The Great Attention Heist | Hacker News Reader

The Great Attention Heist

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206 pointslxm86 comments

Strikes me that the ability to focus and direct ones own attention will (or already has) become a new form of class divide; those who can concentrate and those who can't. And it will likely have much different boundaries than earlier class divisions like wealth - in fact the wealthy are more likely to struggle given greater access to a wide range of digital products.

It seems like a manifestation of the same divide to me: those who pay to direct (or misdirect) peoples attention, and those who consume the messages.

Start everyday as a producer, not a consumer.

https://lifehacker.com/5887345/start-every-day-as-a-producer...

I would argue the opposite. The poor are incentivized to use free (but containing ads) products. The rich can pay their way out of those attention seeking ads.

Or pay someone else to take care of certain chores so that they have the time to sit down and think.

Seriously been considering doing this for food.

I would agree with this, but it isn't even just straight ads. Think about something like Netflix - the $10 a month subscription is nothing to the rich person, so if they don't use it or use it for one or two shows they don't care. To the poor person they need to use it to justify the expenditure. So essentially they are incentivized to consume more, in a very indirect way.

> Think about something like Netflix - the $10 a month subscription is nothing to the rich person

I don't see myself as rich, more like middle class, and $10 is nothing I worry about too much.

Not $10 as a lump sum, but a subscription?

Get netflix. Binge watch for a month. Cancel. Repeat when you feel like and can afford.

That was exactly the point OP was making. For a poorer person, Netflix might be a few times a year splurge. What happens when an anticipated slow month turns busy? This person is torn between "wasting" $10 that they really can't afford to spend again next month or neglect other things in their life to get their money's worth this month.

I read him as saying, "have netflix always and always binge watch".

I thought that comment was strange as well. For $10/month, Netflix provides a bevy of entertainment. It's probably one of the cheapest forms of entertainment - even more so among paid forms of entertainment.

If you're hurting for cash, try to get an amplified indoor antenna and Netflix. You'll make a one-time purchase of $20-$40 for an antenna[0], (likely) receive a decent channel selection[1], and $10/month for on demand streaming.

[0]: This is the antenna that I have in my home, and I want to kick myself for not getting an antenna sooner: https://www.amazon.com/1byone-Amplified-Detachable-Performan...

[1]: Confirm available OTA channeles here: http://www.tvfool.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...

> Think about something like Netflix - the $10 a month subscription is nothing to the rich person, so if they don't use it or use it for one or two shows they don't care. To the poor person they need to use it to justify the expenditure.

Netflix has a hundred million subscribers. It's hardly a rich man's entertainment.

And the poor in social capital have to, or at least can easily feel like they have to, jump at attention-devouring social networks because they need every visibility boost they can get.

People who already have a bunch of good connections can relax because they know they're embedded enough in the minds of their friends and colleagues that dropping off Twitter for a week won't be risking missing the one opportunity that they need to break into the next social class up.

It reminds me of Cal Newport's book Deep Work, where he argues those who can deliberately focus in the 21st century and actively deny themselves from being distracted (scheduled e-mail reading, banning Slack, only reading news certain times of the day) and go deep in subject matters will have massive advantages in the knowledge economy. The open office trend certainly hasn't helped. One of my friends who is a ML coder says he'll get 4x done in a single day at home compared to going to work where he gets bombarded by conversations.

After reading many books related to apps and attention (e.g. Hooked!, Irresistible), I elected to give up using Facebook, Instagram, and put heavy restrictions on my habit of going to Reddit/NYTimes/News Websites.

And I'll print things from the web so that I can concentrate on it without distraction in a quiet room with no digital distractions.

When I was younger, I probably called Knuth a luddite for abstaining from e-mail all the way back in the 90s. But wow, my opinion has done a full 180 over the 2010s.

Another thing I did recently - shut off all alerts on my phone other than text messages and Telegram (both of which are pretty rare in my case). Before doing that I would get alerts from my personal email, a family email and multiple work emails. Now I get hardly any alerts and already feel much more productive throughout the work day because these things aren't catching my eye/ear so often. It's really interesting.

My phone spends 99% of its time either off or in silent mode. I turn it off/down during work hours so I can focus, and then I forget to turn it back on/up. It annoys the crap out of my friends / family, but it's worth it. I use it as an answering machine, GPS, and casual web browser.

What I haven't figured out how to do is do the same thing with work communications (Slack et all). Since I work remotely, it's important that I have a virtual office door that people can knock at. The problem is that if you too often have your door closed on Slack, people complain that you're never available. If you have your door open too often (the default), you always have this nagging feeling that you're going to be interrupted soon, so you may as well not start on anything that requires focus.

^^^ Does anyone here work remotely and have a good solution for this?

Have the door closed during certain hours (slack has a dnd mode, which can be overridden if it is important) then people will learn to contact you during those times, especially if you down prioritise those who accept the system.

You are going to catch some slack, offset that by producing more/better than anyone.

Accept the system -> abuse the system.

> And I'll print things from the web so that I can concentrate on it without distraction in a quiet room with no digital distractions.

Kindle paired with Instapaper or similar service is great too. Saves a tree or three in lifetime as well :)

I do something similar to the printing thing. I send interesting but long articles to Instapaper. Instapaper delivers them to my Kindle where I read the articles in my downtime.

A counterpoint is Warren Buffett. His office doesn't have a phone or computer or anything that might interrupt him. He tells his secretary to hold everything while he goes inside, kicks back, and reads volume after volume of market data. To me, focus is more accessible to the wealthy. If I could afford it, I'd pay someone to handle Slack/phone/email for me so I could do what I most enjoy, which is get into a flow with the knowledge that I won't be interrupted.

It's true that the wealthy need discipline in order to achieve focus, but the poor need discipline and an environment that is conducive to focus. The latter is getting rarer and rarer. The very poor often live in crowded, noisy, and even unsafe areas.

Chemistry is tacitly striving to help. I mean, things like Adderal or Ritalin don't need any marketing around people whose jobs need concentrated attention. But those are controlled substances; nicotine, less so, and caffeine is just dispensed for free in most offices.

The ability to read a broadsheet newspaper rather than a tabloid 'newspaper' was the old 'class divide'. In the pre-internet days when newspapers were still allegedly important, not everyone could read a full length article in 'The Manchester Guardian'. (Not sure what the U.S. equivalent would be).

Papers like 'The Sun' and 'The Daily Mail' were there to entertain and brainwash. Their headline writers were absolutely excellent at what they did, e.g. 'FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER'. Does that not pique your curiosity? There is not a lot that can be added to that story - did the hamster taste nice? Who knows, the hamster was never eaten and the article was a bit of 'fake news' (clickbait) and was there to promote the comedian's up and coming tour.

Most people elected to read something other than 'The Guardian' even if they went broadsheet rather than tabloid. For every Guardian reader there were ten 'Telegraph' readers and maybe three 'Times' readers. Now I was a paperboy back then so I read all the papers extremely quickly. Only 'The Guardian' and 'The Financial Times' interested me enough to not speed read. It amused me to see people waste their attention on the other papers. Why spend a Sunday ploughing through The Sunday Times? It was a good all-day read back then. Yet I felt a lot of people were going through the motions, trying to focus on these stupid papers that rarely had more than one genuine bit of investigative journalism in them, if that.

As a child with every paper free to read every day I gravitated towards the newspaper requiring attention. I could have just stared at Sam Fox's breasts on page 3 of the Sun but preferred the financial pages of the Guardian, followed by the international news. Importantly I decided this for myself, not out of peer pressure. Moving swiftly on to today and here I am reading HN instead of whatever junk appears as 'news' on the Internet Explorer home page or the online version of the Daily Mail. Why am I again in the minority of people seeking more than PR pieces about 'hamsters being eaten'?

So will the wealthy be disproportionately affected by issues with concentration? That seems to be the implication of your statement. However, I'm also unconvinced that the ability to concentrate (above an average level, at least) has historically been an important component of accumulating wealth.

"Do not feed the monsters. Some are wandering thought forms, looking for a place to set up house. Some are sent to you deliberately. They come from arrows of gossip, jealousy or envy–and inadvertently from thoughtlessness. They feed on your attention, and feast on your fear." - Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (via dukeofbookingham)

Rightly said. Bitterness and jealousy do occupy one's being and then there is nothing left to give.

Do people really click more ads the longer they spend on Facebook? It feels like an unreasonable assumption to me. Clicking on an advert takes you away from the app, so if you design an app that people never want to stop using then they're never going to click an ad. The 'ideal' (for Facebook, not for users of Facebook) is an app that people want to use enough to be aware of an ad that's displayed on the page, but that isn't compelling enough for them to want to stay on the page rather than click on the ad to go wherever it takes them.

Facebook would maximise their profit by tailoring the application to be something that people want to log in to as regularly as possible but not to stay on for very long so they're compelled to click away after a seeing an ad. Maybe that's what Facebook have done, but when you hear about users spending hours a day scrolling through their timeline on there it doesn't seem that way.

Ads aren't just about click-throughs though. If someone is scrolling endlessly and seeing adverts every few minutes, that's still influencing them. Possibly more so because they're in a comfortable cycle of absorbing snippets of information, and don't appraise it critically.

Yes, exactly. Click-throughs are great and easily measurable, but showing a product name/image in the context of a user seeking content has value in itself.

It's probably mostly accidental clicks. Facebook doesn't care (in fact they love it), because they get paid whether the clicks are intentional or not.

That is exactly what they've done, training you to quickly open the app to check for notifications/messages/event invites.

More recently, after running a script found on here to unfollow everyone in my feed, I've noticed that Facebook will "invent" notifications - someone's birthday, an event near me, etc - to keep the dopamine slot machine going

> More recently, after running a script found on here to unfollow everyone in my feed, I've noticed that Facebook will "invent" notifications - someone's birthday, an event near me, etc - to keep the dopamine slot machine going

They crank that stuff up when you haven't visited them in a while as well. It comes off a super desperate if you're not addicted, but I'm sure it must work on someone.

If try to disable your account, the last screen confronts you with big banners saying so-and-so will miss you if you leave Facebook.

Facebook is the most emotionally manipulative application I've ever seen.

When I stopped using Facebook and deleted the app, Facebook started sending me emails like "You have 7 unread notifications". They didn't even specify or list the notifications itself, just the count unread. Super desperate.

Obviously I clicked the unsubscribe link. :D

It looks like they put all their research on clickbait to profitable use.

You used to be able to receive and reply to Facebook messages via email. They took out the reply feature and recently they've taken out the content as well. Now their notifications are just "you have 23 unread messages." Their only goal now seems to be to force you onto their app.

Oh dear HackerNews, how dearly I love thou, but how many hours of me life has ye taken already? I’d rather not know

The difference that I justify for using HN over a lot of other aggregators in the quality of the content tends to be much higher. I still have a large backlog of repos and writeups that I'd like to study, all found from submissions on HN.

> I still have a large backlog of repos and writeups that I'd like to study, all found from submissions on HN.

I have one too. The relevant question is, are those things relevant for your work and projects? If not (that's my case), there isn't much difference.

There is. Watching memes all day is way less productive than reading about some obscure processor bug, or doing a tutorial in the newest functional js dialect.

Time spent on HN was very rarely wasted, and more than once led me to things that directly improved what I do for money.

If HN was a subscription-only service, I'd subscribe in a heartbeat. (It would have a number of downsides, of course.)

Nah, somebody would make a free version.

A social site's technical implementation is nothing; the community is everything.

True—but there are interesting feedback loops between the two.

HN is probably in my top two time-wasters. And yet, it also gives me genuinely useful information.

It even sometimes prevents wasted time. I'll look at the comments first, and quickly figure out that the article is a waste of time. I find that out faster from the comments than I would from the article. Net result - time saved (or at least time more efficiently wasted...)

We haven't seen nothing yet. Smartphone addiction is a thing, but at least you can put your phone in your pocket on silent and go on with your day.

But AR lenses are coming and will be the next big thing in my opinion. Imagine being immersed in this semi-virtual world all day long. Imagine being a child and grow up in a world where these things are ubiquitous. Imagine what this will do to their attention.

I don't have to imagine, I just have to wait.

Imagine the world a hundred years from now, where almost everything is presented as augmented reality, and where someone who doesn't have permanently augmented vision is seen as an outsider, much like the Amish today.

Think about nothing being sold with a color or pattern anymore, because you can just customize it to whatever you want in your AR view. Think about products not having any sort of printed imagery, because it's pointless when animated digital overlay overrides it anyway.

Think about being one of those outsiders who sees an entire world where everything you interact with is black and white and you can't hold but the lowest job, because you are literally blind to 99.9% of "reality". Think about not being able to live a middle class life without augmenting your vision.

I assume you look at that world as bad. Though that's purely assumption on my part, since you offer no value judgement.

But using that assumption and for the sake of discussion, I'll point out that your dystopian vision could be applied to most technologies. Imagine a time when anyone can get a hold of you. They no longer need to write a letter or go to a telegraph office, your voice is there, whenever they want it. They are able to invade your home with this attention seeking technology by installing a little bell. You are more and more marginalized in the workplace if you are not permanently wired to this network of contacts.

Of course, this process escalates as technology escalates, but it's not the first time that someone has looked at the future and said "think about this world that is so alien". I just wonder where we cross the line to dystopia

Yes, I'm old enough to remember how glorious it was that, as a kid, you would be unreachable most of the day without even your parents freaking out. I think smartphones are a small piece of a current dystopia.

I can turn off my phone most of the day and still interact with society, though. A ubiquitous AR has a high probability of being nightmarish ~50 years in, IMHO.

We all worry about that future, and have seen the crazy AR video about SPAM on vimeo.

But humans will constantly optimize their lives for greater happiness.

Each piece of technology that makes life better, can also be a trap of addiction. But we will figure this out.

I have access to stimulus like sugar, drugs, alcohol, and gambling, all of which are easily overindulged, but somehow most of us figure out a good balance. Those that can't get the balance right, are supported with in different ways like laws that protect the public.

The AR integration will be the same. When it gets to the point that long term suffering outweighs temporary happiness society will set up boundaries and EVERYONE will be ok with that. Maybe some people will think you are silly for not having AR lenses in all the time, but it won't be that much different from being that guy who doesn't drink at a party.

> I have access to stimulus like sugar, drugs, alcohol, and gambling,

I think the current diabetes and opioid epidemics show that a huge chunk of society is not "optimizing their lives for greater happiness".

There's a game exactly about this coming out soon named The Last Night, you might want to look into it

http://oddtales.net/

Bingo. Some time ago, I watched a video of Mark Zuckerberg at some VR conference and he said something like "VR is not about replacing reality. It's about making it better".

I mean, imagine the quality and realism of the AR/VR tech in 10, 20 or 30 years.

You can almost see some Black Mirror-esque scenario where the earth is overpopulated, resources are diminishing, there's less and less quality jobs, so why not upload your brain into a VR world, get rid of your physical body and live in this virtual paradise forever without having to work, pay taxes, without worrying about getting physically hurt, etc... The question is: are you still alive? Is it still "you" that is in this computer?

That's the premise of one of my favorite, underrated SciFi books, Everyone in Silico[0]. It's also part of the premise of Ready Player One[1].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Everyone-Silico-Jim-Munroe-2002-11-22...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/0307...

Just as you can put your phone in your pocket, you can take off your AR lens. (At least until it's surgically implanted. Even then, it should still have a silent mode, just like your phone.)

The free version will come with ads. That you can't turn off. I'm not counting on a silent mode.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Maybe you should consider building the first implantable lens, so you can shape the way that the technology develops.

I don't have the money required to be a decision maker.

Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge explores this a bit. Classroom distractions become students throwing up graphics in their shared AR and the one guy in the room that doesn't know how to access it is left out of the joke. It's been a while since I read it but I think one of the big plotlines was getting one of the older characters to finally learn how to use the shared AR.

Just engaging with all the devices is a job in itself. Its very tough to focus.

I keep all social media & news apps in a tablet that I refer to as the "time-killer". Controlling the alerts is a losing game. So, I just put all in a separate device. Even with browser, I have a separate profile that I use for HN & reddit.

Even my phone is silent most of the times. I wish there was a answering machine app, so I can respond to calls at my convenience. In my circle, we actually just voice message via whatsapp, so no one is disturbed and can respond at a convenient time.

"Just engaging with all the devices is a job in itself. Its very tough to focus. I keep all social media & news apps in a tablet that I refer to as the "time-killer". Controlling the alerts is a losing game."

I have manually disabled nearly all notifications on my phone, which works pretty well for me (but I think your isolation strategy sounds like a pretty good one, too).

Each time you update the OS or the app, it messes with the settings. So, since these things are designed to suck you in & the I am sure the developers deliberately overwrite the settings.

That is why I decided to have a separate device.

I loved the article, even though I disliked a banner ironically trying to catch my attention at the beggining.

old news I guess but I recently realized I could block elements with ublock origin so I blocked the "hot meta questions" and "hot questions from other stack exchange sites" elements from stack overflow because I'd see some slightly interesting topic and get sucked in.

not sure what other similar helpful things I can do. I unfollow agressively on Facebook. use Fbpurity to filter as much as possible. don't use Twitter.

I still get distracted all day long. should probably ban HN from my life for the 4th time . it's not easy. I changed my hosts file once but VMs don't use the same file. tried using parental controls on iOS but they ban way too much. used noprocrast but can open incognito window although it helps not being able to comment. Wishing there was a fake VPN app for iOS I could use to block sites

There is...it’s called Freedom. It’s a bit buggy, but it works for my purposes. I use that on iOS and Cold Turkey on PC

It's ironic there is a popup advertising contests and giveaways upon page load.

Relevant XKCD...

https://xkcd.com/570/

Why don't you use an ad blocker?

I am using uBlock Origin in Safari but it still appears. This is a smaller and more obscure site I don't expect a blacklist to be 100% effective.

huh. I'm on Firefox w/ uBlock and tested in Iridium, both blocked any popup.

I'd really like my phone to be able to prioritize notifications and only bug me for important things. Calls, SMS, notifications etc should all be hidden and prioritized. A call from my wife, or someone I know should be immediately shown. Notifications about important emails as well, not so much about the latest offer available on amazon.com. Phones make it hard to control the level of notifications and could do a better job at that.

In android there is a "do not disturb" option that silences everything but calls (you can drill it down further to starred contacts or none at all) and sms messages (also drillable), I always have this on.

I turn off read receipts where I can, allowing me greater control of when I respond and I also silence group chats and people who are bothersome indefinitely. If they are important enough I will find time to answer them, regardless of how "noisy" or "noiseless" they are. If it's urgent, they can call.

You can install a pihole server at your home that will block advertisers through DNS, allowing you to use even free apps without ads. (I haven't done this yet since I moved recently).

As for emails, I imagine you can have a single email address on your phone for important emails and configure email forwarding rules from your default email, I haven't tried this though.

Gmail with the split inbox has that feature (although for the life of me I can't get it to put updates/promotions into the same bucket, though they are) and inbox allows you to bundle and split things even more.

Every other month I go on a media diet: no social media, no news, no unnecessary browsing of any kind - only books and a small number of podcasts are allowed (plus whatever Internet usage is necessary for work). I've been doing this for more than a year now, and it has helped me feel a lot less "fragmented". I highly recommend it.

What do you do when you need to know something? (recent example: my toilet stopped refilling, I had no idea what was wrong and found the information on the internet). Also, which podcasts do you prioritize?

haha, on opening the page a popup shows that needs to be clicked away to read the article!

OMG, don't use the internet without something like uBlock Origin! Are you crazy‽

The Attention Merchant - another similar read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28503628-the-attention-m...

This makes me think, that on the scale of the paperclips game we are well past where most players would think we are. We are actually at the beginning of the hypno drone release project.

When my friend on FB share various stupid chance-to-win contests they are selling my attention for their chance to win. I was looking for a decent way to tell them.

The decent way is to unfollow them.

The decent way is to stop using facebook.

That's the healthy way.

Why not all three:

1. Tell your Facebook followers that the platform is manipulating and using them (by posting articles like this one to your feed).

2. Unfollow the most annoying ones (or send them even more personalized messages about how they're being used).

3. Leave Facebook once you think enough people have gotten them message.

Facebook might die quicker if enough people do this, and it will be better for everyone, not just you.

this should be a mandatory read for everyone, like a warning label

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