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I think what I think about docudramas in general: Hyperbolic. I think the harms of social media are exaggerated, and not entirely unique to social media. I don

I think what I think about docudramas in general: Hyperbolic. I think the harms of social media are exaggerated, and not entirely unique to social media. I don’t have a problem with Facebook knowing what content I interact with and using that to serve me ads, or content that I want to spend time consuming. I don’t agree with the characterization of publishing or volunteering information (likes, posting photos, profile details) as private information. Facebook makes clear what information is public, what is shared to friends, etc. I think most people are relatively aware their interactions determine ad selection, as it is intuitive. It’s really not scary to me that Facebook knows which city I live in to target ads. I don’t agree with the characterization of engineering apps to provide entertainment or social value as “manipulation” in the harmful sense. The fact that something is enjoyable to use or is used a lot isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and is not necessarily an addiction. To use another example, I would want game developers to “manipulate” me to enjoy playing a game. That’s the point. The fact that people spend lots of time on social media just demonstrates that they derive something from it, not that it’s addictive or harmful. Is social media a worthwhile use of your time? Maybe not. Is it an intrinsically harmful activity? No. I think the Internet in general allows for the more rapid, selective spread of information, and that it lowers the cost of publishing. It follows that ideas can spread quickly, including conspiracy theories. I don’t agree that belief in pseudoscience, rumor, or superstition is anymore prevalent than it was before social media. I think it’s just more visible to everyone how many people do believe wacky ideas. Regardless, social media isn’t going to suddenly make me believe the moon landing was fake, so I don’t see it as being harmful. In short, I don’t think ad targeting is harmful or violating my privacy. I don’t think social media is harmful but that passive consumption of media is not the best use of time, like video games or watching TV.

save_ferris 6y ago
> The fact that people spend lots of time on social media just demonstrates that they derive something from it, not that it’s addictive or harmful. I was totally with you until this moment. This is like arguing that people with alcoholism get something out of drinking too much. It’s one thing to say that you’re comfortable with the amount of information that’s collected about you and how it’s used, but how can you ignore the fact that these companies hired experts in psychology and paid millions to keep people using their apps, just like child psychologists were deployed to TV advertising in the 80s and 90s? These apps are absolutely addictive because they were explicitly and intentionally designed to be. Spending hours in an infinite scroll wormhole does not automatically mean you’ve derived something important or worthwhile. It just means you were entertained enough by the possibility something might be good if you just keep scrolling, and that’s a problem for some.
- alexmingoia 6y ago
  I spend lots of time reading. Is reading an addiction? I don’t think spending time on something is necessarily an addiction. Can social media be an addiction? Sure, in the same way videgames can be an addiction. I wouldn’t go as far as saying video games are harmful. Social media is also different in that it’s a means of communication. It does have utility for communicating whereas video games or drinking doesn’t.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    It’s not about how you consciously choose to spend your time, it’s about being able to choose when to stop. I commonly hear from alcoholics that the problem isn’t that they want 1 drink, the problem is that they want 10 drinks. They lack the ability to moderate consumption and be able to consciously stop. Social media struggles from this exact same problem. It’s so easy to just keep scrolling, to just keep seeing what’s further down the feed. Maybe I missed a picture that I would like, or something. This FOMO is intentionally designed and baked into the apps to keep people from leaving them. You can choose to put down the book whenever you want to or need to, and maybe you don’t have a problem putting down social media either. But many, many people do. Just because you don’t feel psychologically pulled in doesn’t mean that it’s not a real addiction. There’s an easy way to test this out on yourself. Commit to going a whole day without checking your favorite social media apps and add the parental control time limit to those apps. If you find yourself unconsciously whipping out your phone and checking social media, you’ll see the prompt to input your parental control code. If you’re anywhere near the statistical average human, you’re gonna find yourself mindlessly checking social media multiple times that day. That’s what I’m talking about.
  - messo 6y ago
    > I spend lots of time reading. Is reading an addiction? I don’t think spending time on something is necessarily an addiction. Anything can become addictive, really, if we use ASAM's official definition: «People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.» The difference between books and feed-scrolling is stark. Books are linear, static and finite, while your feed is ever-changing and adapting to your patterns of behavior – and practically infinite. These differences are huge when it comes to the potential for "continued used despite harmful consequences".
messo 6y ago
I am not categorically against ads on online platforms (or offline for that mater), but I do have a problem with the power these companies have gained by gathering and analyzing fine-grained data-points on us and our behavior. The fact that most people only have a very vague idea about how these systems work and how much data is collected is worrying. The fine grained control over who you can show ads to is a problem in itself and a tool ripe for exploitation by anyone who wants to nudge certain demographics in any direction they want, political or otherwise. We have seen several examples on how wrong this can go already. > I don’t agree that belief in pseudoscience, rumor, or superstition is anymore prevalent than it was before social media. I have seen up close and personal how a combination of Facebook and Youtube's algorithms have cleverly identified and massively amplified certain tendencies in people I'm close to. That is a personal, political and societal problem we should not ignore.
ccortes 6y ago
>The fact that people spend lots of time on social media just demonstrates that they derive something from it, not that it’s addictive or harmful. I think the point of the movie is to show that it is addictive and harmful and it is built that way intentionally. And it gets worse for younger generations. >Regardless, social media isn’t going to suddenly make me believe the moon landing was fake, so I don’t see it as being harmful. Maybe not the moon landing, but it can make you believe many other things with out you even noticing. We've seen examples of this already, there's nothing new here.
- sunopener 6y ago
  > but it can make you believe many other things with out you even noticing. Case and point. This is false. This is fiction. You believe what you want to believe, you choose to believe the lie that there is anything outside of you that can make you or another do this that or another. That there exist some such authority that can be responsible vs everybody standing up and taking their personal responsibility only to realize that their whole identity is based on more lies and that no one on this planet is in control, that control, safety, security, certainty are as illusory as saying farts stink. All narratives, all stories, all fiction, untruth, the truth cannot be spoken nor written. "Please! Write me out of the Story of the Cave of Plato!" Sorry there bud, You're the one that's gonna have to write yourself out of Plato's cave, out of Plato's Mind, then out your own, if you dare. > There's nothing new here. Nothing is not new. Nothing has been around for a very long time. Even before Time came around. You know the Time Being, The Implication Being, the Reason Being, the The State of Being, the Very Being, the Difference Being, the Latter Being, The World Being--They all sit around and laugh at you, they know they're knot RA-EL, yet 'ere thy arrrr(prepping for talk like a pirate day soon, excuse me), "making" them as real as social media can make you believe many other things without you even noticing. ;)
- renewiltord 6y ago
  The truth is that platforms like HN are the worst offenders. While consumption-oriented platforms are clearly consumption-oriented, the addiction from text-based platforms like HN is far more insidious. People think they're making a difference when they come here, but nothing is happening. They get the dopamine hit of some karma, and replies, but they're in their trench and the other guy is in the other trench and the battle lines aren't moving. HN is a pretty clever tool. It honeypots entrepreneurs who can't develop so they don't compete with the guys who can develop. The former category, instead of competing¹, talks here about how they can't finish their side projects and how they can't get motivation to work, and other unrelated stuff that is just addictive entrepreneur or tech porn. This streamlines the experience for doers, who avoid the manipulative trap that is HN, and are busy building product. ¹ Competition is bad. cf. Zero to One
neves 6y ago
The harms of social media are understated. I live in Brazil. Social media was one of the main reasons of the election of our president, Bolsonaro. Now we have more than 130.000 deaths from coronavirus, the Amazon and Pantanal are burning, our institutions are crumbling. My fellow software developers aren't just make some far way teenagers depressed. This is is real harm in the real world.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Have you considered that the root problem may be that a plurality of voting Brazilians are simply terrible people? Fascists rose before with radio and newspapers once and there wasn't any meaningful changes preventing the usage for such and yet they didn't reoccur indefinitely in the same nation. Stop blaming the tech and start blaming your countrymen for being awful people.
  - fellellor 6y ago
    Sorry, but this sounds mean.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      What's mean about it? Brazilian voters are simply reaping what they sowed - "social media" has nothing to do with it. It's called living in a democracy.
      - maxlamb 6y ago
        You should see “The Great Hack” on Netflix. It might change your mind.
  - dang 6y ago
    Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, so please don't post like this to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
DharmaPolice 6y ago
>I don’t agree that belief in pseudoscience, rumor, or superstition is anymore prevalent than it was before social media. I think it’s just more visible to everyone how many people do believe wacky ideas. I think this is a key point. In particular I think educated people (for want of a better term) are often dangerously out of touch with how many people (particularly internationally) don't share their worldview. I remember the first time having dinner with a family and finding out I was the only person at the table who believed in Darwinian evolution. I was shocked because these people weren't even particularly religious. Up to that point, except for strict religious people I don't think I'd even spoken to someone who didn't believe in evolution. Or at least, it never came up. And this is the point really - what social media does do is increase social friction on these topics. I worked with a guy who didn't believe dinosaurs existed (also not religious). After the initial debates it was fairly easy to just let it rest since he was a nice guy and completely sane on all other topics. But if this had been on social media if I had seen anti-dinosaur posts on a regular basis that would probably have got to me eventually and I would have blocked him. Even though, in social terms it doesn't matter if he believes in dinosaurs or not. The other thing it does is make people feel less embarrassed of holding particular viewpoints. Lots more people than you might think believe in witches and curses but (quite rightly) think they'll be ridiculed if they discuss this too openly. But if you're on a Facebook group where everyone believes in witchcraft it starts to feel like a legitimate opinion. And then someone else sees one of your pro-witch posts and suddenly there's a discussion about where all this new belief in witches came from. This kind of conflict drives a shitload of activity and makes everyone involved feel bad one way or another.
- greggman3 6y ago
  > In social terms it doesn't matter if he believes in dinosaurs or not. Yes, I can choose not to bring up that topic. And I choose to ignore it because I don't know what else to do. But, I can't completely let go of the idea that a person who doesn't believe in dinosaurs is voting on things like whether or not schools teach about dinosaurs or whether or not kids should be vaccinated or whether or not masks will cause co2 poisoning. I don't know exactly where to draw the line. I don't know how to put this without people reading something into it that's not there but, I'm perfectly ok with someone having arguable reasons for holding an opinion different than mine but I'm not so okay with them having nonsense reasons. To give an example, for some reason my my dad stopped believing in evolution in his 40s and will spout nonsense reasons like claiming eyes are impossible because it's too big a step which is logically false. You can easily name the steps. I'm not saying I require him to believe in evolution, I only want him to give valid reasons. A valid reason could be "because god tells me so and to ignore all other input" but valid reason is not "because evolution can't make eyes"
dxbydt 6y ago
I totally, 100%, agree with you. I worked at Twitter pre-ipo. There were no “expert psychologists” anywhere in the company at that time, unlike what people below claim. Whatever features we built were mostly organic ( things like hashtags rose from the twitter community itself, not fron some internal mandate). The 140 char limit was a technical sms limit, not some feature purposely engineered to get you to engage more. Many of these things such as like button, heart button, retweet - for every “success” such as this, there were numerous failures that simply did not catch on. All in all, it was a bunch of clever hacks. The ipo happened, we sold our shares and moved on. Most of us deleted our twitter accounts shortly after. Its not like any of us were actively tweeting anyways. Many of my colleagues went to work at facebook. They have a barely functioning facebook page, which they hardly ever post on. A few of my friends work at insta. They don’t even have a profile - they said it’s mostly celebrities who post pictures about some luxury goods, not us developers who are git checking code. It has no relevance to us. Basically, a lot of us are completely bored with this social nonsense, and we’ve moved on to more important things. Social garbage is just not interesting. One of my friends works at Linkedin on something called Linkedin Stories. So I casually asked if he had ever written a linkedin story. He said you must be a bigtime loser to even think of using that garbage feature! I guess once you know how the sausage is made, you lose the craving.
- throwawaydad101 6y ago
  There's a bit of Sisyphus in everyone's story it would seem.
- intended 6y ago
  You don't need to have an "expert psych" initially. Sitting with a friend rehashing what we studied about skinnerian conditioning and a diablo like game we thought of a frankenstinian game which knew exactly when to hit you for a transaction to let you level up/get new item and so on. Years later and micro transaction enabled mobile games came out. Adding simple psych based analysis to systems isn't hard, you would just pick it up from gaming/other industries and recreate it as a best practice. People are interested in this, and are doing great amounts of research to figure out how to do it better.
danielrhodes 6y ago
I'm not super bothered much by it either. However, there is data to show, through Facebook's own research, that is possible to manipulate people's sense of well being and their perspective by what is being shown to them. For example, Facebook could show a person only posts from their friends expressing negative sentiment and put you in a bad mood. Although these algorithms are quite sophisticated, there is no universally accepted heuristic for what is ideal for somebody to see. For example, let's say your friends have broad political leanings but you lean left. Should the algorithm only show you left leaning political posts because that's what you like, or should it optimize for you engaging with a broader variety of content but maybe increase your dissatisfaction. I think these are very difficult questions to answer. Another issue is that people are very biased towards believing what is put in front of them. If your mind sees a pattern, it starts attributing truth to that pattern. This idea that you should just see all the facts and then "you decide" is a cop-out in my opinion -- your mind will have decided before you were ever able to apply rational thought to something. Most people are used to seeing filtered information that has been vetted (newspapers, textbooks, teachers, experts, etc.), and the age of social media presents a problem insofar as this filter does not exist or exists in the court of public perception or algorithms. You can see evidence of this in that there are otherwise rational people who are being easily tricked into believing these whacky conspiracy theories and fake news, as you point out. I think that's a pretty big problem with serious societal repercussions.
- rcorleone 6y ago
  > Should the algorithm only show you left-leaning political posts because that's what you like, or should it optimize for you engaging with a broader variety of content but maybe increase your dissatisfaction. They should give that control to the user. Users should have the ability to select how much diversity they want and then provide feedback later to the content for the AIs to iteratively understand better, just like in Google news, Youtube. In addition to that, a report analysing the user's engagement with content and topics, for the user to reflect upon.
cwhiz 6y ago
You are vastly understating the volume and type of data that Facebook is gathering. You casually mention photos but there is a mountain of information in each and every photo. People upload tens of thousands of photos. You also just hand wave away the real psychological manipulation that is available when bad actors have enough information on you. “I won’t be convinced the moon landing was fake.” Sure, that’s likely true, but you aren’t special or immune from manipulation. With enough data ANYONE can be surgically targeted and manipulated. And the worst part of all of it is that you can’t opt out. You can upload a photo that I am in. Facebook can scan and get a ton of demographic information about me. Then they can continue to trace and build out my “invisible” profile, all without me needing an account. It’s absurd.
rcorleone 6y ago
Even I feel the narrative is played quite disproportionately (democracies are falling, dystopian world). Doesn't any engaging TV show (Game of Thrones) does something similar, keep you engaged by twist and turns, experimenting/testing with new characters? A/B testing on users is perceived as experiments on lab rats in the docudrama. And why is the ad-based business model a bad thing? If the platform target specific customers without any misleading information, it can really help both the customers and the advertisers. Seems like a win-win. I feel absolutely necessary for these platforms to understand us better, by capturing various data points and then manipulate/filter our feeds. There is so much content published every second, a genuine AI can really come handy. If I feel that my feed is getting polarised and I am in an echo chamber, I can consciously subscribe to alternate and diverse opinions and people. In reality, "You are average of the 5 people you surround yourself with" On a side note, Netflix itself is a competitor to Facebook (content), Google (Youtube) and also engineering resources. Netflix is too "competing for user's attention" with these tech giants. Netflix too in a way was getting you hooked to the documentary by playing around with tempo and music frequency, that triggers some engaging chemical reaction.
dionidium 6y ago
Like many privacy advocates, the documentary begs the question on most of the privacy issues it discusses. Some people seem to have an intuitive sense that they're being violated whenever anyone trades data about them or surveils them in public or aggregates their emails for crime-fighting purposes (or any of a dozen other examples), but I don't share it, so I'm not responsive to arguments that rely on the assumption that we share common ground on this point.

save_ferris 6y ago

> The fact that people spend lots of time on social media just demonstrates that they derive something from it, not that it’s addictive or harmful. I was totally with you until this moment. This is like arguing that people with alcoholism get something out of drinking too much. It’s one thing to say that you’re comfortable with the amount of information that’s collected about you and how it’s used, but how can you ignore the fact that these companies hired experts in psychology and paid millions to keep people using their apps, just like child psychologists were deployed to TV advertising in the 80s and 90s? These apps are absolutely addictive because they were explicitly and intentionally designed to be. Spending hours in an infinite scroll wormhole does not automatically mean you’ve derived something important or worthwhile. It just means you were entertained enough by the possibility something might be good if you just keep scrolling, and that’s a problem for some.

alexmingoia 6y ago
I spend lots of time reading. Is reading an addiction? I don’t think spending time on something is necessarily an addiction. Can social media be an addiction? Sure, in the same way videgames can be an addiction. I wouldn’t go as far as saying video games are harmful. Social media is also different in that it’s a means of communication. It does have utility for communicating whereas video games or drinking doesn’t.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  It’s not about how you consciously choose to spend your time, it’s about being able to choose when to stop. I commonly hear from alcoholics that the problem isn’t that they want 1 drink, the problem is that they want 10 drinks. They lack the ability to moderate consumption and be able to consciously stop. Social media struggles from this exact same problem. It’s so easy to just keep scrolling, to just keep seeing what’s further down the feed. Maybe I missed a picture that I would like, or something. This FOMO is intentionally designed and baked into the apps to keep people from leaving them. You can choose to put down the book whenever you want to or need to, and maybe you don’t have a problem putting down social media either. But many, many people do. Just because you don’t feel psychologically pulled in doesn’t mean that it’s not a real addiction. There’s an easy way to test this out on yourself. Commit to going a whole day without checking your favorite social media apps and add the parental control time limit to those apps. If you find yourself unconsciously whipping out your phone and checking social media, you’ll see the prompt to input your parental control code. If you’re anywhere near the statistical average human, you’re gonna find yourself mindlessly checking social media multiple times that day. That’s what I’m talking about.
- messo 6y ago
  > I spend lots of time reading. Is reading an addiction? I don’t think spending time on something is necessarily an addiction. Anything can become addictive, really, if we use ASAM's official definition: «People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.» The difference between books and feed-scrolling is stark. Books are linear, static and finite, while your feed is ever-changing and adapting to your patterns of behavior – and practically infinite. These differences are huge when it comes to the potential for "continued used despite harmful consequences".

messo 6y ago

I am not categorically against ads on online platforms (or offline for that mater), but I do have a problem with the power these companies have gained by gathering and analyzing fine-grained data-points on us and our behavior. The fact that most people only have a very vague idea about how these systems work and how much data is collected is worrying. The fine grained control over who you can show ads to is a problem in itself and a tool ripe for exploitation by anyone who wants to nudge certain demographics in any direction they want, political or otherwise. We have seen several examples on how wrong this can go already. > I don’t agree that belief in pseudoscience, rumor, or superstition is anymore prevalent than it was before social media. I have seen up close and personal how a combination of Facebook and Youtube's algorithms have cleverly identified and massively amplified certain tendencies in people I'm close to. That is a personal, political and societal problem we should not ignore.

ccortes 6y ago

>The fact that people spend lots of time on social media just demonstrates that they derive something from it, not that it’s addictive or harmful. I think the point of the movie is to show that it is addictive and harmful and it is built that way intentionally. And it gets worse for younger generations. >Regardless, social media isn’t going to suddenly make me believe the moon landing was fake, so I don’t see it as being harmful. Maybe not the moon landing, but it can make you believe many other things with out you even noticing. We've seen examples of this already, there's nothing new here.

sunopener 6y ago
> but it can make you believe many other things with out you even noticing. Case and point. This is false. This is fiction. You believe what you want to believe, you choose to believe the lie that there is anything outside of you that can make you or another do this that or another. That there exist some such authority that can be responsible vs everybody standing up and taking their personal responsibility only to realize that their whole identity is based on more lies and that no one on this planet is in control, that control, safety, security, certainty are as illusory as saying farts stink. All narratives, all stories, all fiction, untruth, the truth cannot be spoken nor written. "Please! Write me out of the Story of the Cave of Plato!" Sorry there bud, You're the one that's gonna have to write yourself out of Plato's cave, out of Plato's Mind, then out your own, if you dare. > There's nothing new here. Nothing is not new. Nothing has been around for a very long time. Even before Time came around. You know the Time Being, The Implication Being, the Reason Being, the The State of Being, the Very Being, the Difference Being, the Latter Being, The World Being--They all sit around and laugh at you, they know they're knot RA-EL, yet 'ere thy arrrr(prepping for talk like a pirate day soon, excuse me), "making" them as real as social media can make you believe many other things without you even noticing. ;)
renewiltord 6y ago
The truth is that platforms like HN are the worst offenders. While consumption-oriented platforms are clearly consumption-oriented, the addiction from text-based platforms like HN is far more insidious. People think they're making a difference when they come here, but nothing is happening. They get the dopamine hit of some karma, and replies, but they're in their trench and the other guy is in the other trench and the battle lines aren't moving. HN is a pretty clever tool. It honeypots entrepreneurs who can't develop so they don't compete with the guys who can develop. The former category, instead of competing¹, talks here about how they can't finish their side projects and how they can't get motivation to work, and other unrelated stuff that is just addictive entrepreneur or tech porn. This streamlines the experience for doers, who avoid the manipulative trap that is HN, and are busy building product. ¹ Competition is bad. cf. Zero to One

neves 6y ago

The harms of social media are understated. I live in Brazil. Social media was one of the main reasons of the election of our president, Bolsonaro. Now we have more than 130.000 deaths from coronavirus, the Amazon and Pantanal are burning, our institutions are crumbling. My fellow software developers aren't just make some far way teenagers depressed. This is is real harm in the real world.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Have you considered that the root problem may be that a plurality of voting Brazilians are simply terrible people? Fascists rose before with radio and newspapers once and there wasn't any meaningful changes preventing the usage for such and yet they didn't reoccur indefinitely in the same nation. Stop blaming the tech and start blaming your countrymen for being awful people.
- fellellor 6y ago
  Sorry, but this sounds mean.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    What's mean about it? Brazilian voters are simply reaping what they sowed - "social media" has nothing to do with it. It's called living in a democracy.
    - maxlamb 6y ago
      You should see “The Great Hack” on Netflix. It might change your mind.
- dang 6y ago
  Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, so please don't post like this to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

DharmaPolice 6y ago

>I don’t agree that belief in pseudoscience, rumor, or superstition is anymore prevalent than it was before social media. I think it’s just more visible to everyone how many people do believe wacky ideas. I think this is a key point. In particular I think educated people (for want of a better term) are often dangerously out of touch with how many people (particularly internationally) don't share their worldview. I remember the first time having dinner with a family and finding out I was the only person at the table who believed in Darwinian evolution. I was shocked because these people weren't even particularly religious. Up to that point, except for strict religious people I don't think I'd even spoken to someone who didn't believe in evolution. Or at least, it never came up. And this is the point really - what social media does do is increase social friction on these topics. I worked with a guy who didn't believe dinosaurs existed (also not religious). After the initial debates it was fairly easy to just let it rest since he was a nice guy and completely sane on all other topics. But if this had been on social media if I had seen anti-dinosaur posts on a regular basis that would probably have got to me eventually and I would have blocked him. Even though, in social terms it doesn't matter if he believes in dinosaurs or not. The other thing it does is make people feel less embarrassed of holding particular viewpoints. Lots more people than you might think believe in witches and curses but (quite rightly) think they'll be ridiculed if they discuss this too openly. But if you're on a Facebook group where everyone believes in witchcraft it starts to feel like a legitimate opinion. And then someone else sees one of your pro-witch posts and suddenly there's a discussion about where all this new belief in witches came from. This kind of conflict drives a shitload of activity and makes everyone involved feel bad one way or another.

greggman3 6y ago
> In social terms it doesn't matter if he believes in dinosaurs or not. Yes, I can choose not to bring up that topic. And I choose to ignore it because I don't know what else to do. But, I can't completely let go of the idea that a person who doesn't believe in dinosaurs is voting on things like whether or not schools teach about dinosaurs or whether or not kids should be vaccinated or whether or not masks will cause co2 poisoning. I don't know exactly where to draw the line. I don't know how to put this without people reading something into it that's not there but, I'm perfectly ok with someone having arguable reasons for holding an opinion different than mine but I'm not so okay with them having nonsense reasons. To give an example, for some reason my my dad stopped believing in evolution in his 40s and will spout nonsense reasons like claiming eyes are impossible because it's too big a step which is logically false. You can easily name the steps. I'm not saying I require him to believe in evolution, I only want him to give valid reasons. A valid reason could be "because god tells me so and to ignore all other input" but valid reason is not "because evolution can't make eyes"

dxbydt 6y ago

I totally, 100%, agree with you. I worked at Twitter pre-ipo. There were no “expert psychologists” anywhere in the company at that time, unlike what people below claim. Whatever features we built were mostly organic ( things like hashtags rose from the twitter community itself, not fron some internal mandate). The 140 char limit was a technical sms limit, not some feature purposely engineered to get you to engage more. Many of these things such as like button, heart button, retweet - for every “success” such as this, there were numerous failures that simply did not catch on. All in all, it was a bunch of clever hacks. The ipo happened, we sold our shares and moved on. Most of us deleted our twitter accounts shortly after. Its not like any of us were actively tweeting anyways. Many of my colleagues went to work at facebook. They have a barely functioning facebook page, which they hardly ever post on. A few of my friends work at insta. They don’t even have a profile - they said it’s mostly celebrities who post pictures about some luxury goods, not us developers who are git checking code. It has no relevance to us. Basically, a lot of us are completely bored with this social nonsense, and we’ve moved on to more important things. Social garbage is just not interesting. One of my friends works at Linkedin on something called Linkedin Stories. So I casually asked if he had ever written a linkedin story. He said you must be a bigtime loser to even think of using that garbage feature! I guess once you know how the sausage is made, you lose the craving.

throwawaydad101 6y ago
There's a bit of Sisyphus in everyone's story it would seem.
intended 6y ago
You don't need to have an "expert psych" initially. Sitting with a friend rehashing what we studied about skinnerian conditioning and a diablo like game we thought of a frankenstinian game which knew exactly when to hit you for a transaction to let you level up/get new item and so on. Years later and micro transaction enabled mobile games came out. Adding simple psych based analysis to systems isn't hard, you would just pick it up from gaming/other industries and recreate it as a best practice. People are interested in this, and are doing great amounts of research to figure out how to do it better.

danielrhodes 6y ago

I'm not super bothered much by it either. However, there is data to show, through Facebook's own research, that is possible to manipulate people's sense of well being and their perspective by what is being shown to them. For example, Facebook could show a person only posts from their friends expressing negative sentiment and put you in a bad mood. Although these algorithms are quite sophisticated, there is no universally accepted heuristic for what is ideal for somebody to see. For example, let's say your friends have broad political leanings but you lean left. Should the algorithm only show you left leaning political posts because that's what you like, or should it optimize for you engaging with a broader variety of content but maybe increase your dissatisfaction. I think these are very difficult questions to answer. Another issue is that people are very biased towards believing what is put in front of them. If your mind sees a pattern, it starts attributing truth to that pattern. This idea that you should just see all the facts and then "you decide" is a cop-out in my opinion -- your mind will have decided before you were ever able to apply rational thought to something. Most people are used to seeing filtered information that has been vetted (newspapers, textbooks, teachers, experts, etc.), and the age of social media presents a problem insofar as this filter does not exist or exists in the court of public perception or algorithms. You can see evidence of this in that there are otherwise rational people who are being easily tricked into believing these whacky conspiracy theories and fake news, as you point out. I think that's a pretty big problem with serious societal repercussions.

rcorleone 6y ago
> Should the algorithm only show you left-leaning political posts because that's what you like, or should it optimize for you engaging with a broader variety of content but maybe increase your dissatisfaction. They should give that control to the user. Users should have the ability to select how much diversity they want and then provide feedback later to the content for the AIs to iteratively understand better, just like in Google news, Youtube. In addition to that, a report analysing the user's engagement with content and topics, for the user to reflect upon.

cwhiz 6y ago

You are vastly understating the volume and type of data that Facebook is gathering. You casually mention photos but there is a mountain of information in each and every photo. People upload tens of thousands of photos. You also just hand wave away the real psychological manipulation that is available when bad actors have enough information on you. “I won’t be convinced the moon landing was fake.” Sure, that’s likely true, but you aren’t special or immune from manipulation. With enough data ANYONE can be surgically targeted and manipulated. And the worst part of all of it is that you can’t opt out. You can upload a photo that I am in. Facebook can scan and get a ton of demographic information about me. Then they can continue to trace and build out my “invisible” profile, all without me needing an account. It’s absurd.

rcorleone 6y ago

Even I feel the narrative is played quite disproportionately (democracies are falling, dystopian world). Doesn't any engaging TV show (Game of Thrones) does something similar, keep you engaged by twist and turns, experimenting/testing with new characters? A/B testing on users is perceived as experiments on lab rats in the docudrama. And why is the ad-based business model a bad thing? If the platform target specific customers without any misleading information, it can really help both the customers and the advertisers. Seems like a win-win. I feel absolutely necessary for these platforms to understand us better, by capturing various data points and then manipulate/filter our feeds. There is so much content published every second, a genuine AI can really come handy. If I feel that my feed is getting polarised and I am in an echo chamber, I can consciously subscribe to alternate and diverse opinions and people. In reality, "You are average of the 5 people you surround yourself with" On a side note, Netflix itself is a competitor to Facebook (content), Google (Youtube) and also engineering resources. Netflix is too "competing for user's attention" with these tech giants. Netflix too in a way was getting you hooked to the documentary by playing around with tempo and music frequency, that triggers some engaging chemical reaction.

dionidium 6y ago

Like many privacy advocates, the documentary begs the question on most of the privacy issues it discusses. Some people seem to have an intuitive sense that they're being violated whenever anyone trades data about them or surveils them in public or aggregates their emails for crime-fighting purposes (or any of a dozen other examples), but I don't share it, so I'm not responsive to arguments that rely on the assumption that we share common ground on this point.