Everyone calling for government intervention when unsubscribing or taking a device away from a child would work is just hastening the end of free (libre) general purpose computing.
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Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
171–180 of 198 posts
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#172Thank god, and a million times yes.
There is no market if you have no mechanism for price discovery, no meaningful alternatives, users are addicted, confused, and simply unable to switch.
Things WERE better before we combined skinner boxes with ad tech, before we preyed on users and applied every trick in the book to entrap them.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Github project data is easy to export: https://docs.github.com/en/issues/planning-and-tracking-with ... Only the project owner can do that.
As a project owner, I don't want random individuals exporting my project data and cloning it somewhere else
too bad because it's easy to get it through the API
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#174On one hand, this is insidious when targeting children.... On the other these kind of metrics are what pretty much every company tries to optimize. We're going to get better and better at hacking the human brain - for good and evil and we're going to have to trade some free will and personal liberty to really keep the worst of it in check. The dark pattern bullshit is the easiest thing to regulate but I don't have a…
Which is fine. As the article points out, we value markets because they find ways to allocate resources effectively. Insider trading is illegal because it breaks the market.
Firms can optimize as they like, but if the net result is that the market ceases to function, then those behaviors get penalized.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#175> The burden of proof should fall on the platform, not the victim. The question is not whether a harmed user can show specific damage. The question is whether the company can show, before rolling a product out to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design. That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features. Could we have a regulatory agency that keeps an eye on dark patterns a…
Wait how?
Internal testing showed these features were addictive. They had resources allocated to creating addictive experiences for tweens.
The underlying behavioral science is well studied, down to the causal level.
Dark patterns are designed to make it hard to exit and unsubscribe. The language is purposefully obtuse, the options buried behind menu choices. We have enough A/B testing data to know how effective friction is at dissuading people from following a path.
How are we proving a negative here?
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#176While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed. How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?
> How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want? For laws like this it always boils down to "I'll know it when I see it" which is such a shockingly poor way to write legislation that I'm flabbergasted it doesn't immediately fail any amount of rudimentary scrutiny. Not to mention the latitude it grants for selective enforcement. It's bas…
A large portion of the laws you live under, are exactly like this. Norms make up the major chunk of governance.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#177I'm no defender of engagement algorithms and social media (including upvote based algos and this site too)....but this is a ridiculous argument. Social media is not making you behave in ways you don't want. On the contrary, it's giving you EXACTLY what you want. People want to doomscroll social media instead of engage reality, because the real world requires action, effort and social risk...doomscrolling is pure pass…
I'll agree and add on: doesn't every for-profit enterprise want their products to be as addictive as possible (retrofitting that word in various ways to suit whatever their context)? If I'm making bicycle wheels, I want all my customers thinking "these are the best bicycle wheels. I don't want them from any other supplier ever again and actually I want some that I don't even need just in case." I want them up at nigh…
The article in question is linked, and it does a great job of putting the varied forces into a single frame of reference.
The market is the thing we create, and its effective functioning is what competition and regulation is meant to enable. It is through the functioning of the market that effective resource allocation occurs.
> A market economy is meant to generate the best allocation of resources and the biggest benefits for consumers. For these promises to be fulfilled, consumers must be able to see and choose alternatives deliberately; compare them on undistorted dimensions; form preferences that reflect actual interests; and switch freely. Cognitive exploitation undermines all four of these. Infinite scroll captures attention. Dark patterns distort comparison. Dopaminergic loops manufacture compulsion. Addiction engineering blocks effective switching.
> Securities regulation offers an instructive analogy. When a trader manipulates stock or derivatives prices, the law treats the crime as a structural harm to the broader market; the corrupted price no longer tells the truth. Cognitive exploitation should be seen in the same light, at a much larger scale. When platforms systematically manufacture the preferences of billions of users, consumer signals no longer point anywhere useful. That is a structural failure.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#178I'm so happy the economist is converting this important topic. Now if only the dick heads running this complete rag could listen to the wonderful people who wrote that enlightened piece and let users unsubscribe: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rli0u9/how_t...
It seems much better now. At least in the EU. 4 years ago I had to do the same to change my address to a different country. Now I could do it with a simple form. It seems that I can cancel my subscription also without chat/call.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#179How much time you spend on something has become a metric of success in both gaming and social media. I occasionally play a perpetually-in-alpha AAA+ game (I won't name it to avoid the flames) that recently asked users to fill out a questionnaire. At no point did it ask how they could make my time spent in the game more fun or awesome. They did explicitly ask, "What can we do to make you spend more time in game?". The…
I learned that lesson nearly two decades ago when I first started as a game dev straight out of school. I had much less free time and began appreciating shorter games with focused experiences that ended relatively quickly (6-8 hrs). This allowed me to experience more variety. Unfortunately, games keep getting longer and longer with more and more filler. The problem is that many gamers complain loudly when games are s…
Yes, I appreciate a long game.
But you're right comparatively few games give you "more game" vs "more filler"
For example, I liked factorio because I was always struggling with the "current paradigm" and trying to get to the "next paradigm". For example, coal powered furnaces vs electric furnaces. Or conveyor belts vs trains.
But some games just make themselves longer by just turning the knobs on grinding.
I guess this is like novels vs short stories. And we are seeing the same sorts of things where the story arc is stretched over a long series of books and content is fluffed up a bit.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#180> The burden of proof should fall on the platform, not the victim. The question is not whether a harmed user can show specific damage. The question is whether the company can show, before rolling a product out to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design. That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features. Could we have a regulatory agency that keeps an eye on dark patterns a…
Wait how? Internal testing showed these features were addictive. They had resources allocated to creating addictive experiences for tweens. The underlying behavioral science is well studied, down to the causal level. Dark patterns are designed to make it hard to exit and unsubscribe. The language is purposefully obtuse, the options buried behind menu choices. We have enough A/B testing data to know how effective fric…
Proving something is addictive is not proving a negative