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Comment by afro88 | Hacker News Reader

> Using transformers to incorporate different user actions based on the current user context helps steer music recommendations directly towards the user’s current need

What if the user's current need is to not play music? To not consume yet more content? To not make them addicted to the content application?

How can we optimize for user wellbeing, and still make money? That's the question we should be pouring resources into

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> What if the user's current need is to not play music?

Then don't play music. You are asking for something that only works in a dystopia.

Either the machine tries to understand "what I need now" from partial information and will not play me music when I want to listen because it thinks it "knows what I need".

Or the machine actually is hooked up to my real time health data and possibly brain activity to actually know what I need.

I definitely don't want to have a personal computing machine thinking it knows what I want and deciding for me in such a way, or to have such access to my internal state.

You missed my point a little. We keep optimizing for more addictive services. It's just as dystopian for a service to always present exactly what will keep me using the service and giving thumbs up.

Every single entertainment service of product in the history of entertainment has been designed so the user has the most entertainment as possible, and its up to the user to moderate consumption. Nobody creates entertainment services that are boring on purpose just because they believe in temperance or whatever, and if they do, nobody uses them because by definition they are more boring than they could've been.

No, but that's also not what I'm saying. Open your mind a little bit. Here's my reply to someone else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41303877

There is a world where services are engaging, fulfilling and not harmfully addictive.

Open my mind to what? Not autoplaying songs? You're just the current times temperance movement. It didn't work then and it'll never work.

Move away from the songs strawman you're arguing against. My point was about content in general. As we get better and better at recommending the next content item based on engagement and likes, we make things more addictive. We don't have to do this. Not everything needs to be a slot machine that keeps you there as long as possible.

I love listening to one podcast episode each evening while I clean my kitchen. I do this each day. I would pay for this. I don't want this to hijack my brain and keep me up all night with content that requires an inordinate amount of willpower to put down.

There are plenty ways to provide content and make money off it without optimising for the best possible next item that keeps a person engaged until they fall asleep.

What might that look like in this situation? A user goes to play Spotify and it responds with “No” and shuts itself down? I generally agree with you that endless content consumption is a bad thing, but I also can’t envision a system where this is possible. It requires enough friction for the user to decide against continuing, which either comes in the form of a service providing less appealing content, making content more costly to consume, such as literally paying per song played, or services simply refusing to serve more content after a certain point. All of which are complete non-starters.

Those are non-starters, but there is a lot that can be done in the space. Not autoplaying the next item is a good example. Look at how services handle things in kids mode. That's just one way to think about it.

I often make the same criticism about services like this, but personally, discovering good new music greatly enriches my life.

Sometimes I'll bounce off of a given artist several times, over years or decades, until the right track catches me when I'm "ready" for it, and then I'll enjoy discovering their whole catalog. At that point, the affinity is durable. I would love to find whoever is my next (e.g.) Steely Dan.

Yeah, me too. But this being google, and them talking about youtube... you know where this tech is going next.

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