5 ms·

I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't

I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.

woodpanel 8mo ago
[flagged]
- mym1990 8mo ago
  Eh, its not like it is happening overnight. Its like a cancer that slowly spreads without much notice and then one day the democracy collapses and its too late to do anything about it.
- joe_mamba 8mo ago
  This. If all it took was a $300k ad campaign on tiktok to get the population of a country(Romania in this case to be specific) to vote for a shady no-name candidate that came out of nowhere, instead of the well known candidates of the establishment, that should tell you the politics of your country betrayed its electorate so badly that they would rather commit national suicide instead of voting the establishment again to screw them over for the n-th time. Tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that. I'm not saying social media isn't cancerous and shouldn't be regulated, because it is and it should, I'm saying that in this specific case it's a symptom of a much bigger existing disease and not the root cause of it. What I'm mostly afraid of now, is that the lesson governments took from this is not that social media should be regulated and defanged of data collection and addictiveness, but instead that governments should keep and seize control of said data collection and addictiveness so they can weaponize it themselves to advance their agendas over the population. Case in point, the now US-controlled tiktok does more data harvesting than when it was Chinese owned.[1] At least China couldn't send ICE to your house using that data. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-new-terms-of-service-privacy-geolocation-personal-information/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-new-terms-of-service-pri...
  - cbg0 8mo ago
    > tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that Actually both can be true.
    - joe_mamba 8mo ago
      Not in this case. Romanian people hated their corrupt politicians since way before tiktok was invented, so much so, that it's not even a partisan issue, all of them are equally unpopular. Tiktok only acted as release valve for that pent-up anger, but it's not the cause of it. The cause is 35+ years of rampant theft and corruption leading to misery and cases of death of innocent people. So blaming of tiktok is a convenient scapegoat for Romania's corrupt establishment to legitimize themselves and deflect their unpopularity as if it's caused by Russian interference and not their own actions. NO, Russian interference just weaponized the massive unpopularity they already had. So here's a wild idea on how to protect your democracy: how about instead of banning social media, politicians actually get off their kiddie fiddling islands, stop stealing everything not nailed to the ground and do right by their people, so that the voters don't feel compelled to pour gasoline on their country and light it on fire out of spite just to watch the establishment burn with it. Because when people are educated, healthy, financially well off and taken care of by their government who acts in their best interest, then no amount of foreign social media propaganda can convince people to throw that all away on a dime. But if your people are their wits end and want to see you guillotined, then that negative capital can and will be exploited by foreign adversaries. Like how come you don't see Swiss or Norwegians trying to vote Russian puppets off TikTok to power and it's not because they have more control on social media than Romania. This isn't a Romanian problem BTW, many western countries see similar political disenfranchisement today, and why you see western leaders rushing to ban or seize control of social media and free speech, instead of actually fixing their countries according to the pains of the voters.
  - tzs 8mo ago
    That only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties. They use a two-round system to elect their President that works like this: 1. If a candidates gets more than 50% in the first round they are the winner, and there is no second round. 2. If there is no clear winner in the first round, the top two from the first round advance to the second round to determine the winner. In that election there were 14 candidates. 6 from right-wing parties, 4 from left-wing parties, and 4 independents. The most anyone got in the first round was 22.94%, and the second most was 19.18%. Third was 19.15%. Fourth was 13.86%, then 8.79%. With that many candidates, and with there being quite a lot of overlap in the positions of the candidates closer to the center, you can easily end up with the candidates that are more extreme finishing higher because they have fewer overlap on positions with the others, and so the voters that find those issues most important don't get split. You can easily end up with two candidates in the runoff that a large majority disagree with on all major issues. They really need to be using something like ranked choice.
- dataflow 8mo ago
  Ah yes, let's destroy all the weak democracies; they're not strong to begin with.
- ben_w 8mo ago
  I imagine there was a similar argument a century ago about how if alcohol kills your marriage, it wasn't a very strong marriage. I wonder if we'll get speakeasies where people can get endogenous dopamine kicks from experiencing dark patterns?
- thinkingtoilet 8mo ago
  No. It's us humans that aren't very strong to begin with. To not admit it is to deny reality at this point.
- lm28469 8mo ago
  It's like saying ww2 started because of a few grams of lead and ended because of a few kilo of uranium You'd be technically true but your missing 99.9% of the point, you can't dilute these complex topics in such dumb ways and use it as an argument
tokyobreakfast 8mo ago
> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.
- kelseyfrog 8mo ago
  Drug stores should stock morphine available without age restriction and if you don't want it, just don't buy it.
  - tokyobreakfast 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - kelseyfrog 8mo ago
      Yes. The amount of emotional deregulation apparent in your response only advances my point.
    - ben_w 8mo ago
      Endogenous drugs, exogenous drugs. Same effect on the brain, and in some cases the actual literal same substances. The difference is that endo-/exo- prefix, the former is made in your body, the latter is supplied from outside. We have been learning how to induce certain experiences, which correspond to certain substances, for a long time; we're getting more competent at it; this includes social media A/B testing itself to be so sticky that a lot of people find it hard to put down; this is bad, so something* is being done about it. * The risk being "something should be done; this is something, therefore it should be done"
- ahhhhnoooo 8mo ago
  Just stop using heroin. Just stop eating fast food. Just stop going to the casino. Just don't smoke anymore. We know plenty of things are quite bad for us, and yet we find them difficult to stop. Somewhat famously difficult to stop. I think telling people, "just don't..." trivializes how difficult that is.
erxam 8mo ago
I do so too. Dark patterns should never be acceptable. The amount of paid shills opposing this is a good indicator that it's the right move.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
jameson 8mo ago
As a person working at social media I support this as well. I'm a hypocrite. I admit, but the pay is too good to find alternative. Terms like "DAU" or "engagement" is common in our field and the primary objective is how to make users spend more time on our platform. We don't take safety or mental health seriously internally but only externally for PR reasons. CEOs won't change that because the more time user spends on the platform, the more ad revenue it brings. Only way is to regulate it.
- deaux 8mo ago
  > . I'm a hypocrite. I admit Great, admission is the first step. > but the pay is too good to find alternative. Yet then you immediately undo it! Try "I'm too greedy". You're the actor with the free will here. The subject of the sentencd shouldn't be "the pay". That is just an amount, a sum, that exists - neither too high nor too low. That is all in the eye of the beholder.
  - andyferris 8mo ago
    Honestly, the EU is more likely to change the behavior of e.g. Facebook than a single employee would. (IMO if the US federal government spent more time caring for it's citizens it would consider doing such things more seriously itself).
  - samrus 8mo ago
    Give them a break. People want to live a good life. We as a society shouldnt incentivize bad behavior with capital
    - justacrow 8mo ago
      Engaging in bad and immoral behaviour for capital is still bad and immoral behaviour, particularly when one has other choices.
      - samrus 8mo ago
        The point of capitalism is that it incentivizes behavior at a large scale through the allocation of capital. That behavior could be bad or good. The way to make sure that behavior isnt bad is to regulate the economy to ban it. Not to scold people who follow those incentives but then do nothing about the actual incentive structure
s_dev 8mo ago
I installed a Firefox plugin that makes YouTube shorts display as normal videos. I was genuinely shocked how much of a difference it made to my habits.
- reycharles 8mo ago
  Would you mind sharing the name of that plugin? Thanks!
  - s_dev 8mo ago
    youtube-shorts-block This is the one I use.
KolibriFly 8mo ago
The tricky part is defining harm without sliding into paternalism

woodpanel 8mo ago

[flagged]

mym1990 8mo ago
Eh, its not like it is happening overnight. Its like a cancer that slowly spreads without much notice and then one day the democracy collapses and its too late to do anything about it.
joe_mamba 8mo ago
This. If all it took was a $300k ad campaign on tiktok to get the population of a country(Romania in this case to be specific) to vote for a shady no-name candidate that came out of nowhere, instead of the well known candidates of the establishment, that should tell you the politics of your country betrayed its electorate so badly that they would rather commit national suicide instead of voting the establishment again to screw them over for the n-th time. Tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that. I'm not saying social media isn't cancerous and shouldn't be regulated, because it is and it should, I'm saying that in this specific case it's a symptom of a much bigger existing disease and not the root cause of it. What I'm mostly afraid of now, is that the lesson governments took from this is not that social media should be regulated and defanged of data collection and addictiveness, but instead that governments should keep and seize control of said data collection and addictiveness so they can weaponize it themselves to advance their agendas over the population. Case in point, the now US-controlled tiktok does more data harvesting than when it was Chinese owned.[1] At least China couldn't send ICE to your house using that data. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-new-terms-of-service-privacy-geolocation-personal-information/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-new-terms-of-service-pri...
- cbg0 8mo ago
  > tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that Actually both can be true.
  - joe_mamba 8mo ago
    Not in this case. Romanian people hated their corrupt politicians since way before tiktok was invented, so much so, that it's not even a partisan issue, all of them are equally unpopular. Tiktok only acted as release valve for that pent-up anger, but it's not the cause of it. The cause is 35+ years of rampant theft and corruption leading to misery and cases of death of innocent people. So blaming of tiktok is a convenient scapegoat for Romania's corrupt establishment to legitimize themselves and deflect their unpopularity as if it's caused by Russian interference and not their own actions. NO, Russian interference just weaponized the massive unpopularity they already had. So here's a wild idea on how to protect your democracy: how about instead of banning social media, politicians actually get off their kiddie fiddling islands, stop stealing everything not nailed to the ground and do right by their people, so that the voters don't feel compelled to pour gasoline on their country and light it on fire out of spite just to watch the establishment burn with it. Because when people are educated, healthy, financially well off and taken care of by their government who acts in their best interest, then no amount of foreign social media propaganda can convince people to throw that all away on a dime. But if your people are their wits end and want to see you guillotined, then that negative capital can and will be exploited by foreign adversaries. Like how come you don't see Swiss or Norwegians trying to vote Russian puppets off TikTok to power and it's not because they have more control on social media than Romania. This isn't a Romanian problem BTW, many western countries see similar political disenfranchisement today, and why you see western leaders rushing to ban or seize control of social media and free speech, instead of actually fixing their countries according to the pains of the voters.
- tzs 8mo ago
  That only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties. They use a two-round system to elect their President that works like this: 1. If a candidates gets more than 50% in the first round they are the winner, and there is no second round. 2. If there is no clear winner in the first round, the top two from the first round advance to the second round to determine the winner. In that election there were 14 candidates. 6 from right-wing parties, 4 from left-wing parties, and 4 independents. The most anyone got in the first round was 22.94%, and the second most was 19.18%. Third was 19.15%. Fourth was 13.86%, then 8.79%. With that many candidates, and with there being quite a lot of overlap in the positions of the candidates closer to the center, you can easily end up with the candidates that are more extreme finishing higher because they have fewer overlap on positions with the others, and so the voters that find those issues most important don't get split. You can easily end up with two candidates in the runoff that a large majority disagree with on all major issues. They really need to be using something like ranked choice.
dataflow 8mo ago
Ah yes, let's destroy all the weak democracies; they're not strong to begin with.
ben_w 8mo ago
I imagine there was a similar argument a century ago about how if alcohol kills your marriage, it wasn't a very strong marriage. I wonder if we'll get speakeasies where people can get endogenous dopamine kicks from experiencing dark patterns?
thinkingtoilet 8mo ago
No. It's us humans that aren't very strong to begin with. To not admit it is to deny reality at this point.
lm28469 8mo ago
It's like saying ww2 started because of a few grams of lead and ended because of a few kilo of uranium You'd be technically true but your missing 99.9% of the point, you can't dilute these complex topics in such dumb ways and use it as an argument

tokyobreakfast 8mo ago

> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.

kelseyfrog 8mo ago
Drug stores should stock morphine available without age restriction and if you don't want it, just don't buy it.
- tokyobreakfast 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kelseyfrog 8mo ago
    Yes. The amount of emotional deregulation apparent in your response only advances my point.
  - ben_w 8mo ago
    Endogenous drugs, exogenous drugs. Same effect on the brain, and in some cases the actual literal same substances. The difference is that endo-/exo- prefix, the former is made in your body, the latter is supplied from outside. We have been learning how to induce certain experiences, which correspond to certain substances, for a long time; we're getting more competent at it; this includes social media A/B testing itself to be so sticky that a lot of people find it hard to put down; this is bad, so something* is being done about it. * The risk being "something should be done; this is something, therefore it should be done"
ahhhhnoooo 8mo ago
Just stop using heroin. Just stop eating fast food. Just stop going to the casino. Just don't smoke anymore. We know plenty of things are quite bad for us, and yet we find them difficult to stop. Somewhat famously difficult to stop. I think telling people, "just don't..." trivializes how difficult that is.

erxam 8mo ago

I do so too. Dark patterns should never be acceptable. The amount of paid shills opposing this is a good indicator that it's the right move.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

jameson 8mo ago

As a person working at social media I support this as well. I'm a hypocrite. I admit, but the pay is too good to find alternative. Terms like "DAU" or "engagement" is common in our field and the primary objective is how to make users spend more time on our platform. We don't take safety or mental health seriously internally but only externally for PR reasons. CEOs won't change that because the more time user spends on the platform, the more ad revenue it brings. Only way is to regulate it.

deaux 8mo ago
> . I'm a hypocrite. I admit Great, admission is the first step. > but the pay is too good to find alternative. Yet then you immediately undo it! Try "I'm too greedy". You're the actor with the free will here. The subject of the sentencd shouldn't be "the pay". That is just an amount, a sum, that exists - neither too high nor too low. That is all in the eye of the beholder.
- andyferris 8mo ago
  Honestly, the EU is more likely to change the behavior of e.g. Facebook than a single employee would. (IMO if the US federal government spent more time caring for it's citizens it would consider doing such things more seriously itself).
- samrus 8mo ago
  Give them a break. People want to live a good life. We as a society shouldnt incentivize bad behavior with capital
  - justacrow 8mo ago
    Engaging in bad and immoral behaviour for capital is still bad and immoral behaviour, particularly when one has other choices.
    - samrus 8mo ago
      The point of capitalism is that it incentivizes behavior at a large scale through the allocation of capital. That behavior could be bad or good. The way to make sure that behavior isnt bad is to regulate the economy to ban it. Not to scold people who follow those incentives but then do nothing about the actual incentive structure

s_dev 8mo ago

I installed a Firefox plugin that makes YouTube shorts display as normal videos. I was genuinely shocked how much of a difference it made to my habits.

reycharles 8mo ago
Would you mind sharing the name of that plugin? Thanks!
- s_dev 8mo ago
  youtube-shorts-block This is the one I use.

KolibriFly 8mo ago

The tricky part is defining harm without sliding into paternalism