this is pretty much the line that always comes from corporate lobbyists. We have armies of highly paid people that work at companies to exploit every little weakness of the human psychology and put out a ton of fake information. But let's just make this the responsibility of the individual and ignore the amount of manipulation that's done . They did this for smoking and now they are doing it for obesity and social media addiction. I bet the opioid crisis is also blamed on individuals that don't take responsibility for themselves.
As an individual you almost have no chance to escape unless you put in a lot of effort to get better information and even then it's hard considering how much misinformation is being put out.
Why do we allow the creation of a society that's hostile to people so companies can make money exploiting their weakness?
There are a couple of facets here, so I'll address them separately.
For one, it's not remotely my experience or that of my social circles to say you have "almost no chance" of healthy social media use (or abstinence, if that's your thing). It seems roughly as "inescapable" as "not going to the gym" or "not reading enough". I can't even imagine how you arrived at this conclusion. There are plenty of people who are either off social media or very happy with their level of usage, and they got there with sustained incremental effort, just like any form of self-improvement. Spreading the message that you're utterly helpless and your only hope is regulatory rescue isn't helping people, it's actively harmful. To forestall the often-ludicrous charge of "victim-blaming": it has nothing to do with blame to realize that the ultimate consequences fall on you, and that it's a good idea to do what you can to mitigate those consequences.
This isn't independent of advocating for regulatory action. My gut instinct is against regulation of social media, but from what I've seen, there are people out there who think of their social media usage as closer to involuntary addiction than a fun vice to indulge in, so I don't want to dismiss offhand any suggestions for regulation. I just simply can't imagine why you'd want to tell people (or yourself!) that they have no hope of getting to a better place.
Sure you can get to a better place and you should try to do so. What I am saying is that it’s very hard and that it’s not your personal failing if you don’t succeed. Some things are easy for some people that are hard for others. For example I have never had weight problems and naturally eat relatively healthily. But I see people who try really hard to not eat fast food but somehow can’t stay away. For these people the constant advertising and availability of fast food is deadly.
I think that we should not allow the seducers to do whatever they want.
Agreed, of course. I'd go so far as to so this is a prerequisite for doing anything difficult. But I interpreted the following quote as a considerably more hopeless outlook:
> As an individual you almost have no chance to escape unless you put in a lot of effort to get better information and even then it's hard considering how much misinformation is being put out.
It doesn't take Herculean effort to fix these habits, it just takes a sustained attempt to change your habits, without even pushing that hard. (and of course, there are the particularly-susceptible for whom even sustained effort won't work).
My pushback was against the sentiment often expressed here that there's no hope at an individual level, but it sounds from your second comment like you don't agree with that either.
For you maybe. But you have to understand that there are a lot of highly educated, highly paid people trying to figure how to make their products as addictive as possible to as many people as possible. So a lot of people stand no chance because their weaknesses are being exploited with precision.
Do you have no habits that annoy you but keep coming back no matter how much you try too get rid of them?
This is the leap I don't buy. First of all, it's factually incorrect: you're not being targeted with anything like precision. I worked in AI research before the boom and work between research and product now, I'm likely better than most of the highly educated, highly paid people you're talking about, and ML models aren't the otherworldly wizardry that people think they are. They work well on average; there's no highly paid team dedicated to analyzing wutbrodo or ididntdothis's usage and building a custom model. If you're making a mild effort to recognize and push back against mindless media consumption, you've already moved yourself away from the center of mass being targeted. And frankly, these companies aren't going to chase after you when the bulk of their usage comes from the chunks of the population whose behavior clusters better.
> Do you have no habits that annoy you but keep coming back no matter how much you try too get rid of them?
Honestly? No, I don't. I don't think I'm even particularly good at moment-to-moment willpower either. I just look at it differently. To take my diet as an example, it's almost exactly where I want it to be from a health perspective. It's to the point that my friends assume I'm some sort of iron-willed ascetic continually putting in effort to eat well, but it's completely effortless for me. But it took a literal decade for me to get here, through incremental change and letting my habits (and probably biology) adjust. If I had been in a rush and gotten repeatedly frustrated at my lack of rapid progress, I doubt I would have ever ended up here.
Reducing mindless media consumption and usage is similar (though in my experience, takes far less time), and is helped along by any number of apps and extensions.
This isn't a general argument that this is trivial for everyone, nor that regulation is inappropriate to help the average person who hasn't recognized the problem. What I'm pushing back against is the claim that "there's no hope of escape" for most, barring some extreme level of informedness or willpower. There are highly paid people with decades more experience making junk food hyperpalatable too. But while there's scope for regulation to help the average person, it'd be both inaccurate and unhelpful to claim that "there's no hope of escape" for an individual from the Standard American Diet.
Honestly I think a comparison to cigarettes is fair. Between the anti-patterns, the machine learning, the A/B testing, and the behavioral engineering, modern phone apps are more addicting than niccotine, and it's no more a person's fault for not being able to control themselves than it is for a smoker craving another cig.
The problem cuts a lot deeper than people having no self control. They are actively fighting intelligent, well resourced adversaries who have a long term goal of getting you hooked.
Trying to quit overuse of mobile phones while not losing access to their good features (maps, calendar, actual phone) is like trying to quit smoking while constantly walking around with a lit cigarette in your mouth.
"Hey man what are you doing with a cig behind your desk?"
- "I'm trying to quit smoking."
It started with my team at work getting together one day (almost a year and half back - some Trump BS was unfolding) and saying, if it gets too bad lets decide as a group to block ports/sites/apps etc on the company network. Slowly the list of things to block started growing.
It was really surprising how easily one could get consensus, that something specific was too distracting, effecting people and group productivity. Nobody wants to be the guy who says HN is addictive. But once someone says it at a meeting everyone starts nodding. News sites were the first to go. Then video. Then social media and most instant messaging/irc. We have moved to Signal to avoid some of the dark patterns in other IM/chat apps. And everyone is using the google/apple well being apps.
Almost everything is done on email or face to face these days. And almost 70 people now in what we call the noise cancellation club.
Right now things get unblocked during lunch time for 30 mins and after 5pm. There are common areas where things are unblocked, but they are intentionally pretty public spaces.
People of course can use their phones, but the fact that there is this environment available where it has become socially acceptable to be phone free, has definitely made a difference.
Before smartphones (generally speaking), the majority of your notifications were on your computer. If you walked away from it, you were no longer getting them.
Today, you've got a notification blaster in your pocket/purse, which is bad enough for work stuff, but if you participate in social media, it's a FOMO machine too. By default, all of your notifications are artificially urgent.
I'm a little older than the average HN'er, so my attitude in life has been closing my social circles to be a very small group of people with richer interactions, as opposed to enlarging it to a large group with less rich interactions. Because of that, it's been pretty easy to wean myself off of FB (not that it was ever a big part of my life in the first place), and I've never considered Twitter, Instagram or anything else to be that interesting. I will admit that I enjoy Reddit - those cute animal gifs are quite relaxing after a stressful day, but I don't use Reddit the way most people use FB or other social media.
When it comes to notifications, I turn a lot of them off. I keep my work notifications on during the hours I consider myself available (for urgent stuff, people know they have to call me), and tightly restrict other notifications that can be distracting.
And if an app doesn't let me disable notifications then I just uninstall it. Facebook Messenger was awful about this, when I saw there was no "Disable notifications", only a "Turn notifications off for 24 hours" option I immediately uninstalled it. Facebook was even worse, ostensibly you could turn notification types off individually, but whenever they added a new type of notification you'd have to go in and turn that off too, or it'd just forget what other notifications you had turned off and you'd start getting them again. Amusingly uninstalling the Facebook app gave me a nice battery performance boost too.
Another thing I've found handy is in my IM app I have notifications for everyone turned off by default, and only allow notifications for close friends and family. Why should any random person on the internet be able to grab my attention like that?
> Another thing I've found handy is in my IM app I have notifications for everyone turned off by default, and only allow notifications for close friends and family.
I figure the next step in the evolution of norms will be this understanding of granularity filtering down to the non-tech-savvy masses.
I use a hierarchy when it comes to prioritizing communications and notifications: Voice > sms > work im/email > personal im/email
Based on that hierarchy, I have different sets of rules as to the types of notifications I get and when I get them.
And I know you can permanently turn notifications of for any given contact because I have done so for one who didn't understand that messenger is not for long conversations that should have been on email, just because you typically get a quicker reply.
Honestly, I didn't even need to go that far. Just turning off notifications for Facebook was enough for me to completely stop using it.
Self-training in a bit of discipline is one of the most valuable things one can do with their life.
I've removed FB 2 years ago and couldn't be happier, the idea of being spammed with notifications like I was before is so alien now. I've paused notifications on noisy WhatsApp groups and go there maybe 1x a month. Removed most chat apps. Life is good. Try it.
I mean, if you want to drop nicotine addiction, you don't keep a 12-pack of cigarettes lying around, right?
I don't understand that argument. By the same reasoning all drugs should be legal:
Everyone know's it's bad. People get trapped. It has severe consequences for personal health and the society as a whole. But, hey, "it's not impossible to break free from it" by yourself. No need for Government action.
The key metric for me is impact to society. You can do all bad things to you if you want to, and they only impact yourself, but if things have large impact on:
- Social fabric (stability of families and communities)
- Political Culture (erosion of discourse culture)
- Education (lower attention span)
- Healthcare (burnout!)
- Working productivity
It might be a good idea to change the rules to prevent these effects.
Yeah, that actually works pretty great for Portugal and the war on drugs shows that just changing the rules doesn't work (another example in the same vein: the prohibition). People aren't that stupid that they need someone else to tell them what's good or bad for them. They know that. They just don't act accordingly, and that's the real problem, and you can't just fix that by saying no you can't do X. Everyone already knows they shouldn't do X. Your rules aren't adding anything.
It's not like in Portugal you go and buy cocaine and the government expects you to self-regulate; that just doesn't work. Libertarianism works well for perfectly rational individuals, but rationality can't coexist with addictive drugs. Individuals need help breaking from destructive forces that are greater than themselves.
The idea here is not to punish people for using social media, but to punish social media companies for making their apps addictive. Just like in Portugal you can't get jail time if you're addicted, but you certainly do go to jail for dealing.
So following that line of thought, shouldn't we try to help people who are addicted to smartphones manage their lives and addictions, instead of trying to ban them from using a smartphone?
Do you really believe it's the illegal nature of drugs that keep the vast majority of people from using them? It's the fact that they know it's bad. In the future social media could be no different.
I don't know if I would be in favor of legalization, but Portugal has had reasonable success with decriminalizing all drugs.
FWIW, from a selfish perspective, I wish most drugs were legal: ; I used marijuana responsibly before it was legal and continue to use psychedelics responsibly, and the reason I don't do meth or cocaine isn't because it's difficult to get, but because I'm aware of how dangerous they are. But I'm genuinely curious as to what could make you think that, for the average person, legality doesn't drive a substantial amount of their attitudes towards usage of a given drug.
it is still illegal to manufacture and sell fetanyl to the public, just as the OP is suggesting regulating the addictive nature of social media/technology.
No one is saying let’s criminalize using smart phones.
There's also an absence of morality in these businesses. Facebook and many others established themselves with a giant bait and switch. Get the users, then put the pinch on them by selling every bit of info and using dark patterns to a point just shy of them quitting. That's an accepted way to do things. There is an underlying attitude that any legal and profitable venture is valid. Caveat emptor, greed is good, social darwinism. I'd regulate against that but I don't see how.
You could form some sort of regulatory body that decides itself what practices are acceptable and leverages fines against those that aren't, but that kicks the can down the road and also entrenches big businesses who can afford to interact with such an entity. Barriers to competition help create the monopolies and cartels that prevent consumers from punishing bad business practices.
Can you elaborate on why you think Facebook was a bait and switch? "They trust me, the dumb fucks" was during Facebook's infancy, and came to public attention years and years ago. More concretely, Facebook has consistently been amoral and user-hostile, and anyone paying even a little bit of attention knew that by, say, 2012. Hell, there were complaints about its addictive (+stalkery) potential when the news feed launched, in 2006! I'm what way is this a bait and switch, instead of clearly signaling the company they were the entire time?
The upshot is that people don't really see a problem with obtrusive monetization directly (FB ads aren't particularly egregious from a UI perspective), but rather attempts to increase engagement, which of course substantially predate their monetization efforts. The News Feed and related controversy are an easy, early example, as is the promotion of Farmville-style "games" (ca 2009/10), which also substantially predates Facebook's mainstreaming and the bulk of their user growth.
What is distracting for me is this feeling that the stakes are very high right now and that I can't afford to be missing out on available knowledge. This isn't FOMO about what my friends are doing on social media since I'm really only on here and Twitter, where none of my friends are, but a fear that I'm missing some key piece in a puzzle.
It's more a sense that there are major systemic crisis we are facing that need solving and my brain is consumed by finding ways to think about these crisis and how to evaluate and implement some kind of solution. I don't know if anyone else is also feeling this anxiety as a source of distraction from normal life or if this is just a personal psychosis.
Based on my personal experience I think that systemic complexity is driving up base-level anxiety which is being exploited by media and political entities to profit from anxiety-induced distraction, which only increase the complexity of the systems as every agent becomes further debilitated in their role by anxiety and anxiety-exploiting distractions.
PS - When I say "anxiety", I mean a deep feeling of uncertainty about the future.
This is pretty much the purpose of mindfulness practice: to force this quiet and make you contend with the thoughts actually causing your anxiety. I know this sounds like woo, but it's worth at least trying out mindfulness meditation and getting a keener sense of what concerns you. (And of course, it's entirely possible that you know your own mind and your model is correct. I just thought I'd share similar experiences I've had in the past)
We like to frame this as a personal issue because the individual decides to keep checking social media outlets. On the other hand, social media outlets think of people collectively: they incorporate addictive features based upon correlations between features and desirable usage patterns. This is an incredibly powerful tool since the decisions of an individual is difficult to rely upon, yet the patterns of large collections of people can be modeled and the uncertainties in that model understood. In other words, we are placing ourselves at a serious disadvantage if we insist upon looking at the issue through the lens of the individual.
In a sense, the government has to educate the collective since there is a conflict of interest otherwise. The companies that have the most control over the information that people see are also the companies that have the largest interest in keeping people glued to their screens.
To be frank claiming that private interests having influence is reason for giving power to the government is like saying that chickenwire is unfair to the foxes because the farmer is exploiting the chickens.
They are chosen to be our servants - not our masters - the power should be separated for a reason.
There is a big difference between a democratically elected government and a business. Governments must demonstrate restraint because they ultimately report to the people. Businesses typically demonstrate restraint in order to avoid regulation by the government. If you neuter government, then there are very few reasons for them to demonstrate restraint. In other words, the government is the chicken wire.
It feels pretty good. I'm more at peace with the world when I sit there and take it all in.
They can't even put their phone down when something is actually happening right in front of them. People have been recording with their phones since the inception of the camera phone, but I recently saw a metal concert where nearly everyone in the audience had their phones out, including those in the pit! These people should be headbanging, dancing around and roughhousing, but instead they just stood there for periods of time mouth a-gape with their phones raised. Do we really need 3,000+ copies of the same concert using up bandwidth and storage? People are so desperate to be a YouTube star in even the most minuscule of ways. They'll view life through a screen if it meant getting a 1,000 views. It must be distracting as hell to be living life and constantly wondering if you should be recording it.
I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it.
I am guilty of this behavior myself and it's something that I've been working on a lot lately. I recognize that this is a problem, but I don't really support the government saving us from ourselves. I think this is something that average person just needs to educate themselves on and make the decision for themselves. It's not impossible to break free from it.
I highly suggest everyone checkout Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. It's a fantastic read.