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Comment by deegles | Hacker News Reader

My gut feeling is that nothing will change meaningfully as long as employee promotions are dependent on increasing engagement (either directly or indirectly).

I believe that no single person sits down and says "let's make kids get addicted to our product," but they do run A/B tests or new features and keep the better performing variant. The end result of many of these cycles is the same.

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It is not even about employee promotion.

You can't ban a communication tool. That is just absurd.

Yeah lol

Research shows 100% of bullying is caused by humans and eliminating all human contact reduces bullying by 100%

Amazing!

With LLMs that doesn't have to be true anymore.

I worked at Meta for 7 years, focusing on Youth Engagement for a number of those years. We had incredible sociology research on what is good and healthy for kids online. We were not allowed to build any of it because the Director and VP class only rewarded "number go up" and punished any other activity. I quit the Youth group in frustration because they just wouldn't let me build or even code.

Is any of the sociology research available publicly? Very curious what ya'll wanted to build.

only took 7 years of collecting pay checks for you to become conscious

nothing will change until people stop enabling meta with their labor

Do you regret having devoted so much of your time and energy to the mission of that company?

Nothing will meaningfully change, it's mostly a money grab I assume. Politicians and media have built up this boogieman for years and now it's time to cash in. The kids supposedly negatively affected won't see any of that money either. The social media companies just need to donate more to campaigns to make it go away. Cynical as hell, but watch, that is how it plays out.

>I believe that no single person sits down and says "let's make kids get addicted to our product," but they do run A/B tests or new features and keep the better performing variant.

Television stations make pilot programs to see if a show is any good. Intentionally making bad shows isn't a great business model. Television stations want shows people will watch, otherwise they are wasting a ton of money. I suspect social media is similar.

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