Why social media bosses don’t use social media
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I wish it was possible to disable showing points in HN for this exact same reason. Both in stories and my comments. I'm sure Greasemonkey could help but I'd like this embraced by HN, if possible.
Unfortunately, bookmarklets no longer work as easily and as reliably as they used to work.
But at least it can open a new tab with a full-page iframe, which was just enough for me to implement my autoreload bookmarklet. [1]
Apart from that, I believe there are meta-extensions which provide a generic way to inject JavaScript into every page. This is just one extension, but manages multiple bookmarklets (or whatever they call these snippets).
javascript:(function(){var%20i,x;for(i=0;=document.getElementsByTagName("*")i];++i)x.style.color="#000000";})();The points do help in surfacing articles and comments. Nobody needs to see them instantly.
I don't have any numbers, but I'd bet 99% of visits to comment pages are made in the first day of the article being submitted (i.e. when it's in the front page or second page).
I mostly just don't participate in upvoting or downvoting at all (here or on reddit), unless something really catches my attention.
Personally, I still think this is one thing slashdot had right. Random selection of certain established users as "moderator" who could not only give a comment a point rating between 0-5, but also a descriptor (funny, offtopic, etc).
Honestly I miss the slashdot days of old.
we need social signals to determine how the society we are in is functioning. points, likes, follows are very poor proxies - but we need something. if those proxies are making billions for some people that's not the fault of our need for social alignment.
Thanks for being a awesome HN, keep it up.
With the old web forums you could wait a day or two to respond or a day or two to check for replies. But the timing dynamic here (and on many other sites) encourages much more frequent checks and much more rapid-fire conversations.
More often then not, when that threshold is crossed, I realize I'm too late and my post will just sit there, unread.
Aren't there others who think it'd be great to have a "sticky" or "follow" button, in essence signalling "I'm going to follow this discussion for a few days / weeks, because I'm genuinely interested"?
Also if there was a way to easily "suscribe" to a thread (email alerts) that'd help. (Someone mentioned hnreplies.com in a sibling comment, never tried it, but I'll check it out)
This is one of the problems with online conversations in general. Person A makes a lot of low effort comments without putting much thought into it and without bothering to check the accuracy of what they're writing. Person B thinks about whether or not they have anything to add to the conversation, spends time thinking about other people's comments, checks any claims they make to see if they're accurate, rewrites their comment so that it flows better, etc. Person A is going to end up making many, many more comments than Person B. The conversation will look more and more like Person A's posts, even when those people are in the minority.
There are some places that suffer more from this than others, but I think it affects just about every online conversation to some extent. It would be interesting to see what effect posting limits would have.
However I still think that the "short-lived" nature of discussions here is a relatively independent problem. I think integrating a way to "subscribe to a story" with email alerts on HN itself (rather than independent apps like hnreplies.com), and _displaying_ the number of people who did subscribe, would pave the way for longer-lived discussions. By seeing the number of people who did "subscribe to the story" you'd know whether or not it's still worth posting a comment even though it's been a day or two.
Maybe that's the reason forums have longer-lived discussions. You can easily get alerts when there are new posts in a discussion where you've posted.
In general I wish there was more attention paid to the way different platforms shape our conversations, and more interest in exploring alternative platforms.
Some discussions (not all :) that arise on HN are rich and deep, with intelligent people exploring the topic, often someone with expertise/experience/domain knowledge will pitch in to inform the rest - and I haven't found many places on the Web where such discussions happen regularly.
It's a pity sometimes when such a discussion gets swept away in the timeline, simply archived, rather than continuing it over a longer-term, to really have a chance to think deeply and collectively.
It's lead to the convention of "/sub" (or as I prefer, "/surveil") as an indicator of interest.
But a good conversation can remain alive for days, weeks, months, or even years.
[1] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/18066-hn-comment-trees
Eh, what? How is the pool of admissible members chosen? Surely you don't mean "any member gets a point"?
> Seeing your comment or submission on the front page is a reward on itself
Comments don't show up on the front page, and you don't get points when your submissions are upvoted.
Points are awarded but it is not 1-to-1 with upvotes.
Back when it was more about the profile, about "stalking" friends and connecting with real-life acquaintances, it was much more addictive. Features like "you know this person via these two steps", poking, but also subtle clues like the timing of when somebody visited your page, or that they commented on an old photo (meaning they browsed your gallery)... that is all missing now. Facebook was so addictive because it enabled you to obsess about social connections. Friends, crushes, people with common hobbies, and so on.
When I did use Facebook daily, it was for all the reasons you mention. If I ever log onto the site now I'm immediately driven away, it's just a bunch of advertising and nothing I care to see.
A 'feed' does not have to be overtly social to have addictive potential.
Suppose you visit a news site, not a social one, no likes, hearts or any feedback from other users.
The stories appear in a feed that you can refresh. 80% of the stories are of no interest to you, but 20% are great.
You can't predict when an interesting story will appear.
This configuration is enough to create "positive reinforcement" and the unpredictability can foster addictive behaviour.
When you encounter an article you like, it's a bit like sifting through sand and finding a gold nugget, you get a dopamine hit for that.
The fact that the nuggets only come up randomly and are hard to predict is called an "intermittent reinforcement schedule" and is known to elicit a high rate of response from the subject.
Maybe you mean kuro5hin?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber#C....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Simple_schedules
Facebook news feed for me is utter garbage!
Say what? Tweeting once per day seems like a lot of tweeting to me. But I guess things are relative...
Once per day may indeed be a healthy usage but it's not the level of engagement desired by the companies.
Whether that's the actual case or not is the question, and we could compare other executives of technological but non social media companies to see the level of how much of their own dog food they eat. There's a further question which is whether eating ones own dog food is a good measure.
That's also just on my personal account, I run another account as well, though it's lower traffic, and mostly retweets.
Sounds to me like The Guardian is shoehorning the facts to fit their narrative.
I have a (fairly bad) smartphone and no data plan (just a small 200mb/mo emergency contingent). I have deleted all social media apps (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Messenger, all Games). On the go, I use apps with offline capabilities. Pocket Casts for Podcasts, the Kindle app for my books, Spotify for music. Those get synced on Wifi
If I use any apps of this kind, I do so on my Laptop:
Here, I have more control by using three Chrome extensions:
- Stay Focused (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...) which gives me a few minutes per day on a set of blacklisted sites.
- Newsfeed Eradicator ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat... ) - does exactly what the name suggests. Still possible to use Facebook for events and to talk to friends
- Distraction Free Youtube (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-youtube-distrac... ) deactivates the features that suck you down the Youtube rabbit whole of by clicking on recommended videos.
On top of that, I use uBlock which blocks all the ads that I would have to endure on my phone.
A little lower level, I have a modified hosts file which blocks social media sites: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
Obviously it is possible to circumvent all of these self-imposed obstacles, but taking a couple of seconds to "take the safety off" is often enough to remind me why I have blocked those pages in the first place. It is enough time to let my prefrontal cortex reign in my dopamine seeking reptile brain.
Taking these measures has allowed me to drastically reduce my time spent on distracting sites.
I use browser extensions to block the tracking side of things, uninstalled the apps from my phone, and I'm now pretty happy with my relationship with Facebook and the impact it has on my life (~0).
I honestly don't get it when people have to do all that stuff to "protect" themselves instead of just... not going on Facebook 15 times a day? I consider myself like an easy target for addictive services but, I don't know, I guess I just have better things to do.
For instance, I noticed myself picking up my phone and browsing certain websites (dopamine sources) whenever my thoughts wandered into a topic I find distressing -- instead of confronting those thoughts and thinking them through. For me, Facebook happens not to be addictive, but other sites are (for instance, Quora). I was wasting hours on those sites instead of doing productive things.
Setting up a content blocker to make me think twice before visiting them has helped. So has adding an app that I can set to block using my phone for a given period of time, forcing me to put it down and do other things.
I've given serious consideration to limiting myself to mobile versions of the game I'm addicted to, but I can't answer 'yes' yet!
I can also vouch for the effectiveness of this strategy based on slow motion Street Fighter 4 on a machine with an integrated graphics card.
Addiction is built-in in these apps from every possible way. There are lots of information on how they do that. Your comment is like saying, why don't people just stop taking narcotics, there are better things to do.
Its rather unsettling how easy it is to replace some of these words with 'mdma' and make it sound like a drug dealer encouraging you to go to raves with other people on mdma and not do mdma by yourself at home because you won't enjoy it as much.
Success for a social network is not "people feeling better on average" it's people coming back more often on average. Their actual level of enjoyment or well-being is irrelevant to the platform.
A social network's ideal audience would be a group of people who are relatively discontent with their lives and provide a series of small improvements to that state of being, but ones that quickly fade, and then encourage them to repeat that cycle as often as possible. That way the susceptibility to advertising remains high and boosts advertiser ROI, which raises the social network's value as a platform.
Come to think of it, that sounds pretty familiar.
I've never used Instagram much, but that sounds like one aspect of that network I've read about. Everyone curates their profile to make their lives seem more fun and more interesting than they really are, often with a materialist angle. The real you looks inadequate compared to these false lives, leaving many feeling insecure about themselves. Then you have professional "influencers" with hyper-curated profiles that depict a fantastically fun and fashionable life. They make money by shilling products that subtly promise to let you join in on that lifestyle, if you only buy.
Its just that, Instagram especially because of the power of an image, its like not only did they set out to create a platform to maximize your insecurity, they recruited thousands of people and gave them a special title ("influencer") and pay them to amplify that message as loudly as possible, then bake in the same addictive interactions as Facebook, and then monetized the whole thing.
Its not to say that its always bad and should be shut down, just be aware of the effects it can have and be honest about how you react to them.
I mean they might really want you to, but they don't put apps on your phone and reset your privacy settings to let them reach out to you and spam you with notifications through multiple channels (email/text/sms) multiple times per day trying to get you to engage that are endlessly optimized by very smart people to trigger that engagement, not a lot, but just a hit to get you coming back for more.
And then grow into one of the largest companies in America lead by one of richest men in America by leveraging the addicting and repetitive nature of that activity to literally and intentionally monetize _their_ influence how _you_ think (advertising).
Sorry, but what is going on right now @ Facebook can't be hand waved away by saying that humans are social animals.
But I see your point in that FB's management isn't really pushing to make those sort of interactions happen more frequently, they're just trying to get people to spend as much time on it as possible to extract ad money from them.
You seem to be using it in a responsible way, don't let anyone judge you for that.
Just be aware of the forces arrayed against you and be honest about how it effects you. If you find yourself not enjoying it or see it have a negative effect on your loved ones, try to cut back. If you have no problem doing so, then there's nothing to worry about, but if you do find it difficult then you know you may have a problem.
Honestly, I expect within the year we'll see the first nationwide support groups for social media addiction a.l.a Alcoholics Anonymous. If no one has done a startup yet for an app that is designed to help, that would be a great opportunity.
But that’s a false dilemma. Those aren’t the ONLY two things you can do on FB. And you don’t need FB for your “close” friends, you can do that it person, via email, FaceTime, whatever.
> Facebook’s locked-down nature means mere mortals can’t see the private posts on Zuckerberg’s timeline, but it is hard to imagine him getting into arguments about a racist relative’s post of an anti-immigration meme.
Make it sound like the article is just about bashing social medias, without having an answer to the question in the title.
I don’t use Facebook much, but I’ve never made a public post and my friends aren’t visible. But you wouldn’t know this without asking me. My goal is to never be the subject of an article, but if I was, it would be lazy on the part of the author to assume that I don’t use Facebook because I have no posts visible to the author.
It doesn't.
> Make it sound like the article is just about bashing social medias
Every day the media releases propaganda against social media. On HN, we get a "social media/facebook" is responsible for all the ills of the world nonsense routinely followed by the same suspicious "I quick facebook and I won the lottery" style comments.
If you feel like, check HN on the waybackmachine or any other archive site and you'll see.
The obvious reason social media execs don't use social media as much is because they are too busy. It's the same reason that movie execs don't watch many movies, it's why football execs don't' watch too much football games, it's why newspaper execs don't read much newspapers, etc.
Most top execs are busy running a company to be doing anything else. But theguardian along with the rest of the media has to spin everything for their own agenda.
They're the merchants, not the product. The people who watch all day are the product. The people who obsessively check their instagram feeds for uplikes (or whatever they're called this week) are the product.
I too am a social media conscientous objector.
Partly because FB said they won't always offer information I create to my "friends." So why should I create it?
Partly because I've really come to dislike getting sucked down a rabbit hole of stuff the social media companies machine learning knows will snag my attention.
Partly because fake nuz is worthy of protest and boycott.
Mostly because the charge humans get from accumulating "uplikes" is a soul-corrupting addiction. I could rant on about professor René Girard's mimetic theory and human yearning to think we're better than the next guy, and how one Peter Thiel helped FB corrupt Girard's work. But, bah. Back to work.
With Facebook, you are using your true identity resulting in the pressure of having to post perfect content, you often have to post photos which are extremely time consuming to get right, the number of people who can "upvote" is very limited and the lack of a "downvote" button makes trolling for downvotes impossible.
On the other hand, a short but effective text post on Reddit or a forum can be done in a minute and potentially generate a huge flamewar and thousands of people upvoting or downvoting, and it doesn't matter if it turns out to be dumb or ineffective or otherwise bad.
And all you need is to just express the most controversial and hyperbolic take possible on a given existing subject, while on Facebook you'd need to come up with original content.
Finally, while Reddit might be accused of doing it intentionally for traffic, the web forums and newsgroups where this behavior started most definitely did not, so it's more of an intrinsic property of public one-to-many communication systems than something evil that Facebook came up with.
So Zuck is no longer an Entertainer, his a Dealer right now.
Yet neither was it my fault: it's simply that the material was boring. Lack of focus really implied that I needed something harder, more important (and thus more exciting) to do.
(Your hypothetical argument based on false moral absolutisms is familiar around the internet, usually used to excuse unethical behaviour. Don't fall for it)
Take this principle elsewhere, it works the same. Safe to assume, the casino owner doesn't gamble, or the gambling site owner doesn't as well. Does any tobacco exec smoke regularly? I'm not even going to look for a factually accurate answer. It seems this principle seems extremly robust.
"...and they are probably there only once"
Brin's two most recent posts are from six months ago. Those broke a drought dating to August, 2015.
https://plus.google.com/+SergeyBrin
Page hasn't posted since August, 2015, a re-share of Brin's post then:
https://plus.google.com/+LarryPage
Google CEO Sundar Pichai hasn't posted publicly since March, 2016:
https://plus.google.com/+SundarPichai
That's not an overwhelming endorsement.
The obvious reason social media execs don't use social media as much is because they are too busy. It's the same reason that movie execs don't watch many movies, it's why football execs don't' watch too much football games, it's why newspaper execs don't read much newspapers, etc.
Most top execs are busy running a company to be doing anything else. But theguardian along with the rest of the media has to spin everything for their own agenda.
Would be great if we went a few days without the standard "I hate social media" from the toxic "traditional media".
"Never get high on your own supply"
Jobs didn’t let his own kids use an iPad, Tim Cook discouraged his nephew... these people know exactly what this tech is designed to do.
I think that's a little stilted in this case. I read voraciously as a kid. My parents often took my book away and kicked me outside. By the same rule, they knew exactly what books are designed to do.
I don't think it's so nefarious as that when it comes to [this]technology. They weren't designed to rake in ad dollars from childrens' misinformed taps.
I think they thought kids just need moderation. And kids are horrific at moderation. So until they learn, they get told what to do, or no cookies at all.
Hell, before tablets and user-friendly computers, it was video games are the devil, before that TV was the devil, before that the radio and the talkies are the devil.
Social media is a different animal. It's making use of the technology to a certain end. Sort of like how some TV talk shows and old kids radio adventures were really just disguised advertising that profited the most from bringing you back every episode.
Nice way to conflate anti-immigration opinions with racism, Guardian. You probably don't even know you're doing it.
ftfy
Uploaded her first video 3 months ago (following the monetization outcry). Seems very hard to me to really understand the platform and its problems/opportunities without fully embracing it from a creator and viewer perspective.