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Facebook’s war on free will

theguardian.com

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Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#171

Post by onewaystreet »

makomk wrote: post #158
athenot wrote: post #65

> The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines. This is the money quote of this article, and it's been on my mind quite a bit as of late. More than ever, we live in a world where there are many forces ready to take full advantage of our laziness. It takes a bit of introspection to really understand the tradeoffs that are appr…

Of course, in the pre-internet age we were forced to outsource our thinking to the press instead, it's just that you're less likely to see them running articles about how they themselves are waging a war on our free will.

And before the press it was the church, the community and the family.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#172

Post by naravara »

Woofles wrote: post #112
52-6F-62 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left Facebook about two years ago now. I nearly immediately lost contact with all of the people I'd spent my time with in the city (outside of work). I don't chase them down for other reasons, but it is striking how much it supplanted everything else. After returning an old work phone I'd made the mistake of not copying all of their numbers over. I moved elsewhere within the city, and so I don't run into them in th…

I think the happy medium here, where you can still keep in touch with people but not get sucked into checking it all the time, is deleting the app from your phone. It used to be habit for me to unlock my phone and if I didn't have anything to do, just open the app and begin scrolling. Once that wasn't easily accessible I stopped completely. Now I only go on Facebook if I have a reason to, like looking someone up or c…

>I think the happy medium here, where you can still keep in touch with people but not get sucked into checking it all the time, is deleting the app from your phone. It used to be habit for me to unlock my phone and if I didn't have anything to do, just open the app and begin scrolling. Once that wasn't easily accessible I stopped completely. Now I only go on Facebook if I have a reason to, like looking someone up or checking the only group (fantasy sports) that is active. I also can still use messenger for those few people that prefer it.

The service goes out of its way to make you install the app too, which I find annoying. The mobile site doesn't actually allow you to check your private messages without installing Messenger.

Really the only thing I use it for at this point is for invitations to events, notices when bands I like are performing, and the like. But every day it seems like they make it harder to just be an intermittent user of the site.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#173

Post by ryandrake »

Chardok wrote: post #157
ryandrake wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...that you can choose whether or not to use.

Thats not entirely true. Facebook will build a profile on you through like buttons and information shared from family/friends/acquaintances whether you choose to or not.

Why would I care about that if I don't use the product? How would anything that Facebook does affect someone who does not use it?

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#174

Post by somewhatoff »

trendia wrote: post #25
ikeyany wrote: post #16

You could take a year-long class on the psychological influence (some call it social engineering) of Facebook and you'd barely scratch the surface. One example I find particularly interesting is how Facebook slowly expanded what would trigger a notification, keeping people fixated on that red box like rats to sugar water.

It had the opposite effect for me -- now that everything gives me a notification, half the time I see the red dot on the corner I assune it's something stupid.

The worst is if you turn off notifications from Messenger, it flashes up the red number to tell you you need to turn them back on.

I found it very, very annoying at first... now it's just taught me to ignore the red numbers entirely.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#175

Post by root_axis »

Chardok wrote: post #157
ryandrake wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...that you can choose whether or not to use.

Thats not entirely true. Facebook will build a profile on you through like buttons and information shared from family/friends/acquaintances whether you choose to or not.

This is not unique to Facebook; Amazon, Google, Equifax and many other businesses build a profile on you regardless of whether you want them to or not.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#176

Post by root_axis »

ryandrake wrote: post #173
Chardok wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not entirely true. Facebook will build a profile on you through like buttons and information shared from family/friends/acquaintances whether you choose to or not.

Why would I care about that if I don't use the product? How would anything that Facebook does affect someone who does not use it?

Well, someone could certainly take your photo and post it on Facebook without your knowledge and that could lead to serious consequences, however, one's photo could just as easily end up on reddit, imgur, HN or any other internet community. Incidentally, the photo posted on Facebook would at least not be indexed by google.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#177

Post by hawski »

makomk wrote: post #158
athenot wrote: post #65

> The problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines, we are really outsourcing thinking to the organisations that run the machines. This is the money quote of this article, and it's been on my mind quite a bit as of late. More than ever, we live in a world where there are many forces ready to take full advantage of our laziness. It takes a bit of introspection to really understand the tradeoffs that are appr…

Of course, in the pre-internet age we were forced to outsource our thinking to the press instead, it's just that you're less likely to see them running articles about how they themselves are waging a war on our free will.

But Facebook is more internationally widespread and free of charge. And in the pre-internet age I assume that attention span was at least a bit longer than today.

Also then it was the authority of press that supposed to do the thinking, but now I feel it's echo chamber and social pressure.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#178

Post by jpalomaki »

ikeyany wrote: post #16

You could take a year-long class on the psychological influence (some call it social engineering) of Facebook and you'd barely scratch the surface. One example I find particularly interesting is how Facebook slowly expanded what would trigger a notification, keeping people fixated on that red box like rats to sugar water.

Probably we (as in Facebook users) are part of the largest psychological experience in history. With the billion users and trillions of actions, the computers at Facebook have an unprecedented opportunity to make experiments on us to see what makes us tick.

Take notifications as an example. Not that hard to think that there could be some machine learning system trying to find the best possible notification pattern to lure back a user who has not visited Facebook for a while. On Facebook scale you can run large number of tests in reasonable small time frame and still get pretty good number of observations for each test.

Similar thing could be applied to quite many things on Facebook. Most of the things they want to optimize are easy to measure. Like how often we check the site, how much time we spend there, how many times we click ads and so on.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#179

Post by Chardok »

root_axis wrote: post #176
ryandrake wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I care about that if I don't use the product? How would anything that Facebook does affect someone who does not use it?

Well, someone could certainly take your photo and post it on Facebook without your knowledge and that could lead to serious consequences, however, one's photo could just as easily end up on reddit, imgur, HN or any other internet community. Incidentally, the photo posted on Facebook would at least not be indexed by google.

Not only post your picture, but friends can tag it with a name along with time and location, and now association with certain circles of friends. You are probably not going to get that kind of context with a picture on reddit or imgur.

Re: Facebook’s war on free will

#180

Post by zebrafish »

ryandrake wrote: post #120
zebrafish wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is not about "you" the HN reader, or you the poster, or me. The point is about all of the millions of users who are unaware, haven't read this article, are tech-illiterate, don't understand the psychology, etc. You and I are completely insignificant in the face of this horde of people who are becoming increasingly vulnerable to subtle manipulation. That's the point of this article. A rising tide lifts all b…

That's actually a pretty dismissive comment. It may not have been your intention, but it reads like: "Oh, those poor commoners, who aren't as intelligent as us and can't see the truth that we can see! Why, they're using this terrible thing and they don't even know any better! The masses must be saved from themselves."

No, you're pretty close. I will nitpick that awareness has nothing to do with intelligence and I mentioned nothing about anyone's intelligence level. However, awareness doesn't guarantee compliance.

People were made aware that smoking causes cancer, vaccines do not cause autism, and that man-made production of CO2 was causing accelerated climate change. In each of those cases, there are experts in the field warning common people of the danger. In each of those cases, the experts observed that people didn't know about the dangers beforehand. In each of those cases, there are people who refute the claims of the experts or flat out do not care (I should note that plenty of intelligent people fall into this last category).

I expect this scenario will be no different.

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