The movie consulted (and interviewed) the guys from this podcast Your Undivided Attention https://www.humanetech.com/podcast
It has nice episodes with deeper discussion of the social network social problem.
The Social Dilemma
181–190 of 421 posts
Re: The Social Dilemma
#182Earlier 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…
Comparing newspapers to Facebook is likening a cup of water to the ocean ("just water, scaled up"). People aren't reading an ever-changing, infinite-supply, A/B tested, microtargeted newspaper.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with much of your post, except this: > I think the challenge for defeating those theories is providing the poor, undereducated and marginalized a more wholesome way to spend their time among other people. Why do you think it's the poor who buy into these theories? I live in a relatively well to do neighborhood (not in the US) and I've seen plenty of anti-5G banners hanging from balconies, there are plenty of…
> Why do you think it's the poor who buy into these theories? It is not solely the poor and uneducated who buy into these theories. However, for several extreme movements in recent years, sociologists have noted that they mainly tend to attract people who are socially marginalized in some way. While the educated and even some elected politicians can become visible proponents of the given conspiracy theory, they are a…
How is it that sociologists know these things about anons?
Re: The Social Dilemma
#184I really like this documentary/film, but if I’m being honest, it does leave a taste of typical SV virtue signaling in my mouth. The website explicitly states that their site allows cookies "set through our site by our advertising partners and may be used to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant ads on other sites." Since visiting I received two ads for “Moment” in instagram, and one for Asana on You…
This actually enforces the point of the movie.
We don’t live in a world that can break free of these atrocities.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#185Social Media platforms are like being famous without any of the good parts.
You just get all the shitty parts of living your life with 1000 fake friends(I mean fans) like a hero complex, or an influence complex, or hyper sensitivity to judgement, or addiction to others opinions, or addiction, or suicide, or an inability to communicate with people different than you, or an inability to determine fact from scam, or a permanent state of social one-up-manship, or a constant stream of unending judgement for all your actions in a public forum, or shit tons of fake friends, or complete social isolation in a room of people, or an advocate complex.
All for the pretend reason of "communication" or "connecting the world".
Humans are not built to have close social bonds with 50+ people, it breaks down something about what grounds us. It is why there is a cliché for the famous person with all the bad parts above.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#186I 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.
It never occurred to me until now that Hacker News is free and this statement could be applied here as well, though I'm not exactly sure in what way.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 g…
Putting aside for a moment the much tighter feedback loop and way more in-depth metrics that allow much greater tuning and targeting...
With broadcast media, you can turn off the TV, radio, or put down the magazine. The social punishment cost of this is limited - If someone asked you about current affairs or the latest show etc, you might have to deal with being out of the loop.
But with smartphones and social media, everyone's a content publisher and it's all intertwined. Stepping back/checking out has a much higher social cost as you're not reachable and you're gonna miss those life updates from friends and family if you're not sitting on the same communication channels as them.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#188I 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.
It never occurred to me until now that Hacker News is free and this statement could be applied here as well, though I'm not exactly sure in what way.
YCombinator companies advertise here for jobs?
Re: The Social Dilemma
#189I 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.
It never occurred to me until now that Hacker News is free and this statement could be applied here as well, though I'm not exactly sure in what way.
To change your behaviour to look more favourably on Ycombinator startups. (/s?)
Re: The Social Dilemma
#190I 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.
This kind of wording is conspiratorial mumbo jumbo. A social media's product is it's platform and software. Their revenue comes from advertising. No one ever told someone watching network TV in the 80s, "you are the product", because that would be ridiculous. It's no less ridiculous to do that with websites and phone apps.
Why can't we just have a frank discussion about advertising and privacy without this kind of manipulative language?