Damage That Has Been Done” > My 10-year-old sweet daughter innocently searched for “tap dance videos” and now is in this spiral of horrible extreme “dance” and contortionist videos that give her horrible unsafe body-harming and body-image-damaging advice. I’ve tried to go in and manually delete all recommended videos, put in parental controls, everything (including blocking the app) — but she’s finding ways to log on using browsers and school computers. These terrible videos just keep being recommended to her. She is now restricting her eating and drinking. I heard her downstairs saying “work to eat! work to drink!” I don’t know how I can undo the damage that’s been done to her impressionable mind. So your sweet 10-year-old daughter is learning dirty dancing now? And your first reaction is to blame a website for this? Young women have had these problems long before YouTube. TALK TO YOUR DAUGHTER. How long did you spend writing this? Have you tried just sitting her down and helping her with her self esteem issues? There's no app for it, it's just called being a supportive and encouraging parent. > 05: How I Lost My Father > My stepfather is an 80-year-old retired scientist from Ecuador. He was always curious about all sources of wisdom, theories and knowledge, is very literate and educated, enjoys discussing current events and scientific discoveries. But for a few years, he has become quite lonely and spends a large amount of time on the internet — and on YouTube in particular. His curious mind quickly brought him toward "alternative theories" on multiple topics: conspiracies, Illuminati and other alien-based stories, Bible-inspired as well as radically anti-religious obscure worldviews, "pyramidologists", etc. > Despite the fact that we tried to erase his YouTube history and "clean" his browser, his recommendations are completely filled by these kinds of esoteric videos, with those recognizable synthetic (TTS) voice-over commentaries, endlessly proposing a similar video after another. He sometimes falls asleep while watching. His days are filled by such content, which has quite strongly affected his worldview toward a much grimmer and more pessimistic turn. It seems impossible for us, his family, to fight against the recommendation algorithms that steers his digital consumer life. It is quite sad and frustrating to see a loved one bury oneself more and more into this kind of obscure, negative and extremely confidence-depriving influence. > My father, before his passing, thought aliens were already living among us in disguise, that he could eliminate his heating bill with a new "free energy" device, and that UFOs were all over the place. He showed me YouTube videos that "proved it." I spent hours trying to explain to him that YouTube is full of "free energy" scams, that the best UFO is maybe a shitty little DARPA toy, and that aliens among us in plain clothes was simply delusion caused by YouTube videos. He could not come to grips with why people could be dishonest, or why the FCC wasn't doing their job, and trusted what he saw on his TV way too much. He was consuming YouTube on his TV and maybe thought the same FCC kind of government regulation he was used to was still present there. How much better could our time together have been if not for YouTube-induced delusions? So all you tried doing was taking away his computer? You can't stop him from taking the bus to the library! It sounds like he was extremely lonely. The best thing you can do is spend more time with him, and maybe get to the root of what is causing him to be unhappy. With both the father and the daughter, I believe that the feelings are coming first, and the media they are seeking out is a reaction to it. The 10 year old girl has very normal self esteem and body issues, and needs a mother there to support her. The elderly father feels alone, depressed, and maybe abandoned, and is seeking out videos that are congruent with his state of mind. I have a lot of experience with this. I had a very similar situation with a family member who became embroiled in Trutherism about a decade ago. But it wasn't the fault of the Internet. It was because he was depressed and miserable for other reasons. The conspiracies that he saw, when distilled down, were based his much more pragmatic anxieties. When he got emotional support and a job, he was much better. This guy should have tried spending more time with his father and helped him feel safe and close, then he wouldn't have spent so much time watching this.
kerkeslager 7y ago
There's a few problems with this viewpoint: 1. Do we want to figure out who to blame, or do we want to fix the problem? You're blaming the people who watch the videos, but that doesn't lead to any solution to what is a pervasive problem in our society. 2. If we must play the blame game, then at least let's be nuanced about it. Sure, it's my personal responsibility if I make the poor choice to start smoking, but cigarette companies are responsible for producing a product that kills people. These are two separate actions: one done by me, and one done by a corporation. We're each responsible for our own action, and neither one is good.
- true_religion 7y ago
  Cigarette companies are reviled for having information that smoking kills, and not only supresssing it but going as far as to claim smoking has health benefits. That goes way beyond personal responsibility. It was a wide spread fraud. YouTube isn’t really doing that. They simply recommend things that you may like and succeed or fail at it. When people are uncomfortable with the recommendations it’s a failure, not a conspiracy against the public.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    > They simply recommend things that you may like That's the misconception here. Youtube is recommending things that make you watch more Youtube. Their customer base is advertisers, not viewers.
RangerScience 7y ago
> Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions Ehhhhh. You make decisions and take actions inside contexts that other people create. So, if you want to be absolute about it, you have to only consider the choices you as they differ from your alternatives. If you did not have (or, within epsilon, did not experience having) any other choices, are you accountable at all? And, since all of this is super fuzzy anyway (YouTube presents you with a weighted choice, at which "exit" is near the bottom), you have do something like take the cross-product of each option with the modifications made to your capacity to choose that option and _then_ the difference between each of those and _then_ you can begin to say what someone is accountable for given their choices, but then that's not accounting for past traumas, and then you start getting into free will and "can you even make a choice anyway". > instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me? ....yes. Definitely. Because that corporation sure as shit won't, and it's not so much a question as that we each are responsible for ourselves as an observation, because mostly, other people aren't gonna do it. You might be responsible for the outcome of your decisions, but it's not exactly reasonable for the rest of us to hold you completely accountable, because you're not wholly responsible for the options you decided between.

sysbin 7y ago

Free will is an illusion but you can continue to postulate otherwise. You can feel like you’re responsible while not really being true in both situations.

tomc1985 7y ago
Ok. How? And are we talking predestination or simply external locii of control lack of free will?
- kayza 7y ago
  There is the narrating self and the experiencing self. The narrating self makes up stories from the information that the experiencing self feeds to it. The important thing being that the experiencing self cannot judge, it just... experiences. Takes in every bit of sensory information and let’s the narrating self make up the story it thinks matches the experience one goes through. Now, imagine the sensory overload you get when stuck on YouTube, showing those reviews, unboxing videos, whatever to you - or more precisely, to your experiencing self. At some point your narrating self will make up the story and then you end up paying 15k for camera equipment... of course, it’s your choice, right? EDIT: https://medium.theuxblog.com/the-peak-end-rule-ff7246115248 https://medium.theuxblog.com/the-peak-end-rule-ff7246115248
  - sysbin 7y ago
    This is a good explanation of the situation OP went through.
  - muxator 7y ago
    Thanks for this explanation and for the link. Once younlook at the ad-driven economy from this point of view, it becomes harder to be condescending.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> Free will is an illusion but you can continue to postulate otherwise Aren't you implying free will by saying a person "can continue to postulate otherwise"?
- sysbin 7y ago
  postulate: suggest or assume the existence, fact, or truth of (something) as a basis of reasoning.
  - unkulunkulu 7y ago
    The conundrum is in the word “can”
    - syssbin2 7y ago
      I guess "will" would have been better.
  - unkulunkulu 7y ago
    To really live up to your philosophy you seriously need to completely abandon modal verbs in your language
ARandomerDude 7y ago
Depends on what you mean by "free will." Natural liberty, moral liberty, ultimate sovereignty...
- sysbin 7y ago
  You're not free in any of those situations.
  - ARandomerDude 7y ago
    Curious where you're coming from -- Materialistic determinism? Hyper-Calvinism? Something else?
    - syssbin2 7y ago
      Hard determinism
      - ARandomerDude 7y ago
        Caused by?
maratd 7y ago
> Free will is an illusion but you can continue to postulate otherwise. Then you won't be mad at me for down-voting your comment? It wasn't my choice!
- sysbin 7y ago
  I'm curious why you think I would care in the first place if that's your attitude.
  - unkulunkulu 7y ago
    This is the path of irresponsibility, leads to not caring, what denying it really accomplishes? You really will argue that you can’t even try acting otherwise? Reminds Ice T from rick and morty schwifty :)
    - syssbin2 7y ago
      Nope, a person with the childish attitude that the person exhibits is a clown in either mental capacities of understanding free will is an illusion or not. Understanding free will is an illusion increases analysing how you are as a person and in my opinion makes you become a pacifist.
      - maratd 7y ago
        > analysing how you are as a person and in my opinion makes you become a pacifist This contradicts your argument. If there is no free will, you can't make yourself become anything.
        sysbin 7y ago
        That's not what I wrote. People who understand free will is an illusion become pacifists.
kbutler 7y ago
If free will is an illusion, then the influence of the algorithms is also illusory. Furthermore, Google had no choice but to create the algorithms as they have, therefore holding them (or anyone) accountable for any harm is meaningless. Much better to act as if free will is not illusory, and do what we can to improve things.
- syssbin2 7y ago
  I disagree and that's very much a strawman argument. I still want to improve things and even when knowing free will is an illusion.

fortran77 7y ago

YouTube does have problems, but I'm not sure what Mozilla tries to accomplish by hosting this once-sided set of gripes. The first one I saw was from a father concerned that his daughter would watch dance videos and would want to become more physically fit. A healthy response would be to say "Great! Now let's find a gym or studio where you can do this safely, effectively, and work toward your goals." For my young children, I hand select videos for them. Videos I've watched or know about. Just like parents have done for kids for the past 30 years or more.

michannne 7y ago
It really isn't that difficult to spend an afternoon or a weekend curating playlists of content for your kids, the difficulty comes from the recommended feed, which can show things wholly unrelated to the video. It's trivial to set up a script to remove the feed on PC, but on mobile it's another story and I'm not sure many parents want to go through that mess. Sounds like there is a selling opportunity there.
Swizec 7y ago
We were raised by TV. Come home after school and watch re-runs of 90's American sitcoms, Discovery Channel, History Channel, some Cartoon Network. Watch TV, do your homework, snack around, then your parents come home 3 or 4 hours later and your freedom stops.[1] Today kids are raised by YouTube. The crucial difference is that when I was a kid there was common consensus that hey maybe we shouldn't play the goriest and sexiest things on TV between 2pm and 7pm when kids are watching. YouTube doesn't have that. Yet. I'm sure eventually it will have to. [1] I learned more than I care to admit about human interaction, personal relationships, and how the world works from American TV shows. But I also learned so much English that people often confuse me for a native speaker.
- dathinab 7y ago
  The problem is that YouTube tries to have that and fails. For once kids I had been spoken with (~12y) where aware that there are thinks they don't want to see. But then we have that problem that it's no longer obvious what is "bad" and what isn't. For once youtube removes/age locks videos which are obvious not teen safe (gore, porn). But this mainly gives a illusion of safety. The problems are normally not the obvious "bad" videos but such which seem to be fine. Except that they aren't because they either change their stile/content midway or are bad in a more subtile way. EDIT: Just to be clear old TV also had manipulative content, but this was normally only about advertisements and politics due to curation. YT has manipulative content of cults of all kind, often with noticeable risks to mental and/or physical health. And the politically motivated manipulative content seems to have become much more wild/dangerous as it's practically way less restricted.

tick_tock_tick 7y ago

It's really embarrassing that Mozilla is pitching this as if people have no agency. The idea that we need to stand together and tell youtube that we are incapable of any kind of self controls is a bad joke.

deleted 7y ago

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save_ferris 7y ago

This came up in a TED talk about the ethics of online advertising a while back, but I can't recall who the speaker was. They talked about the transformation of advertising in the age of big data, and how marketing efforts have shifted from benign, widely-encompassing efforts in print and tv to highly-targeted, tailored initiatives to drive sales. The implication being that by using consumer data, we could be building systems that are capable of targeting those who struggle with impulsive behavior or are easily co-opted (think old people and scam callers) and not even know it. It really comes down to how you view things like addiction and impulsive behavior, and how those things impact free will. The fact that we don't really know with any kind of certainty that people who struggle with these things are protected when using the internet raises a lot of questions. Should people with these struggles just not use the internet?

felipemnoa 7y ago

>>getting sucked into the "look how awesome mirrorless camera It is definitely a double edge sword but being obsessed about something and pursing it to no end could lead to extraordinary results. Lots if not most of great accomplishments have been done by people that would just not let something go.

somada141 7y ago
I certainly agree that a 'healthy obsession' with a topic can yield amazing results! I sincerely doubt I'll now become a renowned photographer but even if I don't I hope to be able to own my decision to try (and potentially fail).

eganist 7y ago

> Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions and lack of impulse control instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me? Not every brain works the same way. In fact, every brain is certain to work differently. Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault. We believe we have agency, but this depends on the underlying inputs to our knowledge base. When the inputs are manipulated and result in new assumptions, the decisions we make are invariably influenced and often in ways we don't expect. This is also the root of concepts like unconscious bias. Tldr: probably not, because you cant control your inputs anymore.

unkulunkulu 7y ago
> Not every brain works the same way. In fact, every brain is certain to work differently. Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault. Impulse control is a skill, not everyone is the same or has equal level of abilities in anything, but we are ultimately choosing our reaction to an input and we have power to extend our influence on ourselves and world around us.
- eganist 7y ago
  It's also a heritable trait, at least based on the slew of research I found when googling impulse control genes. That doesn't mean it can't be improved, but it does mean we should be respectful of people who may have a much harder time with it. Not everyone can meet a societal baseline that's challenging enough for people deemed to be normative; a person with one arm is plenty likely to be good at basketball, but imposing qualification rules based on their capability to do free throws might be a bit out of bounds... so to speak. That's what algorithm (self-)regulations (and gripes along what Mozilla published here) would aim to address.
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
> Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault. If someone with bad impulse control kills another person, is it not their fault? I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I'm just pointing out that this is the moral principle being debated here. I certainly don't know the answer, but we should think about this one a little bit before saying that no one is ever at "fault" for anything. Impulse control is just another facet of human personality, just like being aggressive, or being a bigot.

ocschwar 7y ago

> At the risk of being vehemently downvoted I gotta say this is terrifying. Not because Mozilla is trying to hold YouTube responsible for not doing a better job fine-tuning their addiction-machine (who hasn't found themselves sucked into the one-more-video vortex) but because we're now happy to blame some algorithm for our shortcomings and take no personal responsibility for our actions. Much as I am confident about my ability to keep Youtube from turning me into a hate-spewing misogynist who needs to be made persona non grata at Bass Pro for the common good, I have no confidence at my ability to dodge bullets from more mediocre minds who go that route by way of Youtube.

michannne 7y ago
There are a number of compromises you have to make when you decide to live alongside millions of other people with wildly different viewpoints.
- ocschwar 7y ago
  And we can negotiate those compromises by calling on Youtube to change how they run their site.
IAmEveryone 7y ago
FYI if you get flagged again: HN reacts harshly to mentioning misogyny because it believe it is a false concept invented by evil women that should have never left the kitchen.

uses 7y ago

> we're now happy to blame some algorithm for our shortcomings and take no personal responsibility for our actions Seems like a bit of a strawman? > Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions Certainly, and those using algorithms to direct human behavior have accountability as well, wouldn't you say? Are they not accountable for their behavior? Wouldn't it be rather opposed to the way we think about most products and services if those implementing algorithms were held exempt from all consequences or responsibilities of putting their product into the world? Surely you acknowledge that algorithms wield incredible power? Or else we wouldn't be having this discussion nor would the world's most powerful corporations be investing vast resources into using algorithms to further their goals?

kart23 7y ago

I think mostly it's scary because it's free and incredibly accessible: Anyone can get addicted, and you don't need money, a drug dealer, or any of those things to fall down a rabbit hole. Yes, you should be held accountable if you watch 2 hours of youtube a day, but I think that there's a difference between a legal obligation and the right thing to do. Yeah, google doesn't HAVE to do anything. But they really should. It's the right thing to do.

tunesmith 7y ago

Isn't it more complicated than that? We have great self control where we are choosing to exercise our will power, but will power is a limited-renewable resource. I mean, I can ride a bicycle down a hill and focus on it and do a great job, but if that hill has a ton of animated billboards that's got to affect me on some level, differently than if the street were bare, right? I think we as a society are going to have to get a lot more savvy about how easy it is to influence other people when they're not paying close attention.

rolph 7y ago

the neuropsychological mechanisms, being exploited are about as primative as a patellar reflex. You can be cognizant and keep a leash on it, but in the correct context you are guaranteed to give in, unconscious of the process.

Keloo 7y ago

This and some comments below is the extreme to one or the other end. The situation is as almost always grey (not white or black). If you are procrastinating on youtube or buy junk there is something you can do (you have some degree of control) also there is something Youtube can do (they also have some degree of control), why do we involve so much extremism into discussions around (ads, privacy, etc..) P.S. I spend <2h/day on youtube mostly on the shows or tutorials I wanted in advance. I spend <20min/day on fb (90% messenger, 10% groups that I "have to" follow). Very close to 0 social media activity for more than 2 years now. So it's definitely possible.

spion 7y ago

I can easily blame an algorithm if the company has provided no way to tweak or override its recommendation engine parameters, or at minimum allow curation or filtering companies picked by users (or responsible guardians) to override recommendation decisions. If YouTube doesn't want to be responsible for it, it should provide means for other companies to pick up the slack.

ogurechny 7y ago

This is insane. Not because of the campaign (pretty forgettable), or YouTube involvement (the more our favorite corporation is bashed, the better), but because of how people who have made it think. They see themselves (or people next to them) as some sci-fi blobs of flesh who are fed by the robots, and therefore feel the need to complain when the robots are not doing their work well enough. “Oh, no, bad things happen in the world! People die, people kill, people believe in things I consider stupid, people neglect their relatives, and blame it on modern technology! I want to revert myself to not knowing all of that. Please lobotomize me gently.” Also: clear cookies, don't login into any accounts when you don't need it, type your specific search terms in, don't click on those totally obvious clickbait ads/videos/whatever. Here, I solved your “recommendation problem”.

neilk 7y ago

I understand how you're struggling with this, but can I make an observation? You seem to have a personal experience that you are vulnerable to YouTube. However, you seem to be concluding that you are NOT vulnerable to YouTube. Not based on data, but because that is an unacceptable conclusion. Like a lot of people, you believe accountability is important for society to function. And it seems like you force blame on yourself, in order to rescue the notion of accountability. I think you see the problem, right? But what if this whole way of thinking isn't right? There are some people alive today who still believe that getting a disease is a sign of not praying enough. Like, living in the USA right now. We know they are wrong. What if being vulnerable to cognitive exploitation is similar? What if it's foolish to put this in the realm of "the victim needs moral strength" and it should be more in the realm of "the perpetrator needs to stop harming / the risk factors need to be reduced by collective actions".

somada141 7y ago
I may have oversimplified and have come across as saying "personal responsibility and self-control needs to be absolute and be treated as such". I was by no means trying to exonerate YouTube or any service that aims to manipulate its users. I was only trying to convey that a large campaign against exploitation should not be the other extreme where victims are automatically absolved while the perpetrator is entirely demonized. Surely there must be a middle-ground?
- neilk 7y ago
  I don't see an inherent reason why the middle ground is correct when assessing blame. Or indeed why blame is a kind of conserved quantity and if we give more to one we must give less to another. Look, when I got up in the morning I had no intention of looking at videos from the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack, but I followed an urge and lost 15 minutes as it led me to viral videos about deleted scenes from Star Wars and then surprisingly well-made fan videos, and... you get the gist. On the other hand, many people at YouTube did wake up this morning with the intention of maximizing my viewing time. They are armed with supercomputers and artificial intelligences piloted by Ph.Ds. If in some future world, "conspiracy to steal time" was a crime, this would be an easy prosecution. That said, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't take any steps to defend myself. I should use something to block certain sites. But just because I have that responsibility doesn't diminish someone else's culpability for inflicting harms.

II2II 7y ago

The personal accountability argument is perfectly reasonable for most people, yet there are also vulnerable populations to consider. While we can usually assume that children are under the care of a responsible adult, there are cases where they are not. For other populations, that assumption cannot be made. Those with intellectual disabilities, psychological problems, and substance abuse problems are frequently left to their own devices as long as they are to some extent functional in society. That is before considering marginalized people. While they may be able to walk away from videos that marginalizes them, they are not always free to walk away from people who marginalize them. (These are people who may, or may not, be reinforcing their prejudices from those videos.) They may be enticed to view a video that appears to align with people like them, only to discover that it is attacking people like them. Then there are the sheer numbers. A message repeated often enough, even if it is only through thumbnails and titles, will have an impact upon a person's well being. It is also important to realize that this environment is the product of decisions made decades ago, when we decided that anyone can post anything with few consequences. Whether you view that as good or bad depends upon several factors, such as where you fall on the spectrum of free speech. Yet there was one clear consequence: anyone did post anything and making content discoverable became a problem. Given the bulk of data, it became effectively impossible for humans to categorize or recommend content, so algorithms entered the picture. Since the algorithms cannot do it properly, we should not be surprised by people blaming the algorithms or the creators of those algorithms. Is there a way to fix the problem? Short of scrapping YouTube, I doubt that there is a human solution. There is too much content and you cannot rely upon creators to do so accurately (too many motives, lack of understanding, or laziness to deal with). So the only real solution is to tackle the algorithms or face the consequences of the existing ones. EDIT: clarification on "creators".

jerry1979 7y ago

Individuals may have freewill, but general populations certainly do not. I think people are concerned because these algorithms are a population-level problem. Also, in your individual example, I think the 'blame' exists partially with you and partially with youtube. Your weakness for camera gear combined with the strength of the camera gear algorithm guided you to buy 15k worth of stuff.

majewsky 7y ago
> Individuals may have freewill, but general populations certainly do not. So free will is when we have not zoomed out enough to see patterns? That actually explains a lot.

zelly 7y ago

Everyone thinks they are the exception to Pavlovian incentives, brainwashing, dark patterns and social engineering. That can't possibly be the case. Everyone thinks $XX.99 doesn't work on them, but it still does. You wouldn't design security for a system on the premise that your users are too smart to mess up, so why make the distinction for yourself personally. The intellect is stronger than the will. Remember the story of Odysseus handcuffing himself to a pole to avoid the lure of the Sirens.

apostacy 7y ago

The common problem here is that people are not doing any emotional work, and are blaming YouTube for their personal failings. The first and only solution that these people come to is to try to restrict people's access. Stop blaming technology and just talk to your loved ones! > 02: “I Don’t Know How To Undo the Damage That Has Been Done” > My 10-year-old sweet daughter innocently searched for “tap dance videos” and now is in this spiral of horrible extreme “dance” and contortionist videos that give her horrible unsafe body-harming and body-image-damaging advice. I’ve tried to go in and manually delete all recommended videos, put in parental controls, everything (including blocking the app) — but she’s finding ways to log on using browsers and school computers. These terrible videos just keep being recommended to her. She is now restricting her eating and drinking. I heard her downstairs saying “work to eat! work to drink!” I don’t know how I can undo the damage that’s been done to her impressionable mind. So your sweet 10-year-old daughter is learning dirty dancing now? And your first reaction is to blame a website for this? Young women have had these problems long before YouTube. TALK TO YOUR DAUGHTER. How long did you spend writing this? Have you tried just sitting her down and helping her with her self esteem issues? There's no app for it, it's just called being a supportive and encouraging parent. > 05: How I Lost My Father > My stepfather is an 80-year-old retired scientist from Ecuador. He was always curious about all sources of wisdom, theories and knowledge, is very literate and educated, enjoys discussing current events and scientific discoveries. But for a few years, he has become quite lonely and spends a large amount of time on the internet — and on YouTube in particular. His curious mind quickly brought him toward "alternative theories" on multiple topics: conspiracies, Illuminati and other alien-based stories, Bible-inspired as well as radically anti-religious obscure worldviews, "pyramidologists", etc. > Despite the fact that we tried to erase his YouTube history and "clean" his browser, his recommendations are completely filled by these kinds of esoteric videos, with those recognizable synthetic (TTS) voice-over commentaries, endlessly proposing a similar video after another. He sometimes falls asleep while watching. His days are filled by such content, which has quite strongly affected his worldview toward a much grimmer and more pessimistic turn. It seems impossible for us, his family, to fight against the recommendation algorithms that steers his digital consumer life. It is quite sad and frustrating to see a loved one bury oneself more and more into this kind of obscure, negative and extremely confidence-depriving influence. > My father, before his passing, thought aliens were already living among us in disguise, that he could eliminate his heating bill with a new "free energy" device, and that UFOs were all over the place. He showed me YouTube videos that "proved it." I spent hours trying to explain to him that YouTube is full of "free energy" scams, that the best UFO is maybe a shitty little DARPA toy, and that aliens among us in plain clothes was simply delusion caused by YouTube videos. He could not come to grips with why people could be dishonest, or why the FCC wasn't doing their job, and trusted what he saw on his TV way too much. He was consuming YouTube on his TV and maybe thought the same FCC kind of government regulation he was used to was still present there. How much better could our time together have been if not for YouTube-induced delusions? So all you tried doing was taking away his computer? You can't stop him from taking the bus to the library! It sounds like he was extremely lonely. The best thing you can do is spend more time with him, and maybe get to the root of what is causing him to be unhappy. With both the father and the daughter, I believe that the feelings are coming first, and the media they are seeking out is a reaction to it. The 10 year old girl has very normal self esteem and body issues, and needs a mother there to support her. The elderly father feels alone, depressed, and maybe abandoned, and is seeking out videos that are congruent with his state of mind. I have a lot of experience with this. I had a very similar situation with a family member who became embroiled in Trutherism about a decade ago. But it wasn't the fault of the Internet. It was because he was depressed and miserable for other reasons. The conspiracies that he saw, when distilled down, were based his much more pragmatic anxieties. When he got emotional support and a job, he was much better. This guy should have tried spending more time with his father and helped him feel safe and close, then he wouldn't have spent so much time watching this.

kerkeslager 7y ago

There's a few problems with this viewpoint: 1. Do we want to figure out who to blame, or do we want to fix the problem? You're blaming the people who watch the videos, but that doesn't lead to any solution to what is a pervasive problem in our society. 2. If we must play the blame game, then at least let's be nuanced about it. Sure, it's my personal responsibility if I make the poor choice to start smoking, but cigarette companies are responsible for producing a product that kills people. These are two separate actions: one done by me, and one done by a corporation. We're each responsible for our own action, and neither one is good.

true_religion 7y ago
Cigarette companies are reviled for having information that smoking kills, and not only supresssing it but going as far as to claim smoking has health benefits. That goes way beyond personal responsibility. It was a wide spread fraud. YouTube isn’t really doing that. They simply recommend things that you may like and succeed or fail at it. When people are uncomfortable with the recommendations it’s a failure, not a conspiracy against the public.
- majewsky 7y ago
  > They simply recommend things that you may like That's the misconception here. Youtube is recommending things that make you watch more Youtube. Their customer base is advertisers, not viewers.

RangerScience 7y ago

> Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions Ehhhhh. You make decisions and take actions inside contexts that other people create. So, if you want to be absolute about it, you have to only consider the choices you as they differ from your alternatives. If you did not have (or, within epsilon, did not experience having) any other choices, are you accountable at all? And, since all of this is super fuzzy anyway (YouTube presents you with a weighted choice, at which "exit" is near the bottom), you have do something like take the cross-product of each option with the modifications made to your capacity to choose that option and _then_ the difference between each of those and _then_ you can begin to say what someone is accountable for given their choices, but then that's not accounting for past traumas, and then you start getting into free will and "can you even make a choice anyway". > instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me? ....yes. Definitely. Because that corporation sure as shit won't, and it's not so much a question as that we each are responsible for ourselves as an observation, because mostly, other people aren't gonna do it. You might be responsible for the outcome of your decisions, but it's not exactly reasonable for the rest of us to hold you completely accountable, because you're not wholly responsible for the options you decided between.