At least in this specific instance, they can look at the blast radius and make a determination. But this feels legally unsatisfying in the general case
And even with those definitions things weren't very clear. I used to work for financial traders here in Chicago. Every year there would be an unofficial snow futures market. It was a fancy way for all the traders and clerks to gamble on monthly snowfall at O'Hare.
But to my delight, the CME eventually created an actual, legal weather derivative for snow. What made one gambling and the other not? What makes any given bet a legitimate financial trade versus pure gambling? Let me know if you figure it out.
My point being that not having a clear definition won't stop us from grappling with the harms. Nor should it. Figuring out what new things really mean is always a messy process.
In your snow example, those guys were gambling on snow for fun. The formal weather derivative - most weather derivatives have parties (usually players in the energy market, sometimes agriculture) who have real underlying risk and aren't entering those contracts to create risk for it's own sake. It's quite hard to get a market off the ground when there is no underlying risk - people purely speculating generally don't generate enough volume to achieve liftoff. Look at Kalshi and the volume on most bets - it's tiny.
Buy bunch of call options? Gambling. Buy a bunch of put options for stock I already hold, somehow honorable investing.
Too cynical. This disqualifies basically anything you can do with money. If you put it in a bank to get interest you are solidly into the not-gambling end of the scale. And I don't think an index fund is that much more to the gambling side.
The only risk in a bank deposit is up at the "societal collapse" level. Are you really so extreme as to say that's gambling, and if so isn't having money at all a form of gambling?
If you fiddle with "investments" with the intent of making money without doing anything else, that's gambling.
Sticking money in the bank with the hope that it's still there next time you come back to it is not really gambling. You're just doing the default thing.
But that applies to having money at all. That can't be enough to call it gambling.
> expectation, intent
I understand your argument here, but I disagree. Shifting to the bank that offers the best rate is good management, not gambling. Understanding how interest works and being motivated by interest to do bog-standard money storage doesn't turn that storage into gambling.
> without doing anything else
I don't understand how this connects at all. Maybe it reflects badly on you if you want to turn money into free income, but that doesn't make it any more or less of a gamble. It's a totally different axis.
It is, because there's no choice not to gamble. You have to make choices, and none of those choices are risk-free. The options are on a scale between low-risk negative-return and high-risk high-return. But the risk is never zero - not even in FDIC insured accounts - and there's an element of randomness involved in the outcomes.
That's the point. There's no option to say "I have this store of value, and if I don't do anything with it it will retain its value forever."
It won't. So you're forced into risk assessment and randomness, not just with money but with assets in general.
This is the foundation of the economy. All non-trivial transactions are based on risk/reward estimates, and some parts of the economy can force risk and hazard on others.
It's not just a casino you can never leave, it's a casino where the management use various tricks to siphon money from your assets into their pockets without giving you any agency over what happens.
If you don't believe in that, precious metals are another way to go. I don't personally subscribe to that theory but that's the idea.
Gambling is creating risks that don't need to be created, for their own sake. Some people like risk all by itself - gamblers.
Being killed by a meteorite is a statistical issue. Having your house stolen by a bank during a manufactured recession is a crime, and should be avoidable.
Yes, that was actually happening after 2008. For example:
Allow me to refine my point: It's gambling when you seek to increase your risk profile in the hope of gaining higher returns, without actually doing anything else other than "invest" the money.
I generally agree, but I don't think it's a binary. If an insured bank is 10% gambling then an index fund is 20% and roulette is 100%. And the snow derivative sounds like it's probably above 80%.
> without actually doing anything else other than "invest" the money.
I don't see why this changes whether it's gambling. Investing in a restaurant and starting your own restaurant are both very risky bets.
There are lot of value investors which sit at home do stock picking occasionally. They don't work for their money. I don't think they are gambling.
The only investors that fits your non gambling definition seems to be the active investors who take part in the companies. But most investors don't
For example, it's also possible to be actively taking part in the money making activity while taking unnecessary risk. A person can run his own company but recklessly making bets on the loan or spending decisions. So this is the other side of the story where they are gambling and they are actively working with their money.
It's about risk adjusted returns, not higher returns. If you are not considering the risk assessment you are objectively wrong. Take my previous example, how is actively working with you money by taking higher risk less gambling, than passively investing for example an all weather portfolio which is designed to preserve the capital? An all weather portfolio is firstly proposed by Ray Dalio to be as conservative as possible to hedge against all kind of risks while hopefully get some gain.
> Most "investing conservatively" is just being a bit more wary as to what risks are acceptable.
That's objectively wrong. For example lots of etf is designed to reduce risk by diversifying the investment. Just take your own just put money in the bank example. Suppose you do not live in stable country US/EU, and your country is having high inflation. How is just putting money in the bank with your country's depreciating currency less risky than let's say you invest in a global portfolio or an all weather portfolio? In this case, by not managing your risk profile, you are taking more risk.
I am only giving out 1 example to show that `Most financial investment is really putting money into something higher` is objectively wrong. It's actually the opposite if you look into how portfolio managing works. Majority of the funds managed for the Sovereign state or the rich are about hedging against the risks, it's the opposite of gambling.
You don't have risk that the lakers win tonight. You don't have to bet on the game.
Gambling is creating risks for their own sake.
So putting money in my savings account is gambling, but investing in businesses is not.
I suspect I misunderstand your point completely.
But if it's the same risk I don't see why.
Isn't that a bet that your government won't devalue your currency fast enough?
You are conflating risk with gambling. You can go through life without gambling, you can't go through life without risk.
Our entire society is based on being forced to gamble. If you don't invest your money in some capacity then inflation will eat you alive.
These appeals usually go like this: we should stop providing more free money to the people who are strong enough to go and take it. Individually we are weaker, so let's stop this collectively. But someone needs to lead the collective. And just like that - you have created another strongman who will just take what he can. In other words: Communism.
If you are creating risk that didn't exist, you are gambling.
The stock market isn't gambling if you are just buying equities - you are literally purchasing a small stake in a company. The fact that prices move around a lot doesn't make it gambling per se. If I offered a new price on your house every day, it doesn't make your house purchase a gamble.
The point is always the same, you want to end up better off than others that didn't buy what you bought.
If the oil futures purchase turns out to have been worthwhile because price went up due either to production going down or demand up, that doesn’t somehow create new oil. You just get to buy it cheaper than others. You coulda yoloed on spy puts and used that money to buy the more expensive oil at market prices and it's all the same. But you call one gambling and another not gambling, idk, it's all similar to me.
This doesnt help the gambling distinction though. What activities can take over your neurological reward mechanism? Pretty much everything, like neurotically washing your hands. So you have to factor in societal scale and amount of (potential) harm and this is where the vague debate begins. A key point is a dealer/platform, profiting from your behavior, to exclude neurotics.
A striking observation i made was, that gambling machines have deliberate delays between action (eg pull the lever) and reaction/reward for the brain to create tension and to break it with a dopamine spike. This deliberate design is how the machine exploits your brain and makes you an addict. A similar system is the endless social media feed (or even worse brainrot short videos). You scroll, you see new stuff, you identify content maybe emotionally. Its the same fast stimulus-reward cycle. Meassured in 1-2 seconds, same as gambling machines.
If your position is unrelated to a risk or wildly above the magnitude, you are creating risk for it's own sake. Gambling.
The legality of it has zero to do with anything. You can gamble legally and illegally. You can gamble in markets which are made for hedging.
I worked for market makers. Their theoretical job is to provide liquidity. They are required to always give a price. So if the theoretical cereal maker wanted to buy a wheat future to reduce risk, the market maker has to offer to sell them one. Then the theoretical farmer comes along later and the market maker buys a matching future and they're back to even.
That by your definition is not gambling. But the fraction of trades that can be justified as actually helping hedge a real risk is very small. Some people trading are pure speculators, pure gamblers. But some of the non-gambler participants will trade in ways that are effectively gambling as well.
I think it's effectively impossible to always tell on a trade by trade basis which ones are gambling. We could say it's all related to hedging, as the law does, but I think that's in practice ridiculous. It's a business filled with degenerate gamblers.
So I return to my point that even though there's no bright line, it's still worth muddling though and finding some practical guidelines.
As for the market maker themselves - they are definitely not gambling. They are trying to make money while reducing risk to the extent possible. You don't walk into the risk management committee and get an excited response because you increased risk all else equal, right?
Having worked for market makers, I find it weird to get lectured on what they really are. That never goes down well, but especially not when the lecture is wrong. https://xkcd.com/793/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line
It's possible I misinterpreted your statement though, and if so: apologies.
I say this as someone who had a lot of fun GAMBLING during the World Cup.
In certain cases you can use information asymmetry to your advantage. You know something they don't. A good example is any market dependent on public opinion surveys (eg political polling). That data can be hard to find. If you can find it faster than everybody else then you win more often. There is still some chance involved but it's more like poker than blackjack (not a great analogy but you get my drift).
Gambling is playing games with negative EV
Legally, it's whether the bet meets the legal definition of gambling as per the legislation applicable in your jurisdiction and any binding case law. There's no universal answer.
But from an ordinary language perspective, the difference is whether it involves an element of skill sufficient (at least in theory) to win in the long run if you possess that skill. For example:
Roulette - generally gambling
Blackjack - usually gambling these days, sometimes not if count counting is feasible
Poker - not gambling
Stock market investing - not gambling
That entirely depends on the asset classes you invest in. Proper stonks? Sure, that's not gambling. But as soon as you enter the fun world of derivatives and daytrading...
If (risk > some_threshold) then gambling = true; else gambling = false;
With derivatives your risk is often greater than with traditional stocks. But that's not universally true. If you invest in a startup your risk is massive, whereas if you invest in a well diversified and low leveraged portfolio of derivatives your risk might be substantially lower.
And in any case, so what? If you place a small bet on every number of a roulette table your risk is essentially zero: you'll simply make a guaranteed fixed loss of 5.26% on every spin. On the other hand, if you invest in the Vanguard Total Stock Market index tracker, you might hope to make around 8 to 10% per year, but in some years (e.g. 2008) you might make a big loss (37%), so the risk is significant. Yet I think most people would agree that the former is gambling while the latter is not.
The important factor isn't how much risk you take on, it's whether a sufficiently skilled person can achieve a positive mathematical expectation over a series of similar bets.
Indeed, but I'm not alone in making this decision, it's a common thing in the finance world, known there as "accredited investor" [1].
Generally, the distinction between gambling and investing (a fine line that especially Kalshi and Polymarket are attempting to walk, by the way) often is "can the investor / gambler influence the outcome of the investment by knowledge". Say, a stock like GME... the initial analysis by DFV clearly was investment, based on very thorough research. The Army of the Apes however that m00ned the stonk? That was pure degenerate gambling, with the point not being profits but hedgefunds closing down.
Alternately, you could frame it in terms of positive sum vs zero/negative sum systems. The former is investing, the latter gambling.
All of the three categories are defined as gambling in pretty much all jurisdictions across the globe. However, they are classified as different types, e.g. roulette is closer to slots than poker is. Then poker can be "cash tables" vs "tournament". The main classifier difference is "game of chance" vs "game of skill", yet there are lots of nuances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
In the distant past of 2011, offering online poker to Americans, even from overseas, brought serious Federal prison time. That was before the lobbyists got to work.
And betting on sports is ganbling too, despite the excuse of "skilled game" being deployed there too.
In the absence of a clear referent or definition, who gets to decide what constitutes a "harm"? What substance do their claims have beyond conveniently spun moral arguments? Why does betting on an event as common and unalterable as the weather require adoption by an incumbent entity and/or regulation by the state to achieve legitimacy?
The jury.
Also there is a reason why trust in institutions are lower than Trump's approval, institutions are prone to corruptions and enriching the elites while advocating for policies that do not help worker's material needs.
But again, I say that shouldn't stop us from grappling with harms. A good example is food safety regulation. Are there clear, perfect answers? No. But we muddle through anyhow, doing our best to balance many factors. And we should.
If you tell people at a dinner party your wealth came from it, will they be impressed and intrigued, or will they roll their eyes and be dismissive?
"I know how to throw dice" doesn't have quite the same intellectual ring as "I know how to trade derivatives contracts" haha
Roughly that.
Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain
You can also stop taking drugs at any time. Or stop drinking. Or stop smoking. Or stop doomscrolling.
Edit: I wonder if a hypothetical digital experience like the samizdat out of infinite jest is possible? I.e. a digital experience which hits the brain in the perfect way to produce addiction without a chemical basis
If you as a person engage with a product to a degree where it causes demonstrable, measurable harm to yourself or your life, you are addicted.
If you repeatedly willingly do so despite the harm, then yes.
- large scale public health campaigns on dangers of skin cancer. With a catchy song and slogan ("slip, slop, slap... Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, slap on a hat")
- schools make it compulsory for kids to have hats in summer
- regulate tanning salons, promote fake tans in preference to sunbeds
- doctors check people for skin cancers during regular checkups
And over just a few years, being very brown quickly gets associated with being reckless and unhealthy.
In other words, regulate and educate
And that’s not even going into the science behind addiction where the whole “but you chose to do this” gets more and more dubious the deeper you go.
In law, it is sufficient to show an intent to take actions that foreseeably caused harm. Specific laws, of course but you don’t need to cover hypotheticals that capture all abstract cases in order to to show a particular actor caused harm.
> you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.
doubt. Lonely people will get addicted.
You can stop scrolling instagram "at any time", too.
Chatbots are actually a pretty poor but very relevant choice of example: they are already tuned with RLHF to be engaging and addictive to talk to. That's a huge reason why LLM psychosis is a thing, and it's a big reason why some people like using chatbots so much. They're designed to be addictive, just like facebook/instagram/tiktok are.
"You can stop gambling at any time"
As much as I may agree with you, you need a different argument.
The problem with your examples is that it's a person lying to themselves. GP is acting as an objective third party and telling the truth about their hypothetical.
There are lots of things you really can stop at any time. I could stop eating peanut butter at any time, if I had a compelling reason.
If the user cannot use e.g. instagram without generating engagement metrics, then it is not a voluntary metric.
User reports - which are generated via a deliberate action from the user - are voluntary.
Measuring the amount of linger time on content is an incredibly powerful signal precisely because it is subconscious.
It’s the difference between giving someone a like/dislike button and wiring up a heart monitor to see what causes faster heart rate. One is voluntary - intentional, if that makes it more clear - the other is involuntary - just an artifact of using the app which can be measured but which is unintentional.
I don’t believe we should be measuring lizard brain responses and using them to serve up content. Let people make conscious choices instead.
Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...
But it seems strange to use belief in widespread wrongdoing in the food industry to oppose punishing wrongdoing in the tech industry.
Is it just nihilism? All industries are corrupt, therefore prosecute none of them?
I honestly don’t understand your position… it seems to be “unless you can simultaneously prosecute all wrongdoers in all industries all at once, prosecute nobody”. But that can’t be right?
If everyone is speeding and only you are getting a ticket than yes you're being singled out, that's generally not how the law is enforced. They're also using cameras since it's indeed hard to give tickets to 10 cars at once.
Not everyone gets caught. The deterrence is the likelihood of getting caught times the penalty. And yeah, the guy with a bright red, loud-exhaust sports car is more likely to be ticketed than grandma in a minivan, at the same speeds on the same roads. This is life.
I think you have to figure out when this is in service of the user's intentions or not, and that's where it gets tricky.
Apparently you can't trust users revealed preferences and have to use something else.
Practically, it won't happen. These thought experiments are exercises where people imagine the websites they don't want other people using getting worse, while failing to imagine any way that it might negatively impact any site they use. Usually when I press the topic it turns into a game of whack-a-mole where the other people come up with more and more exceptions and specifics to these theoretical laws to reveal what they really have in mind, which is targeting some small handful of social media sites that they don't want other people to use. We see this with the age restriction laws where the comments come out in full force demanding ID checks and huge fines for Facebook and TikTok, but there are meltdowns whenever people realize that the regulations would be coming for their Discords, YouTube viewing, and Reddit access too.
I halfway imagine this whole exercise ending with some big show about warnings, where users who join TikTok or other websites have to click a big warning sign that says they might be addictive. If some countries start instituting laws against recommendations or personalize recommendations, the popularity of VPNs will continue to rise so people can simply use the products like they want instead of having to deal with nerfed versions to satisfy some country's laws.
This is what I was talking about in the second half of my comment: Every time I bring up the fact that these proposals would be overbearing, people start brainstorming infinite carve outs and exceptions that would exempt the products they use, but harm the products they don’t want other people using.
If these laws hit the books they’re not going to be neatly shaped to avoid the things you like and only impact the things you don’t.
Sleep-deprived teenager autopsy: a teenager with enormous purple eye bags, phone surgically fused to their hand, lying face-down on a school desk at 3 AM.
Body-image filter ward: rows of teenage faces grotesquely stretched, pinched, inflated, beautified and looksmaxed until everyone looks like the same embalmed Instagram mannequin.
Doomscroll thumb: a gigantic swollen thumb with the fingerprint worn completely smooth from infinite scrolling. The tendon is labeled "ENGAGEMENT."
Facebook scam victim: an elderly person's wallet dissected on an autopsy table -- completely hollow, with a Facebook ad where the money used to be.
Algorithmic stomach contents: an autopsy tray containing "suggested for you": rage bait, diet videos, conspiracy sludge, influencer ads, and one photo from somebody you actually know.
Predator warning: a cute Instagram DM screen shown as an anglerfish -- friendly profile photo as the glowing lure, enormous teeth hiding behind it.
Facebook Hospital: a free to play educational game where you have to spend virtual currency for cures to the ailments Facebook gave you, like Bloaty Head from reading all the AI generated engagement porn.
Maybe they should insert disgusting slices of actual carcinogenic lung tissue into boxes of cigarettes, since images of them aren't impactful enough.
That would be harder for smokers to ignore, and it would make the cigarettes harder to light, worse smelling and tasting.
> when I have exactly 2 hours of TV watching time in a week and don't want to waste it finding a new show.
The television is a tool for watching shows. The show is ostensibly the draw, and the television is the vehicle for watching it, no? So why do some people (lots of people actually) feel compelled to sit in front of the television to watch something? If there is no show that one wants to watch, why the compulsion to sit in front of the television?
I've spent countless nights in front of Netscape Navigator surfing from site to site. I'm fully aware how compelling the device-content system can be. But it's always been the content side, not the device side, that was compelling.
I have the same experience with youtube, reddit and HN. I don't really know what I expect to see when I open the HN front page. If I knew, I'd navigate to that site directly. But I know I'll see something on HN. Maybe something that catches my eye.
Netflix is just the same. "I'm in the mood to watch a documentary. Let's see what they've got."
> "I'm in the mood to watch a documentary. Let's see what they've got."
Because I have kids, an active life, and a lot of physical hobbies and activities.
And some times it’s 10PM, too early for bed, too tired from a busy day, and I’m looking to relax and enjoy a show with my wife for an hour.
I said two hours per week because that’s about how much it ends up being. The fact that this is attracting criticism and even a sister comment calling me “addicted” is bizarre. What even is the goal here? Shaming people for relaxing and enjoying things? Feeling a smug sense of superiority over others for their consumption choices during down time?
Is it lost on you that these criticisms are coming in the comments section of a social news site where people waste a lot of time?
I'm a happy paid user of Spotify and just ignore the recommendations (I'm not looking at a screen), and I use YouTube heavily with a browser plugin that hides recommendations (which kills the end of video loop). I get recommendations from people, and use the products for curation, bookmarking and subscriptions. They're good.
Whereas Instagram and TikTok are vacuous and useless to me - I can't make myself use them. I think my brain knows what's wrong with them, and makes a kind of disgust reaction very quickly.
I agree, there's a very low level, emotional difference between them. I'm not sure I could encode it in law, but it is different.
> This would include everything from my Spotify recommending new music that I like to my Netflix showing me similar shows.
Spotify recommending music and Netflix recommending shows that are similar to what? To previously recommended music/shows. This is exactly the problem.
> I'm a responsible adult. I want those things.
This is a clear indicator that these things are addictive and are in fact gambling.
What problem, exactly?
Helping me find new music to enjoy?
I’m beginning to think some people have forgotten what we’re supposed to be angry about and now we’re just angry at all things tech.
Spotify recommending new music to me or continuing to play music suggestions when my playlist runs out is in no way harmful. It improves my life. I lose nothing to it. I gain new exposure to music.
It’s fine. Let people enjoy things.
> This is a clear indicator that these things are addictive and are in fact gambling.
I assure you I am neither addicted nor am I gambling when I listen to new music on Spotify.
What are we even doing here? Is this some puritanical push against all things that people might enjoy?
You're claiming it's making your life better, ostensibly by a relative report of the hedonic response a newly introduced piece of music auto delivered to you by the recommendation algorithm invokes. The problem they hint at though is the passive nature involved. You aren't finding that new piece, it's getting pushed. That pushing incentivizes optimizing for continued engagement, an act children, intellectually and developmentally disabled individuals, as well as those in the throes of cognitive decline/impairment, are not at all well equipped to self-regulate against when pitted against paid behavioral psychologists designing maximally engagement encouraging interfaces.
The incentive, and the existence of predatible populations is the problem I take away from it. I can agree you should be free to opt-in mind, but I can also see the wisdom in a by default interface wherein engagement hacking is forbidden being the norm, and that norm coming with a minimally controversial algorithm boiling down to "chronological feed of known/subscribed to sources", followed by a link of some sort to open an interface to the recommendations.
Facebook/Insta/Shorts are absolutely not that non-engagement farming interface. Hell my grandmother toward the end was about driven mad by it, and it was all I could do to just try to remind her that just because the machine had it on offer doesn't mean she had to partake, but her community centric character made that a bit of an ordeal for her.
There is absolutely a pathological pattern to the way tech companies hunt for eyeballs to monetize, and it is a damn shame it's taken this long to start getting traction to even talk about it.
Is it helping you find new music or is it feeding the same thing it has been feeding you in a reinforcement loop? Are you really searching or are you mindlessly taking what's on offer?
> Spotify recommending new music to me or continuing to play music suggestions when my playlist runs out is in no way harmful.
In both Netflix and Spotify any real discovery is quite well hidden, nearly all of the feeds you can get are algorithmically generated for you to consume what is beneficial to them. You get an interface pretending to offer you a choice and an algorithm behind, designed and fine-tuned by behavioral psychologists to get you coming back for more. An apparently it is doing it's job so well that you keep defending it.
Can you opt out of those features? If not, how do you know you want those things or if you are just being manipulated into using them?
Kind of, by using a different software.
How can you use a different version of Netflix to watch shows that are only available on Netflix?
How can you use a different version of YouTube to watch videos that are only available on YouTube?
> Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations? You do not get covered by Section 230.
If they get to exercise editorial powers, then it doesn't make sense for them to be protected from liability for choosing what to publish. If they just give you a giant firehose, then they're not doing anything editorially and they should not have any liability as clearly that's not _their_ speech.
No matter what the “algorithm” is, at some point it’s a choice of what to put in front of the user - a publishing choice.
Unless the rules are solely determined by myself and deterministic (no selection or choice on the platform end) then they are publishers.
And liable.
However, I don't really see how Section 230 is even relevant here. What Section 230 protects them from is for being liable for what is in the individual user posts posted to Facebook. It essentially just makes it so that if you have a beef with what someone posts on Facebook and want to sue you sue the poster rather than Facebook.
What is being alleged is that Facebook's decisions in how to arrange and present and show or not show that user content has harmed people. Those are things that are not in scope for 230.
Legal systems have dealt with these sorts of slippery definitional issues for centuries! In this specific case, I would venture that the applicable legal standard would be some form of a balancing-the-factors test, where there is a list of criteria that a court weighs to determine if a given situation meets a legal threshold. It’s purposefully designed to have flexibility and ambiguity, with the expectation that, over time, courts will develop precedential law defining how the factors apply in various contexts.
For something like “addictive social media”, imagine a standard with factors such as:
- Whether an algorithm determines what material is presented to the user, based on a statistical model of user behavior;
- Whether the product was developed with the input of behavioral psychologists;
- Whether a significant portion of the users exhibit compulsive use of the product;
- Any mechanisms implemented l by the developer to deter compulsive use;
and so on.
So a mail s/w that pushes up mail that it deems important?
Modern social media is choosing from a vast pool of content and the algorithm's entire goal is to maximize engagement for monetary gain (at whatever cost to society). There's only so much "engagement maxing" you can do with an email sorting algorithm especially if the premise for an email inbox is that you'll always only ever see your emails and nothing else.
If you're targeting individuals with specific content algorithmically, you're hardly a dumb platform for user-generated content, and I would argue that it's well over the line that would classify you as a publisher.
In fact protecting publishers from liability for user generated content was one of the main points of section 230.
Except when it's called "prediction markets" and therefore it isn't.
Somehow the "you can afford to lose your entire stake, you aren't leveraged, this isn't a con you fell into" is missing.
(thats aside from "you aren't an inside trader with privileged knowledge because of family ties to the WH, are you")
Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted - intentionally not just let them write that one message, but distract them into other stuff - would qualify.
"Oh but your honor if you find me guilty then you must also shut down YouTube", he said with a confident smirk. As if it was not trivial to establish intent in the case of meta, who were probably high fiving while sharing reports titled "Basic methods to make teenage addiction go up".
So Netflix, Youtube, basically all ad based websites and social media should be hit with the same requirements no ? Even the news try to get engagement - it's usually not like they really care about honest and facts based reporting.
Well yeah they hate to think about themselves that way, but that's the life they choose. Now - would they like that choice to be taken away from that or substinatially reduced? Would they like to live without Netflix, Meta, Youtube, porn, junk food etc etc - or have these products completely transformed ? Seems like they wouldn't.
List goes on. Socio.
I don’t really see how it’s much different than premeditated murder versus manslaughter.
In this case I wholly believe much of Facebook and Instagram’s addictiveness is the result of intentional choices and decisions made by people at Meta.
If the feed is made of posts belonging to the connections i follow (be it business pages or persons) in temporal order, then chances for addiction are low. If the algorithm decides for me what is relevant and from whom and in what order, then chances are high for addiction potential.
Algorithms are optimised for engagement (time spent there and interactions), not for my benefit (keeping up with my connections and interests). And they usually follow reinforcement/reward schedules -> specifically the Variable Ratio pattern. Just like gambling.
"For example, in a lab setting, this might involve delivering food pellets to a rat after one bar press, again after four bar presses, and then again after two bar presses. Gambling and lottery games are good examples of a reward based on a variable ratio schedule."
For FB, it could be how many irrelevant posts do i see before i get an update from a friend.
Maybe not? Maybe if enough minors experience harm from a platform, that's enough to restrict it for minors.
100% yes. Remember, this is somewhat adversarial: Meta increases its products addictiveness year by year. Banning individual practices fails if the rate of that growth exceeds the impact of point solutions.
- non-chronological timeline
- promoted content from people you don't follow
- Rewards for using the app (reddit is a great example of this)
- Dark patterns to take control away from the user about what they see
So like the general argument is "company X was causing material harm, knew they were causing harm, and actively decided to continue causing harm while covering it up."
It'd be similar to suing someone who sold a dangerous toy under the label "safe for all ages". The lawyers don't need to ban specific features (sharp edges, fast motors, etc.). They just have to argue the way it's put together harms kids, the company knew about it, and they kept lying about it anyway.
The remediations could therefore be case-specific. They don't need to ban infinite scroll in general, just ban Meta from applying it to their products, since it's known to be harmful in that context.
If they have a set of characteristics that line up with social negatives, they should be disallowed or not permitted for persons under N years old (like for gambling or smoking). This doesnt solve the problem for adults of course, but its a good compromise.
I would very readily be in favor of outright banning infinite scrolling video feeds, even if its just for under 18s
As for Meta itself, and proving their case - I can't imagine it'll be difficult. Whatever they get in discovery + endless testimony from various people that have worked there will already likely leave it beyond any reasonable doubt.
Instead lawmakers should be making new laws.
What if I told you that judicial outcomes are often nondeterministic?
We just use those.
Although it may be possible to replicate either with AI. But it still should be conversation style rather than infinite feed thing without any input.