I see it more akin to the opioid crisis. Just like drug manufactures shouldn't be pushing opioids as a way to deal with minor pain and depression because they know it hooks users. Maybe social media companies shouldn't be pushing hateful and outrageous content to hook their users.
You can sing about personal responsibility all you want. But these companies pay scientists millions of dollars a year to come up with ways to keep you hooked. The only way to win is not to play the game. Normal people are seriously outgunned here.
This is quite right. PragmaticPulp's phrase "an act perpetrated by evil corporations on us helpless individuals" is a bit of rhetorical jujitsu, creating a strawman to set up a rallying cry "I believe people have agency!" You don't have to assume that individuals are "helpless", as if they are generally helpless and lacking agency, to agree that these corporations are exploiting them.
That said, people's agency is limited (bounded rationality). Awareness of how one is being manipulated is not evenly distributed among the population (asymmetric information). And even when there is awareness, people are unevenly affected by it and unevenly empowered to deal with it.
Similarly, Lyft makes it nearly impossible to figure out where to turn off the coupon notifications. And don’t get me started on LinkedIn...
This isn’t just an issue for normal people. It’s also time-consuming and troublesome for anyone short of the dev who built the dark pattern.
What annoys me is new categories of notifications that Twitter turns on by default, even for users who have disabled all of these novel/generic/impersonal notification types.
How is this a strawman? This article is absolutely this inflamatory, if not more so.
> Reddit, for example, has always obfuscated the true Karma score (“to prevent vote brigading”)
There is no reason to believe otherwise. Everyone from Youtube and cheat-bot detection services utilizes the same strategy.
> To the contrary, the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love, and Plenty will all be private (or publicly traded) entities.
Basically, the conclusion is that we're inevitably going to turn into 1984. There isn't even a suggestion of how to change the situation.
Exactly like tobacco companies had scientists on the payroll to boost addiction. That is the best and most accurate analogue for Facebook I believe, it’s like smoking, it’s addictive and it externalises its harmful effects.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/18/facebook-cambri...
> He was hired to work at Facebook as a quantitative social psychologist around November 2015, roughly two months after leaving GSR, which had by then acquired data on millions of Facebook users.
https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/07/exclusive-to-sell-ads-in-...
> Corey has been working as a quantitative researcher at Facebook since last summer. His growth research team has “two sociologists and a manager trained in communications with a sociologist as an advisor,” according to an article he published early this year. The team helps expand Facebook to developing countries. Corey uses R-based software stack, collects data via Hive and uses a few other coding languages to do his job.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
> We now know that’s exactly what happened two years ago. For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves.
> This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion,” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it.
I feel the downvotes were unwarranted. (Not accusing you of Downvoting) Perhaps the user isn't familiar with the industry. I know I'm out of my league with most of the content posted here.
Wall Street gobbled up most ph.D's and researchers years ago, but marketing/ads space have a stranglehold on much of it nowadays.
To this list I'd add the concept of epistemic hygiene. Just as crowding together in metropolises re-wired our culture to value hygiene, these informational metropolises of social media will eventually cause us to greatly value epistemic hygiene. Seeing a rage-inducing headline would then evoke a kind of "ew..." response. At least, this is what I hope will happen. Maybe it will require a generational turnover.
A lot of the calls-to-action used to generate "engagement" are the same calls to action used for legitimate communications, and the only way to tell is to "engage" with the product.
There's nothing wrong with people opening their social media app if they receive a real message from a friend. The problem is when the platform is incentivized to "manufacture" messages even when there aren't any.
Not at all; its more like breaking up with a toxic, manipulative, dishonest partner. There's many more fish in the sea and there's many more ways to heathily socialize than just Facebook. Though I suppose people in abusive relationships often have a sort of Stockholm syndrome where they see no alternatives.
Point of working through the analogy being, even on an individual basis framing leaving a relationship as some sort of arbitrary choice is kind of nonsensical, in particular if there is a power imbalance between the people in the relationship, to the point where staying in an abusive relationship might be a 'rational choice'.
Which is actually why we've created very elaborate laws and customs surrounding marriage rather than telling everyone "well if you don't like it just leave".
>Point of working through the analogy being, even on an individual basis framing leaving a relationship as some sort of arbitrary choice is kind of nonsensical
Could you give some common examples where an individual "literally cannot leave" FB, or where leaving FB would put others at risk?
The best example I could think of is a small business owner losing potential money from taking their business page off FB.
>I know quite a lot of people who are required by their employer to maintain a facebook presence because that's how they get into contact with a lot of clients.
Being compelled to mix business with personal life like this seems quite objectionable indeed.
This is going to make a world of difference the first time people try it. I started monitoring screen time/configuring notifications about a year ago, and made me feel a lot better about the time I spent on my phone.
But, all of this assumes that social media should (and will) stay the same as it currently is with addictive never ending feeds and endless notifications.
At the end of last year I sat down thought of what social media could look like if it was designed to be used less, and in a way that would add value to people.
For me, that looked like intentional written reflections, shared with a small circle of close friends and family. To keep me from scrolling, there would be no feed. To keep me from checking my phone, content would rarely be surfaced.
This ended up becoming Sundayy, a mindful social network that you can only check once a week (on Sunday): https://www.sundayy.app
Each day you're prompted to slow down and reflect, but there is no feed of reflections. They're all kept secret, for now. At the end of the week, on Sunday, reflections are revealed. It's a more intimate insight into how people close to you lived their week - day by day and in their own words.
We should definitely bring more awareness to monitoring screen time and curating feeds, but we should also question whether we should have to do any of that at all :)
While well-intentioned, I think it's likely people will simply be checking Sunday and Facebook.
When I deleted FB from my phone, I looked around, and there really wasn't any alternative social media platform that didn't have the same setup - ads, feeds, notifications.
I really just wanted to put an alternative out there, so people could find something else if they're in my situation.
Sundayy isn't just challenging FB, but it's challenging the unconscious association between "social media" and "endless feeds", "ad revenue model", and "hijacking notifications".
I long for a day when social media isn't rooted in any of those things.
If it's done well, it should have the opposite effect. Describing all the ways that companies are trying to get you addicted will help inoculate people against their tricks. In order to psychologically defend yourself, you first need to understand exactly what you're defending yourself against.
I couldn't agree more, and to add to that I think it's usually a foolish approach to treat people as hapless automatons without any agency if you're trying to convince them that your point is worth listening to. If you look at two of the worst political failures in the UK recently (the Remain campaign for the Brexit referendum in 2016 and Labour's election campaign in 2019), I think what they have in common is that they essentially told people "you're a downtrodden proletariat buffeted about by forces well outside your control, but we can make things better for you" which is such a foolish approach in my opinion. Regardless of whether they actually do or not, the average person likes to think they're in control of their own destiny so blaming everything on Facebook being manipulative bastards will never work if your aim is to change the public's relationship with social media.
That's the plain and simple truth, isn't it? I mean, I don't control facebook.
In the same way, I bristle at the suggestion that I'm not rational enough to resist the "addiction" of push messaging. We all know what the word "addiction" actually means. This is not addiction, this is just hokey phooey using fake-medical language to push a liberal agenda of extra regulation.
Every time I get a notification from Twitter or Facebook, my day gets a little brighter. When LinkedIn tells me that someone is looking at my profile, that means someone cares, and that's a wonderful thing to know.
I still peruse feeds of some people I used to follow, but now, instead of doing it compulsively every hour or whenever I need my dopamine, I do it once a month or so, if I don’t forget. I don’t have them bookmarked, so I also enter the full URLs.
And if Twitter says I need to log in to read more of a thread, or whatever, too bad. I don’t have that thingy that you use to log in to Twitter.
Now, Facebook is a different story since they offer a very walled garden. You cannot even read most of the stuff unless you log in, by default. Trouble is, there are people on it I interact with. As it happens with some of those people, Facebook is the only way to reach them.
And another thing is Hackernews, of course.
See, those are places where stuff happens. You go there, scroll to what interests you, engage in a discussion, and it almost feels like meeting people again, especially in a pandemic world.
Or I just want to feed my brain with new stuff to get that sweet dopamine.
I think that what could change this addiction could be entraining the brain to release dopamine as a reward for engaging into more immersive, time-consuming activities. Like reading more of the long form, deep articles or books. Watching a 2 hour movie instead of 15 minute usual youtube fodder. Get that side project to a usable state (starts crying).
The options seem to be: 1) Delete your social media account 2) Set up timers (OS-level, account-level, etc) 3) Filter you feed to only the people who matter
The first two options didn't work for me. I created a new account and deleted the timers. The first option left me feeling excluded. The second option just turned SM into a drip-feed, making me check whenever the timer was up. If they work for you, great!
The option that worked was to filter facebook and snapchat to only show people who personally mattered to me in the physical world. I only see things about people I come into contact with and care about. I know them well enough to know the whole story rather than just what they post at face value. Their posts can encourage conversations rather than make me feel bad about some cool thing I'll never do or know more about.
Social media is a tool which, used effectively, can benefit you. But used ineffectively it can harm you. I hope schools of the future or some people/institution teach effective social media use. Or hopefully we can enforce social media companies to follow some regulations regarding user wellbeing.
The optimist in me see’s how ridiculous and blatant the drivel is becoming and suspects we’ll achieve some sort of collective enlightenment before we extinct ourselves. A smarter media then emerges (timing is everything here) eschewing advertising dollars in favour of a more consumer friendly model.
Then again, I’m probably being naive.
Another plug[0] but, I'm hoping to be a part of this solution. Just a personal project right now, but I'm building a search website whose end goal is to be ad-free (paid) and let users create filters to remove any of the countless trash websites that SEO their way to the top of google.
Currently I've just got it working for web search and a few filters I've created for myself (removes a ton of websites I never find value in, some blogs, news sites, pinterest, etc.)
[0] https://hadal.io
I agree; aligning interests is important.
> I really hope they win out in the long run
It's hard for me to see how they can. Advertising supported services are free to the user, which improves take-up which means that network effects are in their favour.
Ad supported free services will (unfortunately) always dominate network effect driven spaces.
We are so outgunned it's almost ridiculous to try. The game is rigged.
Abstinence as a strategy is not in and of itself flawed. The way lots of people cope with the dangers of heroin is simply by never trying it their whole life. Lots of addicts adopt a strategy of permanent abstinence, forever.
Some things are very harmful. I don't think we all need to try all to them, just to make sure.
Exactly. I not a big FB user, but last year I was on a lot more than normal b/c I was home. Then one day I realized I was just either arguing with family or reading things that left me disappointed, and wondered why am I subjecting myself to this? I didn't delete my account because I still use messenger to communicate to a few people, but I haven't been on FB proper for months.
Isn't this also denying people their individual agency, though? Using Facebook is not like sex is for teens, who are faced with the rather unavoidable biological realities of puberty. There are many ways to achieve the things people seek from Facebook, some technological and some not.
We don't need to start under the assumption that people will not be able to commit to having more healthy media consumption habits. These tools offered by Apple, Facebook and Google you mention are not things we should be encouraging. If these companies had the user's best interests at heart, their products would not need these kinds of sub-features in the first place. But when you study the gambling and nicotine industries to figure out how to better hook your users to your mobile apps, you didn't start out from the right place. So I would reckon the answer to that would be to abstain from the product entirely.
Seriously, give it a try. Shockingly easy.
I have my home router configured to not allow any social media-capable devices to connect on Sundays.
After a few weeks, the FOMO cycle is broken and you realize that there's more to life than scrolling.
Those tools are provided by exactly the same companies that were manufacturing the addiction in the first. The tools can be revoked or changed the second they show signs of actually being effective.
Sorry, but this is like asking your drug dealer to help you with becoming clean.
In aggregate, the population is at the mercy of material forces. Turning a social problem into an individual moral failing has never managed to solve anything at scale.
You’re not going to give people agency by having them press a button provided by someone else. The button doesn’t really do anything. “Cold turkey” is really the only solution to these mind games.
This means that we can teach our Social Media Inbox (abbreviated here SMI) that we don't like certain messages, and the SMI will remove them from the feed.
The trick here is that the SMI has its incentives aligned with the user, not the social media companies. So there is no incentive to make us addicted.
Yes, but that's only going to have a small effect, at best. Just like you can't solve the obesity crisis by telling people to eat less.
Things are getting more addictive (http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html) because companies under technology and capitalism form weak superintelligencies that are capable of building things that are increasingly addictive. So asking people to use willpower to overcome that is going to increasingly fail.
I think the only thing that could succeed is government intervention.
> I know the common refrain is "Delete Facebook!"
If FB and other social media providers were required to federate using ActivityPub, then people would be able to delete FB and still have access to their friends and contacts on it.
> We also need to encourage people to take control of their feeds, muting users and topics who draw them into unproductive discussions.
With ActivityPub it would be a lot easier to build applications that allow them to control and curate their feeds for themselves. The user is back in control.
However, there's a second, parallel problem adding fuel to the fire: The more we talk about overindulgence in social media (or Netflix, or video games, or fast food) as an act perpetrated by evil corporations on us helpless individuals, the less sense of individual agency we give ourselves. I'm not suggesting that we let social media companies off the hook, but battling this problem is going to require more than simply shaming them in Medium posts. We have to start reminding people that they are in control of their decisions, and that they can take steps to reduce their social media usage to healthy levels.
I know the common refrain is "Delete Facebook!" but that's the equivalent of abstinence-only education. We need to start talking about how to configure Screen Time on iOS, or how to use Facebook's built-in tools to hide content you don't want to see. We also need to encourage people to take control of their feeds, muting users and topics who draw them into unproductive discussions.