Roger McNamee: I invested early in Google and Facebook and regret it
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
I invested in Google and Facebook years before their first revenue and profited enormously. I was an early adviser to Facebook’s team, but I am terrified by the damage being done by these Internet monopolies.
Facebook and Google get their revenue from advertising, the effectiveness of which depends on gaining and maintaining consumer attention. Borrowing techniques from the gambling industry, Facebook, Google and others exploit human nature, creating addictive behaviors that compel consumers to check for new messages, respond to notifications, and seek validation from technologies whose only goal is to generate profits for their owners.
The people at Facebook and Google believe that giving consumers more of what they want and like is worthy of praise, not criticism. What they fail to recognize is that their products are not making consumers happier or more successful. Like gambling, nicotine, alcohol or heroin, Facebook and Google — most importantly through its YouTube subsidiary — produce short-term happiness with serious negative consequences in the long term. Users fail to recognize the warning signs of addiction until it is too late.
I know just the person...
Something like RescueTime baked into iOS would be Apple's greatest productivity feature.
Advances in food production means that the proportion of people starving and undernourished is lower than ever. It also means that, for the first time, excess food is a problem for more than just kings. It would be kind of crazy to complain that these advances in food production are per se a bad thing because they enabled obesity. They're just a tool that accelerate both good and bad uses.
It was already possible to feed the idle, addiction-prone part of your mind with channel-surfing and People magazine. The Internet has accelerated this possibility by making everything about access to content more efficient, but describing efficiency solely as "making access to bad stuff" more efficient makes no sense.
To me it seems similar to blaming an advance in fuel efficiency for making it cheaper for bank robbers to get to their targets. It's true, but also missing the point.
Our economy is intertwined enough that "your actions somewhere down the line may be making it easier for someone to make choices that ruin their lives" is probably true of literally every single person. If you work on a product making low-skill hiring more efficient, you're also lowering McDonald's costs and making it even harder for people with unhealthy relationships with food to resist, and thus "you may be ruining some people's lives".
It's so broad a claim that it's utterly meaningless.
If you started your own site there's absolutely no way you could be profitable competing on both hosting costs and payout to creators.
I broadly agree that creators hugely benefit from these platforms, but that really doesn't seem to be what they're optimizing on imho. And you basically admitted they're a monopoly with that final statement.
Having a low cost infrastructure for video streaming and good advertising deals is not a monopoly, it's an investment.
How could the system incentivize companies like Facebook and Google to use prosocial utility functions in their recommendation engines?
e.g. a video recommendation engine that on default settings suggests videos it thinks will cause the viewer to feel satisfied and change activities if it thinks it will improve their overall wellbeing to stop watching videos now.
Facebook allows you to reconnect with old friends more easily or meet new people in person.
YouTube has some of the best resources to learn software development, math, history, and really anything for free.
There are pro's and con's for every company.
On the Facebook front, there I agree 100%.
I suppose that's a reasonable assumption to make about the average user of anything (myself included).
Yes, it is addictive, but not in the same manipulative way that Facebook is.
I watched my nephews, for 20 minutes, simply throw blocks into a box and say "throw and a miss! Throw and a hit!" It was mindless and ritualistic, and frankly we should frightened of this wooden blocks trend. Don't get me started on the game they call "Tag". /s
I feel like the word "addiction" is losing it's meaning. Just because someone likes something and continues to do it doesn't mean that it's an addiction.
// edit: And really, think about your own experience with video games. Sure, we all played video games at the expense of our homework and conversation with my parents. But who could blame me? Middle & high school cater to the students with room-temp IQs, my parents just rambled about the economy and weather and the boring things I talk about now, and I lacked any challenge in my life expect punking noobs in Starcraft.
It's less the homework and more your ability to interact with your neighbor without a reward.
Kids really might stay up all night playing with "addictive" wooden blocks. They might spend 10+ hours a day with the blocks. They may have violent mood swings when you take the blocks away.
But wooden blocks...suck. The types of entertainment kids have had access to in the past is nothing like what they will have access to in the future.
When I was 6-10, I had an unhealthy relationship with comic books. I stole them. I read them to the detriment of education. My parents just had to manage my addiction, because beating it was impossible. And these were just ultimately just crappy drawings on crappier paper.
When my child is 6-10, he will be able to put on a VR Headset and actually BE a comic book superhero. If children can be overwhelmed by a wooden blocks obsession, how the fuck are they supposed to incorporate the type of stimulus into their lives we are now building for them?
If we're at a point where we consider hours of toy unboxing videos and watching adults play with toys on a little screen developmentally equivalent to hours of playing with physical objects or reading comic books, I guess I give up on this whole humanity experiment.
I think that if the games are structured correctly they can be pro-social. I've been playing PUBG and I've made a handful of friends by joining a squad where I only know one person, and meeting the other people, and then next time I see them on Discord saying hello.
I suppose the other parenting fear is that kids who are addicted to amazing games/VR/youtube won't have the drive to accomplish things in life? I think that games can, to some extent, teach and reward goal-setting. I bait-and-switched Youtube for Games in my previous comment, and I am concerned with kids who watch TV for multiple hours a day, so... the youtube/toddler criticism from kodt may be pretty on-point.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if at least a little boredom in a kid's life is important for character development :-/
Fast forward a few decades and I've found a nice niche in hardware supply chain. I think play that becomes an obsession can indeed have healthy effects that aren't immediately apparent at the time, but I share your skepticism about YouTube.
Now our sugar is being upgraded to crack-cocaine. The Amish are always going to be wrong, until they are right.
I work in Las Vegas, where we had to put VERY strict rules on the gaming industry to prevent them from absolutely destroying large chunks of the population (more than they already do). I'm sure that someday our government will have to step in and protect the vulnerable in our society from the Candy Crush of the next decade.
I've been thinking a lot lately about much our industry seems to be trying to leverage addiction. It's certainly not just Facebook and Google -- it seems to be happening throughout consumer technology. For example, video games seem carefully optimized to turn us into Skinner mice, and most television apps have adopted the annoying "play the next episode unless the user opts out in X seconds" feature. (Even Plex, although I'm not sure what they're getting out of it.)
Ultimately, I suppose it's up to the consumer to resist the addiction while availing themselves of the value provided by these products, in much the same way that most of us can enjoy and appreciate beer, wine, and spirits without becoming alcoholics. But thinking about these things is making me reconsider what sort of projects I'd like to work on.
EDIT: Obligatory Paul Graham article on the subject: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
In my more pessimistic/imaginative moments, I feel like after the coming apocalypse the internet will be banned, Butlerian Jihad-style; long-range communication technologies only for the elite in strictly regulated contexts, because too much access for the individual causes addiction and madness. To be clear, I don't think this is a good outcome (as with the Industrial Revolution, technology has huge long-term benefits if the terrible costs can be overcome) but I think there needs to be a really serious change in how we think about communication technology, and part of that means acknowledging its harms.
It looks like it's also summarized as a TED talk (I've not seen it) https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_...
I remember seeing this guy playing "point and click" games, and they looked so pointless...
To be fair, this is how broadcast/cable TV always worked.
We've gotten caught out several times watching 'just one more episode' because there was a cliffhanger only to discover to our frustration that it was a double cliffhanger.
It would have been better for us if we had saved the previous episode for another day instead of going down the rabbit hole.
This should be a hint that every feature that makes a product easier to use isn't some nefarious anti-consumer plot: sometimes they're made with the intent to, uh, make the product easier to use.
> Ultimately, I suppose it's up to the consumer to resist the addiction while availing themselves of the value provided by these products, in much the same way that most of us can enjoy and appreciate beer, wine, and spirits without becoming alcoholics. But thinking about these things is making me reconsider what sort of projects I'd like to work on.
As contrarian as I come across in these threads, I don't disagree with the concept that the user doesn't bear 100% of the responsibility for an addictive environment. What I do find odd is how incredibly common the view is across HN that the user bears 0% responsibility, and that they're just a hapless, helpless victim of forces beyond their control.
There are some positive things in life that require maturity and self-control to enjoy safely: I like alcohol less than most of my friends, but I don't go around railing against drinkers and blaming alcohol dealers for being exploitative. I like other drugs a lot more, and I'm well-aware that, just like alcohol, enjoying them comes with the responsibility to be safe about them.
Spamming me from a 2 factor auth number to use your product is a new low I've never encountered elsewhere.
Once a company gets going, even if it is discovered there are long term issues with their products, they will be hard to compete against.
What were these? Just the stimulant effect of nicotine?
Some of my friends started smoking during final high school exams to combat stress and fatigue.
He says that and then proceeds to provide absolutely nothing to back up such an extraordinary claim (emphasis on the serious negative + long-term part).
This article reeks of some terrible combination of nanny state authoritarianism and trite moral lecturing about proper use of one's time (something that was more common a century or more ago when the US was overflowing with lecturing about how to live a 'proper' life).
Want to know why people are spending 50 minutes per day on Facebook? Because for those people it's better than the alternative, their lives are devoid of anything better to do with that time (specifically the person doesn't want to do anything else with that time, after all it's their free will choice). That's the same reason those same people were previously watching four or more hours of TV each night (which they frequently pay/paid a lot of money to do). They want to watch hours of tv, they want to spend 50 minutes on Facebook - who are you to tell them how to live?
Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Kik, Viber, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, email, text messages, etc. People want to hyper socialize, you can think it's unhealthy if you like, you still don't get to determine how people live and you never will.
I signed up for Youtube Red, their commercial free subscription. I fill my subscriptions with topics I want to learn more about. It is easier to curate content on Youtube than Facebook.
I would pay Facebook $2-5/month not to show me advertisements.
I'd expand that beyond ads alone, to have the payment prevent tracking, profiling, "filter bubbling", and sometimes emotional manipulation experiments. [1] But that model won't scale, and it wouldn't offer Facebook growing value over time either.
You could still have a free service that displays ads.
Apple's track record of not needing to track me or sell my personal information to prop up its business models, because they launch products that have real "get the end users to pay money for it" business models, is one reason why I stick with their products.
If you put a monthly fee for ad free service, probably your mostly valuable customers (those error m with money to spend) are first to switch.
Facebook can probably generate vast amounts of profits from the users if it manages to be part of the actual transaction, not just an ad platform. The same kind offer thing Google was planning with Google Checkout. IIRC the idea was they would not charge for clicks, but would get payment of customer actually makes the purchase.
Think about Facebook first creating for you the urge to buy something (by manipulating you feed) and then selling the thing or taking their cut off the transaction.
Same applies to Big Macs, pizza, slushies, Cheetos, TV, seating, laziness, political pundits, marijuana, ...
In the end it is all about caveat emptor: is up to the customer to decide.
> In the end it is all about caveat emptor: is up to the customer to decide.
In a balanced world, where choices are relatively evenly spread, this may be true.
In a world where the number of harmful choices far exceed the number of healthful ones, and the harmful ones are much more profitable (and so promoted more heavily), free choice becomes a different proposition.
However much willpower, intelligence, and savviness we think we have, we get tripped up by our firmware defects, even when we know they are there and try to be wary[1].
Deliberately exposing ourselves to proven brain hacks and thinking we are immune and have real choices is ... inadvisable.
Anyone who is diabetic (or simply overweight) and tries to buy or eat food that is not harmful to the pancreas will appreciate how eternally vigilant one must be to avoid the cleverly hidden food label traps, and how choice is manipulated, cynically and incessantly, by the US food industry.
Extrapolate this to most US industries, and re-evaluating "choice" may be a depressing task.
[1]: Thinking: Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
EDIT: typo
Without realizing it - his short sightedness is exactly the root of the problem he's complaining about.
Also, everyone is susceptible to manipulation of their dopamine reward system, no matter how robust. The impact of effect varies from person to person.