5 ms·

Meta is a symptom; the whole business is rotten. We've all heard the vocabulary: engagement maximization, a/b testing, emotional targeting, ad auctions, user s

by imglorp 3mo ago

Meta is a symptom; the whole business is rotten. We've all heard the vocabulary: engagement maximization, a/b testing, emotional targeting, ad auctions, user surveillance, sentiment analysis. Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds. Civilization needs to rein in all these terrible things corporations do to humans.

dan_i 3mo ago
[dead]
rf15 3mo ago
What HUMANS do to humans. Any one of the people in power could have stopped this, and none of them did.
- imglorp 3mo ago
  Sort of - it's collective wrongdoing. Individuals on the street do not do this to each other. Individuals in groups justify their tiny contribution as insignificant towards the aggregate societal harm the organism does. Leaders like Zuck, on the other hand, have no excuse. And marketers, there's still time to save your souls and find honest work.
- intended 3mo ago
  Yes and no. At the scale of these firms, it is an issue of incentives, more than it is personal responsibility. I know that many of the people who worked in safety flagged issues. I know NGOs and victims reached out to people in the firm over and over again. Humans wanted to do the right thing. Its just that for other humans, they had to answer to shareholders and they had a far stronger set of incentives to ensure they made “number go up”. Your string of people doing the right thing, makes little headway in the face of the tide of other humans who have incentives to increase time on site.
baggachipz 3mo ago
> Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds. Neither are most adults. The current situation in the world is plenty of evidence for that.
- dijit 3mo ago
  "You are not immune to propaganda" is a phrase that doesn't hit hard enough. It applies to you dear reader, yes you, not u/baggachipz.. YOU. I am also not immune, I believe myself to be, constantly. My worldview is truth and I am "open to other ideas"- yet I have very obviously anchored myself to things the first time I hear of them, despite actively making steps to try to see all angles and explain away facts with alternative theories. (which is exhausting) I definitely believe what someone wants me to believe. It's plain, it's obvious, and yet it continually happens. It's only with a decade of distance that I even realise what had happened. And people call me "balanced" and "intelligent", theoretically I have more tools to deal with this than the majority of the population. Yet... I am not immune to propaganda.
  - baggachipz 3mo ago
    Sure, but lots of people are way more susceptible. Self-reflection is important here. The ability to question one's state and beliefs is the only tool to combat propaganda. Most people don't seem to do that; they parrot party lines and stay glued to their "news" networks.
    - lazide 3mo ago
      Because for the most part, it works, and it’s way easier. Until someone takes the car off a cliff, of course, but that almost never happens.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Which beliefs have you questioned lately?
etcimon 3mo ago
All those software turds getting liquidated and replaced by open source would be the best thing for humanity altogether
jhickok 3mo ago
Assuming we eek thru a whirlwind of catastrophic dangers, one day we will look at this period of time with the same reaction as if we had been sprinkling lead on our cereal.
austin-cheney 3mo ago
In all fairness social media is in the same kind of business model as porn and gambling. None of that is forced on anybody. If you don't want those in your life then just don't consume them. If you don't want them in your household use a DNS blocker. How much should we really parent the rest of society?
- edwcross 3mo ago
  Law forbids my local administrative entities from engaging with porn and gambling. Yet they force me to use Facebook if I want to see events that are happening (and paid with my taxes). So, sorry, but the liberal ideal paradise of "let loose and people will choose" does not work in practice, at least where I live. I need some laws to force my less tech-savvy nearby citizens to make the right choices.
  - netsharc 3mo ago
    A decade ago official entities like police or city hall would say "Follow us on Twitter to get the latest news", and would just use it as an instant publication platform (well it's what it was designed for)...
    - edwcross 3mo ago
      Yes but for local political points, they left Twitter last year, because "it was trendy". Besides, lots of old people living here, so they can't leave Facebook, otherwise the old people won't get their news! As if they cared, most news are only useful for working people and families anyway... but oh well, they vote, they have time to complain loudly, and they have all the houses around here (because of course, why would they move to a better-suited flat place, and leave their now-too-large-for-a-couple houses so that families could move instead?), so the mayor has to be on Facebook, and not on Bluesky or Mastodon or somewhere else.
  - Mwntalhwalth 3mo ago
    In order to follow clubs the local HS puts on you have to follow their Instagram account. They put the content/updates nowhere else. "Need to be on IG dad so I can be active in extracurricular in HS." Mandate APIs out and this problem goes away so folks can vibe code really simple solutions that keeps you off the site.
wseqyrku 3mo ago
Large corporations behave very much like a typical dictatorship anywhere in the world. And I mean they are playing the exact same playbook as much as they can. Actually sometimes I don't know which one borrowed from the other. The latter is definitionally the ultimate monopoly, which looks like the annual target for those corporations.
kridsdale1 3mo ago
I worked in the team at Facebook (2017-2019) relevant to this stuff. I saw (did not write) some of the documents cited. The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people, working very hard all the time to steer the ship away from harm to normal people and toward establishing healthy relationships and media diet. We were consistently undermined and overruled by the Directors and Executives. Many health and safety boosting projects (with evidence) were cancelled or turned backwards to maximize harm, because it correlated with revenue or “Time Spent” or “Sessions”, which I guess their equity was based on. Those leaders own full responsibility for this.
- throwaw12 3mo ago
  But you can't sue individuals in this case. They will say: I had this metric to increase shareholder value, I tuned it, that's it, no one stopped me or told me not to do it. US just needs different laws
- AlexandrB 3mo ago
  The old adage applies to social media: "the medium is the message". You can't steer a ship whose whole purpose is crashing into icebergs from crashing into an iceberg. You're working against the whole purpose of the thing itself. Even if these engineers are Facebook were successful another, less idealistic, social media company would pick up the slack of promoting the clickbaitiest most sensationalistic content possible. We already saw this happen with the meteoric rise of TikTok. I don't know what the solution is, but the incentives created by the combination of algorithmic feeds and how lucrative internet "fame" can be consistently encourages the worst kind of content.
  - rawgabbit 3mo ago
    Social should and will get the tobacco treatment. Social media is detrimental to public health and will get regulated/taxed to the point the industry will become unprofitable.
    - AlexandrB 3mo ago
slibhb 3mo ago
> Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds. Then their parents shouldn't let them use the internet. I find it interesting that so much of how people think about morality involves attributing free will unevenly. I.e. "facebook execs" are using their free will to addict people but those people have no ability to resist. It's so obviously corrosive to think something like "only evil people have free will; good people are just hapless victims".
- KyleTheDev 3mo ago
  I don't really see how this applies in the specific thread? I understand your overall point, and I agree. But, here, we're talking about individuals pushing a company & its' employees towards creating what can be considered poison. They themselves would not be immune to their poison, and I'd wager plenty of them are probably equally addicted to their devices. Children will also be susceptible, and potentially more-so due to their developing brains. I don't really see how this scenario is an uneven attribution of morality.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  What do you think it's like to be a child when all your friends have InstaTok and you don't?
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

by imglorp 3mo ago

dan_i 3mo ago

[dead]

rf15 3mo ago

What HUMANS do to humans. Any one of the people in power could have stopped this, and none of them did.

imglorp 3mo ago
Sort of - it's collective wrongdoing. Individuals on the street do not do this to each other. Individuals in groups justify their tiny contribution as insignificant towards the aggregate societal harm the organism does. Leaders like Zuck, on the other hand, have no excuse. And marketers, there's still time to save your souls and find honest work.
intended 3mo ago
Yes and no. At the scale of these firms, it is an issue of incentives, more than it is personal responsibility. I know that many of the people who worked in safety flagged issues. I know NGOs and victims reached out to people in the firm over and over again. Humans wanted to do the right thing. Its just that for other humans, they had to answer to shareholders and they had a far stronger set of incentives to ensure they made “number go up”. Your string of people doing the right thing, makes little headway in the face of the tide of other humans who have incentives to increase time on site.

baggachipz 3mo ago

> Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds. Neither are most adults. The current situation in the world is plenty of evidence for that.

dijit 3mo ago
"You are not immune to propaganda" is a phrase that doesn't hit hard enough. It applies to you dear reader, yes you, not u/baggachipz.. YOU. I am also not immune, I believe myself to be, constantly. My worldview is truth and I am "open to other ideas"- yet I have very obviously anchored myself to things the first time I hear of them, despite actively making steps to try to see all angles and explain away facts with alternative theories. (which is exhausting) I definitely believe what someone wants me to believe. It's plain, it's obvious, and yet it continually happens. It's only with a decade of distance that I even realise what had happened. And people call me "balanced" and "intelligent", theoretically I have more tools to deal with this than the majority of the population. Yet... I am not immune to propaganda.
- baggachipz 3mo ago
  Sure, but lots of people are way more susceptible. Self-reflection is important here. The ability to question one's state and beliefs is the only tool to combat propaganda. Most people don't seem to do that; they parrot party lines and stay glued to their "news" networks.
  - lazide 3mo ago
    Because for the most part, it works, and it’s way easier. Until someone takes the car off a cliff, of course, but that almost never happens.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Which beliefs have you questioned lately?

etcimon 3mo ago

All those software turds getting liquidated and replaced by open source would be the best thing for humanity altogether

jhickok 3mo ago

Assuming we eek thru a whirlwind of catastrophic dangers, one day we will look at this period of time with the same reaction as if we had been sprinkling lead on our cereal.

austin-cheney 3mo ago

In all fairness social media is in the same kind of business model as porn and gambling. None of that is forced on anybody. If you don't want those in your life then just don't consume them. If you don't want them in your household use a DNS blocker. How much should we really parent the rest of society?

edwcross 3mo ago
Law forbids my local administrative entities from engaging with porn and gambling. Yet they force me to use Facebook if I want to see events that are happening (and paid with my taxes). So, sorry, but the liberal ideal paradise of "let loose and people will choose" does not work in practice, at least where I live. I need some laws to force my less tech-savvy nearby citizens to make the right choices.
- netsharc 3mo ago
  A decade ago official entities like police or city hall would say "Follow us on Twitter to get the latest news", and would just use it as an instant publication platform (well it's what it was designed for)...
  - edwcross 3mo ago
    Yes but for local political points, they left Twitter last year, because "it was trendy". Besides, lots of old people living here, so they can't leave Facebook, otherwise the old people won't get their news! As if they cared, most news are only useful for working people and families anyway... but oh well, they vote, they have time to complain loudly, and they have all the houses around here (because of course, why would they move to a better-suited flat place, and leave their now-too-large-for-a-couple houses so that families could move instead?), so the mayor has to be on Facebook, and not on Bluesky or Mastodon or somewhere else.
- Mwntalhwalth 3mo ago
  In order to follow clubs the local HS puts on you have to follow their Instagram account. They put the content/updates nowhere else. "Need to be on IG dad so I can be active in extracurricular in HS." Mandate APIs out and this problem goes away so folks can vibe code really simple solutions that keeps you off the site.

wseqyrku 3mo ago

Large corporations behave very much like a typical dictatorship anywhere in the world. And I mean they are playing the exact same playbook as much as they can. Actually sometimes I don't know which one borrowed from the other. The latter is definitionally the ultimate monopoly, which looks like the annual target for those corporations.

kridsdale1 3mo ago

I worked in the team at Facebook (2017-2019) relevant to this stuff. I saw (did not write) some of the documents cited. The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people, working very hard all the time to steer the ship away from harm to normal people and toward establishing healthy relationships and media diet. We were consistently undermined and overruled by the Directors and Executives. Many health and safety boosting projects (with evidence) were cancelled or turned backwards to maximize harm, because it correlated with revenue or “Time Spent” or “Sessions”, which I guess their equity was based on. Those leaders own full responsibility for this.

throwaw12 3mo ago
But you can't sue individuals in this case. They will say: I had this metric to increase shareholder value, I tuned it, that's it, no one stopped me or told me not to do it. US just needs different laws
AlexandrB 3mo ago
The old adage applies to social media: "the medium is the message". You can't steer a ship whose whole purpose is crashing into icebergs from crashing into an iceberg. You're working against the whole purpose of the thing itself. Even if these engineers are Facebook were successful another, less idealistic, social media company would pick up the slack of promoting the clickbaitiest most sensationalistic content possible. We already saw this happen with the meteoric rise of TikTok. I don't know what the solution is, but the incentives created by the combination of algorithmic feeds and how lucrative internet "fame" can be consistently encourages the worst kind of content.
- rawgabbit 3mo ago
  Social should and will get the tobacco treatment. Social media is detrimental to public health and will get regulated/taxed to the point the industry will become unprofitable.
  - AlexandrB 3mo ago

slibhb 3mo ago

> Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds. Then their parents shouldn't let them use the internet. I find it interesting that so much of how people think about morality involves attributing free will unevenly. I.e. "facebook execs" are using their free will to addict people but those people have no ability to resist. It's so obviously corrosive to think something like "only evil people have free will; good people are just hapless victims".

KyleTheDev 3mo ago
I don't really see how this applies in the specific thread? I understand your overall point, and I agree. But, here, we're talking about individuals pushing a company & its' employees towards creating what can be considered poison. They themselves would not be immune to their poison, and I'd wager plenty of them are probably equally addicted to their devices. Children will also be susceptible, and potentially more-so due to their developing brains. I don't really see how this scenario is an uneven attribution of morality.
inigyou 3mo ago
What do you think it's like to be a child when all your friends have InstaTok and you don't?

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]