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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”?

#171

Post by auganov »

MrGilbert wrote: post #147
auganov wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to keep your followers you'd need to migrate before they ban you. But yes, I guess you can start over somewhere else while on big ones you're out forever. So in that sense I guess it is a tiny improvement. But if most of your followers were concentrated on server[s] that don't like you, you may not be able to reach them anymore.

If your followers are "real" followers, and if you are important to them, they'll get in touch outside the fed and will know where to find you. Maybe that's what we should strive for. I have 200+ followers on Twitter, but if you ask me, I can only name 15 with real, social interaction. And I think that's great.

If that's how you define "real" followers then you might as well use an IM application instead. IMO the whole point of (Twitter style) social media is having effortless reach and interactions without explicitly sending stuff to anybody.

I had over 10 thousand and had many interactions with people but wouldn't feel like bothering them on other platforms (unless it was of the same nature).

And the few people who bothered to contact me personally felt a little awkward too. I don't necessarily want to be talking to these people directly.

The magic is you just publish whatever you want and people can look at it. They can comment but there's no obligation to respond. Having actual conversations with that many people would be a huge chore. The whole thing isn't about having relationships with people at all but about spreading information. It could be about yourself in which case there would be some implicit one way relationship but that's just one use case.

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

#172

Post by mikeshank »

save_ferris wrote: post #103
blueterminal wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you try to help an alcoholic? Would you tell him that it's alcohol producers' who is at fault? Or would you tell him to try and get help? Why would an advice be different for over-consumption of social media, coke, big macs, tv shows, casinos etc.?

> Why would an advice be different for over-consumption of social media, coke, big macs, tv shows, casinos etc.? Of course, different people deal with these kinds of issues differently, but it's also important to recognize the vast differences between consuming too much alcohol vs consuming too much tv. Firstly, if you've spent any significant amount of time around a recovering alcoholic and discussed the issue openl…

There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99% of them are shit

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

#173

Post by knobcore »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #82
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> but I'm sadly not very optimistic about big changes in the next decade or so. Yeah. I liked it a lot as well, even though there was nothing new. This documentary is like walking into a crack house and saying "Hey guys! I've got this great PowerPoint presentation on how bad crack is for you!" Nice idea, I guess, but there's no reason at all I would think it has a chance of accomplishing anything. These efforts appe…

I quit FB 5 years ago due to a couple other friends quitting and explaining their reasoning. If .1% of FB or Twitter users delete after this film, I'd say it's still a win.

This type of thing reads like "please compost, recycle, and take public transportation" stuff. That's what I thought of the movie too.

Andrew Keen has the right answer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRbI-Ui9vEI) but nobody likes it. We're still all stuck in the John Barlow trap, thinking that if we just tweaked things here and there all will be right.

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

#174

Post by knobcore »

It will have the same effect the DMCA did on piracy after Napster. That's what will happen. Even if the big companies come clean and start policing, that will just move the extremists who have already built their army into decentralized encrypted chat platforms, and they will still recruit over these tools too.

You've gotta basically build the entire Internet from scratch, with some kind of government and some kind of identification system so that if someone comes to take down social discourse they are removed from not just one platform but all of them and they can't come back without some kind of appeal. In addition, all political discourse held should be required to adhere to scientific and scholarly standards. I have no problem with people who aren't from institutions to challenge the status quo, sometimes that has benefits but if they aren't armed with a pile of evidence to prove why the status quo is wrong, they should not be amplified and that regulation should be central.

Until you have both of these things, anything else you do will be a waste of time. It will either become like some sort of Vegan alt-lifestyle or morph into yet a new set of big platforms. Both are untenable, as fixing this has to require the participation of the entire social system.

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

#175

Post by quicklyfrozen »

nip180 wrote: post #31

It was very ironic that Netflix, who once said that sleep is there biggest competition, releases a documentary about how it’s rivals in the attention economy are harmful. Yes, Netflix doesn’t advertise directly to me, but many of the effects are still present. The way I think and behave can be changed by programming I watch on Netflix. Netflix uses a recommendation engine to keep me engaged. Netflix has implemented s…

Fortunately Netflix's recommendations are (almost) never compelling enough to keep me watching. :-)

I'm also much more cognizant of the time lost by committing to another 30-60 minute episode vs. a few minutes for another YT video.

But it does seem like some sort of regulation might be required to give consumers some control over dark patterns (i.e. force them to include settings to turn things like auto-play off).

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

#176

Post by pks016 »

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…

Similar reactions from me. Every other day we see articles those focus on these things. Significantly nothing new; in fact I cringed at some moments. I guess I/we are not the target audience.

For cultural impact: Nope. It's gonna stay in people's mind few days. Then again back to normal.

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

#177

Post by timeuser »

ses1984 wrote: post #139
timeuser wrote: post #77

It was a good explanation of some issues with current social media platforms. But I don't think that ad driven business models and algorithmic content manipulation are the biggest problems we are facing in all this. The fundamental problem is we humans aren't wired to deal with information and social connection and this scale and speed. It's too easy for just about anyone to find and confirm anything they want to bel…

I think you're underestimating the power of algorithmic manipulation. Take a simple ecommerce AB test as a starting point. Should our shopping cart look like A or B? Apply Bayes theorem and it doesn't take that long to gather evidence that A increases conversions by 1%. Now replace the simple AB test with a multi armed bandit. Now run the multi armed bandit continuously across all social media platforms and keep twea…

I understand what you are saying and agree that algorithmic manipulation is a problem. I think it's very profitable for these companies and people can be manipulated by it. I still think it's a small aspect of the problems of the network & scale of information access/publishing which are leading to conspiracy content and mob amplification. Problems which exist even without algorithmic manipulation being involved. At this point, just due to the network of EVERYONE using mobile devices to connect & consume content it's similar to the eternal September problem but at full scale and saturation. Is the algorithmic manipulation needed for Fox News & other biased media to reach, feed & manipulate its audience? I think you could delete Facebook from everyone's phones and we'd still have a polarized world with these bubbles, conspiracy and mobs continuing as long as everyone still has their smartphones. I also think pagerank and similar popularity based ranking is just as big of a problem as the algorithmic timelines because it directly amplifies what we say and want to hear even without the personalization of search aspect. I'm not defending Facebook and algorithmic manipulation, I just think there is too much focus on that aspect of the problem and don't think we can fix things with that focus.

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

#178

Post by zozbot234 »

fellellor wrote: post #135
Nasrudith wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that the root problem may be that a plurality of voting Brazilians are simply terrible people? Fascists rose before with radio and newspapers once and there wasn't any meaningful changes preventing the usage for such and yet they didn't reoccur indefinitely in the same nation. Stop blaming the tech and start blaming your countrymen for being awful people.

Sorry, but this sounds mean.

What's mean about it? Brazilian voters are simply reaping what they sowed - "social media" has nothing to do with it. It's called living in a democracy.

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

#179

Post by messo »

knobcore wrote: post #174

It will have the same effect the DMCA did on piracy after Napster. That's what will happen. Even if the big companies come clean and start policing, that will just move the extremists who have already built their army into decentralized encrypted chat platforms, and they will still recruit over these tools too. You've gotta basically build the entire Internet from scratch, with some kind of government and some kind o…

The movie does not argue for policing content, but directs criticism towards massive data gathering, analysis and micro-persuasion trough algorithms.

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

#180

Post by neves »

fellellor wrote: post #133
neves wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The harms of social media are understated. I live in Brazil. Social media was one of the main reasons of the election of our president, Bolsonaro. Now we have more than 130.000 deaths from coronavirus, the Amazon and Pantanal are burning, our institutions are crumbling. My fellow software developers aren't just make some far way teenagers depressed. This is is real harm in the real world.

Most systems won’t change overnight because of the guy on top. What makes you so sure Brazil would have done better with the opposing party candidate as president? Maybe the problem lies in a supposedly chronically underfunded healthcare system, by a number of previous administrations? This would then reflect, in an electoral democracy, of the citizenry’s misplaced priorities.

Men, this guy fired 2 health ministers during a pandemic. And during a pandemic we don't have a health minister!
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