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.
The Social Dilemma
141–150 of 421 posts
Re: The Social Dilemma
#142Earlier 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.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#143A 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…
Re: The Social Dilemma
#144I 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…
Re: The Social Dilemma
#145I 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.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#146This 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
#147Earlier 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.
Re: The Social Dilemma
#148Re: The Social Dilemma
#149I 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…
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
#150I 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…