5 ms·

It's wild to me how many people are willing to throw basic civil liberties overboard because they don't like the other guys. Today's media circus is about addi

by troad 7mo ago

It's wild to me how many people are willing to throw basic civil liberties overboard because they don't like the other guys. Today's media circus is about addictive social media. Before that it was video games and rock music and D&D clubs. Before that it the Satanic panic of the 80s, gay 'recruitment', Soviet spies. Much before that it was witches and heretics. And so on and so on, forever. If you have a choice, maybe don't be part of the pitchfork wielding mob? The people with the pitchforks always think they're warriors of justice. They generally aren't. They just tend to make everything worse. (Plus the economic motivations are so clear here - traditional media hate social media because social media ate the traditional media's cosy entrenched profits, so now social media are to blame for Russia, for Trump, for anxious teenagers... and must immediately be regulated out of existence)

kjkjadksj 7mo ago
At some point we limit your freedom of expression to do things like dump toxic waste up river. This ought to be no different. The poisoning of the american mind for profit.
- twoodfin 7mo ago
  The traditional solution to speech you don’t like is more speech you do like.
  - techblueberry 7mo ago
    No one is trying to regulate speech. And actually, the traditional solution was a duel to the death.
    - twoodfin 7mo ago
      What else could “at some point we limit your freedom of expression” possibly mean?
      - troad 7mo ago
        Yes, such a coherent argument: "no one is trying to restrict your speech, and if they were it would be good actually." There are people who just can't admit to themselves they actually hate free speech. Because they're people who've never needed it. They've never been abolitionists speaking against slavery, or civil rights leaders speaking against apartheid - whether in South Africa or the American South. They've never been gay people fighting for equality, or trans people fighting to survive. They've never been an unfavoured minority - ethnic, religious, sexual, linguistic, what have you. They don't need free speech, so why should you? Everyone else already has all the rights that they could possibly want or need, so as far as they're concerned, all these people are needlessly disruptive to the public order. So they maintain a fiction of collectivism, in reality a majoritarian hegemony, while silencing anyone who'd speak out against it. They can't quite bring themselves to say they oppose free speech, but they act in practice to undermine it. It is a contemptible stance. Somewhere out there is a young lesbian in Russia finding her people on social media, a young atheist in Saudi Arabia making friends online. And the majority is as ever ready to throw the most vulnerable under the bus, so that they, the majority, don't need to take a modicum of responsibility for their own idle doomscrolling. And if they need to whip up a moral panic to do so, fine. More efficient that way, helps override people's rationality.
        deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
        techblueberry 7mo ago
        I’m not one of those people, I hate free speech. Also, wtf are you on about, none of the people you mentioned need infinite scroll and addictive algorithms to connect with eachother. Aside from the fact that these social media companies have LITERALLY put their finger on the lever to prevent the kind of people you’re talking about from connecting with eachother! If you want to defend those people then what we need is better protocols and platforms, not giant trillion dollar companies with three people in control of speech. There is zero excuse to defend addictive algorithms with “but won’t you think of the underprivileged”
  - intended 7mo ago
    The traditional solution worked for traditional problems. I suspect most people don’t remember WHY free speech itself is valued. It’s often treated in a talismanic sense. At least in America, a good part of the value of Free speech comes because it is a fundamental building block to having a vibrant market place of ideas. Since no one has a monopoly on truth, our best model is to have a fair competitive market place that allows good ideas to thrive, even if they are uncomfortable. The traditional risk to the free exchange of ideas was government control; the suppression of trade. However, in the era we live in, we have evolved to find ways to shape the market through market capture. Through overwhelming the average user, instead of controlling speech. Bannon called this “flooding the zone”. The traditional solution ensured a working and vibrant marketplace for its era. I don’t know what tools we will develop for the modern era. Do note, we depend on content moderation to keep forums like HN running. The fundamental power of content moderation is censorship. Without the exercise of these censorial powers, we would not be able to have this discussion.
- troad 7mo ago
  And at some point we limit Japanese American freedom of movement for general public safety during a war with Japan. Still no different? Bad take. Civil liberties matter.
- jimmyjazz14 7mo ago
  Toxic waste is harmful to everyone all the time, social media is maybe harmful to some people some of the time, kinda like peanuts, should we ban peanuts? I'll further add that social media is beneficial to many people as well.
alex1138 7mo ago
Perhaps but then you get stuff like this https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/facebook-you-needy-sonofabitch/ https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/facebook-you-needy-sonofabit... They need to play fair or GTFO
- troad 7mo ago
  You get stuff like... obnoxious notifications? Duolingo's notifications are borderline emotional blackmail ("don't make the owl sad!"), and Duolingo is a vastly profitable company that expressly targets school-aged children. But because it's not social media, it's... fine? What does playing fair even mean in this context?
  - alex1138 7mo ago
    It's not just that, it's also outright black hat behavior like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
techblueberry 7mo ago
This is a completely false equivalence. No one’s trying to regulate an activity they’re trying to regulate the unhinged behavior of trillion dollar companies. How many people who played DND or video games or music or any of the other things you listed regretted it afterwards? How many people playing DND would say “I wish I was out with my friends because this game is too addictive”. None, because they were with their friends!! The closest thing would be cigarettes. And while I think cigarettes should be legal normalized and plentiful, I’m aware enough not to attack the movement that marginalized them. No one is talking about content here, and to emphasize the point, I think no one is really defending social media, for all the examples you gave it was an activity no one understood except the small group of people whom it gave meaning. Everyone understands social media and most people hate it. And in fact, I might go so far as to say you’re directionally incorrect. Social media is the force that killed speech, that killed the things that made DND and punk music and transgressive video games possible. Social media is the victory of those people who wanted to normalize the abnrormal.
- troad 7mo ago
  >> How many people who played DND or video games or music or any of the other things you listed regretted it afterwards? How many people playing DND would say “I wish I was out with my friends because this game is too addictive”. None, because they were with their friends!! Lol. Tell me you weren't around for the D&D panic without saying you weren't around for the D&D panic. This was precisely the argument used. "These kids should be out, running around, climbing trees! They're missing their childhoods! Here's Becky, age 15, to tell us how much happier she is now that she's hanging out with her girlfriends at the park, instead of summoning demons in her parents' basement." And everyone bought it in exactly the same way that they buy the social media teen panic now. There were developmental psychologists on TV to explain how harmful D&D was to the kids' sensitive developing brains, how it was a gateway drug to all sorts of destructive self-behaviours, how parents were just so gosh dang powerless to do anything about it (all their friends are doing it!), and how the state needed to step in NOW! Sound familiar? Honestly, you've seen it once, you've seen all there is to see. The social media panic has all the characteristics of any other moral panic. Some unpopular thing is alleged to be hurting children, and if you support it, then you're probably some kind of child abuser. Because we're all so perfectly rational, we all know our suspicions are 'directionally correct', to borrow your beautifully Orwellian turn of phrase. Certainly nothing to do with the ceaseless drum of narratives directed against social media that we imbibe from every external conduit - films, TV, newspapers - and live and breathe and occupy as though it were reality. Hey did you see that Netflix show Adolescence, about the harms of social media? It's fiction, but it really <strike>creates</strike>captures the moment. It's just so directionally correct, you know? Not like our prejudices can ever be echoed back to us through our own media, in an ever shriller feedback loop. No need to build up any defenses against that sort of thing. Grab those pitchforks.
maxaw 7mo ago
The big difference is that in many cases the people who support this are the same ones that are addicted. You’re telling addicts to stop their moral panic over their own addiction
intended 7mo ago
TLDR: This isn’t a moral panic, and this has been building up for a decade plus now. Heck no. Year after year after year these issues have been brought up and ignored. I worked in this damn domain, and have seen better people than me try their best to avoid exactly this outcome, for these exact same firms. I can give credit to the people at these firms who try to do the right thing, but the firm itself needs to answer in terms of revenue and growth figures. The fact is that your policy and T&S teams are cost centers, while the quarterly shareholder report is God. There is only one way these incentives line up. It’s been YEARS of teams within these firms raising the issues of user harms and getting no where. I remember having T&S folks cry on MY shoulder about how they couldn’t get engineering resources even while working at a FAANG company. Others talked about how, out of sheer repetition, they developed a protocol for the times an engineering team would inevitably come in to “fix” T&S issues. They knew they would get sidelined, till eventually the PM/engineers/Savior would run into the same problems they had been dealing with forever, and then ask for help. Public research also has issues - If you want to do actual research on tech, you can’t even get the data. If you get the data, you also get the NDA, which means your results need to make tech look good, or the report becomes an internal report that will never see the light of day.
cindyllm 7mo ago
[dead]
techblueberry 7mo ago
Weve stopped worried what unaccountable social media ceos might be doing to manipulate the media environment with mark Z as an advisor to Trump? How is legacy media oppressive but social media algorithms freedom? Social media is a regulated space, it’s not a free market of ideas, it’s a particular viewpoint shaped by like 5 people. How can you be so skeptical of everything else but be like “stop it guys, Zuck’s got our best interests at heart” How would like regulating more transparency in social media algorithms violate your right to free speech? What if we just made it so social media companies had to give you more control of the algorithm?
jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
It's very maga-coded moment, but tech not government: a transcendent rage demanding only things be broken.

by troad 7mo ago

kjkjadksj 7mo ago

At some point we limit your freedom of expression to do things like dump toxic waste up river. This ought to be no different. The poisoning of the american mind for profit.

twoodfin 7mo ago
The traditional solution to speech you don’t like is more speech you do like.
- techblueberry 7mo ago
  No one is trying to regulate speech. And actually, the traditional solution was a duel to the death.
  - twoodfin 7mo ago
    What else could “at some point we limit your freedom of expression” possibly mean?
    - troad 7mo ago
      Yes, such a coherent argument: "no one is trying to restrict your speech, and if they were it would be good actually." There are people who just can't admit to themselves they actually hate free speech. Because they're people who've never needed it. They've never been abolitionists speaking against slavery, or civil rights leaders speaking against apartheid - whether in South Africa or the American South. They've never been gay people fighting for equality, or trans people fighting to survive. They've never been an unfavoured minority - ethnic, religious, sexual, linguistic, what have you. They don't need free speech, so why should you? Everyone else already has all the rights that they could possibly want or need, so as far as they're concerned, all these people are needlessly disruptive to the public order. So they maintain a fiction of collectivism, in reality a majoritarian hegemony, while silencing anyone who'd speak out against it. They can't quite bring themselves to say they oppose free speech, but they act in practice to undermine it. It is a contemptible stance. Somewhere out there is a young lesbian in Russia finding her people on social media, a young atheist in Saudi Arabia making friends online. And the majority is as ever ready to throw the most vulnerable under the bus, so that they, the majority, don't need to take a modicum of responsibility for their own idle doomscrolling. And if they need to whip up a moral panic to do so, fine. More efficient that way, helps override people's rationality.
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - techblueberry 7mo ago
        I’m not one of those people, I hate free speech. Also, wtf are you on about, none of the people you mentioned need infinite scroll and addictive algorithms to connect with eachother. Aside from the fact that these social media companies have LITERALLY put their finger on the lever to prevent the kind of people you’re talking about from connecting with eachother! If you want to defend those people then what we need is better protocols and platforms, not giant trillion dollar companies with three people in control of speech. There is zero excuse to defend addictive algorithms with “but won’t you think of the underprivileged”
- intended 7mo ago
  The traditional solution worked for traditional problems. I suspect most people don’t remember WHY free speech itself is valued. It’s often treated in a talismanic sense. At least in America, a good part of the value of Free speech comes because it is a fundamental building block to having a vibrant market place of ideas. Since no one has a monopoly on truth, our best model is to have a fair competitive market place that allows good ideas to thrive, even if they are uncomfortable. The traditional risk to the free exchange of ideas was government control; the suppression of trade. However, in the era we live in, we have evolved to find ways to shape the market through market capture. Through overwhelming the average user, instead of controlling speech. Bannon called this “flooding the zone”. The traditional solution ensured a working and vibrant marketplace for its era. I don’t know what tools we will develop for the modern era. Do note, we depend on content moderation to keep forums like HN running. The fundamental power of content moderation is censorship. Without the exercise of these censorial powers, we would not be able to have this discussion.
troad 7mo ago
And at some point we limit Japanese American freedom of movement for general public safety during a war with Japan. Still no different? Bad take. Civil liberties matter.
jimmyjazz14 7mo ago
Toxic waste is harmful to everyone all the time, social media is maybe harmful to some people some of the time, kinda like peanuts, should we ban peanuts? I'll further add that social media is beneficial to many people as well.

alex1138 7mo ago

Perhaps but then you get stuff like this https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/facebook-you-needy-sonofabitch/ https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/facebook-you-needy-sonofabit... They need to play fair or GTFO

troad 7mo ago
You get stuff like... obnoxious notifications? Duolingo's notifications are borderline emotional blackmail ("don't make the owl sad!"), and Duolingo is a vastly profitable company that expressly targets school-aged children. But because it's not social media, it's... fine? What does playing fair even mean in this context?
- alex1138 7mo ago
  It's not just that, it's also outright black hat behavior like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

techblueberry 7mo ago

This is a completely false equivalence. No one’s trying to regulate an activity they’re trying to regulate the unhinged behavior of trillion dollar companies. How many people who played DND or video games or music or any of the other things you listed regretted it afterwards? How many people playing DND would say “I wish I was out with my friends because this game is too addictive”. None, because they were with their friends!! The closest thing would be cigarettes. And while I think cigarettes should be legal normalized and plentiful, I’m aware enough not to attack the movement that marginalized them. No one is talking about content here, and to emphasize the point, I think no one is really defending social media, for all the examples you gave it was an activity no one understood except the small group of people whom it gave meaning. Everyone understands social media and most people hate it. And in fact, I might go so far as to say you’re directionally incorrect. Social media is the force that killed speech, that killed the things that made DND and punk music and transgressive video games possible. Social media is the victory of those people who wanted to normalize the abnrormal.

troad 7mo ago
>> How many people who played DND or video games or music or any of the other things you listed regretted it afterwards? How many people playing DND would say “I wish I was out with my friends because this game is too addictive”. None, because they were with their friends!! Lol. Tell me you weren't around for the D&D panic without saying you weren't around for the D&D panic. This was precisely the argument used. "These kids should be out, running around, climbing trees! They're missing their childhoods! Here's Becky, age 15, to tell us how much happier she is now that she's hanging out with her girlfriends at the park, instead of summoning demons in her parents' basement." And everyone bought it in exactly the same way that they buy the social media teen panic now. There were developmental psychologists on TV to explain how harmful D&D was to the kids' sensitive developing brains, how it was a gateway drug to all sorts of destructive self-behaviours, how parents were just so gosh dang powerless to do anything about it (all their friends are doing it!), and how the state needed to step in NOW! Sound familiar? Honestly, you've seen it once, you've seen all there is to see. The social media panic has all the characteristics of any other moral panic. Some unpopular thing is alleged to be hurting children, and if you support it, then you're probably some kind of child abuser. Because we're all so perfectly rational, we all know our suspicions are 'directionally correct', to borrow your beautifully Orwellian turn of phrase. Certainly nothing to do with the ceaseless drum of narratives directed against social media that we imbibe from every external conduit - films, TV, newspapers - and live and breathe and occupy as though it were reality. Hey did you see that Netflix show Adolescence, about the harms of social media? It's fiction, but it really <strike>creates</strike>captures the moment. It's just so directionally correct, you know? Not like our prejudices can ever be echoed back to us through our own media, in an ever shriller feedback loop. No need to build up any defenses against that sort of thing. Grab those pitchforks.

maxaw 7mo ago

The big difference is that in many cases the people who support this are the same ones that are addicted. You’re telling addicts to stop their moral panic over their own addiction

intended 7mo ago

TLDR: This isn’t a moral panic, and this has been building up for a decade plus now. Heck no. Year after year after year these issues have been brought up and ignored. I worked in this damn domain, and have seen better people than me try their best to avoid exactly this outcome, for these exact same firms. I can give credit to the people at these firms who try to do the right thing, but the firm itself needs to answer in terms of revenue and growth figures. The fact is that your policy and T&S teams are cost centers, while the quarterly shareholder report is God. There is only one way these incentives line up. It’s been YEARS of teams within these firms raising the issues of user harms and getting no where. I remember having T&S folks cry on MY shoulder about how they couldn’t get engineering resources even while working at a FAANG company. Others talked about how, out of sheer repetition, they developed a protocol for the times an engineering team would inevitably come in to “fix” T&S issues. They knew they would get sidelined, till eventually the PM/engineers/Savior would run into the same problems they had been dealing with forever, and then ask for help. Public research also has issues - If you want to do actual research on tech, you can’t even get the data. If you get the data, you also get the NDA, which means your results need to make tech look good, or the report becomes an internal report that will never see the light of day.

cindyllm 7mo ago

[dead]

techblueberry 7mo ago

Weve stopped worried what unaccountable social media ceos might be doing to manipulate the media environment with mark Z as an advisor to Trump? How is legacy media oppressive but social media algorithms freedom? Social media is a regulated space, it’s not a free market of ideas, it’s a particular viewpoint shaped by like 5 people. How can you be so skeptical of everything else but be like “stop it guys, Zuck’s got our best interests at heart” How would like regulating more transparency in social media algorithms violate your right to free speech? What if we just made it so social media companies had to give you more control of the algorithm?

jauntywundrkind 7mo ago

It's very maga-coded moment, but tech not government: a transcendent rage demanding only things be broken.