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Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#161

Post by dxbydt »

alxmng wrote: post #28

I think what I think about docudramas in general: Hyperbolic. I think the harms of social media are exaggerated, and not entirely unique to social media. I don’t have a problem with Facebook knowing what content I interact with and using that to serve me ads, or content that I want to spend time consuming. I don’t agree with the characterization of publishing or volunteering information (likes, posting photos, profil…

I totally, 100%, agree with you. I worked at Twitter pre-ipo. There were no “expert psychologists” anywhere in the company at that time, unlike what people below claim. Whatever features we built were mostly organic ( things like hashtags rose from the twitter community itself, not fron some internal mandate). The 140 char limit was a technical sms limit, not some feature purposely engineered to get you to engage more. Many of these things such as like button, heart button, retweet - for every “success” such as this, there were numerous failures that simply did not catch on. All in all, it was a bunch of clever hacks. The ipo happened, we sold our shares and moved on. Most of us deleted our twitter accounts shortly after. Its not like any of us were actively tweeting anyways. Many of my colleagues went to work at facebook. They have a barely functioning facebook page, which they hardly ever post on. A few of my friends work at insta. They don’t even have a profile - they said it’s mostly celebrities who post pictures about some luxury goods, not us developers who are git checking code. It has no relevance to us. Basically, a lot of us are completely bored with this social nonsense, and we’ve moved on to more important things. Social garbage is just not interesting. One of my friends works at Linkedin on something called Linkedin Stories. So I casually asked if he had ever written a linkedin story. He said you must be a bigtime loser to even think of using that garbage feature!

I guess once you know how the sausage is made, you lose the craving.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#162

Post by soylentcola »

rapnie wrote: post #112
soylentcola wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the questions this raises next for me are: Would this scale if a given instance somehow gained the level of adoption people seem to value in a Twitter or a Facebook? It seems to me that the major draw and reason people stay on those services is the fact that they can communicate with essentially everyone in one place. Also, to follow the first question, given that a major (if not the only) draw for most users…

Good points. First of all, it doesn't matter which instance you're on. You can still follow your friends, influencers, etc. on other instances.. unless your instance has the other instance in its blocklist (e.g. if it doesn't adhere to moderation rules that apply on your instance). Natural re-centralization is an issue, with mastodon.technology and mastodon.social being by far the largest instances. This could devolv…

Thanks for the clarification. I'm not terribly educated on the state of Mastodon/similar federated social media.

Also interesting that you brought up Gmail/email. I've thought for a while (admittedly as someone far more on the "user" side than the "developer" one) about how email is an example of how things might work better. For as much as Gmail and a few others have captured the vast majority of the average userbase for personal email, it's still reasonably easy to choose a different provider (and can even roll your own if you really thought it worthwhile).

Switching email providers doesn't stop me from emailing people who use Hotmail or Gmail (ignoring for a minute any issues of overzealous filtering of uncommon mail servers). The individual services can implement their various extra features like spam blocking, auto sorting, etc. but for the most part, the common protocol means that an email from me@me.server can still be sent to a list of addresses at gmail.com, aol.com, hotmail.com, etc. If I want to send a message to people on Facebook, I need an active "valid" Facebook account that can be tied to their social graph.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#163

Post by throwawaydad101 »

dxbydt wrote: post #161
alxmng wrote: post #28

I think what I think about docudramas in general: Hyperbolic. I think the harms of social media are exaggerated, and not entirely unique to social media. I don’t have a problem with Facebook knowing what content I interact with and using that to serve me ads, or content that I want to spend time consuming. I don’t agree with the characterization of publishing or volunteering information (likes, posting photos, profil…

I totally, 100%, agree with you. I worked at Twitter pre-ipo. There were no “expert psychologists” anywhere in the company at that time, unlike what people below claim. Whatever features we built were mostly organic ( things like hashtags rose from the twitter community itself, not fron some internal mandate). The 140 char limit was a technical sms limit, not some feature purposely engineered to get you to engage mor…

There's a bit of Sisyphus in everyone's story it would seem.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#164

Post by allenu »

rapnie wrote: post #35
newscracker wrote: post #8

Though there was hardly anything that I didn't already know , I liked the movie very much for its presentation that drove the point well to people who may not have understood how these platforms work, the privacy implications and the dangers therein. I've already recommended this movie to some more people. As for the cultural impact of the movie, I don't think it's going to be much. Cambridge Analytica had so much ne…

> Don't tell me that Mastodon and Mastodon clones can be replacements for Twitter, Facebook, Facebook groups, Facebook events, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. Of course not. Because Mastodon is a federated microblogging service. As that it is a good alternative for Twitter. My Mastodon client has a better UX than twitter, no algorithmic feed, no ads, no trackers, no distracting recommendations, and - importantly -…

Unfortunately, Mastodon doesn't have a lot of things Twitter has going for it, such as search or trends. These two things make it easier to find others and to get a pulse on what's happening around you.

I just tried searching for "seattle" and it just gives me a list of my own posts that match it and users with seattle in their name. In the past search seemed to work differently (not sure what changed), but when I searched for "seattle" then, I mostly got back a list of prostitutes who were hashtagging their posts with city names—–not exactly what I'm looking for.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#165

Post by mensetmanusman »

blueterminal wrote: post #65
messo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some basic rules and regulations would be great :) This should of course not replace taking personal responsibility, but humans are way to easy to influence / hack to leave it entirely to market forces. Some common ground and basic rules is at the very core of any healthy society or community. Speed limits, traffic lights and bike lanes creates great conditions for a healthy marketplace. An absence of regulations ben…

> Some basic rules and regulations would be great :) Any specific ones? I personally can't think of any at all that would work.

Yes, make facebook news feed default to first in / last out, and let users upload community created filtering algorithms so they can decide whether they see certain news/sites etc. or if they just see their grand kid’s picture (and if there are none, they would probably log off of FB quite quickly, which is why FB does not offer this as an option now)

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#166

Post by monster2control »

I think everyone should watch it. I think there can be a lot of good done on a platform like Facebook, if it's goal wasn't to get you hooked. If it had real moderation of content.

The proliferation of fake and misleading information has clearly caused a lot of harm to the United States and I'm sure other countries as well.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#167

Post by Osiris »

save_ferris wrote: post #32
alxmng wrote: post #28

I think what I think about docudramas in general: Hyperbolic. I think the harms of social media are exaggerated, and not entirely unique to social media. I don’t have a problem with Facebook knowing what content I interact with and using that to serve me ads, or content that I want to spend time consuming. I don’t agree with the characterization of publishing or volunteering information (likes, posting photos, profil…

> The fact that people spend lots of time on social media just demonstrates that they derive something from it, not that it’s addictive or harmful. I was totally with you until this moment. This is like arguing that people with alcoholism get something out of drinking too much. It’s one thing to say that you’re comfortable with the amount of information that’s collected about you and how it’s used, but how can you ig…

> The fact that people spend lots of time on social media just demonstrates that they derive something from it, not that it’s addictive or harmful.

I can't tell you how many times I hear my wife say "I need to get off Facebook" but never does. There's very much an addiction.

I use Facebook, but I've found that I spend nearly all my time in specific groups (for me that's motorcycle related groups) because it's a great source of help for "who wants to go riding" or "how do I fix this" or "can I borrow a tool". When it's very topic specific, social media can be really awesome.

What my wife complains about is "friends" that are posting about politics. She just wants to hear about their personal lives but wants them to shut the hell up about politics.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#168

Post by aimindcontrol »

messo wrote: post #104
aimindcontrol wrote: post #55

I'm actually worried about the similar issues with Google search results at the moment. 2 examples. 1) The new suggested answers on search results. As an example search for "is salt bad for you". The top results might be correct though I've seen other searched that I believe aren't (different searches). Under that is this new "People Also Ask" section listing all kinds of questions, each with a single answer. AFAIK t…

They include an example in the movie regarding search results (and auto-complete suggestions) to illustrate that the answer you get is influenced by the algorithms knowledge of your world view. The example they use is: "Climate change is …", where people are shown their "truth". I wonder how long it takes before Google makes a change to the results of that exact search string, hehe.

That's a similar but different problem IMO.

I think I mostly want Google to help me find things. If I search for "windows" I'm 99% more likely to be looking for Microsoft Windows where as some carpenter or interior decorator is probably looking for glass windows.

This new issue is google claiming to tell me the right answer about any topic and it's really Google's AI claiming to know the answer on any topic. I admit it might be me. The old presentation of webpage hits suggested to me that google was not taking responsibility for the answers themselves, only for "search results". The new presentation is that Google is making it appear this are official answers. I know somewhere in the fine print Google will claim no responsibility but the presentation suggests they are.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#169

Post by dxbydt »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #132
alxmng wrote: post #28

I think what I think about docudramas in general: Hyperbolic. I think the harms of social media are exaggerated, and not entirely unique to social media. I don’t have a problem with Facebook knowing what content I interact with and using that to serve me ads, or content that I want to spend time consuming. I don’t agree with the characterization of publishing or volunteering information (likes, posting photos, profil…

>I don’t agree that belief in pseudoscience, rumor, or superstition is anymore prevalent than it was before social media. I think it’s just more visible to everyone how many people do believe wacky ideas. I think this is a key point. In particular I think educated people (for want of a better term) are often dangerously out of touch with how many people (particularly internationally) don't share their worldview. I re…

> I think educated people are often dangerously out of touch with how many people don't share their worldview.

What you call above a wacky idea - is actually not that wacky. I may believe dinosaur X existed but not dinosaur Y. That’s perfectly ok. Much of this stuff is not “settled science”. I work in academia, and mostly its a milder version of VC vacuousness. You occasionally throw stuff out & see what sticks. It’s plausible, but not proven one way or other. So you publish something - the goal is mostly signaling and mindshare acquisition. If everyone waited until we knew forsure with 100% consensus, then nothing would get published. That’s why a majority of academic research can’t be replicated, but it is still published and it is still legit.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#170

Post by monster2control »

rizpanjwani wrote: post #134
newscracker wrote: post #8

Though there was hardly anything that I didn't already know , I liked the movie very much for its presentation that drove the point well to people who may not have understood how these platforms work, the privacy implications and the dangers therein. I've already recommended this movie to some more people. As for the cultural impact of the movie, I don't think it's going to be much. Cambridge Analytica had so much ne…

what about something like a non-profit? I was quite disappointed that keybase.io sold to zoom. I always thought more of it like a neutral public utility.

wt.social ?
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