Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

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Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive. Including cheeseburgers and fun video games.

>Most alarming is the “internet points”. On Reddit, this is called Karma. On Twitter, it’s likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score displays the community’s overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can vote! The reality is very different. Reddit, for example, has always obfuscated the true Karma score (“to prevent vote brigading”), and the position of a piece of content within the feed can be purposely decided by the Reddit home office, not by the community. This is incredibly, deeply sinister.

Why is it 'deeply sinister' -- he just seems to assert it, reddit home office isn't putting other content there that isn't sponsored -- astro turfing exists and explains a lot of that but I don't think it's the reddit admins. The voting mechanism is pretty good at determining interesting content from uniteresting content.

This whole article reads like a conspiracy theorist rant like some luddite against tech. There are negative behviors associated with modern technology but this article just asserts that without really elaborating exactly why. It just blankly gestures "you know -- bad tech, feedback loops, doom srolling" all the keywords!

Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, pointed out the hazards of "Peer to peer electronic media" in the 1960s with uncanny accuracy. Calling someone a luddite when your own views are as anachronistic as they are is ridiculous.

And stop flattering yourself by calling social media 'tech'. Every industry uses technology, calling it 'tech' doesn't distinguish it in any way. Social media is a medium for a exchange like a book, or a campfire. Different media have different effects on how information is conveyed and how the world is understood by the users of said medium.

Social media has been overwhelmingly influential to the way people communicate and understand one another and denying any questioning of it's effects outright is telling. Your tribalism is showing. Marshall McLuhan warned you about this, you should have listened.

This comment is as equally polarizing as GP, just in the opposite direction. You can have social media be tech, have some net effect on society (whether that's good or bad is literally being debated right now) and be addictive.

As with anything in life, there is nuance. Social media isn't a great satan and it isn't god's gift, it's somewhere in between.

Well yes, case in point, social media has a tribalizing effect on people. I don't disagree that comments on the internet tend to be polarizing. I wouldn't have commented at all if it wasn't to disagree with somebody, that's normal in these parts.

I wonder what happens when most of the population is relying on such a medium for their understanding of the world beyond what they can see and touch? I don't think me setting a good example here on HN is going to have much effect against the basic human impulses that social media selects for.

> stop flattering yourself

What does this even mean? Why would it be flattering himself?

The implication is that the poster works on social media.

> This whole article reads like a conspiracy theorist rant like some luddite against tech.

Your whole comment is a rant. At least the article you're complaining about had some points to make.

Much of what the author mentions has its roots in behavioural addiction research. In particular, there are many parallels with the gambling industry, and how it profits from maximising user engagement and potential for addiction.

I think you are missing the point. Yes, cheeseburgers can be addictive. Consider if $burger_chain provided an unlimited burger, which you could eat forever. This would certainly be very problematic, but at least you have the biological function of “too full to eat” which gets you to stop. But you can imagine how bad this could be for many people even with that function.

Social media is even worse. It’s an unlimited hit for hours and hours and hours with hardly any short-term consequence which causes you to break out of the loop.

The other point you are missing is that the incentives are all wrong. The incentive for posts on social media is engagement, which means polarizing content, which means radicalization.

At least with a fun video game, you might have fun playing it and learning new skills and stories! But I can admit that I often spend too much time captured in the game loop a because it’s unlimited — that’s problematic.

It’s still fair to point out that the incentives for $burger_chain are all wrong too — hence why fast food is so full of sugar and other ingredients which are bad for you, but taste good in the moment to many. It’s to drive addiction, which drives recurring sales. I think that’s messed up to.

In intelligence circles, you evaluate an adversary in terms of capabilities as a rule, then figure out the impact of those capabilities when employed against you.

I find it interesting that so many people in the world have a knee jerk reaction specifically against doing this. Especially when it comes to tactics around manipulation. The fact is, everyone is vulnerable to it. You don't spend all your time worrying about it mind, but it behooves one to evaluate and maintain a sense of perspective. No, Reddit probably isn't always actively engaging in some direct form of manipulation.

Oh wait, yes they are, they advertise, and they moderate. Both of those are active measures to shape discourse, the difference in whether this is positive or negative tends to come into play based on who the shaping of discourae benefits, and who it maligns, and where you are in respect to that divide. They aren't a hands off neutral platform.

The more interesting article, in my mind, would have been one less focused on particular tech, and moreso the role of manipulation in the modern world.

Tech and "tech companies" are a huge red herring in these discussions. These are business models and business decisions. The algorithms aren't doing this on their own - there are humans there, making decisions to mess with people's heads and make money through tricking other people to part with their money.

It's the same problem as we had 100+ years ago - and really even the same problems real (not stereotypical) Luddites rose against: business decisions. But talking about this is boring, we've been having this discussion for generations. Focusing on "tech" generates more clicks.

> I don't think it's the reddit admins

It's actually the mods. A select small number of people are mods on the top 50 or so subreddits by size. They can control what gets posted, what gets upvoted and what gets silently censored. It's also an (unpaid) full time job, it's naive to think they're not monetising their power in any way.

>It's actually the mods.

Mod means nothing -- I'm a reddit mod. Admin is paid employee of reddit with completely different access level. A planted story by a mod is still within the grounds of "astroturfing" accusing reddit admins is another order of magnitude of corruption higher. Like I said I don't think reddit admins are doing it but the author does seem to imply it.

Mod doesn't mean nothing. A lot of the powerusers also moderate major subs and can spike opposing content and users who would interfere with their clout-chasing, and appeal to sympathetic admins to enforce "harassment" provisions if their manipulations were being critically discussed in places on Reddit that are beyond their reach.

I mean, is there any defensible reasons for why we often see the top powerusers on these subs also act as mods? I'm sure that they aren't behaving as "normal" mods.

You can buy and sell subreddits. Just as you can buy and sell mod powers in popular subreddits.

Reddit also has purchased up/downvotes (through click-farms/bots), opaque moderation, and the real-time public display of these promote mobs and groupthink even if it were actually organic. I don't think for a second their algorithms do a good enough job of mitigating these clickfarms.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04206.pdf

> Even though the environment of r/unpopularopinion encourages users to freely express their opinion, the dominant population of this community is young white males, and only the opinions representing them are supported by general users and brought up to the front page. Consequently, the minority opinions are neglected and it results in another spiral of silence phenomenon in the community

I don’t know if young white males needs to be said or if that’s just speculation. What matters more is the outcome which is actually just more groupthink.

I mean, they took a sample of the sub, and that is what they found (see their notes on data collection process done via Reddit Chat)

Regardless, I agree with you, the groupthink is the issue here - I do think it is telling though, that it is a groupthink (allegedly) skewed by the white male perspective. Which I think is also an issue, lack of representation in such echo chambers. But you’re right - two separate issues that happened to be intertwined here. Anti-racist echo chambers are still echo chambers.

There is an arms race between reddit admins and spammers in general -- who will ruin any platform with eyeballs on it.

This article does not address that all -- vote fuzzification apparently only serves "brigading" -- thast not what it's for. It's for spammers so they can't judge the effectivness of their bots.

The author misses the wood from the trees. I'm not seeing valid criticisms either which means he didnt' even Google to see what others said of reddit, e.g. poor moderation tools for large subs.

> Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive.

Also holds for the edit-compile-test cycle, I suppose.

Cheese burgers and video games aren't free dude.

Bad enough they are handing out free drugs. On top of that look at the behavior it produces. Algo amplification of all the content that generates polarization, misinfo, mob justice etc is not possible without a corral of people addicted to and conditioned by the Like/Click/Upvote/View/Follower count.

When their behavior is unproductive. They point at their Like counter as validation. Thats how Trump end ups thinking he is doing something productive.

He could be referring to pinned posts.

I think it's valid to say the point system contributes to the formation of the echo chamber.

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