Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Social Dilemma

thesocialdilemma.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 421 posts

Re: The Social Dilemma

#161

Post by mdoms »

npunt wrote: post #119
mdoms wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were, in fact, people who could have predicted this. Did they?

Not sure if she explicitly wrote about likes = teen suicide, but I'm sure danah boyd would have had something to say about it, given her research focus on the intersection of social tech and teens lives. She was already well respected at that time and known to my team when I worked in Yahoo's online communities division in 2006 and went to her talks. The relationship between suicide & social status has been well know…

So, no?

Re: The Social Dilemma

#162

Post by pbw »

codysc wrote: post #3

I just watched this last night. A lot of the content will already be well known to the HN audience. There was one big light-bulb moment for me. One of the speakers was clarifying the "If you're not paying then you are the product" idea. He refined it to, (rough quote), "Changes to your behavior and actions are the product" That distinction made the insidiousness much more clear than the former statement.

For the last 5000 years advertising has tried and succeeded at making people change their behavior and actions. It's not all that insidious, it's just how advertising works, that's its entire purpose.

The doc was not awful, it's good to get people talking, but it was more one-sided than a facebook feed, which I found very ironic. Every well lit talking head had the same point of view, they presented their mic drop line and then there was no discussion, no counterpoint, no follow up.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#163

Post by Animats »

wussboy wrote: post #134
Animats wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the distributed social networks ever get enough users to attract spammers, they'll have an even worse spam problem than the centralized ones. They don't collect enough info network-wide to detect spammers.

I feel like that particular issue could be resolved with even the most rudimentary reputation system. It’s how humans have solved the problem amongst ourselves. But I agree it will be a problem.

Email has struggled with that problem for decades. Also, reputation systems are easily scammed. See eBay, Yelp, Amazon, etc.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#164

Post by g42gregory »

I was really affected by the first 3/4th of the movie. But then, they started expressing their (personal?) beliefs, for example: "What happens if people begin to believe that government lies to them?" Oh horror! ...Well that happens sometimes, and sometimes with a good reason.

They kind of stared loosing credibility with me after that. I wish the movie would stay on a single message/issue. It would have been more powerful, at least for me.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#166

Post by intricatedetail »

g42gregory wrote: post #164

I was really affected by the first 3/4th of the movie. But then, they started expressing their (personal?) beliefs, for example: "What happens if people begin to believe that government lies to them?" Oh horror! ...Well that happens sometimes, and sometimes with a good reason. They kind of stared loosing credibility with me after that. I wish the movie would stay on a single message/issue. It would have been more pow…

Seems like they want to control facts and packaged it as educational, helping piece. Imho that's quite disgusting manipulation.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#167

Post by soneca »

amurthy1 wrote: post #157
soneca wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the extra step of social media is that they are not satisfied by changing your behavior from not buying a product to buying a product. They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more and be subject to more advertising on the future. So they make you more fanatic or more extremist or more polarized, because it will lead you…

> They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more How is this different than any other kind of media like TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.? All of them are trying to make their product engaging so that you consume more of their media and more of their ads. Just because those services also charge a subscription fee, doesn't change the…

Other platforms never leveraged opinions, pictures, life facts from people I know, like friends, family, acquaintances, coworkers, etc to induce behavior change.

And things change a lot with scale. Even if the intent or the principle is the same, dynamics are different if it is in a scale orders of magnitude larger.

I don’t think we should be dismissing new understandings of how social media affect our lives on the grounds that other media in the past tried to do the same.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#170

Post by hervature »

dominotw wrote: post #101
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t they just not use the thing? Usually this critique is applied to social media, which is not an essential human need. Ubiquitous and handy, yes. But not essential.

social contact is a need. I don't think i can actually survive without watsapp.

I'll be the first to tell you that humans are social beings that need social contact. I'll also be the first to tell you that social media is not necessary for that. I assume you're being hyperbolic with Whatsapp being vital for life, but do you honestly not know how humans got their fill of social interaction 12 years ago? And no, the answer isn't Facebook.
Post reply on HN