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Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#71

Post by [deleted] »

messo wrote: post #62
blueterminal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you propose to solve this problem besides teaching others to take personal responsibility?

Some basic rules and regulations would be great :) This should of course not replace taking personal responsibility, but humans are way to easy to influence / hack to leave it entirely to market forces. Some common ground and basic rules is at the very core of any healthy society or community. Speed limits, traffic lights and bike lanes creates great conditions for a healthy marketplace. An absence of regulations ben…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#72

Post by messo »

blueterminal wrote: post #65
messo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some basic rules and regulations would be great :) This should of course not replace taking personal responsibility, but humans are way to easy to influence / hack to leave it entirely to market forces. Some common ground and basic rules is at the very core of any healthy society or community. Speed limits, traffic lights and bike lanes creates great conditions for a healthy marketplace. An absence of regulations ben…

> Some basic rules and regulations would be great :) Any specific ones? I personally can't think of any at all that would work.

@blueterminal: There are many proposed solutions, some better than others. GDPR is a step in the right direction, it should not be easy or trivial to collect huge amounts of data on people. There is no good rational justification for this behavior. Consumer protections is important and should be extended to how algorithms are used. Fine-grained targeting of ads (political or not) should not be allowed, due to the obvious negative consequences for societies. An expert panel could be given the task to make some sensible compromises.

The irony is that such regulations would ultimately benefit the companies that are currently being criticized, making long term survival more likely. Regular people would be better of too, and I would not need to discuss movies like The Social Dilemma on HN.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#74

Post by auganov »

rapnie wrote: post #35
newscracker wrote: post #8

Though there was hardly anything that I didn't already know , I liked the movie very much for its presentation that drove the point well to people who may not have understood how these platforms work, the privacy implications and the dangers therein. I've already recommended this movie to some more people. As for the cultural impact of the movie, I don't think it's going to be much. Cambridge Analytica had so much ne…

> Don't tell me that Mastodon and Mastodon clones can be replacements for Twitter, Facebook, Facebook groups, Facebook events, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. Of course not. Because Mastodon is a federated microblogging service. As that it is a good alternative for Twitter. My Mastodon client has a better UX than twitter, no algorithmic feed, no ads, no trackers, no distracting recommendations, and - importantly -…

> Much less risk to be de-platformed from your favorite walled-garden for obscure reasons.

Federation does absolutely nothing for this. The risk is probably even higher given how small most of these instances are. Much more likely to run into an admin/moderator.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#75

Post by II2II »

blueterminal wrote: post #61
II2II wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way of promoting personal responsibility is to make people aware of a problem. Some people may be able to figure it out on their own, others find out from someone close to them, yet others will learn of it from other sources (such as documentaries). That being said, I believe that social responsibility also has to play a role. If companies were simply interested in making a product appealing, they would look at h…

> One way of promoting personal responsibility is to make people aware of a problem. Totally agree. Movies like these or like "That Sugar Film" are extremely important. > That being said, I believe that social responsibility also has to play a role. If companies were simply interested in making a product appealing, they would look at how well it is received. When companies start employing psychology, there is a stron…

> They are going to inevitably do that, and that's what we should expect them to do. I don't think there are any solutions to that except building some new services / protocols.

The trouble is interoperability. Creating open social media platforms has been tried before, yet the uptake seems to be those with strong ideological views. You would pretty much have to compel new and existing social media networks to support the services/protocols in order to give people a viable option. I'm not sure that many people are ready for that type of legislation, and I'm not even sure it is a good thing. At least existing social media services have some incentive, may that be the company's reputation or the value of the data itself, to offer some degree of privacy protection.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#76

Post by smeeth »

blueterminal wrote: post #65
messo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some basic rules and regulations would be great :) This should of course not replace taking personal responsibility, but humans are way to easy to influence / hack to leave it entirely to market forces. Some common ground and basic rules is at the very core of any healthy society or community. Speed limits, traffic lights and bike lanes creates great conditions for a healthy marketplace. An absence of regulations ben…

> Some basic rules and regulations would be great :) Any specific ones? I personally can't think of any at all that would work.

Some (including myself) would argue that a repeal of section 230 would go a long way towards solving some of these issues.

A large part of the problem is that social media companies algorithmically serve content to serve their purposes, but are not liable for the consequences of algorithmically served content.

To me, using an algorithm to select what content to show a user is exactly the same thing newspapers do: editorializing. I don't understand why its treated any differently.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#77

Post by timeuser »

It was a good explanation of some issues with current social media platforms. But I don't think that ad driven business models and algorithmic content manipulation are the biggest problems we are facing in all this. The fundamental problem is we humans aren't wired to deal with information and social connection and this scale and speed. It's too easy for just about anyone to find and confirm anything they want to believe and so many others that believe it. On the other side of that coin it's too easy for anyone to reach an audience with whatever they want. Focusing on the algorithms and business models is a bit of hubris and a distraction from the harder problem of empowering mobs. I know people caught up in the conspiracy theories. They aren't finding them through Facebook. Some of it is through YouTube rabbit holes but a lot of it is just websites found through Google (which is really just popularity ranking) or text messages shared between friends & family directly. People have these biases and want to believe these things and the access to these easy tools of connection and communication are amplifying us. Maybe regulation, moderation, filtering and defensive algorithms can help? Maybe we will learn to deal with it better and society will change to accommodate it but it's becoming a rough transition at the least.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#78

Post by DanielBMarkham »

newscracker wrote: post #8

Though there was hardly anything that I didn't already know , I liked the movie very much for its presentation that drove the point well to people who may not have understood how these platforms work, the privacy implications and the dangers therein. I've already recommended this movie to some more people. As for the cultural impact of the movie, I don't think it's going to be much. Cambridge Analytica had so much ne…

>> but I'm sadly not very optimistic about big changes in the next decade or so.

Yeah. I liked it a lot as well, even though there was nothing new.

This documentary is like walking into a crack house and saying "Hey guys! I've got this great PowerPoint presentation on how bad crack is for you!"

Nice idea, I guess, but there's no reason at all I would think it has a chance of accomplishing anything.

These efforts appear, make a splash, and then ... dissolve. I wish it weren't so, but there are some extremely powerful social forces at work here. A TV show ain't going to do much.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#79

Post by zls »

jordwest wrote: post #23

I don't work on algorithm-driven platforms, but I built a tool [1] to help deal with them. I'm very glad to see this reaching the mainstream. Like most people in the tech industry with some understanding of how these things work, I've been increasingly worried about the harms it's doing to myself, others and society at large. Once you've seen the damage it's doing, you can't unsee it. It drives me crazy that others c…

Thanks for NFE!! That and FB Purity have reduced the time I spend Facebook to nothing, except for messages.

I put a bit of effort into finding extensions like this, and Distraction Free Youtube, Inbox when Ready, Amazon Lite, etc this year and I've been shocked and how much less "sticky" I'm finding the internet. Willpower and personal responsibility are great, but better yet is not even having to try.

When I use my phone, the difference is absolutely incredible, since I can't bring this huge suite of extensions with me. and as a result I've been uninstalling apps gradually over time -- you can disable surprisingly core functionality on Android, including the web browser.

Re: Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?

#80

Post by mrow84 »

blueterminal wrote: post #65
messo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some basic rules and regulations would be great :) This should of course not replace taking personal responsibility, but humans are way to easy to influence / hack to leave it entirely to market forces. Some common ground and basic rules is at the very core of any healthy society or community. Speed limits, traffic lights and bike lanes creates great conditions for a healthy marketplace. An absence of regulations ben…

> Some basic rules and regulations would be great :) Any specific ones? I personally can't think of any at all that would work.

I can see two obvious interpretations of what you might be implying:

1. That, because you are unable to think of rules and regulations that would work, there must not be any.

2. That, in order for anyone to legitimately suggest that something might be worth attempting, they must already have a working solution.

Is it one of those two, or something else?

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