9 ms·

I'd add that algorithmic feeds are another part of the triad (quartet?), and probably the worst offender. Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok,

I'd add that algorithmic feeds are another part of the triad (quartet?), and probably the worst offender. Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time, a distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement will be those that call for outrage, which leads to radicalization [1]), and just in general a society where our information consumption is determined by black boxes with opaque goals that do not optimize for the common good. I attribute a significant part of the political rift and radicalization that has occurred in the western world in the past few years to specifically this feature, the algorithmically determined, engagement maximizing, feed. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00550-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00550-7

luplex 6y ago
I think this is how AI takes over humanity. Humans are so short-sighted, we don't even need a superintelligence to outsmart us. We happily stand by and collect profits while letting the AI do whatever it wants. Really, we need regulation that makes companies care about side-effects of their AI technology.
- skohan 6y ago
  I have sometimes mused about how we have worried about "sky net" since the 90's, but we've already let AI have power to control our lives to some extent. For instance, there are cases you can point to where some normal person on Twitter with a couple dozen followers posted the wrong thing, it blew up into an international story, and they eventually got fired from their real-world job for it. Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? In a lot of cases it was the algorithm: for whatever reason that tweet drew engagement, so a massive spotlight was put on this mostly-private individual. In a real way that's an example of an AI system deciding to take away someone's livelihood.
  - ramphastidae 6y ago
    > Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? This is a serious stretch. The algo didn’t force that person to sign up and post their every ignorant thought on a public forum. People can just put down their phones but they love the attention. Individuals are just as guilty for giving power over themselves to social media.
    - skohan 6y ago
      I'm not "blaming the AI" for this person's behavior. My point is that there was a non-human component in this decision process which led to this person losing their livelihood. To make an old-world analogue, in 1980 for someone to be held to account for an objectionable view, it probably would have involved some journalist making the decision to write a story about the comments which someone made. That human component in deciding what is newsworthy has been replaced by a machine in some cases. Another example would be dating apps. Now we have algorithms which make decisions about which parts of the dating pool an individual will have access to. In a real sense, non-human intelligence is playing some role in who gets to pass on their genes to the next generation, and with whom. I'm not saying that our lives are ruled by machines, but they're not completely not governed by machines either.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      If anything, the next generation of people will learn to avoid online polarized engagement using their own identities. They will create these curated and sterile personas under their real name while using a nom de plume for actual content. I'm kind of surprised that aliases have not widely taken off already. But I suppose the consequences are not very severe yet.
      - iamatworknow 6y ago
        >I'm kind of surprised that aliases have not widely taken off already. The funny thing is that these aliases already existed, but we've largely eschewed them for our "real" identities. Prior to probably Facebook I think every interaction I had with other people online was behind a screen name detached from my real world identity.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  Wait until people figure out how much power the AIs already have over election outcomes.
  - minikites 6y ago
    What?
    - Consultant32452 6y ago
      The AI determines which political articles and posts you see. The AI determines if you get reminded to register/vote. At the extremes the AI has a very strong impact on whether you believe Obama is a secret Muslim or Trump is a Russian asset.
      - wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Which means people best able to play people to increase the "this post is good" score of the AI will sway the election results. It's not enough to control them, but I'd imagine you can tip a close election by 10% or so.
        Consultant32452 6y ago
        Dr. Robert Epstein has done some research on this and has testified before Congress about it. Here's one article. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-google-search-bias-elections-20190322-story.html https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-google-search-bia...
        wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Reality has a left-wing bias. It's not surprising that people who research things drift away from right-wing rhetoric.
        throwaway3699 6y ago
- mym1990 6y ago
  It reminds me of Spirited Away and how everyone fed No Face for a little gold in return, but in the end they all got eaten.
joshspankit 6y ago
The other component is that algorithmic feeds encourage echo chambers. People engage with outrage most when they are on the “same side” of it.
- xwolfi 6y ago
  But what of trolling then, a sort of counter reaction to the echo chamber where large outliers enter the room and disturb the equilibrium? For my part I think it's asynchronous written debates that are the source of these problems, so even earlier than facebook. On a large massive forums, people write for themselves, not the others, and barely read the discussion. Oral debates or written rendering of them, had the advantage to be slow, less variate, and adaptative to a single argumentative line. Nowadays when you discuss an issue online, everyone starts new train of thought to escape adaptation, and care little about an audience they d need to seduce or convince. I suppose I just did the same anyway, you can reply but I wont read :)
  - wccrawford 6y ago
    Trolling pushes people further into their echo chambers. It isn't intended to encourage a wider world view, it's intended to hurt. It just convinces people that they're already on the right side.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    I think this is partially correct. People write for themselves, but they also write for an audience. The latter is a problem because they can essentially ignore whatever they are responding to as long as triggers n upvote. This disincentivizes honest and productive dialog in favor of nitpicking, gotchas, or simple ridicule. The former is like a bunch of drunk grandpas mumbling to themselves in a room, the latter is like a self interested orator playing to a crowd. Asynchronous written debate can be the one of the best forms of communication. Think about Jefferson’s letters or other famous correspondence. The incentives are just wrong on boards with ranking and voting
throwaway29389 6y ago
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicalization I'm honestly surprised to see the world "radicalization" used as a net negative thing, rather than positive/negative/neutral depending on context. E.g. Gandhi would have been called "radical" without implying any violent tendency.
- michaelt 6y ago
  Since 9/11 it's been common to use "radicalization" to refer to crossing the line between regular Islam and Radical Islam. And (to a lesser extent) the equivalent process for other domestic terrorist groups. People will still understand what you mean if you use "radicalization" to refer to positive things, but they'll wonder if you're making a very dry joke.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I think this emerges as a collective version of the "my views are always normal" fallacy. * Anyone who drives slower than me is an idiot and anyone who drives faster than me is reckless. * Anyone who's worse than me at me at Overwatch is a noob, anyone who's better than me has no life. * Anyone who's views are less extreme than me is a sheep, anyone who's views are more extreme than me is a radical. It takes a lot of effort to realize that I'm on the "radical" spectrum for a lot of my political views (I'm hella progressive) and that that isn't a bad thing, but neither are other people's, in my view less aggressive, ideas for tackling problems.
  - gugagore 6y ago
    It certainly feels tricky because "radical" can apply to ideas about goals and also to ideas about ways of achieving goals ("tackling problems"). It's hard to suss out people's goals. They might not understand their goals themselves, and "goal" may be an abstract and unknowable thing. But I think it's necessary to find some goals to be a bad thing in order to figure out your own politics.
toto444 6y ago
I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically and that makes an insane difference to the quality of the conversation. You go from the most outrageous at the top to the most discussed at the top. All content gets a chance to be read. Even if it the first user find it uninteresting. On reddit, if what you post gets a downvote very quickly, you're basically done.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  Yes, Reddit basically encourages flashy comments. But the rub with traditional message boards is, that they don't scale well. Some subreddits have many, many thousands of active regular participants. It's hard for a single subforum to operate at that scale.
  - starpilot 6y ago
    Isn't this the same as the algo-driven placement of HN stories and comments?
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      To a certain extent, yes, though my understanding is that HN's comment ranking algorithm is substantially different from Reddit's.
      - gibspaulding 6y ago
        Also, HN is more of a news feed than a forum, so it makes sense to favor newer posts over knowledge-base type threads. Makes me sort of want an HN forum though. Maybe limited to self posts and with a more chronological feed.
- wott 6y ago
  > I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically Chronologically by last update, otherwise you could always read /r/yoursub/new, but that's only chronologically by last original post. By last original post doesn't help much. For slow-moving subs, it doesn't change anything much; for fast-moving subs, it's okay-ish if you care about posts more than comments, but you still lack curation (however imperfect).
mschuster91 6y ago
> even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" At least for Twitter, it allows you to turn that algorithm crap off and it respects that choice - iirc even across devices. Facebook, meanwhile, has entirely turned off that ability.
- notacoward 6y ago
  The functionality is still there, but they've made it harder and harder to access. It used to be an obvious choice. Then it was buried in options, then deeper in options, and now I can't even find it any more. However, if you add the magical "?sk=h_chr" to your Facebook bookmark you'll get a chronological feed (at least until you click on the icon to go back to the top so refresh instead). I'm sure they'll completely break it some day. They broke it briefly once already. Since I was working at Facebook at the time I filed a task on it. The response was the rudest I ever got in 3.5 years at the company. If it works, as long as it works, it's basically by accident (or because some front-end developer is resisting management's constant pressure to deprecate it).
  - anticensor 6y ago
    It is still working. But no, uncurated chronological feed is just too dense for me.
  - annadane 6y ago
    Is the culture at fb really toxic like that? Like surely they can't possibly claim 'we take feedback seriously! :D' and then ignore the hoardes of screaming masses who are being held hostage by a monopoly where the platform pretty much literally owns their social graph
- kjakm 6y ago
  I’m pretty sure Twitter switches you back to the algo feed after a certain amount of time (or at least they used to).
ghoward 6y ago
I agree. In fact, I wrote about that fact on my blog. https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicalization/ https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicali...
api 6y ago
I definitely think personalized feeds are the worst in terms of "negative value creation." I don't think Qanon for example would be a popular movement without having ridden the YouTube recommendation algorithm and Facebook's personalized feeds before those companies were forced to ban it. I think of it this way. Lets say I walk past someone on the street and say "hi." Now lets say I punch them in the face. What creates the most engagement?
rconti 6y ago
I liked Facebook much more when I could scroll back far enough and my perfectionist mind would see where I previously left off and I'd feel "caught up". You can still do it, but the content changes a bit every time. Twitter seems a lot worse; you'll never be able to "go back" and find that thing you just saw a minute ago before you closed the app, and it's just infinite.
thethethethe 6y ago
> Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time I like watching YouTube, I learn a lot from it. My wife likes watching tiktok, it is an exchange of culture. How exactly is this a waste of time? What would be a better use of my time? Making money for someone else? Watching TV? If I (and many others) enjoy it, why does it matter? > distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement will be those that call for outrage, which leads to radicalization This is propaganda. Do you think the perspective imposed on the public by an elite group of individuals, hand-fed information by government press conferences doesn't lead to a distorted world view?
cush 6y ago
Tiktok's algorithm is on a completely other level.
- quenix 6y ago
  I’ve used TikTok, and the way its algorithm made me feel is unparalleled. It’s truly something else. I’m not sure how it does it, but it’s one of the only apps where one truly feels they have a live being behind the screen watching and tweaking the recommendations. It’s fluid, responds almost immediately, and feels like it knows everything about how I consume the content. Tiktok must employ some smart statisticians.
  - IQunder130 6y ago
    Smart statisticians or the next best thing - the kitchen sink black box method
    - namelessone 6y ago
      what method is that?

luplex 6y ago

I think this is how AI takes over humanity. Humans are so short-sighted, we don't even need a superintelligence to outsmart us. We happily stand by and collect profits while letting the AI do whatever it wants. Really, we need regulation that makes companies care about side-effects of their AI technology.

skohan 6y ago
I have sometimes mused about how we have worried about "sky net" since the 90's, but we've already let AI have power to control our lives to some extent. For instance, there are cases you can point to where some normal person on Twitter with a couple dozen followers posted the wrong thing, it blew up into an international story, and they eventually got fired from their real-world job for it. Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? In a lot of cases it was the algorithm: for whatever reason that tweet drew engagement, so a massive spotlight was put on this mostly-private individual. In a real way that's an example of an AI system deciding to take away someone's livelihood.
- ramphastidae 6y ago
  > Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? This is a serious stretch. The algo didn’t force that person to sign up and post their every ignorant thought on a public forum. People can just put down their phones but they love the attention. Individuals are just as guilty for giving power over themselves to social media.
  - skohan 6y ago
    I'm not "blaming the AI" for this person's behavior. My point is that there was a non-human component in this decision process which led to this person losing their livelihood. To make an old-world analogue, in 1980 for someone to be held to account for an objectionable view, it probably would have involved some journalist making the decision to write a story about the comments which someone made. That human component in deciding what is newsworthy has been replaced by a machine in some cases. Another example would be dating apps. Now we have algorithms which make decisions about which parts of the dating pool an individual will have access to. In a real sense, non-human intelligence is playing some role in who gets to pass on their genes to the next generation, and with whom. I'm not saying that our lives are ruled by machines, but they're not completely not governed by machines either.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    If anything, the next generation of people will learn to avoid online polarized engagement using their own identities. They will create these curated and sterile personas under their real name while using a nom de plume for actual content. I'm kind of surprised that aliases have not widely taken off already. But I suppose the consequences are not very severe yet.
    - iamatworknow 6y ago
      >I'm kind of surprised that aliases have not widely taken off already. The funny thing is that these aliases already existed, but we've largely eschewed them for our "real" identities. Prior to probably Facebook I think every interaction I had with other people online was behind a screen name detached from my real world identity.
Consultant32452 6y ago
Wait until people figure out how much power the AIs already have over election outcomes.
- minikites 6y ago
  What?
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    The AI determines which political articles and posts you see. The AI determines if you get reminded to register/vote. At the extremes the AI has a very strong impact on whether you believe Obama is a secret Muslim or Trump is a Russian asset.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Which means people best able to play people to increase the "this post is good" score of the AI will sway the election results. It's not enough to control them, but I'd imagine you can tip a close election by 10% or so.
      - Consultant32452 6y ago
        Dr. Robert Epstein has done some research on this and has testified before Congress about it. Here's one article. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-google-search-bias-elections-20190322-story.html https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-google-search-bia...
        wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Reality has a left-wing bias. It's not surprising that people who research things drift away from right-wing rhetoric.
        throwaway3699 6y ago
mym1990 6y ago
It reminds me of Spirited Away and how everyone fed No Face for a little gold in return, but in the end they all got eaten.

joshspankit 6y ago

The other component is that algorithmic feeds encourage echo chambers. People engage with outrage most when they are on the “same side” of it.

xwolfi 6y ago
But what of trolling then, a sort of counter reaction to the echo chamber where large outliers enter the room and disturb the equilibrium? For my part I think it's asynchronous written debates that are the source of these problems, so even earlier than facebook. On a large massive forums, people write for themselves, not the others, and barely read the discussion. Oral debates or written rendering of them, had the advantage to be slow, less variate, and adaptative to a single argumentative line. Nowadays when you discuss an issue online, everyone starts new train of thought to escape adaptation, and care little about an audience they d need to seduce or convince. I suppose I just did the same anyway, you can reply but I wont read :)
- wccrawford 6y ago
  Trolling pushes people further into their echo chambers. It isn't intended to encourage a wider world view, it's intended to hurt. It just convinces people that they're already on the right side.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  I think this is partially correct. People write for themselves, but they also write for an audience. The latter is a problem because they can essentially ignore whatever they are responding to as long as triggers n upvote. This disincentivizes honest and productive dialog in favor of nitpicking, gotchas, or simple ridicule. The former is like a bunch of drunk grandpas mumbling to themselves in a room, the latter is like a self interested orator playing to a crowd. Asynchronous written debate can be the one of the best forms of communication. Think about Jefferson’s letters or other famous correspondence. The incentives are just wrong on boards with ranking and voting

throwaway29389 6y ago

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicalization I'm honestly surprised to see the world "radicalization" used as a net negative thing, rather than positive/negative/neutral depending on context. E.g. Gandhi would have been called "radical" without implying any violent tendency.

michaelt 6y ago
Since 9/11 it's been common to use "radicalization" to refer to crossing the line between regular Islam and Radical Islam. And (to a lesser extent) the equivalent process for other domestic terrorist groups. People will still understand what you mean if you use "radicalization" to refer to positive things, but they'll wonder if you're making a very dry joke.
Spivak 6y ago
I think this emerges as a collective version of the "my views are always normal" fallacy. * Anyone who drives slower than me is an idiot and anyone who drives faster than me is reckless. * Anyone who's worse than me at me at Overwatch is a noob, anyone who's better than me has no life. * Anyone who's views are less extreme than me is a sheep, anyone who's views are more extreme than me is a radical. It takes a lot of effort to realize that I'm on the "radical" spectrum for a lot of my political views (I'm hella progressive) and that that isn't a bad thing, but neither are other people's, in my view less aggressive, ideas for tackling problems.
- gugagore 6y ago
  It certainly feels tricky because "radical" can apply to ideas about goals and also to ideas about ways of achieving goals ("tackling problems"). It's hard to suss out people's goals. They might not understand their goals themselves, and "goal" may be an abstract and unknowable thing. But I think it's necessary to find some goals to be a bad thing in order to figure out your own politics.

toto444 6y ago

I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically and that makes an insane difference to the quality of the conversation. You go from the most outrageous at the top to the most discussed at the top. All content gets a chance to be read. Even if it the first user find it uninteresting. On reddit, if what you post gets a downvote very quickly, you're basically done.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
Yes, Reddit basically encourages flashy comments. But the rub with traditional message boards is, that they don't scale well. Some subreddits have many, many thousands of active regular participants. It's hard for a single subforum to operate at that scale.
- starpilot 6y ago
  Isn't this the same as the algo-driven placement of HN stories and comments?
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    To a certain extent, yes, though my understanding is that HN's comment ranking algorithm is substantially different from Reddit's.
    - gibspaulding 6y ago
      Also, HN is more of a news feed than a forum, so it makes sense to favor newer posts over knowledge-base type threads. Makes me sort of want an HN forum though. Maybe limited to self posts and with a more chronological feed.
wott 6y ago
> I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically Chronologically by last update, otherwise you could always read /r/yoursub/new, but that's only chronologically by last original post. By last original post doesn't help much. For slow-moving subs, it doesn't change anything much; for fast-moving subs, it's okay-ish if you care about posts more than comments, but you still lack curation (however imperfect).

mschuster91 6y ago

> even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" At least for Twitter, it allows you to turn that algorithm crap off and it respects that choice - iirc even across devices. Facebook, meanwhile, has entirely turned off that ability.

notacoward 6y ago
The functionality is still there, but they've made it harder and harder to access. It used to be an obvious choice. Then it was buried in options, then deeper in options, and now I can't even find it any more. However, if you add the magical "?sk=h_chr" to your Facebook bookmark you'll get a chronological feed (at least until you click on the icon to go back to the top so refresh instead). I'm sure they'll completely break it some day. They broke it briefly once already. Since I was working at Facebook at the time I filed a task on it. The response was the rudest I ever got in 3.5 years at the company. If it works, as long as it works, it's basically by accident (or because some front-end developer is resisting management's constant pressure to deprecate it).
- anticensor 6y ago
  It is still working. But no, uncurated chronological feed is just too dense for me.
- annadane 6y ago
  Is the culture at fb really toxic like that? Like surely they can't possibly claim 'we take feedback seriously! :D' and then ignore the hoardes of screaming masses who are being held hostage by a monopoly where the platform pretty much literally owns their social graph
kjakm 6y ago
I’m pretty sure Twitter switches you back to the algo feed after a certain amount of time (or at least they used to).

ghoward 6y ago

I agree. In fact, I wrote about that fact on my blog. https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicalization/ https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicali...

api 6y ago

I definitely think personalized feeds are the worst in terms of "negative value creation." I don't think Qanon for example would be a popular movement without having ridden the YouTube recommendation algorithm and Facebook's personalized feeds before those companies were forced to ban it. I think of it this way. Lets say I walk past someone on the street and say "hi." Now lets say I punch them in the face. What creates the most engagement?

rconti 6y ago

I liked Facebook much more when I could scroll back far enough and my perfectionist mind would see where I previously left off and I'd feel "caught up". You can still do it, but the content changes a bit every time. Twitter seems a lot worse; you'll never be able to "go back" and find that thing you just saw a minute ago before you closed the app, and it's just infinite.

thethethethe 6y ago

> Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time I like watching YouTube, I learn a lot from it. My wife likes watching tiktok, it is an exchange of culture. How exactly is this a waste of time? What would be a better use of my time? Making money for someone else? Watching TV? If I (and many others) enjoy it, why does it matter? > distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement will be those that call for outrage, which leads to radicalization This is propaganda. Do you think the perspective imposed on the public by an elite group of individuals, hand-fed information by government press conferences doesn't lead to a distorted world view?

cush 6y ago

Tiktok's algorithm is on a completely other level.

quenix 6y ago
I’ve used TikTok, and the way its algorithm made me feel is unparalleled. It’s truly something else. I’m not sure how it does it, but it’s one of the only apps where one truly feels they have a live being behind the screen watching and tweaking the recommendations. It’s fluid, responds almost immediately, and feels like it knows everything about how I consume the content. Tiktok must employ some smart statisticians.
- IQunder130 6y ago
  Smart statisticians or the next best thing - the kitchen sink black box method
  - namelessone 6y ago
    what method is that?