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The Social Dilemma

thesocialdilemma.com

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Re: The Social Dilemma

#231

Post by jwilber »

dpcan wrote: post #184
jwilber wrote: post #158

I 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.

?

The point of the movie (per the website as well) is literally a call to, “rebuild the system.”

Re: The Social Dilemma

#232

Post by disambiguation »

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.

in much the same way the documentary was designed to do!

Re: The Social Dilemma

#233

Post by adamsea »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #79
lozf wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always liked: "Advertising robs you of your dignity, and sells it back to you at the price of the product."

With the arguable exception of therapy/counselling, you can never retrieve your dignity and self-worth by buying a product. So all it really does is sell the promise .

True. As a side point, IMHO, therapy and counseling are not products.

They’re services, and, even more so, should be a service bound by a medical code of ethics, which, since the healing professions go way back, imho makes therapy and counseling distinct from many other services.

:)

Re: The Social Dilemma

#234

Post by adamsea »

api wrote: post #135
gundmc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Changes to your behavior and actions..." Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services. There are plenty of paid services that are riddled with ads as well. Movies, Cable TV, airline flights, etc. The fact is that people and organizations are _constantly_ trying to influence your behavior. It's not obviou…

None of this is new in principle. The difference we are talking about here is more between a hunting rifle and an M-16. The depth, pervasiveness, and insidiousness of persuasion is so much greater with social media. It’s a wider channel, a bidirectional, channel, and a one on one channel. Now when tech similar to GPT-3 gets out there it’s going to be like hunting rifle vs atomic weapons. Pretty soon we will have what…

For anyone unsure like me, GPT-3 is a deep-learning based model which can be trained to produce human like written language (text).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3

Unsettling indeed.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#235

Post by shajznnckfke »

adamsea wrote: post #226
shajznnckfke wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just advertising, but any communication. You wrote this comment to influence me and everyone who else who read it.

You would reduce it all to atoms.

I’m just trying to take the ideas in this thread seriously. If we are going to argue that it’s bad to try to influence people’s behavior, we ought to think through what that means when applied to entities other than Facebook. That will help us figure out if we really mean what we are saying. Is it an actual value we hold, or only a rhetorical point when we are taking about a few tech companies?

Re: The Social Dilemma

#236

Post by isignal »

It was a persuasive documentary but I felt it conflates two issues which happened together - the rise of mobile phones and the rise of social media. The rise of smartphones has an important role in making social media more addictive. Some people are addicted to watching videos from Netflix or browsing websites like hacker news etc on smartphones too, which isn't necessarily a "social" activity.

All the engagement tricks played by social media would have only gotten so far without smartphones. On the contrary, people might have been addicted to smartphones even without social media apps.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#237

Post by shi314 »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #190
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.

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 ma…

Ever Heard of Nudge Economics?

Re: The Social Dilemma

#238

Post by yashap »

mavsman wrote: post #186
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.

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.

It’s content marketing for Y Combinator itself, like a blog on steroids. Y Combinator wants to market to the following groups:

- startup founders, that could apply to YC

- investors, that could invest in YC companies

- potential customers for YC companies

- potential employees for YC companies

HN brings all of these people into a YC controlled community, and gets them thinking about YC frequently. It’s outstanding marketing, and like all great content marketing, it also provides value to the people being marketed to.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#239

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #112
gundmc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Changes to your behavior and actions..." Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services. There are plenty of paid services that are riddled with ads as well. Movies, Cable TV, airline flights, etc. The fact is that people and organizations are _constantly_ trying to influence your behavior. It's not obviou…

Right, except in this case Google and Facebook are not paying the people who create the content (so-called "users")^1, however Google and Facebook are the ones getting paid by the advertisers. The so-called "users" are also paying for the internet access and bandwidth over which the ads are delivered. In sum, the "users" are the ones paying for the costs of this particular advertising vector (the internet and web). 1…

Actually, Facebook does not share any of their ad revenue with their Facebook "users".

Re: The Social Dilemma

#240

Post by sibeliuss »

_mkef wrote: post #20

Great movie that I agree with 1000% . I suggest Lost Connections and 10 Arguments for deleting your social media ( mentioned in the movie) as well. I stopped using all social media as of last year and the results have been amazing. I'm more at peace , I no longer getting into stupid Facebook arguments. Online you aren't interacting with whole people, so being absurdly mean is easy. Most people online are just their f…

Used to waste so much time arguing on FB comments -- and now that I'm off of it all of that energy has been reclaimed. It's been a remarkably positive change in every way.
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