so this is basically like “we couldnt raise money and this is how i rationalize it”?
Engineered Addictions
251–260 of 467 posts
Re: Engineered Addictions
#252Are we overthinking this? Old school specialty sites are still around, with topics, categories, and discussions around the whole site emphasis. As someone who likes to grow a little food in a semi-rural area, I enjoy permies.com - every day, a volunteer posts a new question or reposts a relevant topic, depending on the season or recent interest or whatever. But they're not trying to make a billion dollars. Or even a…
This may be a misinterpretation tangent, but I play tennis and do a bit of inline skating, and I find one of the benefits is it provides a grounding to the real, physical world; time away from the constant feed of new shit on the internet. I also get in-person human interaction, which is an additional grounding effect. I've made plenty of friends as a result of both activities, and these friends cover a wide spectrum of personalities and backgrounds and life experiences.
This isn't necessarily turning the clock back 30 years, it's just finding some (of the plenty of) other activities I can enjoy that don't require a screen.
Additionally, for both of these activities, if your mind is elsewhere you can't do it. You have to be 'present'. Tennis is technically difficult to play proper shots (and I'm not particularly good at it, I enjoy the challenge of getting better) and inline skating, well, if you take your mind / eyes off your environment for a second you're putting your bodily integrity at risk. Having that 'presence' or singular focus is also grounding. It clears a lot of the other shit that builds up.
And, not that I feel this viscerally, there's no manipulation of my intent around my activity: I don't get derailed onto a track I wasn't intending to follow.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#253Bogey man staff psychologists aren't to blame for these woes, and they certainly aren't some unstoppable force with reins to all things you do.
The Internet was "addicting" long before there was ever a concept of social networks the way that there is today. I used to sit on my computer from sun down to sun up way back in the mid 90s, and I knew hundreds of other people that did the same thing.
I've been "addicted" to social networks that predate modern capital schemes, such as message boards, IRC, AIM, ICQ, MMORPGs, and so on.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain how that model isn't generalizable while avoiding describing the consequences? I want to know why it can't work not how it fails.
After Stalin's death, the Soviet union wasn't a total failure. And few can argue that China is a total failure today. But they paid a much higher price than what's acceptable. To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population. (This includes Scandinavian countries, which is less common knowledge). Then you can build on the new generation which won't res…
Kind of sounds like what is happening now in the west under our current financial/economic system, albeit slowly by manufacturing crisis's and health problems to whittle down the population.
>To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population
It sounds like you are conflating "common good" with authoritarianism.
Common good happens at the grass roots level and then spreads by consensus. Doesnt mean it will happen on a large scale, esp if there are larger forces at work.
It seems like this is a population size problem to me. Or at least a concentration of large populations in a small area (Cities). Maybe the trick is to spread out the population a bit more and prevent areas from becoming over populated somehow.
I don't have the data in front of me right now, but there are some sources that say when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in.
Thus this creates social circles that try to gain power for powers sake and do not contribute to society.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
People pay for software all the time. Hell I pay $30/month for a fucking email client (Superhuman). But no one has tried it for a social network. I think the problem is that people think a social network is worthless unless you hit Twitter scale, but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work. People are now saying that Discord is being enshittified, right on schedule. Maybe there's an oppo…
Ning, Substack, OnlyFans, Nostr, mirror.xyz, Farcaster are paid social networks, among others. It's been tried, with varying degrees of success based on user base. But people are cheap as fuck. Even here we post links to archive.is to get around paywalls (which rubs me the wrong way). Every time YouTube Premium come up the comments are full of people saying they won't pay up.
I’m not going to pay for something and still be the product. These sites would have to be fundamentally different from what they are today, for me to justify paying for them, starting with: they should not be collecting, selling, or profiting off of data about me. They should also not be deciding for me what ways I can use their products.
People bemoan “nobody’s willing to pay for an online newspaper” and that’s true: they won’t pay for them in their current user-monetizing form. Same with YouTube: I’m not going to pay for an ad-free YouTube in its current form: with auto-playing next videos, algorithmic recommendations, Shorts, and sponsored content embedded in some creators’ videos. Give me a different, better product that does not try to monetize me, and I might pay for it.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#256Last paragraph seems to speak without speaking. > We built these platforms. We can build better ones. But only if we're willing to abandon the economic models that made the current ones inevitable. Until we change those incentives, every attempt to fix social media will become part of the problem it’s trying to solve. We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar compan…
He's not. Anything he has in mind is socially unacceptable and he knows it. We'd all love to rebuild economics from the ground up. But as soon as you try you realize that everyone has a different idea and they can't agree on anything.
And then there's also https://preview.redd.it/hv628lvgpdva1.jpg?width=1574&format=...
Which I'm pretty sure is an unsolved problem?
Re: Engineered Addictions
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.
Humans don't generally have the same needs, and to the extent they do they're competing over limited resources. At one extreme you get theories like communism or socialism that treat humans as disposable cattle to be murdered or starved when they stand in the way of whatever the party leaders decide is the common good. The common good is something that has to be worked out deliberatively and is more like taking the r…
The word "Common Good" has a specific meaning. It steams from the word "Common" which means the people that share common values at our most basic levels, and "Good" means whats best for the people that share these common values.
What you are talking about is imposed self-interest at the level of the population from one or a small population that do not represent the common good. Not the same thing IMHO.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People pay for software all the time. Well obviously some people would pay. The hurdle that a company needs to clear is getting enough people to pay to support both an engineering staff and the infrastructure costs. Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work…
Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work is prohbitively high. Is this really so? Let's try doing the math: you're describing a distributed team of maybe 10 people, likely less. Let's assume you need $600K/year to run this business (is this the right number?…
The hard part is how to acquire that 10000 paying users and how to make them stay.
I think a the problem is for every social media user who finds it valuable enough to pay, there are ten more who don’t use it enough justify paying. And if you only serve the first group but not the later, then the first group will just get bored and move back to X or Instagram, or they just ditch social media entirely and move into private group chats. And if you serve the later then your operation expenses will multiply.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work? Commenters all across the internet will say they’d pay good money for a site that does something specific that sounds like a good idea. Then when the site is built, you will discover that they will not, in fact, pay any money for it at all. You will continue to add the features they request and the goalposts will continue to move. Social networks are even mo…
Kagi just passed 50k users: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=members They claim to be profitable, but the TAM for services people are used to thinking of as "free" is small.
Given how many complaints about Google search you regularly see on this website and elsewhere, you would think there will be a lot more people willing to pay for non shitty search. And yet Kagi does not have enough paying users to fill a football stadium. To me, this validates GP’s point about how people love to talk about paying for services and then proceed to not pay for any services.
Re: Engineered Addictions
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
And businesses as a whole produce positive externalities, as intended, which is why we continue to allow them to exist.
Only when accounting is done without calculating ecological cost, including human quality of life.
Human quality of life tends to be pretty shit without them though, and that is ignoring all of the competitively a necessity "choices" where not doing so is literally suicidal. Not adopting early agriculture and settling down leads to nomadic hunter gatherers being outnumbered and genocided by sedentary farmers sorts of necessity. Refusing to mine and pollute means bad things happen to you when you encounter metallic armed and armored foes.