9 ms·
Ledger of Harms
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y agoThere should be something more specific about Tinder there. Cannot see how two-parent family units will not decline even further over the next few decades (not the only factor there of course but asking for government hand-outs is not the solution either).
- motohagiography 5y agoThe idea that the nuclear family can survive installing a secret slot machine for anonymous sex in every pocket is culpably naive. It was novel, sure, but it's objectively an inferior good and a vice if you don't manage it well.
- mettamage 5y agoFor what this comment is worth: I'm watching too much YouTube and it's screwing with my life. Underneath it is a desire to have more social relationships I think. My previous "addiction" was Facebook, years ago. Since then it has been YouTube.
- hkt 5y agoI've been the same with Twitter and Facebook. I've quit both and sometimes feel at a loss as to what to do, but I'm finding that if I put in the (frankly, herculean) effort I can find groups I like that are less geared towards dominating my attention and more rewarding. One such group has been my trade union, which I hadn't expected.
- faeyanpiraat 5y agoYt is ridiculously addictive. They seem to recommend just the right thing to “okay lets watch this one last video” wasting hours of my day.
- sva_ 5y agoWeird, the algorithm usually gives me crap, and I rarely click the recommendations. Perhaps because I didn't 'train' it.
- rgoulter 5y agoOverall I don't find YT too addicting. - I think several different websites can substitute for "I'm bored, what's in the fridge?". Though, I did have to manually ignore a bunch of clips-from-tv -shows type channels.
- faeyanpiraat 5y agoI've trained it for 7 years, it knows me better than my parents.
- hoseja 5y agoWorst part, it's actually objectively good content in large part, as far as I am able to tell.
- jl6 5y agoContent addicts need to realize that there is more objectively good content out there than they are physically capable of consuming in one lifetime. Therefore the question to ask is how much of your life do you want to spend on content consumption.
- beckman466 5y agoSame, I watch mostly leftist and socialist content and the algorithm suggests utter shit.
- andrepd 5y agoDon't worry, as soon as you watch 1 video from an alt-right channel your feed will be inundated with far-right content.
- grapist420 5y agowhat are you watching, what’s the point, how is it screwing with your life
- drybjed 5y agoHere's a few tips to combat this addiction: - turn off Youtube history, there will be no more suggestions based on your recent viewing activity to keep you engaged. Also, searching for a sink review will not result in Youtube suggesting sink-related videos for the rest of eternity. - install browser extensions: Clickbait Remover for Youtube (sanitizes video previews to remove clickbaity look from them) and DF Youtube (allows you to disable comments, related and other sections on the page, leaving only the video itself to focus on). Now you should be able to deal with this addiction in no time.
- Jolter 5y agoFirst one kind of works, kind of doesn't. They still make recommendations based on your "likes" which is enough to fill at least my feed with semi-relevant content.
- OneEyedRobot 5y agoThat's a shame since I think that Youtube can be really amazing. My main (practically only) use for it is to watch amateur-produced special interest shows that are done on a regular basis. Usually it seems to involve automotive bodywork or subsurface mining with the occasional computer show. The channels that move to having sponsors or getting a lot of free stuff are for the high jump (although it's absolutely a riot to watch Heather Heying shill for some sofa company, hating life all the while). I think the best ones are done by pure hobbyists. Otherwise my current plan is to build a library of worthwhile videos via youtube-dl and DVD transfers. My guess is that the ad environment and much heavier copyright policing on youtube will make much of it unwatchable over time.
- andrewzah 5y agoClear your watch history and only watch things that are positive or educational. My youtube recommendations are purely music albums and different educational channels.
- mthwsjc_ 5y agoWhy is this being called a ledger? Is it a special kind of list?
- quantafire 5y agoThis posted also in the last 24hrs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28544615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28544615
- sva_ 5y agoIt reminds me of something odd I heard recently. There seems to be a growing consensus that the Turing test is not an adequate measure of intelligence, and many argue Turing was misunderstood; that too much significance was given to the test. Now the Amazon folks came along with the "Alexa prize". Whoever creates a bot, that people want to spend the longest duration of time with, wins. So maximal user engagement is seen as measure of intelligence. I find it really weird that our tools seem to seek to waste the largest amount of time for us. I would've thought, that the ideal assistant would minimize engagement time, while maximizing utility; and it also seemed to me like a product like that would easily blow the time-wasting competition out of the water. But it doesn't seem so. Maybe too early in the development...
- ssss11 5y agoThe ideal assistant, and the corporate strategy of capitalist behemoths, is clearly at odds. The longer we give them attention the more money they make.
- beckman466 5y ago> our tools seem to seek to waste the largest amount of time for us Yeah and it might seem fun initially, yet in the long term shit like Alexa and striving for artificial ‘human-like interaction’ just creates more alienation. ...and alienation and isolation, and an atomized society, only benefits capital. Our current mode of production aims to keep workers easily replaceable, with projects siloed and in rigid knowledge hierarchies that make workers dependent (and keeps the propertied class propertied), instead of enabling and fostering the individual and collective intellectual and emotional growth and skills of humanity. Instead of AI to keep us ‘company’, we need systems that enable humans to have maximum transparency, agency and participation [1]. Platform cooperativism and ‘protocol cooperativism’ (through projects like http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws and holochain) are imo the most important shifts of our time. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/19/open-source-revolution-conquer-one-percent-cia-spy https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j...
- lifekaizen 5y ago
- HPsquared 5y agoGrammatical nitpick: don't call your information a set of factoids. "1. An inaccurate statement or statistic believed to be true because of broad repetition, especially if cited in the media. 2. (originally Canada, US) An interesting item of trivia; a minor fact."
- hoseja 5y agoInsufferable nitpick: that has nothing to do with grammar specifically.
- MrsPeaches 5y agoI like: fact is to factoid, what human is humanoid. I kinda looks like a fact but isn’t.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andrewzah 5y agoThe reality is that it means both of those things, because people use them interchangeably. That's just how it is.
- Timsmits 5y agoWe've been building an app to help you to make your smartphone screentime more conscious and we've just opened the beta this week! <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unpluq.beta&referrer=utm_source%3Dhackernews%26utm_medium%3Dpost%26utm_campaign%3Dhackernews_post https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unpluq.bet...> It basically blocks distracting apps by default and gives you a barrier to open them like shaking your phone for a couple of seconds! Eager to hear what any of you think of it!
- amelius 5y agoThis gives an unbalanced view, as it leaves out all the benefits of social media, such as watching funny videos, watching friends have a good time on holidays, staying "in the loop" with gossip, staying informed about events, releasing anger about political issues, and such.
- Jolter 5y agoI think the argument is that all those things you mention can be bad or good, depending on how (and how much) it is done. I think nobody will debate that you can use social media to watch funny videos. But my personal standpoint is that every individual would be better served by consuming less content and instead doing something that is truly fulfilling. Such as spending time with others AFK, studying a topic of interest, taking up a creative hobby, doing a sport etc.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoI agree with you, but ultimately you can't impose your values on other people (at least not without force), and so we gotta just let people be people.
- Jolter 5y agoI'm not sure what your point is. Should we stop discussing problems we see in society? Will the problem go away, then? Of course I can't (and wouldn't) force people at gunpoint to log our of their social media. Nobody is suggesting that. The article ("ledger") attempts to make an argument for a societal change. How would one start changing society, if one is not allowed to start gathering arguments/evidence in favor of the change one wants to see? "People be people", sure; if there wasn't a trillion-dollar industry profiting from people being hooked on social media and applying every trick at their disposal to keep people hooked, then you would have a point. No, it's not in people's nature to be hooked on scrolling Instagram. It's an entirely artificial problem that we have created together.
- dj_mc_merlin 5y agoI feel that a lot of these aren't necessarily harms, just a change in how things are done. > Children who have been cyberbullied are 3x more likely to contemplate suicide compared to their peers. > Children who experienced cyberbullying during their adolescence were significantly more likely to engage in risk-taking health behavior as adults. Yes, bullying is bad. Now kids can get bullied online. Such is the way of things. > About 40% of 13-17 year olds reported it was “normal for people my age to share nudes with each other.” .. so? People used polaroids before. It was harder so it was done less often, but done it was. > Children who see videos of child influencers holding unhealthy foods consume significantly more calories than those who see influencers holding other types of objects, as clearly shown by experiments using randomized control trials. In other news: researchers rediscover priming is a real effect. > More than half US middle-schoolers cannot distinguish advertising from real news, or fact from fiction. That's how its always been. Don't most people have a memory of being a kid around that age, and have your parents blow your mind by suggesting that not everything you see on TV is true? > 77% of teenagers get their news from social media, with 39% stating that they “often” get news from celebrities, influencers, or personalities, according to a survey of over 800 teens aged 13-18. Ah, so they should get their news from the TV or newspaper instead. Much more reliable, right? All news is dogshit, and various levels of lies. If you've ever been the center of a news story, you know that they literally lie and pull stuff out of nowhere constantly. Its made my jaw drop before. > 30% teens report that they pay “very little attention” to considering the source from which they are getting their news on social media. So 70% pay more than "very little attention" (phrasing!). I'd say most teens are actually better at discerning scams/obviously misleading content online than non-techie 50+ year olds, as long as it doesn't align with their biases (but that's a universal problem). > Several self-harming videos have been circulating on TikTok, from the "Skull breaker" challenge to the "Cha Cha Slide" challenge (which involves repeatedly swerving a car across a road in time to music). BREAKING NEWS: what do the bracelets around your child's wrist mean? Could they be engaging in secret parties where they take drugs and suck dick? This is fearmongering. > The number of US teenagers who are online continuously is increasing at a dramatic pace, almost doubling from 2015 to 2018: 24% to 45%. Because the internet is taking over the world.
- grapist420 5y ago
- bob229 5y agoI love the CHT but no serious organisation uses the NYT as a source
- roenxi 5y agoThe perspective this site offers is valuable; but they suffer from not having a baseline. One that stuck out to me is "Technology integrates and often amplifies racism, sexism, ableism and homophobia". This seems unreasonable - all of these things were substantially worse before technology got involved. Technology seems to blunting the sting, enabling more effective organisation among minorities and promoting a better understanding of the problem. It seems likely that many of these problems were much worse before the big social media companies too.
- baktubi 5y agoThere’s obviously good things provided by tech (otherwise folks wouldn’t have started using it). A social network is a good thing in theory. The problem is not the technological concept itself but where and how we consume it (e.g every 30 seconds). Keep in mind Facebook started when mobiles were somewhat limited and children had flip phones if at all. And on those, “background apps” were scarcely a thing. Nowadays, people are like zombies—and more time is spend wasting away in front of multimédia than providing value to the world.
- hashkb 5y ago> There’s obviously good things provided by tech (otherwise folks wouldn’t have started using it) The "good" doesn't have to be significant for us to become addicted. There are some upsides to smoking cigarettes and other self-destructive behaviors, I'm sure.
- baktubi 5y agoHmm come to think of it cigarettes are actually a social network of sorts. At least in the beginning :)
- VSerge 5y agothey create the need for breaks from anything from work to recreational activites, and provide opportunities for interaction with like-minded humans. I'd say that qualifies, and although I never liked smoking and am grateful to have dodged that bullet, I always envied the natural icebreakers that smokers had when stepping outside of a place to smoke with random others.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 5y agoOkay, I just woke up, still a bit cross-eyed. I read the title as "Ledger of Hams" and expected a proto-food-blogger writing a log of all the hams he ever ate, how they compared to his "ieal" ham, and attempts to create a mathematical model of "the perfect ham". Now I want to read that piece.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoI feel like this is a bit too tech centric. Poor dopamine hygiene will ruin your life. Doesn't really matter if you're hooked on twitter or methamphetamine. People who profit from encouraging poor dopamine hygiene will have an outsized influence on the people they've hooked, doesn't matter if you're managing an ad campaign in the US or part of the opium pipeline in Afghanistan.
- aidenn0 5y agoI think you are in violent agreement with TFA; most people don't need to be convinced that meth dealers don't have their clients' best interests at heart...
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoYeah, I suppose you're right. I originally clicked the link hoping that a "ledger of harms" would chronicle the worst offender for each harm. Not inciting anybody to anything, just making it known that if someone had some adversarial behavior in mind, then it would be best directed at such and such an organization. That's what I would call violent agreement.