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There was already a campaign - humanetech.com started by no suprise a former Googler a while back.

Through internal studies, they already knew quite a few years ago that Google engineers where as likely as to get addicted and waste time on cat videos, the kardashians and whatever else as much as the people the platforms end up hooking. Those results produced some internal 'what about my kids' outrage.

What they then discovered is deaddicting ppl is much more complicated and takes a whole lot longer than getting them to turn into screen touching addicts. It was so complicated not to mention the opposite of what generated rev that it got quietly shelved and ppl left No big diff between Google and Big Tobacco in this regard.

What you are seeing today is them dusting off the cobwebs on that project as the unintended social and psychological consequences are finally taking a serious unignorable toll.

I don't see Google or Facebook contributing to the solution. They will play the same game Exxon Shell Philip Morris et al play. And that game remains empire defense.

It's up to you to keep your kids safe.

Exactly. The PR game is tough, so they have to make moves like these, but it gleams unauthentic when you consider there's teams at Google dedicated to increasing watch-time on Youtube, for example.

If they were really focusing on digital well-being this wouldn’t be a notification; they would just stop auto-playing the next video. They would hide the "related videos" list after your time is up, etc. They don’t have to be drastic; there’s "small" changes that aren’t far-fetched that they could make if this really was a "focus" for them.

"Reminding" you you’re bingeing while you’re bingeing is the kind of stuff a team comes up with when they know doing something to keep people from bingeing is the right thing to do, but they also don’t want to have those crucial-yet-awkard meetings with the Growth team downstairs or argue with the Playback Time team in the next building.

"Shush" and "Wind Down" are already on Samsung phones, and FB is in good relations with Samsung (see oculus), so doubt this would be Facebook killer.

Additionally, Facebook already turn down video in newsfeed (it decreased time-spent), and changed goals to 'meaningful social interactions'. Long term, being useful is more important than grabbing attention (and FB plays long-term game). The fact that FB, Instagram, Youtube, are "grabbing attention", is only byproduct of thinking that time-spent like metrics are good proxies for usefulness (and they were really easy to optimize), which turns out not to be true (or at least they don't tell the full story). Hackernews is grabbing my attentions the most for me, should I blame the ranking model?

Most engineers, managers, designers, ... in these companies are people who want to build useful stuff, rather than maximizing short term gains for share holders (additionally none of these companies are paying dividends, so if you maximize value for share holders, you should play mid to long game). If you can make these engineers realized that what they are building is harmful, they will change it.

Disclaimer: I worked at Facebook and it from inside, so have different "trust" model for these companies, and expectations how they work internally. I don't believe that there sinister master-plan behind every feature they release, instead, they are complex organisms with many players that are optimizing for different goals (sometimes sometimes seemingly opposite).

> Most engineers, managers, designers, ... in these companies are people who want to build useful stuff, rather than maximizing short term gains for share holders (additionally none of these companies are paying dividends, so if you maximize value for share holders, you should play mid to long game)

This sounds very nice but is a little hard to believe considering the behavior of the company.

> I don't believe that there sinister master-plan behind every feature they release

You don't need to have a sinister master plan - extreme greed, a lust for power, and a lack of ethics is more than sufficient.

> "Shush" and "Wind Down" are already on Samsung phones, and FB is in good relations with Samsung (see oculus), so doubt this would be Facebook killer.

How are they called? (Looking at my S9 and can't find anything similar.)

> My cynical read of this is that it's an attack on Facebook

Yah, and hooray. Google may be more powerful and invasive even, but there's tons of reasons they have a less-manipulative, less-awful business model overall. Any successful attack on Facebook is a good thing.

All these companies are bad, but Facebook is the worst of them. I'd say Facebook < Google = Amazon < Microsoft < Apple < FLO (free/libre/open).

All these companies are shitty in certain ways, but some are shittier than others. Apple's walled-garden censorship of copyleft software on iOS is what led me to embrace GNU in the first place, but the level of dark-patterns they do is nothing like Facebook.

Why Google over MS? 5-10 years ago I'd agree, but not as much now. They are trying to be a cloud service company funded by enterprise and there's nothing inherently wrong with that as far as I can see. I'd also put Amazon below MS due to labor abuses that are not as prevalent at MS.

MS charges for their product, which means the users are not the product. Agreed.

It's often repeated, but this is a silly slogan. It's not either-or. Subscription magazines have ads. There is nothing preventing a business from making money from users and ads, and if anything, a subscription makes it easier to know who your users are, so the ads are more valuable to advertisers.

Some business models require this; most newspapers wouldn't be in business without both subscription and ad sales.

Windows 10 is apparently a case in point: it's not free and it has ads.

Or, they sell both the license and the users by having an install base that has trouble switching. Remember windows 10 ads? https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/3/17/14956540/mic...

Okay, I think you're right. I'll edit my post. But it's super complex. MS has done extremely bad perverse dark-patterns with Windows 10 and has extended the level of ads-built-in beyond what was happening before. They seem to be trying to be as bad as Google and are just worse at it. And they don't seem to do as much redeeming things.

Yeah you're right. Ranking big, faceless, multinational corporations on who does the most bad when they all do lots of it is really hard. MS does have a lot of dark pattern garbage going on.

Yikes. So much to say.

> Google may be more powerful and invasive even, but there's tons of reasons they have a less-manipulative, less-awful business model overall.

They sell ads too. Sure, they don't have THE newsfeed, but they're still trying. Google Now is a feed with personal and non-personal content they're trying to sneak into your life. They're still trying to make their way into your feelings and social network with Google photos, their Clips camera, etc.

Google invented the "shadow profile": they were there, checking which website's you visited before Facebook was even a thing. They're even doing it without cookies now [1].

Google is the company Facebook has been trying to become. They're very colorful, they have those cute doodles, Android is "open"; they're an older company that's been smarter at PR. Part of that has been not making huge waves, keeping all data closed (as opposed to Facebook, which has an open platform), and keeping quiet.

> Any successful attack on Facebook is a good thing.

Facebook isn't going anywhere, and if it does, who will step in to cover the social networking space? I can assure you Google will be the first in line. You'll have a single company with full information about you. Then what?

> I'd say Facebook < Google = Amazon < Microsoft < Apple < FLO (free/libre/open).

I know it's perhaps a bit much to ask, but would you care to elaborate with why your raking is as it is?

These rankings are so often just personal hunches based on what has been on the headlines lately and it leads to sentiments like this.

I'm not trying to defend Facebook, but rankings without factual evidence make little sense. Of course Facebook will be at the bottom, cause the media and Facebook have always been at odds [2]. Media is a big business with interests too, and Facebook is one of, if not its biggest threats.

Apple and Google collect more location and app-usage data than Facebook. Apple had big controversies about suicides in its manufacturing plants: latest was this year [3]. Amazon workers are treated like cattle [5] and even have to pee on bottles to save time [4].

Why is Microsoft not on top of your list? Is it because the "innovation" Apple brought last decade offsets those lives lost at Chinese factories? Why is Google collecting data about which apps you use and which websites you visit on your phone not worse than Facebook doing it through a VPN [6]?

This is not meant to address your comment specifically or personally push you in any way shape or form, I just want to address all comments of people claiming "Facebook is worse than Google" and putting Google in some sort of moral high-ground.

There's no good company vs bad company here. These are all companies, and companies have morals when it makes business sense. Our job is to not fall for PR games and make them accountable on all fronts, and if you look past the PR, I personally think, you realize that vouching for a company to beat another just hurts everyone.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/how-g...

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook-rupert-murdoch-thre...

[3]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/07/suicide-chinese-...

[4]: https://nypost.com/2018/04/16/amazon-warehouse-workers-pee-i...

[5]: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/7-examples-ho...

[6]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/facebook-starts-pushing-it...

About the suicide at the factory: everybody points finger at Apple, but the factory is owned and operated by Foxconn. I'm not saying that to defend Apple, but it's an important thing to keep in mind.

I'm not an expert, but I'm not a trend-follower either. I've been anti-Facebook from early days. It was obvious from the beginning that they were far more of an attack on the open internet than Google.

It was Google Plus that pushed Facebook to even acknowledge and support at all the idea that people had different personas in different contexts and wanted to relate to and share with different people in different ways.

Google has long offered far more actual control and transparency than Facebook. Google offers products that should exist at least, such as web searching to state the obvious. Facebook-style social media shouldn't exist — they want to be an AOL-type walled-garden.

My opinions have nothing to do with the media, and I'm not apologizing for Google or Amazon's real problems.

I don't want to get into defending Apple (their direction with iOS years ago was the final straw that drove me to move to GNU/Linux full time). I could go on about why I now still feel MS is worse though.

Overall, you speculate a lot about how my judgments are probably superficial. What I'll admit is that they ARE general impressions, not a detailed analysis. But my concerns are not johnny-come-lately scapegoating or unthoughtful.

> some sort of moral high-ground

GNU has the moral high ground here, not even Linux has that.

To be clear, I'm not even saying Facebook is useless. It has some value and has captured a ton of value (which is why it makes sense for people to use it to get the value they've captured). On that note, consider that Facebook does far more to destroy the long-term archival value of the internet than Google.

There aren't comparable complaints like this: https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/fuck_facebook for Google or the other companies, even though they have their own serious issues.

I'm highly critical of them all.

Thanks for the thoughtful answer, I agree with you, and am glad you don't consider yourself a trend-follower. Stay critical, HN.

Another possible cynical angle is that they are getting out in front of a major PR problem. The rumblings about the addictive nature of tech have been getting louder for years. I just talked to a startup that was just going to replace the whole Android launcher to help solve this. And there are plenty of HNers who have their own custom solutions to this, some going as far as downgrading to a dumbphone.

If they can shift the discussion from "phones are bad" to "some apps are bad", suddenly it's not their problem anymore. People looking to collect scalps will be focused on the ones creating the most exploitative experiences. Which is not only good for Google, but good for everybody, in that's putting pressure closer to the right place.

Except that Facebook has also stated they too want their products to be less addictive. But let's be real, Google is also very much talking only about real addiction, the negative kind that negatively effects people's lives, like alcoholism does. They absolutely have every incentive to keep you glued to YouTube and Google Maps. ($$$)

Plus, you mention Facebook, maybe because it's popular to shit on them here, but it's really not just them, this is systemic problem across our entire industry.

Netflix has created an environment where people can spend an entire 3 day weekend watching just one show, and barely leave the couch. It works for the brand, but is it healthy? Amazon has built a model that searching for one problem leads you down a rabbit hole of product reviews and other suggestions where you most definitely can waste hours and end up buying tons of junk along the way.

Those are just 4 big brands, but for us, Github keeps iterating to make its platform more addictive. I've spent hours in there finding novel projects and reading code. Or let's not forget about Reddit, I've spent an entire day at the park on Reddit instead of reading the book I went to the park to read.

Cynically, they’re playing from big tobacco’s book, and this is like putting filters on a Lucky Strike. The product is the same, it can still be used the same way, and they only make money when it’s used that way. But now they have a shred of deniability and some PR. If this holds, they’ll have “Lite” experiences next, and other “healthy options” that still don’t change the underlying nature of the product.

> The real genius is that it fits Apple's brand really well, way better than Google's

Agreed. Of course, Apple would hate to look like they’re late to the party, but it’s probably too late for this to be introduced st this years Apple Developers Conference, right? Or perhaps it doesn’t need to be introduced there and could just be rolled out on the next version of iOS this fall?

Regardless, I wonder what will be the fate of apps like mine (BeeLine Reader), whose entire purpose (making reading on-screen easier by using line-wrapping color gradients) would be thwarted by Wind Down. We’ve already seen implications from Night Shift, which is especially annoying for our users who use our app for accessibility reasons and have to toggle the mode just to use our app.

Of course, you wouldn’t want apps to be able to unilaterally exempt themselves from the greyscale mode. But if you let users choose which apps to exempt, then would they just end up whitelisting (“colorlisting”?) Facebook and other addictive apps — defeating the purpose?

It is good if it's to Google's benefit because that means it's serious instead of a brand image campaign.

PR&D?

You make an excellent point regarding Apple.

I think most people don't know and/or don't care, but you can get the best of both world with CopperheadOS.

Note: CopperheadOS is not for everybody though, I suggest reading this before trying it: https://copperhead.co/android/docs/usage_guide