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Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

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Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#201

Post by babuskov »

blunderkid wrote: post #16

There should be only one regulation for fb, display following warning on all pages/screens: Statutory Warning: This product is specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction so you are guided down a slippery slope of over consumption & that is how this company makes money. Overuse of this product is known to cause - anxiety, depression, low self esteem, constant craving for attention, short attention spans, inab…

You could apply the same label to many other entertainment products and websites as well.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#202

Post by Nasrudith »

ianopolous wrote: post #106

The one regulation that could save us from Facebook would be to mandate an open API. That would solve the network effect problem for new social networks and enable real competition.

That would be a mixed bag in several ways - while good for making a diverse ecosystem it would mean Cambridge Analytica style abuses would be the norm and rely upon user savviness for security. In a lowest common denominator base like Facebook - that won't work well.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#203

Post by rhinoceraptor »

gargron wrote: post #92
macspoofing wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Like maybe, a social network that doesn’t manipulate us, or scan our faces without permission, or build dark profiles of everyone, or read our personal messages, or Heh. Fat chance. The next generation of social networks will be coming from China because China is the perfect incubator for this category of software. You'll yet wish for Facebook.

The next generation of social networks is already here. It's decentralized and open-source. Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, loads more, all part of the same network, the fediverse.

I'm not sure it's really possible to launch new decentralized protocols anymore, and get any kind of mainstream traction. We have HTTP and email basically by historical accident. Even RSS was shown to really just be an implementation detail of Google Reader, and there wasn't enough of an organic ecosystem outside of that for it to survive.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#204

Post by raziel2p »

wolco wrote: post #196
raziel2p wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If facebook only shows content you agree with, it's creating social bubbles where everyone is cheering each other on and criticism is not allowed, and you end up with anti-vax groups. And if facebook emphasizes content you engage with (albeit negatively), you end up with anecdotes like yours. Facebook is a tool, use it as such rather than being entitled and feeling disempowered. You can hide people from your timeline…

Entitled is a loaded word. That makes it seem like the user is unreasonable and he should take whatever facebook gives him. Be quiet you don't matter, you are lucky they allowed you on the platform. Is it unreasonable to expect facebook to be able to determine the tone of the conversation. They probably already do this or are in the process of researching this. This is a great feature and I look forward to getting co…

I absolutely think the user is unreasonable in this context. what about people who actually enjoy discussing other people's conflicting opinions? (maybe hard to believe that exists any more, even moreso on facebook, but still...) how would you allow this positive engagement to keep happening but avoid OP's example of negative engagement?

the tools are there on facebook to control the content of your feed to quite an extent. if you don't use this and demand that facebook change its system to adjust the feed for everyone based on your personal tastes, yes I think that's entitled.

not saying I like or even use Facebook, but still.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#205

Post by Gigablah »

tyfon wrote: post #169
dageshi wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it is in its format. Like Digg and Reddit before it, the addictive part comes from a constant stream of new "stuff" for us to consume. To anyone looking at us pre reddit/digg many of us would look "addicted" to HN based on our usage of it.

Yes I won't deny the format is addicting, it's just not specifically designed to optimise addiction like certain other sites.

If that were the case, they'd hide the karma score.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#206

Post by raziel2p »

FriendlyNormie wrote: post #152
raziel2p wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If facebook only shows content you agree with, it's creating social bubbles where everyone is cheering each other on and criticism is not allowed, and you end up with anti-vax groups. And if facebook emphasizes content you engage with (albeit negatively), you end up with anecdotes like yours. Facebook is a tool, use it as such rather than being entitled and feeling disempowered. You can hide people from your timeline…

Anti-vaxxers are relentlessly criticized everywhere. They don’t have a protective social bubble. The criticism they receive from people they assume are brainwashed idiots only strengthens their beliefs.

the reason they're able to dismiss criticism is because there's a bubble of people and content (blogposts, videos) that are being fed to them via social media, gradually convincing them that they are right. if social media like Facebook showed a more "objective" collection of content in your feed, you would end up with <1% anti-vax, flat-earth, climatechange-denial etc. content, and it becomes much harder to hold on to this conviction.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#207

Post by EGreg »

celdon25 wrote: post #170
EGreg wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, we are addicted because of the tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where the commons is human attention and the mechanisms are Notifications and Updates from Your Contacts. If Facebook doesn’t do it, then LinkedIn or Twitter will. So Facebook is like Microsoft - do whatever it takes to win.

If you disable types of notifications or otherwise remove sources of notifications on Facebook, and those are the notifications that you normally get, Facebook will start giving you new notifications for things that you weren't getting notifications for before. Things like "We have a new friend suggestion for you". Facebook is engineered to give you a steady stream of notifications, and as far as I know, there's no w…

Well, you are right. I am simply pointing out that Facebook is not alone in this. Even small sites like Alignable spam you with notifications like “{{PersonYouNeverHeardOf}} has looked at your profile, you’re being noticed!” in an effort to try to get people, and it works!

We have known this since 2011 when we started Qbix to build an open source alternative — see https://qbix.com/people for a list of how it is different and more responsible. I hope other companies take on board these principles. Our tagline is “Empowering People. Uniting Communities”. So I feel passionate about this.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#208

Post by dmix »

dontdoitpls wrote: post #197
skohan wrote: post #184

Classic regulatory capture. Once you're big enough lobby effectively, get legislators to pull the ladder up from behind you. This reminds me: I was working at a small health services startup in 2009. We had a good relationship with a number of small-scale healthcare providers, and when the ARRA was passed mandating that all providers move to electronic health records, we evaluated the concept of getting into that bus…

Blows my mind how many people ignore this problem when they demand more regulations.

They always talk about the big evil Facebooks of the world when they demand regulations that hit entire industries and mostly just keep the same big companies in power.

The regulations never just target the big firms who caused the individual incidents that caused the outrage or the individuals only doing bad behaviour.

Nor does the regulations go away as industries adapt, change for the better, or get disrupted over the course of decades the same old laws apply, further keeping old entrenched powers in place and their negative anti-consumer behaviour which markets were attempting to correct.

It's the story of modern America industry. And it always starts with good intentions.

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#209

Post by 8note »

raziel2p wrote: post #135
josephg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what basis are you claiming that that most teams at FB are optimising the product for well being as opposed to ‘engagement’ (addiction)? Do you have first hand knowledge? Do you know the people involved? Do you have citations? I stopped using FB a few years ago after I had an argument with a friend on the platform. The algorithm decided to keep showing us one anothers’ content - I assume so we would both write mor…

If facebook only shows content you agree with, it's creating social bubbles where everyone is cheering each other on and criticism is not allowed, and you end up with anti-vax groups. And if facebook emphasizes content you engage with (albeit negatively), you end up with anecdotes like yours. Facebook is a tool, use it as such rather than being entitled and feeling disempowered. You can hide people from your timeline…

and if they optimized for me clicking away from Facebook, and visiting less?

both the examples you've listed are still with the goal of having people spend more time on facebook

Re: Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

#210

Post by danans »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #130
dbspin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's true that social problems are complex and multivariate, what gets missed in the American context is the importance of virtuous and viscous circles. So for example the net cost of normalising college debt, and the regulatory exceptions to bankruptcy etc around this form of debt, is not simply a generation entering the workforce in debt. It's massive concrete measurable inequality between those who can affor…

>We can disagree about the causes of social issues in America, and their solutions; but its inarguable that there has been no effort to systematically test and deploy policy interventions at a national level in any kind of evidence based way. Why do we need to do these things at the national level? The federal government is intentionally not set up to be able do these kinds of things. Doing these things at the federa…

> Using policy to mitigate social problems does seem to work well at the state level (for any given problem there seems to always be a state that's doing a good job tackling the problem)

In the case of healthcare, the coverage standards, cost controls, revenue collection and payments must be handled at the federal level, otherwise you will end up with huge differences in benefits between state programs, which will result in similar issues seen with insurance companies today.

For example, today, insurance companies are often loathe to pay for expensive-upfront but cheaper long-term procedures because the typical time for customer retention is correlated with how long their customers stay at their job. They don't want to pay for the procedure that their competitor is going to get the cost savings from down the road.

There is nothing to stop an unregulated US-state run universal health system from doing the same thing.

Also, because US states by definition have open borders, it would encourage health care arbitrage in densely populated border areas, which would overstress the systems of states with better health coverage, leading to inevitable legal conflict between those states.

This is not to say that states can't play a role in the day-to-day local administration of healthcare benefits - just as they do with Medicare today - but the baselines have to be defined at a federal level.

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