Skinner Marketing: We're the Rats, and Facebook Likes Are the Reward (2013)
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I feel like a broken record for saying this, but the solution to this problem along with most social problems is education. A well educated population will know when they're being taken advantage of and punish the actors accordingly. It's no surprise that the most effective way to control people is to prevent them from being well educated.
Every mindlessly ambitious corporate exec knows the simplest way to get ahead is to do something the other guy isn't ready to do. You can't compete if you don't have these kind of characters on your bench to do the dirty work. And every company has them and many are lead by them.
The incentives for bad action will change only when the global consumption mega-machine hits some sort of breaking point. Otherwise there are too many good lawyers and congressmen already in place to keep you out of jail.
Education is never a solution, because its practically unsolvable. Here a list of factors that affect education outcomes.
Child/Student fetal health, maternal health, child nutrition, stimulation, General health, adult/child stress levels, prolonged illness, availability of food, water, electricity and security.
Family poverty levels, need to work, familial stability,
Study habits, study training, parental guidance, word use in family conversation, familiarity with language of education, ability to learn, availability of time to learn, which builds into whether you picked up the initial building blocks of the subject and therefore future success. Propensity to learn, interest in subject.
The list goes on. This is one of the weaker lists I've made, but the essence of it, is that there are a huge number of variables that can easily break the ability of a student to finish a subject.
Remember that completion rates for MOOCs are about 7%. That's the result when you have voluntary, motivated students, choosing the classes they want to study.
Solving "education", is a proxy for having already solved whatever societal problem required people to be educated in the first place.
People would love to have the time to take a class on philosophy to enrich their lives, or a class on logic, on media manipulation.
But if you remember conversations on HN, people constantly look down on the arts and humanities, such classes are "pointless", you wont get a job.
A non-controversial opinion at time your education system is being valued more as a treadmill for college, in itself a tread mill so people can get jobs.
The rule of thumb is that any time you find yourself saying "education will solve it", work backwards, because Education is currently unsolvable.
(and we may not want to solve it - if you could get people trained on a "good" subject in shorter times than ever before, then you can also train them on "bad" subjects in shorter times than ever before.)
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/17/515753599/...
Top ranking company brass actually go to prison for crimes, versus the USA, where they get a tiny fine at the very worst. Or a large severance payout.
Perhaps it would charge high profile users and aim to satisfy readers and posters, not advertisers or shareholders?
That said, cigarettes were the same thing so I think in the future the solution to "habit forming tech" is simply to create a cultural push back and potentially regulate.
internet got to me to a point that when my line is broken I feel better in less than a second.
I have an issue, I'm a hoarder, and internet / socnet are an infinite graph to walk so I have a hard time not walking. Similar to the concept of "not missing things" (forgot the usual term).
The Theory of Addiction is no longer about dependence or withdrawal, it is about getting people to perform repetitive action. It doesn't matter what that action is.
> Thanks to Skinner's work, brain MRIs, and more recent research by psychologists, neuro-scientists, and behavioral economists, we now know how to design cue, activity, and reward systems to more effectively leverage our brain chemistry and program human behavior.
Effectively, Facebook designed a system that gives people rewards for giving people rewards.
I'm giving credit to the thousands of engineering hours that gave rise to the simple like button, and weeded out the less addictive alternatives. (Remember the poke button?)
> It's the content of the user's post that the person is liking, not the genius of Facebook.
I agree.
A like is equivalent to a paycheck.
Just instead of an well marketed FB post you have to have a well marketed employee image.
Not saying it's better or worse but ignoring this aspect of capitalism invites problems. (IMNSHO)
In fact if you look at the countries that regularly top the lists of best places in the world to live (Australia, Canada, Scandinavia) they all follow that sort of model to various different degrees.
The bad actors get more press.
All the software companies making products that help people out don't get good press. From implantable diabetic insulin pumps that auto-regulate, to small educational software made by people who love the field they are in.
Heck, Google Maps has made mass transit many times more usable than before, a definite societal good. I love being able to visit almost any major city in any country and have Google maps tell me what bus/subway/lightrail line to use.
There is code out there that helps writers organize their thoughts, mobile apps to help with meditation, and plenty of sites using ad revenue to create high quality video content about how to effectively and safely get in shape and work out at the gym.
Not to mention the thousands of small merchants who make their livelihood from capitalism. I go to an independent optician, the eye glasses I'm currently wearing were locally designed and manufactured. And how many authors has Amazon helped support? Many independent authors who could never have gotten recognized, or had a fan base before, can now support themselves through writing and publishing.
Capitalist incentives are an overall good, but it is incredibly unfortunate that as a species we have used our learnings about ourselves to create self-destructive economic cycles. (Not that this is anything new, opium dens were a thing for a long time!)
Yes, because they have the largest impact, a la 2008 for example, and the subsequent bailouts. A thousand honest, sincere and low-impact nuns are rightly ignored in the face of a few pedophile priests who were juggled from parish to parish.
In seriousness though, I hate to be "that other" guy, but I'm tired of this. We pick out some flaw in our culture and immediately decide the solution is to throw capitalism away entirely like it's a JS framework. As if everything we have including the forums where we complain about capitalism weren't created by capitalism. I don't think it's perfect, but it seems to be the most successful system we've created so far. And one of the best parts is that unlike some systems, you choose what you take part in. You think social media is addictive and it's creators have malicious intent? Don't use it!
It would be nice if we went back to business models where companies sell products to their end users and not sell their end users to others.
There's nothing wrong with advertising, it's fast, passive, egalitarian and effective for both sides. Perhaps people need better training and self-control but that applies to a whole lot more in life than just ads on a social network.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) - more or less the original how-to manual, breathtaking both in its cynicism and in its candor.
There's something that could be viable it bundled with other products. That something would be much more like email than Facebook (what is good). Yet, ad-based Facebook would beat it all the time.
If you include services in that you are talking about what, 98% of economic activity currently?
You don't have to make a binary decision between capitalism and socialism or communism. It's a spectrum with many steps in between. I suspect or hope that there will be a movement the other way again.
Should we regulate behavior targeting? Data collection? Advertising nature and reach?
Europe in general has led the way with privacy and data rights and we're starting to see similar movements in the US now to fix some of the major problems.
The only difference is the scale of the hierarchy. Capitalists are dictators of the four walls of their enterprise. Communists just scaled the size of the enterprise up to a point where the Coase theorem is working against it.
Neither say anything about individual or popular sovereignty. And as I think we're just starting to see (and will see more of, as the US declines), late-stage capitalism taken to an extreme is no more attractive than the USSR was.
As for the constant "pretty idea that doesn't work" ideological mantra, that requires either defining away China or taking on predictive debt that sounds little different than an earnest Bolshevik did 100 years ago.
I don't think we really give each other enough credit. For instance not all that long ago ad blockers were a really niche thing. And people using them wondered how all of these fools could continue to subject themselves to the nonstop eye gouging and exploitation of ads at the time. But while some people were slower on the uptake, over time things changed. And that change has in turn also completely reshaped the web along with it in an extremely positive way.
I don't see any reason to expect we won't see a similar change as people begin to understand the consequences and exploitation of social media. In a way I think many of these industries are currently just exploiting naivete. People are easiest to exploit when they don't understand that it's even a thing. A conman in a city of angels would have a field day. And while we're certainly no angels, the idea that simply 'keeping in touch with your friends' could be in any way exploited is something that is not very intuitive to many people.
People will always be exploited so long as there are people seeking to exploit others. It is unfortunate that our system incentivizes this sort of sociopathic behavior, but at the same time our system also enables the most meritorious some of the best chances of 'making it' even when their ideas sound insane. How many approval committees (which any sort of social system is going to come down to) would have thought it wise to give Elon Musk 9 figures of money to go start building rockets because 'I think I can do it better than these companies that have been doing it for decades.'? It was an insane gamble, but his to make thanks to the fact he was able to accumulate a very large personal wealth through his other endeavors. I'd agree with supporting the bottom by all means possible, but I think it is important that companies - even awful ones - are allowed to be developed and thrive.
The role of government is to regulate when a product doesn't serve the publics interests
Lol you need to do a little reading on socialism. Democratic ownership of the means of production.
So for example I think everyone reading Hacker News has a side project they would like to make that would take something like 6 months to implement. It might even go as far as automating their job, or disrupting entire industries like Stripe or Square did.
Instead, most of us are barely making rent. So we spend the entirety of our time doing evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) work. This is largely by design, because profit comes from an imbalance in skills. We pay more when we need something. If we fix all the problems in the world by way of disruptive 6 month startup projects, there won't be anybody to buy the stuff that they can't make themselves. That's why I look at wealth inequality as a means rather than an end. The less time/wealth we have, the more time/wealth they have.
As for externalities, well, those are handled through tax policy since governments are the only entities large enough to counter the private sector. The general trend now is to gut all science and environmental agencies. The current era reminds me very much of growing up in the 80s. Tremendous potential being squandered for short term gain.
The world we are in is exactly the world he envisaged. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began their orgies of deregulation based on this man's work.
I'm assuming that is meant as a sarcastic nod to, like, a ton of stuff.
But taking the question of "is capitalism a poison on society" seriously:
Are you concerned about capitalism, capitalism as we're currently applying it, or laissez-faire free markets?
Most ills are ultimately because humans are short-sighted, poorly informed, lazy, emotionally biased, easily manipulated, and poor at evaluating risk, at least compared to the capitalistic ideal. Garbage in, garbage out.
What's wrong with throttling matches? that seems like an anti-spam feature.
The implication however is the same with the [Parent]'s claim of throttling - it creates an artificial scarcity, at best, and full-on emotional dependency at worst.
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3054871/whats-your-tinder-score-...
Here it's nothing. And there is no way to miss that it's nothing after the fact.
Do you reminisce after writing a well-liked post? After a night spent levelling up?
The explanation that these fearsome psychology engineers make us refresh Facebook waiting for a notification sounds a lot like updated neuro-linguistic programming (they drop an anchor!). Frankly, I don't buy it.
There's something deeper about people so desperately seeking an ersatz of connection over social networks. This alienation could not have been caused by Facebook. It just happens to be benefiting from the same trend that brought us an opioid addiction epidemic and below replacement TFRs.
We all have our vices. And there's not as much of a difference between these various stimuli as you seem to think. It's more a question of degree than a qualitative difference. In addition to the things you mentioned, I also don't reminisce about the (few) long nights of work I've ever put in.
This line of thinking quickly leads to nihilism. Humans like doing things, and different humans like different things. Almost all possible human pursuits have some element addiction, because "addiction" is just a strong form of the way any behavior gets created and reinforced.
To put it another way, what do you "have" after an instance of birth-control-protected sex? It's as ephemeral as anything else on the list. I definitely do not reminisce about each instance of this that's happened in my life.
Now, up-votes may not mean much on their own. But, it is a way of keeping score and there is a tendency to think of down-votes as a failure. From that standpoint it's easy to start thinking of up-votes as success and start to optimize for them.