211–220 of 411 posts
Internet is full of Information, good and bad. So is social media. But we should take purpose driven approach whenever we are online. Instead of getting ourselves trapped into psychologically designed products, we should remain focus on our purpose.
The core fallacy is that we’re all “good people” with “the best of intentions” and that we’re all shocked, simply shocked, at the “unintended, negative consequences” of the systems we deliberately designed to be as addictive as possible. i.e.:
- “It is very common,” Rosenstein says, “for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.” - McNamee: “The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences” - “Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive.
The last quote is especially ludicrous. With all due respect to Tristan Harris, if he isn’t being misquoted then he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. I was an engineer/PM/exec at Bebo in the early days, before the $850M AOL exit and the complete catastrophe that followed. We absolutely 100% “deliberately set out to make our products addictive”. Bebo only existed as a serious venture-backed company at all due to extremely aggressive viral flows which were, yes, deliberately designed to get the unsuspecting user to email invite links to every single person in their address book. All of the top social startups were doing the same thing. The ends (better UX + higher valuation thanks to network effects) justified the means (deliberate hijacking of our users’ minds at scale).
But don’t take my word for it. The article’s author proves my point by immediately contradicting himself. Here’s the full quote in context:
Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.
A friend at Facebook told Harris that designers initially decided the notification icon, which alerts people to new activity such as “friend requests” or “likes”, should be blue. It fit Facebook’s style and, the thinking went, would appear “subtle and innocuous”. “But no one used it,” Harris says. “Then they switched it to red and of course everyone used it.”
Okay. So to recap: they decided to use a red button because nobody used the blue one. It was not an unintentional accident. It was based on careful reflection after testing different versions. This is what I call “deliberate”.
Why does this matter?
Because if we aren’t honest with ourselves about the problem, we’re not going to fix it.
How many times are people going to fall for the “oops, I did it again?” excuse from the titans of social tech? Does anyone else remember Facebook platform? The original F8 conference outlined a vision of an open-access social technology platform that would make the world a better place. Instead, we got FarmVille.
The problem isn’t the technology. The problem is that the vision for this technology was always about money and power. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous and ultimately counterproductive if the goal is to fix the system.
I don’t want to come across as overly negative to the author or to the people cited in it. We need more critical discussion of these issues, not less. But fundamentally this problem is due to a lack of integrity in people, not technology. And we’ll never fix the lack of integrity at the heart of the tech world if we keep pretending that none of us knew what we were doing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. I just want to say I did read it. It has a number of concerns that are mixed together in a way that's not entirely consistent, compelling, or even especially new. Consider the idea that democracy is being destroyed because people are helpless addicts of social media. You can make a plausible argument that American society and democracy are going through a troubled spell. But it's a big step to say that's all…
Speaking of the fake news, Internet and the social media are at the same time THE BEST way to verify information. How would one go to independently verify some news article in 80s? There was no quick way to do it, and consequently nobody did it, people just expected it's true if it's in the newspapers (and often it wasn't). Now you just need to google a little or google search the image and the problem solved - or ev…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“ Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. ” — Donald Knuth ( http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html )
(You might wanna remove the they screw up the link.) Email seems to be an analogy for communication or perceiving information, or at least a predecessor of more fast-paced forms of that. Could it be these new forms are so efficient and fast-paced, they overload our brain? Before the TV (which had limitations at start as well), there was telephone and radio. Both were limited. Telephone was expensive (monopoly yada ya…
-- Joseph Wood Krutch
If this is true Then it also presents a unique opportunity. I.e. There should be a very real and observable productivity boost from being able to ignore your phone and working on career building/family-relationship projects. If you can tear yourself from your phone for 3 Hours a day and work on career building projects, you should be able to get far ahead of others in your social circles who can't break the addiction…
I really need to do that again.
It seems like the root cause of all this is advertising. Social media companies need attention grabbing features to draw eyes on ads, makes you wonder if we'd still be facing this dilemma of social media was sites were a paid service.
A great little book on the conflict inherent in advertising-driven media, from 1909:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that but I believe the look on his face was one of joy or at least accomplishment. The media parroted that spin. That said, metaphorically we're already in The Matrix. Humans were just fuel for the system. When I see so many over-weight/obese "consumers" I can't help but think how happy the system is to have them; how well they're fulfilling their role. VR glasses will simply close the loop.
> That said, metaphorically we're already in The Matrix. Humans were just fuel for the system. When I see so many over-weight/obese "consumers" Well, if we go with The Matrix, then these battery specimens so far have only been storing energy, not releasing it.. =)
Consuming (i.e., food, clothing,fuel,etc.) is the "energy" that drives The Matrix. Humans are mere consumers. That's how they're refered to. That's how we refer to ourselves.
The fact that we're choosing ro over-consume to the point of killing ourselves and killing to planet is about as dystopian as it gets.
Sadly VR goggles might be our only hope.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. I just want to say I did read it. It has a number of concerns that are mixed together in a way that's not entirely consistent, compelling, or even especially new. Consider the idea that democracy is being destroyed because people are helpless addicts of social media. You can make a plausible argument that American society and democracy are going through a troubled spell. But it's a big step to say that's all…
Speaking of the fake news, Internet and the social media are at the same time THE BEST way to verify information. How would one go to independently verify some news article in 80s? There was no quick way to do it, and consequently nobody did it, people just expected it's true if it's in the newspapers (and often it wasn't). Now you just need to google a little or google search the image and the problem solved - or ev…
The problem is that Google results are often misleading or incorrect themselves. This is as expected. The sole purpose of Google is to maximize shareholder value. It would be silly to expect it to optimise for any other metric like the fairness or accuracy of results.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/the_rsa/are-digital-technologies-maki...
[2] https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2017/53-the-nine...