> Medellin's plan to make cocaine less addictive
Yeah, nah.
Google's Plan to Make Tech Less Addictive
101–110 of 129 posts
Re: Google's Plan to Make Tech Less Addictive
#102It's clearly a contradiction. Companies like Google thrived on addictive behavior of users online. Now that Google basically is the Internet for consumers they want to crack down on online and tech addiction? Really? What I've read in the article means to me that Google will toss away the responsibility to users by making them aware of their usage patterns. "We told them they need a break from consuming our apps, but…
It's only a contradiction if you think short term. Long term, it's clearly in Google's interest to engender sustainable consumption. People who are comfortable with the role their smartphones play in their lives are much more valuable consumers than addicts who are apprehensive over it. They are also much less likely to seek radical action which may damage Google in hard to predict ways.
[deleted]
Re: Google's Plan to Make Tech Less Addictive
#103My cynical read of this is that it's an attack on Facebook. Google has a giant attention platform in YouTube, but Facebook and Instagram are attention platforms. I think YouTube will decline a bit as a result of this, but the rest of Google - and the data collection of Android are untouched. If people become less addicted to their phones, they're still going to have their phone when they go to restaurants and take ph…
> My cynical read of this is that it's an attack on Facebook Yah, and hooray. Google may be more powerful and invasive even, but there's tons of reasons they have a less-manipulative, less-awful business model overall. Any successful attack on Facebook is a good thing. All these companies are bad, but Facebook is the worst of them. I'd say Facebook All these companies are shitty in certain ways, but some are shittier…
Yikes. So much to say.
> Google may be more powerful and invasive even, but there's tons of reasons they have a less-manipulative, less-awful business model overall.
They sell ads too. Sure, they don't have THE newsfeed, but they're still trying. Google Now is a feed with personal and non-personal content they're trying to sneak into your life. They're still trying to make their way into your feelings and social network with Google photos, their Clips camera, etc.
Google invented the "shadow profile": they were there, checking which website's you visited before Facebook was even a thing. They're even doing it without cookies now [1].
Google is the company Facebook has been trying to become. They're very colorful, they have those cute doodles, Android is "open"; they're an older company that's been smarter at PR. Part of that has been not making huge waves, keeping all data closed (as opposed to Facebook, which has an open platform), and keeping quiet.
> Any successful attack on Facebook is a good thing.
Facebook isn't going anywhere, and if it does, who will step in to cover the social networking space? I can assure you Google will be the first in line. You'll have a single company with full information about you. Then what?
> I'd say Facebook
I know it's perhaps a bit much to ask, but would you care to elaborate with why your raking is as it is?
These rankings are so often just personal hunches based on what has been on the headlines lately and it leads to sentiments like this.
I'm not trying to defend Facebook, but rankings without factual evidence make little sense. Of course Facebook will be at the bottom, cause the media and Facebook have always been at odds [2]. Media is a big business with interests too, and Facebook is one of, if not its biggest threats.
Apple and Google collect more location and app-usage data than Facebook. Apple had big controversies about suicides in its manufacturing plants: latest was this year [3]. Amazon workers are treated like cattle [5] and even have to pee on bottles to save time [4].
Why is Microsoft not on top of your list? Is it because the "innovation" Apple brought last decade offsets those lives lost at Chinese factories? Why is Google collecting data about which apps you use and which websites you visit on your phone not worse than Facebook doing it through a VPN [6]?
This is not meant to address your comment specifically or personally push you in any way shape or form, I just want to address all comments of people claiming "Facebook is worse than Google" and putting Google in some sort of moral high-ground.
There's no good company vs bad company here. These are all companies, and companies have morals when it makes business sense. Our job is to not fall for PR games and make them accountable on all fronts, and if you look past the PR, I personally think, you realize that vouching for a company to beat another just hurts everyone.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/how-g...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook-rupert-murdoch-thre...
[3]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/07/suicide-chinese-...
[4]: https://nypost.com/2018/04/16/amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-i...
[5]: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/7-examples-ho...
[6]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/facebook-starts-pushing-it...
Re: Google's Plan to Make Tech Less Addictive
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Plenty of people struggle with the problem they're solving here. Especially at Google, where they a) think of themselves as a nice, mission-driven company, and b) they do a lot of user-focused stuff that doesn't immediately contribute to quarterly revenue, and c) they have a workforce that can easily switch jobs, there's plenty of reason to think that they're sincere here. It's surely true that execs looked a…
Lets be real though. Youtube binge-watching is not a matter of "forgetting" to take a break. We have clocks— we’ve all been there bingeing and thinking "uh, when the clock hits XX:00 I’ll stop watching" or "I’ll stop after two more videos", etc. Recommended videos are very good though, and always very accessible. There's always another great, tailored video auto-playing after the one we're in. A better effort IMO wou…
Sure. And that's an issue for the YouTube team, but not an issue for the Android team. It's perfectly possible to me that this happened not for cynical reasons, but mainly because the Android people were just doing something they thought good for the user, and nobody powerful was cynical enough to stop them just to juice short-term metrics for one product among many.
Re: Google's Plan to Make Tech Less Addictive
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why Google over MS? 5-10 years ago I'd agree, but not as much now. They are trying to be a cloud service company funded by enterprise and there's nothing inherently wrong with that as far as I can see. I'd also put Amazon below MS due to labor abuses that are not as prevalent at MS.
MS charges for their product, which means the users are not the product. Agreed.
It's often repeated, but this is a silly slogan. It's not either-or. Subscription magazines have ads. There is nothing preventing a business from making money from users and ads, and if anything, a subscription makes it easier to know who your users are, so the ads are more valuable to advertisers.
Some business models require this; most newspapers wouldn't be in business without both subscription and ad sales.
Windows 10 is apparently a case in point: it's not free and it has ads.
Re: Google's Plan to Make Tech Less Addictive
#106A great move for Google would be to treat notifications in Android as Google Now cards; i.e have some machine learn if it is relevant content. Observing if the user has opened the notification, and also offer more feedback options in the long press menu.
IMHO, best results would be obtained by letting the apps emit their own feature vectors to be fed to the learner. Google could aggregate these among all their users. App creators would learn to provide features that actually inform of a kind of proposed interaction. Failing to do so would boot them out of this users' "attention market".
I receive about 20 useless facebook notification for a relevant one (mainly when someone is talking to me in the fb chat). Facebook could clearly publish the following along to the learner with each notification:
* is it a chat message?
* is it from someone I have talked to recently?
* is it from a cluster of users that talks to each other frequently that I am part of
* a representation of the cited cluster above
* location of the content (with some additional feature engineering from the phone, who knows if I've been there previously)
* it is a photo/video/text?
* a doc2vec vector if it is text content
* an image embedding if it is a photo
etc.
I believe this could reduce the amount of notifications by a solid order of magnitude, while not lowering the usefulness value too much. We would suffer way less hijacking, and reduce our addiction of the mindless novelty-seeking kind.
Re: Google's Plan to Make Tech Less Addictive
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why Google over MS? 5-10 years ago I'd agree, but not as much now. They are trying to be a cloud service company funded by enterprise and there's nothing inherently wrong with that as far as I can see. I'd also put Amazon below MS due to labor abuses that are not as prevalent at MS.
Okay, I think you're right. I'll edit my post. But it's super complex. MS has done extremely bad perverse dark-patterns with Windows 10 and has extended the level of ads-built-in beyond what was happening before. They seem to be trying to be as bad as Google and are just worse at it. And they don't seem to do as much redeeming things.
Yeah you're right. Ranking big, faceless, multinational corporations on who does the most bad when they all do lots of it is really hard. MS does have a lot of dark pattern garbage going on.
Re: Google's Plan to Make Tech Less Addictive
#108My cynical read of this is that it's an attack on Facebook. Google has a giant attention platform in YouTube, but Facebook and Instagram are attention platforms. I think YouTube will decline a bit as a result of this, but the rest of Google - and the data collection of Android are untouched. If people become less addicted to their phones, they're still going to have their phone when they go to restaurants and take ph…
"Shush" and "Wind Down" are already on Samsung phones, and FB is in good relations with Samsung (see oculus), so doubt this would be Facebook killer. Additionally, Facebook already turn down video in newsfeed (it decreased time-spent), and changed goals to 'meaningful social interactions'. Long term, being useful is more important than grabbing attention (and FB plays long-term game). The fact that FB, Instagram, You…
> "Shush" and "Wind Down" are already on Samsung phones, and FB is in good relations with Samsung (see oculus), so doubt this would be Facebook killer.
How are they called? (Looking at my S9 and can't find anything similar.)
Re: Google's Plan to Make Tech Less Addictive
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My cynical read of this is that it's an attack on Facebook Yah, and hooray. Google may be more powerful and invasive even, but there's tons of reasons they have a less-manipulative, less-awful business model overall. Any successful attack on Facebook is a good thing. All these companies are bad, but Facebook is the worst of them. I'd say Facebook All these companies are shitty in certain ways, but some are shittier…
Yikes. So much to say. > Google may be more powerful and invasive even, but there's tons of reasons they have a less-manipulative, less-awful business model overall. They sell ads too. Sure, they don't have THE newsfeed, but they're still trying. Google Now is a feed with personal and non-personal content they're trying to sneak into your life. They're still trying to make their way into your feelings and social netw…
About the suicide at the factory: everybody points finger at Apple, but the factory is owned and operated by Foxconn. I'm not saying that to defend Apple, but it's an important thing to keep in mind.
Re: Google's Plan to Make Tech Less Addictive
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those features you listed seem like quite useful ones for day to day usage. Many things won’t have a bright line “this makes the product useful” vs. “this makes the product addictive” feature classification.
> Many things won’t have a bright line “ Agreed. Though how often have you found autoplay by default makes YouTube useful?
For multi-parts videos?