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Comment by post_break | Hacker News Reader

I mean this is why they do it. You knew it was wrong, you knew they were going to take that data and mine it, and you still said sure.

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Are you writing that to emphasize the urgency for the government to pass legislation to reign in unregulated online casinos as they continue refining their dark patterns? (I.e., without legislation, these companies will continue finding more and more sophisticated ways to get the user to act against their own interest.)

Or do you mean imply that a practical approach to reign in unregulated online casinos is to spread the message of, "Just Say No," in web forum comments to the ostensible addicts?

Or to be fair, something else entirely? My point is I can't tell without context there whether you are sympathizing with the user ("ah yes, something needs to be done because they've found your weak spot"), or chastising them for not having the force of will to resist dark patterns.

Edit: clarification

Not the poster you are replying to, but I stopped feeling empathy for people who complaint about lack of privacy, yet willingly give up their data to non-essential services that ask for it with all the proper disclosures.

If you agreed to sharing all your contacts to listen to “musical tweets”, I don’t see why you’ll be complaining. You willingly made a trade off.

... willingly give up other peoples‘ data.

Exactly. What a jerk right?

“Oh noes I had to give up all of my contact’s personal information... but I got into that beta!!”

Social status is a hell of a drug. Clubhouse is a place where people like Elon Musk and famous successful scientists and businesspeople hang out so all the hustler startup get-rich people want to be on board. It's exclusive, it's just for fancy iPhone users. Finally an elite place where you can only get in by invite, most cannot resist. If they miss out on the bandwagon, how can they call themselves an early adopter on the bleeding edge? What will their friends thi k of them? Almost as if they used Android or something.

I wish it were more clear what exact info we were giving to the app (not just generic "contacts" or "photos") and when the app is receiving that info.

I know more about coding than 95% of my friends and I still don't fully understand the depth of info that I transmit to an app when I agree to give it permissions on my iOS device.

E.g., if I give Whatsapp access to my photos on my iPhone, does that mean all of the photos that are stored on my iPhone, including screenshots and hidden photos, are uploaded to Whatsapp servers? Does it upload when I take a new photo or when I open the Whatsapp app?

So if, in this case, Whatsapp is indeed pulling all of a user's photos, including hidden photos, to their servers, I imagine many people would not want that to happen. So 1) I'd want to know ahead of time exactly what will be pulled and 2) ideally, I could have a way to use the app without giving it the keys to everything.

Correct. I've been a member for going on a year now and I have scores of invites I don't appear to be able to send because I won't share my contacts. Not that I care enough to invite people, but it's a dark pattern to even require it.

I have heard there's a way to share invites without sharing contacts, but I haven't cared enough to even do a cursory search on that.

unsync your contacts from whatever service provider you're using, make sure they're gone, go ahead and share the contacts (which are now empty) with Clubhouse, get the invites, then revert everything back?

That means that more than likely clubhouse have our details even if we have no desire to be part of it.

It’d be fun once they’ll have EU presence.

I think they had a wave of people join from Germany either earlier this month or last month, so I imagine there are already plenty of Europeans on the app. Plus, doesn't GDPR apply even if there's just one user who resides in the EU?

Having European data subjects is enough ground to ask them to abide by the GDPR. But assume they won't, then you'll have to go to a European court, which could rule whatever, but it can't do much to a company that has no money or persons in the EU to collect from.

Yup, I've been wondering just how inept national and local government seem to be in regulating a global internet. Seems that if we want to have global internet, we eventually might have to come up with a more coherent form of global governance.

Fomo is a helluva drug.

And this tells me that there is a need for another step up for this app - to not only poison the contacts, but to temporarily 1) backup => 2) delete => 2a) share poisoned list => 3) restore contacts.

So we can share the list, but they'll never get our real contacts, only trash data. Enough use it, maybe they'll stop

But wouldn't this company have to periodically review your contacts, to slurp up new ones?

Yup, probably their next move would be to require constant access to contacts list and check whenever the app runs.

The next move on this side would be to keep contacts in a separate app from the std Android/Apple app, and then have to make calls, texts, etc. from there.

If only there weren't so many sociopaths running these companies... sorry, wrong planet

They do it because all the successful social apps need to make contact discovery easy. The ones that don't use this trick - ethical - we don't hear so much about, maybe they don't succeed.

There are quite a few that have not done it. I don't think it's necessary for success at all.

HN seems to be doing pretty well, and it's never done this sort of thing, as far as I know.

Reddit never did it during their growth phase, instead they provided their own seed content.

Metafilter has never done anything unethical to my knowledge.

There are many, many successful social networks which have not performed unethical contact harvesting and other shady things.

Clubhouse raised money at a billion dollar valuation. Hacker News specifically and Metafilter aren’t in the same stratosphere

What are you trying to say?

That because they have a lot of VC money riding on it, they have to do "growth hacking" in order to justify the funds and grow quickly enough to satisfy the investors?

Well, I guess I have to agree.

I assumed the OP saying successful social apps as in successful to the point of being known by at least some average people. Metafilter and Hacker News are both very niche and tiny.

Hacker News doesn’t have the same business model as others either. It’s to help the namesake incubator. It succeeds with that. Getting contacts etc wouldn’t benefit Hacker News. Hacker News could lose a decent amount of money yearly without any prospect of breaking even and still be run.

Most other apps of any kind can’t be run that way, including Reddit and Metafilter.

Perhaps it is just a fact that we have to accept that large (1M+? 10M+? 100M+?) social networks cannot remain sustainable without abusing their users. That would mean we can benefit from building smaller, sustainable communities for ourselves and those we care about. I'm surprised it's not happening already, to be honest.

With today's technology, you can spin up a community website for, e.g. your family or your organization for the price of basic Web hosting and have all the perks of connecting without the downsides of e.g. your data being harvested and reviewed by anyone at CompanyX.

Sure, you have to do your own security, but the big social networks aren't impervious either. And you gain the advantage of not having your account randomly disabled or spamfiltered or shadowbanned.

It won't protect you from NSA or FBI, but I don't think most people care about that. On the other hand, people I've spoken with are aware and do care about snooping by CompanyX employees.

The more I think about it, even as writing this comment, the more I can see that we are very close to rapid disruption in the social network space.

Perhaps it is my family being minority immigrants with other caveats. Snooping by employees is rarely done. It most likely isn't going to mess you up too badly either.

On the other hand, the number of people I know who are either deathly afraid or just normally afraid of the government and its agencies like the ones you mentioned is high. This is definitely going to be a minority of people. My family and extended family aren't common cases.

I don't see either as big deals though. Not enough to have people not stick with bigger apps that have network appeal.

I don't believe disruption of anything but more of the same in different clothing happening. I'm a pessimist though.

But still, why do they need to steal your addressbook? They can offer you to spam your contacts without demanding. Is the profit contingent on selling the address book data? To the point where they won't let you invite more people (help them grow!) without it?

The pushback is minimal. A lot of the pushback possibly includes people that are going to be upset by many things. Specific Reddit communities and Hacker News are good examples of that. If these demographics are unlikely to be happy with your social product’s privacy and dark or non dark patterns, catering to them makes no sense.

I don’t know any one outside some geeky sites and only one person personally who cares about any of this. Some do say lame casually. But it’s not going to be a deciding factor for using the app.

—

To add on to the whims of the geeky communities. Some companies escape it more than others. Airbnb doesn’t get much shit for spamming Craigslist people in early days. Compared to the negative talk of Uber, Facebook, etc, they also get no where near any criticism for the way they incentivize negative aspects of their platform.

—

All of this to say - there’s no real downside if money and power is the primary goal.

>I don’t know any one outside some geeky sites and only one person personally who cares about any of this. Some do say lame casually. But it’s not going to be a deciding factor for using the app.

My experience is completely different from yours. Out of the dozens of people I've spoken with about this stuff, I can't remember a SINGLE PERSON who didn't express dissatisfaction with at least one of: lack of privacy and potential willy-nilly snooping by CompanyX employee; arbitrary blocking and post removal without good cause; bad interface design; low quality of content.

I don't go fishing for it either, it just happens in conversation, although I sometimes am the first to broach the subject of social networks.

Sorry, I was exaggerating and didn't make it clear what I meant. Yes people care. A lot of people will especially say something or another. Most won't actually not connect to Clubhouse with their contacts though.

So I see the same dissatisfaction. I find that to be closer to slacktivism level of caring for most people though. If they stop using an app or don't use it from the get go for X reason, it usually doesn't align with how they're using other apps. So technically they did not use something because of the dissatisfaction you described. However, they aren't actually applying that even remotely consistently.

I think it is just habit and culture, and both can change very quickly. There are many examples throughout history, e.g. civil rights movement.

They do it because all the successful social apps need to make contact discovery easy.

Signal does it with hashes which it doesn’t store anyway

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Do...

In my case, I don't even remember giving them permission to use my contacts, yet I got accepted because one of my contacts sent me an invite.

I might have given them permission without realizing it, but what could've also happened is that they saw my phone number in someone else's contact list, and assumed we were contacts.

You probably didn’t share, as I didn’t. I believe the contacts permission is only required if you want to share an invite, not to accept one.

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