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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

Extremist conduct keeps people engaged longer, so they see more ads.

Facebook/YouTube/Twitter all exploit the dark side of human nature. They've been doing it for so many years, that it's difficult to imagine that it's unintentional.

>in Google’s effort to keep people on its video platform as long as possible, “its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” and adds, “It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube...

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These companies are always going to want to hold our attention but it's us at the end of the day who decide to give them our attention. I think as a society we need to prove that we are smarter than these companies and are capable of discipline and self-control.

In corporate america, it's hard for me to see any private owned corporation doing what's in best interest for the public versus their own pockets.

> I think as a society we need to prove that we are smarter than these companies and are capable of discipline and self-control.

Kind of like how we said that the answer to alcohol & tobacco was to show self-control, not restrict sales and advertising? Expecting people to go one on one against enormous companies’ profit motives is a recipe for failures.

Except that this is not alcohol or tobacco, this is a digitized version of a free attention grabbing tabloid customized to the person's "interests" is always available to view at their desire. To me this makes it difficult to regulate as it's not purely based on the amount of consumption, it's based on the content you consume.

No, it's not the same as a physical product but there's a growing body of research, supported by some of Facebook's internal commentary, suggesting that it has similarly addictive characteristics, which is why I made that comparison. The point, again, is simple: most people recognize that it will not be optimal to tell everyone that it's their job to ignore a billion-dollar promotional system run by a company which makes more money if they get addicted.

There are some things which you could try regulating: for example, a lot of what drives the dubious aspects comes back to algorithmic promotion maximizing time on site and advertising views. Legislators could ban algorithmic promotion for children, require companies to identify and curb addictive levels of consumption, or require companies to put more effort into moderation on the posts & comments which they promote.

Similarly, I believe at least some countries are exploring requirements to clearly indicate photos which have been modified or retouched.

I agree that content consumed by facebook/instagram can be addictive. But I don't think this is unique to them, I think youtube (my personal weakness), netflix, television, video-games and movies all fall into this category. The particular problem with instagram is that it encourages people to post the "highlights" of their life. Therefore people end up consuming a super un-real version of what life is and end up depressed when they compare it to their own. This issue is not a problem of an algorithm or moderation but of one's personal expectations.

There are tons of great examples where algorithmic feed is useful, particularly when your feed is related to activities such as cooking, music and exercise.

In theory I think the concept of forcing the companies to behave a certain way is ideal but I'm still unsure of what type of legislation could be put in place to address the problem in the article.

Yes, I don't think anyone is saying that this is unique to Facebook — they just get the most attention by virtue of popularity and profitability, and having lied about what they knew and when in various related areas. Ignoring the question of the exact effects of all of the political use of social media in the previous decade, that simply happening to the degree it did guaranteed that they'd get a lot more scrutiny.

I definitely agree that there isn't a proven solution for this problem — that's normal for major technological changes. We saw the same thing with printed books, magazines, and newspapers; radio; TV; the internet; etc. — not to mention things like cars which weren't communications technologies but definitely had major impacts on society. I think the best thing we can get right now is more of the data companies like Facebook and Google tend to avoid sharing, especially after various governments experiment with rules and it becomes possible to see what does and doesn't work.

Cigarettes aren't highly regulated because they are addictive, they are regulated because they literally rot and kill your internal organs.

"Some people feel bad about their bodies after viewing social media" doesn't nearly meet the threshold of measurable harm that tobacco does. And algorithmic promotion can be positive, unlike the universally health-corrosive effects of cigarettes.

That's not the relevant part of the comparison: the point we were talking about is that there are plenty of examples of things where society uses regulation rather than expecting most individuals to make good choices all of the time.

Where the impact of cigarettes is relevant is in the discussion of how _strong_ a particular regulation should be. A deadly threat certainly warrants stricter rules than something minor, just as we do not enforce zoning violations with the death penalty.

If there's a specific policy proposal you could talk about whether you think it'd be effective or overkill but instead you appear to be arguing that there's no need to even consider the range of policy options.

There are quite a few things to think about here: 1) When do we agree science has actually reached a conclusion about something? Facebook is quite a new phenomenon. Social studies research is notoriously difficult to replicate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis While it's pretty clear social media has drawbacks, I am not convinced they are materially worse for kids than Netflix or pop culture. 2) Why do we only think about the kids? If we say that social media is more harmful than good - why not ban it altogether? There's this sense that after 18 years old we are all responsible autonomous creatures worthy of maximum freedom but I think that's not based on anything. 3) What happens if we decide to hold everything in our lives to the same yardstick of how good it is to our mental health? I mean social media shouldn't be the exception right? Is watching a violent sadistic show like Games of Thrones good for our mental health? Or watching T.V in general for more than 1 hour a day? How about using Twitter? Or the internet in general? Owning a smartphone? Looking at your smartphone for more than 30 minutes a day? The list of things in our modern lives that have a questionable effect on our mental well-being is enormous.

Or walk into a casino and look at the people pouring their savings into addictive slot machines. It's kind of eerie how modern slot machines actually appear to be converging with mobile games in many ways.

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/todd-matthews-and-emily...

https://www.bestuscasinos.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/slo...

https://ak.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/1023380611/thumb/1....

Expecting draconian regulations on social media to work is a recipe for failure. How many billions wasted on the war on drugs? People are always going to want to view extremist content, see beautiful people that cause body image issues, etc.

If people didn't want to see it, they wouldn't click on it. Banning it or regulating it is not going to change that, it's just going to cause it to shift elsewhere. It's human nature.

> Expecting draconian regulations on social media to work is a recipe for failure.

Regulations come in flavors other than draconian. Do you have a specific policy proposal which you're referring to? Otherwise it seems somewhat disingenuous to predict the failure of something which we don't even have enough detail to discuss.

War on drugs is not an appropriate analogy here. A better analogy would be a known addictive, but legal, product being subject to tighter regulation to reduce its overall appeal and social harm--e.g. tobacco.

> as a society we need to prove that we are smarter than these companies ...

I agree that this is a test of our society.

> ... and are capable of discipline and self-control

These organizations have enormous resources dedicated to exploiting our frailties and overcoming an individual's discipline and self-control. One option is to continue to expect every man, woman, and child to fight this battle alone in their own head every day.

But we'd probably achieve better results more efficiently by organizing ourselves as well. Then we can combat it collectively as a community and a society like we have done for other human frailties. This would mean things like education, societal pressure, and regulation.

Yes I agree that it's difficult for us to fight individually. I believe we should start informing children about the dangers of the internet once they begin to consume customized feed-based content. I believe parents also have the right to (and should to a certain extent) regulate consumption of their kid's digital media.

> I think as a society we need to prove that we are smarter than these companies and are capable of discipline and self-control.

I think it's a losing game.

For as long as big social is allowed to be “free” with its paying customers being advertisers, it will keep benefitting from trolling and other unhealthy behaviours (narcissism?) that happen to drive up engagement and ad revenue. With user lock-in, full control over UI and algorithms at its disposal, big social has way too many tricks up its sleeve for your average tired-after-work-or-school, running-out-of-willpower, vulnerable user to consciously compensate for.

Normalising paid social (forcing interoperability, downgrading platforms to pipes) is probably the most straightforward way for us to finally gain the ability to vote with our wallet and to choose client software crafted with our needs in mind. (I’m not a proponent of regulation bloat or special rules for select big companies; I think a small but strategically focused general requirement could be enough for such a change to happen.)

We aren’t smarter than these companies. They spend billions of dollars and hire top people in their fields to keep us engaged.

The idea that this is just a lack of willpower on our end is total bs

>These companies are always going to want to hold our attention but it's us at the end of the day who decide to give them our attention.

These companies are already amplifying content they think will hold our attention, by leaning into people's worst instincts.

>In the fall of 2018, Jonah Peretti, chief executive of online publisher BuzzFeed, emailed a top official at Facebook Inc. The most divisive content that publishers produced was going viral on the platform, he said, creating an incentive to produce more of it.

Mr. Peretti blamed a major overhaul Facebook had given to its News Feed algorithm earlier that year to boost “meaningful social interactions,” or MSI, between friends and family, according to internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that quote the email.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-algorithm-change-zucke...

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