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Comment by misdichotomy | Hacker News Reader

> Normal people are seriously outgunned here.

This is quite right. PragmaticPulp's phrase "an act perpetrated by evil corporations on us helpless individuals" is a bit of rhetorical jujitsu, creating a strawman to set up a rallying cry "I believe people have agency!" You don't have to assume that individuals are "helpless", as if they are generally helpless and lacking agency, to agree that these corporations are exploiting them.

That said, people's agency is limited (bounded rationality). Awareness of how one is being manipulated is not evenly distributed among the population (asymmetric information). And even when there is awareness, people are unevenly affected by it and unevenly empowered to deal with it.

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It’s not just normal people who are outgunned — I am tech-savvy and have had an iPhone since the day they were released. I know how to modify notification settings, but there’s nothing I can do preemptively when can simply Twitter add a new category of notifications, as they did the other day. I had to go into the notification settings within the app and disable this new category, and then do it again for each of the three accounts on my phone.

Similarly, Lyft makes it nearly impossible to figure out where to turn off the coupon notifications. And don’t get me started on LinkedIn...

This isn’t just an issue for normal people. It’s also time-consuming and troublesome for anyone short of the dev who built the dark pattern.

Why would you have notifications turned on for Twitter? Just turn them off. The trick is to intentionally go on social media and waste time, instead of being pulled in by a notification.

I use Twitter for my startup and want to get mention and retweet notifications. I turn off all others, and as a result I get only a handful of notifications per week.

What annoys me is new categories of notifications that Twitter turns on by default, even for users who have disabled all of these novel/generic/impersonal notification types.

You're struggling against the unbalanced power dynamic that proprietary software creates between developers and users.

Indeed, that's precisely what makes these techniques so powerful. For many people, even self-knowledge isn't a reliable defense.

> This is quite right. PragmaticPulp's phrase "an act perpetrated by evil corporations on us helpless individuals" is a bit of rhetorical jujitsu, creating a strawman...

How is this a strawman? This article is absolutely this inflamatory, if not more so.

> Reddit, for example, has always obfuscated the true Karma score (“to prevent vote brigading”)

There is no reason to believe otherwise. Everyone from Youtube and cheat-bot detection services utilizes the same strategy.

> To the contrary, the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love, and Plenty will all be private (or publicly traded) entities.

Basically, the conclusion is that we're inevitably going to turn into 1984. There isn't even a suggestion of how to change the situation.

And, there's only so much time in the day. Nobody can afford to keep up to date with every possible threat the market throws at us, and to stay vigilant and proactive. You end up picking your battles.

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