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The Social Dilemma

thesocialdilemma.com

141–150 of 421 posts

Re: The Social Dilemma

#141
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.

If you don't pay you obey!

Re: The Social Dilemma

#142
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. I wonder what it's like also to kind of... Not really make it about that at all. Say you're hanging out with your friends IRL, and you're not paying them to hang out with you, or didn't pay the grass to hang out with them among it. Are you still being a "product"? I think in that case we don't dig into it because it all seems part of some natural order of things. I guess we just need to keep livi…

https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical... This may or may not be related, because I'm finding it difficult to parse your comment.

Honestly, I love it! Thanks for that. :) Yeah I care about this: we have scaled bakeries that make lots of stuff, and we've industrialized it and commercialized it and ... etc. And that's great! But we also bake at home in our kitchen, for our families. We do things in between: small businesses that serve their communities. I want that we do that with software, and I want it to be as widespread as is with things we take that more for granted about like cooking. We're doing it already: when you write a blog post, you are producing a software experience for someone else. I hope that over time we spread the empowerment of creation of more kinds of software experiences across more people, and also without needing to make everyone feel like it needs to be about scaling: gardening, not necessarily agriculture.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#143

A lot of people are going to say this movie is filled with people who made their millions and are now on an apology tour. Their bank accounts are still large, and their creations are still at large. I agree. But this also makes them the most effective people to talk about it. I've had so many non-tech people in my life be blown away by this movie. Nothing in it was new to me or anyone here, but most people don't hear…

I think the arguments in the film are a bit embellished, but certainly they got interesting people to go in front of the camera and they made some good points.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#144
post #33

I thought the movie was well made and did a good job explaining things, especially to people who don't follow the business. There is one consideration no one seriously thinks about when it comes to social media companies, in particular Facebook and Twitter. They cannot be fixed. They are failed experiments and need to end. The whole premise of the companies is to guide people's emotions for profit whether where they…

You could say the same thing about Fox News..

Re: The Social Dilemma

#145
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.

I really liked the futures analogy. On top of my head: > there are pork chops futures, oil futures, and now human futures. This is so full of sense in all degrees.

I feel like they edited that quote a little too far away from the final(?) statement she gave, which was along the lines of "these markets should be banned, just like we have banned markets in human organs and human slaves."

Re: The Social Dilemma

#146
> "Changes to your behavior and actions are the product"

This and how they are eroding the attention spans of the consumers of their product.

Now more than ever it is important that thought workers develop their attentional skills, they're in short supply and getting shorter and shorter!

Re: The Social Dilemma

#147
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you go about ending Facebook and Twitter. Facebook's market capitalization is $720B. Twitter is a relative minnow at $32B. Neither will go down without a pretty enormous fight; the resources at their disposal outflank the most well funded political campaigns in history. It's not realistic to think that these large social networks can be put back into the box. Ultimately, consumers like them, even if…

It has nothing to do with consumers. Congress created Google and Facebook with a stroke of the pen in 1996. They can delete them with another stroke of the pen anytime.

If they become liable for user content then yes but you’ll have the entire tech industry lobbying against you.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#149
post #17
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.

> "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…

This is taking the comment out of its context.

Yes its benign taken out of that context.

In the context of social media and tech, this is no longer the case, or it is the case that people are not comfortable with its untrammeled evolution and utilization.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#150
post #47
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.

> He refined it to, (rough quote), "Changes to your behavior and actions are the product" That's true of all media. Doesn't matter if you pay for it or not. Even netflix. Even this post. What is the "documentary" trying to achieve? Change behavior. Who is behind the social media campaign? "Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468533 > That distinction made the…

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