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Snapchat is harming children at an industrial scale?

157 points by Tomte 2y ago

yar-aa0 2y ago
[flagged]
dang 2y ago
There was a related thread on the front page: TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716665 Since that article is several months old and this one is new, we swapped it out. I assume it makes more sense to discuss the new one. Also, there were lots of criticisms of the other article for supposedly focusing only on TikTok, and those criticisms seem supplanted by this piece. (I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong, nor have I read it.)
- burningChrome 2y ago
  The same outlet did the TikTok story: Following the format of our previous post about the “industrial scale harms” attributed to TikTok, this piece presents dozens of quotations from internal reports, studies, memos, conversations, and public statements in which Snap executives, employees, and consultants acknowledge and discuss the harms that Snapchat causes to many minors who use their platform.
- pelagicAustral 2y ago
  You can essentially just wildcard the social network name and everything still applies. That's the status quo
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - graemep 2y ago
    Except FB, which mostly harms the middle aged.
    - morkalork 2y ago
      It was harming kids on an industrial scale back when it was new, before Instagram et al cannabalized their audience
      - basisword 2y ago
        Was it? In Facebook’s early days you actually followed your friends and only saw their content. There wasn’t even an algorithm until a few years in when they stopped showing the feed chronologically. It wasn’t perfect but it was largely just an extension of your IRL social life.
        spacechild1 2y ago
        Yes. Early FB was a completely different application and pretty similar to MySpace.
        nonameiguess 2y ago
        Getting into the limits of my memory here, but as far as I recall, early Facebook didn't have a feed at all, chronological or otherwise. It was just a directory of students at your own school, skeuomorphic to the physical "facebook" that universities would hand out each semester to students on campus, which gave you a headshot of everyone along with their room numbers. At some point, they added an updateable "status" field to the profiles, to tell your friends how you were feeling that day or what you were doing or whatever. When they started showing those on the home page instead of just on the profiles, then there was a feed, which eventually transformed into the monster we see today. But early on, it was just a digital phonebook with headshots and exactly equivalent to physical items that schools already distributed.
      - biker142541 2y ago
        Would generally disagree here. Especially when limited to edu emails, it was focused on human connections. Even after it opened to broader audience, it was centered on explicit connections you already had (or to some limited extent discovering new ones through network effects). Now whether social networks in even these basic forms are harmful (discouraging physical connections, isolation in digital environments, etc), is maybe a different topic. Exposure to echo chambers of harmful, hateful content driven by algorithms seems to be more the focus here. MySpace, early FB, or even AIM/ICQ, and others focused on facilitating connections and communication didn’t drive the same level of harm imo.
burningChrome 2y ago
With both of these articles, are we finally getting to a tipping point with social media and its negative effects on people?
- isk517 2y ago
  I think part of it is that social media has now been around long enough that it is becoming possible to study the long term effects on our monkey brains from being constantly exposed to the lives and opinions of millions of strangers on a global level.
- zonkerdonker 2y ago
  People knew smoking killed for decades. Do you think that with no policy change and no regulation, that Marlboro and Philip Morris would have let their market tank? Advertising - banned, smoking indoors - banned, and most importantly, taxing the hell out of them (every 10% increase in cigarette prices results in a 4% decrease in adult consumption and a 7% decrease in youth consumption). There isn't really directly comparable policy to taxing these free social media platforms., however, and the whole thing is a bit stickier. Before any policies can stick, the public needs to be aware of the issues. That is tough when most people's 'awareness of issues' comes directly from social media.
- fazeirony 2y ago
  for sure. but if ANY of that kind of thing gets in the way of profits, well then that's not OK. in capitalism, profit is the only thing that matters. CSAM? drugs? underage use? pfft. until this country gets serious about this stuff - and don't hold your breath on that - this is the absolute acceptable norm.
zonkerdonker 2y ago
Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds. I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling geofence on their property. How great would it be to have a snapchat free home zone? Or FB, or tiktok
- dang 2y ago
  One past thread: Thank You, Yakkers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223199 - April 2017 (108 comments) Lots of comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22yikyak%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- rollcat 2y ago
  Technological solutions to societal problems just don't work. Some $EVIL technology being fashioned to harm individuals isn't to blame - the companies behind that technology are. You can pile up your geofencing rules, the real solution lies somewhere between you deleting the app and your government introducing better regulation.
  - kennywinker 2y ago
    Geofencing around schools is the kind of thing you might see if government attempted to regulate this
    - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
      Don’t we geofence sale of alcohol and tobacco around schools?
      - vkou 2y ago
        I think vending machines dispensing whiskey shooters would be a great addition to any classroom. People clearly want the product, and I would clearly stand to make a lot of money from it.
Frieren 2y ago
Each generation of parents fails on something. This generation is failing at recognizing the dangers of social media. Teenagers and even children are being radicalized on-line, sold dangerous diets, manipulated by state sponsored creators, lied by companies, taught anti-science, and the list goes on and on. How is all this not heavily regulated? Even adults need protection from scammers, fake products, misleading ads, hidden product promotions that look like personal opinions... We have gone back a 100 years when it comes to consumer rights, and children are the ones that are paying the highest price.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  As a parent, I never failed to recognize it. I just failed to be able to do anything about it. You were a teenager once, I'm sure you can remember how little influence your parents actually had over how you actually spent your time. Or at least saw that in your friends. This is a society wide thing. Parents are pretty much powerless. So yes, regulation. But you'll see how discussion of any proposal for this goes down in this forum. Just imagine across the whole polis.
  - radicaldreamer 2y ago
    Regulation of social media probably polls pretty well, I think polls have even found that most high schoolers want to reduce or end their usage of it
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      Phone use during class time is banned in my kid's high schools. Makes no difference -- it's completely unenforced by the teachers. They're practically physically adults, teachers don't want to risk the confrontation, etc. And the kids suffer for it. And my youngest uses no social media but their mind is still eaten by constant phone usage. More than social media, the problem is the device. The form factor. The "smartphone" is a malevolent technology.
      - 2y ago
rattlesnakedave 2y ago
This all seems like obvious byproducts of an ephemeral photo based platform. Beyond these, there's also the shitty "explore" feature that pushes sexually explicit content that can't be disabled. Surprised that's not mentioned here.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
Trigger warning for descriptions of ruined teenager lives (including up to death), complete with happy mugshots of "before". (Some things are worth getting disturbed by though.)
n4ture 2y ago
Hi @dang, Sorry to hijack this thread with a completely off-topic issue, but I have no idea where else to reach about this. I did a submission yesterday showcasing the work of some of my colleagues at UofT, it's satire but it is backed by serious academical work. I was very sad to see it quickly got flagged and removed from the front page when it started to generate discussion. I just wanted to ask you to unflag it or provide an exlaination as to why it should remain flagged and is breaking the guidelines, as I believe censoring/muting academics on important topics such as AI in the current political climate is yet another dangerous step towards fascism. The submission in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43704319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43704319 Thanks for listening to my plea, and again apologies for being so off-topic! Best, n Edit: formating/typo for clarity
- tomhow 2y ago
  Please email hn@ycombinator.com with questions like this.
Nevermark 2y ago
The social media business model is predicated on scaling up obvious and huge conflicts of interest. To scales unfathomable a couple decades ago. Basic ethics, and more importantly the law, need to catch up. Surveilling, analyzing, then manipulating people psychologically to mine them for advertisers is just as real a poison as fentanyl. And when it scales, that mean billions of dollars in revenue, actual trillions of dollars in market value unrelentingly demanding growth, playing whack-a-mole with the devastating consequences isn’t going to work. Conflicts of interest are illegal in many forms. Business models incorporating highly scalable conflicts of interest need to be illegal. We could still have social media in healthier forms. They wouldn’t be “monetizing” viewers, they would be serving customers. Facebooks army of servers isn’t required to run a shared scrapbook. All those servers, and most of Facebook’s algorithms and now AI, are there to manipulate people to the maximum extent possible.
WaitWaitWha 2y ago
I do want to note a tangential topic on social media harming children and young adults. In my personal experience, kids and young adults particularly those who grew up immersed in social media (born after ~1995–2000), seem to struggle with recognizing appropriate, undistorted social cues and understanding the real-world consequences of their actions. To Snapchat harming kids, I think it is more than just evil people doing "five key clusters of harms". Even adults often expect the same instant reactions and flexible social dynamics found online, which blinds them to the more permanent, harsher outcomes that exist outside of digital spaces. Anecdotally, the utter shock that shows on some people's face when they realize this is sad, and very disconcerting. (At an extreme think "pranksters", that get shot or punched in the face, and they are confused why that happened, when "everyone loves it online".) How to fix this? the suggested solutions will not solve this problem, as it does not fit the "clusters of harms".
cbruns 2y ago
Some readers here presumably work at Snap. How do you feel about this and your work? Do you sleep soundly at night?
- stickfigure 2y ago
  I don't work for Snap, but they do use some software I wrote, so I guess that's close enough. I find all of these "social media is bad" articles (for kids or adults) basically boil down to: Let humans communicate freely, some of them will do bad things. This presents a choice: Monitor everyone Orwell-style, or accept that the medium isn't going to be able to solve the problem. Even though we tolerate a lot more monitoring for kids than adults, I'm still pretty uncomfortable with the idea that technology platforms should be policing everyone's messages. So I sleep just fine knowing that some kids (and adults) are going to have bad experiences. I send my kid to the playground knowing he could be hurt. I take him skiing. He just got his first motorcycle. We should not strive for a risk-free world, and I think efforts to make it risk-free are toxic.
  - some_random 2y ago
    Are you not willing to even entertain the notion that communication platforms could influence the way that it's users communicate with each other? That totally ephemeral and private image based social media could promote a different type of communication compared to something like say, HN, which is public and text based? Sure you take your kid skiing, but presumably you make them wear a helmet and have them start off on the bunny hill, I agree that a risk-free world is an insane demand that justifies infinite authoritarian power but there is a line for everyone.
    - stickfigure 2y ago
      Yes, I make my kid wear a helmet. I make sure his bindings are set properly. I make sure he's dressed warmly. I make sure he's fed and hydrated. I am the parent. The ski resort provides the mountain, the snow, and the lifts. He's a bit too young to be interested in taking pictures of his wang but I'd like to think this is a topic I can handle. Teaching him to navigate a dangerous world is sort of my job. I'm not losing sleep over it.
neilv 2y ago
(Since the TikTok post was swapped out with this one, I'll repost my late comment here, since it applies to a lot of companies.) > As one internal report put it: [...damning effects...] I recall hearing of related embarrassing internal reports from Facebook. And, earlier, the internal reports from big tobacco and big oil, showing they knew the harms, but chose to publicly lie instead, for greater profit. My question is... Why are employees, who presumably have plush jobs they want to keep, still writing reports that management doesn't want to hear? * Do they not realize when management doesn't want to hear this? * Does management actually want to hear it, but with overwhelming intent bias? (For example, hearing that it's "compulsive" is good, and the itemized effects of that are only interpreted as emphasizing how valuable a property they own?) * Do they think the information will be acted upon constructively, non-evil? * Are they simply trying to be honest researchers, knowing they might get fired or career stalled? * Is it job security, to make themselves harder to fire? * Are they setting up CYA paper trail for themselves, for if the scandal becomes public? * Are they helping their immediate manager to set up CYA paper trails?
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  My team at Facebook in the 2010s made many such reports. We did that work because our mandate was to understand the users and how to serve them. We did that with full good natured ethical intent. We turned the findings in to project proposals and MVPs. The ones that were revenue negative were killed by leadership after all that work, repeat cycle.
  - neilv 2y ago
    Interesting. Any sense whether that system was consciously constructed? (Like, Task a group to generate product changes appealing to users, and then cherrypick the ones that are profitable, to get/maintain profitable good product.) Or was it not as conscious, more an accident of following industry conventions for corporate roles, and corporate inefficiency&miscommunication?
    - kridsdale1 2y ago
neilv 2y ago
> We suggested to them some design changes that we believe would make the platform less addictive and less harmful: [...] 5. Stop deleting posts on Snap’s own servers. Can someone say the original intent or de-facto use case of Snapchat, and how that's changed over time? Around the time it started, I heard that it was for adult sexting, with people thinking they could use it to send private selfies that quickly self-destruct. So that (purportedly) the photos can't be retained or spread out of the real-time person-to-person context in which they were shared. (I guess the ghost logo was for "ephemeral".) And then I vaguely recall hearing that Snapchat changed the feature, or got rid of it.
ViktorRay 2y ago
Does anyone remember the Hacker News thread last week about Black Mirror? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43648890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43648890 Many in the comments were criticizing Black Mirror for being unrealistic. Especially in Black Mirror’s assumption that negative technologies would be introduced into society and ruin people without folks realizing. Well…Snapchat is basically a Black Mirror story. It was introduced and became widespread without much debate. The negative effects are happening. We know of them. Nothing happens. So the Black Mirror criticizers were wrong. “You best start believing in Black Mirror stories Mrs Turner. You’re in one!” And so are the rest of us. Look around you and tell me the world isn’t a Black Mirror episode.
- sanarothe 2y ago
  I take the opposite viewpoint as the criticisers -- they're too real, too foreseeable, that I would almost ask the Black Mirror writers not to give "them" any more ideas.
  - LeifCarrotson 2y ago
    It's the same problem as Charles Stross wrote about in "Don't Create the Torment Nexus": https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr... Discussed on HN in 2023, with 392 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38218580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38218580 The question is whether you want Black Mirror producers or SciFi authors to continue generating art and entertainment. Those have value to people with literary comprehension, but they might also be misinterpreted by people who believe them to be a roadmap. My fear is that by shifting the medium from novel to TV show, you're removing the slight filter that keeps out those with insufficient literacy to sit down with an interesting 400-page paperback and opening it to those who can press "Play".
- abletonlive 2y ago
  How is Snapchat a black mirror episode? Do you think even 10% of Snapchat users are harmed in the ways discussed in this article? This is like saying we are living in Dune because we have some people in space. So just because some people are harmed in society suddenly black mirror is not too on-the-nose or unrealistically pessimistic?
aylmao 2y ago
> “Think it would be interesting to investigate how healthy Snapstreak sessions are for users… If I open Snapchat, take a photo of the ceiling to keep my streak going and don’t engage with the rest of the app, is that the type of behavior we want to encourage? Alternatively, if we find that streaks are addictive or a gateway to already deep engagement with other parts of Snapchat, then it would be something positive for “healthy” long term retention and engagement with the product.” For I second I thought this employee was talking about what's healthy for the user. Certainly not though; they mean what's healthy for the "user-base". I find very interesting how this sort of language leads to certain employee behaviour. Using the concept of "health" to mean retention and engagement, might overcast thinking about health from a user's perspective— it's similar terminology but very different, and sometimes even opposite, goals.
- SamuelAdams 2y ago
  GitHub does the same thing with commits, displaying them on your profile. Is that remarkably different than what Snapchat is doing?
  - matsuui 2y ago
    I'd say so. Some obsess over their commit history but it is mostly out of the way and only a representation of how active you are. The snapchat streaks are a key feature and designed to keep you coming back every day, you can even pay a dollar to restore it if you miss a day.
- exceptione 2y ago
  Bingo. If more people were carefully analyzing language, they could spot earlier that people are on the slippery slope of, lets call it, anti-human beliefs; as then they may help them to correct course. If we don't, these narratives are getting normalized. A society is on a curve of collective behavior, there is no stable point. Only direction.
adityapuranik 2y ago
Back when I was graduating from Uni, one day I just decided that Snap streaks pressure was too much. I had streaks of 700 days+ with a person I barely talked to. But most of my streaks were with my best friends, people I talked to every day. It was like a daily ritual, and I couldn't escape it for a while. I decided to go cold turkey, since it felt like the only option. All my friends moaned and complained for a while. They even tried to revive the 'streak' back, but I persisted. Feels really silly when I look back, but 700 days means I was sending snaps everyday for 2 years straight. I still have the app and there are still few friends of mine, who send me snaps about their whereabouts, but I have stopped using it. Blocking the notifications was one of the best decision that I could have made, since that was the single biggest factor in not opening the app itself.
- taraindara 2y ago
  > Blocking the notifications was one of the best decision that I could have made I’ve done this for all social media, and more recently deleted all social apps. I’ll go on Facebook sometime through the web browser, mainly for marketplace. Facebook was the first app I tested disabling notifications on. This had to be about 10 years ago, I noticed they would give me a new notification every 5-10 minutes. I was addicted to checking what the notification as. Usually garbage, and the less I used Facebook the more garbage the notice. Since I’ve stopped using Facebook for anything but marketplace my entire feed is now garbage. The algorithm doesn’t know what to do with me now and its former history. Having no social apps has been a hard change to get used to. But I feel so much better not feeling like I need to scroll. I only scroll on hacker news now… which is easy because the top page doesn’t get that many updates in a day, and after several minutes of browsing “new” I’m satiated I’ve seen all I might want to see
- ensignavenger 2y ago
  So after doing this for 2 years, what were the negative effects other than a few seconds spent each day?
heavyset_go 2y ago
Did some work with researchers at a local university and found out that Snapchat is like the #1 vector for production and distribution of CSAM. Same thing when it came to online grooming.
- azinman2 2y ago
  my guess is anywhere kids are will be that
peterbecich 2y ago
There is a statistic that the average teenager gets 240 smartphone notifications a day: https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/study-average-teen-received-more-200-app-notifications-day https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/study-average-te... Young people have more time ahead of them than anyone. Consequently, in my opinion, young people should be receiving information with a long time period of usefulness. Smartphone notifications have a very short half-life.

157 points by Tomte 2y ago

[flagged]

dang 2y ago

There was a related thread on the front page: TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716665 Since that article is several months old and this one is new, we swapped it out. I assume it makes more sense to discuss the new one. Also, there were lots of criticisms of the other article for supposedly focusing only on TikTok, and those criticisms seem supplanted by this piece. (I'm not arguing whether it's right or wrong, nor have I read it.)

burningChrome 2y ago
The same outlet did the TikTok story: Following the format of our previous post about the “industrial scale harms” attributed to TikTok, this piece presents dozens of quotations from internal reports, studies, memos, conversations, and public statements in which Snap executives, employees, and consultants acknowledge and discuss the harms that Snapchat causes to many minors who use their platform.
pelagicAustral 2y ago
You can essentially just wildcard the social network name and everything still applies. That's the status quo
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- graemep 2y ago
  Except FB, which mostly harms the middle aged.
  - morkalork 2y ago
    It was harming kids on an industrial scale back when it was new, before Instagram et al cannabalized their audience
    - basisword 2y ago
      Was it? In Facebook’s early days you actually followed your friends and only saw their content. There wasn’t even an algorithm until a few years in when they stopped showing the feed chronologically. It wasn’t perfect but it was largely just an extension of your IRL social life.
      - spacechild1 2y ago
        Yes. Early FB was a completely different application and pretty similar to MySpace.
      - nonameiguess 2y ago
        Getting into the limits of my memory here, but as far as I recall, early Facebook didn't have a feed at all, chronological or otherwise. It was just a directory of students at your own school, skeuomorphic to the physical "facebook" that universities would hand out each semester to students on campus, which gave you a headshot of everyone along with their room numbers. At some point, they added an updateable "status" field to the profiles, to tell your friends how you were feeling that day or what you were doing or whatever. When they started showing those on the home page instead of just on the profiles, then there was a feed, which eventually transformed into the monster we see today. But early on, it was just a digital phonebook with headshots and exactly equivalent to physical items that schools already distributed.
    - biker142541 2y ago
      Would generally disagree here. Especially when limited to edu emails, it was focused on human connections. Even after it opened to broader audience, it was centered on explicit connections you already had (or to some limited extent discovering new ones through network effects). Now whether social networks in even these basic forms are harmful (discouraging physical connections, isolation in digital environments, etc), is maybe a different topic. Exposure to echo chambers of harmful, hateful content driven by algorithms seems to be more the focus here. MySpace, early FB, or even AIM/ICQ, and others focused on facilitating connections and communication didn’t drive the same level of harm imo.

burningChrome 2y ago

With both of these articles, are we finally getting to a tipping point with social media and its negative effects on people?

isk517 2y ago
I think part of it is that social media has now been around long enough that it is becoming possible to study the long term effects on our monkey brains from being constantly exposed to the lives and opinions of millions of strangers on a global level.
zonkerdonker 2y ago
People knew smoking killed for decades. Do you think that with no policy change and no regulation, that Marlboro and Philip Morris would have let their market tank? Advertising - banned, smoking indoors - banned, and most importantly, taxing the hell out of them (every 10% increase in cigarette prices results in a 4% decrease in adult consumption and a 7% decrease in youth consumption). There isn't really directly comparable policy to taxing these free social media platforms., however, and the whole thing is a bit stickier. Before any policies can stick, the public needs to be aware of the issues. That is tough when most people's 'awareness of issues' comes directly from social media.
fazeirony 2y ago
for sure. but if ANY of that kind of thing gets in the way of profits, well then that's not OK. in capitalism, profit is the only thing that matters. CSAM? drugs? underage use? pfft. until this country gets serious about this stuff - and don't hold your breath on that - this is the absolute acceptable norm.

zonkerdonker 2y ago

Anyone remember YikYak? I was in university at the time, the explosive growth was wild. After the inevitable bullying, racism, threats, doxxing, that came with the anonymous platform, YikYak enabled geofencing to disable the app on middle and high school grounds. I think every social media platform with an "age limit" should be required to do this as well. And open it up, so that anyone can create their own disabling geofence on their property. How great would it be to have a snapchat free home zone? Or FB, or tiktok

dang 2y ago
One past thread: Thank You, Yakkers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14223199 - April 2017 (108 comments) Lots of comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22yikyak%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
rollcat 2y ago
Technological solutions to societal problems just don't work. Some $EVIL technology being fashioned to harm individuals isn't to blame - the companies behind that technology are. You can pile up your geofencing rules, the real solution lies somewhere between you deleting the app and your government introducing better regulation.
- kennywinker 2y ago
  Geofencing around schools is the kind of thing you might see if government attempted to regulate this
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    Don’t we geofence sale of alcohol and tobacco around schools?
    - vkou 2y ago
      I think vending machines dispensing whiskey shooters would be a great addition to any classroom. People clearly want the product, and I would clearly stand to make a lot of money from it.

Frieren 2y ago

Each generation of parents fails on something. This generation is failing at recognizing the dangers of social media. Teenagers and even children are being radicalized on-line, sold dangerous diets, manipulated by state sponsored creators, lied by companies, taught anti-science, and the list goes on and on. How is all this not heavily regulated? Even adults need protection from scammers, fake products, misleading ads, hidden product promotions that look like personal opinions... We have gone back a 100 years when it comes to consumer rights, and children are the ones that are paying the highest price.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
As a parent, I never failed to recognize it. I just failed to be able to do anything about it. You were a teenager once, I'm sure you can remember how little influence your parents actually had over how you actually spent your time. Or at least saw that in your friends. This is a society wide thing. Parents are pretty much powerless. So yes, regulation. But you'll see how discussion of any proposal for this goes down in this forum. Just imagine across the whole polis.
- radicaldreamer 2y ago
  Regulation of social media probably polls pretty well, I think polls have even found that most high schoolers want to reduce or end their usage of it
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    Phone use during class time is banned in my kid's high schools. Makes no difference -- it's completely unenforced by the teachers. They're practically physically adults, teachers don't want to risk the confrontation, etc. And the kids suffer for it. And my youngest uses no social media but their mind is still eaten by constant phone usage. More than social media, the problem is the device. The form factor. The "smartphone" is a malevolent technology.
    - 2y ago

rattlesnakedave 2y ago

This all seems like obvious byproducts of an ephemeral photo based platform. Beyond these, there's also the shitty "explore" feature that pushes sexually explicit content that can't be disabled. Surprised that's not mentioned here.

BlueTemplar 2y ago

Trigger warning for descriptions of ruined teenager lives (including up to death), complete with happy mugshots of "before". (Some things are worth getting disturbed by though.)

n4ture 2y ago

Hi @dang, Sorry to hijack this thread with a completely off-topic issue, but I have no idea where else to reach about this. I did a submission yesterday showcasing the work of some of my colleagues at UofT, it's satire but it is backed by serious academical work. I was very sad to see it quickly got flagged and removed from the front page when it started to generate discussion. I just wanted to ask you to unflag it or provide an exlaination as to why it should remain flagged and is breaking the guidelines, as I believe censoring/muting academics on important topics such as AI in the current political climate is yet another dangerous step towards fascism. The submission in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43704319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43704319 Thanks for listening to my plea, and again apologies for being so off-topic! Best, n Edit: formating/typo for clarity

tomhow 2y ago
Please email hn@ycombinator.com with questions like this.

Nevermark 2y ago

The social media business model is predicated on scaling up obvious and huge conflicts of interest. To scales unfathomable a couple decades ago. Basic ethics, and more importantly the law, need to catch up. Surveilling, analyzing, then manipulating people psychologically to mine them for advertisers is just as real a poison as fentanyl. And when it scales, that mean billions of dollars in revenue, actual trillions of dollars in market value unrelentingly demanding growth, playing whack-a-mole with the devastating consequences isn’t going to work. Conflicts of interest are illegal in many forms. Business models incorporating highly scalable conflicts of interest need to be illegal. We could still have social media in healthier forms. They wouldn’t be “monetizing” viewers, they would be serving customers. Facebooks army of servers isn’t required to run a shared scrapbook. All those servers, and most of Facebook’s algorithms and now AI, are there to manipulate people to the maximum extent possible.

WaitWaitWha 2y ago

I do want to note a tangential topic on social media harming children and young adults. In my personal experience, kids and young adults particularly those who grew up immersed in social media (born after ~1995–2000), seem to struggle with recognizing appropriate, undistorted social cues and understanding the real-world consequences of their actions. To Snapchat harming kids, I think it is more than just evil people doing "five key clusters of harms". Even adults often expect the same instant reactions and flexible social dynamics found online, which blinds them to the more permanent, harsher outcomes that exist outside of digital spaces. Anecdotally, the utter shock that shows on some people's face when they realize this is sad, and very disconcerting. (At an extreme think "pranksters", that get shot or punched in the face, and they are confused why that happened, when "everyone loves it online".) How to fix this? the suggested solutions will not solve this problem, as it does not fit the "clusters of harms".

cbruns 2y ago

Some readers here presumably work at Snap. How do you feel about this and your work? Do you sleep soundly at night?

stickfigure 2y ago
I don't work for Snap, but they do use some software I wrote, so I guess that's close enough. I find all of these "social media is bad" articles (for kids or adults) basically boil down to: Let humans communicate freely, some of them will do bad things. This presents a choice: Monitor everyone Orwell-style, or accept that the medium isn't going to be able to solve the problem. Even though we tolerate a lot more monitoring for kids than adults, I'm still pretty uncomfortable with the idea that technology platforms should be policing everyone's messages. So I sleep just fine knowing that some kids (and adults) are going to have bad experiences. I send my kid to the playground knowing he could be hurt. I take him skiing. He just got his first motorcycle. We should not strive for a risk-free world, and I think efforts to make it risk-free are toxic.
- some_random 2y ago
  Are you not willing to even entertain the notion that communication platforms could influence the way that it's users communicate with each other? That totally ephemeral and private image based social media could promote a different type of communication compared to something like say, HN, which is public and text based? Sure you take your kid skiing, but presumably you make them wear a helmet and have them start off on the bunny hill, I agree that a risk-free world is an insane demand that justifies infinite authoritarian power but there is a line for everyone.
  - stickfigure 2y ago
    Yes, I make my kid wear a helmet. I make sure his bindings are set properly. I make sure he's dressed warmly. I make sure he's fed and hydrated. I am the parent. The ski resort provides the mountain, the snow, and the lifts. He's a bit too young to be interested in taking pictures of his wang but I'd like to think this is a topic I can handle. Teaching him to navigate a dangerous world is sort of my job. I'm not losing sleep over it.

neilv 2y ago

(Since the TikTok post was swapped out with this one, I'll repost my late comment here, since it applies to a lot of companies.) > As one internal report put it: [...damning effects...] I recall hearing of related embarrassing internal reports from Facebook. And, earlier, the internal reports from big tobacco and big oil, showing they knew the harms, but chose to publicly lie instead, for greater profit. My question is... Why are employees, who presumably have plush jobs they want to keep, still writing reports that management doesn't want to hear? * Do they not realize when management doesn't want to hear this? * Does management actually want to hear it, but with overwhelming intent bias? (For example, hearing that it's "compulsive" is good, and the itemized effects of that are only interpreted as emphasizing how valuable a property they own?) * Do they think the information will be acted upon constructively, non-evil? * Are they simply trying to be honest researchers, knowing they might get fired or career stalled? * Is it job security, to make themselves harder to fire? * Are they setting up CYA paper trail for themselves, for if the scandal becomes public? * Are they helping their immediate manager to set up CYA paper trails?

kridsdale1 2y ago
My team at Facebook in the 2010s made many such reports. We did that work because our mandate was to understand the users and how to serve them. We did that with full good natured ethical intent. We turned the findings in to project proposals and MVPs. The ones that were revenue negative were killed by leadership after all that work, repeat cycle.
- neilv 2y ago
  Interesting. Any sense whether that system was consciously constructed? (Like, Task a group to generate product changes appealing to users, and then cherrypick the ones that are profitable, to get/maintain profitable good product.) Or was it not as conscious, more an accident of following industry conventions for corporate roles, and corporate inefficiency&miscommunication?
  - kridsdale1 2y ago

neilv 2y ago

> We suggested to them some design changes that we believe would make the platform less addictive and less harmful: [...] 5. Stop deleting posts on Snap’s own servers. Can someone say the original intent or de-facto use case of Snapchat, and how that's changed over time? Around the time it started, I heard that it was for adult sexting, with people thinking they could use it to send private selfies that quickly self-destruct. So that (purportedly) the photos can't be retained or spread out of the real-time person-to-person context in which they were shared. (I guess the ghost logo was for "ephemeral".) And then I vaguely recall hearing that Snapchat changed the feature, or got rid of it.

ViktorRay 2y ago

Does anyone remember the Hacker News thread last week about Black Mirror? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43648890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43648890 Many in the comments were criticizing Black Mirror for being unrealistic. Especially in Black Mirror’s assumption that negative technologies would be introduced into society and ruin people without folks realizing. Well…Snapchat is basically a Black Mirror story. It was introduced and became widespread without much debate. The negative effects are happening. We know of them. Nothing happens. So the Black Mirror criticizers were wrong. “You best start believing in Black Mirror stories Mrs Turner. You’re in one!” And so are the rest of us. Look around you and tell me the world isn’t a Black Mirror episode.

sanarothe 2y ago
I take the opposite viewpoint as the criticisers -- they're too real, too foreseeable, that I would almost ask the Black Mirror writers not to give "them" any more ideas.
- LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  It's the same problem as Charles Stross wrote about in "Don't Create the Torment Nexus": https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr... Discussed on HN in 2023, with 392 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38218580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38218580 The question is whether you want Black Mirror producers or SciFi authors to continue generating art and entertainment. Those have value to people with literary comprehension, but they might also be misinterpreted by people who believe them to be a roadmap. My fear is that by shifting the medium from novel to TV show, you're removing the slight filter that keeps out those with insufficient literacy to sit down with an interesting 400-page paperback and opening it to those who can press "Play".
abletonlive 2y ago
How is Snapchat a black mirror episode? Do you think even 10% of Snapchat users are harmed in the ways discussed in this article? This is like saying we are living in Dune because we have some people in space. So just because some people are harmed in society suddenly black mirror is not too on-the-nose or unrealistically pessimistic?

aylmao 2y ago

> “Think it would be interesting to investigate how healthy Snapstreak sessions are for users… If I open Snapchat, take a photo of the ceiling to keep my streak going and don’t engage with the rest of the app, is that the type of behavior we want to encourage? Alternatively, if we find that streaks are addictive or a gateway to already deep engagement with other parts of Snapchat, then it would be something positive for “healthy” long term retention and engagement with the product.” For I second I thought this employee was talking about what's healthy for the user. Certainly not though; they mean what's healthy for the "user-base". I find very interesting how this sort of language leads to certain employee behaviour. Using the concept of "health" to mean retention and engagement, might overcast thinking about health from a user's perspective— it's similar terminology but very different, and sometimes even opposite, goals.

SamuelAdams 2y ago
GitHub does the same thing with commits, displaying them on your profile. Is that remarkably different than what Snapchat is doing?
- matsuui 2y ago
  I'd say so. Some obsess over their commit history but it is mostly out of the way and only a representation of how active you are. The snapchat streaks are a key feature and designed to keep you coming back every day, you can even pay a dollar to restore it if you miss a day.
exceptione 2y ago
Bingo. If more people were carefully analyzing language, they could spot earlier that people are on the slippery slope of, lets call it, anti-human beliefs; as then they may help them to correct course. If we don't, these narratives are getting normalized. A society is on a curve of collective behavior, there is no stable point. Only direction.

adityapuranik 2y ago

Back when I was graduating from Uni, one day I just decided that Snap streaks pressure was too much. I had streaks of 700 days+ with a person I barely talked to. But most of my streaks were with my best friends, people I talked to every day. It was like a daily ritual, and I couldn't escape it for a while. I decided to go cold turkey, since it felt like the only option. All my friends moaned and complained for a while. They even tried to revive the 'streak' back, but I persisted. Feels really silly when I look back, but 700 days means I was sending snaps everyday for 2 years straight. I still have the app and there are still few friends of mine, who send me snaps about their whereabouts, but I have stopped using it. Blocking the notifications was one of the best decision that I could have made, since that was the single biggest factor in not opening the app itself.

taraindara 2y ago
> Blocking the notifications was one of the best decision that I could have made I’ve done this for all social media, and more recently deleted all social apps. I’ll go on Facebook sometime through the web browser, mainly for marketplace. Facebook was the first app I tested disabling notifications on. This had to be about 10 years ago, I noticed they would give me a new notification every 5-10 minutes. I was addicted to checking what the notification as. Usually garbage, and the less I used Facebook the more garbage the notice. Since I’ve stopped using Facebook for anything but marketplace my entire feed is now garbage. The algorithm doesn’t know what to do with me now and its former history. Having no social apps has been a hard change to get used to. But I feel so much better not feeling like I need to scroll. I only scroll on hacker news now… which is easy because the top page doesn’t get that many updates in a day, and after several minutes of browsing “new” I’m satiated I’ve seen all I might want to see
ensignavenger 2y ago
So after doing this for 2 years, what were the negative effects other than a few seconds spent each day?

heavyset_go 2y ago

Did some work with researchers at a local university and found out that Snapchat is like the #1 vector for production and distribution of CSAM. Same thing when it came to online grooming.

azinman2 2y ago
my guess is anywhere kids are will be that

peterbecich 2y ago

There is a statistic that the average teenager gets 240 smartphone notifications a day: https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/study-average-teen-received-more-200-app-notifications-day https://www.michiganmedicine.org/health-lab/study-average-te... Young people have more time ahead of them than anyone. Consequently, in my opinion, young people should be receiving information with a long time period of usefulness. Smartphone notifications have a very short half-life.