Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Internal Facebook Note: Here Is A “Psychological Trick” To Target Teens

buzzfeednews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: Internal Facebook Note: Here Is A “Psychological Trick” To Target Teens

#22

Post by imron »

taneq wrote: post #9

That One Weird Trick: > We eventually identified a psychological trick: > 1. Set the app’s Instagram profile to Private. > 2. Set the bio to something mysterious, e.g., “You’ve been invited to the new RHS app—stay tuned!” > 3. Follow the targeted users. > 4. Wait 24 hours to receive the inbound Follow Requests. (They were curious about our profile so they requested access) > 5. At 4:00PM when school gets out (The Gol…

Students hate them!

Re: Internal Facebook Note: Here Is A “Psychological Trick” To Target Teens

#23

Post by bendoernberg »

s3r3nity wrote: post #16
jeremylylebrown wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when will they learn? What if it's too late for them to claim their attention span back, as they go down the spiral of useless junk/social media? And what about the people who never learn - is it their fault? I suppose if kids/people learn to treat personalized (and well-timed) social media invitations like I treat 3/4ths of the emails I receive, it's not terrible, just more of the same, but at worst, those indiv…

If you want to criticize the entire field of neuromarketing, fine - it's an interesting discussion to have. But I agree with parent commenter in that let's not pretend Facebook is doing anything unique and/or the only ones doing this type of stuff.

What's the case for "billion-dollar companies using neuroscience to manipulate the behavior of individuals is a moral and societal good"? Neuromarketing seems pretty straightforwardly evil to me...

Re: Internal Facebook Note: Here Is A “Psychological Trick” To Target Teens

#24

Post by userbinator »

smt88 wrote: post #19
bm3719 wrote: post #10

In order to reduce the likelihood my child is victimized online by questionable corporate behavior, I've redirected facebook.com to infowars.com in /etc/hosts.

I can't begin to express my horror at the idea of a well-meaning parent funneling their child into a pit of abhorrent fear-mongering, bigotry, and conspiracy theories. I sincerely hope this was a weird joke.

I bet it was a weird joke in the hacker sense --- however "not even wrong" the content of InfoWars is, you have to admit that it is a lot more thought-provoking than Facebook.

Re: Internal Facebook Note: Here Is A “Psychological Trick” To Target Teens

#25

Post by jawarner »

bendoernberg wrote: post #23
s3r3nity wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to criticize the entire field of neuromarketing, fine - it's an interesting discussion to have. But I agree with parent commenter in that let's not pretend Facebook is doing anything unique and/or the only ones doing this type of stuff.

What's the case for "billion-dollar companies using neuroscience to manipulate the behavior of individuals is a moral and societal good"? Neuromarketing seems pretty straightforwardly evil to me...

Are you against marketing in general? What's different about these advanced techniques? I see technology applied to marketing as a natural consequence of business. You have a point that it's not necessarily in the best interest of society at large, but how would we go about regulating the messages businesses are allowed to communicate?

Re: Internal Facebook Note: Here Is A “Psychological Trick” To Target Teens

#26

Post by smt88 »

userbinator wrote: post #24
smt88 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't begin to express my horror at the idea of a well-meaning parent funneling their child into a pit of abhorrent fear-mongering, bigotry, and conspiracy theories. I sincerely hope this was a weird joke.

I bet it was a weird joke in the hacker sense --- however "not even wrong" the content of InfoWars is, you have to admit that it is a lot more thought-provoking than Facebook.

I don't disagree with blocking children from Facebook. Replacing it with InfoWars would be a medicine that's worse than the disease.

Re: Internal Facebook Note: Here Is A “Psychological Trick” To Target Teens

#28

Post by chrischen »

The irony is that this article is using a psychological trick to get us to read basically a non-story about how a startup tried to acquire users using not really a psychological trick.

"Facebook's Teen App" really means "Third Party App Facebook Eventually Acquired"

Re: Internal Facebook Note: Here Is A “Psychological Trick” To Target Teens

#29

Post by saudioger »

The trick itself isn't very shitty, but some of the mentality is:

"Our team obsessed with finding ways to get individual high schools to adopt a product simultaneously."

Seriously? getting a bunch of kids to adopt a product is what you want to obsess about? How about helping companies make a product that's not shit so you don't have to trick kids into using it.

Post reply on HN