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Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

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Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#111

Post by izzydata »

icebraining wrote: post #92
izzydata wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sense, writing a whole book about your decision to delete some social media accounts is just as bad as social media. The whole world doesn't need to know about every mundane detail about your life. You can do things and not feel inclined to tell everyone about it.

The book is not about his decision. In fact, he never had them in the first place.

How can someone write a book about the benefits of leaving social media if they have never experienced them or the process of leaving them?

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#112

Post by syndacks »

dschadd wrote: post #101
gambler wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know how non tech people deal with it. They silently suffer, develop coping mechanisms and time-intensive workarounds. Most don't even understand how things could be better. This is part of the reason so many interfaces are horrible. This isn't even specific to social media platforms. People adapt to crap. Sounds like this is what Jaron is talking about. Design thinking should be taught in schools or as Gen…

Simply curious - where could I go to learn design thinking? Any online courses you recommend? Free would be nice, but I'm open to paying if it's worth it.

Not sure exactly what type of "design thinking" you are looking to learn. In my experience, a lot of people think about design only as it applies to visual/UX. Design Thinking, on the other hand, is more a way to problem solve and understand the issues at hand (and of course, how to solve them).

One resource I recommend is IDEO.org...it's tailored more towards humanitarian type Design Thinking, but it might be a good place to look depending, of course, on your needs ;)

https://www.ideo.org/approach

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#113

Post by nakedrobot2 »

jacquesm wrote: post #6

Jaron Lanier is interesting in the same way the RMS is interesting. You don't have to subscribe to all of their views to get something useful out of reading their output. RMS is the better prophet.

Maybe he is, but he spreads his message and communicates in the absolute worst way for anyone to actually listen to him or take him seriously. Which is really a shame.

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#114

Post by icebraining »

crispyambulance wrote: post #42
spot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nelson's concept was more centralized, and that's why it failed. Having no implementation didn't help.

It is only the media itself that is centralized in Nelson's vision. Today it is the giant middle-men that are "centralized" and call themselves "media". According to Jaron Lanier, Xanadu (Ted Nelson's concept) was all about "two-way" connectivity, not in a trivial sense like client/server websites today but deeply as in a "we're all authors" sense. > "A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network > and what…

The two-way connectivity was between documents (or actually, pieces of media, regardless of type), not in the "we're all authors" sense (the latter was common back then, and in fact the early web browser was also an editor and server).

The Xanadu idea was that if a link was created from A → B, it would be visible in B as well. They have some cute 3D renderings of XanaduSpace on their website that makes it clearer: http://xanadu.com/XanaduSpace/btf.htm

Lanier further claims this would make Google redundant (since you'd "just see where most of the links led" - it's not clear to me how you'd do that without processing (ie, scraping with a bot) all the documents and their links), and also Facebook because, apparently, what we were missing is a way to see who is linking to our content, so we can "meet people who share out interests" (personally, this is what I see forums or Reddit being used for, whereas Facebook was primarily about people you knew personally).

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#116

Post by icebraining »

izzydata wrote: post #111
icebraining wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book is not about his decision. In fact, he never had them in the first place.

How can someone write a book about the benefits of leaving social media if they have never experienced them or the process of leaving them?

Does one have to get shot to know it hurts? Is a male doctor incapable of advising a pregnant woman?

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#117

Post by malvosenior »

tsunamifury wrote: post #96
lazyjones wrote: post #73

I would be interested in his opinion about slapping the user in the face with greyed-out content and a subscription box on top when he tries to follow a link to read this interview. Isn't this a great example for how the digital world doesn't let us do what we intend to and doesn't deliver on its promises?

Jaron supports premium payment for articles. I don’t know why so many hacker news readers both are illogically irate about paywalls and also irate about data collection. The irony is almost overwhelming.

> I don’t know why so many hacker news readers both are illogically irate about paywalls and also irate about data collection. The irony is almost overwhelming.

Because they're not the same HN users? I don't care at all about data collection but I abhor terrible UI such the modal ad in the original post.

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#118

Post by dragonwriter »

malvosenior wrote: post #117
tsunamifury wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jaron supports premium payment for articles. I don’t know why so many hacker news readers both are illogically irate about paywalls and also irate about data collection. The irony is almost overwhelming.

> I don’t know why so many hacker news readers both are illogically irate about paywalls and also irate about data collection. The irony is almost overwhelming. Because they're not the same HN users? I don't care at all about data collection but I abhor terrible UI such the modal ad in the original post.

> Because they're not the same HN users?

This; people keep confusing conflicting vocal minorities with a minority with shared but incoherent preferences.

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#119

Post by styfle »

decasia wrote: post #7

The thing I keep thinking is that I want to have social software built on a co-operative model (like a food co-op): you all pay some nominal membership fee (could you fund servers and developers on $5/year/user?), and the software would then be developed to fit the agreed-upon needs of the community, without dark patterns or behavior modification projects, openly, and with some kind of community governance (which nee…

I think some mastodon[0] servers are run this way: users pay a small portion to cover hosting costs and there is usually some topic that brings that server/community together. However, you are not limited to a single mastodon community because they are federated (similar to email where gmail users can communicate with hotmail users).

[0]: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

Re: Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

#120

Post by gambler »

dschadd wrote: post #101
gambler wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know how non tech people deal with it. They silently suffer, develop coping mechanisms and time-intensive workarounds. Most don't even understand how things could be better. This is part of the reason so many interfaces are horrible. This isn't even specific to social media platforms. People adapt to crap. Sounds like this is what Jaron is talking about. Design thinking should be taught in schools or as Gen…

Simply curious - where could I go to learn design thinking? Any online courses you recommend? Free would be nice, but I'm open to paying if it's worth it.

Reading Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman is a great start.

There is a whole track on design at Coursera, but I only watched one course from it, so can't say anything about its quality.

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/interaction-design

It seems the term "design thinking" has been hijacked by consultants. What I mean by it: being aware of how tools/artifacts drives people's actions/behaviors and changing the former to proactively make people's lives better. Sounds simple, but in practice today's world is obsessed with needs, wants and features, not the actual process of living with technology and other human artifacts.

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