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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Instagram does a ton of A/B testing on new features, I'm sure they could have done the research.

I remember when Facebook did research to show causation between newsfeed items and mental health. Everyone reviled them for “running dangerous manipulative experiments on human beings”.

After that, I bet they definitely want to avoid the same bad PR. It would be worse if they ran it on children, and someone died during the course of their experiment.

The problem wasn't necessarily the A/B testing rather than what came next, Cambridge Analytica. This current headline seems to follow the same message, that being able to manipulate a users mental health is beneficial to Meta.

Collecting the data isn't a problem, but utilization is? Seems to be the same problem.

I’m sure they had A/B tested the feature, but it’s hard to think of a metric they could measure in those tests that would reliably detect the alleged harm.

I’m not sure they made the right choice in the absence of data, but I do believe that they didn’t have the data or a good way to get it.

The idea that we can, as technologists, build or continue to do something that is so intuitively wrong because it is, in some sense, profitable and there is an absence of data to prove it’s harm is an indictment of modern society and ethics.

“Intuitively wrong” is subjective. The idea that a self-selected, self-righteous minority should set the moral compass for the majority is the real indictment of modern society and ethics. If there is no way to achieve majority consensus on one decision (there’s always a collective consensus on whether to be on a platform), then it only makes sense that the platform owners should be the one to choose

Yeah I think what you are identifying is also definitely wrong. But what I am saying holds.

You don’t think, for example, that most people would think it’s a bad idea to write software to facilitate showing teenagers unattainable and more desirable versions of them selves?

> You don’t think, for example, that most people would think it’s a bad idea to write software to facilitate showing teenagers unattainable and more desirable versions of them selves?

That ship sailed with the invention of the printing press. This conversation happened in the fashion industry with publications like Cosmopolitan long long ago.

The difference is in fashion magazine it is editors who choose what to project. With apps, it is teenagers themselves who create versions of themselves because kids compare themselves to others and it gets very clique - the apps aren't the problem per se, it is human behavior that is buggy and that is the real thing to fix because the next thing will come around that feeds off of the same suboptimal pathways in our brains, whether it is designed intentionally to make money or not.

Only way I could immediately think of is to survey users.

It reads as "survived users".

Facebook did A/B testing on psychological effects of their products a decade ago and people are still up in arms about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

Doubt we’ll ever see them do it again.

People say this but what, you're going to A/B test a feature removal? Randos being like "hey, where is this feature now?"

At least if you remove the thing wholesale you can do the PR push along with it, and actually do something _good for people_ (at least if you subscribe to this concept in general).

I think it's hard to suss out some stuff quantitatively on this, but ... honestly? If you do qualitative interviews with a bunch of kids across the spectrum, have quotes with them, an info packet with all these articles.... maybe you're wrong, but the upside feels important and the downside feels pretty trivial.

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