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Comment by AlbertoRomGar | Hacker News Reader

A month ago, China made effective a new regulation that will force companies like Alibaba, Tencent, or ByteDance to give users the option to turn off recommendations, among other measures targeting algorithms to protect minors and the elderly, ensure fair pricing, prohibit fake news generation, or reduce addiction.

Is this the beginning of a world optimized for well-being instead of engagement?

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"Is this the beginning of a world optimized for well-being instead of engagement?"

I am too cynical to believe this. Would be nice though.

Sadly, I'm with you on this. My immediate reaction after reading that quote was "Who decides what constitutes well-being?"

Unfortunately, the answer is whomever is in power.

Honestly, the older I get, the more I like the vision of a 1930-era utopia. I get up. I have a communal exercise program in the morning. I work for some number of hours, while kids are at school. It's a 32 hour work week, but that's made up for with my 8 hours mandatory education. I'm guaranteed a job, a house, food, and medical care. I'm guaranteed retirement and disability too. There is no advertising. I don't have access to video games, alcohol, drugs, or Facebook.

I can describe how I'd set one up, to guarantee personal freedoms and human rights, and reasonable systems of governance, but at the end of the day, I think "whomever is in power" will make better decisions about human well-being than the invisible hand of capitalism.

I think China has some elements of the right approach:

- Free markets for mass-produced commodities.

- Socialized banks, resources, real estate, and other rent-collecting industries.

- A hybrid for tech and information

China has a technocratic communisim which embraces capitalism since the 1970s. That includes the learnings and notes from a 5,000 year old administrative bueracracy corps formed by qishihuang of the first ming dynasty. China is doing great (today), however poor planning as recently as the 1970s lead to widespread food shortages and people selling their kids to butchers for cannabalism (so it still has capitalism is my point). I like china personally, it's not a utopia, but it is closer to utopia than anything I have experienced in the usa.

Unless you have to breathe the air in Beijing :)

Pollution's gonna happen somewhere unless the way we manufacture changes radically. The US never solved the problem, it just outsourced it. Overall, I think progress's been made.

China doesn't embrace capitalism. They're thoughtful about where they have and haven't embraced it.

On the whole, I am glad for China. I like having multiple systems, and unlike many others, I feel like the government is trying very hard to improve, and sometimes succeeding.

However, I think your view of it as closer to a utopia is a little disconnected from reality. The US is still a nicer place to live than China, unless you're a tourist. The gap has closed rapidly, but it's still there.

I think each system has upsides and downsides. I'm glad for having multiple systems. I hope they can learn from each other. The Chinese concepts of meritocracy, family, and long-term planning, as well as the emphasis on education, would go a long ways here. I also like what's socialized and what isn't. I like weak IP laws and contracts; I think China's in the right place there now (I wouldn't have said so a few years back, where it was the wild west)

The US still has lower corruption. The US is much more transparent. I also don't like the way Chinese politicians are kinda dicks, openly insulting the US. Then there's issues like Tibet, Honk Kong, Taiwan, and the Uighurs, as well as mass surveillance (although the US is not much better on the last one, as of late).

I feel like at some point, China might find a chill government who will let a lot of those slide or move into a more balanced position.

I hope they do. I can see path for China to really become closer to a utopia than virtually any other place right now.

>It's a 32 hour work week, but that's made up for with my 8 hours mandatory education.

What are you requesting be done to you if you are found to be truant from your mandatory education? That's the other side of laws that seems to be ignored in these kinds of proposals.

In general, I'm a fan of little happening. In the same way as if I don't vacuum or make my bed, nothing happens, but it's what I'm expected to do. There's some social stigma, and little more.

With classes, I guess I don't advance in my career as much.

Critically, society would be structured with room for this, and a place I'm expected to be without distraction.

> the more I like the vision of a 1930-era utopia

A utopia for non-minorities, you mean? Because the 1930s were not necessarily a pleasant time for everyone involved.

The 1930s were a horrible time, but had plenty of beautiful utopian visions of the future.

That's when communism and fascism were sparring with democracy in Europe, China had the Kuomintang and CCP visions, the Soviet system was new, and so on. There was a lot of interesting political thought.

> Honestly, the older I get, the more I like the vision of a 1930-era utopia

Fundamentally all you're saying is that you're a child who needs to be told what to do. That is not compelling.

The solution you're looking for is to grow up. You don't need a totalitarian government to do that for you. You can get that done on your own.

> I can describe how I'd set one up, to guarantee personal freedoms and human rights, and reasonable systems of governance

Maybe just do what Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are doing. They're not perfect, but they sound more like what you want while also allowing you to be an adult.

No. I'm saying I like structure in my life. It's work to get that done on my own, and I'd like someone else to do that for me.

I'm managing several major projects, and I like having a project manager tell me what to do. Before that, I had an admin to boss me around. At some point, I figured out that scheduling and planning all this stuff is no fun. If I wake up, and have a calendar of meetings, or a big block of time for writing, or whatever, I am much happier than if I'm planning it myself. If I have a project, deadlines are nice. I set them, but an RPM or admin can harass me to make sure I remember them and meet them.

My project manager, and before that, my admin, report to me. It's not totalitarian at all.

I don't see why a government needs to be totalitarian to structure my life. I think everyone should have a free basic home. I also think everyone should be welcome to buy a nicer home if they choose.

I get the appeal of having structure, but I only think it works if it's voluntary to sign up for it. What you're describing sounds like a voluntary military enlistment (communal exercise, job, house, food, medical care, retirement, and disability), except with access to video games, alcohol, drugs, and Facebook (and also more hours).

However, the system will fall apart if it's mandatory for all. People will shirk their 32-hour work week, do the bare minimum for 8 hours mandatory education (e.g. clicking through modules super fast, or Googling all of the answers), make their own video games (which would be great), go through the motions of mandatory exercise, brew alcohol, grow or synthesize drugs, and create their own social network, even via amateur radio.

The counter-culture sounds a lot more fun. Also, the utopia is incompatible with people with dreams of becoming game developers, people who critique expensive wine, and people who spend a variable amount of time self-learning on their own, versus fixed hours.

The imposition of how a person spends their time is a separate principle from guarantees of a job (an income guarantee is preferred, because a lot of people will effectively and potentially rationally do the bare minimum/no work at the job), housing, food, and medical care.

If that's your objection then anything other than tyranny is impossible. By definition the people who do anything have power.

the point is the people in power represent a limited set of elites that are not invested in the best interests of anyone but themselves

Maybe but it’s just a thought-terminating cliche that someone always throws out at any proposal at all besides shrugging your shoulders and accepting every problem.

I disagree, this is an objection that applies to this particular solution.

Its a global truth that corruption and tyranny is always a risk, but the amount of that risk varries with the solution proposed, and there are plenty of ways it could be mitigated to varrying degrees.

Devolving power to many smaller regional entities can offer a kind of open corruption that would be hard to pull off at a national level without attracting attention.

Still though, being able to turn off the recommendation algorithm is a good option to have.

Yes, any system that relies on a set of guardians to protect the masses from themselves has the strong potential to be tyranical.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

The standard solution of course is to divide up power and create checks and balances amongst trusted groups.

A nice idea in theory, but obviously it has limitations if we could have checks and balances written into the Constitution at the same time as chattel slavery.

Eventual consistency.

That’s just the most glaring example. But beyond that I think another issue with our system is that having so many forces pull in so many directions makes it hard to have a coherent long-term plan or response to crises.

Eventual inconsistency is actually the resilient system.

Preventing institutions from becoming corrupt and no longer serving their members is different from preventing all types of evil.

The american constitution wasn't designed around the idea that slaves were supposed to be fairly dealt with by the government

This is kind of weaseling out of the question since I don’t think even China’s harshest critics are claiming it isn’t benefiting party members.

"from themselves" I don't work in a tech company and I want the ability to turn that off rn

The law doesn't specify what you get when you turn off the recommendations, largely because there are too many possibilities and it can't adequately define a solution over all products. The net result is companies will likely comply to the minimum extent possible allowing you to turn off your algorithmic feed by turning off your feed entirely. Many products will be useless without this feed so consumers will opt into turning it back on and nothing will change.

For example, with facebook, a good user experience would be turning off the algorithmic feed results in a purely temporal one with all your existing filters in place. I highly doubt facebook is going to reimplement a temporal feed to give people a viable option for turning off the feed they want them to use.

So my prediction is nothing will change because the algorithms disabled option will intentionally be a very poor experience designed to make you immediately turn the algorithms back on.

Judges usually hate this "well actually..." reasoning when you try to go against the spirit of the law in the US.

I assume in China where they can just jail the CEO on bull shit charges they'll definitely put in a good faith effort.

If it really disables recommendations and just displays content in chronological order, it would be quite nice. Although technically the differentiation isn't trivial. Is a simple search optimized for relevancy an algorithmic suggestion? I would say yes, even if it is clear what is meant in spirit of these laws: Suggesting buzzing content to increase engagement.

Looking at Google results that clearly favor media outlets compared to any other content, something similar could maybe bring back better search results. I am amazed that Google sabotages their primary product in such a way.

Their primary product is delivering eyeballs to ads, and they’ve boiling-frogged us all to accepting them at the top of the search. Or, maybe income as been added to their legendary search algorithms?

Chronological order doesn't mean unbiased. LIFO is an algorithm. The only way to remove bias from the platform would be to deliver 100% of the available content at equal priority. But practical time and space limitations make that impossible. If a provider is nothing more than a dumb pipe moving bits from an input queue to an output queue, then the control of the moderation moves further away from the end user and into the hands of the content creators. Whoever is better and faster at getting their bits pushed into the pipe will be able to censor by brute force any opposing viewpoints.

Better search won't change that. If the current state of search is trying to find the one independent needle in a pile of commercially produced hay, imagine how it will be when the farmer didn't hire someone to shovel all the manure out of the barn.

You could allow the user to design his own algorithm...

I like the search hackernews angolia filters: manual upvotes, time, match based on your keywords etc

It's very basic, isn't it? There's no apparent way to sort the results oldest-first.

Chronological order is the worst. It makes gaming the system easy by spamming as much as possible.

I think there is something lost in translation, the "recommendation" would means "personalization", mostly to do with using user data or behavior for recommendation, but a pure independent ranking algorithms.

I was actually thinking this morning that I'd like a similar feature for YouTube. It's recommdation system seems to basically regurgitate the very last thing I watched.

I'd like a button or option to tone down how much a video influences the recommendation. Not ignore since I obviously wanted to watch it but I don't need 500 videos of various scenes in a film just because one popped in my head and I just wanted to see that.

Ye gods I miss the days when I could watch "Ben Cooks part 1" and actually have the suggested videos be "Ben Cooks part 2" and "Ben Cooks part 3".

In my experience it would recommend "Ben Cooks part 5" after playing "Ben Cooks part 2", for some reason.

Although sometimes it throws up an obscure clip with maybe 100k-400k views, something random but strangely delightful that it is funneling attention to. And everyone in the comments is new to it, saying “the algorithm brought me here”. I’ve been fascinated by it. They’re almost like reverent worshippers, “all hail the algorithm”. It’s never content that’s heavily curated, like a personality’s page. It’s always like “summer 2004 raccoon eating a dorito”. It brings us together for this brief moment, guides us like a shepherd for the sheep. Like a God, we have little idea of how or why it does what it does (shows us one piece of content or another). I really enjoy those moments.

Does this include removing the layer below this layer of the filtering/censoring of what content can reach the masses to begin with? Is it a double standard and/or hypocritical and/or virtue signalling otherwise? "These individual companies aren't capable of doing this for the betterment of society but we are"?

TikTok would suck so much if they blocked you from your Follows recommendation feed and For You recommendation feed. The platform doesn't have a nonpersonalized feed so you will have to search for content you want to watch.

Well-being can't be measured, so it can't be optimized for.

Oh, well, we might not agree on what the best measure of it is. But we have quite a few contenders.

I strongly dislike the CCP, but sometimes terrible governments can pass good laws. I wish our government was a bit more pro-active in this area.

Yes, I’ll make that leap of faith. Let’s keep going in that direction.

Ah china, the picture of freedom

> Is this the beginning of a world optimized for well-being instead of engagement?

No, it is not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide

It's amazing to me how easily people "forget" the actual UN-recognized religious holocaust that is happening right now, while praising its architects.

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