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How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

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Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#21

Post by p1necone »

gooddelta wrote: post #4
jasonlfunk wrote: post #2

This is terrible but blaming WhatsApp is misplaced. If it wasn't WhatsApp, it would have been another service. Either it will be easy to communicate or it won't be. If it is, it can be used as a force for good or a force for evil. The real problem is so much more difficult that it's easy to try to find something you can do, block the technology, so you feel like you are doing something even if it's completely ignorin…

That's the entire problem with this industry – we make the assumption that someone less ethical than us will come along and build the shitty product anyway, and use that as justification to do something we likely shouldn't. Blaming WhatsApp is misplaced, in some sense – the blame lies with startup culture, and with each of us that choose to make that excuse.

Are you suggesting that basic text communication apps should not exist?

This is fundamentally very very simple functionality - there's no social media algorithms surfacing different content to different people or anything like that.

Are you seriously advocating that we should just disallow digital communication. (Not to mention advocating it using digital communication)

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#22

Post by stickfigure »

gooddelta wrote: post #10
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is "growth hacking" in a chat app? There were no ads here, no algorithmic timeline, no perverse incentives, nothing that you could potentially consider as malicious. What should WhatsApp have done? Every single post about WhatsApp here has people pontificating about this and that but no one offers any suggestion of what should be done.

Yeah, definitely no advertising, particularly overseas, that could have contributed to WhatsApp's growth. No features added like large groups that could be used to spread disinformation. WhatsApp chats are used to influence advertising, so that goes out the window. This happened because WhatsApp provided the means for it to happen – and you can speculate all day long about whether some other app would have made it po…

The logical conclusion of this perspective is that human beings should not be allowed to freely communicate in groups. I'd rather not live in your world.

Technology can't fix broken human beings. There is a moral failure here, but it isn't Facebook's. Blaming WhatsApp at best makes the real problem harder to fix, and at worst makes excuses for the actors in this horrorshow.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#23

Post by gooddelta »

ryandrake wrote: post #18
gooddelta wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the entire problem with this industry – we make the assumption that someone less ethical than us will come along and build the shitty product anyway, and use that as justification to do something we likely shouldn't. Blaming WhatsApp is misplaced, in some sense – the blame lies with startup culture, and with each of us that choose to make that excuse.

There's no shortage of ignorance and gullibility offline--it's not something that was just invented with social media. It's easier to blame "startup culture" than have a hard look at the unpleasant parts of one's own culture. > "Mob lynching isn’t a new phenomenon in India. According to some reports, there were more than 2,000 lynchings in India between 2000 and 2012 — well before WhatsApp was around." I don't know,…

You're not wrong – part of the blame obviously lies there.

But even if it is simply enabling and perpetuating an existing problem, why haven't we asked ourselves why technology isn't addressing the issue? How is this future we've created any better? Because it's faster? Because the UI is nicer?

It's rare to see startup culture produce anything that I would call true innovation. Maybe I just have a higher bar than most folks. That could be what I'm arguing here, and that doesn't change the fact that you have a point – I just believe we have to do better.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#24

Post by IBM »

jasonlfunk wrote: post #2

This is terrible but blaming WhatsApp is misplaced. If it wasn't WhatsApp, it would have been another service. Either it will be easy to communicate or it won't be. If it is, it can be used as a force for good or a force for evil. The real problem is so much more difficult that it's easy to try to find something you can do, block the technology, so you feel like you are doing something even if it's completely ignorin…

>The real problem is so much more difficult that it's easy to try to find something you can do, block the technology, so you feel like you are doing something even if it's completely ignoring the root of the issue.

Blocking WhatsApp would be a perfectly justifiable solution! Regulating it would be as well. Facebook and Google want to airdrop their products into all of these emerging markets for growth, ignoring all the negative externalities until someone holds them accountable. None of these countries need to be fatalist about technology or these companies.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#26

Post by user111233 »

gooddelta wrote: post #3

I know this is going to be an inconvenient reminder for many folks, but: if you play any part in bringing software (or technology in general) into the world, you have an obligation to consider the moral, ethical, and political ramifications of what you are building at every single step of the way. What happened in that village wasn't an accident – it was the result of careful "growth-hacking", design, product work, a…

I haven't used whatsapp but from what I understand it's just an IM app. I'm not sure how an IM app can be responsible for this behavior. It simply lets users send messages to each other. There are no algorithms sorting what you see or promoting certain kinds of interactions. It seems that maybe some societies are far too trusting of baseless rumors and can't handle the fact that they are now able to share rumors incredibly fast.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#27

Post by gooddelta »

stickfigure wrote: post #22
gooddelta wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, definitely no advertising, particularly overseas, that could have contributed to WhatsApp's growth. No features added like large groups that could be used to spread disinformation. WhatsApp chats are used to influence advertising, so that goes out the window. This happened because WhatsApp provided the means for it to happen – and you can speculate all day long about whether some other app would have made it po…

The logical conclusion of this perspective is that human beings should not be allowed to freely communicate in groups. I'd rather not live in your world. Technology can't fix broken human beings. There is a moral failure here, but it isn't Facebook's. Blaming WhatsApp at best makes the real problem harder to fix, and at worst makes excuses for the actors in this horrorshow.

Speed and reach, my friend. Lynchings happened in the US a while ago, but they weren't a universal phenomenon. A platform with the speed and reach of WhatsApp makes disinformation more potent.

Nowhere in my post did I suggest human beings shouldn't be allowed to freely communicate – what I'm suggesting is that maybe we haven't built the right tools to enable that safely, and instead, we're exacerbating the "broken human beings" side of this issue.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#28

Post by ryandrake »

gooddelta wrote: post #23
ryandrake wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no shortage of ignorance and gullibility offline--it's not something that was just invented with social media. It's easier to blame "startup culture" than have a hard look at the unpleasant parts of one's own culture. > "Mob lynching isn’t a new phenomenon in India. According to some reports, there were more than 2,000 lynchings in India between 2000 and 2012 — well before WhatsApp was around." I don't know,…

You're not wrong – part of the blame obviously lies there. But even if it is simply enabling and perpetuating an existing problem, why haven't we asked ourselves why technology isn't addressing the issue? How is this future we've created any better? Because it's faster? Because the UI is nicer? It's rare to see startup culture produce anything that I would call true innovation. Maybe I just have a higher bar than mos…

Yea, I happen to agree with that too. Although I don't think WhatsApp is necessarily an unethical software, far too often, we see stories here of startups and bigger technology companies, totally tossing ethics aside in search of their "engagement" or "reach" or whatever stupid metric they're chasing. As software engineers "on the inside", we have both an obligation and unique opportunity to stop these things before they start. Or at the very least not contribute toward it.

For every unethical piece of software that gets written, there's at least one engineer... one of us, maybe even someone reading this very post... who said "Sure, boss, I could totally write that!"

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#29

Post by gooddelta »

lxrbst wrote: post #17
gooddelta wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, definitely no advertising, particularly overseas, that could have contributed to WhatsApp's growth. No features added like large groups that could be used to spread disinformation. WhatsApp chats are used to influence advertising, so that goes out the window. This happened because WhatsApp provided the means for it to happen – and you can speculate all day long about whether some other app would have made it po…

It's a chat application. How people can be so ignorant to abuse such a simple thing is beyond me. As much as I hate Facebook, I don't get how you can put this on WhatsApp. From the looks of it, you could've achieved the same thing with someone printing and spreading around fliers. Doesn't mean a printing company selling printers should consider the "moral, ethical, political ramifications".

Printing creates a barrier to entry. You have to have enough conviction in your idea, and the determination to actually write the statement, lay it out, and print and distribute it. You don't just type "oh shit lxrbst should be hanged lmao," hit send, and reach 100 people.

You're basically describing why journalism is important, and still has an important place in our society.

Re: How WhatsApp Destroyed a Village

#30

Post by gaius »

jasonlfunk wrote: post #2

This is terrible but blaming WhatsApp is misplaced. If it wasn't WhatsApp, it would have been another service. Either it will be easy to communicate or it won't be. If it is, it can be used as a force for good or a force for evil. The real problem is so much more difficult that it's easy to try to find something you can do, block the technology, so you feel like you are doing something even if it's completely ignorin…

Either it will be easy to communicate or it won't be.

But ease-of-use is only one product dimension. Different tools encourage different modes of communication. The kind of discourse and the use cases of tool A and tool B will be different and which is better depends on what outcome you are trying to achieve - substantive debates for the good of humanity, or “engagement”.

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