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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, the first thing you're greeted with on this site is an attention-grabbing ad, if you choose to browse without protection.

If modern media a DoS attack, it's not very sophisticated since it can be easily avoided by non-participation. Install an Ad blocker. Browse the web in private mode. Turn off notifications. Treat everything you read with skepticism (assume it is trying to manipulate you). And never, ever interact with social media. Share your attention deliberately, mindfully, and voluntarily.

I don't buy into this victim mentality. Nobody is "stealing" my attention unless I agree to it.

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> I don't buy into this victim mentality

I don't think we should be thinking about this from a psychological perspective but instead a sociological one. Yes individuals can disconnect and do whatever they need to assuming adequate resources but that's beside the point.

If you think of people as boxes with inputs and outputs I think it's very worth understanding how social media impacts those boxes and what the long term affects are.

Has nothing to do with being a victim. Just if you press this button on every box does something desirable for society happen? Or something negative? Or we can't tell still?

And if it is negative then do we as a society want regulations to reduce the impact?

You can't really know what the impact is. You probably can't even come up with a crisp, uncontroversial definition of what "social media" actually is. Most people seem to use the term to mean Twitter, but Twitter is garbage and lots of people don't use it at all. Is Hacker News "social media"? Is Slashdot? Is the comments section of the New York Times? Is IRC?

The moment you start down the "we are weak and helpless and we need the smart benevolent geniuses in Government to help us" you're just gonna lose a whole lot of people. Because there's no reason to believe there is even a problem here, let alone a problem that needs to be solved with regulation.

The demarcation line is pretty clear IMO (it isn’t even social media). It’s technology whose goal is to manipulate its users to engage with itself. And it hires an army of engineers, designers, scientists, and soon AI to achieve that goal.

Right now it’s social media that is at the forefront of this war with people. Tomorrow it might be a different technology.

That's not clear at all. Do you think the Twitter founder's goal was literally written down somewhere as "manipulate users to engage with it"? Or for Facebook? None of these companies will agree with that assessment, so it's entirely your own subjective opinion.

Well, the interviewee in the article provides a good metric.

You don't need to look at the founders' intentions. You simply need to look at the metrics they are optimizing on. For public companies like Facebook and Twitter it's even easier. You have to look at the metrics they are talking to their investors about.

I've taken it a bit further with my ad blocker. Started blocking not just ads but irrelevant things like:

* Top/Related posts (they distract)

* Newsletter signup blocks in the middle of articles (I never ever want to signup for newsletters)

* Sharing tools (I know how to cut-past a URL, thank you)

* Recent comments blocks (I don't care)

* Page footers (bloated with completely irrelevant information)

* ... and so on

You will be surprised how much stuff you can actually just block!

Also, I recommend browsing youtube via something like startpage.com or duckduckgo.com. That way you're not distracted by follow up videos, recommendations and comments.

mps-youtube

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

Oh, just wait until the hordes come out of the woodwork to poo-poo you for blocking ads and such.

They have their reasons, like "No Ads means no free content", or "You're taking the money out of content creators mouths", or variations on a theme.

What's doubly silly, is I control how my computer renders what content, downloads what content, and does whatever actions I want. Once it leaves your computer/network, its no longer up to you, ad company.

(Is now waiting for Wildvine to be used on content, forcing such ad viewage, now that DRM is part of the bloody HTML5 spec.)

That's the thing though. If those ads are forced on you say like in-game ads you can't skip then I'll just do what I do with them. Something else. Volume down, attention elsewhere until it's over. Just like those old unskippable YouTube ads. I might not be able to skip them but they don't get any of my attention either way.

Seems inevitable. Unfortunately, the content companies have a lot of leverage because they are the ones making the content that you want to see.

First, there's a cost to gaining such technical knowledge, and many people are not literate enough to deploy all the technical measures you suggest.

Second, 'never ever interact with social media' is just a way of avoiding the problem. People like social media because we're social creatures and there's value in being able to communicate with other people of like mind. It can also be a trap if one only ever does so, but 'never use it' is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Why shouldn't people be able to socialize in a virtual context without any sort of legal privacy protections or tools that allow them to selectively filter out commercial information?

You might as well advise people to avoid having their telephone calls monitored by never calling anyone. Well, sure, but that's an elaborate way of saying you don't know what to do about the problem other than avoid adopting useful technologies.

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