What deserves our attention?
deliberati.io
deliberati.io
Good luck. When I have talked to people about advertising in general, I've found that they just don't care. Apparently it is a very special mode of thinking where you consider your own attention valuable, attach anything more than 0 importance or cost to watching a message, worry about getting influenced (people will quickly think you are crazy when you choose this tack)... For sure I have found some people here and there who are sympathetic to this way of thinking, but if you want a wider debate about these sorts of issues I fear the first step is let go of your assumption that you can get people to consider your arguments at all if you'd just explain your reasoning clearly enough.
Perhaps rephrasing "do you care about watching ads" to "do you care how much time you spend on social media". I am sure people see little value in visual pollution, specially when you can tune most of it out using ad blockers. I am less sure people don't care about having more time to do things that make them actually happy.
In a way this is not new, you can read Seneca complaining about this in his essay On the Shortness of Life:
“Men do not allow anyone to take possession of their estates, and, if there is the slightest dispute about the limit of their property, they rush to pick up stones and weapons: but they allow others to make inroads into their life, even extending personal invitations to those who will one day possess it. No one is found who would be willing to divide up his own money: but when it comes to his life, each one of us gives others a share in it, and how many others!
…How many have plundered your life without you realising what you were losing?…You live as though you were going to live forever.”
discused a few days ago..
To me that's one of the great values of these old philosophical/psychological texts. They can reveal what is essential and what is accidental in us.
I do think that there are always going to be people that fall in line with that they are told while a select few "decision makers" call most of the shots. The takeaway from your comment is that we need decision makers that are going to lead things to be more healthy instead just benefitting one side.
Opportunity costs.
We fundamentally don’t understand that life is finite and those times change into something 100% different with different pressures.
Modern civilization is built on specialization. We don't have to all worry about the same things. We can pick and choose, and the other stuff is Someone Else's Problem.
This is why there are specialty sites, like forums and subreddits and Hacker News. However, even Hacker News is awfully broad, showing people lots of stuff they probably don't care about and aren't going to do anything about.
RSS feeds and subscription-based following can help if you're careful about curation, but following people has the downside that many people don't stick to the subjects they're experts in and will often repost stuff you don't like because they don't have similar tastes.
And this means having custom filtering would not be a bad thing if the providers of the algorithms could be trusted.
In the culture of the internet prior to 2010, usually whatever was the most recent post would get the the top spot, and I believe the internet culture at the time was more decentralised and people congregated around certain topics to only discuss that topic.
I think this is what is missing from the modern day internet (in part due to the combination of reddit and algorithmic attention seekers), in that people do not talk about the same things to the same people in real life. People usually keep their friends in different groups and talk about different things to each other, and they talk about whatever they want to think about.
"Engagement-based ranking, use by many social networks, is even worse. It concentrates attention on controversy, outrage, and out-group animosity."
It does concentrate on those things!
Perhaps a sad fact for humanity is that "our collective participation in public discourse produces the shared values and narrative that enables collective action toward common goals" - and maybe unconsciously, those common goals are controversy, outrage and out-group animosity.
Maybe social media really just exemplifies a really ugly side to human's that has been enabled by the internet. Perhaps, through the evolution of our species, we have been hardwired for negativity, and the internet just makes it a lot worse.
Just a thought.
The last ice age wiped out many large mammals in North America. The right mix of traits in warm weather wasn’t right when the cold weather hit.
So maybe social media winter is coming?
In humans, this manifests as community building during stressful times, and we band together. I remember after 9/11 happened, a significant portion of the world seemed to coalesce emotionally in support of America (outliers notwithstanding).
Same thing with all the other mass tragedies around the world that we seek to turn toward the useful purpose of building community and a collective empathy.
I have many friends who will create chaos in their lives so that they can feel, even for a moment, the brief-but-beautiful reunion after a bitter fight.
Personally, I see this behavior building towards something on a very long timescale, but in the short term, it is incredibly disruptive. The disruptiveness is essential to break up habits, good and bad. We long for better ways, and slowly but surely, we develop them.
There can be no change, even positive change, without disruption and discomfort.
I've noticed in myself that my dopamine circuits aren't activated much by working for rewards. But they fire up a lot to get me to do a tremendous amount of work to avoid potential negative consequences. It's not in an anxious way per se... it's just that's what seems to fire up my reward circuits with respect to long-term planning/thinking.
There's an interesting and somewhat related saying I learned from one of the Indian tribes near me: "If you don't believe the rumors, you'll surely perish... but if you believe ALL the rumors, you'll perish even faster."
My above comment however was just a thought I had. I am not an authority on the topic.
Many of these things are concentrated, always-available versions of an "important thing" - food, relationships, novelty, power fantasies.
These systems we've created aren't revealing anything new, they are just taking advantage of what triggers our brains the most.
I completely disagree with "controversy, outrage and out-group animosity" are our common goals. They are just some, among many, items effective at grabbing our attention.
This is possible if everyone would agree to some reasonable ground rules… which they won’t.
For one thing, the public square is about politics. No matter what your rules of discourse are, they will allow some narratives to flourish, and since the goal is to dominate, this is necessarily at the expense of other narratives. Which means your rules are inherently political (and therefore, subject to debate), whether you want them to be or not.
Attempting to measure, in real time, the validity or the popularity of an idea provides a perverse incentive. I honestly believe there is simply no way to do this.
Maybe the closest is by returning comments in random order on every load, and hiding all likes/upvotes on any comment for a set period of time. Even returning comments chronologically gives precedence to ideas that occur often, even if they are posted by the same user. This is however not a "fun game" and unlikely to be successful as a site.
Even with this, I think you would still end up with sites having a definite lean one way or another on certain issues, as users mentally total up they kinds of comments that reached the top after the results were revealed and users self-select into or out of the site.
So probably the "best" way is just random, always, and never show any rankings at all. People are free to rank the comments mentally based on their own incomplete information, potentially poor reasoning skills, and their own incentives. But that's the best you can do.
I believe that it can help to use the global ethics "capabilities approach" by Martha Nussbaum:
It is a terrible rule indeed. It also serves mob censorship of opinions, especially when there is "downvote" option.