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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”?

#191

Post by [deleted] »

mawise wrote: post #158
motohagiography wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While many of us (technologists) were unsurprised, is there any reaction from friends and relatives who say, "wait, you knew about this and you didn't say anything?" This doc is way less dramatic, but when the Snowden leaks happened I responded to people with, "what parts of this could I have told you about that you would have believed if you hadn't seen it in the news?" Reality is, most people are more afraid of bei…

> Reality is, most people are more afraid of being thought of as an outsider than any conceivable consequence that befalls their perceived in-group I think that very nicely sums up the problem. Very few people are willing to socially isolate themselves this way. I've been working on an open-source self-hosted private blogging platform[1] that I have visions of being a facebook replacement, but the truth is very few p…

[deleted]

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

#192

Post by intended »

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…

You don't need to have an "expert psych" initially.

Sitting with a friend rehashing what we studied about skinnerian conditioning and a diablo like game we thought of a frankenstinian game which knew exactly when to hit you for a transaction to let you level up/get new item and so on. Years later and micro transaction enabled mobile games came out.

Adding simple psych based analysis to systems isn't hard, you would just pick it up from gaming/other industries and recreate it as a best practice.

People are interested in this, and are doing great amounts of research to figure out how to do it better.

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

#193

Post by danielrhodes »

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'm not super bothered much by it either. However, there is data to show, through Facebook's own research, that is possible to manipulate people's sense of well being and their perspective by what is being shown to them. For example, Facebook could show a person only posts from their friends expressing negative sentiment and put you in a bad mood.

Although these algorithms are quite sophisticated, there is no universally accepted heuristic for what is ideal for somebody to see. For example, let's say your friends have broad political leanings but you lean left. Should the algorithm only show you left leaning political posts because that's what you like, or should it optimize for you engaging with a broader variety of content but maybe increase your dissatisfaction. I think these are very difficult questions to answer.

Another issue is that people are very biased towards believing what is put in front of them. If your mind sees a pattern, it starts attributing truth to that pattern. This idea that you should just see all the facts and then "you decide" is a cop-out in my opinion -- your mind will have decided before you were ever able to apply rational thought to something.

Most people are used to seeing filtered information that has been vetted (newspapers, textbooks, teachers, experts, etc.), and the age of social media presents a problem insofar as this filter does not exist or exists in the court of public perception or algorithms. You can see evidence of this in that there are otherwise rational people who are being easily tricked into believing these whacky conspiracy theories and fake news, as you point out. I think that's a pretty big problem with serious societal repercussions.

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

#194

Post by [deleted] »

blueterminal wrote: post #51
skummetmaelk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good old personal responsibility. It's your responsibility not to walk into traps laid out to catch you. Why stop people from laying out the traps? They're just trying to make a living, it's perfectly fine!

What do you propose to solve this problem besides teaching others to take personal responsibility?

[deleted]

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

#195

Post by intended »

timeuser wrote: post #177
ses1984 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yup, after watching this I figured that we are going to eventually see a law which prevents behavior management of humans through code, all reccomendation and tailoring algorithms will be put into a central transparent repository with public access and study of its impact.

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

#196

Post by ArtWomb »

As a documentary film, I bailed after the first few interviews. The novelty of peeking inside internet giants was lost on me. Just felt like awkward confessions of some of my peers with ethical second-thoughts.

I also feel like one method was singled out amongst others: the facebook algorithm. Which exploits its proprietary model of the links between individual humans to boost signal. I don't use the product myself. But I have to ask, to those who do use it regularly, how can any of jaron lanier's darkest predictions come as any surprise?

If you are in the mood for a free doc feature that will utterly blow your mind, I can sincerely give a high rec to The Real Story of Paris Hilton. It's actually a real life horror movie that I found to have a similar energy to Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue. But non fiction ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOg0TY1jG3w

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

#197

Post by tw1912112 »

neves wrote: post #180
fellellor wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I don't think there is any working evidence that Facebook has helped changing minds to elect a world leader. For all the blame Trump gets, Obama was the first leader to use FB for wider reach, and Twitter as well.

Mike Bloomberg spent like some 100Mn+ on FB ADs but still couldn't convince even a 1% of voters in the primary.

Blaming FB has become like very strawman, and indirectly insiuates that voters are stupid and gullible, which is never ever the case. This technique was used by Labour in UK as well, but turns out people just didn't like Labour at all, and blaming FB just backfired.

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

#198

Post by dane-pgp »

mawise wrote: post #158
motohagiography wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While many of us (technologists) were unsurprised, is there any reaction from friends and relatives who say, "wait, you knew about this and you didn't say anything?" This doc is way less dramatic, but when the Snowden leaks happened I responded to people with, "what parts of this could I have told you about that you would have believed if you hadn't seen it in the news?" Reality is, most people are more afraid of bei…

> Reality is, most people are more afraid of being thought of as an outsider than any conceivable consequence that befalls their perceived in-group I think that very nicely sums up the problem. Very few people are willing to socially isolate themselves this way. I've been working on an open-source self-hosted private blogging platform[1] that I have visions of being a facebook replacement, but the truth is very few p…

> "follow me on this website I built with these separate login credentials"

That does seem to be one of the biggest hurdles stopping migrations from inferior platforms to superior ones. (The other main hurdle being network effects / the lack of interoperability).

It's like the saying "If you can get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.", i.e. "If we had a single sign-on system that worked across the whole of the web, users would be halfway towards all the best sites."

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

#199

Post by capkutay »

I think the main takeaway was the influence on children. I don't think there's precedent for providing kids with constant access to dopamine-driven, socially adjacent experiences. At least with TV and video games, they're finite activities with time limits (hopefully).

Yet giving a pre-teen a phone where they're constantly being spammed with addictive content is dangerous. I can't even imagine all the psychological and developmental implications.

In terms of adults being addicted to apps and their data being used for ad-targeting...eh. User beware. I think we have bigger issues facing us.

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

#200

Post by josalhor »

glitchdout wrote: post #187

I wish they had presented more solutions. The way I see it, infinite scroll feeds generated by algorithms should be outlawed. Same with Like counts. (It seems Instagram has begun testing this https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/14/instagram-private-like-cou... ) Facebook wasn't that bad when you had to visit each person's wall or when the feed was in chronological order.

IMO a bigger problem is the effect these platforms have on children. There should be systems in place that extend the regulations that exist on TV to the social media experience.
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