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The Social Dilemma

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Re: The Social Dilemma

#291

Post by bickeringyokel »

barbs wrote: post #104
ffggvv wrote: post #39

i tried to watch the movie and i honestly don’t get the hype. It really seems to be confirmation bias where those who already hate social media just rave about the movie. and i actually think it did a very poor job at explaining things to people completely unfamiliar with the issues. i wonder if it will change a single mind or just preach to the choir

Speaking from personal experience - I watched the film with my girlfriend and a lot of it was news to her. It's changed her relationship with social media and technology. I also suggested it to a friend who was pretty addicted to Facebook and believed a lot of conspiracy theories. It's made him realise how FB has given him (and others) a distorted picture of reality. He's now disconnected from Facebook and only keepi…

This movie hasn't been out long, you sure your friends won't be up to their old ways in a month or two?

Re: The Social Dilemma

#292

Post by pietroppeter »

An interesting thread that points a couple of issues in the movie: https://twitter.com/vaishnavi/status/1307455391249301504

Summarizing: the people interviewed were not the one who should have been interviewed. People from in house policy temas and others are much more knowledgeable about this and have been raising these types of issues all along. It would also have helped to show a much more diverse picture than a bunch of repented tech bros.

At the end of the thread, two additional posts reinforce and expand the message:

https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/social-dilemma-netflix-...

https://librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/flamethr...

Re: The Social Dilemma

#293

Post by ForHackernews »

rbanffy wrote: post #68
ForHackernews wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. The free software movement has been highlighting the danger of software that works for its authors rather than its users for 35 years. If these very intelligent people are going to claim they didn't understand what they they were doing, my only response is: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

These companies are not software. They are services. Services people engage with voluntarily. When you engage with a company, any company, you can be sure your incentives are not completely aligned. In the case of social networks, the misalignments are particularly troubling.

> These companies are not software.

Oh whoops, you better tell Big Goog so they can stop paying all those expensive software engineers.

I'm sorry but the apologist arguments on this thread are really laughable: "Nobody could have known!", "It's not software!", "Young teens can just voluntarily not use the software (sorry--"service") that all their friends are on!"

Re: The Social Dilemma

#294

Post by nothis »

gundmc wrote: post #17
codysc wrote: post #3

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.

> "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…

Yea, but it's never spelled out like this.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#295

Post by ricardo81 »

Nothing new in it for the HN crowd I suppose.

For me, privacy is the core issue, though "free" is part of the problem. A social network charging a dollar a year wouldn't be great for investors but would essentially pay for itself. (As a Brit, I'd be more inclined to pay that dollar than the BBC license fee at ~170x the expense for all the "soft power" it has.).

With the monetary dial removed, filter bubbles are still a problem. I'm thinking it would be good if more algorithms could be used to counterweight a persons predilections. Show me stuff based on my interactions/friends/groups I'm in/people like me/opinions I hold/mood I'm in, but counterweight it with things/people that are potentially opposite or more neutral. Perhaps associate with groups of ideas for this cause, i.e. political belief, people at my place of work, people that visit the same places I do. It could be totally transparent, viewed, and even possibly reset.

I think the documentary was good for the general public to me made aware of how Facebook/Google, pretty much all "big tech" is aggressively mining data, some more than others.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#296

Post by cassianoleal »

yesenadam wrote: post #243
cassianoleal wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in most Latin languages there isn't a separate word. At least in Portuguese and Spanish, both advertisement and propaganda are simply "propaganda".

Not true. In spanish, "ad" is usually anuncio , or sometimes comercial or publicidad . Propaganda can also be used, but is less common than those i think, I've never heard it used. I once read an original edition of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) with its title in a jaunty typeface on the cover, before the word had a negative connotation. Pic of its cover here: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/edward--bernays/p…

I have definitely heard "propaganda" in South American Spanish-speaking countries. Perhaps a regional quirk?

Re: The Social Dilemma

#297

Post by dwd »

codysc wrote: post #3

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.

So...essentially the product they sell is your metadata; which is also the data the surveillance state finds valuable.

Re: The Social Dilemma

#298

Post by bickeringyokel »

un_montagnard wrote: post #97

I watched it last night. It's pretty good for non HN crowd that might not know this already. But I personally felt that they forgot the most important question: what pushed algorithm to recommend what they are recommending? Why are Youtube's rabbit holes more likely to be conspiracy theory related and/or inflammatory content? In the beginning, the algorithm was probably equally pushing for this type of content and mo…

A large amount of my recommended YouTube videos are educational, but I subscribe to a lot of nature docs, history etc, I don't think the algorithm dislikes this kind of content for me. So I guess the answer to your question is, we can?

Re: The Social Dilemma

#300

Post by Shinchy »

Kosirich wrote: post #282

Does anyone see a tipping point or an event that could in scale drive people from social media of Facebook, Twitter. By that I don't mean to a competitor.(perhaps a naive question) Also, is there a common denominator among people here who have stopped using social media? I mean, other than self awareness, retrospective ect. which people here generally have more than the average population. What was the "I need to red…

I could possibly see the upcoming US Election causing a bit of an exodus from Social Media platforms as more people become drained by the fatiguing constant flow of extreme views from both sides (mind, I thought that last time).

I will say the big thing for me that made me put my mobile device down (of which I now barely use) was the sheer quantity of hours a day I was wasting away looking at it - this was being amplified by Covid. My thing was getting worked up by stupidity or hateful opinions on Twitter or Reddit (obviously the platforms helped out). The more I looked the more I got annoyed, seeking out arguments if you will. It wasn't until I just stepped back and realised that I'm seeking the opinions of a tiny tiny fraction of a global population that I realised how stupid it was. There are 7 billion people in the world, you can find any opinion you want - it's foolish to spend your day hunting these down and what's worse is that it starts to warp your own personal view away from who you really are. I think the catalyst was Covid for making me realise this, I think more people will start waking up to the same reality.

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