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Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case
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Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case
#302How is any app/website that 1) appeals to kids, 2) sells attention, 3) does A/B testing and/or has a self-learning distribution algorithm NOT guilty of this?
A/B testing is one way to make things “addictive” but you can also make addictive products without it. A really good designer could make a highly engaging app or an editor can write clickbait headlines all with without testing.
These products maximize revenue through engagement with advertisements. The outcome is built into their business model.
Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case
#303Doritos now liable for creating a good tasting chip? This is madness.
Normally I don't see people walking down the street staring at their Doritos
Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case
#304The solution to this would be a law forcing these sites to allow third-party suggestion algorithms, so that you can choose who and how content is being suggested to you. It could be perhaps as simple as allowing third-party websites and apps for watching Youtube on your phone. And it's okay if this would be a premium paid feature, so there's no counter argument that "it costs them money to host videos". This is not a…
The solution to all of Big Tech's monopolies is actually pretty simple: Interoperability must become a law - this includes using custom algorithms or allowing other platforms (like your own app) to access YOUR data on whatever platform 'hosts' it.
Cory Doctorow wrote a great article on it:
"Interoperability Can Save the Open Web" https://spectrum.ieee.org/doctorow-interoperability
> While the dominance of Internet platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon is often taken for granted, Doctorow argues that these walled gardens are fenced in by legal structures, not feats of engineering. Doctorow proposes forcing interoperability—any given platform’s ability to interact with another—as a way to break down those walls and to make the Internet freer and more democratic.
Most notably, he retells how early Facebook used to siphon data from its competitor MySpace and act on user's behalf on it (e.g. reply to MySpace messages via Facebook) - and then when the Zuck(er) was top dog, moved to made these basic interoperability actions illegal by law to prevent anyone doing to him what he did to others.
Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
They'd find another method. Why are we allowing this in the first place? I don't have an answer to fix this whole mess, but it starts with our attitude towards addiction. We've built a system that rewards addiction in all sorts of places. Granted, every addiction is different, and I'm of the opinion that it's not (drug = bad), it's how you use it and react to it. We can control the latter, but we choose to ignore it…
In the span of how long it takes for law to catch up to what’s going on, YouTube and Facebook has been around for a tiny amount of time.
They have been around long enough to have done unknowable damage to entire generations of humans
Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case
#306The solution to this would be a law forcing these sites to allow third-party suggestion algorithms, so that you can choose who and how content is being suggested to you. It could be perhaps as simple as allowing third-party websites and apps for watching Youtube on your phone. And it's okay if this would be a premium paid feature, so there's no counter argument that "it costs them money to host videos". This is not a…
Third-party recommendation algorithms would be interesting, but I think
they'd only address one layer of the addictive design the verdict is actually
about. Autoplay, infinite scroll, notification timing, the variable reward
patterns from likes and comments -- those are all independent of which
algorithm picks the next video. You could swap in the most wholesome
recommendation engine imaginable and a kid is still gonna sit there for hours
if the UI is designed around endless content with no natural stopping points.
Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
ah yup: > It comes on the heels of a Delaware court decision clearing Meta’s insurers of responsibility for damages incurred from “several thousand lawsuits regarding the harm its platforms allegedly cause children” — a ruling that could leave it and other tech titans on the hook for untold future millions.
I wonder at which point do children become such a liability for platforms that it's easier to just ban all children altogether. Children don't have disposable income to buy ads/subscriptions. They don't have experience to write about. The only thing they have that adults don't is time which translates into engagement metrics. In an ideal world, the adults that buy/manage the computers would create age-restricted acco…
Nobody takes “age-restricted account[s] for children” seriously.
Parental controls and age-restrictions are almost universally half-baked, buggy fig leafs to displace negative attention from software and content providers.
Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case
#308Doritos now liable for creating a good tasting chip? This is madness.
One could argue that the ultra processed food industry is doing exactly what the tobacco industry did wrt to making their food addictive.
There is a difference in creating a food that tastes good vs creating a food that tastes good, but instantly wants you to eat the whole bag.
Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case
#309Just kids? Not adults?
Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case
#310The solution to this would be a law forcing these sites to allow third-party suggestion algorithms, so that you can choose who and how content is being suggested to you. It could be perhaps as simple as allowing third-party websites and apps for watching Youtube on your phone. And it's okay if this would be a premium paid feature, so there's no counter argument that "it costs them money to host videos". This is not a…
Bluesky does this. In fact, the For You algorithm is a community built algorithm and way more popular than the native Discover algo.