I’m clearly addicted, but does HN have any sort of algorithm designed to maximize my time on it?
I’m sure these companies do everything in their power to make their services more addictive, however we have to consider that this is just looking for a scapegoat.
"Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero."
Go look at something such as a phpbb site where topic ordering is driven solely by 'bumps' - the most recent topic to have a comment gets bumped to the top of the page listing. You'll find they rarely have any worse ordering of content than voting systems provide. In my opinion it tends to be simply superior. It also avoids the huge problem in point based systems of requiring some 'parallel universe' /new stream that only a tiny and biased minority ever view.
But voting systems drive "engagement." One intuitively surprising discovery is that downvoting users tends to drive them to comment more, frequently with lower quality posts following. I say 'intuitively surprising' because it seems counter intuitive, yet if you've spent any time on point driven message boards, including here, you see the constant stream of little tit-for-tats as a downvoted user (or two) engage in an ever lower quality of 'debate' in some isolated thread. As for upvotes it goes without saying that that little micro-shot of dopamine is what's built, and arguably sustaining, the social platforms of today.
As for bump-ordering, I lost most of my youth to phpbb-like forums, and I'd say they foster a mindset of even more obsessive interaction because not only do non-nested threads become impossible to follow if you're away for long enough, but keeping your preferred topics on the front page requires frequent monitoring and carefully-timed comments.
You mean like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19129671 which directly links to the 'parent' of your comment and is formatted almost exactly like a 'Ask HN' post?
HN, like reddit, optimizes for engagement using the post ranking algorithm.
that upvotes are visible to the user is a big one. Hackernews (or reddit for that matter, which employs a similar mechanism), would work just as well for the purpose of conversation if your score was hidden.
But seeing that number next to your name climb up is something that drives a lot of engagement on the platform. I don't think this is intentional on HN's part, but on Reddit for example I have no doubt that the activity generated by the 'karma' mechanism is left in place precisely because it generates so much (meaningless) content.
Even email can be habitual. Stop sending them and - sans spam and newletters - you stop getting emails.
It's too easy to be addict today.
I think humans spent the 20th Century learning how to live with the availability of unlimited sugar and fat.
I could easily consume 10,000 empty calories per day. But instead I’m eating a bag of fresh organic vegetables as I write this because I learned to resist my biological urges to gorge myself on foods designed to trigger them like chips, cookies and soda.
I think people in the 21st Century need to learn how live with the availability of unlimited information. To consume more of the mental equivalent of organic vegetables and less of the mental equivalent of soda.
Adults are just children who grew up. There's still no reason to believe they will just "learn" on their own.
Instead of favorably comparing yourself, with your bag of organic vegetables (my imagination is running wild picturing what that must look like) and your superior intelligence which led to self-learning how to escape sugar and fat, to the rest of the American populace who clearly need to learn, devote some of your time and expertise to actually making an attempt to educate and help those who don't know better or who are trapped in addiction.
That's why so many professionals are so adamant about sharing their theories on nutrition.
It's just the unfortunate reality that there are also countless special interest groups with particular motives when it comes to spreading disinformation.
(I do share links to studies I find interesting, but I don't really believe I can evaluate them and know which ones will hold up.)
I do think it takes a certain level of expertise to start making claims about things like Keto without just repeating something you heard elsewhere, but a diet with lots of vegetables is undeniably healthy.
Don't be afraid to share the knowledge you feel confident in. Just hold back on the stuff in which you aren't confident. :)
If you're feeling confident about something without having done your due diligence, that's a separate issue.
The effects of binging television are less clear, especially when it’s accepted in advertising that binging television is OK. Look at all the Comcast ads that celebrate binge watching.
At least with food advertising it’s been tamped down a bit. Lays potato chips used to have “bet you can’t eat just one” like it was some sort of a drug pusher.
I think it's more insidious than that -at least the ads I've noticed.
There's a lot of normalizing of binge watching. Of making it a "given". When I say "normalizing" I mean things like "Since you're going to be gorging on your favorite shows, use our phone/our service/our devices to do them on the because they're the best".
It's not even a question in many ads; the assumption is that you're going to be binging already. Celebrating would be closer to beer commercials ("it's been a hard week, now it's netflix time!").
When did binge ever become appropriate to use as something to be encouraged?Feels insane. I mean even binge eating vegetables probably shows a problem, it should just be part of a balanced diet.
The problem was that pathological/excessive users were overly skewing the recommendations algorithms. These users tend to watch things that might be unhealthy in various ways, which then tend to get over-promoted, and lead to the creation of more content in that vein. Not a good cycle to encourage.
Netflix may have this problem, but FB, YT and other (relatively) open access platforms definitely suffer from it to varying degrees.
Like the author, I do find it refreshing that at least some steps are being taken to identify and remediate. A lot more can be done.
Recommendations are simply a service that makes my life easier and potentially gives me something cool to watch (they don't usually work that good, but that's not the argument here).
But it's not actually true that they're not ad based: They follow the great new strategy of native advertising.
I’m the kind of person who avoids trailers and on-the-next-episode-of spoilers, and Netflix assaults you with both of these things. The only way to turn it off is to leave.
Would you treat your friends like that ? Say, a friend asks you to recommend them a good video on software development. Are you going to optimize your recommendation as to make them take the longest time possible to achieve their goal ?
No, I'd link them to relevant videos that helped me in the past, and then maybe link them some more later on to help them further increase their skills after learning the basics. These hypothetical videos were interesting and helpful to me, and I figure that since I found them interesting maybe my friend will too. That's what it sounds like YouTube is doing, only they get money.
Employable skill = bad
Travel = bad
Family = bad
activism = bad
traditional news media = good
entertainment = good
video games = really really good
YouTube most defenitley does not optimize for videos I “might like”
If Netflix wants people to spend more time on Netflix, they should probably stop adding forehead-slapping "features" like mandatory autoplaying previews that encourage people to stop spending so much time surfing through the back catalog.
Of course, it's vitally important to Netflix's business model that you don't discover just how limited their catalog is. That's not an issue for YouTube, and it's interesting to consider how these requirements feed into UX engineering at the two companies.
It’s why HBO is not even a serious competitor to Netflix, even though they tend to focus more on quality instead of quantity.
It’s all about taking your time. Netflix even says their main competitor is something like Fortnite, which again, consumes a lot of your time.
Sometimes they're hilariously entertaining. Most of the time they're so off the mark that I don't watch them. If Youtube really wanted to increase my engagement they would stop showing irrelevant ads and stop crippling the free YouTube app. I mostly go to YouTube for movie trailers and videos from Deep learning courses. That's it, the end.
What YouTube appears to want is for me to pay to use it and it gets in my way and makes YouTube inconvenient in every possible way to try and persuade me to throw money at it. This will never happen but hey keep on trying.
I owned a book one time that had such a bad ending I didn't read it.
history/
“Pemberton’s French Wine Coca Nerve Tonic,” the precursor to Coca-Cola was a patent medicine and was proported to cure morphine addiction (of which Pemberton suffered from after the U.S. Civil War).
The addictive affects of the coca leaf weren’t widely accepted at the time due to the limited concentration of active cocaine in the “wines” it was typically included with. That it had addictive qualities was a side-effect, not a conscious decision to aid with repeat business.
/history
Coke was pretty good about getting it out of their product when people realized it had bad effects- before any serious public discontent over cocaine was popular
You can't really accuse Netflix of the same.
> This is just addiction peddling.
In light of this problem of the radicalising of vulnerable people like is happening on YouTube, your use of the word 'just' in this way, shows that you are either ignorant to the problem or have an hidden agenda in trying to downplay it. I hope it is the former.
Some sources:
https://samharris.org/podcasts/persuasion-and-control/ https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/hoe-youtube-rec... (Dutch) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...
> your use of the word 'just' in this way,
When using 'just' in this way you down-play the problems. 'Hidden agenda' might have been a bit extreme on my part. What I had in mind was the down-playing of issues to seem smarter than others.
In the context of the Cumex fraud you could say "It is just stealing". When doing this you project that we shouldn't be concerned, it is _just_ stealing, which it isn't.
It becomes counter productive to solving the issues because when someone who doesn't know about the problems surrounding YouTube's algorithms and reads that 'it is just "addiction peddling"' they might conclude that people are overreacting.
My issue here is that, in YouTube's case, this is not 'just' attention peddling. I also don't agree with you that this is 'a logical consequence of a system that optimises for maximum engagement'. Netflix, as we have established, also wants my attention, but that doesn't mean that I go from Rick and Morty to Nazi propaganda. On YouTube you can go from listening to music to getting lectured by White Supremacists without actively seeking this extreme content out.
They have optimised their algorithm to make this transition very gradual in order for you to stay engaged along the way and in effect they have created a mechanic in which people slowly get radicalised.
It is very easy to down-play this by saying this is logical and just attention peddling, but I'd say it is closer to psychological abuse of people in their most private and vulnerable moments. All this _just_ to make money from advertisement. The algorithms might not have started out this way, but there has been enough criticism on what is happening for YouTube to finally do something about it, yet they haven't. This means it is intentional.
In this context, putting "just" before it can be seen as a way to remove focus from the detail that someone else is focus on to look at the bigger problem. That is what I see here as well.
Your conclusion that it is intentional is too fast. There is a less evil interpretation of real life, and that is that it's not practical for them to implement this in a way that still yields addicted users while avoiding radicalised users. Their money is more important than a problem that a minority is vocal about; it's an unfortunate consequence, but that doesn't make it the intent.
Couch potato-ising people is terrible for our future too. And dismantles defenses of people who would otherwise laugh off the political indoctrination content in other media.
My fellows :
- ublock
- firefox block all trackers
- ghostery block all
- remove all notifications
- remove facebook
- do not engage with social media except professionally
- stick to long read forms of entretainment (HN enters this category with no video nor images)
my only curse is whatsapp that i use both personally and professionally
> Remove all notifications
Including email? There are plenty of legitimate uses for notifications.
Otherwise, solid list and I especially like your last bullet point, but don't discount the amount of information that can be gained from a good video or infographic.
The people at work who have chat and email notifications turned on just spend their days reacting to whatever comes in.
I find that if something is urgent enough, somebody will call me or come to my office to get my attention.
The recommendation engine only turns evil when it takes the viewer down a never-ending path into dark, negative, useless material and misinformation.
Adults are citizens that have freedom to choose. That is what being an adult is about. That's why kids need to be harbored from certain things. They lack the experience and education to choose wisely.
Putting that burden on the state or a website is losing the bigger picture. Any time I hear the word addiction it makes me sad people are saying they can't make an adult choice in their lives and need someone to stop them.
In the 70s - as a reaction to the club of rome, they had this insane idea to freeze part of humanity, until the imminent crisis was over. This is what the internet is- a freezer- it freezes social interaction, it freezes your desires, your plans - it freezes everything.
To become defrosted, does not by default improve the world. Its ultimatly a personal desicion.
> One view of the status quo is that media companies are aggregating human attention and selling it at a discount–far below minimum wage–to advertisers in a massive arbitrage on human capital.
It brings to mind the greed and stupidity of a lord thinking that anything his subjects do which isn't earning him money is stealing from him.
Definitely. Unfortunately the appeal to emotion and rare cases are parroted by those that feel they do know.
> It’s as if someone invented cocaine for the first time and we have no social norms or legal framework to confront it.
Or airplanes or telephones or the printed word.
The engine wants people to spend as much time as possible on YouTube.
Netflix’s wants the same, even though it’s not even ad based!
Facebook wants the same.
As infinitum.
This is just addiction peddling. Nothing more. I think we have no idea how much damage this is doing to us. It’s as if someone invented cocaine for the first time and we have no social norms or legal framework to confront it.
One thing you can never get back is time. It runs one way and as of this writing, we all have a finite amount of it.
Conspiracy videos are the least of the problem.