41–50 of 349 posts
It was a great workplace, but I don't think it was adding much value to the world.
Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive. Including cheeseburgers and fun video games. >Most alarming is the “internet points”. On Reddit, this is called Karma. On Twitter, it’s likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score displays the community’s overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can vote! T…
Your whole comment is a rant. At least the article you're complaining about had some points to make.
Much of what the author mentions has its roots in behavioural addiction research. In particular, there are many parallels with the gambling industry, and how it profits from maximising user engagement and potential for addiction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have an actual example website/app that does this “less addictive” thing?
Reddit's redesign. 'Less addictive' for me. I'm sure there must be some target audience for whom this is more addictive, but I'm not the one, I just want to read the comments of the thread I choose myself in peace.
Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive. Including cheeseburgers and fun video games. >Most alarming is the “internet points”. On Reddit, this is called Karma. On Twitter, it’s likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score displays the community’s overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can vote! T…
> I don't think it's the reddit admins It's actually the mods. A select small number of people are mods on the top 50 or so subreddits by size. They can control what gets posted, what gets upvoted and what gets silently censored. It's also an (unpaid) full time job, it's naive to think they're not monetising their power in any way.
Mod means nothing -- I'm a reddit mod. Admin is paid employee of reddit with completely different access level. A planted story by a mod is still within the grounds of "astroturfing" accusing reddit admins is another order of magnitude of corruption higher. Like I said I don't think reddit admins are doing it but the author does seem to imply it.
I'd add that algorithmic feeds are another part of the triad (quartet?), and probably the worst offender. Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time, a distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement wi…
I think this is how AI takes over humanity. Humans are so short-sighted, we don't even need a superintelligence to outsmart us. We happily stand by and collect profits while letting the AI do whatever it wants. Really, we need regulation that makes companies care about side-effects of their AI technology.
For instance, there are cases you can point to where some normal person on Twitter with a couple dozen followers posted the wrong thing, it blew up into an international story, and they eventually got fired from their real-world job for it. Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? In a lot of cases it was the algorithm: for whatever reason that tweet drew engagement, so a massive spotlight was put on this mostly-private individual.
In a real way that's an example of an AI system deciding to take away someone's livelihood.
I always thought it was pretty obvious when YouTube rolled out screen time reminders. It had nothing to do with anything but minimizing liability in case the general public ever catches on to what they are doing to kids mental health. What’s hilarious is they probably have some “data retention policy” and will get away with it. I guess it’s why SV engineers want to care about social issues so much. When you’re up in…
How is this that much different to similar "concerns" about kids watching to much tv back in the 60's 70's etc.
Big TV’s goal is to broadcast as engaging as possible material to a general audience. This is broad and therefore not very addictive / effective.
Big Tech’s goal is to broadcast as engaging as possible material to an individual. This is specific and therefore very addictive / effective.
Regardless that the goal is the same, one is a heavier hitter, and we should have regulations to protect people against the bigger punches.
Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive. Including cheeseburgers and fun video games. >Most alarming is the “internet points”. On Reddit, this is called Karma. On Twitter, it’s likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score displays the community’s overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can vote! T…
Also holds for the edit-compile-test cycle, I suppose.
Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive. Including cheeseburgers and fun video games. >Most alarming is the “internet points”. On Reddit, this is called Karma. On Twitter, it’s likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score displays the community’s overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can vote! T…
I find it interesting that so many people in the world have a knee jerk reaction specifically against doing this. Especially when it comes to tactics around manipulation. The fact is, everyone is vulnerable to it. You don't spend all your time worrying about it mind, but it behooves one to evaluate and maintain a sense of perspective. No, Reddit probably isn't always actively engaging in some direct form of manipulation.
Oh wait, yes they are, they advertise, and they moderate. Both of those are active measures to shape discourse, the difference in whether this is positive or negative tends to come into play based on who the shaping of discourae benefits, and who it maligns, and where you are in respect to that divide. They aren't a hands off neutral platform.
The more interesting article, in my mind, would have been one less focused on particular tech, and moreso the role of manipulation in the modern world.
Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive. Including cheeseburgers and fun video games. >Most alarming is the “internet points”. On Reddit, this is called Karma. On Twitter, it’s likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score displays the community’s overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can vote! T…
Bad enough they are handing out free drugs. On top of that look at the behavior it produces. Algo amplification of all the content that generates polarization, misinfo, mob justice etc is not possible without a corral of people addicted to and conditioned by the Like/Click/Upvote/View/Follower count.
When their behavior is unproductive. They point at their Like counter as validation. Thats how Trump end ups thinking he is doing something productive.
I did an internship with a very profitable Swedish mobile game before the pandemic, and it was really interesting to see the doublethink: everyone knew we were making a drug, but people avoided speaking of it in that way. It was always "our most engaged players readily spend on in-game items", and never "the most addicted users spend money so they can continue playing" It was a great workplace, but I don't think it w…
The constant rationalization around the office was basically something like: "They're paying for fun, it would otherwise be drinks/movies/real gambling/etc, we're just a different medium". This, of course, completely ignored the boatload of psychological exploitation tricks that we used to keep people playing (and paying). The game mechanics were literally a rigged slot machine. The meta-game was designed to constantly tantalize you with something just out of reach. The monetization was high-pressure, time-sensitive, and used false discounts to increase value ("Get this $20.00 pack for $1.99! Only for the next 60 minutes!")
It got very draining after a while, and I'm much happier now that I've left the industry.