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Facebook brought us in with the promise of keeping in touch with friends, but the incentives are to "engagement at all costs". I'm hoping that if we can offer

by mawise 4y ago

Facebook brought us in with the promise of keeping in touch with friends, but the incentives are to "engagement at all costs". I'm hoping that if we can offer an alternative that lets people keep up with their friends without the engagememt incentive then we could greatly improve societal mental health. Thats why I build Haven[1] as open source and self hosted, along with several 3rd party hosting providers. No central entity means no "engagement at all costs". [1] https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org

nkingsy 4y ago
This is a tragedy of the commons situation because people cannot help themselves. What we are actually seeing is users going to TikTok because it is even more engaging. People may say they want to keep up with their friends, but they will choose the more engaging activity. There is no regulating or out-competing it. Governments should provide identification, communication, community, payments, etc platforms for their citizens, but entertainment is always going to look like this unless stoicism is somehow engrained into our culture. Entertainment itself is measured by engagement, so it will end with unlimited personalized ai generated content that will be almost impossible to put down.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >This is a tragedy of the commons situation because people cannot help themselves. SOME people cannot help themselves. I spend 0 minutes on social platforms. I can help myself just fine. Some people have much more addictive personality traits than others. Please, don't paint everyone with the same broad brush. It doesn't help the conversation in a meaningful manner
  - nkingsy 4y ago
    First off you’re on hn, which is social media and absolutely optimized for your specific engagement. I also figured the “some” was implied because the world is a complicated place. I do believe we all have our weaknesses, though mindless consumption is more attractive to some than others.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      If you equate HN to actual social platforms then okay. The HN "algo" is user driven by fellow readers up-voting/down-voting which is much more common interests. There are no "friend" relations on HN. The other platforms are all advertising based algo driven with intentional doping to make people addicted to the platform. This isn't even apples-to-oranges comparison. After the dust from Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers settles and everything gets evaluated, I sincerly hope that Meta/Zuck,et.al gets investigated in the same line as Purdue.
      - cma 4y ago
        Reddit is vote based so would you include that too? HN also has advertising (it has hiring ads for ycombinator companies put in as mostly organic-looking posts with no [ad] tag).
        dylan604 4y ago
        I don't want to get into an argument about what an ad is, but I think we all understand what the difference of ad driven algos on the social platforms vs hiring blogs, Who's Hiring, etc on this platform. Also, I just never have liked Reddit.
  - classified 4y ago
    > I spend 0 minutes on social platforms. You're spending time on HN.
    - eimrine 4y ago
      But he is not spending time on social platform.
      - smsm42 4y ago
        And he can't wait to tell the Internet how proud he is about that.
        dylan604 4y ago
        Only in relation to a thread about how much time people are spending on the socials. It's part of the conversation. That's kind of how the work.
dylan604 4y ago
I never used Friendster, and thought that everyone spending so much time on MySpace was just wasting time. However, I'd love for socials to be back to just MySpace levels of people engaging with each other, sharing music, etc vs the ad engagement driven by ads instead of common interests.

by mawise 4y ago

nkingsy 4y ago

This is a tragedy of the commons situation because people cannot help themselves. What we are actually seeing is users going to TikTok because it is even more engaging. People may say they want to keep up with their friends, but they will choose the more engaging activity. There is no regulating or out-competing it. Governments should provide identification, communication, community, payments, etc platforms for their citizens, but entertainment is always going to look like this unless stoicism is somehow engrained into our culture. Entertainment itself is measured by engagement, so it will end with unlimited personalized ai generated content that will be almost impossible to put down.

dylan604 4y ago
>This is a tragedy of the commons situation because people cannot help themselves. SOME people cannot help themselves. I spend 0 minutes on social platforms. I can help myself just fine. Some people have much more addictive personality traits than others. Please, don't paint everyone with the same broad brush. It doesn't help the conversation in a meaningful manner
- nkingsy 4y ago
  First off you’re on hn, which is social media and absolutely optimized for your specific engagement. I also figured the “some” was implied because the world is a complicated place. I do believe we all have our weaknesses, though mindless consumption is more attractive to some than others.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    If you equate HN to actual social platforms then okay. The HN "algo" is user driven by fellow readers up-voting/down-voting which is much more common interests. There are no "friend" relations on HN. The other platforms are all advertising based algo driven with intentional doping to make people addicted to the platform. This isn't even apples-to-oranges comparison. After the dust from Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers settles and everything gets evaluated, I sincerly hope that Meta/Zuck,et.al gets investigated in the same line as Purdue.
    - cma 4y ago
      Reddit is vote based so would you include that too? HN also has advertising (it has hiring ads for ycombinator companies put in as mostly organic-looking posts with no [ad] tag).
      - dylan604 4y ago
        I don't want to get into an argument about what an ad is, but I think we all understand what the difference of ad driven algos on the social platforms vs hiring blogs, Who's Hiring, etc on this platform. Also, I just never have liked Reddit.
- classified 4y ago
  > I spend 0 minutes on social platforms. You're spending time on HN.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    But he is not spending time on social platform.
    - smsm42 4y ago
      And he can't wait to tell the Internet how proud he is about that.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        Only in relation to a thread about how much time people are spending on the socials. It's part of the conversation. That's kind of how the work.

dylan604 4y ago

I never used Friendster, and thought that everyone spending so much time on MySpace was just wasting time. However, I'd love for socials to be back to just MySpace levels of people engaging with each other, sharing music, etc vs the ad engagement driven by ads instead of common interests.