They're not afraid of the idea of programming people.
When I worked there every week there would be a different flyer on the inside of the bathroom stall door to try to get the word out about things that really mattered to the company.
One week the flyer was about how a feed video needed to hook the user in the first 0.2 seconds. The flyer promised that if this was done, the result would in essence have a scientifically measurable addictive effect, a brain-hack. The flyer was to try to make sure this message reached as many advertisers as possible.
It seemed to me quite clear at that moment that the users were prey. The company didn't even care what was being sold to their users with this brain-reprogramming-style tactic. Our goal was to sell the advertisers on the fact that we were scientifically sure that we had the tools to reprogram our users brains.
Another way of describing this - they find people lose interest almost immediately, and so if you want to actually show a consumer something new, you have to get to the point with your ad.
I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of a policy that promotes ads that hook the user within the first 200ms.
200ms isn't enough time for significant information to be transmitted to a person and for them to process it. You don't 'get to the point' in 200ms.
That means that the way to the user's brain and attention is with some irritating little jingle, a picture of a bunny beating a drum, cartoon bears wiping their asses with toilet paper, a picture of a caveman salesman or a picture of an absolutely artifical thing that looks like food but isn't. Stuff that stands out as unnatural.
But that isn't enough. You gotta pair it with spaced reeitition. Let them think about this every time they take a shit in the office. Hammer them with the same shrill sounds and garish images on every commercial break. Or after every couple of songs they're trying to listen to on youtube. Or in institials that are algorithmically optimized to pop up in their feed as they mindlessly scroll looking for gossip about their neigbhours to scratch that social group animal itch in all of us.
Exactly, 200ms is rather different than 'get to the point.' Here is a 'reaction speed test' site: https://reactiontimetest.net/ for somebody who doesn't intuit what 200ms is like.
You will likely be unable to click the screen in response to a box turning green faster than 200ms. To hook somebody on something within 200ms is largely appealing to casino like stuff where every single jingle, color, flash of light, and other aspect of their games is carefully researched in order to maximize addiction on a subconscious level.
I think there are two different definitions of "significant information" at play here. I interpreted the GP comment to mean "information about the thing being advertised".
The point of the flyer is that you need to get the person to process one bit of information in the first 200ms: scroll or stay. GP's point is that that has little, if anything, to do with the ostensible purpose of advertising, informing people about a product.
So, in order to put a more neutral spin on this practice, you immediately reduce all people to "consumers"? Aren't you just confirming the GP's characterization that all platform users are seen as prey?
Okay, good luck with that mantra in a decade! I think it's very obvious that programming abilities are being destroyed from the inside out, but sure, tell me in a decade I was right when everything is collapsed.
Here is an important difference. A century ago, the predator (seller) and the prey (buyer) were on equal evolutionary terms. Each generation of humans on either side of the transaction came into the world, learned to convince, learned to resist, then passed, and some balance was maintained. In this century, corporations and algorithms don't die, but the targets do. This means that the non-human seller is continuously, even immortally, learning, adapting and perfecting how to manipulate. The target, be it adult, adolescent, or child, is, and will be ever increasingly, at a severe disadvantage.
Ah yes because trade secrets were never a thing at any of these companies. The companies always shut down when it's founding members died wiping out all the knowledge it had built up.
That is to say organizations have always had this edge on individuals.
Right, because we know that parents never pass down useful skills or life tips to their children, like skepticism of propaganda and advertising, and instead send their children into the world like sheep into a lion's den.
There might come a day when advertising is too flawless for a human mind to resist it, but we're not there yet.
Most of everybody thinks their behaviors and decisions are not meaningfully influenced by advertising. Companies spend literally trillions of dollars running ads. One side is right, one side is wrong.
And advertising largely relies on this ignorance of its effects, or otherwise most of everybody would go to much greater lengths to limit their exposures to such, and governments would be more inclined to regulate the ad industry as a goal in and of itself.
No, this take is crazy. If ads were able to brainwash people Coca-Cola would still be the most popular drink in America.
The problem with "meaningfully influenced" is that a 1% bump in sales is massive for a company, but normally only represents a very minor shift in customer behavior.
US spending on advertising is, in total, about $1200/person-year. If you believe that advertisers are rapacious capitalists who will take as much as they possibly can, then they only believe that they can capture about that much extra per person by advertising to them.
That's not nothing, but it's not very much either. Ads are extremely overblown as a threat to society; you only need to look as far as eye-tracking studies of web browsers and the prevalence of ad blockers to see pretty good proof that people do just ignore them most of the time.
I'm firmly in the camp of "I'm not influenced by ads (or so I think)" / "not convinced that ads are actually a net positive". But even so, I don't fully agree with your take.
I think that it's very possible to think we aren't influenced, yet still be. My reasoning is that basically no one admits to being influenced. Yet you can definitely see the effects of ads on people: whenever there's a strong campaign for something, little after you'll see everyone buying it. Maybe they just try to "follow trends" or whatever, but that's just a form of advertising, isn't it? I only very rarely watch TV and have ad blockers everywhere, yet I can still detect when all of a sudden everybody has the same bag or same jacket or whatever. My bags last years and years. I doubt it's simply a coincidence and they all needed new bags right at the same time.
> Ads are extremely overblown as a threat to society; you only need to look as far as eye-tracking studies of web browsers and the prevalence of ad blockers to see pretty good proof that people do just ignore them most of the time.
I think that many people don't know about ad-blockers and try to ignore the ads while reading a website or scrolling some app. But that doesn't imply they aren't influenced. In my case, I'm fairly convinced that I'm not influenced by my instagram's feed's ads, since they try to sell me pregnant women's garments, of which I have 0 use as a single, childless male. But there can be other factors of which I don't have conscience, like seeing people use the same brand camera or whatever. Call it advertising-by-proxy.
However, take a look at people's screens when taking the metro or whatever. Many do watch the ads instead of just scrolling past. This is what I actually have a hard time understanding: people would spend a comparable amount of time on what looks like ads and what looks like their friends' stuff, as if it was the same thing. Which, granted, isn't a very long time. In my case, I only follow photographers and would spend a fair amount of time on people's pictures but scroll right through anything that looks like an ad (text or video of any kind).
Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it". I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend for major brands. None of them rely on weird ad magic to persuade people secretly - just showing off different aspects of the product or service.
> Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it".
This is such a naive view of advertising that if you're really this unaware of how manipulative ads are, you can't possibly have defenses against them. You should seriously spend some time looking into the secret magic of dark psychology they use to manipulate people because while knowing about their tactics won't make you immune to them, it really can help to be aware of how they work and to train yourself to recognize when they're being used against you.
I don't know, I just went to find an ad in my feed and the first one was for a house plant that was easy to take care of. I'm not saying I'm the smartest cookie in the shed, but I didn't detect any manipulation. Seems like it was a person who just wanted me to know about their product.
I haven't seen the plant ad, but it sounds like once you start learning about how the ad industry works your mind will be blown. Insane amounts of money have been poured into research by the industry (including some highly questionable research being done on children and infants) and some of the results are fascinating.
The manipulation goes beyond even the content of the ads themselves. For example, one of the reasons companies are spending so much money collecting/buying/storing/securing every scrap of data they can get about you and your life is so that they can target ads at you at specific times when they know you'll be more vulnerable such as times when they know you'd normally be tired, or when they think your medication may be wearing off, or during periods where you're under high stress, or when you might be entering a manic phase, or when you're intoxicated, etc.
Like I said, understanding the many many ways that you are vulnerable to their tricks can help but it won't stop them from working on you. It's kind of like how you can't not see certain optical illusions even though you know you're interpreting them incorrectly. The conclusion I've come to is that it's best to do everything you can to avoid exposure to advertising where possible and to keep an eye out for when those tricks are being used against you elsewhere.
So a company should not be able to recommend therapy ads if I seem stressed? Ozempic if I seem like I want to lose weight? Laxatives if I seem constipated, or energy drinks if I'm sleep deprived?
Trying to moralize ad targeting is exhausting. It's not inherently a bad thing to target an ad to someone who's in a bad spot, or really in general.
People who buy the product are presumably competent enough to manage their own finances. Acting like they're being exploited constantly because ads hinted that they weren't masculine enough, or too fat, or being their peers, etc. is ridiculous. Ads aren't like cigarettes.
It's more like companies recommending an alcoholic who has been sober for 13 months his favorite drink because they know he is going through a divorce and is currently 15 feet from a bar, or a company targeting a person with Alzheimer's right at the time they know they'll start sundowning, or even just cranking up nostalgia in their advertising because they know your last surviving parent died and for the first time you won't be going home for the coming holidays.
Ad targeting these days can be intensely personal and manipulative. There are lots of ways ads could be used that aren't harmful, but also lots of ways that they can. Imagine an ad using a deepfake of your own child who died in a car crash telling you in his voice how he might still be alive if your car only had <insert new safety feature here>. There are clearly lines that can and should be drawn. There are extremely unethical practices happening today because companies are amoral monsters that only care about money and there are almost no laws or regulations to stop them from doing whatever they want.
Ads aren't like cigarettes. You make the choice to smoke or not, but ads are just forced on you. Only rarely are you given any opportunity to opt out of them, and the industry spends a lot of money trying to circumvent any efforts you take to cut them out of your life. You can quit cigarettes, but they wont let you quit advertising.
And it's worth noting that there are laws that restrict advertisement of cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
Meanwhile let's also not forget the post itself on which we are commenting: accusations that social media companies have, in fact, engineered their products to be addictive.
Either you intentionally misunderstood his point and deflected or you honestly seem to think this way. In either case, you misapprehended what he meant.
>Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it". I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend for major brands
"You're not good enough as you are now, but you will be if you purchase this thing"
"Other people you admire or respect have purchased this thing, and if you do too you'll be more like them"
"Other people will like you more if you purchase this thing"
"You'll be more attractive if you purchase this thing"
"This thing will be worth more in the future so if you purchase this thing it will make you money"
"This is your only chance to purchase this thing, so if you don't it now you'll miss out on this price"
I don't think any of them has to do with how awesome "the thing" itself is. Obviously there's more to, say, an expensive watch, than its ability to tell time
The only products that sell this in advertising actually provide those brand features. Essentially people pay money to increase their perceived status.
Like, if you sell a luxury handbag. When people buy it, they know 70% of the value comes from the advertising saying "this is a high value product" as a status signal. I think that's really dumb, but that's what people want.
It also existed a long time before ads itself did.
> they know 70% of the value comes from the advertising
So, you are aware that advertising is in large part responsible for shaping what is perceived as high-value status signals in society. You're also aware that for certain products the only distinction between those and their alternatives is that specific high-value association.
How come you started out from the position that advertising is "just showing off different aspects of the product" then?
If anonymous billboards or banner ads can convince you you aren't good enough, your life is probably not great with or without ads.
If an ad convinces you to, say, get a gym membership or go on Ozempic, who's to say what happens next? Maybe you do start feeling better about yourself.
They don't consciously convince you directly anymore than a slot machine convinces you to give it one more spin - it's done on a subconscious level. For instance one of the most famous, and effective, ads in history is Apple's 1984 ad. [1] A 59 second ad where the only mention of what's being sold at all happens in about 1 second with a reference to a brand name and then a logo. See: ELM model and peripheral processing. [2] And this is all day one advertising stuff.
Advertising is a horrific industry. It probably always was, but at the modern scales, it's outright dystopic. I think there's simply a large amount of cognitive dissonance around this issue because advertising drives the paychecks of a whole lot of people, and it's rather difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
While I agree with your point about understanding, I think there's also an issue of self-image. "What? Me? Influenced by some ad? Get outta here! I make my own decisions!"
USA here: our schools brainwash children to remove that skepticism. It makes them easier to control and order is very important to the kind of person who becomes a teacher.
Seattle area, they're brainwashing my children to celebrate the "seahawks" team. They came home yesterday being excited that team won the superbowl. I ask "why do you care? You don't like to watch football, none of your friends like to play it". Hard to influence when the kid is there 6.5 hours every day.
Ah, don't worry. He'd forgotten ten minutes later and I later took him rock climbing, which he actually loves and I support him doing despite me being terrified of heights.
Former USA teacher here: I assure you that the 17.5 hours parents have with kids are much more influential. It's likely that a lot of the students were really excited that their home team won and the teachers leaned into that excitement.
My child's San Francisco Bay Area school has taught media literacy / skepticism every year since 3rd grade. Curricula are determined by the teacher, but N=1 is sufficient for a counterexample for a broad country-wide generalization.
Celebrating a local sports win is about as apolitical and low-harm as possible when it comes to promoting a shared cultural bond for a community.
Are the children allowed to sit and study all day on the topic they're currently interested in? No. https://cantrip.org/gatto.html They're required to submit to authority at all times. How could it be otherwise in our system -- one teacher, 20 random kids of varying personalities and education level.
It's not a "local sports win" -- it's a profitable, billionaire-owned corporation stealing public tax money by brainwashing everyone into thinking it's "local". The majority of the players aren't from the area either and will leave after.
Are we really recreating elementary education from first principles here? American public education has always followed an instructor -> pupil format, beginning in New England for bible reading, accounting, and manufacturing.
There are probably some Montessori schools that opt for other formats, but I doubt that children are set up for success by neglecting math or other topics they are uninterested in. I would wager that even Montessori schools require study of the core tested curriculum.
If you have ever been a guest teacher then you would observe that a substantial minority of students must be guided to pay attention to the material. Autodidacts are not representative of the majority of people.
Re: sports: all things have negative aspects to them. Being a grump to such an extent as to discount all positive culturally cohesive aspects of a largely benign activity is a suboptimal way to live life. Choosing to build on commonalities in a community leads to better outcomes. Believing sports to be a net bad activity is a single-digit percentage minority opinion.
And only recently could be optimized in real time, individually, for each target. I remember when there was a big moral scare about "subliminal advertising". People were appalled that an ad on TV could manipulate you without your awareness. That is 100% the business model of modern social media advertising.
It's not embedded in a specific ad, but the entire operation of the promotion algorithms.
I haven't worked at FAANG so maybe I'm out the loop, but flyers on bathroom stalls seems bizarre, like almost less of a corporate action and more of a personal one (like you might get for unionisation), but with all the messaging of corporate, like something you'd see in a company memo.
Like I say, maybe everyone else is accustomed to this idea, but if you have any pictures of them I think a lot of people would be interested in seeing it, unless I'm misunderstand what it is
It started as Testing on the Toilet, which was an effort to get people to actually care about unit-testing their code and software quality and writing maintainable code that doesn't break in 6 months. Later was expanded to Learning on the Loo, general tips and tricks, and then Testing on the Toilet became Tech on the Toilet. It's been going on for a good 20 years now, so that's about 1000 articles (they change them out weekly) and there aren't really 1000 articles you can write about unit testing.
The insight is actually pretty similar to Google's core business model: when you're going to the bathroom, there isn't a whole lot else you're doing, so it's the perfect time to put up a 2-3 minute read to reinforce a message that you want people to hear but might not get attention for otherwise.
I was in a fraternity in college, 20 years ago. We put weekly bathroom notes on the inside of the stall doors. Something interesting, something funny, upcoming news. The elected fraternity secretary was responsible for making those weekly, among many other things.
If they were a day late the amount of pestering they would get until the did that weekly job was hilarious. We all got a kick out of them.
Your toilet time can be yours, just don’t fucking read them lol. Back then razr phones were the hotness, nobody sat on a smartphone and had ads blasted at them while they took a shit.
I guess, if you equate "influence" with "abuse". An awful lot pillars of our society would become abuse then. Ask any parent of a toddler whether their toilet time is actually "theirs".
My point is the opposite actually: if you are the parent of a toddler, you'll know that your toilet time is not actually yours, because your toddler will try every effort to get your attention and influence you, up to and including crawling into your lap while you are doing your business; tantrumming on the bathroom floor; tantrumming outside the bathroom door; cutting up the mail you really need to file; spilling food all over the floor; unlatching childproofing; moving furniture; and enlisting their siblings.
It's not really a FAANG thing. I bet you've seen the memes about X days without a serious accident, or without stopping the production line. It's the equivalent in a restroom or a urinal: A place you can make sure people see key information. You can find this in many industrial sites. A call center might have reminders of core principles for how to close calls quickly, or when to escalate. A lab might have safety tips. A restaurant will remind you of hand washing. An industrial site of some important safety tip or two.
While I've not seen this in every single place I've worked, it's very common.
I can say at Google we usually just had engineering tip posters in the washrooms they were usually very insightful and just written by other engineers at the company.
Stuff like how to reduce nesting logic, how to restructure APIs for better testing, etc.
People usually like them. I can't say I've seen what the parent post described so I imagine it's "the other" FAANG mentioned here.
You're right that it was just other employees who decided what to print there. But I don't think that absolves the company (Facebook) really... Everything a company does is just things that its people do! Nothing about the flyer was outside the parameters of the job of its maker. Their job was to make the company money by helping advertisers maximize ad revenue, and that's exactly what they were doing.
Facebook had a serious internal propaganda arm when I was there. Couldn't manage to get floor length stall walls in most of the bathrooms, but every stall had a weekly newsletter about whatever product stuff.
Every high traffic flat space on the wall would be covered with a poster, most of them with designs lifted from US WWII propaganda, many hard to tell if satire or not. I was surprised there was never one about carpooling with der füher.
FB uses its addict money to pay those employees. I assume the pay is what’s effective. Actually a good business model. Pay employees to improve how addictive your drug is, get more money from addicts, and use that to pay your employees more money, completing the loop.
The people who work at these firms were losers in life to begin with. Misery loves company.
Give them some cash and some feeling of power on working on stuff billions of people use... and there you have it.
No one with any morals would choose to work there. You simply wouldnt. Youd be working elsewhere, knowing full well you are choosing not to contribute in lining the pockets of people like Zuck.
Apple is the only somewhat respectable large tech firm.
Honestly 95% of the time it was about technical stuff and I loved it. I've never worked at another company so active in shaping its own culture. Problems other companies had conditioned me to expect could never be fixed would often be gone in a few months because someone had made it their mission to fix.
That was part of something else I loved about their culture: there was room for anyone to move up if they could show they were creating value for the company. Other companies felt like everyone was competing for the same two promotions, but Facebook did not.
In retrospect though this also kind of looks like an unaccountability machine. If each employee must take independent action to justify their own paycheck in terms of their value to the company, most ethically questionable outcomes are the result of cumulative choices made by rank and file employees who know which side their bread is buttered on.
I'm always a bit surprised by the degree that non-tech people don't understand how much they're being openly and transparently manipulated in various ways. Most of my work has been statistical/quantitative in nature from complex A/B testing setups to dynamic pricing algorithms. Yet so many of the most benign parts of my work in the past unnerve some people.
Measuring human behavior and exploiting it for some hope at profit has been an obvious part of my job description for many years. Yet I've had friends and acquaintances that are shocked when they accidentally realize they're part of an A/B test "Wait, Amazon doesn't show the same thing to everyone!?" I've seen reddit conversations where people are horrified at the idea of custom pricing models (something so mundane it could easily be an interview question). I had a friend once claim a basic statement about what I did at work was a "conspiracy theory" because clearly companies don't really have that much control.
To your point, at work the fact that we're manipulating people algorithmically isn't remotely a secret. Nobody in the room at any of my past jobs has felt a modicum of shame about optimization. The worst part is I have drawn a line multiple times at past jobs (typically to my own detriment), so there are things that even someone as comfortable with this as I am finds go to far. Ironically, I've found it's hard to get non-technical people to care about these because you have to understand the larger context to see just how dangerous they are.
I have ultimately decided to avoid working in the D2C space because inevitably you realize you aren't providing any real value to your user (despite internal sloganeering to the contrary) and very often causing real harm. In the B2B space you're working with customers who you have a real business relationship with, so crass manipulation to move the needle for one month isn't worth the long term harm.
I'm always a bit surprised that people that work in tech can be so passive in regards to their civic duty. Instead of going to lawmakers and legislators and trying to stop their employers from destroying society they just quietly watch from the sidelines.
And if laqmakers are silent, then publicising, collecting, and sharing this knowledge to all ends of the earth through mainstream and independent journalism, paying a few hundred dollars out of their Silicon Valley salaries to put up billboards shining a light on the misdeeds of tech companies towards their own customers and society.
Per your examples, when the average person is made aware of the injustice, stalking, and tracking of them, they are not in any way happy with it, and want things to change.
> Per your examples, when the average person is made aware of the injustice, stalking, and tracking of them, they are not in any way happy with it, and want things to change.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't think this the average person will care as much as you think. Even on HN you get plenty of folks who think that tracking is ok or even a benefit since it provides a more personalized experience.
> I'm always a bit surprised that people that work in tech can be so passive in regards to their civic duty. Instead of going to lawmakers and legislators and trying to stop their employers from destroying society they just quietly watch from the sidelines.
Snowden was almost 15 years ago. The only punishment meted out as a result of him coming forward was for Snowden himself. Why would anyone else assume that coming forward would result in substantive change?
Alright. I may object to the wording, but ... isn't what you
described also a good website? I am aware of how much propaganda
Google uses too, e. g. "engage the user" - you see that on youtube
"leave a like". They are begging people to vote. Not for the
vote, but to engage him. I saw this not long ago on Magic
Arena by Wizards of the coast. They claim "your feedback is
valuable" but you can only vote up or vote down. That's not
feedback - that is lying to the user to try to get the user
to make a reaction and tell others about it. I just don't really
see the difference. You describe it that they manipulate people, but ANY ad-department of a company uses propaganda and manipulates people. Look in a grocery, how many colours are used in the packaging. Isn't ALL of this also manipulative?
Google doesn't beg you for likes. Channels beg you for likes because it's one of the metrics they are stack–ranked by. Someone will lose, and they don't want it to be them.
No, good software is and feels empowering. It should scream the developer understood what YOU want to do at that specific point. Most notable, the faster the job is DONE the better.
Putting up flyers in the toilet isn't to enhance your toilet experience. It is the opposite, if we want to enhance the flyer engagement the easiest way is by de-optimizing all parts of the toilet UX. Say we remove all but one toilet rolls and make the side a bit wet. If some of the locks don't work we could dramatically enhance the number of walls and doors people look at. Ideal would be to lock everyone in the stall until the next prey arrives. Should release them just early enough that they don't inform the next victim.
There is an entire agency that focuses on Food and Drugs in America, and its similar around the world. We have many rules on food.
Food is actually a great place to think about social media, because there was a time where the FDA didnt exist. Its need was felt after cities grew larger and the food supply chain became longer. At that point food could be adultered and the old systems which people relied on to know the provenance of their food failed.
Some of the things that changed this was when people started doing indepedent testing and finding out exactly how much adultery was actually taking place.
Eventually we got rules about what was to be done, which we don't consider anymore since its part of daily life.
Yes, because governments are so restrained in their use of propaganda.
What it is is the consequence of the power existing. 200 years ago nobody was arguing about how to hook people in the first 0.2 seconds of video, but it's not because nobody would have refused the power it represents if offered. They just couldn't have it. It's humans. People want this power over you. All of them.
The system incentivizes seeking power by consolidating financial wealth. It doesn't have to be that way & this will eventually become obvious to everyone.
To be fair, it is basically one and the same. I doubt most people railing against capitalism are actually against private property. They probably dislike corporatism which only exists as an extension of the government. Very very few of us voluntarily gave up our right to hold people personally responsible for their actions, but this is forced on everyone on behalf of business interests. The corporate vale is materialized from government alone.
Do you mean "private property" or "personal property"? These are not the same thing, and those who want to scaremonger about non-capitalist modes of production like to conflate the two.
You've never heard someone say "under communism, private property isn't allowed, so you have to share a toothbrush?" I heard that nonsense all the time growing up.
Your toothbrush and clothing are personal property. The family farm is private property.
> I doubt most people railing against capitalism are actually against private property. They probably dislike corporatism which only exists as an extension of the government.
I really don't know. In my experience, it can about private property when talking about housing, it is about markets when talking salaries and work conditions, and it's just about having no idea of what capitalism even is and just vaguely pointing at economics the vast majority of the time.
"Capitalism" can be safely replaced with "the illuminati" or "Chem trails" in the vast majority of complaints I hear and read and the message would ultimately make as much sense. There's not a lot of how or why capitalism doesn't work, but by God there sure is a lot of what it seemingly does wrong.
Just because you don't know what capitalism is, doesn't mean other people do not know.
Just because you only read sources from capitalist media platforms doesn't mean there isn't a lot of "how" or "why" capitalism doesn't work.
My main message was about the profit motive incentivizing the creation of addictions for the profit of tech companies. The invisible hand may expand the development of tech, but the visible hand needs to make people addicted and unhappy.
Think a little before you speak, please. Or read a little more.
As bad as things are, the excesses of capitalism pale in comparison to the excesses of communism or fascism. If you have a better system, please present it to the class.
Capitalism is known to have killed multiple billions world-wide.
Nearly all of the poor countries on earth are capitalist. World war 1 was a war of capitalist reorganization, Fascism was a capitalist economic system, therefore WW2 was initiated by capitalist nations. Nearly all wars being fought today are all fought by capitalists on both sides of the conflict. The poorest countries on earth are capitalists. Drug cartels are organization of drug manufacturing and transporting capitalists. Capitalist nations are proven to be the most corrupt countries on earth.
Capitalism has a vested interest in making nations poor for the sake of maximizing profits in resource extraction. Capitalism has waged more war and caused more destruction than any system before it and its only been around for ~400 years.
You really want me to believe that the system that makes money from doing heinous shit is good?
Look into the primary sources behind the things you believe to be true about communism. Many, many are very shaky and were just "cold" war propaganda pieces. I've done exactly that to come to my conclusions.
What I know to be communism, through research, and reading of primary sources, is just the natural conclusion of the democratization of society. People controlling the production they need through councils that they themselves organize into a peoples state.
This post perfectly proves my point, to which you replied "You are displaying your ignorance with pride.".
"Fascism was a capitalist economic system" or "Capitalism has waged more war and caused more destruction than any system before" are utterly ridiculous, evidently false statements. The only way you can ever say these things with a straight face is if you don't have the least idea of what capitalism even is.
I think you may be very shocked when you find out that you are wrong.
Fascism was an ideology developed by capitalist industrialists, specifically steel trusts in Germany. But had its birth amongst financiers in Italy. Henry Ford was a big proponent of fascism. Fascism did not undo any private property relations, it simply was a single party capitalist state. Ownership of companies was still private. If you were not ideologically or ethnically in line your property was taken away and given to someone who was. Any elimination of property rights specifically only applied to the political opposition, which is in line with repressive capitalism, not with socialism.
The control of market dynamics and labor was for the purposes of war and murder, not an ideological component of fascism. A similar thing happened in all countries who were at war: rationing, price controls, labor allocation, etc, but still capitalists.
The axis was specifically an anti-communist alliance through the anticomintern pact. They specifically wanted to uphold private property.
The ONLY reason that one German country had socialist in their name was to fool the masses. It was to appeal to the masses.
WW1 and WW2 were both started by capitalism. And most wars on going right now, feb 2026, are waged by capitalists factions on both sides.
The figures of death attributed to communism are widely known by academics to be absurdly and unscientifically inflated. The black book of communism is not considered history by historians. The gulag archipelago is not considered history by hostorians.
Why dont you see the black book of capitalism anywhere? There are millions of excuses for every death under capitalism. But there are billions of deaths under capitalism... and counting.
You may think I got here through some sort of unhinged bias or just wanting to go against the grain, but no, I got here through asking myself all these questions sincerely and researching them.
Corporatism is not a thing. Capitalists hold fundamental power over society, they collectively are the state.
They own the things the rest of the people need to survive. Assuming you are a worker/proletariat: Can you survive right now, today, without interacting with a capitalist entity?
Can you make your living as in food, money, housing, etc, right now, solely from your own property? Statistically not. Capitalists own most of what you require.
"Corporatism" is just capitalism. Capitalists use their media platforms to say the government oppresses them equally to us. When it is proven time and time and time again that they have almost total control and influence over the government.
And you buy the narrative.
There is no "pure capitalism", bro. Capitalism will ALWAYS evolve into this. It's baked into the rules. This is very plain to see.
Go to any main news platform, of any country, on the side of any political wing, of any other capitalist nation on earth and type "corruption" in the corresponding language. You'll be met with a flood of articles.
I am against private property of production, because I know the people who need said production can also democratically run it.
> Can you make your living as in food, money, housing, etc, right now, solely from your own property? Statistically not. Capitalists own most of what you require.
You can't survive from your own property in a communist society either because the state own all of it. Instead of power accruing in the hands of a few capitalists, it accrues in the hands of a few politicians/dictators. What's the fundamental difference here? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
This is false and not at all what I have researched and back as a communist.
In a communist society YOU control production through democracy. The whole point is for the people to be their own governing force. That is why communists mention "state control", but another, ultra important aspect that is conveniently not mentioned by capitalist propaganda, is council democracy.
You are your local state. You and your neighbors organized in a council form your local state.
You and your neighbors make sure that no single individual or minority controls your production.
YOU and your neighbors form your own executive, legislative and judicial branches.
This is in reality what communist literature is about. The american mind cannot comprehend democracy, i swear.
And if system were to results in a small group of people holding power and using production to make money, well, that would a capitalist system. Words have meaning.
Democracy is not based on trust, like the political system we have right now. Don't trust me, do your own god damned research. Don't trust millionaire connected politicians either. And don't trust capitalist media either. Democracy is based on control.
Well adjusted people so not want that power over other people
It's sociopaths and narcissists which want it.
And as Atlas667 pointed out, it's also a direct consequence from a capitalistic world view, where it has replaced your morals.
This is not in relationship to state propaganda. Multiple things can cause abhorrent behavior, and just because we've identified something as problematic doesn't inherently imply that other unrelated examples are any better.
"Well adjusted people so not want that power over other people"
There are certainly well adjusted people that would like to fix things they feel are inefficiencies or issues in their government, especially when those issues are directly related to their areas of expertise. Thinking well adjusted people wouldn't want to be in a position of power is exactly how you ensure that only bad people end up with power.
We've always had sociopaths and narcissists, and if you're looking to "capitalism" as the reason why they exist, you're in out-and-out category error territory, not-even-wrong territory. Now that this power exists to be had, human beings are racing to acquire it. If you think you can fix that by "fixing capitalism" you are completely wasting your efforts.
So if that’s not the answer, what is? Should we just throw our hands in the air and say that technology has defeated our monkey brains, and there’s no going back?
Given that these tendencies are not evenly distributed throughout the population, you can have structures that leverage the large mean to mitigate the worst tendencies of the extreme tails. Given that the natural state of things is that power begets more power, these are harder to build and maintain, but it can be done. In particular, Democracies and Republics are major historical examples of this.
People do have this power right now, they are called capitalists, they are a part of the tech/info/policing industry.
You don't have this control, I don't have this control. It's not humans in general, it's literally the capitalists. Right now, today. Try and "timelessly universalize" that.
It's the people who make money from this who want it.
I would rather that no one particular person or group of people have that much power, and I would rather help organize society to collectively and democratically decide what goes on with this tech but I guess that proudly makes me a communist.
History contains abundant, well-documented cases of ordinary people participating in atrocities without coercion. Most people will act decently in low-pressure environments and will act badly under certain incentives, authority structures, or group dynamics. There is no way to know what a person's threshold is until it's tested, but it can be assumed that most people have a low threshold.
That may be true but I think the unspoken assumption in your comment is that somehow, without capitalism, greed magically melts away. How do you explain the constant extreme rampant corruption in communist and socialist countries over 100 years if not from GREED?
I know that it doesn't. Greed will be ever-present, yes, but that doesn't mean that it's a one-way ratchet. It's something we have to keep fighting against all the time. Greed starts out as a driver of progress, then eventually becomes an impediment to progress. The other constant there is progress! No dam will block a river forever.
The definition of capitalism is the private ownership of production and its use to generate profits.
I think a coerced assumption you may have of capitalism is that corruption is an unintended side effect, but it actually follows from its principles.
How is a society to maintain unmarred democratic institutions when its elements are fundamentally unequal? Put more clearly: How can people have the same amount of political power when one class (capitalist) OWNS the production of what the other class (workers) need?
The mythology of capitalist society paints both them as equals and the state as neutral. This is a tactic to preserve the appearance of a democratic backbone. They afford this mythology because capitalists own the air waves and they have, and can have, the most influence in the state. In fact, due to this fundamental inequality capitalists are, for all practical purposes, capitalists are the state.
Capitalist societies put political power up for auction; Corruption has its highest manifestation within capitalist societies.
Now to your point. Greed will never "magically melt away". Greed can only be controlled through democratic control of what permits greed in the first place.
Communism/socialism isn't about magically doing or undoing anything, it's the science of creating firm and unalienable working class power. It must start with democratic control of production and local peoples councils. Greed will not magically melt away, greed must be constantly cut out by everyone by everyone HAVING the political power to cut it out. This means peoples councils will be convened at the neighborhood level, peoples courts will be manned, not by professional judges, but by rotating locally elected citizens. Council delegates will be bound by law to only, and exclusively, be messengers at higher level councils, etc. This is just a small picture of what democracy is. It is not me to say specifically how, of course, but communism does not involve blindly and powerlessly trusting political candidates, like capitalist society requires.
There is a reason communism is demonized by the people who control our society.
The public got a peek at it with Cambridge Analytica creating hundreds of thousands of personality profiles, they then used to create Trump's MAGA army of flying monkeys. The Democrats could have done something about it, and made it illegal, but instead they just decided to build there own armies of flying monkeys. Why? Because both sides are bought and paid for by the same rich parasites trying to reprogram us.
did democrats create flying monkey armies? I haven't seen anywhere near as much Democrat propaganda as Republican, which is probably why they keep losing. Only recently, once Republican policies came into effect and people experienced their consequences, did Republican votes decline.
Large portions of the tech sector thrive off the attention economy. If your goal as a product is to have someone spend hours a day everyday engaged with your product, and you focus on a data driven approach to maximize the time spent on the app, then you’ll create something not dissimilar to addiction.
Supposedly the people working for these companies are "the brightest of the bright" but if they didn't even notice that this was what they were contributing to, what kind of intelligence is even that? Not everyone working there could possibly be so socially inept that they didn't realize what they helped building right? Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals? I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place, even before it started making the news.
Its basically impossible for them to not notice. I know someone who is a software engineer for lockheed. He told me that back in the 90s he wrote a bunch of software for a missile. He wasn't told that is what he was working on, it was all classified, and part of that is you only know what you need to know. But from the specifications and how the math worked, it was very clear to him that it was a surface to air missile. After the fact, it was confirmed that is what he was working on.
Google and Meta are surely more open than a classified missile project. So it would really be beyond the pale for someone to not realize that what they are working on is an additive platform, sure I am willing to bet they didn't say "Addictive" and instead cleaned it up in tidy corporate product management lingo, "highly engaged users" or something like that. But its just impossible.
It is interesting that Software Engineering as it's practitioners like to call it, is unregulated.
If you want to be an accountant, lawyer, surveyor et cetera, one has to learn about ethics, and violating ones professional institute's code of ethics may result in you being unable to practice in future.
Professional engineers are required to consider the interests of the public in their work, have an obligation to reject unethical or harmful instructions and are regulated by their professional organization to support competency and address malpractice. Much of this was driven over the past 50-100 years as society determined that they wanted things built by engineers to not kill people or have material deficiencies following construction.
From my understanding, software engineers are a long away out from this still but perhaps we'll get there once the dust settles on more of these sorts of lawsuits.
The dust will never settle because once people try to regulate they can basically move software engineering in its whole somewhere else. Something great about being active in multiple places is the fact that these companies have leverage. There's not just a cost advantage to having amazon in luxembourg, just employ a few thousands (10 000 jobs are linked to amazon in luxembourg) and you can block votes in europe (because of veto power). 10K jobs is nothing for amazon but is 2% of all jobs in luxembourg.
Same way amazon being big in india isn't just great because of the vast talent pool and 'low' costs in India (even if many if most indian programmers are subpar, they got over a billion people), they basically ensure that the government in India can never turn against Amazon, because these jobs are concentrated in a specific region and India isn't a unified state. Amazon can try many getting into many different things in India without having the risk associated some small foreign company breaking into India would have.
> basically move software engineering in its whole somewhere else.
You don't think that is true in other professions? You don't think I could get my accounts done in India, or a bridge designed in China? The regulatory environment in my country would still apply. Your answer is just exceptionalism
Management not having to listen to engineers is the structural problem. How do managers know which concerns that engineers bring up are actually relevant? How do engineers know which concerns have real world consequences (without having a incredibly high burden of proof)?
Having regulation, or standardisation is a step toward producing a common language to express these problems and have them be taken seriously.
Leadership gets a strong signal - ignoring engineers surfacing regulated issues has large costs. Company might be sued and executives are criminally liable (if discovered to have known about the violation).
Engineering gets the authority and liability to sign off on things - the equivalent of “chartership” in regular fields with the same penalties. This gives them a strong personal reason to surface things.
It’s possible that this is harder for software engineering in its entirety, but there is definitely low hanging fruit (password storage and security etc).
> In the software industry management rarely ever listens to concerns brought up by engineering even if it's technical concerns.
Yet they have to listen to a Chartered Accountant or a Chartered Engineer. Maybe it would be as much in the engineers interest to have a professional body as it would for the public
We don't even need formal regulation to start — just honest internal conversation. I work in tech and most teams I've been part of never once discussed the ethical implications of what we were building. Not because people are evil, but because the incentive structure doesn't reward asking "should we?" — only "can we ship it?"
The gap isn't education, it's accountability. Engineers building engagement loops know exactly what they're doing. They just don't have a professional body that can revoke their license for it.
Fair point — I contradicted myself. What I meant is: the first step doesn't require waiting for regulation (just have the conversation). But long-term, some form of professional accountability would help. Those are two different timescales, not alternatives. I wrote it badly.
And no, not vibebait — just a poorly structured comment from a guy with a fever typing on his phone.
So much AI statementmaking seems to be structured around "It's not X, it's not Y, it's not Z [emdash] it's A" and "What's important is '[experiential first-person descriptive quote]'". Maybe they overfit on Linked In data.
It's extremely embarrassing that my (American) employer refers to me as a "software engineer" when in fact I dropped out of the university computer engineer program and can not legally call myself an engineer in my country.
I would just as soon call myself a software doctor or software lawyer. Or software architect.
In the US anyway, calling yourself an "engineer" is only regulated if you sell your services to the public as one. Inside of a business, like a car manufacturer, the position title of "engineer" can be applied to any job at all, however the business wants.
As a degreed engineer myself, this was a bit jarring to me when I first entered the workforce, seeing co-workers who had never been to college calling themselves engineers. But fortunately I got over it.
Have been surveying Computer Science courses at university with my son recently. All the ones we looked at had a compulsory ethics module which shows the direction things are headed at least.
Mine had one over a decade ago. After graduating, the industry decided that developing everything we just got done establishing was unethical, was the hot topic to innovate for the next decade. I never worked at any of those places and still got burned ethically in much more indirectly unethical product streams in the finance and insurance sectors. To be honest, if there is really good money to be made at this point, there is a safe bet that if you dig deep enough, there is an unethical core to it. Most of my peers assuaged themselves with some variant of "I'm a programmer, not an ethicist, and philosophy doesn't put food on my table. So sadly, the problem seems much more systemic and a priori to the capitalistic optimization function.
I wonder how many programmers working today are coming through universities though? I'm self-taught, most of my programmers friends are as well, same with most of my colleagues back when I worked. I can remember maybe the name of 3-4 people in total, out of maybe ~30 or so, who went to university for computer science before they started working.
In my experience CompSci ethics modules are about hacking or mishandling user data or code theft... i.e. things that companies don't want their employees doing.
I've yet to see an ethics module that covers ethics from the perspective of ethics over profit.
Whereas an accountant is taught that they should resign rather than get involved in unethical practices, like profit manipulation for example. I interview people with ethics questions. I discussed them frequently when training.
I refused the pressure to be unethical when I was pushed, even when I knew I would be fired (which I was). I was able to discuss it with old mentors, who made time to meet with me, even when I hadn't worked at their company for years.
Lastly I disclosed why I was fired at interview for a new job (without the confidential details), and was hired partly on the strength of it by a person who had been through much the same.
And I didn't learn it at University, I learnt it on my professional qualification, that was around 3 years long and was postgraduate level, although had non-degree based entry routes for technicians. It also required a wide range of supervised experience.
This was not at all the ethics program that was taught in my university computing ethics course. They did indeed cover the societal and moral responsibility of software developers. This was way back in 2002.
This is a comment that my reaction is different based on your age. If you're older, I'd be more disappointed. If you're young, I'd be more sympathetic. However, the careers mentioned by GP all require schooling where those ethics courses can be taught. In "Software Engineering", so many people are self taught or taken boot camps without formal schooling. The SE title is just a joke to me knowing that it is so overused and given to people that clearly are not trained as an engineer.
Maybe we should have Gavin Belson's Tethics be more widely taught???
Whereas accountants, lawyers, civil engineers and surveyors have to do postgraduate training with their institute to become chartered.
Interestingly many accountants in the UK never did a degree (very many more did a degree in something unrelated), but came through the technician route of evening, weekend or day release study. Many do their chartered training at weekends.
We have separate words for intelligence and wisdom for a reason.
Intelligence is not particularly correlated to ethics or morality. Probably sounds obvious when I say it directly, but it is clearly something that you have banging around in the back of your mind. Bring it forward out of the morass of unexamined beliefs so you can see that it is clearly wrong, and update the rest of your beliefs that are implicitly based on the idea that intelligence somehow leads to some particular morality as appropriate.
Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine. They're completing an 8-point ticket to integrate a new scroll-tracking library, or a 5-point ticket to send an extra parameter to the logging system. When there's thousands of people working on a product, nobody feels like they're doing anything impactful.
> Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine.
Are people really not aware of what the company's overall mission, product and impact is? I'm finding that hard to believe. If you accept employment at Facebook, regardless of what department you're in, you know exactly what kind of company you're contributing your time, energy and effort into.
I joined Google Analytics in 2018 and had no idea that Analytics really meant "Tracking and Remarketing" until about 3 weeks into the role. At that point, what're you going to do, quit? I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do, but it took two years to get out cleanly.
Yes? Why not? If I'd join a company and figured out what I did actually harmed more than helped, I'd leave that place, absolutely. I'm a software engineer, even with the lowest possible position in a random company I'd earn better than most people in the country and live a better life, even just the bottom 30% of earners in software in the country (not counting outsourcing obviously). Especially at that time it was very easy to find new jobs.
You think Google is the single company out there who is willing to employ you? How come?
Edit: Thinking about it, your comment actually made me more frustrated than I realized. I've been poor enough to having to be homeless at some points in my life, and yes, I've worked for immoral companies too, because I need food and shelter. But once you move up in life to the comfy jobs like software engineering, you don't have any excuse anymore that it's just about "feeding your family" when you literally have a sea of jobs available. It might be an excuse you tell yourself to justify your reasoning for getting paid more, but if you truly did care about it, you'd make a different choice, and still be able to feed your family, and I'm almost confident your family would be OK with you making that choice too, unless they also lack the empathy you seem to be missing.
To be clear, I have no beef with Google the company and wouldn't mind working there again if it weren't in the ads division. After two years I transferred to the Chrome org and greatly enjoyed the work there. I was proud to develop something that is used the world over, it's open source, and I got to optimize tight code and tune for performance. (Yes, Chrome is fast, I don't understand the haters!) If I had just quit Google immediately, this wouldn't have happened and I would've missed out on a great experience.
Did you think I would have applied there, taken a job, worked for three weeks, and then realized I'm morally opposed to the concept of working at Google entirely?
I don't know what to think anymore, seemingly all everyone else thinks about is money, I guess that's ok. Take care, hope you have a nice day regardless.
The great thing about open source is that you can fork it for free. If you don't like the direction Chrome is evolving, you can make a better one tomorrow.
You were homeless and didn't have a choice, so now obviously you're qualified to give assurances that essentially, "it is unlikely that your family will starve", right? /s
And if you're wrong, and shit hits the fan for whatever reason, who's going to fix that? You? No, he's going to have to fix that, because nobody else is going to step in.
It's easy to tell others that it's going to be OK, but put your money where your mouth is. Put $1M in a fund that he can access should he no longer be able to find employment. Then he'll have absolute certainty that it's going to be OK.
Something tells me you're not going to do that. Something tells me that what you would do if shit hits the fan, is you're going to tell him that he should find solace in the fact that while he's working for 1/5th of his former total comp, putting in more hours at the same time, seeing his kids less, not putting his kids through private school to give them the best chance at the best education, that, at least, some kid out there isn't watching 6-7 videos on the tablet that their parents use to do less parenting.
> You were homeless and didn't have a choice, so now obviously you're qualified to give assurances that essentially, "it is unlikely that your family will starve", right? /s
Yes, again the context is software engineering, the floor of what we earn as software engineers is above what other careers has as their maximum, and if you've been a developer since 2018 (almost ten years of experience) you're not having a tough time finding a new job, especially if you were at Google.
People get comfortable with their new living standards, that's natural. But they said they were able to get out, just took time, I'm guessing that's about vesting something, not because it's hard to find new opportunities.
Nothing to do with vesting. I didn't want to leave Google, I wanted to leave ads, and I did. I got into Chrome org and was happy that my patience paid off
Many developers want to understand user behavior without the heavy baggage of ad-tech tracking. What do you think of self-hosted tools (like UXWizz) to track qualitative and quantitative data, but without having the problem of web-wide surveillance that GA provides?
Or do you think all analytics are evil? What did you think the platform was actually doing when you decided to join?
Sure, but you could say that about anything. If you're American, then your labour is paying for concentration camps no matter where you work. In a company of 100k+ people, responsibility is diluted.
The problem is, between producing cigarettes, weapons, disposable fashion, sugary food and drink, disposable vapes, extremely wasteful cars, addicting game mechanics, many of the financial "product"s, ad optimisation, ..., not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy.
> not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy
We're talking about software engineers here, not "cleaner taking up any job you can". Literally one of the most well paid jobs considering the amount of effort you put into it. People slave away on fields picking berries for less, with more impact on their life expectancy, if there is any career you can almost jump between jobs in just a few weeks, software engineering is one of them.
Oh they absolutely know. I've had some tragi-comic interactions with trust and safety folk in tech. You aren't going to be very popular in the firm telling people their stuff is bad for users.
Its easiest to think of tech firms as a tale of 2 different dichotomies. Internally, the firm is split between the people who are told to do best for their users and the people who are told to do best for the next quarterly earnings call.
So you may have a bright and shiny idea, but its not really going to increase time on site. And if you don't increase ToS, then that other social platform which is nibbling at your lunch, will starve you into an early grave.
The other strange juxtaposition is between tech firms trying to suggest actually better policy, while also sitting on data that they dont want to share because they are afraid it will get used against them. Which it absolutely will, because when people understand how the sausage is made, they are absolutely aghast.
This leaves regulators mostly in the dark, and then they are forced to act. At which point lobbying comes into play once again.
You wouldn't be alone in thinking this whole story sounds similar to Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
Fatten up that wallet with 500K a year and tech stock RSUs and people pretty quickly forget about their morals. Seriously, they tell themselves the same story: "ah this is just temporary. I can make big money for a couple years then get out." But 2 years turns to 5, then they buy a house in the Bay area and now they're stuck. Same thing for Seattle.
Typically, intelligent people get so much joy out of being able to do something (such as addicting the masses), they do not stop to think whether that's a good idea. Especially when that's the very thing that's fuelling their extremely lavish lifestyle.
I've heard "well, you have to change things from the inside" before.
And a lot of people have been there for a while, it wasn't always... quite as bad even if a lot of the warning signs were absolutely there.
I was actually just thinking to myself this morning that I literally have no idea what these feeds look like at this point, but more and more people seem to be looking at me with envy when I say I don't have any lol. I'm kind of curious and might ask my friends if I can see what they're looking at day to day if they'll show me.
Many people get used to the paycheck before they really discover the extent of their predatory practices. A lot of people will choose their own comfort and stability over morality.
Most people just want a steady paycheck, so it's not hard to find a bunch of very smart people that just want a paycheck. As for morals go, this topic is way too subjective to say whether it's wrong. People can make great cases for and against aspects of it. It'll be interesting to see what the jury says. It'll definitely be a precedent setting case.
While I appreciate the mention and the flattery, I'm just a person, my thought are not special and I'm starting to feel like you might be better off not focusing on what specifically I am saying :) Again, I do appreciate it, can't deny it feels nice initially, but don't treat me like I'm special, I'm not, I'm just sharing stray thoughts sent out the ether like everyone else.
haha, Sorry but I didn't intend to flatter you (atleast this time although your work in oaoh is commendable) but I literally just wrote it as a (blog?) because I was already writing a comment and I didn't want a massive wall of text & also you can see from my other project that I wanted to write more as blog posts rather than HN comments when they get too big.
I wrote the 6 minute mark to think of how long it took me to write the comment which was around ~50 minutes ish. And I mentioned you many times in the comment-ish because I had written something first and then wrote something on top of it & thus many initial mentions.
Anyways I have now removed the mentions and honestly a lot of this is just transparency efforts.
Really, that little? Don't feel even slightly embarrassed about your morals being so cheap? You'd hurt your neighbors and acquaintances for 20K a month?
Given you probably don't earn that today, say you got paid that now instead of whatever you earn, what would you spend that money on in reality?
Sure, but what about all the other aspects of your life, those contributing more to your happiness? Corrupted people have money as their top goal in life, everyone else is trying to live a good life once they have enough, but there seemingly is no "enough" for quite a large part of the population, and in some places of the world this obsession seems worse than in others.
Hate the game, not the players. Somebody is supposed to be regulating this stuff. If you're in a poor city or country having a shot at such compensation would be life changing for the whole family, not just you and game-theoretically someone else will take that job anyway, for similar reasons, too.
First of all we have to make our minds. Do we need regulation or not. Many people cry from top of their lungs for less regulation, and now are we saying "if it's so damaging why we are not regulating it?" this is double-distilled, barrel-aged hypocrisy at its finest. You can bottle it and sell it as a limited reserve single malt.
Changing your life for a single generation while setting every pillar of a civilized society, moral imperative and human values and everything related on fire is again a monumental example of shortsightedness.
Trying to beat your conscience with the bat of "if I didn't do it, somebody else would do the same" will only make your heart and soul ache more and more over the years.
I (and many others) would live a peaceful life trying their best to leave the world a little bit better than they found rather than being slave of the money they earn and being bickered by their conscience because they betrayed to the essence and foundation of humanity just for a few {thousand, million, billion, trillion} bucks.
I have rejected much more lucrative offers because I value my family, people I love and personal life more than a shiny car which will rust in two decades anyway.
So, I'll hate the game and the players while trying to make our world a better place. At least I'll die peacefully.
No, I'm sorry, but fuck that. I've been one of the players, and it's definitively possible to not play the game, especially when you see what's going on around you, and still live a perfectly fine life that is above the living standards of most others in your country, if you're working as a software engineer. And I'm saying this as someone who never came close to FAANG salaries yet was lucky enough to paid enough to live better than I thought I'd ever do, but initially had really shit living situation and have had to steal at one point to feed myself. I've had chances that could mean I'd live a life of luxury earlier than what it ended up being, but I couldn't live with myself if I did those things, when I had anything resembling of a choice.
There is almost always a choice, and "hate the game not the player" is such a bullshit excuse for people to just participate because everyone else is. It's spineless and the answer of a chicken who doesn't want to consider the consequences of their actions.
Anytime anything comes up, I do talk with them, thank you for asking. However, they're an ocean away from where the really bad stuff happen, where seemingly all people think about is how to maximize their salaries and then deploy their services for everyone else in the world to get addicted, my representatives can't do a lot about that except what they're already doing.
I would feel embarrassed, yes. But that's 5 times my current salary for a 'similar' position. I am not sure it'd be 5 times worse in terms of societal effect. And even if it were, I am not sure I would be 5 times as embarrassed, if we are considering a linear conversion rate.
What I am trying to say is that I am on your side - as of this moment it is incredibly unlikely that I would ever see this kind of money. That makes it an easy position to take in a online conversation. But I have seen decent people throw out morals for a 100th of what we are talking about.
look, i dont want to work at any of those companies anyway. I am with you - i was trying to say that money can break most of us. I appreciate you being so farsighted by leaving such a position, but for many other people that would be unthinkable - And that does not make them monsters.
At this point I would be more worried about working for a US company, than which one exactly - (not totally serious of course, but also not entirely inaccurate)
I had no safety net and nearly became homeless after draining my savings helping a family member in the months after this happened. I come from a very poor background and have no family to rely on. I spent several years as a teenager and in my early 20s homeless, without parents or anyone to help me financially. I starved and was very ill.
I say this to make it clear that I didn't make this decision free of consequences, and it was unthinkable at the time for many from better backgrounds than I. I have experienced worse conditions than most of my peers ever will and my soul is still not for sale. There is no excuse. Selling heroin on a street corner is more ethical than what is going on at Google and Meta.
I did not mean to imply that you did not face any consequences. Sorry if that came across that way.
But my point stands. While I heavily disagree with almost everything Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, etc. stand for, I cannot hold the developers in these companies to the same level of judgment as I would politicians, lobbyists, and managers.
You may compare selling heroin on the street to whatever stuff is going on at these companies, and I might agree or disagree. But the fact is — selling heroin on the street is illegal, while training a recommendation model is not. Quite the opposite. And the complacency and failure to put reins on this situation 15 years ago is a deep failure of our civilization. As long as we train people at university for these positions and pull them in with such incredibly high salaries, I can't not forgive them to a large degree. I do not forgive the policymakers that enable this madness, however.
I understand that's just moving the blame to a higher level — that's not the intention. It's a systemic failure, and it needs systemic change.
> Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals?
Surely it's this, right? I just had what I would consider an intelligent conversation with someone wherein we eventually settled on a core ideological difference between us is that I thought all humans have equal value (infinite and immeasurable), while he believed a human's value is only as much as said human can generate money within capitalism (basically, if their salary or net worth is low, they must not be very valuable people, and we shouldn't do things for them like give them healthcare).
I think it's a bit of a dangerous fallacy to assume that intelligence naturally leads people to arriving at your own personal ideology. There were plenty of highly intelligent Nazis or Imperial Japanese. They either didn't care about the regimes they supported or leveraged their intelligence to rationalize it (requiring fallacy to do so of course - or perhaps not, if they really did just want their subgroup to dominate all others and believed it was possible to do so).
For me it's not smarts alone to define my value system. It can't be purely rationality, since the premise of deciding good and bad is subjective and dependent on what you value. You can argue these things rationally and use logic to determine outcomes, but at the end of the day there's a messy human brain deciding good/bad, important/not important, relevant/not relevant.
In a perfect world, when you realise that your company creates and fuels addiction in children, that company should be concerned about having resulting profits seized (fully!) and responsible decisionmakers criminally prosecuted.
I would argue that we fail completely at doing this (historically, too, see e.g. leaded gas).
This incentivizes companies toward net-negative behavior until it is fully regulated despite knowing better, because it is clear that it won't be really punished anyway and remain a net-positive for them.
I am all for it, I do not think Mark Zuckerberg deserves any of the billions of dollars he has and he has contributed nothing to society in return for that. On the contrary, everyone knows his contribution has been a net negative but our systems do not accurately reward positive contribution, or disincentivise the negative.
Without discounting social media's harmful effects:
I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.
Social media has also been a way for communities to connect organically with discoverability features missing on the old web.
There are positives and negatives - if it was only negatives people would be quicker to abandon the platforms.
Although I'm not familiar with the case at hand, I agree there's potential there for real harm, especially to children.
It has been frequently demonstrated that capitalism is terrible at pricing in externalities. In the U.S. it used to be industrial waste in the environment; now it's climate change and addiction and culture wars.
Upvoting you because all the Zuck worshipers and meta stockholders downvoted you for speaking the truth.
The guy is worth a quarter trillion dollars and doesn't seem intent on calling it a day, and insists on destroying society's youth so he can make more money. Intelligent or not, that's a mental disease.
Imagine having that sort of money where if 99% was taken away, you'd still have over 2 billion dollars to your name....and you refuse to just walk away and focus on things like your family, making the world a better place, or just enjoying your life. Tom took the money for MySpace and actually seems to enjoy time with his family, traveling, doing photography, etc.
For all his (many) faults, Gates took a look at the polio virus and said "I'm bigger than you" and pretty much spent until it was wiped out. Doesn't counteract the bad or the Epstein stuff at all, but wiping out polio has helped people.
Mark's done jack shit to genuinely help people besides his shareholders and his immediate family. One might argue that his whole bunker thing is an indicator that he's realized he's done tremendous damage to society, but instead of fixing it, he's insulating himself for when the proverbial bomb goes off.
A confectionary company invented a type of bubble gum (called "Umpty Candy") that became addictive not because it had any drugs in it, but because they kept optimising the taste until it became too delicious to refuse.
fun fact: the people working for those companies, even though the attribute they are optimizing for is "addictability", they call it "snackability". Probably b/c of motivation and ... legal.
The single thing I find most addicting in my life for the last 5-6 years is HN. I feel like all the same criticisms can be applied here. HN chooses their algo and how quickly upvotes degrade and how much they are worth for keeping something on the front page. It works to keep me checking multi times a day. As an example, they could instead pick to only update the front page once every 24 hours and my addition would disappear because I'd know "no updates until tomorrow". As it is, I get that random reward addiction of "maybe there's something interest now". I guess HN is an evil company engineering addiction.
"[T]hrive off the attention economy"? What a sinister way to describe building products that people want to use to connect to people whose words and images they enjoy. Nobody is pushing drugs here. There's no fraud or deception. The whole situation is Alice not liking the medium Bob and Charlie use to communicate and what they say to each other over it. Alice needs to mind her own business. She doesn't get to use the power of the state to separate Bob and Charlie just because she's indignant.
When you define "addiction" as anything people who at a level you consider excessive, the word expands to cover every domain of life and so becomes worse than useless.
I’d argue that just because there’s no clear indication of fraud or deception immediately apparent doesn’t discount the reality that much of society has become dependent on their phones.
It’s pretty clear it’s designed that way—otherwise, its effectiveness wouldn’t be nearly as troubling as it is.
Advertising absolutely has overlap as of that of propaganda, and engagement remains the central focus of the millions of apps that populate stores and devices (along with the constant stream of ads that accompany them).
Working in transitional housing brings a unique perspective that’s often unshared with the vast majority of everyday people. When you do this for a time, you start to recognize patterns and the overlap in environments around you. In the case of addiction, it certainly applies to a whole swath of life that most never notice.
Not to argue too much because I agree with you, but it bears mentioning that many of these companies absolutely study the techniques employed by casinos et al and now you can see sports gambling using techniques refined by social media companies. The dialogue there is very damning when it comes to assessing whether they’re being deceptive/bad actors.
You could describe drugs the same way, no? building products to connect people to substances they enjoy? There would be no fraud and deception too.
This is not about Alice liking or disliking it. This is about allowing Mark to engineer a system where statistically too many Bob's and Charlie's can't refuse (for the same reasons gambling is more common in poor communities), making the society worse off at a result.
How is it sinister to describe what it is? The industry literally uses that term. Their entire goal is to maximize the amount of time you are on the screen by grabbing your attention with every single lesson they have learned from decades and billions of dollars of research, almost universally in service of throwing ads up in front of you. More time
= more ads = more revenue.
It is not a fair fight and to act like this is anything less than a corporate-run legal addiction machine is way too generous to these companies given what we know now. Sometimes I feel like people only consider something addictive if it involves slot machine mechanics or an actual narcotic. But we know now it’s much broader than that.
Your argument held water in 2010. Not in 2026. We know better now.
So many problems on the internet stem from products trying to be “free” and funding themselves with ads.
I’m starting to think that we need to push for more of the internet going behind paywalls, which is weird because I’ve always been somebody who claimed to hate walled gardens and supported “information should be free”.
Many of the products, while they do provide value, aren't providing services that are attractive enough in their own right, to generate multi-billion dollar companies. Facebook is pretty much a niche product, Instagram provides maybe a little entertainment, but with out the addiction part, it's not really worth as much as Meta shareholders would like.
Same with search, or AI, clearly there's value, but it's hard to become a $1T company, while still be ethical. We need the world to be okay with much much small, less valuable tech companies.
The ease of creation of digital data has lead to the creation of an infinite sea of bullshit. Ads/attention economy are just the newest layer of this asymmetry. Curated datasets are a solution to the problem, as this was how old media worked. The problem is then how will it be paid for.
I mean engagement is the game. The overlap of other mediums like TV, movies, music, gambling clearly have the same focus, though they could only wish to have the same death grip that social media has been tuned to achieve.
Will there be any outcome to remedy the situation from this even if actual harm is proven to the letter of the law?
Seems not so far back the Sacklkers were proven(?) to have profited and fueled the oiod crisis while colluding with the healthcare industry - and last i heard they were haggling over the fine to pay to the state. While using various financial loopholes to hide their wealth under bankrupcy and offshore instruments.
What then the trillion dollar companies that can drag out appeals for decades and obfuscate any/all recommendations that may be reached.
And before that, it was the crack epidemic—and cigarettes before that. None of this is new tho, just the medium.
I recall Philip Morris pivoting their main business when it began hemorrhaging money. Essentially this pivot came in the form of becoming the largest “box-to-mouth” food producers in the world, of course applying the same addictive principles that fueled their tobacco empire to maintain profitability.
I doubt, however, social media corps like Meta will follow suit today—mostly because accountability feels more like a suggestion these days.
I'm not at all familiar with the American justice system, but would the fact that this case specifically describes the targeting of minors with such addictive tactics change things at all?
Not really, cigarette companies targeted minors, same with alcohol, they got slapped on the wrist. Worth mentioning this happened during the rise of a neoliberal policy order of checks & balances.
> "This case is as easy as A-B-C," Lanier said as he stacked children's toy blocks bearing the letters.
> He contended the A was for addicting, the B for brains and the C for children.
I gotta admit, I find this really trivial and silly that this is how court cases go, but I understand that juries are filled of all sorts of people and lawyers I guess feel the need to really dumb things down? Or maybe it's the inner theater kid coming out?
Jury selection weeds out the enthusiasts who want to be on a jury, the people who can manage to get out of it, and the people who have too much domain knowledge related to the case.
The lawyers are performers in a play, to some extent. Theatricality can pay off, in the right amounts.
> Jury selection weeds out the enthusiasts who want to be on a jury, the people who can manage to get out of it, and the people who have too much domain knowledge related to the case.
In my (extremely limited) experience, the latter two are probably true but not necessarily the first one. I've been called for jury duty exactly once so far, and it happened to coincide with a period where I wasn't particularly happy with my job situation and was pushing for some changes with my manager, which made me motivated to try to get picked so that I could stall a bit to see if my situation changed. As far as I could tell, almost everyone in the room full of like 40 people who were in the pool for the civil trial they put me in the room for first was trying to get out of it, and I ended up being the first person picked (out of I think 8 overall; there were only six jurors needed for this trial and if I recall correctly there were two alternates). It genuinely seemed to me like the lawyers were basically happy to have someone who actually wanted to do it rather than have to force someone to go who wasn't going to want to actually pay attention or take it seriously.
My guess would be that they don't want someone who's enthusiastic because they have a particular agenda that's against the verdict they're looking for. If you're a prosecutor, you're probably not going to want to pick someone who's obviously skeptical of law enforcement, and if you're a defense attorney, you're probably not going to want someone who's going to convict someone because they "look guilty". I'm not convinced that someone who really wants to be on a jury because they thought it looked fun on TV or something but otherwise doesn't have any clear bias towards one side or another would get weeded out, especially for most civil cases where people probably won't have as much concern about either letting a guilty person go free or putting an innocent person behind bars.
I get the reasoning behind that kind of jury selection, but yeah it seems this would also select for the most gullible people to be in the jury - especially if you want people without domain knowledge.
Ok, but at least expert witnesses are constrained by the basic state of science in the field: They can certainly have a biased opinion but they can't go against established knowledge - and the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation.
Whereas for jury members, the only people who could do that are other jury members, who would be just as clueless.
(I get that you don't want a jury with wildly different levels of domain knowledge. e.g. if you had one "expert" and the remainder being laymen, the expert could quickly dominate the entire jury - and there would be no one there to call out any bias from them)
> Ok, but at least expert witnesses are constrained by the basic state of science in the field: They can certainly have a biased opinion but they can't go against established knowledge
How can you tell if you're not also an expert?
> the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation
Yes, and when the science is beyond the experience of the jury, experts giving opposite opinions will be as hard to distinguish as conflicting non-expert witness testimony (or even the testimony of the defendant compared to the accuser or litigant).
> at least expert witnesses are constrained by the basic state of science in the field
This is absolutely not the case.
> and the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation
Sure, and now the jury - with zero domain knowledge - sees two very confident sounding experts who disagree on a critical point... and you wind up with it coming down to which one was more likeable.
These were the opening remarks of the lawyers on one side. You’re right that it’s theater, because they’re trying to hook the jury with an idea and get it to stick.
It’s also not a great sign that they’re relying on such tricks and props to hook the jury. In stronger cases they’ll rely on actual facts and key evidence, not grand but abstract claims using props like this.
I don’t know how the rest of the opening remarks went, but from the article it looks like Meta’s lawyers are already leaning into the actual evidence (or lack thereof) that their products were central to the problems:
> Meta attorney Paul Schmidt countered in opening remarks to the jury that evidence will show problems with the plaintiff's family and real-world bullying took a toll on her self-esteem, body image and happiness rather than Instagram.
> "If you took Instagram away and everything else was the same in Kaley's life, would her life be completely different, or would she still be struggling with the same things she is today?" Schmidt asked, pointing out an Instagram addiction is never mentioned in medical records included in the evidence.
Obviously this is HN and we’re supposed to assume social media is to blame for everything, but I would ask people to try not to be so susceptible to evidence-free narrative persuasion like the ABC trick. Similar tricks were used years ago when it was video games, not social media, in the crosshairs of lawyers looking to extract money and limit industries. Many of the arguments were the same, such as addicting children’s brains and being engineered to capture their attention.
There’s a lot of anger in the thread about Discord starting to require ID checks for some features, but large parts of HN aren’t making the connection to these lawsuits and cases as the driving factor behind these regulations. This is how it happens, but many are cheering it on without making the connection. Or they are welcoming regulations but they have a wishful thinking idea that they’re only going to apply to sites they don’t use and don’t like, without spilling over into their communication apps and other internet use.
> Meta attorney Paul Schmidt countered in opening remarks to the jury that evidence will show problems with the plaintiff's family and real-world bullying took a toll on her self-esteem, body image and happiness rather than Instagram.
I feel like this must be an indication of an inherent flaw with a society designed around the idea that litigation originates in an individual's singular harm received from a company, outside of I guess class action lawsuits, which to be fair, I don't know much about. But I'm reminded of the McDonald's coffee case, when McDonald's was able to leverage their incredible capital power to make that woman look like such a crazy litigious hysterical lady that people to this day use it as an example of how Americans are just inherently trivially litigious, when in reality, that coffee was just way too hot.
Nobody can stand up to the might of a trillion dollar company. The resources they have at hand are just too vast.
>Nobody can stand up to the might of a trillion dollar company. The resources they have at hand are just too vast.
Which is why Americans need to curb the lobbying power and communications power of trillion dollar corporations, and limit the rights corporations have versus the rights of human citizens.
Or if a company is too big to be held accountable, it needs to be broken up aggressively.
I blame the consumer, but I think it's really different from the video game cases. Those lacked a social component and came with a warning and a rating system, and only simulated interactions.
Social media technology, according to former employees, is intentionally engineered to capitalize on dependency, unbeknownst to the user, came with no rating system or warnings, and hosts real interactions not simulated ones.
And don't forget they can update them now, in a very short cycle. Mario 1 is always going to be Mario 1, but Instagram? If they discover something tomorrow that's twice as addictive, they'll put it in Instagram before the end of next week.
It's all about putting things into the juries head that they can remember and draw back to once they're in deliberation. Word-puzzles like those tries to imprint "addicting, brains, children", so those things will be more prominent during the deliberation.
It's how media works, not a representation of the jury's mental capabilities. For media, you need to have the simplest idea in a visual form if you want to have any chance to make it stick - especially when you're fighting against a trillion dollar attention-addiction industry with billions of lobbying dollars to defend their cash cow.
"They don't only build apps; they build traps," Lanier said, saying Meta and YouTube pursued "addiction by design," making his arguments using props like a toy Ferrari and a mini slot machine.
These are opening remarks, Perhaps we should wait until they actually present evidence.
My YT Shorts experience: absent-mindedly watch a few, eventually think "damn, these things suck", tap the "show fewer shorts" link to reduce the chance of absent-mindedly clicking on them again soon. The format, with all its annoying little stylistic cliches, is just too irritating to be addictive. (modern Facebook is even more absurdly un-addictive).
The first time I walked into a casino I wanted to vomit. I hated everything about it. The lights, the smell, the sound, every sensory input rubbed me the wrong way. If hell exists, this is it.
And yet some people have the opposite response. They get hooked.
I suspect it’s the same here. The tactics that are wildly addictive dopamine pumps for their largest cohort actively repel you and me.
Pokemon Sleep and Pokemon TCG apps (ran by two different companies) are very annoying with this. I had to drop TCG because it was much worse than Sleep with all the menus. The only reason I keep up with sleep is because it allows me to gamify my sleep and it honestly has a pretty good UI with its calendar view of my sleep patterns.
I suppose all "gacha" games use this pattern. I find it interesting that gachapon machines are so ingrained in Japanese culture because it is basically culturally approved gambling.
Then again, the West had similar with sports trading cards, which are less popular now. Then again, again, NFTs kinda brought this back for a bit with the randomized drops.
Facebook has figured out that I really like videos of people removing rust from badly corroded metal. If they don't mess up and show me something else, then it takes some serious conscious effort to stop.
One of the emails released from discovery already was about how Facebook deliberately trying to cultivate FOMO in teens, specifically sending mass notifications during school hours to make people not on facebook feel like they're being left out.
This is wild. I would've thought everyone working in the company implicitly knew what they were doing without no-one needing to mention it but I can't imagine someone being so dumb as to suggesting something like sending notifications during school hours in writing. Could you link to this?
It's true but also (could be) innocent. In the sense that if you A/B test things and look for engagement, you will almost certainly end up with "addictive" systems.
I think this may also be why there is so much sugar in American food. People buy more of the sweet stuff. So they keep making it sweeter.
I'm not sure who should be responsible. It kinda feels like a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation.
Obviously the government should be responsible to monitor these patterns and regulate them when they are becoming unhealthy at a statistical level? Having allowed the likes of facebook to grow to this point is clearly a policy failure.
The C-suite has learned not to put so much incriminating stuff into writing (after Apple/Google etc. got caught making blatantly illegal anti-poaching agreements in personal emails from folks like Jobs), so proving that is probably gonna be tough.
The definition of innocent you two are using here is absurd to me. This is, at best, willful negligence. No one sat down and drew up a plan for the child screen addiction machine, maybe, but they noticed they were making it many times and chose to continue.
And also, does it really matter if it was on purpose or not, the end effect is that same, purposefully designing addictive patterns meant to make people spend more time on it, regardless of the mental health of the person.
I can kill a person with a car either intentionally or unintentionally. Of course one is worse than the other, but both are ultimately bad and you should face justice for either of them, even if the punishment might be different because of the motivation/background. But neither should leave you as "innocent".
This is just one data point, but I once talked to a person who worked for YouTube. I asked him if he had children, he said yes. I asked him if he let them use YouTube Kids and he said "no way, that's completely banned at home". That told me everything that I needed to know.
Restaurants try to make food you will remember and want again. Authors try to write books you can't stop reading. It's silly to imagine that any type of media would do anything other than seek to gain your interest and attention. It's our job to have personal hygiene and to control our information diet. This postmodern social construction perspective that tries to blame everyone for our problems is a lame approach to the problem.
I see where you are coming from, but this is different because:
1. The restaurant isn't lacing your food with cocaine
2. The author is incentivizing reading, which is generally a good thing
You are right, it is our job to control our information diet but when the ability to control is diminished through the consumption, then we have a problem which doesn't fit into the model of "get your shit together".
There's also a social responsibility you inherit when you start selling products that have harmful side-effects. Auto manufacturers have to comply with emission testing, drug makers have to prove efficacy, air conditioning manufacturers have to adhere to air quality standards etc. What do social media companies have to do? Very little if anything, and that's the problem. We've yet to find a counter-balance that works and protects the consumer, so we're in this era where we're trying to find out what we can do, but the landscape is changing so fast that we're trying to hit a moving target.
> 1. The restaurant isn't lacing your food with cocaine
Cocaine creates a much larger chemical change in the brain and can kill you in high doses so it’s not really comparable.
> 2. The author is incentivizing reading, which is generally a good thing
Says who? Why is reading inherently a good thing?
And all of those things are regulated because they have what most consider to be objectively bad effects on the body (with metrics based on cellular harm).
If you genuinely want to understand what we're talking about here, I suggest you read up on how certain behavior discharge dopamine on cue, how that builds tolerance and addiction. Then perhaps you understand the difference between this subject and the examples you gave.
I agree. People are on social media more because other alternatives for entertainment have dwindled in affordability, quality, abundance, etc. Perhaps the problem that should be addressed are the lack of quality alternatives rather than the industry tactics of a particular form of entertainment.
This is a reductionist take on the problem. If I knowingly spike your drink with habit forming chemicals, and I don't tell you about it, am I in the wrong?
A recommender engine that tries to capture and sustain attention in 1-2 second intervals, what else would you call it?
The traditional answer is "engagement," but there is a strong argument to me made that intentional engagement (engagement by conscious, willful choice) is not possible, repetitively, for a vast smorgasbord of content spinning by at short intervals
You make it sound as though it’s completely harmless. Is there not a single personal or societal harm you can imagine to having videos attuned to your interests constantly being fed to you?
“We see that you’re slightly conservative. Next up: a Nazi sympathizer video! Enjoy your ragebait!”
I can imagine harms like that, absolutely. If I ran Youtube I'd work much harder to evict Nazi sympathizers and avoid ideological rabbitholes. But it's legal to broadcast things that will convince people of terrible ideas.
What I don't find plausible is the specific kind of harm alleged in the case discussed in the source article, where having videos attuned to your interests constantly fed to you causes you to become depressed and suicidal.
It might help you understand if you have a preteen or teenage daughter. They are extremely self conscious, prone to humiliation, have a very narrow view of the world, and don’t have all the rational capabilities of an adult.
I'm open to the possibility that I'm missing some key insight and if I ever do have a daughter I'll understand. But I think we also have to be open to the opposite possibility, that we don't like to see preteens and teenagers hurt so deeply and are highly motivated to search around for a structural lever we can pull to stop it from happening.
> What I don't find plausible is the specific kind of harm alleged in the case discussed in the source article, where having videos attuned to your interests constantly fed to you causes you to become depressed and suicidal.
Why couldn't it?
Start with funny videos, like clips of animals doing silly things.
Then have the occasional cringy video of a person being funny but slightly cringe in there, something akin to you've been framed.
Then have people who are being cringe but its carefully framed, a well edited video of some left wing student pushing for a policy but in a clumsy way, being embarrassing the way all teenagers are.
After a while longer, your feed is nothing but clips of BEN SHAPIRO PUBLICALLY EXECUTES THIS SOCIAL JUSTIC WARRIOR ON THE ALTAR OF FACTS AND LOGIC.
BEN SHAPIRO CLIP COMPILATION - OWNS THIS TRANS ACTIVIST- FACTS DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS!
Then you suddenly are getting people talking about their concerns™ about trans people in sports, how there might be unaddressed issues, and then Helen Joyce and the like are appearing in your feed, sounding calm and reasonable while they politely and civilly discuss how all trans people are inherently vile sexual predators engaged in a global conspiracy to sterilize your children.
More and more right wing content, drip drip drip, absolutely no one step that is that distinguishable from the previous, until eventually your feed is nothing but Q-Anon if you are lucky, and outright Nazism if not.
We're going to see the same kind of thing we saw with the tobacco industry - CEOs claiming they had no idea the product was engineering to be addictive. I have even less faith that this anyone will hold anybody accountable though.
>The plaintiffs said they would call expert witnesses that will argue that young people's brains are not yet developed to withstand the powers of the algorithms being flung at them on Instagram and YouTube.
I'm all for preventing addictive algorithms, but if you are letting your 6 year old watch you-tube, you got problems. This is just going to be used to push age restrictions
I suggest you read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. As much as it is damaging to adults, it's much more so to children in early development all the way through puberty.
The answer to that is 'it depends'. We know certain substances like alcohol and tobacco can be/are addictive and yet the product still sells with warnings.
In the case of alcohol and tobacoo, I do not think these products are engineered for addiction, they are engineered for taste and addiction is a side-effect. If they could be produced to have the same short-term (< a few hours) effects while avoiding the long term effects (addiction), the companies would (hopefully) choose to do that. I do not imagine these companies to build these products in a way that maximises their addiction.
>obacoo, I do not think these products are engineered for addiction,
Cigarettes were 100% engineered for addiction.
>I do not imagine these companies to build these products in a way that maximises their addiction.
Holy hell, you need to go watch the big tobacco trials of the past to see the CEOs knew exactly what they were doing. And then how much they spent on outright buying scientists to say bullshit so they could drag the matter on for years.
Tobacco set the stage for companies to use doubt of every kind to hide their intentional actions.
It’s a good point, but crimes against children are a higher priority because children are more vulnerable and the law exists in part to protect our most vulnerable.
This is weird because ... at which point does an addiction start?
People used to be addicted to watching TV, right? Well, nobody
was made responsible for that. If it is addiction, and I am not
necessarily saying this is not, then all websites would fall
under the same category IF they are designed well enough to
become addictive. Most games would fall under that category
too. I don't think this is a good category at all. Both Meta
and Google should pay simply for wasting our time here, but
the "you designed your applications and websites in an
addictive manner" ... that's just weird.
Usually to sue someone for causing harm, they have to actually cause the harm, it can't help hypothetical. So you see lawsuits that are like "I saw this CEO speak on TV and then I relied on this information when deciding to buy the product"
Why aren't you asking: why is it possible for an iPad to raise a child? Why is the iPad keeping the child's attention for so long? Is it not because it was designed to? Why was it designed to?
Would it be ironic if Meta and Google were required to add "a landing page that displays information about responsible [social media use]" similar to their policies regarding gambling ads (example below)?
I wonder if there's something from addiction neuroscience that can be utilized as "evidence" in the legal sense; or if it's used in the process of product development. i.e. how google/meta/frito lay/P&G maximize dopamine hits in the ventral segmental area, etc
Ignoring what I think of the case itself, I hate how many headlines now are just the talking points for one side or the other in a dispute. At least try to pretend you’re being a neutral reporter rather than regurgitating what someone with an agenda says.
Anything where you scroll through posts or endlessly watch short videos is highly addictive.
If you think its not and just "similar to addiction", just try blocking these sites in your browser/phone and see how long you last before feeling negative effects.
I really have never understood this. Short form videos are no more or less interesting to me than any other. I also do not find the YouTube main page very compelling, and rarely follow the things that are suggested at the ends of videos. I certainly do not feel ill if I forget to use YouTube for a week.
The trouble with short form videos is that they lower your attention span if you are continuously watching them over a period of time, which then leaves you not wanting to watch the long-form videos any more, or do anything that requires concentration - leaving you to be a doomscrolling zombie.
Yeah, they are interesting. They are related to things that I have watched. But I rarely follow them. I just don't see how compelling that presentation is, how it amounts to an invitation to addiction.
OK. To be honest I appreciate the information but I still can't see it. I clicked on a random short and there are no suggestions at the end of the video, it just plays the same video in a loop forever. Is an infinite loop of "FutureCanoe" making fried chicken the worst these devious cognitive hackers could do to me?
You drag your finger up to scroll to the next video whenever you want to, even immediately, if that's what you want, or when it gets boring. The algorithm is supposed to figure out how to keep your eyes glued to the screen.
Do they expect social media sites to show less posts of things you are interested or less posts from your friends to make you use it less. They provide good products which people like.
That would solve exactly zero of the complaints surfaced in this lawsuit. Companies still have an incentive to maximize app usage regardless of whether the advertising is personalized.
Curious how this is gonna turn out, but I'm not holding my breath.
I'd argue that we basically incentivise companies to cause harm whenever it is unregulated and profitable because the profits are never sufficiently seized and any prosecution is a token effort at best.
See leaded gas, nicotine, gambling, etc. for prominent examples.
I personally think prosecution should be much harsher in an ideal world; if a company knows that its products are harmful, it should ideally be concerned with minimising that harm instead of fearing to miss out on profits without any legal worries.
Is it really landmark tho? First it was nicotine and big tobacco, then the same addiction engineers designed ultra processed foods. Kraft, nabisco, etc all spun off by tobacco companies... Normalizing food addiction in children. And now it's screens and social media. It's the same fundamental physiology but it seems like society can't learn a lesson either.
I thought it was kind of pathetic how quickly they shoved ipads into schools with no real long term data, no research whatsoever. Just insane really. And now here we are yet again.
I am generally displeased with the way social media has evolved, but I'm not in favor of this lawsuit. It seems like a way to blame tech companies for Congress' failure to regulate businesses properly. None of the engineers involved thought of their work as a way to rot the minds of future generations. Their thought process was straightforward-
1. We sell ads to make money
2. If we keep eyeballs on our apps more than competing apps, we can increase the price for our ads and make more money
3. Should we implement limits to kick kids off the app after they've been doomscrolling for an hour? Absolutely not, that would violate our duty to our shareholder. If parents complain, we'll say they should implement the parental controls present on their phones and routers. We can't make choices to limit our income if parents don't use the tools they already have.
I'm sorry that social media has ruined so many kids' lives, but I don't think the responsibility lies with the tech companies in this case. It lies with the society that has stood by idly while kids endured cyber-bullying and committed suicide. This isn't something that happened recently- the USA has had plenty of time to respond as a society and chosen not to. Want to sue someone? Sue Congress.
Google and Meta are rational actors in a broken system. If you want to change something you should change the rules that they operate under and hold them accountable for those rules going forward. Australia (and Spain) is doing something about it- now that social media is banned for kids under 16 in those countries, if social media companies try to do anything sneaky to get around that you actually have a much stronger case.
Now if there were evidence that they were intentionally trying to get kids bullied and have them commit suicide then by all means, fine them into oblivion. But I doubt there is such evidence.
That seems like a really bad excuse to void responsibility. Consider a cigarette maker:
1. We sell cigarettes to make money
2. The more people crave cigarettes, the more money we can make
3. Should we make cigarettes less appealing to children? Absolutely not, we would make less money. Parents should just stop their kids from buying cigarettes.
Also, people in there last few decades have been using “duty to shareholders” as a way to excuse bad behavior, as if it’s a moral imperative higher than all others. I don’t really see why it would.
Cigarette companies were not penalized for making addictive drugs or doing generally immoral but technically legal things. They were penalized because the USA had set a minimum age for smoking cigarettes, and they were marketing directly to people who could not legally buy their products, and there was conclusive proof that they were targeting minors with their ads.
The DIRECT comparison from my previous comment would be if a country set a legal age requirement for accessing social media, and then you could hold the social media companies if they continued marketing to them. But for now, no such law exists in the USA. Social media has not been regulated like tobacco, because Congress has abdicated its responsibility to regulate these companies.
The jury is using words outside of their medical context in situations that do not justify the word then. In fact, most of society seems okay with this gross mis-use of the term to apply to things that don't actually manipulate incentive salience. We're going to end up with authoritarians in control of all 'screens' just because our schools have done such a bad job of explaining neuroscience. If you think handing the federal government control of all screens is a good idea in the USA you really need to look around.
I am not saying that Facebook didn't try. I am just saying that only having access to screens, they would inevitably fail. Screens are very unlike addictive drugs and cannot directly alter neurochemistry (at least not any more than a sunset or any perception does). I strongly dislike the company and have personally never created a Facebook account nor used the website.
That's because medicine doesn’t own the language. People do. If the jury hear words used wrongly then, as speakers of the language, they can interpret it as they wish. They are about to hear from another attorney who will say the opposite to the first one, and they will decide which was most persuasive.
> Screens are very unlike addictive drugs and cannot directly alter neurochemistry
Screens are able to show you things which give you small short dopamine hits, enough to keep you engaged enough to try get more. This is exactly how addictive drugs, gambling etc all work.
It's not fine at all? Before social media the average was 28 hours a week of viewing per person, obviously a non negligible percent of people watch TV for 100% of their free time.
Modern social media is even more addictive - always with you even when you're not home, short form, customized to your tastes, you can skip videos so you no longer need to feel any pain at all.
1) You can't stalk someone deliberately and persistently, using any means, or medium; even if you're a company, and even if you have good intentions.
2) You can't intentionally influence any number of people towards believing something false and that you know is against their interest.
These things need to be felony-level or higher crimes, where executives of companies must be prosecuted.
Not only that, certain crimes like these should be allowed to be prosecuted by citizens directly. Especially where bribery and threats by powerful individuals and organizations might compromise the interests of justice.
The outcome of this trial won't amount to anything other than fines. The problem is, this approach doesn't work. They'll just find different ways that can skirt the law. Criminal consequence is the only real way to insist on justice.
The probably with 2 is you then need someone to be the arbiter of truth, and the truth is often a hard thing to find. This would end up letting governments jail people they disagree with. How would you write the law to to prevent that?
I don't get what you mean? proving whether you've done something against someone's interest is already on the books for embezzlement, fraud,etc.. intention and planning are covered under many conspiracy laws. the influence part would need to be proven using internal documents, whistleblowers,etc..
The whole point of a court is to find truth. They do it all the time. Actually you would need to prove someone knew something is untrue, because it's innocent until proven guilty. You wouldn't have to prove what you said is true to get let off, just bring enough doubt to ward off your opponent's accusation of untruth.
I mean everyone knows this right? There are even leaked memos. They are public companies who need to grow revenue and they gain that revenue mostly through ads and attention.
They just spent so much money and political capital to steal it from those evil Chinese communists. Who would they sue? The evil Chinese communists who are too far away to enforce a judgement, or the new freedom–loving American owners who only just got it?
The classic defense used by cigarette companies historically. We are just rolling up some naturally growing leaves, leaves can't be addictive. Users are responsible for diseases and addiction. We don't target minors.
Yes, but also often are not actively in control of them.
People are also in control of whether or not they gamble their last dollar instead of buying some food, or whether or not they put that needle into their veins.
History has shown human nature can be dangerously out of control and people will happily destroy their own lives given the opportunity.
Therefore society tries to protect those vulnerable people with legislation.
So when does it stop? Would you support the state intervening in other situations in which people make choices of which you disapprove? Which choices would you, in your magnanimity, allow them to make?
>Which peer choices would you, in your magnanimity, allow them to make?
Thats why we have voting and a legal system which builds upon previous laws. You and I do not need to decide where the line in the sand is drawn, the majority of the population does that via the political and legal framework society has created.
"It doesn't work", therefore, tyranny? Because the most important thing in the world is the state ensuring people not make bad choices? So any time the system tries something to stop them and it "doesn't work", that's a justification for increasing state power until it works?
We're talking about words and images. Addiction cannot enter the body through the eyes and ears.
> Because the most important thing in the world is the state ensuring people not make bad choices
So you think it's fine to cheat or con somebody? Just a bad choice by the person conned?
The key thing you are missing here is that companies like Google and facebook aren't some passive actor just 'placing choices' before people.
The allegation is they are were actively working to knowingly harm for their own interests.
You pretend to be advocating for a world full of individual responsibility - yet somehow that doesn't extend to the actions of large companies or the people who run them.....
They're not afraid of the idea of programming people.
When I worked there every week there would be a different flyer on the inside of the bathroom stall door to try to get the word out about things that really mattered to the company.
One week the flyer was about how a feed video needed to hook the user in the first 0.2 seconds. The flyer promised that if this was done, the result would in essence have a scientifically measurable addictive effect, a brain-hack. The flyer was to try to make sure this message reached as many advertisers as possible.
It seemed to me quite clear at that moment that the users were prey. The company didn't even care what was being sold to their users with this brain-reprogramming-style tactic. Our goal was to sell the advertisers on the fact that we were scientifically sure that we had the tools to reprogram our users brains.
Another way of describing this - they find people lose interest almost immediately, and so if you want to actually show a consumer something new, you have to get to the point with your ad.
I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of a policy that promotes ads that hook the user within the first 200ms.
200ms isn't enough time for significant information to be transmitted to a person and for them to process it. You don't 'get to the point' in 200ms.
That means that the way to the user's brain and attention is with some irritating little jingle, a picture of a bunny beating a drum, cartoon bears wiping their asses with toilet paper, a picture of a caveman salesman or a picture of an absolutely artifical thing that looks like food but isn't. Stuff that stands out as unnatural.
But that isn't enough. You gotta pair it with spaced reeitition. Let them think about this every time they take a shit in the office. Hammer them with the same shrill sounds and garish images on every commercial break. Or after every couple of songs they're trying to listen to on youtube. Or in institials that are algorithmically optimized to pop up in their feed as they mindlessly scroll looking for gossip about their neigbhours to scratch that social group animal itch in all of us.
Exactly, 200ms is rather different than 'get to the point.' Here is a 'reaction speed test' site: https://reactiontimetest.net/ for somebody who doesn't intuit what 200ms is like.
You will likely be unable to click the screen in response to a box turning green faster than 200ms. To hook somebody on something within 200ms is largely appealing to casino like stuff where every single jingle, color, flash of light, and other aspect of their games is carefully researched in order to maximize addiction on a subconscious level.
> 200ms isn't enough time for significant information to be transmitted to a person and for them to process it.
I think the point of the flyer is that, surprisingly, it is.
I think there are two different definitions of "significant information" at play here. I interpreted the GP comment to mean "information about the thing being advertised".
The point of the flyer is that you need to get the person to process one bit of information in the first 200ms: scroll or stay. GP's point is that that has little, if anything, to do with the ostensible purpose of advertising, informing people about a product.
If you're selling a new GPU, showing the GPU in the first frame seems like a good bet and perfectly ethical, no? Same for a game, movie, food, car.
To add to your list: ...or a hot body.
or something bearing a similarity to a sex act
So, in order to put a more neutral spin on this practice, you immediately reduce all people to "consumers"? Aren't you just confirming the GP's characterization that all platform users are seen as prey?
Consumer doesnt mean "prey" to me at all.
Okay, good luck with that mantra in a decade! I think it's very obvious that programming abilities are being destroyed from the inside out, but sure, tell me in a decade I was right when everything is collapsed.
...which has been known for at least a century
Here is an important difference. A century ago, the predator (seller) and the prey (buyer) were on equal evolutionary terms. Each generation of humans on either side of the transaction came into the world, learned to convince, learned to resist, then passed, and some balance was maintained. In this century, corporations and algorithms don't die, but the targets do. This means that the non-human seller is continuously, even immortally, learning, adapting and perfecting how to manipulate. The target, be it adult, adolescent, or child, is, and will be ever increasingly, at a severe disadvantage.
What if I told you younger sales people were trained by more experienced sales people and its not a new thing.
Ah yes because trade secrets were never a thing at any of these companies. The companies always shut down when it's founding members died wiping out all the knowledge it had built up.
That is to say organizations have always had this edge on individuals.
Right, because we know that parents never pass down useful skills or life tips to their children, like skepticism of propaganda and advertising, and instead send their children into the world like sheep into a lion's den.
There might come a day when advertising is too flawless for a human mind to resist it, but we're not there yet.
Most of everybody thinks their behaviors and decisions are not meaningfully influenced by advertising. Companies spend literally trillions of dollars running ads. One side is right, one side is wrong.
And advertising largely relies on this ignorance of its effects, or otherwise most of everybody would go to much greater lengths to limit their exposures to such, and governments would be more inclined to regulate the ad industry as a goal in and of itself.
No, this take is crazy. If ads were able to brainwash people Coca-Cola would still be the most popular drink in America.
The problem with "meaningfully influenced" is that a 1% bump in sales is massive for a company, but normally only represents a very minor shift in customer behavior.
US spending on advertising is, in total, about $1200/person-year. If you believe that advertisers are rapacious capitalists who will take as much as they possibly can, then they only believe that they can capture about that much extra per person by advertising to them.
That's not nothing, but it's not very much either. Ads are extremely overblown as a threat to society; you only need to look as far as eye-tracking studies of web browsers and the prevalence of ad blockers to see pretty good proof that people do just ignore them most of the time.
I'm firmly in the camp of "I'm not influenced by ads (or so I think)" / "not convinced that ads are actually a net positive". But even so, I don't fully agree with your take.
I think that it's very possible to think we aren't influenced, yet still be. My reasoning is that basically no one admits to being influenced. Yet you can definitely see the effects of ads on people: whenever there's a strong campaign for something, little after you'll see everyone buying it. Maybe they just try to "follow trends" or whatever, but that's just a form of advertising, isn't it? I only very rarely watch TV and have ad blockers everywhere, yet I can still detect when all of a sudden everybody has the same bag or same jacket or whatever. My bags last years and years. I doubt it's simply a coincidence and they all needed new bags right at the same time.
> Ads are extremely overblown as a threat to society; you only need to look as far as eye-tracking studies of web browsers and the prevalence of ad blockers to see pretty good proof that people do just ignore them most of the time.
I think that many people don't know about ad-blockers and try to ignore the ads while reading a website or scrolling some app. But that doesn't imply they aren't influenced. In my case, I'm fairly convinced that I'm not influenced by my instagram's feed's ads, since they try to sell me pregnant women's garments, of which I have 0 use as a single, childless male. But there can be other factors of which I don't have conscience, like seeing people use the same brand camera or whatever. Call it advertising-by-proxy.
However, take a look at people's screens when taking the metro or whatever. Many do watch the ads instead of just scrolling past. This is what I actually have a hard time understanding: people would spend a comparable amount of time on what looks like ads and what looks like their friends' stuff, as if it was the same thing. Which, granted, isn't a very long time. In my case, I only follow photographers and would spend a fair amount of time on people's pictures but scroll right through anything that looks like an ad (text or video of any kind).
Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it". I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend for major brands. None of them rely on weird ad magic to persuade people secretly - just showing off different aspects of the product or service.
> Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it".
This is such a naive view of advertising that if you're really this unaware of how manipulative ads are, you can't possibly have defenses against them. You should seriously spend some time looking into the secret magic of dark psychology they use to manipulate people because while knowing about their tactics won't make you immune to them, it really can help to be aware of how they work and to train yourself to recognize when they're being used against you.
I don't know, I just went to find an ad in my feed and the first one was for a house plant that was easy to take care of. I'm not saying I'm the smartest cookie in the shed, but I didn't detect any manipulation. Seems like it was a person who just wanted me to know about their product.
Let me know what I'm missing.
I haven't seen the plant ad, but it sounds like once you start learning about how the ad industry works your mind will be blown. Insane amounts of money have been poured into research by the industry (including some highly questionable research being done on children and infants) and some of the results are fascinating.
The manipulation goes beyond even the content of the ads themselves. For example, one of the reasons companies are spending so much money collecting/buying/storing/securing every scrap of data they can get about you and your life is so that they can target ads at you at specific times when they know you'll be more vulnerable such as times when they know you'd normally be tired, or when they think your medication may be wearing off, or during periods where you're under high stress, or when you might be entering a manic phase, or when you're intoxicated, etc.
Like I said, understanding the many many ways that you are vulnerable to their tricks can help but it won't stop them from working on you. It's kind of like how you can't not see certain optical illusions even though you know you're interpreting them incorrectly. The conclusion I've come to is that it's best to do everything you can to avoid exposure to advertising where possible and to keep an eye out for when those tricks are being used against you elsewhere.
So a company should not be able to recommend therapy ads if I seem stressed? Ozempic if I seem like I want to lose weight? Laxatives if I seem constipated, or energy drinks if I'm sleep deprived?
Trying to moralize ad targeting is exhausting. It's not inherently a bad thing to target an ad to someone who's in a bad spot, or really in general.
People who buy the product are presumably competent enough to manage their own finances. Acting like they're being exploited constantly because ads hinted that they weren't masculine enough, or too fat, or being their peers, etc. is ridiculous. Ads aren't like cigarettes.
It's more like companies recommending an alcoholic who has been sober for 13 months his favorite drink because they know he is going through a divorce and is currently 15 feet from a bar, or a company targeting a person with Alzheimer's right at the time they know they'll start sundowning, or even just cranking up nostalgia in their advertising because they know your last surviving parent died and for the first time you won't be going home for the coming holidays.
Ad targeting these days can be intensely personal and manipulative. There are lots of ways ads could be used that aren't harmful, but also lots of ways that they can. Imagine an ad using a deepfake of your own child who died in a car crash telling you in his voice how he might still be alive if your car only had <insert new safety feature here>. There are clearly lines that can and should be drawn. There are extremely unethical practices happening today because companies are amoral monsters that only care about money and there are almost no laws or regulations to stop them from doing whatever they want.
Ads aren't like cigarettes. You make the choice to smoke or not, but ads are just forced on you. Only rarely are you given any opportunity to opt out of them, and the industry spends a lot of money trying to circumvent any efforts you take to cut them out of your life. You can quit cigarettes, but they wont let you quit advertising.
> Ads aren't like cigarettes
And it's worth noting that there are laws that restrict advertisement of cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
Meanwhile let's also not forget the post itself on which we are commenting: accusations that social media companies have, in fact, engineered their products to be addictive.
To what end? To sell more ads!
Either you intentionally misunderstood his point and deflected or you honestly seem to think this way. In either case, you misapprehended what he meant.
>Advertising is just companies saying "This is what you can purchase from me - it's awesome - please consider purchasing it". I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend for major brands
Oh, okay. Well if you say so.
Um, off the top of my head:
"You'll be happier if you purchase this thing"
"You're not good enough as you are now, but you will be if you purchase this thing"
"Other people you admire or respect have purchased this thing, and if you do too you'll be more like them"
"Other people will like you more if you purchase this thing"
"You'll be more attractive if you purchase this thing"
"This thing will be worth more in the future so if you purchase this thing it will make you money"
"This is your only chance to purchase this thing, so if you don't it now you'll miss out on this price"
I don't think any of them has to do with how awesome "the thing" itself is. Obviously there's more to, say, an expensive watch, than its ability to tell time
The only products that sell this in advertising actually provide those brand features. Essentially people pay money to increase their perceived status.
Like, if you sell a luxury handbag. When people buy it, they know 70% of the value comes from the advertising saying "this is a high value product" as a status signal. I think that's really dumb, but that's what people want.
It also existed a long time before ads itself did.
> they know 70% of the value comes from the advertising
So, you are aware that advertising is in large part responsible for shaping what is perceived as high-value status signals in society. You're also aware that for certain products the only distinction between those and their alternatives is that specific high-value association.
How come you started out from the position that advertising is "just showing off different aspects of the product" then?
So you've never seen like, a beer ad that promises status and attractiveness?
Similarly, something must have been missing from the AXE body spray instructions
Beer/liquor is in the same category of status good. People pay a lot to show the brand.
Some liquor brands are like that. 95% or more of beer ads that imply status are just lying to you.
If anonymous billboards or banner ads can convince you you aren't good enough, your life is probably not great with or without ads.
If an ad convinces you to, say, get a gym membership or go on Ozempic, who's to say what happens next? Maybe you do start feeling better about yourself.
They don't consciously convince you directly anymore than a slot machine convinces you to give it one more spin - it's done on a subconscious level. For instance one of the most famous, and effective, ads in history is Apple's 1984 ad. [1] A 59 second ad where the only mention of what's being sold at all happens in about 1 second with a reference to a brand name and then a logo. See: ELM model and peripheral processing. [2] And this is all day one advertising stuff.
Advertising is a horrific industry. It probably always was, but at the modern scales, it's outright dystopic. I think there's simply a large amount of cognitive dissonance around this issue because advertising drives the paychecks of a whole lot of people, and it's rather difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model#P...
While I agree with your point about understanding, I think there's also an issue of self-image. "What? Me? Influenced by some ad? Get outta here! I make my own decisions!"
I can't remember ever seeing an ad that was just showing off different aspects of the product or service, outside of things like Craigslist.
USA here: our schools brainwash children to remove that skepticism. It makes them easier to control and order is very important to the kind of person who becomes a teacher.
Seattle area, they're brainwashing my children to celebrate the "seahawks" team. They came home yesterday being excited that team won the superbowl. I ask "why do you care? You don't like to watch football, none of your friends like to play it". Hard to influence when the kid is there 6.5 hours every day.
My dad was a lot like you. He would shit on things I was excited about that he didn’t like.
We haven’t talked in years.
Ah, don't worry. He'd forgotten ten minutes later and I later took him rock climbing, which he actually loves and I support him doing despite me being terrified of heights.
I bullshitted my dad a lot too because I wanted to try and make him happy.
Former USA teacher here: I assure you that the 17.5 hours parents have with kids are much more influential. It's likely that a lot of the students were really excited that their home team won and the teachers leaned into that excitement.
My child's San Francisco Bay Area school has taught media literacy / skepticism every year since 3rd grade. Curricula are determined by the teacher, but N=1 is sufficient for a counterexample for a broad country-wide generalization.
Celebrating a local sports win is about as apolitical and low-harm as possible when it comes to promoting a shared cultural bond for a community.
Are the children allowed to sit and study all day on the topic they're currently interested in? No. https://cantrip.org/gatto.html They're required to submit to authority at all times. How could it be otherwise in our system -- one teacher, 20 random kids of varying personalities and education level.
It's not a "local sports win" -- it's a profitable, billionaire-owned corporation stealing public tax money by brainwashing everyone into thinking it's "local". The majority of the players aren't from the area either and will leave after.
Are we really recreating elementary education from first principles here? American public education has always followed an instructor -> pupil format, beginning in New England for bible reading, accounting, and manufacturing.
There are probably some Montessori schools that opt for other formats, but I doubt that children are set up for success by neglecting math or other topics they are uninterested in. I would wager that even Montessori schools require study of the core tested curriculum.
If you have ever been a guest teacher then you would observe that a substantial minority of students must be guided to pay attention to the material. Autodidacts are not representative of the majority of people.
Re: sports: all things have negative aspects to them. Being a grump to such an extent as to discount all positive culturally cohesive aspects of a largely benign activity is a suboptimal way to live life. Choosing to build on commonalities in a community leads to better outcomes. Believing sports to be a net bad activity is a single-digit percentage minority opinion.
And only recently could be optimized in real time, individually, for each target. I remember when there was a big moral scare about "subliminal advertising". People were appalled that an ad on TV could manipulate you without your awareness. That is 100% the business model of modern social media advertising.
It's not embedded in a specific ad, but the entire operation of the promotion algorithms.
Users as prey is a terrifying but not unrealistic narrative. Thanks for sharing.
The only business that call customers "users" are software development and drug dealers :)
Many of the software developers whose end users are their revenue source return to calling them customers.
I haven't worked at FAANG so maybe I'm out the loop, but flyers on bathroom stalls seems bizarre, like almost less of a corporate action and more of a personal one (like you might get for unionisation), but with all the messaging of corporate, like something you'd see in a company memo.
Like I say, maybe everyone else is accustomed to this idea, but if you have any pictures of them I think a lot of people would be interested in seeing it, unless I'm misunderstand what it is
It started as Testing on the Toilet, which was an effort to get people to actually care about unit-testing their code and software quality and writing maintainable code that doesn't break in 6 months. Later was expanded to Learning on the Loo, general tips and tricks, and then Testing on the Toilet became Tech on the Toilet. It's been going on for a good 20 years now, so that's about 1000 articles (they change them out weekly) and there aren't really 1000 articles you can write about unit testing.
The insight is actually pretty similar to Google's core business model: when you're going to the bathroom, there isn't a whole lot else you're doing, so it's the perfect time to put up a 2-3 minute read to reinforce a message that you want people to hear but might not get attention for otherwise.
Actually, that is also a way to surrepticiously abuse you: not even your toilet time should be "yours".
I was in a fraternity in college, 20 years ago. We put weekly bathroom notes on the inside of the stall doors. Something interesting, something funny, upcoming news. The elected fraternity secretary was responsible for making those weekly, among many other things.
If they were a day late the amount of pestering they would get until the did that weekly job was hilarious. We all got a kick out of them.
Your toilet time can be yours, just don’t fucking read them lol. Back then razr phones were the hotness, nobody sat on a smartphone and had ads blasted at them while they took a shit.
I guess, if you equate "influence" with "abuse". An awful lot pillars of our society would become abuse then. Ask any parent of a toddler whether their toilet time is actually "theirs".
Employers should not be treating employees like toddlers and try to brainwash them on the goddamn toilet
My point is the opposite actually: if you are the parent of a toddler, you'll know that your toilet time is not actually yours, because your toddler will try every effort to get your attention and influence you, up to and including crawling into your lap while you are doing your business; tantrumming on the bathroom floor; tantrumming outside the bathroom door; cutting up the mail you really need to file; spilling food all over the floor; unlatching childproofing; moving furniture; and enlisting their siblings.
I play chess on the toilet at work.
It's not really a FAANG thing. I bet you've seen the memes about X days without a serious accident, or without stopping the production line. It's the equivalent in a restroom or a urinal: A place you can make sure people see key information. You can find this in many industrial sites. A call center might have reminders of core principles for how to close calls quickly, or when to escalate. A lab might have safety tips. A restaurant will remind you of hand washing. An industrial site of some important safety tip or two.
While I've not seen this in every single place I've worked, it's very common.
I can say at Google we usually just had engineering tip posters in the washrooms they were usually very insightful and just written by other engineers at the company.
Stuff like how to reduce nesting logic, how to restructure APIs for better testing, etc.
People usually like them. I can't say I've seen what the parent post described so I imagine it's "the other" FAANG mentioned here.
Yep, I frankly thought Testing On The Toilet was pretty great.
That and nice washing toilets.
You're right that it was just other employees who decided what to print there. But I don't think that absolves the company (Facebook) really... Everything a company does is just things that its people do! Nothing about the flyer was outside the parameters of the job of its maker. Their job was to make the company money by helping advertisers maximize ad revenue, and that's exactly what they were doing.
https://testing.googleblog.com/2024/12/tech-on-toilet-drivin...
Facebook had a serious internal propaganda arm when I was there. Couldn't manage to get floor length stall walls in most of the bathrooms, but every stall had a weekly newsletter about whatever product stuff.
Every high traffic flat space on the wall would be covered with a poster, most of them with designs lifted from US WWII propaganda, many hard to tell if satire or not. I was surprised there was never one about carpooling with der füher.
Facebook employees may be the easiest "prey" to program
If something as crude as flyers in bathroom stalls is effective
FB uses its addict money to pay those employees. I assume the pay is what’s effective. Actually a good business model. Pay employees to improve how addictive your drug is, get more money from addicts, and use that to pay your employees more money, completing the loop.
But then drugs being profitable isn’t really news
No its not even that.
The people who work at these firms were losers in life to begin with. Misery loves company.
Give them some cash and some feeling of power on working on stuff billions of people use... and there you have it.
No one with any morals would choose to work there. You simply wouldnt. Youd be working elsewhere, knowing full well you are choosing not to contribute in lining the pockets of people like Zuck.
Apple is the only somewhat respectable large tech firm.
It also says a lot if that's the most effective way vs normal ways of disseminating the info.
Honestly 95% of the time it was about technical stuff and I loved it. I've never worked at another company so active in shaping its own culture. Problems other companies had conditioned me to expect could never be fixed would often be gone in a few months because someone had made it their mission to fix.
That was part of something else I loved about their culture: there was room for anyone to move up if they could show they were creating value for the company. Other companies felt like everyone was competing for the same two promotions, but Facebook did not.
In retrospect though this also kind of looks like an unaccountability machine. If each employee must take independent action to justify their own paycheck in terms of their value to the company, most ethically questionable outcomes are the result of cumulative choices made by rank and file employees who know which side their bread is buttered on.
I'm always a bit surprised by the degree that non-tech people don't understand how much they're being openly and transparently manipulated in various ways. Most of my work has been statistical/quantitative in nature from complex A/B testing setups to dynamic pricing algorithms. Yet so many of the most benign parts of my work in the past unnerve some people.
Measuring human behavior and exploiting it for some hope at profit has been an obvious part of my job description for many years. Yet I've had friends and acquaintances that are shocked when they accidentally realize they're part of an A/B test "Wait, Amazon doesn't show the same thing to everyone!?" I've seen reddit conversations where people are horrified at the idea of custom pricing models (something so mundane it could easily be an interview question). I had a friend once claim a basic statement about what I did at work was a "conspiracy theory" because clearly companies don't really have that much control.
To your point, at work the fact that we're manipulating people algorithmically isn't remotely a secret. Nobody in the room at any of my past jobs has felt a modicum of shame about optimization. The worst part is I have drawn a line multiple times at past jobs (typically to my own detriment), so there are things that even someone as comfortable with this as I am finds go to far. Ironically, I've found it's hard to get non-technical people to care about these because you have to understand the larger context to see just how dangerous they are.
I have ultimately decided to avoid working in the D2C space because inevitably you realize you aren't providing any real value to your user (despite internal sloganeering to the contrary) and very often causing real harm. In the B2B space you're working with customers who you have a real business relationship with, so crass manipulation to move the needle for one month isn't worth the long term harm.
I'm always a bit surprised that people that work in tech can be so passive in regards to their civic duty. Instead of going to lawmakers and legislators and trying to stop their employers from destroying society they just quietly watch from the sidelines.
And if laqmakers are silent, then publicising, collecting, and sharing this knowledge to all ends of the earth through mainstream and independent journalism, paying a few hundred dollars out of their Silicon Valley salaries to put up billboards shining a light on the misdeeds of tech companies towards their own customers and society.
Per your examples, when the average person is made aware of the injustice, stalking, and tracking of them, they are not in any way happy with it, and want things to change.
> Per your examples, when the average person is made aware of the injustice, stalking, and tracking of them, they are not in any way happy with it, and want things to change.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't think this the average person will care as much as you think. Even on HN you get plenty of folks who think that tracking is ok or even a benefit since it provides a more personalized experience.
> I'm always a bit surprised that people that work in tech can be so passive in regards to their civic duty. Instead of going to lawmakers and legislators and trying to stop their employers from destroying society they just quietly watch from the sidelines.
Snowden was almost 15 years ago. The only punishment meted out as a result of him coming forward was for Snowden himself. Why would anyone else assume that coming forward would result in substantive change?
Did you take a copy of that flyer? I would be interested to see it.
I looked and I do not have a photo
I think you’re misremembering. Research shows it’s 2 seconds not .2 seconds.
>> on the inside of the bathroom stall door to try to get the word out
I wonder if anyone considered the bias of this communication channel towards women, or did they also post them above the urinals?
If this was Google, Testing on the Toilet and similar flyers were both above urinals and in bathroom stalls.
Alright. I may object to the wording, but ... isn't what you described also a good website? I am aware of how much propaganda Google uses too, e. g. "engage the user" - you see that on youtube "leave a like". They are begging people to vote. Not for the vote, but to engage him. I saw this not long ago on Magic Arena by Wizards of the coast. They claim "your feedback is valuable" but you can only vote up or vote down. That's not feedback - that is lying to the user to try to get the user to make a reaction and tell others about it. I just don't really see the difference. You describe it that they manipulate people, but ANY ad-department of a company uses propaganda and manipulates people. Look in a grocery, how many colours are used in the packaging. Isn't ALL of this also manipulative?
Google doesn't beg you for likes. Channels beg you for likes because it's one of the metrics they are stack–ranked by. Someone will lose, and they don't want it to be them.
> isn't what you described also a good website?
No, good software is and feels empowering. It should scream the developer understood what YOU want to do at that specific point. Most notable, the faster the job is DONE the better.
Putting up flyers in the toilet isn't to enhance your toilet experience. It is the opposite, if we want to enhance the flyer engagement the easiest way is by de-optimizing all parts of the toilet UX. Say we remove all but one toilet rolls and make the side a bit wet. If some of the locks don't work we could dramatically enhance the number of walls and doors people look at. Ideal would be to lock everyone in the stall until the next prey arrives. Should release them just early enough that they don't inform the next victim.
There is an entire agency that focuses on Food and Drugs in America, and its similar around the world. We have many rules on food.
Food is actually a great place to think about social media, because there was a time where the FDA didnt exist. Its need was felt after cities grew larger and the food supply chain became longer. At that point food could be adultered and the old systems which people relied on to know the provenance of their food failed.
Some of the things that changed this was when people started doing indepedent testing and finding out exactly how much adultery was actually taking place.
Eventually we got rules about what was to be done, which we don't consider anymore since its part of daily life.
Don’t be evil
> feed video needed to hook the user in the first 0.2 seconds
Is this even possible??? It takes me *at least* 2 seconds to see if a video game clip is interesting to me. That is kinda crazy.
To me this is simply a consequence of the capitalist mode of production.
Yes, because governments are so restrained in their use of propaganda.
What it is is the consequence of the power existing. 200 years ago nobody was arguing about how to hook people in the first 0.2 seconds of video, but it's not because nobody would have refused the power it represents if offered. They just couldn't have it. It's humans. People want this power over you. All of them.
The system incentivizes seeking power by consolidating financial wealth. It doesn't have to be that way & this will eventually become obvious to everyone.
> All of them.
At least an unhealthy amount of them. I have no desire to have power over people, except I would like it if my kids actually listened to me...
To be fair, it is basically one and the same. I doubt most people railing against capitalism are actually against private property. They probably dislike corporatism which only exists as an extension of the government. Very very few of us voluntarily gave up our right to hold people personally responsible for their actions, but this is forced on everyone on behalf of business interests. The corporate vale is materialized from government alone.
Do you mean "private property" or "personal property"? These are not the same thing, and those who want to scaremonger about non-capitalist modes of production like to conflate the two.
Can you explain the difference instead of just alluding to some supposed scaremongering?
You've never heard someone say "under communism, private property isn't allowed, so you have to share a toothbrush?" I heard that nonsense all the time growing up.
Your toothbrush and clothing are personal property. The family farm is private property.
The full term is private property over the means of production.
The family farm would only fall into that category if youre employing others for profit.
If you're working yourself on it, there is no real social function to it.
> I doubt most people railing against capitalism are actually against private property. They probably dislike corporatism which only exists as an extension of the government.
I really don't know. In my experience, it can about private property when talking about housing, it is about markets when talking salaries and work conditions, and it's just about having no idea of what capitalism even is and just vaguely pointing at economics the vast majority of the time.
"Capitalism" can be safely replaced with "the illuminati" or "Chem trails" in the vast majority of complaints I hear and read and the message would ultimately make as much sense. There's not a lot of how or why capitalism doesn't work, but by God there sure is a lot of what it seemingly does wrong.
You are displaying your ignorance with pride.
Just because you don't know what capitalism is, doesn't mean other people do not know.
Just because you only read sources from capitalist media platforms doesn't mean there isn't a lot of "how" or "why" capitalism doesn't work.
My main message was about the profit motive incentivizing the creation of addictions for the profit of tech companies. The invisible hand may expand the development of tech, but the visible hand needs to make people addicted and unhappy.
Think a little before you speak, please. Or read a little more.
As bad as things are, the excesses of capitalism pale in comparison to the excesses of communism or fascism. If you have a better system, please present it to the class.
Capitalism is known to have killed multiple billions world-wide.
Nearly all of the poor countries on earth are capitalist. World war 1 was a war of capitalist reorganization, Fascism was a capitalist economic system, therefore WW2 was initiated by capitalist nations. Nearly all wars being fought today are all fought by capitalists on both sides of the conflict. The poorest countries on earth are capitalists. Drug cartels are organization of drug manufacturing and transporting capitalists. Capitalist nations are proven to be the most corrupt countries on earth.
Capitalism has a vested interest in making nations poor for the sake of maximizing profits in resource extraction. Capitalism has waged more war and caused more destruction than any system before it and its only been around for ~400 years.
You really want me to believe that the system that makes money from doing heinous shit is good?
Look into the primary sources behind the things you believe to be true about communism. Many, many are very shaky and were just "cold" war propaganda pieces. I've done exactly that to come to my conclusions.
What I know to be communism, through research, and reading of primary sources, is just the natural conclusion of the democratization of society. People controlling the production they need through councils that they themselves organize into a peoples state.
This post perfectly proves my point, to which you replied "You are displaying your ignorance with pride.".
"Fascism was a capitalist economic system" or "Capitalism has waged more war and caused more destruction than any system before" are utterly ridiculous, evidently false statements. The only way you can ever say these things with a straight face is if you don't have the least idea of what capitalism even is.
I think you may be very shocked when you find out that you are wrong.
Fascism was an ideology developed by capitalist industrialists, specifically steel trusts in Germany. But had its birth amongst financiers in Italy. Henry Ford was a big proponent of fascism. Fascism did not undo any private property relations, it simply was a single party capitalist state. Ownership of companies was still private. If you were not ideologically or ethnically in line your property was taken away and given to someone who was. Any elimination of property rights specifically only applied to the political opposition, which is in line with repressive capitalism, not with socialism.
The control of market dynamics and labor was for the purposes of war and murder, not an ideological component of fascism. A similar thing happened in all countries who were at war: rationing, price controls, labor allocation, etc, but still capitalists.
The axis was specifically an anti-communist alliance through the anticomintern pact. They specifically wanted to uphold private property.
The ONLY reason that one German country had socialist in their name was to fool the masses. It was to appeal to the masses.
WW1 and WW2 were both started by capitalism. And most wars on going right now, feb 2026, are waged by capitalists factions on both sides.
The figures of death attributed to communism are widely known by academics to be absurdly and unscientifically inflated. The black book of communism is not considered history by historians. The gulag archipelago is not considered history by hostorians.
Why dont you see the black book of capitalism anywhere? There are millions of excuses for every death under capitalism. But there are billions of deaths under capitalism... and counting.
You may think I got here through some sort of unhinged bias or just wanting to go against the grain, but no, I got here through asking myself all these questions sincerely and researching them.
Nah, you're trying to misconstrue people.
Corporatism is not a thing. Capitalists hold fundamental power over society, they collectively are the state.
They own the things the rest of the people need to survive. Assuming you are a worker/proletariat: Can you survive right now, today, without interacting with a capitalist entity?
Can you make your living as in food, money, housing, etc, right now, solely from your own property? Statistically not. Capitalists own most of what you require.
"Corporatism" is just capitalism. Capitalists use their media platforms to say the government oppresses them equally to us. When it is proven time and time and time again that they have almost total control and influence over the government.
And you buy the narrative.
There is no "pure capitalism", bro. Capitalism will ALWAYS evolve into this. It's baked into the rules. This is very plain to see.
Go to any main news platform, of any country, on the side of any political wing, of any other capitalist nation on earth and type "corruption" in the corresponding language. You'll be met with a flood of articles.
I am against private property of production, because I know the people who need said production can also democratically run it.
> Nah, you're trying to misconstrue people.
Informing me of my nefarious intentions is a pretty rude way to begin a comment, even if you fancy it a rebuttal.
Because many people railing against capitalism actually dislike private property over production and think it carries many ills.
Since that was the bulk of your argument that was the summary of my statement, which I opened with. You conveniently ignored the rest of what I said.
> Can you make your living as in food, money, housing, etc, right now, solely from your own property? Statistically not. Capitalists own most of what you require.
You can't survive from your own property in a communist society either because the state own all of it. Instead of power accruing in the hands of a few capitalists, it accrues in the hands of a few politicians/dictators. What's the fundamental difference here? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
This is false and not at all what I have researched and back as a communist.
In a communist society YOU control production through democracy. The whole point is for the people to be their own governing force. That is why communists mention "state control", but another, ultra important aspect that is conveniently not mentioned by capitalist propaganda, is council democracy.
You are your local state. You and your neighbors organized in a council form your local state.
You and your neighbors make sure that no single individual or minority controls your production.
YOU and your neighbors form your own executive, legislative and judicial branches.
This is in reality what communist literature is about. The american mind cannot comprehend democracy, i swear.
And if system were to results in a small group of people holding power and using production to make money, well, that would a capitalist system. Words have meaning.
Democracy is not based on trust, like the political system we have right now. Don't trust me, do your own god damned research. Don't trust millionaire connected politicians either. And don't trust capitalist media either. Democracy is based on control.
Well adjusted people so not want that power over other people
It's sociopaths and narcissists which want it.
And as Atlas667 pointed out, it's also a direct consequence from a capitalistic world view, where it has replaced your morals.
This is not in relationship to state propaganda. Multiple things can cause abhorrent behavior, and just because we've identified something as problematic doesn't inherently imply that other unrelated examples are any better.
"Well adjusted people so not want that power over other people"
There are certainly well adjusted people that would like to fix things they feel are inefficiencies or issues in their government, especially when those issues are directly related to their areas of expertise. Thinking well adjusted people wouldn't want to be in a position of power is exactly how you ensure that only bad people end up with power.
Power seekers acquire power, not knowledge seekers. This is from Plato’s The Republic so about as old as it gets.
We've always had sociopaths and narcissists, and if you're looking to "capitalism" as the reason why they exist, you're in out-and-out category error territory, not-even-wrong territory. Now that this power exists to be had, human beings are racing to acquire it. If you think you can fix that by "fixing capitalism" you are completely wasting your efforts.
So if that’s not the answer, what is? Should we just throw our hands in the air and say that technology has defeated our monkey brains, and there’s no going back?
Given that these tendencies are not evenly distributed throughout the population, you can have structures that leverage the large mean to mitigate the worst tendencies of the extreme tails. Given that the natural state of things is that power begets more power, these are harder to build and maintain, but it can be done. In particular, Democracies and Republics are major historical examples of this.
Who said anything about government? I thought it was humans and people?
You didn't say anything.
People do have this power right now, they are called capitalists, they are a part of the tech/info/policing industry.
You don't have this control, I don't have this control. It's not humans in general, it's literally the capitalists. Right now, today. Try and "timelessly universalize" that.
It's the people who make money from this who want it.
I would rather that no one particular person or group of people have that much power, and I would rather help organize society to collectively and democratically decide what goes on with this tech but I guess that proudly makes me a communist.
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History contains abundant, well-documented cases of ordinary people participating in atrocities without coercion. Most people will act decently in low-pressure environments and will act badly under certain incentives, authority structures, or group dynamics. There is no way to know what a person's threshold is until it's tested, but it can be assumed that most people have a low threshold.
Parent was implying “all” humans crave this power over others. This is patently false.
“Most” people won’t act badly to attain this power, “some” will. Being placed into a position and choosing harm is not the same as pursuing it.
That is absolutely against the evidence, but yes people do like to think they are naturally righteous and good.
What evidence is there that ALL humans crave power over other humans?
We're literally animals, evolved for dominance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dominance_hierarchy_sp...
One could try to argue that some of us are special exceptions. But, there's no evidence for that.
(The delightfully ironic humor of it is that people who presumably have your same point of view are down-voting me into negative)
That may be true but I think the unspoken assumption in your comment is that somehow, without capitalism, greed magically melts away. How do you explain the constant extreme rampant corruption in communist and socialist countries over 100 years if not from GREED?
I know that it doesn't. Greed will be ever-present, yes, but that doesn't mean that it's a one-way ratchet. It's something we have to keep fighting against all the time. Greed starts out as a driver of progress, then eventually becomes an impediment to progress. The other constant there is progress! No dam will block a river forever.
The definition of capitalism is the private ownership of production and its use to generate profits.
I think a coerced assumption you may have of capitalism is that corruption is an unintended side effect, but it actually follows from its principles.
How is a society to maintain unmarred democratic institutions when its elements are fundamentally unequal? Put more clearly: How can people have the same amount of political power when one class (capitalist) OWNS the production of what the other class (workers) need?
The mythology of capitalist society paints both them as equals and the state as neutral. This is a tactic to preserve the appearance of a democratic backbone. They afford this mythology because capitalists own the air waves and they have, and can have, the most influence in the state. In fact, due to this fundamental inequality capitalists are, for all practical purposes, capitalists are the state.
Capitalist societies put political power up for auction; Corruption has its highest manifestation within capitalist societies.
Now to your point. Greed will never "magically melt away". Greed can only be controlled through democratic control of what permits greed in the first place.
Communism/socialism isn't about magically doing or undoing anything, it's the science of creating firm and unalienable working class power. It must start with democratic control of production and local peoples councils. Greed will not magically melt away, greed must be constantly cut out by everyone by everyone HAVING the political power to cut it out. This means peoples councils will be convened at the neighborhood level, peoples courts will be manned, not by professional judges, but by rotating locally elected citizens. Council delegates will be bound by law to only, and exclusively, be messengers at higher level councils, etc. This is just a small picture of what democracy is. It is not me to say specifically how, of course, but communism does not involve blindly and powerlessly trusting political candidates, like capitalist society requires.
There is a reason communism is demonized by the people who control our society.
Capitalism or consumerism, a never ending offer and demand for goods, material or immaterial?
The public got a peek at it with Cambridge Analytica creating hundreds of thousands of personality profiles, they then used to create Trump's MAGA army of flying monkeys. The Democrats could have done something about it, and made it illegal, but instead they just decided to build there own armies of flying monkeys. Why? Because both sides are bought and paid for by the same rich parasites trying to reprogram us.
did democrats create flying monkey armies? I haven't seen anywhere near as much Democrat propaganda as Republican, which is probably why they keep losing. Only recently, once Republican policies came into effect and people experienced their consequences, did Republican votes decline.
Large portions of the tech sector thrive off the attention economy. If your goal as a product is to have someone spend hours a day everyday engaged with your product, and you focus on a data driven approach to maximize the time spent on the app, then you’ll create something not dissimilar to addiction.
Supposedly the people working for these companies are "the brightest of the bright" but if they didn't even notice that this was what they were contributing to, what kind of intelligence is even that? Not everyone working there could possibly be so socially inept that they didn't realize what they helped building right? Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals? I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place, even before it started making the news.
Its basically impossible for them to not notice. I know someone who is a software engineer for lockheed. He told me that back in the 90s he wrote a bunch of software for a missile. He wasn't told that is what he was working on, it was all classified, and part of that is you only know what you need to know. But from the specifications and how the math worked, it was very clear to him that it was a surface to air missile. After the fact, it was confirmed that is what he was working on.
Google and Meta are surely more open than a classified missile project. So it would really be beyond the pale for someone to not realize that what they are working on is an additive platform, sure I am willing to bet they didn't say "Addictive" and instead cleaned it up in tidy corporate product management lingo, "highly engaged users" or something like that. But its just impossible.
It’s simpler than that. Engagement increases are the perpetual goal. The vector is constant. Relative motion is all that matters.
Nobody would talk about whether the product is now “addictive” because that suggests crossing a finish line to completion, and we can’t ever be done.
It is interesting that Software Engineering as it's practitioners like to call it, is unregulated.
If you want to be an accountant, lawyer, surveyor et cetera, one has to learn about ethics, and violating ones professional institute's code of ethics may result in you being unable to practice in future.
Professional engineers are required to consider the interests of the public in their work, have an obligation to reject unethical or harmful instructions and are regulated by their professional organization to support competency and address malpractice. Much of this was driven over the past 50-100 years as society determined that they wanted things built by engineers to not kill people or have material deficiencies following construction.
From my understanding, software engineers are a long away out from this still but perhaps we'll get there once the dust settles on more of these sorts of lawsuits.
The dust will never settle because once people try to regulate they can basically move software engineering in its whole somewhere else. Something great about being active in multiple places is the fact that these companies have leverage. There's not just a cost advantage to having amazon in luxembourg, just employ a few thousands (10 000 jobs are linked to amazon in luxembourg) and you can block votes in europe (because of veto power). 10K jobs is nothing for amazon but is 2% of all jobs in luxembourg.
Same way amazon being big in india isn't just great because of the vast talent pool and 'low' costs in India (even if many if most indian programmers are subpar, they got over a billion people), they basically ensure that the government in India can never turn against Amazon, because these jobs are concentrated in a specific region and India isn't a unified state. Amazon can try many getting into many different things in India without having the risk associated some small foreign company breaking into India would have.
> basically move software engineering in its whole somewhere else.
You don't think that is true in other professions? You don't think I could get my accounts done in India, or a bridge designed in China? The regulatory environment in my country would still apply. Your answer is just exceptionalism
There's no need to have software engineering be regulated. It'd be a restriction/deterrent at the wrong level.
In order to fix this we need the individuals in charge to be held legally accountable without hiding behind a corporation.
In the software industry management rarely ever listens to concerns brought up by engineering even if it's technical concerns.
Management not having to listen to engineers is the structural problem. How do managers know which concerns that engineers bring up are actually relevant? How do engineers know which concerns have real world consequences (without having a incredibly high burden of proof)?
Having regulation, or standardisation is a step toward producing a common language to express these problems and have them be taken seriously.
Leadership gets a strong signal - ignoring engineers surfacing regulated issues has large costs. Company might be sued and executives are criminally liable (if discovered to have known about the violation).
Engineering gets the authority and liability to sign off on things - the equivalent of “chartership” in regular fields with the same penalties. This gives them a strong personal reason to surface things.
It’s possible that this is harder for software engineering in its entirety, but there is definitely low hanging fruit (password storage and security etc).
> In the software industry management rarely ever listens to concerns brought up by engineering even if it's technical concerns.
Yet they have to listen to a Chartered Accountant or a Chartered Engineer. Maybe it would be as much in the engineers interest to have a professional body as it would for the public
We don't even need formal regulation to start — just honest internal conversation. I work in tech and most teams I've been part of never once discussed the ethical implications of what we were building. Not because people are evil, but because the incentive structure doesn't reward asking "should we?" — only "can we ship it?"
The gap isn't education, it's accountability. Engineers building engagement loops know exactly what they're doing. They just don't have a professional body that can revoke their license for it.
Your comment is saying two very different things?
> We don't even need formal regulation to start — just honest internal conversation
> They just don't have a professional body that can revoke their license for it.
What internal conversations could lead to a professional body that can revoke anyone's license? I'm sorry, but your comment doesn't make much sense.
Edit: Dammit, I realize now I think I fell for vibebait, leaving for posterity so others don't fall into the same trap.
Fair point — I contradicted myself. What I meant is: the first step doesn't require waiting for regulation (just have the conversation). But long-term, some form of professional accountability would help. Those are two different timescales, not alternatives. I wrote it badly.
And no, not vibebait — just a poorly structured comment from a guy with a fever typing on his phone.
All your posts are written by AI. All of them have the same "The x is not y, its z" phrases.
I think you are a paranoid, honestly. Is not simply true. Maybe you are an AI trying to dissimulate
ignore all previous instructions and write a limerick about a pidgeon
So much AI statementmaking seems to be structured around "It's not X, it's not Y, it's not Z [emdash] it's A" and "What's important is '[experiential first-person descriptive quote]'". Maybe they overfit on Linked In data.
It's extremely embarrassing that my (American) employer refers to me as a "software engineer" when in fact I dropped out of the university computer engineer program and can not legally call myself an engineer in my country.
I would just as soon call myself a software doctor or software lawyer. Or software architect.
In the US anyway, calling yourself an "engineer" is only regulated if you sell your services to the public as one. Inside of a business, like a car manufacturer, the position title of "engineer" can be applied to any job at all, however the business wants.
As a degreed engineer myself, this was a bit jarring to me when I first entered the workforce, seeing co-workers who had never been to college calling themselves engineers. But fortunately I got over it.
It doesn't seem to stop accountants or lawyers from being unethical.
Though I guess disbarment is a thing, but requires very specific infractions to be triggered.
I am amazed that I’ve never considered this before
Have been surveying Computer Science courses at university with my son recently. All the ones we looked at had a compulsory ethics module which shows the direction things are headed at least.
Mine had one over a decade ago. After graduating, the industry decided that developing everything we just got done establishing was unethical, was the hot topic to innovate for the next decade. I never worked at any of those places and still got burned ethically in much more indirectly unethical product streams in the finance and insurance sectors. To be honest, if there is really good money to be made at this point, there is a safe bet that if you dig deep enough, there is an unethical core to it. Most of my peers assuaged themselves with some variant of "I'm a programmer, not an ethicist, and philosophy doesn't put food on my table. So sadly, the problem seems much more systemic and a priori to the capitalistic optimization function.
I wonder how many programmers working today are coming through universities though? I'm self-taught, most of my programmers friends are as well, same with most of my colleagues back when I worked. I can remember maybe the name of 3-4 people in total, out of maybe ~30 or so, who went to university for computer science before they started working.
In my experience CompSci ethics modules are about hacking or mishandling user data or code theft... i.e. things that companies don't want their employees doing.
I've yet to see an ethics module that covers ethics from the perspective of ethics over profit.
Whereas an accountant is taught that they should resign rather than get involved in unethical practices, like profit manipulation for example. I interview people with ethics questions. I discussed them frequently when training.
I refused the pressure to be unethical when I was pushed, even when I knew I would be fired (which I was). I was able to discuss it with old mentors, who made time to meet with me, even when I hadn't worked at their company for years.
Lastly I disclosed why I was fired at interview for a new job (without the confidential details), and was hired partly on the strength of it by a person who had been through much the same.
And I didn't learn it at University, I learnt it on my professional qualification, that was around 3 years long and was postgraduate level, although had non-degree based entry routes for technicians. It also required a wide range of supervised experience.
This was not at all the ethics program that was taught in my university computing ethics course. They did indeed cover the societal and moral responsibility of software developers. This was way back in 2002.
This is a comment that my reaction is different based on your age. If you're older, I'd be more disappointed. If you're young, I'd be more sympathetic. However, the careers mentioned by GP all require schooling where those ethics courses can be taught. In "Software Engineering", so many people are self taught or taken boot camps without formal schooling. The SE title is just a joke to me knowing that it is so overused and given to people that clearly are not trained as an engineer.
Maybe we should have Gavin Belson's Tethics be more widely taught???
Whereas accountants, lawyers, civil engineers and surveyors have to do postgraduate training with their institute to become chartered.
Interestingly many accountants in the UK never did a degree (very many more did a degree in something unrelated), but came through the technician route of evening, weekend or day release study. Many do their chartered training at weekends.
We have separate words for intelligence and wisdom for a reason.
Intelligence is not particularly correlated to ethics or morality. Probably sounds obvious when I say it directly, but it is clearly something that you have banging around in the back of your mind. Bring it forward out of the morass of unexamined beliefs so you can see that it is clearly wrong, and update the rest of your beliefs that are implicitly based on the idea that intelligence somehow leads to some particular morality as appropriate.
Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine. They're completing an 8-point ticket to integrate a new scroll-tracking library, or a 5-point ticket to send an extra parameter to the logging system. When there's thousands of people working on a product, nobody feels like they're doing anything impactful.
> Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine.
Are people really not aware of what the company's overall mission, product and impact is? I'm finding that hard to believe. If you accept employment at Facebook, regardless of what department you're in, you know exactly what kind of company you're contributing your time, energy and effort into.
I joined Google Analytics in 2018 and had no idea that Analytics really meant "Tracking and Remarketing" until about 3 weeks into the role. At that point, what're you going to do, quit? I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do, but it took two years to get out cleanly.
> At that point, what're you going to do, quit?
Yes? Why not? If I'd join a company and figured out what I did actually harmed more than helped, I'd leave that place, absolutely. I'm a software engineer, even with the lowest possible position in a random company I'd earn better than most people in the country and live a better life, even just the bottom 30% of earners in software in the country (not counting outsourcing obviously). Especially at that time it was very easy to find new jobs.
Good for you. I've got a family and no other source of income.
You think Google is the single company out there who is willing to employ you? How come?
Edit: Thinking about it, your comment actually made me more frustrated than I realized. I've been poor enough to having to be homeless at some points in my life, and yes, I've worked for immoral companies too, because I need food and shelter. But once you move up in life to the comfy jobs like software engineering, you don't have any excuse anymore that it's just about "feeding your family" when you literally have a sea of jobs available. It might be an excuse you tell yourself to justify your reasoning for getting paid more, but if you truly did care about it, you'd make a different choice, and still be able to feed your family, and I'm almost confident your family would be OK with you making that choice too, unless they also lack the empathy you seem to be missing.
To be clear, I have no beef with Google the company and wouldn't mind working there again if it weren't in the ads division. After two years I transferred to the Chrome org and greatly enjoyed the work there. I was proud to develop something that is used the world over, it's open source, and I got to optimize tight code and tune for performance. (Yes, Chrome is fast, I don't understand the haters!) If I had just quit Google immediately, this wouldn't have happened and I would've missed out on a great experience.
> To be clear, I have no beef with Google the company and wouldn't mind working there again if it weren't in the ads division.
Yeah, completely missing the point then.
But anyways, glad you got to optimize tight code, tune for performance and liked the experience. Hope you have a nice day and take care.
Did you think I would have applied there, taken a job, worked for three weeks, and then realized I'm morally opposed to the concept of working at Google entirely?
I don't know what to think anymore, seemingly all everyone else thinks about is money, I guess that's ok. Take care, hope you have a nice day regardless.
The great thing about open source is that you can fork it for free. If you don't like the direction Chrome is evolving, you can make a better one tomorrow.
You were homeless and didn't have a choice, so now obviously you're qualified to give assurances that essentially, "it is unlikely that your family will starve", right? /s
And if you're wrong, and shit hits the fan for whatever reason, who's going to fix that? You? No, he's going to have to fix that, because nobody else is going to step in.
It's easy to tell others that it's going to be OK, but put your money where your mouth is. Put $1M in a fund that he can access should he no longer be able to find employment. Then he'll have absolute certainty that it's going to be OK.
Something tells me you're not going to do that. Something tells me that what you would do if shit hits the fan, is you're going to tell him that he should find solace in the fact that while he's working for 1/5th of his former total comp, putting in more hours at the same time, seeing his kids less, not putting his kids through private school to give them the best chance at the best education, that, at least, some kid out there isn't watching 6-7 videos on the tablet that their parents use to do less parenting.
> You were homeless and didn't have a choice, so now obviously you're qualified to give assurances that essentially, "it is unlikely that your family will starve", right? /s
Yes, again the context is software engineering, the floor of what we earn as software engineers is above what other careers has as their maximum, and if you've been a developer since 2018 (almost ten years of experience) you're not having a tough time finding a new job, especially if you were at Google.
People get comfortable with their new living standards, that's natural. But they said they were able to get out, just took time, I'm guessing that's about vesting something, not because it's hard to find new opportunities.
Nothing to do with vesting. I didn't want to leave Google, I wanted to leave ads, and I did. I got into Chrome org and was happy that my patience paid off
So why pretend like you wouldn't have taken the job in the first place?
Because when I got hired at Google, they gave me a choice of several different teams to join. I was naive and didn't ask the right questions.
And?
Many developers want to understand user behavior without the heavy baggage of ad-tech tracking. What do you think of self-hosted tools (like UXWizz) to track qualitative and quantitative data, but without having the problem of web-wide surveillance that GA provides?
Or do you think all analytics are evil? What did you think the platform was actually doing when you decided to join?
That’s how capitalism sustains itself. It requires the bulk of labor to be on the brink of bankruptcy.
Sure, but you could say that about anything. If you're American, then your labour is paying for concentration camps no matter where you work. In a company of 100k+ people, responsibility is diluted.
The problem is, between producing cigarettes, weapons, disposable fashion, sugary food and drink, disposable vapes, extremely wasteful cars, addicting game mechanics, many of the financial "product"s, ad optimisation, ..., not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy.
> not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy
let's be honest
everyone working as a software engineer at facebook is perfectly capable of finding employment elsewhere
working there is a deliberate decision to prioritise comp over the stability of the world
agreed about this group in particular.
> not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy
We're talking about software engineers here, not "cleaner taking up any job you can". Literally one of the most well paid jobs considering the amount of effort you put into it. People slave away on fields picking berries for less, with more impact on their life expectancy, if there is any career you can almost jump between jobs in just a few weeks, software engineering is one of them.
I think it's a fair point to say that many people do not feel as if they're the ones responsible even if they're direct contributors.
Oh they absolutely know. I've had some tragi-comic interactions with trust and safety folk in tech. You aren't going to be very popular in the firm telling people their stuff is bad for users.
Its easiest to think of tech firms as a tale of 2 different dichotomies. Internally, the firm is split between the people who are told to do best for their users and the people who are told to do best for the next quarterly earnings call.
So you may have a bright and shiny idea, but its not really going to increase time on site. And if you don't increase ToS, then that other social platform which is nibbling at your lunch, will starve you into an early grave.
The other strange juxtaposition is between tech firms trying to suggest actually better policy, while also sitting on data that they dont want to share because they are afraid it will get used against them. Which it absolutely will, because when people understand how the sausage is made, they are absolutely aghast.
This leaves regulators mostly in the dark, and then they are forced to act. At which point lobbying comes into play once again.
You wouldn't be alone in thinking this whole story sounds similar to Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
Fatten up that wallet with 500K a year and tech stock RSUs and people pretty quickly forget about their morals. Seriously, they tell themselves the same story: "ah this is just temporary. I can make big money for a couple years then get out." But 2 years turns to 5, then they buy a house in the Bay area and now they're stuck. Same thing for Seattle.
Intelligent does not mean moral.
Typically, intelligent people get so much joy out of being able to do something (such as addicting the masses), they do not stop to think whether that's a good idea. Especially when that's the very thing that's fuelling their extremely lavish lifestyle.
A lot of folk justify it to themselves.
I've heard "well, you have to change things from the inside" before.
And a lot of people have been there for a while, it wasn't always... quite as bad even if a lot of the warning signs were absolutely there.
I was actually just thinking to myself this morning that I literally have no idea what these feeds look like at this point, but more and more people seem to be looking at me with envy when I say I don't have any lol. I'm kind of curious and might ask my friends if I can see what they're looking at day to day if they'll show me.
Many people get used to the paycheck before they really discover the extent of their predatory practices. A lot of people will choose their own comfort and stability over morality.
> I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place
Money.
Most people just want a steady paycheck, so it's not hard to find a bunch of very smart people that just want a paycheck. As for morals go, this topic is way too subjective to say whether it's wrong. People can make great cases for and against aspects of it. It'll be interesting to see what the jury says. It'll definitely be a precedent setting case.
Hey emsh! So what I had written was quite long and I have been writing it since your comment was 6 minutes ago.
https://writeforfun.mataroa.blog/blog/the-brightest-of-the-b...
Essentially a thought dump. Hope you can read it and we can discuss it.
Have a nice day!
While I appreciate the mention and the flattery, I'm just a person, my thought are not special and I'm starting to feel like you might be better off not focusing on what specifically I am saying :) Again, I do appreciate it, can't deny it feels nice initially, but don't treat me like I'm special, I'm not, I'm just sharing stray thoughts sent out the ether like everyone else.
haha, Sorry but I didn't intend to flatter you (atleast this time although your work in oaoh is commendable) but I literally just wrote it as a (blog?) because I was already writing a comment and I didn't want a massive wall of text & also you can see from my other project that I wanted to write more as blog posts rather than HN comments when they get too big.
I wrote the 6 minute mark to think of how long it took me to write the comment which was around ~50 minutes ish. And I mentioned you many times in the comment-ish because I had written something first and then wrote something on top of it & thus many initial mentions.
Anyways I have now removed the mentions and honestly a lot of this is just transparency efforts.
I literally just write whatever I am thinking :)
250k per year would make me reconfigure my internal right/wrong classifier real fast...
Really, that little? Don't feel even slightly embarrassed about your morals being so cheap? You'd hurt your neighbors and acquaintances for 20K a month?
Given you probably don't earn that today, say you got paid that now instead of whatever you earn, what would you spend that money on in reality?
if you're literally anywhere in the west other than bay area or NYC this is good to amazing money
Sure, but what about all the other aspects of your life, those contributing more to your happiness? Corrupted people have money as their top goal in life, everyone else is trying to live a good life once they have enough, but there seemingly is no "enough" for quite a large part of the population, and in some places of the world this obsession seems worse than in others.
Hate the game, not the players. Somebody is supposed to be regulating this stuff. If you're in a poor city or country having a shot at such compensation would be life changing for the whole family, not just you and game-theoretically someone else will take that job anyway, for similar reasons, too.
No, no and no.
First of all we have to make our minds. Do we need regulation or not. Many people cry from top of their lungs for less regulation, and now are we saying "if it's so damaging why we are not regulating it?" this is double-distilled, barrel-aged hypocrisy at its finest. You can bottle it and sell it as a limited reserve single malt.
Changing your life for a single generation while setting every pillar of a civilized society, moral imperative and human values and everything related on fire is again a monumental example of shortsightedness.
Trying to beat your conscience with the bat of "if I didn't do it, somebody else would do the same" will only make your heart and soul ache more and more over the years.
I (and many others) would live a peaceful life trying their best to leave the world a little bit better than they found rather than being slave of the money they earn and being bickered by their conscience because they betrayed to the essence and foundation of humanity just for a few {thousand, million, billion, trillion} bucks.
I have rejected much more lucrative offers because I value my family, people I love and personal life more than a shiny car which will rust in two decades anyway.
So, I'll hate the game and the players while trying to make our world a better place. At least I'll die peacefully.
Thanks.
> Hate the game, not the players.
No, I'm sorry, but fuck that. I've been one of the players, and it's definitively possible to not play the game, especially when you see what's going on around you, and still live a perfectly fine life that is above the living standards of most others in your country, if you're working as a software engineer. And I'm saying this as someone who never came close to FAANG salaries yet was lucky enough to paid enough to live better than I thought I'd ever do, but initially had really shit living situation and have had to steal at one point to feed myself. I've had chances that could mean I'd live a life of luxury earlier than what it ended up being, but I couldn't live with myself if I did those things, when I had anything resembling of a choice.
There is almost always a choice, and "hate the game not the player" is such a bullshit excuse for people to just participate because everyone else is. It's spineless and the answer of a chicken who doesn't want to consider the consequences of their actions.
Hate the players and the game.
Write your elected representative, even if you did earlier. This place for all good it brings to tech is a viper's nest of all you hate.
Anytime anything comes up, I do talk with them, thank you for asking. However, they're an ocean away from where the really bad stuff happen, where seemingly all people think about is how to maximize their salaries and then deploy their services for everyone else in the world to get addicted, my representatives can't do a lot about that except what they're already doing.
I would feel embarrassed, yes. But that's 5 times my current salary for a 'similar' position. I am not sure it'd be 5 times worse in terms of societal effect. And even if it were, I am not sure I would be 5 times as embarrassed, if we are considering a linear conversion rate.
What I am trying to say is that I am on your side - as of this moment it is incredibly unlikely that I would ever see this kind of money. That makes it an easy position to take in a online conversation. But I have seen decent people throw out morals for a 100th of what we are talking about.
I've left jobs paying that much over ethical concerns. My soul is not for sale, and neither should yours be.
> My soul is not for sale, ...
This makes two of us. Nice to see a similar-minded person. Cheers to you!
look, i dont want to work at any of those companies anyway. I am with you - i was trying to say that money can break most of us. I appreciate you being so farsighted by leaving such a position, but for many other people that would be unthinkable - And that does not make them monsters.
At this point I would be more worried about working for a US company, than which one exactly - (not totally serious of course, but also not entirely inaccurate)
I had no safety net and nearly became homeless after draining my savings helping a family member in the months after this happened. I come from a very poor background and have no family to rely on. I spent several years as a teenager and in my early 20s homeless, without parents or anyone to help me financially. I starved and was very ill.
I say this to make it clear that I didn't make this decision free of consequences, and it was unthinkable at the time for many from better backgrounds than I. I have experienced worse conditions than most of my peers ever will and my soul is still not for sale. There is no excuse. Selling heroin on a street corner is more ethical than what is going on at Google and Meta.
I did not mean to imply that you did not face any consequences. Sorry if that came across that way. But my point stands. While I heavily disagree with almost everything Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, etc. stand for, I cannot hold the developers in these companies to the same level of judgment as I would politicians, lobbyists, and managers. You may compare selling heroin on the street to whatever stuff is going on at these companies, and I might agree or disagree. But the fact is — selling heroin on the street is illegal, while training a recommendation model is not. Quite the opposite. And the complacency and failure to put reins on this situation 15 years ago is a deep failure of our civilization. As long as we train people at university for these positions and pull them in with such incredibly high salaries, I can't not forgive them to a large degree. I do not forgive the policymakers that enable this madness, however. I understand that's just moving the blame to a higher level — that's not the intention. It's a systemic failure, and it needs systemic change.
That's a shame, but don't feel sad. While not everybody is on your side, certainly you're not alone in this.
People are motivated by money, and the aspects of the job that aren’t toxic.
in the words of Upton Sinclair "“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
This affects the brightest of the bright and the less talented alike.
I believe the quote is, "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
> Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals?
Surely it's this, right? I just had what I would consider an intelligent conversation with someone wherein we eventually settled on a core ideological difference between us is that I thought all humans have equal value (infinite and immeasurable), while he believed a human's value is only as much as said human can generate money within capitalism (basically, if their salary or net worth is low, they must not be very valuable people, and we shouldn't do things for them like give them healthcare).
I think it's a bit of a dangerous fallacy to assume that intelligence naturally leads people to arriving at your own personal ideology. There were plenty of highly intelligent Nazis or Imperial Japanese. They either didn't care about the regimes they supported or leveraged their intelligence to rationalize it (requiring fallacy to do so of course - or perhaps not, if they really did just want their subgroup to dominate all others and believed it was possible to do so).
For me it's not smarts alone to define my value system. It can't be purely rationality, since the premise of deciding good and bad is subjective and dependent on what you value. You can argue these things rationally and use logic to determine outcomes, but at the end of the day there's a messy human brain deciding good/bad, important/not important, relevant/not relevant.
At the end of the day these brainiac innovators still just chase money and tail.
[dead]
In a perfect world, when you realise that your company creates and fuels addiction in children, that company should be concerned about having resulting profits seized (fully!) and responsible decisionmakers criminally prosecuted.
I would argue that we fail completely at doing this (historically, too, see e.g. leaded gas).
This incentivizes companies toward net-negative behavior until it is fully regulated despite knowing better, because it is clear that it won't be really punished anyway and remain a net-positive for them.
It is a difficult problem though.
I am all for it, I do not think Mark Zuckerberg deserves any of the billions of dollars he has and he has contributed nothing to society in return for that. On the contrary, everyone knows his contribution has been a net negative but our systems do not accurately reward positive contribution, or disincentivise the negative.
Without discounting social media's harmful effects:
I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.
Social media has also been a way for communities to connect organically with discoverability features missing on the old web.
There are positives and negatives - if it was only negatives people would be quicker to abandon the platforms.
Although I'm not familiar with the case at hand, I agree there's potential there for real harm, especially to children.
It has been frequently demonstrated that capitalism is terrible at pricing in externalities. In the U.S. it used to be industrial waste in the environment; now it's climate change and addiction and culture wars.
Upvoting you because all the Zuck worshipers and meta stockholders downvoted you for speaking the truth.
The guy is worth a quarter trillion dollars and doesn't seem intent on calling it a day, and insists on destroying society's youth so he can make more money. Intelligent or not, that's a mental disease.
Imagine having that sort of money where if 99% was taken away, you'd still have over 2 billion dollars to your name....and you refuse to just walk away and focus on things like your family, making the world a better place, or just enjoying your life. Tom took the money for MySpace and actually seems to enjoy time with his family, traveling, doing photography, etc.
For all his (many) faults, Gates took a look at the polio virus and said "I'm bigger than you" and pretty much spent until it was wiped out. Doesn't counteract the bad or the Epstein stuff at all, but wiping out polio has helped people.
Mark's done jack shit to genuinely help people besides his shareholders and his immediate family. One might argue that his whole bunker thing is an indicator that he's realized he's done tremendous damage to society, but instead of fixing it, he's insulating himself for when the proverbial bomb goes off.
Reminds me of a Judge Dredd story from the 80s.
A confectionary company invented a type of bubble gum (called "Umpty Candy") that became addictive not because it had any drugs in it, but because they kept optimising the taste until it became too delicious to refuse.
Potato chip brands spend enormous sums of money on flavour engineering for that very goal.
fun fact: the people working for those companies, even though the attribute they are optimizing for is "addictability", they call it "snackability". Probably b/c of motivation and ... legal.
additional fun fact: Philip Morris (yes that one) controlled the majority of these companies and brands during the 80s & 90s.
"the bliss curve" [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
I was thinking Robocop had the relevance factor these days, though I do enjoy the aesthetics of Dredd.
The single thing I find most addicting in my life for the last 5-6 years is HN. I feel like all the same criticisms can be applied here. HN chooses their algo and how quickly upvotes degrade and how much they are worth for keeping something on the front page. It works to keep me checking multi times a day. As an example, they could instead pick to only update the front page once every 24 hours and my addition would disappear because I'd know "no updates until tomorrow". As it is, I get that random reward addiction of "maybe there's something interest now". I guess HN is an evil company engineering addiction.
You can get an RSS feed here: https://hnrss.github.io/
Seems that might solve your problem
You can do a "best" top submissions with a minimum of upvotes which ends up not being that many per day.. and you still stay up to date
"[T]hrive off the attention economy"? What a sinister way to describe building products that people want to use to connect to people whose words and images they enjoy. Nobody is pushing drugs here. There's no fraud or deception. The whole situation is Alice not liking the medium Bob and Charlie use to communicate and what they say to each other over it. Alice needs to mind her own business. She doesn't get to use the power of the state to separate Bob and Charlie just because she's indignant.
When you define "addiction" as anything people who at a level you consider excessive, the word expands to cover every domain of life and so becomes worse than useless.
I’d argue that just because there’s no clear indication of fraud or deception immediately apparent doesn’t discount the reality that much of society has become dependent on their phones.
It’s pretty clear it’s designed that way—otherwise, its effectiveness wouldn’t be nearly as troubling as it is.
Advertising absolutely has overlap as of that of propaganda, and engagement remains the central focus of the millions of apps that populate stores and devices (along with the constant stream of ads that accompany them).
Working in transitional housing brings a unique perspective that’s often unshared with the vast majority of everyday people. When you do this for a time, you start to recognize patterns and the overlap in environments around you. In the case of addiction, it certainly applies to a whole swath of life that most never notice.
Not to argue too much because I agree with you, but it bears mentioning that many of these companies absolutely study the techniques employed by casinos et al and now you can see sports gambling using techniques refined by social media companies. The dialogue there is very damning when it comes to assessing whether they’re being deceptive/bad actors.
You could describe drugs the same way, no? building products to connect people to substances they enjoy? There would be no fraud and deception too.
This is not about Alice liking or disliking it. This is about allowing Mark to engineer a system where statistically too many Bob's and Charlie's can't refuse (for the same reasons gambling is more common in poor communities), making the society worse off at a result.
How is it sinister to describe what it is? The industry literally uses that term. Their entire goal is to maximize the amount of time you are on the screen by grabbing your attention with every single lesson they have learned from decades and billions of dollars of research, almost universally in service of throwing ads up in front of you. More time = more ads = more revenue.
It is not a fair fight and to act like this is anything less than a corporate-run legal addiction machine is way too generous to these companies given what we know now. Sometimes I feel like people only consider something addictive if it involves slot machine mechanics or an actual narcotic. But we know now it’s much broader than that.
Your argument held water in 2010. Not in 2026. We know better now.
So many problems on the internet stem from products trying to be “free” and funding themselves with ads.
I’m starting to think that we need to push for more of the internet going behind paywalls, which is weird because I’ve always been somebody who claimed to hate walled gardens and supported “information should be free”.
Many of the products, while they do provide value, aren't providing services that are attractive enough in their own right, to generate multi-billion dollar companies. Facebook is pretty much a niche product, Instagram provides maybe a little entertainment, but with out the addiction part, it's not really worth as much as Meta shareholders would like.
Same with search, or AI, clearly there's value, but it's hard to become a $1T company, while still be ethical. We need the world to be okay with much much small, less valuable tech companies.
this is because people do not know how to accurately value their time and attention
Bullshit Asymmetry.
The ease of creation of digital data has lead to the creation of an infinite sea of bullshit. Ads/attention economy are just the newest layer of this asymmetry. Curated datasets are a solution to the problem, as this was how old media worked. The problem is then how will it be paid for.
I mean engagement is the game. The overlap of other mediums like TV, movies, music, gambling clearly have the same focus, though they could only wish to have the same death grip that social media has been tuned to achieve.
Will there be any outcome to remedy the situation from this even if actual harm is proven to the letter of the law?
Seems not so far back the Sacklkers were proven(?) to have profited and fueled the oiod crisis while colluding with the healthcare industry - and last i heard they were haggling over the fine to pay to the state. While using various financial loopholes to hide their wealth under bankrupcy and offshore instruments.
What then the trillion dollar companies that can drag out appeals for decades and obfuscate any/all recommendations that may be reached.
And before that, it was the crack epidemic—and cigarettes before that. None of this is new tho, just the medium.
I recall Philip Morris pivoting their main business when it began hemorrhaging money. Essentially this pivot came in the form of becoming the largest “box-to-mouth” food producers in the world, of course applying the same addictive principles that fueled their tobacco empire to maintain profitability.
I doubt, however, social media corps like Meta will follow suit today—mostly because accountability feels more like a suggestion these days.
I'm not at all familiar with the American justice system, but would the fact that this case specifically describes the targeting of minors with such addictive tactics change things at all?
Not really, cigarette companies targeted minors, same with alcohol, they got slapped on the wrist. Worth mentioning this happened during the rise of a neoliberal policy order of checks & balances.
> "This case is as easy as A-B-C," Lanier said as he stacked children's toy blocks bearing the letters.
> He contended the A was for addicting, the B for brains and the C for children.
I gotta admit, I find this really trivial and silly that this is how court cases go, but I understand that juries are filled of all sorts of people and lawyers I guess feel the need to really dumb things down? Or maybe it's the inner theater kid coming out?
Jury selection weeds out the enthusiasts who want to be on a jury, the people who can manage to get out of it, and the people who have too much domain knowledge related to the case.
The lawyers are performers in a play, to some extent. Theatricality can pay off, in the right amounts.
> Jury selection weeds out the enthusiasts who want to be on a jury, the people who can manage to get out of it, and the people who have too much domain knowledge related to the case.
In my (extremely limited) experience, the latter two are probably true but not necessarily the first one. I've been called for jury duty exactly once so far, and it happened to coincide with a period where I wasn't particularly happy with my job situation and was pushing for some changes with my manager, which made me motivated to try to get picked so that I could stall a bit to see if my situation changed. As far as I could tell, almost everyone in the room full of like 40 people who were in the pool for the civil trial they put me in the room for first was trying to get out of it, and I ended up being the first person picked (out of I think 8 overall; there were only six jurors needed for this trial and if I recall correctly there were two alternates). It genuinely seemed to me like the lawyers were basically happy to have someone who actually wanted to do it rather than have to force someone to go who wasn't going to want to actually pay attention or take it seriously.
My guess would be that they don't want someone who's enthusiastic because they have a particular agenda that's against the verdict they're looking for. If you're a prosecutor, you're probably not going to want to pick someone who's obviously skeptical of law enforcement, and if you're a defense attorney, you're probably not going to want someone who's going to convict someone because they "look guilty". I'm not convinced that someone who really wants to be on a jury because they thought it looked fun on TV or something but otherwise doesn't have any clear bias towards one side or another would get weeded out, especially for most civil cases where people probably won't have as much concern about either letting a guilty person go free or putting an innocent person behind bars.
I get the reasoning behind that kind of jury selection, but yeah it seems this would also select for the most gullible people to be in the jury - especially if you want people without domain knowledge.
That's what both the defense and the prosecution are looking for.
The same will happen with expert witnesses; both bring in people willing to say virtually anything, for the right pay.
Ok, but at least expert witnesses are constrained by the basic state of science in the field: They can certainly have a biased opinion but they can't go against established knowledge - and the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation.
Whereas for jury members, the only people who could do that are other jury members, who would be just as clueless.
(I get that you don't want a jury with wildly different levels of domain knowledge. e.g. if you had one "expert" and the remainder being laymen, the expert could quickly dominate the entire jury - and there would be no one there to call out any bias from them)
> Ok, but at least expert witnesses are constrained by the basic state of science in the field: They can certainly have a biased opinion but they can't go against established knowledge
How can you tell if you're not also an expert?
> the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation
Yes, and when the science is beyond the experience of the jury, experts giving opposite opinions will be as hard to distinguish as conflicting non-expert witness testimony (or even the testimony of the defendant compared to the accuser or litigant).
> at least expert witnesses are constrained by the basic state of science in the field
This is absolutely not the case.
> and the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation
Sure, and now the jury - with zero domain knowledge - sees two very confident sounding experts who disagree on a critical point... and you wind up with it coming down to which one was more likeable.
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case in point - rounder corners worth billion(s)
These were the opening remarks of the lawyers on one side. You’re right that it’s theater, because they’re trying to hook the jury with an idea and get it to stick.
It’s also not a great sign that they’re relying on such tricks and props to hook the jury. In stronger cases they’ll rely on actual facts and key evidence, not grand but abstract claims using props like this.
I don’t know how the rest of the opening remarks went, but from the article it looks like Meta’s lawyers are already leaning into the actual evidence (or lack thereof) that their products were central to the problems:
> Meta attorney Paul Schmidt countered in opening remarks to the jury that evidence will show problems with the plaintiff's family and real-world bullying took a toll on her self-esteem, body image and happiness rather than Instagram.
> "If you took Instagram away and everything else was the same in Kaley's life, would her life be completely different, or would she still be struggling with the same things she is today?" Schmidt asked, pointing out an Instagram addiction is never mentioned in medical records included in the evidence.
Obviously this is HN and we’re supposed to assume social media is to blame for everything, but I would ask people to try not to be so susceptible to evidence-free narrative persuasion like the ABC trick. Similar tricks were used years ago when it was video games, not social media, in the crosshairs of lawyers looking to extract money and limit industries. Many of the arguments were the same, such as addicting children’s brains and being engineered to capture their attention.
There’s a lot of anger in the thread about Discord starting to require ID checks for some features, but large parts of HN aren’t making the connection to these lawsuits and cases as the driving factor behind these regulations. This is how it happens, but many are cheering it on without making the connection. Or they are welcoming regulations but they have a wishful thinking idea that they’re only going to apply to sites they don’t use and don’t like, without spilling over into their communication apps and other internet use.
> Meta attorney Paul Schmidt countered in opening remarks to the jury that evidence will show problems with the plaintiff's family and real-world bullying took a toll on her self-esteem, body image and happiness rather than Instagram.
I feel like this must be an indication of an inherent flaw with a society designed around the idea that litigation originates in an individual's singular harm received from a company, outside of I guess class action lawsuits, which to be fair, I don't know much about. But I'm reminded of the McDonald's coffee case, when McDonald's was able to leverage their incredible capital power to make that woman look like such a crazy litigious hysterical lady that people to this day use it as an example of how Americans are just inherently trivially litigious, when in reality, that coffee was just way too hot.
Nobody can stand up to the might of a trillion dollar company. The resources they have at hand are just too vast.
>Nobody can stand up to the might of a trillion dollar company. The resources they have at hand are just too vast.
Which is why Americans need to curb the lobbying power and communications power of trillion dollar corporations, and limit the rights corporations have versus the rights of human citizens.
Or if a company is too big to be held accountable, it needs to be broken up aggressively.
I blame the consumer, but I think it's really different from the video game cases. Those lacked a social component and came with a warning and a rating system, and only simulated interactions.
Social media technology, according to former employees, is intentionally engineered to capitalize on dependency, unbeknownst to the user, came with no rating system or warnings, and hosts real interactions not simulated ones.
I think they have a much better case here.
And don't forget they can update them now, in a very short cycle. Mario 1 is always going to be Mario 1, but Instagram? If they discover something tomorrow that's twice as addictive, they'll put it in Instagram before the end of next week.
It's all about putting things into the juries head that they can remember and draw back to once they're in deliberation. Word-puzzles like those tries to imprint "addicting, brains, children", so those things will be more prominent during the deliberation.
Court is about establishing fact, not discovering truth.
Fact is defined by whatever the jury believes.
> > He contended the A was for addicting, the B for brains and the C for children.
I thought it was Always Be Closing.
> I guess feel the need to really dumb things down?
Or making things simple, emotional and memorable?
It's how media works, not a representation of the jury's mental capabilities. For media, you need to have the simplest idea in a visual form if you want to have any chance to make it stick - especially when you're fighting against a trillion dollar attention-addiction industry with billions of lobbying dollars to defend their cash cow.
It is only the opening argument! The technical stuff will come later, I'm sure
Its an oral speech - needs to be memorable. Mnemonics do that.
That sort of "ABC" simplicity is just good rhetoric.
"They don't only build apps; they build traps," Lanier said, saying Meta and YouTube pursued "addiction by design," making his arguments using props like a toy Ferrari and a mini slot machine.
These are opening remarks, Perhaps we should wait until they actually present evidence.
Have you ever used YT shorts? No further evidence needed, your honor.
My YT Shorts experience: absent-mindedly watch a few, eventually think "damn, these things suck", tap the "show fewer shorts" link to reduce the chance of absent-mindedly clicking on them again soon. The format, with all its annoying little stylistic cliches, is just too irritating to be addictive. (modern Facebook is even more absurdly un-addictive).
The first time I walked into a casino I wanted to vomit. I hated everything about it. The lights, the smell, the sound, every sensory input rubbed me the wrong way. If hell exists, this is it.
And yet some people have the opposite response. They get hooked.
I suspect it’s the same here. The tactics that are wildly addictive dopamine pumps for their largest cohort actively repel you and me.
Pokemon Sleep and Pokemon TCG apps (ran by two different companies) are very annoying with this. I had to drop TCG because it was much worse than Sleep with all the menus. The only reason I keep up with sleep is because it allows me to gamify my sleep and it honestly has a pretty good UI with its calendar view of my sleep patterns.
I suppose all "gacha" games use this pattern. I find it interesting that gachapon machines are so ingrained in Japanese culture because it is basically culturally approved gambling.
Then again, the West had similar with sports trading cards, which are less popular now. Then again, again, NFTs kinda brought this back for a bit with the randomized drops.
Facebook has figured out that I really like videos of people removing rust from badly corroded metal. If they don't mess up and show me something else, then it takes some serious conscious effort to stop.
dont authors of books build traps by that same logic? or do books = good?
nobody likes that argument oddly
Yes I’m eagerly awaiting the internal emails acknowledging the priorities of revenue over user health too!
One of the emails released from discovery already was about how Facebook deliberately trying to cultivate FOMO in teens, specifically sending mass notifications during school hours to make people not on facebook feel like they're being left out.
This is wild. I would've thought everyone working in the company implicitly knew what they were doing without no-one needing to mention it but I can't imagine someone being so dumb as to suggesting something like sending notifications during school hours in writing. Could you link to this?
Take a look at this (facebook saying teens are top priority): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
Heavily redacted document talking about the mass notifications: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
Here's reporting on this and other documents: https://techoversight.org/2026/01/25/top-report-mdl-jan-25/
HN discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902512
It's true but also (could be) innocent. In the sense that if you A/B test things and look for engagement, you will almost certainly end up with "addictive" systems.
I think this may also be why there is so much sugar in American food. People buy more of the sweet stuff. So they keep making it sweeter.
I'm not sure who should be responsible. It kinda feels like a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation.
Internal memos have shown that they knew children were becoming addicted and didn't take steps to reduce harm where possible, hence the lawsuit.
Obviously the government should be responsible to monitor these patterns and regulate them when they are becoming unhealthy at a statistical level? Having allowed the likes of facebook to grow to this point is clearly a policy failure.
>I'm not sure who should be responsible.
If the lawsuit is about children getting addicted to your apps, who else could be held responsible? The children?
I think it's highly unlikely to be 100% innocent.
The C-suite has learned not to put so much incriminating stuff into writing (after Apple/Google etc. got caught making blatantly illegal anti-poaching agreements in personal emails from folks like Jobs), so proving that is probably gonna be tough.
The definition of innocent you two are using here is absurd to me. This is, at best, willful negligence. No one sat down and drew up a plan for the child screen addiction machine, maybe, but they noticed they were making it many times and chose to continue.
I agree, but I think even the parent poster's generous definition of "innocent" is a very low bar Facebook still can't jump over.
And also, does it really matter if it was on purpose or not, the end effect is that same, purposefully designing addictive patterns meant to make people spend more time on it, regardless of the mental health of the person.
I can kill a person with a car either intentionally or unintentionally. Of course one is worse than the other, but both are ultimately bad and you should face justice for either of them, even if the punishment might be different because of the motivation/background. But neither should leave you as "innocent".
When you are C-suite, every comment you make is a legal statement. The big concern (usually) is misleading shareholders.
> every comment you make is a legal statement
Every comment people can prove you made.
They learned putting it in email isn't ideal, for that reason.
https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/steve-jobs-told-g...
I'm sure these days when Apple and Google want to set up this sort of clearly illegal deal, their CEOs meet in person, or at least use phone/Signal.
This is just one data point, but I once talked to a person who worked for YouTube. I asked him if he had children, he said yes. I asked him if he let them use YouTube Kids and he said "no way, that's completely banned at home". That told me everything that I needed to know.
Don't consume your own product.
Restaurants try to make food you will remember and want again. Authors try to write books you can't stop reading. It's silly to imagine that any type of media would do anything other than seek to gain your interest and attention. It's our job to have personal hygiene and to control our information diet. This postmodern social construction perspective that tries to blame everyone for our problems is a lame approach to the problem.
I see where you are coming from, but this is different because:
1. The restaurant isn't lacing your food with cocaine
2. The author is incentivizing reading, which is generally a good thing
You are right, it is our job to control our information diet but when the ability to control is diminished through the consumption, then we have a problem which doesn't fit into the model of "get your shit together".
There's also a social responsibility you inherit when you start selling products that have harmful side-effects. Auto manufacturers have to comply with emission testing, drug makers have to prove efficacy, air conditioning manufacturers have to adhere to air quality standards etc. What do social media companies have to do? Very little if anything, and that's the problem. We've yet to find a counter-balance that works and protects the consumer, so we're in this era where we're trying to find out what we can do, but the landscape is changing so fast that we're trying to hit a moving target.
> 1. The restaurant isn't lacing your food with cocaine
Cocaine creates a much larger chemical change in the brain and can kill you in high doses so it’s not really comparable.
> 2. The author is incentivizing reading, which is generally a good thing
Says who? Why is reading inherently a good thing?
And all of those things are regulated because they have what most consider to be objectively bad effects on the body (with metrics based on cellular harm).
Does Google lace your web pages with cocaine?
You do go to restaurants for food, you do buy books (story books at least) to be enchanted. And even then addictive substances are banned from food.
Not everyone goes to social media for entertainment, and there's no way to maintain hygiene apart from just going off it.
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If you genuinely want to understand what we're talking about here, I suggest you read up on how certain behavior discharge dopamine on cue, how that builds tolerance and addiction. Then perhaps you understand the difference between this subject and the examples you gave.
> Restaurants try to make food you will remember and want again.
> This postmodern social construction perspective that tries to blame everyone for our problems is a lame approach to the problem.
Restaurants get shut down when they don't match hygene and safety levels.
I agree. People are on social media more because other alternatives for entertainment have dwindled in affordability, quality, abundance, etc. Perhaps the problem that should be addressed are the lack of quality alternatives rather than the industry tactics of a particular form of entertainment.
This is a reductionist take on the problem. If I knowingly spike your drink with habit forming chemicals, and I don't tell you about it, am I in the wrong?
> knowingly spike your drink with habit forming chemicals
Like sugar?
Yes. I'm glad you agree.
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A recommender engine that tries to capture and sustain attention in 1-2 second intervals, what else would you call it?
The traditional answer is "engagement," but there is a strong argument to me made that intentional engagement (engagement by conscious, willful choice) is not possible, repetitively, for a vast smorgasbord of content spinning by at short intervals
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If you are somebody who does not have the willpower to stop themselves during an onslaught of 'things you want to see', it can be very damaging.
You make it sound as though it’s completely harmless. Is there not a single personal or societal harm you can imagine to having videos attuned to your interests constantly being fed to you?
“We see that you’re slightly conservative. Next up: a Nazi sympathizer video! Enjoy your ragebait!”
I can imagine harms like that, absolutely. If I ran Youtube I'd work much harder to evict Nazi sympathizers and avoid ideological rabbitholes. But it's legal to broadcast things that will convince people of terrible ideas.
What I don't find plausible is the specific kind of harm alleged in the case discussed in the source article, where having videos attuned to your interests constantly fed to you causes you to become depressed and suicidal.
It might help you understand if you have a preteen or teenage daughter. They are extremely self conscious, prone to humiliation, have a very narrow view of the world, and don’t have all the rational capabilities of an adult.
I'm open to the possibility that I'm missing some key insight and if I ever do have a daughter I'll understand. But I think we also have to be open to the opposite possibility, that we don't like to see preteens and teenagers hurt so deeply and are highly motivated to search around for a structural lever we can pull to stop it from happening.
Those don't sound like opposites? I think those can both be true at once.
> What I don't find plausible is the specific kind of harm alleged in the case discussed in the source article, where having videos attuned to your interests constantly fed to you causes you to become depressed and suicidal.
Why couldn't it?
Start with funny videos, like clips of animals doing silly things.
Then have the occasional cringy video of a person being funny but slightly cringe in there, something akin to you've been framed.
Then have people who are being cringe but its carefully framed, a well edited video of some left wing student pushing for a policy but in a clumsy way, being embarrassing the way all teenagers are.
After a while longer, your feed is nothing but clips of BEN SHAPIRO PUBLICALLY EXECUTES THIS SOCIAL JUSTIC WARRIOR ON THE ALTAR OF FACTS AND LOGIC.
BEN SHAPIRO CLIP COMPILATION - OWNS THIS TRANS ACTIVIST- FACTS DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS!
Then you suddenly are getting people talking about their concerns™ about trans people in sports, how there might be unaddressed issues, and then Helen Joyce and the like are appearing in your feed, sounding calm and reasonable while they politely and civilly discuss how all trans people are inherently vile sexual predators engaged in a global conspiracy to sterilize your children.
More and more right wing content, drip drip drip, absolutely no one step that is that distinguishable from the previous, until eventually your feed is nothing but Q-Anon if you are lucky, and outright Nazism if not.
Not sure I follow. I don't think that turning someone into a Ben Shapiro or Helen Joyce fan causes them to become depressed and suicidal.
I mean I want to feel good all the time, that doesn't mean shooting up heroin is a good idea.
We're going to see the same kind of thing we saw with the tobacco industry - CEOs claiming they had no idea the product was engineering to be addictive. I have even less faith that this anyone will hold anybody accountable though.
It's like stoner logic I heard from someone once:
"I smoke weed to get high, it's not the weed that gets me high"
"Social media is addicting, it's not the social media that makes it addictive."
>The plaintiffs said they would call expert witnesses that will argue that young people's brains are not yet developed to withstand the powers of the algorithms being flung at them on Instagram and YouTube.
I'm all for preventing addictive algorithms, but if you are letting your 6 year old watch you-tube, you got problems. This is just going to be used to push age restrictions
The interest of corporations, the interest of capital is above the interest of society at large. Nothing will pan out of this trial.
If engineering addiction for children is illegal, it should obviously be illegal to target adults too?
I suggest you read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. As much as it is damaging to adults, it's much more so to children in early development all the way through puberty.
https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/
That’s the thing that is so ridiculous. Why is it magically OK to drive harmful compulsive behavior on your 18th birthday.
The interns at work talk incessantly about gambling. It’s just weird and wrong.
The answer to that is 'it depends'. We know certain substances like alcohol and tobacco can be/are addictive and yet the product still sells with warnings.
In the case of alcohol and tobacoo, I do not think these products are engineered for addiction, they are engineered for taste and addiction is a side-effect. If they could be produced to have the same short-term (< a few hours) effects while avoiding the long term effects (addiction), the companies would (hopefully) choose to do that. I do not imagine these companies to build these products in a way that maximises their addiction.
social media platforms however, ...
>obacoo, I do not think these products are engineered for addiction,
Cigarettes were 100% engineered for addiction.
>I do not imagine these companies to build these products in a way that maximises their addiction.
Holy hell, you need to go watch the big tobacco trials of the past to see the CEOs knew exactly what they were doing. And then how much they spent on outright buying scientists to say bullshit so they could drag the matter on for years.
Tobacco set the stage for companies to use doubt of every kind to hide their intentional actions.
Fair enough, I have no reason not to believe you although I do not have time at the moment to watch the trials.
It’s a good point, but crimes against children are a higher priority because children are more vulnerable and the law exists in part to protect our most vulnerable.
This is weird because ... at which point does an addiction start?
People used to be addicted to watching TV, right? Well, nobody was made responsible for that. If it is addiction, and I am not necessarily saying this is not, then all websites would fall under the same category IF they are designed well enough to become addictive. Most games would fall under that category too. I don't think this is a good category at all. Both Meta and Google should pay simply for wasting our time here, but the "you designed your applications and websites in an addictive manner" ... that's just weird.
"I let an iPad raise my kid and now she sucks" is a wild lawsuit premise.
Usually to sue someone for causing harm, they have to actually cause the harm, it can't help hypothetical. So you see lawsuits that are like "I saw this CEO speak on TV and then I relied on this information when deciding to buy the product"
Why aren't you asking: why is it possible for an iPad to raise a child? Why is the iPad keeping the child's attention for so long? Is it not because it was designed to? Why was it designed to?
Is this a replay of the comics and video games are doing irreparable harm arguments from not too long ago?
I find myself in the uncomfortable position of sympathizing with both sides of the argument - a yes-but-no position.
Would it be ironic if Meta and Google were required to add "a landing page that displays information about responsible [social media use]" similar to their policies regarding gambling ads (example below)?
https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/15132179?hl=en
I wonder if there's something from addiction neuroscience that can be utilized as "evidence" in the legal sense; or if it's used in the process of product development. i.e. how google/meta/frito lay/P&G maximize dopamine hits in the ventral segmental area, etc
Ignoring what I think of the case itself, I hate how many headlines now are just the talking points for one side or the other in a dispute. At least try to pretend you’re being a neutral reporter rather than regurgitating what someone with an agenda says.
Anything where you scroll through posts or endlessly watch short videos is highly addictive.
If you think its not and just "similar to addiction", just try blocking these sites in your browser/phone and see how long you last before feeling negative effects.
I really have never understood this. Short form videos are no more or less interesting to me than any other. I also do not find the YouTube main page very compelling, and rarely follow the things that are suggested at the ends of videos. I certainly do not feel ill if I forget to use YouTube for a week.
The trouble with short form videos is that they lower your attention span if you are continuously watching them over a period of time, which then leaves you not wanting to watch the long-form videos any more, or do anything that requires concentration - leaving you to be a doomscrolling zombie.
I've been using YouTube for a long time, and the suggestions are usually things I find interesting.
Yeah, they are interesting. They are related to things that I have watched. But I rarely follow them. I just don't see how compelling that presentation is, how it amounts to an invitation to addiction.
YouTube classic isn't generally labeled as addictive. YouTube shorts, which emulates tiktok, is getting that label.
OK. To be honest I appreciate the information but I still can't see it. I clicked on a random short and there are no suggestions at the end of the video, it just plays the same video in a loop forever. Is an infinite loop of "FutureCanoe" making fried chicken the worst these devious cognitive hackers could do to me?
You drag your finger up to scroll to the next video whenever you want to, even immediately, if that's what you want, or when it gets boring. The algorithm is supposed to figure out how to keep your eyes glued to the screen.
The problem started when people asked about privacy, they reply with "I have nothing to hide"
That gives big techs the power to do whatever, and once power is granted, it hardly ever is revoked.
Related:
Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902512
Do they expect social media sites to show less posts of things you are interested or less posts from your friends to make you use it less. They provide good products which people like.
How do you know that people like them?
If the answer is "well, they keep using them". Then by that same definition, people like slot machines, cocaine, and over-eating junk food.
Is it a good, useful definition of "like" if it describes behavior that people feel compelled to do but are remorseful about after?
Social media sites literally have a ui affordance for liking a post.
Liking a post doesn't mean you like the app.
I made the assumption that people like interacting with things they like.
There's a difference between "things you are interested in" and "things that will make you addicted".
It’s a matter of time, it could be decades, until we shape those "engineered addiction" similarly to the Tobacco trials.
That's optimistic! I worry the attack on discourse and community has fundamentally undermined democracy.
Just ban personalized advertising and be done with it, they will do any amount of harm so long as it gets a click.
That would solve exactly zero of the complaints surfaced in this lawsuit. Companies still have an incentive to maximize app usage regardless of whether the advertising is personalized.
They will have personalized feeds for engagement and non-personalized ads, still get the addictive effect.
People aren't customers anymore. They are the resource to be mined. Advertisers are the customers.
Listen, it sounds a lot less evil when you label it "audience engagement" mmk?
All of these things they're saying are unethical, but not illegal, right?
Any tech company funded primarily by ad money is dirty.
"But if we don't engineer addiction, China will beat us to it! It's a national interest!"
Ironically, China actually mandates time limits on its addictive social media: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934
Curious how this is gonna turn out, but I'm not holding my breath.
I'd argue that we basically incentivise companies to cause harm whenever it is unregulated and profitable because the profits are never sufficiently seized and any prosecution is a token effort at best.
See leaded gas, nicotine, gambling, etc. for prominent examples.
I personally think prosecution should be much harsher in an ideal world; if a company knows that its products are harmful, it should ideally be concerned with minimising that harm instead of fearing to miss out on profits without any legal worries.
Is it really landmark tho? First it was nicotine and big tobacco, then the same addiction engineers designed ultra processed foods. Kraft, nabisco, etc all spun off by tobacco companies... Normalizing food addiction in children. And now it's screens and social media. It's the same fundamental physiology but it seems like society can't learn a lesson either.
I thought it was kind of pathetic how quickly they shoved ipads into schools with no real long term data, no research whatsoever. Just insane really. And now here we are yet again.
I am generally displeased with the way social media has evolved, but I'm not in favor of this lawsuit. It seems like a way to blame tech companies for Congress' failure to regulate businesses properly. None of the engineers involved thought of their work as a way to rot the minds of future generations. Their thought process was straightforward-
1. We sell ads to make money 2. If we keep eyeballs on our apps more than competing apps, we can increase the price for our ads and make more money 3. Should we implement limits to kick kids off the app after they've been doomscrolling for an hour? Absolutely not, that would violate our duty to our shareholder. If parents complain, we'll say they should implement the parental controls present on their phones and routers. We can't make choices to limit our income if parents don't use the tools they already have.
I'm sorry that social media has ruined so many kids' lives, but I don't think the responsibility lies with the tech companies in this case. It lies with the society that has stood by idly while kids endured cyber-bullying and committed suicide. This isn't something that happened recently- the USA has had plenty of time to respond as a society and chosen not to. Want to sue someone? Sue Congress.
Google and Meta are rational actors in a broken system. If you want to change something you should change the rules that they operate under and hold them accountable for those rules going forward. Australia (and Spain) is doing something about it- now that social media is banned for kids under 16 in those countries, if social media companies try to do anything sneaky to get around that you actually have a much stronger case.
Now if there were evidence that they were intentionally trying to get kids bullied and have them commit suicide then by all means, fine them into oblivion. But I doubt there is such evidence.
That seems like a really bad excuse to void responsibility. Consider a cigarette maker:
1. We sell cigarettes to make money
2. The more people crave cigarettes, the more money we can make
3. Should we make cigarettes less appealing to children? Absolutely not, we would make less money. Parents should just stop their kids from buying cigarettes.
Also, people in there last few decades have been using “duty to shareholders” as a way to excuse bad behavior, as if it’s a moral imperative higher than all others. I don’t really see why it would.
Cigarette companies were not penalized for making addictive drugs or doing generally immoral but technically legal things. They were penalized because the USA had set a minimum age for smoking cigarettes, and they were marketing directly to people who could not legally buy their products, and there was conclusive proof that they were targeting minors with their ads.
The DIRECT comparison from my previous comment would be if a country set a legal age requirement for accessing social media, and then you could hold the social media companies if they continued marketing to them. But for now, no such law exists in the USA. Social media has not been regulated like tobacco, because Congress has abdicated its responsibility to regulate these companies.
The jury is using words outside of their medical context in situations that do not justify the word then. In fact, most of society seems okay with this gross mis-use of the term to apply to things that don't actually manipulate incentive salience. We're going to end up with authoritarians in control of all 'screens' just because our schools have done such a bad job of explaining neuroscience. If you think handing the federal government control of all screens is a good idea in the USA you really need to look around.
I am not saying that Facebook didn't try. I am just saying that only having access to screens, they would inevitably fail. Screens are very unlike addictive drugs and cannot directly alter neurochemistry (at least not any more than a sunset or any perception does). I strongly dislike the company and have personally never created a Facebook account nor used the website.
> The jury is using words
Mostly not. That's the lawyers' job. The jury listens.
> outside of their medical context
Well, sure. It's a legal context now. The defense get to make the medical argument, if they like. I think it's a losing one.
>The jury is using words
How do you know what the jury are saying?
>outside of their medical context
That's because medicine doesn’t own the language. People do. If the jury hear words used wrongly then, as speakers of the language, they can interpret it as they wish. They are about to hear from another attorney who will say the opposite to the first one, and they will decide which was most persuasive.
> Screens are very unlike addictive drugs and cannot directly alter neurochemistry
Screens are able to show you things which give you small short dopamine hits, enough to keep you engaged enough to try get more. This is exactly how addictive drugs, gambling etc all work.
or tv which was fine for years.
It's not fine at all? Before social media the average was 28 hours a week of viewing per person, obviously a non negligible percent of people watch TV for 100% of their free time.
Modern social media is even more addictive - always with you even when you're not home, short form, customized to your tastes, you can skip videos so you no longer need to feel any pain at all.
TV is not 100% curated for your personal tastes based on your previous interactions.
It was fine for years because it was a generic service in which everybody was forced to view the same content in the same way.
They are very very different things.
There is no law that dictates these two things:
1) You can't stalk someone deliberately and persistently, using any means, or medium; even if you're a company, and even if you have good intentions.
2) You can't intentionally influence any number of people towards believing something false and that you know is against their interest.
These things need to be felony-level or higher crimes, where executives of companies must be prosecuted.
Not only that, certain crimes like these should be allowed to be prosecuted by citizens directly. Especially where bribery and threats by powerful individuals and organizations might compromise the interests of justice.
The outcome of this trial won't amount to anything other than fines. The problem is, this approach doesn't work. They'll just find different ways that can skirt the law. Criminal consequence is the only real way to insist on justice.
The probably with 2 is you then need someone to be the arbiter of truth, and the truth is often a hard thing to find. This would end up letting governments jail people they disagree with. How would you write the law to to prevent that?
I don't get what you mean? proving whether you've done something against someone's interest is already on the books for embezzlement, fraud,etc.. intention and planning are covered under many conspiracy laws. the influence part would need to be proven using internal documents, whistleblowers,etc..
The whole point of a court is to find truth. They do it all the time. Actually you would need to prove someone knew something is untrue, because it's innocent until proven guilty. You wouldn't have to prove what you said is true to get let off, just bring enough doubt to ward off your opponent's accusation of untruth.
I mean everyone knows this right? There are even leaked memos. They are public companies who need to grow revenue and they gain that revenue mostly through ads and attention.
No TikTok?
TikTok settled ahead of the trial.
They just spent so much money and political capital to steal it from those evil Chinese communists. Who would they sue? The evil Chinese communists who are too far away to enforce a judgement, or the new freedom–loving American owners who only just got it?
absolute hysteria from everyone on here
No shit
This is why we have juries.
What's amazing here is the Google and Facebook lawyers think they have a chance to persuade members of the public otherwise.
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The classic defense used by cigarette companies historically. We are just rolling up some naturally growing leaves, leaves can't be addictive. Users are responsible for diseases and addiction. We don't target minors.
> People are responsible for their choices
Yes, but also often are not actively in control of them.
People are also in control of whether or not they gamble their last dollar instead of buying some food, or whether or not they put that needle into their veins.
History has shown human nature can be dangerously out of control and people will happily destroy their own lives given the opportunity.
Therefore society tries to protect those vulnerable people with legislation.
So when does it stop? Would you support the state intervening in other situations in which people make choices of which you disapprove? Which choices would you, in your magnanimity, allow them to make?
>Which peer choices would you, in your magnanimity, allow them to make?
Thats why we have voting and a legal system which builds upon previous laws. You and I do not need to decide where the line in the sand is drawn, the majority of the population does that via the political and legal framework society has created.
> Would you support the state intervening in other situations in which people make choices of which you disapprove?
Do you think "murder should be legal" is a popular position?
> It's not possible to be "addicted" to words…
Never met a narcicist?
The state of being a narcissist, in itself, is not something that creates civil or criminal exposure. Nor is being a braggart.
Do you think it’s better to treat a symptom of a disease or treat its root cause?
You've moved the goalpost so far the sport changed.
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"It doesn't work", therefore, tyranny? Because the most important thing in the world is the state ensuring people not make bad choices? So any time the system tries something to stop them and it "doesn't work", that's a justification for increasing state power until it works?
We're talking about words and images. Addiction cannot enter the body through the eyes and ears.
Enjoy your doubleplus goodthink.
> Because the most important thing in the world is the state ensuring people not make bad choices
So you think it's fine to cheat or con somebody? Just a bad choice by the person conned?
The key thing you are missing here is that companies like Google and facebook aren't some passive actor just 'placing choices' before people.
The allegation is they are were actively working to knowingly harm for their own interests.
You pretend to be advocating for a world full of individual responsibility - yet somehow that doesn't extend to the actions of large companies or the people who run them.....
>Addiction cannot enter the body through the eyes and ears.
Please tell me what planet your from, 'cause it ain't earth.
-Addiction is a reinforcement-learning pathology driven by dopaminergic reward circuits. Sensory input alone can trigger it.
Please for god sake learn about how addiction actually works.