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

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231–240 of 266 posts

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

#231
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…

Like many privacy advocates, the documentary begs the question on most of the privacy issues it discusses. Some people seem to have an intuitive sense that they're being violated whenever anyone trades data about them or surveils them in public or aggregates their emails for crime-fighting purposes (or any of a dozen other examples), but I don't share it, so I'm not responsive to arguments that rely on the assumption that we share common ground on this point.

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

#232
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…

Well, the difference is, that YT needs you to watch more to show you advertising to make money. Netflix just needs you to pay your subscription. That is a big difference, as far as the payoff of using psychological hacks goes. I believe, that if Netflix was ad-based it would be a hell of a lot more addictive.

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

#235
post #141

> What will the cultural impact of this movie be? A few months back a bunch of big Facebook advertisers (nike, etc..) pulled back some of their ad spend to punish Facebook over their stance on certain cultural issues. What happened to Facebook? Nothing... Revenues actually went up... Facebook is an incredible tool and platform. No platform (none amongst the FANGs) has the same capabilities of tailoring your internet…

The Facebook boycott was complete hypocrisy. It was framed as being in support of BLM & similar movements despite:

1) The companies involved in the boycott were often the ones with a terrible track record regarding their own treatment of minorities, so it was absolute bullshit virtue-signaling.

2) We were in the middle of a pandemic where the economy essentially shut down so it made total sense to pause advertising for the time being. This was purely a financial decision, framed as some kind of social impact action by some terrible & disgusting companies.

Of course, as soon as the market started recovering and they saw a need to advertise again they were back in full force as if nothing happened.

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

#236

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!

Absolutely. Let's lay out traps for the trap layers then, and find a way to do it for a living. You're saying that's fine, so lets do it.

Except you don't lay out traps for the trap layers. You make it very clear that if they lay out traps then they will face consequences.

They are the ones acting in bad faith and trying to extract resources from you via subversion.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should see “The Great Hack” on Netflix. It might change your mind.

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

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason to be hesistant is /because/ we saw how it was dealt with before! If we had the same godawful most self-righteous prude standards we would be censoring the very concept of LGBT people as "corrupting". It is no accident that acceptance's first step was from unregulated media who slipped through the crack and was able to laboriously crack and pry through the societal bullshit. Fuck the parents - they should…

What "unregulated media" do you feel was responsible for "acceptance's first step"? I'm not an expert on this by any stretch, but I've studied both media history and LGBT issues, and the shows that get cites most often for doing a shocking amount of work in shifting American attitudes toward LGBT folk were, well, regulated media. Specifically, the network sitcoms "Ellen" and "Will & Grace," with earlier tentative ste…

They are the Johnny come lates - look at the various zines and very small newspapers published way back when homosexuality was actively illegal for one and would have been called obscene material but regulation thankfully couldn't be meaningful. Although niche they certainly had a role in growing networks of allies.

On the other end of the contact Internet contact is a later one and although nothing concrete it seems very non-coincidental that generations where straight people could watch gay or lesbian porn, and fanfics being ubiquitous enough that Draco and Harry ships were well known even among people who never read a single one due to lack of interestm

The "balance" is a golden mean fallacy. Best illustrated by a rhetorical question that sounds like a death threat: Is there a balance to be struck between you being alive and unharmed and stone dead?

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

#240
post #182

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.

Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, so please don't post like this to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It has nothing to do with what nation they are - but an uncomfortable conclusion that the problem is in the voter base is self evident for elections.

1. Bolesaro is a fascist and only terrible people would support him. If supporters of genocidal fascists are terrible people the who is? 2. He won the election. 3. A plurality of votes is needed to win the election.

QED the voting plurality are terrible people. I said nothing of other nations by baseline and thought it was abundantly clear that it was a lesson of experience that assuming that a large number of your voting countrymen aren't terrible people is sadly a mistake.

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