81–90 of 285 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. In a long term, company will never do anything against incentives their business model sets up. Google is the ad company. Don't work for ad conpany.
Tell that to the many SF tech workers optimizing for profit.
Twilio, for example, doesn’t need engagement. Last I heard they were swimming in money.
This presentation is wonderful for its PR value "people here care" but naïve bordering on malicious in its approach and understanding of Google's business. 11 years ago PG called the iPad the "hip flask" of the internet (1) and it's 10x worse today than it was then. The incentives of every major ad-supported tech platform are the same - maximize engagement to maximize profit. Every dollar of profit, every promotion,…
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> work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement.
Reddit is a YC company. Amplitude is a YC company. Segment. Mixpanel. Optimizely. The list goes on. All of these companies in some way benefit from maximizing "engagement". I wonder if PG has a smart phone now.
Presentations like these assume people are dumb animals not being able to control their lives. They need to artificially constrained to help them live. Saying bluntly, they need a nanny. I'm an active user or Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and all of them. I turned off GMail notifications for non-important mails. I unsubscribe/report spam promotional e-mail. YouTube autoplay is off (simply because the recommender i…
> That guy Tristan Harris who did the presentation is morally dishonest person: he wants to his cake and eat it. He got his millions from Google, and then decided to play good guy by virtue signalling with this presentation and by playing in Social Dilemma: working against the same companies which made him wealthy enough to not worry about money for the rest of his life. This is like saying that no one is ever allowe…
That was just a remark, not a substantiation of the arguments above. I'm sorry, I mixed it up.
> This is like saying that no one is ever allowed to change their mind
Everyone is allowed to change their mind, but it is helpful to know why and how they did change their mind.
This presentation is wonderful for its PR value "people here care" but naïve bordering on malicious in its approach and understanding of Google's business. 11 years ago PG called the iPad the "hip flask" of the internet (1) and it's 10x worse today than it was then. The incentives of every major ad-supported tech platform are the same - maximize engagement to maximize profit. Every dollar of profit, every promotion,…
Compare to Twitter that's always trying to get me to follow people they want me to follow ans giving me no way to opt out of types of tweets I don't care about like "so-and-so liked:"
Same with Facebook. My feed is full of stuff I don't care about like "so-and-so commented:"
Instagram is the worst in that sometime in the last 12 months my feed switched from only posts by my friends to just th newest posts by my friends followed by Instagram shovelling popular crap at me in an attept to get me waste more time on the app
Other apps like Uber, Lyft send me notification ads I can't opt out of except to turn off all notifications at an OS level.
Dating apps like Tinder waste my time everyday sending me a notification to "Plese Use the app today". I can't turn that off and turning off notifications at an OS level effective makes the app useless.
The only Google property that might arguably be a distraction would be YouTube with it's ads but unlike all the other services YouTube actually provides a "pay for no ads" option which lots of HNers wish other services provided
AFAICT this presentation or at least its ideal has been upheld by Google
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. In a long term, company will never do anything against incentives their business model sets up. Google is the ad company. Don't work for ad conpany.
But then if I don't work for Google, how can I write a blog post patting myself on the back for finally having the guts to leave Google?
This presentation is from 2013. It's a historical artifact that helped kick off the movement to fight distraction in its early days, not the state of the art thinking of the current day. Obviously, a lot of the concerns it expresses are still very relevant.
Started great, but then veered off into attacking the identity of the purported perpetrators. Might be cool at a conference, but in the real world you're losing lots of people.
Presentations like these assume people are dumb animals not being able to control their lives. They need to artificially constrained to help them live. Saying bluntly, they need a nanny. I'm an active user or Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and all of them. I turned off GMail notifications for non-important mails. I unsubscribe/report spam promotional e-mail. YouTube autoplay is off (simply because the recommender i…
> Presentations like these assume people are dumb animals not being able to control their lives You're vastly underestimating the potential to exploit human nature. Just by being here ranting like this shows that the topic bypassed your rational executive function and fired up your sympathetic nervous system.
Human nature were exploited for thousand years, and humans are still doing fine. I didn't see strong arguments why current megacorp mind control is worse than usual.
> Just by being here ranting like this shows that the topic bypassed your rational executive function and fired up your sympathetic nervous system.
I didn't get it. Are you stating that commenting here is irrational? Or that my arguments are irrational?
I don't see how calling out the demographics of the designers making the decisions has anything to do with the larger implications of societal impact. There are terrible things done by people of every demographic to millions of people, as well as great things. It's also less and less true (tho probably more so in 2013 when this was created), yet the problems still exist because the incentives are there (the real issu…
> the problems still exist because the incentives are there
Yes, and who determines the incentives and provides the rewards?
At one company I worked at, we had a digital product that was part of a suite of services our company provided. It was useful to our customers but it's clear, if you see it, that they want to get in, get done what they need to do, and get out. It's a tool to help them do their jobs and nothing more.
You'd think that simplicity and efficiency would be celebrated. The number of times I heard "engagement" and "gamification" used about that product from the marketing team, however...
Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears.
I should note that, we didn't make any more money the longer someone spent on that product. There was no advertising model associated with it--it is a per-seat hosted solution. So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing!