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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

I think this is merely an adjustment to how people use social media.

Regular people expressing their opinion on public media is only a 10-year old phenomenon. But people have been self-censoring in real life forever.

There are things you say at work and things you say at home. There are the subjects you avoid at family gatherings not to spoil the weekend, and you usually don't want all your neighbors to know what you've been up to over your vacations.

Social media being new, people didn't realize the consequences and started expressing stuff they wouldn't have otherwise.

Yes, people adapt, and share less. Perhaps it's social cooling, but maybe it needs cooling a little bit.

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I don't think the problem is just related to social media, that is a pretty narrow way of looking at it. We use online services for everything, from buying stuff to ordering food or hailing a cab. I suggest reading the source cited by OP https://www.socialcooling.com/index.html there are many examples such as

> If you return goods to the store often this will be used against you.

and

> Your health insurer may collect intimate data about your lifestyle, race and more.

Anecdotical: if I have a night out, I tend to pay cash rather than card. Even though I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, just having a few drinks with friends. The bar where we usually go has slot machines ("pokies" as they're called here in Australia) who knows if having many transactions at that bar lowers whatever rating somewhere...

I'm 40 and if you told 20-year-old me that people would have this kind of issues in 20 years, I would have dismissed it as yet another dystopian prediction that's never going to come true.

> If you return goods to the store often this will be used against you.

What is often? I have a hard time believing retail establishments with razor thin profit margins are rejecting profit unless the customer is likely causing them to lose money.

> Even though I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, just having a few drinks with friends.

What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks.

There’s nothing “wrong” with driving more distance than someone else, but auto insurers have to charge more to someone that drives more, since that increases their risk of loss.

> unless the customer is likely causing them to lose money

The problem is that this fact is (or will be) determined by some obscure black box algorithm that might even take into account other unrelated data from social media or data brokers.

Your activity elsewhere shouldn't affect your ability to return an item, regardless of whether it's profitable for the store or not (of course if it was up to the store they would rather not deal with the bad, terrible monsters that dare to... return items).

> The problem is that this fact is (or will be) determined by some obscure black box algorithm that might even take into account other unrelated data from social media or data brokers.

I think this data should be public. Much like a credit report is in the US and can be checked for accuracy.

>of course if it was up to the store they would rather not deal with the bad, terrible monsters that dare to... return items).

I know from experience there are people that abuse return policies (basically stealing by using the item and then returning it), and unless the store increases prices to make everyone else subsidize the people that abuse it, I don’t know what the other option is.

> basically stealing by using the item and then returning it

If the item is in a condition where it can be resold at full price (aka you can't even tell whether it's been used), does it matter? If anything, it reduces waste.

If it's not in a resellable condition, then the store should discount the refund by a reasonable amount to make up for it. We don't need yet more scummy entities like credit bureaus which you can't opt out of.

I'm also not confident that improving the retailers' margins is going to trickle down to lower prices for consumers as opposed to go into some executive's pocket or get pissed away in marketing/advertising spend.

> If the item is in a condition where it can be resold at full price (aka you can't even tell whether it's been used), does it matter? If anything, it reduces waste. If it's not in a resellable condition, then the store should discount the refund by a reasonable amount to make up for it.

How is all of this supposed to be determined at a return counter in the 2 min interaction between a retail employee and customer?

As a customer, I would only like to buy an item that came from the factory. Especially anything electronic, there’s almost no way for me to discern if someone has damaged it otherwise. I also don’t see how manufacturers could be held liable for warranties if they aren’t sure one the chain of custody.

> I'm also not confident that improving the retailers' margins is going to trickle down to lower prices for consumers as opposed to go into some executive's pocket or get pissed away in marketing/advertising spend.

If retail businesses had pricing power, they would be asking for more than razor thin profit margins. Retail executives aren’t currently turning away dollars from their pocket, they don’t have access to them in the first place since competing retailers will take their business if they try to.

> How is all of this supposed to be determined at a return counter in the 2 min interaction between a retail employee and customer?

That's not a valid reason for introducing yet another data collection scheme that's likely to have hidden biases and false positives, not to mention the potential of this data being leaked or exploited for other nefarious purposes (do you really trust a retailer not to secretly use this data for other purposes like marketing).

> As a customer, I would not like to buy an item that did not come from the factory. Especially anything electronic, there’s almost no way for me to discern if someone has damaged it otherwise. I also don’t see how manufacturers could be held liable for warranties if they aren’t sure one the chain of custody.

Is this currently a major problem at big box stores (excluding Amazon because they intentionally ignore the issue)? I personally can't remember a single occurrence of me buying goods in a supermarket that ended up being used/damaged in a way I could tell.

> If retail businesses had pricing power, they would be asking for more than razor thin profit margins. Retail executives aren’t currently turning away dollars from their pocket, they don’t have access to them in the first place since competing retailers will take their business if they try to.

And yet money is still being pissed away in marketing, which means they do have money to spare. Why do you think the savings would trickle down to the consumers instead of just being "invested" into either marketing or something else?

Starting a supermarket isn't an easy task; the barrier of entry and the upfront costs (for the retail location alone) is insane, so I find it hard that competition would prevent this. Possibly over several decades it could translate to your goods being a few dozen cents cheaper, but I'd rather not live in a world where you need to "Login with Facebook" to be able to return an item.

>That's not a valid reason for introducing yet another data collection scheme that's likely to have hidden biases and false positives, not to mention the potential of this data being leaked or exploited for other nefarious purposes (do you really trust a retailer not to secretly use this data for other purposes like marketing).

I didn't claim it was. There are various reasons for the data collection. One is obviously marketing, but another may also be identifying bad actors.

Also, almost all stores have rewards programs of sorts that amount to a few percentage points of discount in exchange for tracking your purchases. People will, by and large, willingly give their identifying information in exchange for this, so I think it's inevitable (unless this type of discount was outlawed).

>Is this currently a major problem at big box stores (excluding Amazon because they intentionally ignore the issue)? I personally can't remember a single occurrence of me buying goods in a supermarket that ended up being used/damaged in a way I could tell.

I don't know, I just know I would rather have something new. I assume electronics or stuff that can be invisibly damaged gets sent back to the manufacturer or sold as refurbished after it is returned.

>And yet money is still being pissed away in marketing, which means they do have money to spare. Why do you think the savings would trickle down to the consumers instead of just being "invested" into either marketing or something else?

How are you determining that money is being pissed away? Are you suggesting all these retail business owners and operators are wasting money that they could be pocketing?

>Starting a supermarket isn't an easy task; the barrier of entry and the upfront costs (for the retail location alone) is insane, so I find it hard that competition would prevent this.

It's very easy to start a retail business. That's why the profit margins are so low, it's all very textbook microeconomics. In fact, with the internet, the retail location matters even less, so the barriers to entry got even lower and now Chinese manufacturers can directly sell to buyers. It's exactly in this situation that marketing and brand awareness (presumably to advertise quality control) is valuable.

> There are various reasons for the data collection. One is obviously marketing, but another may also be identifying bad actors.

And my point is that since companies can't be trusted to not use this data for marketing purposes (and the legal/regulatory environment is ineffective at deterring that) then they should not have that data.

> almost all stores have rewards programs [...]. People will, by and large, willingly give their identifying information in exchange for this, so I think it's inevitable

I don't have a problem with it being optional and voluntary (though I still think more regulation and transparency around what is done with that data is badly needed), but the problem begins when you need a loyalty card or providing identifying data to return an item for example, since as per the previous point they can't be trusted with not misusing this data. I don't want to live in a world where you have to "Login with Facebook" to purchase or return something.

> I just know I would rather have something new

I agree, but I mean whether it's worth proposing and normalizing a large-scale data collection scheme and all the problems this entails (especially around bias - what if your algorithm start declining returns from black people because blacks were under-represented in the data and a single individual making a bad return was enough to sway the balance) to weed out maybe 1% of bad returns?

> How are you determining that money is being pissed away?

Because paying companies to waste people's time and annoy them with ads does not improve the quality of the products that I am buying, and yet part of the price I pay for most goods goes to this useless and counter-productive endeavour.

> It's very easy to start a retail business.

I am talking about starting a business that can compete with the big-box stores, since your original argument was that screening returns would translate to savings and that would give the businesses who do pass on those savings to the customer a competitive advantage, but the average 2-4% saving (or less) isn't enough for a brand new competitor to emerge, thus the established retailers don't actually have pressure to pass on those savings onto the customer instead of making them disappear into a black hole.

I have no idea of the precise savings that screening returns would result in, but I know the following from years of reading financial reports of large retailers:

1) The profit margins are tiny, literally in the sub 5% range.

2) This means the operations of the businesses that do exist have been extremely streamlined, and there's not too much juice left to squeeze

3) If they're doing something, it means it is a necessity to stay in business, and a business wasting money in the single digit percent profit margins will not be in business for long.

4) If a competitor starts screening returns, and sees their profitability rise as a result, then they can price their products more competitively and win business. Retail businesses are competing for volume, and customers only care about price.

You can see from the public reports that no one is getting rich off of these companies. They're probably just doing what they have to do to survive, including the marketing and the screening of returns.

> What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks.

Many countries levy special taxes on alcohol. If at least a portion of that money is used towards healthcare, the subsidy by teetotallers either grows smaller or disappears entirely.

But, of course, that requires correct use of said tax money.

> What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks.

The whole idea behind health care is that some people subsidize other people - ie. most people are healthy and use less health care services than they pay for, while a few people get sick and require health care services that they would never have been able to afford.

I'm fine with subsidizing other people, the alternative is to be okay with people that have problems to be thrown out of the system and not receive the care they need.

In any case, it's not okay for insurers to have fine grained access to what people buy, eat, drink, do. I struggle playing it out in my mind in a way that doesn't end horribly.

> I'm fine with subsidizing other people, the alternative is to be okay with people that have problems to be thrown out of the system and not receive the care they need.

So the discussion is about when use of data is identify losses and remove them from the system versus not using data and spreading the cost out between all participants.

Healthcare is a sufficiently broad benefit that much of society can agree on subsidizing each other (except in certain countries), but even in countries with taxpayer funded healthcare, I don’t know if there would be a consensus on whether or not retailers should be able to track individuals to identify those causing losses and boot them from the system.

Certainly, no one would argue against the right of a small business owner to refuse to do business with a customer that is causing them a loss. At what point does a business become large enough that it can no longer do this?

> Certainly, no one would argue against the right of a small business owner to refuse to do business with a customer that is causing them a loss.

When the profit from occasionally serving one person in a wheelchair is less than the cost of providing the wheelchair access, yet we still demand it, indeed that's why we have to demand it - if you still made money from the person in a wheelchair, you'd put the ramp in anyway.

Yes, I guess there is an exception for people with disabilities, but in the context of this discussion, I mean someone who returning items excessively. Clearly a return policy is infeasible if every person returned every item from every person. There must be an assumption that a return policy won't be abused to keep the return policy feasible for everyone.

In the past decade I’ve anecdotally noted that some places with famously liberal return policies have tightened up. Outdoor equipment retailer REI is my favorite example.

They have switched from unlimited returns forever for any reason to 1 year.

My theory is it’s a combo of two things. 1. People abusing return policies. 2. More and more items that used to be durable becoming consumable. In a lot of industries the drive for lightweight and high tech has led to things that simply can’t last. I have a backpack that weighs less than a pair of jeans, but it certainly won’t last the way my dads old backpack lasted. Same thing with my battery powered drill, I really doubt that I’ll be able to find a battery for it in 30 years.

The backpack and the battery powered drill are two things that have shifted from buy it for life, to consumable good.

I'd rather not pay for someone else social care than have my card transactions tracked so that someone can build a statistical model on my likelihood to need medical care.

My point was that I could be flagged as a gambler even though I've never used pokies, I wasn't talking about alcohol consumption.

In other words I'm worried about a rating being decided by an obscure algorithm that no one can vet.

I think you focus only on the social media impact. The bigger issue is that social cooling is not limited to social media. The larger issue, for me, appears to be that it affects person to person interactions and makes it harder and harder to have an 'adult' conversation with people without adding niceties ( would you kindly consider the possibility of helping me if you are not too busy vs get over here ) or current set of society mandates ( for example, finding 'preferred' pronouns ).

“you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.”

Social cooling is bad. It makes things hidden, where they simmer and build up. It is not good for the individual and it tends to not to be good for society in general, because it is channeled and not always in healthy ways.

In a sense, I agree with you. It is an adaptation, but I am not convinced it is a good one.

I think what is needed must run much deeper than self-suppression. It is time for us to look within and cool off within ourselves so that we can speak and act without hate.

I am hesitant to respond since I am not absolutely certain what you mean, but I will attempt to dig deeper.

How would you define hate? I do not want to put words in your mouth. Just please elaborate a little more.

I think facebook and twitter pushed too hard for people to post everything publicly under their real name. Now we are seeing a shift back to made up usernames and private publishing. I don't know many people who share anything publicly but we all share constantly in private IM groups.

For most sites I don't bother remembering a password. I just sign up every time I need to log in which keeps my accounts young enough that there isn't a significant backlog to trawl through and identify me.

> all share constantly in private IM groups.

Are you certain these groups are private? E2E and no meta data leak?

> isn't a significant backlog to trawl through and identify me.

Are you that confident in your OpSec? No browser fingerprinting, GUID, IP address, location data?

Surely the alphabet soup agencies profile HN users.

It all depends on your threat model, like always.

If your threat modelling includes Mossad, FSB and CIA, by all means do take E2E encryption and metadata into consideration every time you communicate with someone in any way.

For most of us it's just selecting a group of people who know what is a joke or hyperbole in the current context. I've typed out some weird stuff in Telegram and Discord chats I wouldn't want my family or employer to see out of context.

But my threat model doesn't include my employer or my suing Telegram or Discord for my chat logs, so I don't worry about it.

Back in the 90s it was fairly normal to use your real name on usenet - some even included real phone numbers and contact details in their .sigs

I would argue there hasn't been enough cooling. My mother has been having a vicious political argument with my aunts for the better part of a year. Created familial rifts that probably wouldn't have happened without social media.

Sadly, I suspect this is not an isolated phenomenon. I’ve increasingly encountered anecdotes of political division souring personal relationships. I wonder if there are systematic surveys or studies of whether this perceived trend is real.

An interesting corollary of this, I think, is that it creates bubbles of people who all think the same and agree with each other. Since it causes many people to cut people with whom they disagree with out of their life.

These people see the people outside their bubble (their neighbors, friends and family) as “other”. It’s so divisive, it’s causing everyone to hate each other as nobody sees common cause with their own countrymen. It’s very sad, I hope we figure it out.

They also end up with a very different view on reality due to being exposed to different facts and the same facts with different framing. Filter bubbles be strong.

In the current climate, there is clearly one portion of the population rejecting reality, even though there’s plenty of available information.

It has nothing to do with bubbles, it’s people actively deciding to delude themselves.

> there is clearly one portion of the population rejecting reality, even though there’s plenty of available information

That's exactly what the world looks like to a person living in a filter bubble.

I know. The useful distinction for a filter bubble would be for when a person is exposed only to a small set of ideas, such as “big government, subsidized everything” is the best way, or “small government, privatized everything” is the best way”. Or “so and so method of education is the best way”, things that don’t have relatively definitive answers, based on reasonable logic and standards of evidence.

Using filter bubbles to talk about people that think the earth is 6,000 years old, it’s flat, the US government is run by a cabal pedophiles, vaccines are harmful, the US election results are false, etc is not a fruitful endeavor.

If you only encounter "other" ideas in a context where they are derided, mocked and otherwise not taken seriously that's still a pretty damn airtight filter bubble.

There should be however space for saying that a group of people or ideology is simply wrong on some points. We should not be force to pretend that all ideologies, values systems and theories are equal or right. Or honest.

Agreed you shouldn’t have to agree with anyone you don’t actually agree with, but also tolerance (for _all_ people) is important. We should make an honest attempt to understand WHY these people feel the way they do, and try to address the underlying concerns and fears that motivate them. And if it’s not possible to do that, at least talking about them like they’re not all patently evil would be helpful in building better relationships with our neighbors.

The information to which I am referring is easily accessible in encyclopedias, university physics departments, CDC/FDA website, wikipedia, state government websites, etc.

The people deluding themselves are choosing to discredit those sources in favor of their favorite celebrity or social group. Or they're pretending for other nefarious reasons. Either way, referring to this as a filter bubble is inaccurate in my opinion.

These people were educated in the US, know English, know how to use the internet, grew up in a diverse country, some are accomplished business people, years long members of the military with lots of international travel. Few people around the world have as much opportunity to be out of their "filter bubble".

The importance of genes for determining intelligence in humans is also available in Nature, etc. But a large proportion of the population still delusionally believe everyone is the same. Mostly due to filter bubbles.

I don't know anyone, prominent or not, that thinks everyone is the SAME. It's trivial for anyone to see identical twins aren't even the same, so unless there is evidence that a "large proportion" of people think this, I assume it's a made up scenario.

I'm also familiar with quite a few cultures around the world, and they all seem to have concepts of being born "gifted" or some version of being naturally talented.

Just one portion?

Many portions I expect. And which portion depends on which bits of reality you look at it. If you think the current canon set of facts of the dominant ideology is 100% correct now when it wasn't any time in the past 2000 years, well... it's just not very likely.

Just because we don't have perfect knowledge at any one point in time doesn't mean every single idea throughout history is valid. Overtime, discoveries are made, models are refined, textbooks are updated, and as the evidence presents itself, you keep marching forward with the best available information you have.

You mean the side that claims US elections are 100% safe?

I think that Trump definitively lost, but from the point of view of a European (from a former socialist country no less!) the idea that you can have "secure" voting without seeing a person and checking their ID card is ... laughable to say the least.

Yet claiming that as fact is in line with the current propaganda, so ...

People have been falling out with their families since the dawn of time.

Let me guess, two-party system? It tends to polarise people into an us-vs them mentality.

In actual democracies with a half-dozen actual viable options or more, we don't tend to get that heated with politics in general.

Really? I have a hard time coming up with important examples. Germany 1870-1932 had many parties with substantial representation, but how civil was it, particularly after 1918? Mark Twain's essay "Stirring Times in Austria" gives a picture of a multi-party parliament in a nervous breakdown. George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England shows the UK ca. 1910 with two large parties, Liberal and Conservative, and two unignorable smaller ones, Labor and the Irish caucus; it was not pretty.

At this point, does any major European country have more than two viable parties or coalitions? Will the German Greens ever get a Cabinet seat outside a coalition with the Social Democrats? Will the UK Liberal Democrats ever get a Cabinet seat except in coalition?

Germany 1870 was not democracy. Germany was democracy in between 1918-1932 and it was forced to become one by their own enemies.

The incivility after 1918 was result of loosing war, result of anti-monarchy revolution, result of communist attempt for revolution and so on. It also had to do with rejection of democracy on principle. It had less to do with multiple parties existing or lack of two party system.

> At this point, does any major European country have more than two viable parties or coalitions?

If we look at the coalitions that have happened at the national level in this century, we have:

* Social Democrats + Greens

* Conservatives + Social Democrats (like, a lot)

* Conservatives + Liberals

So that's three different coalitions that have actually happened in the last 20 years. Admittedly three is not a lot more than two, but it is more (and we're talking about a time frame that only includes 5 national elections and only about actual coalitions, not potentially viable ones).

And if you look at state governments as well, there are actually a lot more combinations that seem to work.

> Will the German Greens ever get a Cabinet seat outside a coalition with the Social Democrats?

Almost certainly.

At the state level they already have. In one case they're even the majority with the conservatives being the minority partner in the coalition.

At the national level they almost did in 2017. Negotiations between the conservatives, the greens and the liberals failed because the liberals backed out and the greens + conservatives didn't have a majority on their own - they would have been ready to go otherwise. It is entirely possible, even likely, that we will see a conservative-green coalition after this year's elections.

I disagree, even with multiple parties there is always a Right vs Left battle - or better "If you don't think like me then you're the enemy".

If you're outside of those boxes you'll be attacked by both left and right wing people, to varying degrees.

I think it's an education problem, people don't understand the basics of politics or economics. They don't understand that Stalin and Hitler were both crazy authoritarians and not political opposites.

The political compass is quite biased in its questioning, but people are often surprised to hear there are more dimensions https://www.politicalcompass.org/

> even with multiple parties there is always a Right vs Left battle - or better "If you don't think like me then you're the enemy".

It's harder to blame someone of being "the enemy" when there is a half-dozen other parties on the other side.

Yes, there still are rivalries between left/right and authoritarian/liberal parties, but having options takes some of the edge off.

I've seen this happens several times, people just group all other parties as right or left and team up with parties on their side

> Created familial rifts that probably wouldn't have happened without social media.

It's definitely part of it, but not the only reason. I know my family had plenty of familial rifts pre-social media.

> people have been set-censoring in real life forever

Agreed. But what they haven’t done is “over shared” as much as they have in the last decade. So perhaps part of the self-censoring being described is a return to mean?

EDIT: it seems I’ve repeated (and agree with) your last point - “perhaps it needs cooling a bit”.

The thing I find problematic is the line of what things to say at home, office and social media is pretty much non-existing (at least in my tech "bubble"). I rarely find anyone agreeing with me that politics should stay out of the workplace for example, or family gatherings etc.

Maybe you're in a bubble but regardless I don't think it should be a black and white rule.

Whether I discuss politics or similar contentious issues (religion, ethics etc) all depend on the individual relationships. I don't blanket refuse to discuss these things with colleagues, but I do self censor depending on individual relationships. Obviously in work I prioritise my ability to work with the individual and due to that often self censor more, but it's not a blanket rule.

Oh i didnt mean its a black and white deal. I agree with what you are saying. I feel comfortable talking about certain subjects with certain colleagues only that i feel close to, but certainly wouldnt do it in a company wide public forum.

In physics, when we connect all environments, it would end up in equilibrium.

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