On the other hand, it's hard to ignore the fact that typically these people have already profited enormously from these companies and they will never have to face any sort of real ramifications or consequences for the net harm that may ultimately be brought to society.

It's one thing to be sorry, it's another to avoid being complicit in such ventures to begin with. But that's the thing... where is the incentive to "do no harm" in Silicon Valley? There isn't any.

It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the world might look like if people were held accountable indefinitely for the externalities caused by the work they conduct.

Not saying this is practical or even desirable, but clearly it would change people's priorities quite a bit. As a software dev there's very little keeping you from accepting a fat job offer from Facebook unless you happen to have a particularly strong & discerning conscious/moral code. I'd like to believe that I'd turn it down... but I'm not so sure. No wonder the world's brightest minds are working at companies like this.

Historically, the problem with indefinite liability has been government abuse and degradation of evidence (witnesses age and forget, documents are purged as part of regular scheduled maintenance, etc) which work together to create an unfair environment for the victim or perpetrator depending on the specifics of the case. Statutory limits "clear the docket" of potential cases, so to speak, which prevents the government from using an infinitely growing list of crimes and violations combined with selective enforcement to target "undesirable" or opposition elements within the populace.

I do believe that indefinite liability for felonies and fiduciary responsibilities is very desirable in a fair justice system (balanced with a case by case evaluation of future criminal potential so that people who have reformed without prison aren't too heavily punished) but I'm afraid it will require a massive societal change. A system as complex and noisy as the justice system cannot both be an underfunded afterthought and fair. Kind of like healthcare makes up almost 20% of US GDP, so too should the justice system if we are ever to properly align the incentives of management and the public. With the seemingly unstoppable pervasiveness of data collection and surveillance, it might even be practical in the future to prosecute very old crimes in a fair way as long as enough resources are dedicated to enforcement and oversight.

Unfortunately, the people who decide these things are extremely disincentivized from implementing the kind of sweeping changes we'd need.

If we need a more traditional system, then solutions to lower the %GDP of healthcare exists, as every other country in the G20 are at 12%, and kept their growth on par with inflation, unlike the US. Government spending on public safety is around 2%, on par with the rest of the G20. So fixing the former would definitely go a long way in raising the later, placing the US in a leadership position in term of fixing many other problems.

Somehow, as citizens, we need to find a way to incentivize our elected and unelected officials to do good, prioritize the majority of the population, and to take decisions that are sustainables. I don't really have a specific idea how to achieve that.

Yes, it would change peoples priorities: If this was the case (and the definition of "externalities" was broad enough to encompass "No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth") literally nothing of consequence would ever happen.

The those tropes in computer engineering about suits never getting fired for buying IBM, about legal departments wrapping everything in red tape, about bosses insisting on processes, reports and cover sheets? They are on the hook for vague 'externalities', so they cover their asses. Only when we collectively accept a certain degree of risk can progress happen.

Running for the nearest torch and pitchfork shed is not how an open, liberal society deals with adversity.

That being said I think the financial incentive immediately takes over here and as a result those innocent ideals are trampled by analytics and pure psychological nudging.

I mean I wonder what kind of self-deciting stunt Zuck has to pull each day to keep a straight face when he looks into a mirror... The situation really is just so obviously absurd.

FB could be very different from what it is today if different decisions had been made!

I don't think it would be practical to enforce, nor necessarily very fair. Would we want to, say, drag the coal miner into court over his personal contribution to global warming? The world is a tangled web of externalities and none of us would be in a moral position the throw the first stone.

That being said, there is definitely a void of responsibility in social media.

Traditional media is a useful frame of reference. Let's say that some journalist invented a totally bogus story involving a pizza restaurant, a child-sex ring, and a number of named persons. I think this journalist would be hard pressed to get this past his editor and into print, and with good reason, because the editor is responsible for the validity of the newspaper, and so is the newspaper itself. The most likely outcome would be a lawsuit which they'd lose big time.

Back to social media. Let's have a look at Facebook. This is a tech company, not a media company, so they are not really responsible for their content. The users are kind of responsible but a lot of users are fake anyway so no responsibility there either. Behind it all are The Algorithms, and The Algorithms are not really responsible either, it's just convoluted AI type stuff which no one really understands. But let's rewind a bit. Is Facebook a tech company or a media company? Being a tech company is really convenient in terms of washing their hands but should we let them get away with it? Or should we redefine them as a media company and let them own the responsibility of the content which brings in users and ad money? Could the buck land in any other place when you think about it? Sure, it would be a hassle for them, they'd have to employ a lot more people to monitor and moderate content, they'd need to put mechanisms in place for better validation of identities, and they'd be less profitable. But that would be their problem to deal with. Free passes are not always forever.

It might be a little counter intuitive but in terms of jobs it is always good to exercise some counterfactual thinking: What would happen if I didn‘t take the job? Another dev without a strong moral code would likely simply do what they are told without thinking about consequences and long-term impact. Having loud voices within FB itself (hopefully in important positions) might have a big impact! Imagine Zuckerberg getting the low-down for all of his probably well-intentioned but horribly excetued ideas BEFORE they are rolled out...

Agreed with this. It's not only nothing keeping you from it, the society would probably push you towards accepting it. It's a big popular brand so not only would you get a high salary but it would most likely include a high social status. Friends and family would think you've gone insane not accepting a good offer from Facebook and it would most likely be good career choice as well. It must be easier to get other job offers after having worked at Facebook or somewhere similar.

Deep down I think everyone knows this, you will gain economically and socially in every way and the only thing you will need to suppress is the possibility of you feeling you contribute to something less good for society. Easy choice.

And they rarely put their money where their mouth is, meaning they don't use that accumulated wealth to try and solve the issue they've helped create. Talk is cheap.

"In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease."

Amen brother. Nailed it.

I caught up with a friend the other day. He has a first class honours degree in Physics from Cambridge University. He went on to do a PhD in Quantum Mechanics. He is the smartest person I have ever met. He works for a company that trawls social media looking for "trends". This is a guy who could probably be building the warp drive, or a nuclear fusion reactor - instead he spends his days writing code that helps clients sell people shit they don't need - because that is what this insane "market" puts value on. It is a terribly toxic culture exacerbated by social media. I did a "hard break" from social media a year or two back and have never regretted the decision.

Although I like to update the quote to:

"I saw the best minds of our generation writing Snapchat filters."

Because that is where he decided to work. I imagine he could find a role elsewhere focused on the areas you mentioned if he wished with those qualifications.

I don't doubt for a second that VCs fund a shedload of shite and that the social media world has pernicious effects that we are only just starting to understand, but in your example I don't think the tech industry can be blamed for your friend wasting his life building widgets.

Guess where I am in now? Machine learning consulting, left science - doing work that finally pays my bills and gets my kids to a first-class school.

However, I have observed friends seemingly get caught in a pattern: go to a top school, so you can have a high-paying job, so you can afford to send kids to a top school, so they can get high-paying jobs, so that...

In some folks' lives, the value of the "top school" seems to have a circular definition (not true for all folks, of course). It's a little sad, because by breaking out of that pattern, many more possibilities open up (like working in important and fascinating science for lower pay).

But yes, I totally understand what you are referring to - having my kids go to a private school means we have a number of those "circular types" you described to cope with...

It is an unfortunate outcome, but how would you change the systems (e.g. capitalism) that produced this outcome?

Already done for a long time (and still doing). It does not change anything since most other people do not change their behavior.

Yes, me too. It has been a process.

> It does not change anything since most other people do not change their behavior.

I disagree. People do change their behaviour. You did. I did. There are many, many others. It's just not reached a critical mass yet, but give it time, it will. There are whole communities out there that didn't exist ten or fifteen years ago that are kicking back at the system because it gives them a better life.

Keep doing what you are doing, keep the faith, look for ways to accelerate change (something I've become increasingly interested in). It will happen.

You don't have to believe me though - research it yourself, if you want further proof that the current system is not working look at suicide rates, rates of medication use, self-medication (drugs, alcohol, food) and so on. We are living in a very sick, literally, society. Pick anyone of these and you will see trends near exponential.

I am not suggesting anything new or something that is not currently being done, right now, by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, and it does, slowly but surely, change things. I am not saying we are anywhere near there yet though.

There was a great discussion of this problem in 2007: http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...

The previous decades were all cool, and the system keeps optimizing for fun innovation but there are other issues right now

To pretend this is isolated to SV is ignorant. This is what you get in capitalism

The market is going to buy a warp-drive when someone makes it.

In my friend's case he was simply not able to get sufficient funding for his core research. In the end he gave up and got a job and I don't blame him for that.

> The market is going to buy a warp-drive when someone makes it.

It won't happen if our best brains are figuring out how to make you click on ads and concocting the most effective form of fake news. It is a massive diversion of raw talent and resources away from, say, that nuclear fusion reactor.

But also, there is much more in nursing then compassion. It reqires a lot of self control and knowledge.

I'm almost more curious about the societal consequences of young people (mostly male) being raised on abundant internet porn and its role (if any) it plays in how men emotionally and physically connect with women or other men.

Are single-player games tearing society apart? Is a deck of cards wasted on solitaire? Must all bicycles be tandem?

> single-player games

I get obsessive about some games. A completionist, one might say. And when I've achieved what I want to in the game, I suddenly wake up and realize I haven't been outside for a week and I've ignored my friends, family, and colleagues. Worst, the guilt of that realization can be so overwhelming that I am tempted to ignore it and simply start another game that takes over my consciousness.

I've observed similar behavior in some others. It was most obvious among World of Warcraft (WoW) players when I went to university. I knew more than a handful of WoW players who dropped out of school because they found their in-game social circle more important than just about everything else in their lives. Rather than studying or going out, they needed to be present for the next raid (WoW session).

You'll observe that in more than just porn and games, you'll observe it in life in general. In fact for a lot of people that's the definition of a mid-life crisis: Suddenly waking up, realizing that you've been wasting your life slaving at a job you don't like, to make money that pays for things you don't own which you only have to offset how shitty your job makes you feel.

If your doctor told you right now, "you have exactly two weeks to live", would your life be unchanged for the next two weeks, or would you suddenly wake up and think "Holy hell, what have I been doing for the past age(self) years?"

Another obligatory Fight Club reference.

> “ Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off. ”

It could be video games, but it could be lots of hobbies, or work, or a new relationship, etc.

I say that have started play WoW again after several years off and dumping Reddit this evening.

Both of the can be enjoyable places and there are some really good Reddit communities, but it can be be just as addictive.

That is one reason why I have always avoided MMOs. I may obsess over a single player game for a few weeks, but there is always an end.

I never did end up learning magic tricks or real archery, but I did go onto Duolingo and learn German. Kaj Esperanto. Και Ελληνικα…

On the flip side, though, when I'm not playing as part of one of these sessions, I like my relationship with the game. Especially, it's a great way of keeping in touch with a friend long-distance, which is normally something I struggle with[2].

[1]: In the colloquial, not medical, use of the word.

[2]: Somewhat, I also put less effort into long- distance friendships by choice; putting in lots of effort to keep in contact with someone who I wouldn't otherwise interact with becomes a chore and I don't get as much out of it. Since I would still be gaming otherwise, this doesn't become a chore, and regularly using voice chat makes it even better, compared to a game like scrabble where it's just text. (This part not being unique to League, of course; any other real time team game would do the same).

http://psych.utoronto.ca/users/tafarodi/psy427/articles/Owen...

Conclusion for the lazy :

Increased access to the Internet by adolescents has created unprecedented opportunities for sexual education, learning, and growth. Conversely,the risk of harm that is evident in the literature has led researchers to investigate adolescent exposure to online pornography in an effort to elucidate these relationships. Collectively, these studies suggest that youth who consume pornography may develop unrealistic sexual values and beliefs. Among the findings, higher levels of permissive sexual attitudes, sexual preoccupation, and earlier sexual experimentation have been correlated with more frequent consumption of pornography. Researchers have had difficulty replicating these results, however, and as a result the aggregate literature has failed to indicate conclusive results. Nevertheless, consistent findings have emerged linking adolescent use of pornography that depicts violence with increased degrees of sexually aggressive behavior. The literature does indicate some correlation between adolescents’ use of pornography and self-concept. Girls report feeling physically inferior to the women they view in pornographic material, while boys fear they may not be as virile or able to perform as the men in these media. Adolescents also report that their use of pornography decreased as their self-confidence and social development increase. Additionally, research suggests that adolescents who use pornography, especially that found on the Internet, have lower degrees of social integration, increases in conduct problems, higher levels of delinquent behavior, higher incidence of depressive symptoms, and decreased emotional bonding with caregivers.

I personally think it’s completely natural to have such urges and to cave to them. In fact, for men specifically there are some benefits in keeping the system well lubricated (pun not intended). It’s just something one has to moderate.

Additionally, i have noted that people’s expectations of their desired partner is usually skewed from what they see in porn.

Porn is hardly the only - or even the main - driver of this, though. Look around you: you'll see billboards, magazines, TV commercials, banner ads, etc. etc. basically a plethora of images showing gorgeous women. Compared to that, porn's effect on men's partner expectations is probably negligible (unless it's for specifically sexual attributes like whether they shave their genitalia).

I have seen no evidence in myself or my friends that porn affected our expectations for our partners.

The numbers I’ve seen about sex-trafficking ruins all porn for me.

I never used to feel that way until internet-awareness woke me to it.

I don't think adopting either far end of the spectrum view of womens' sexuality is healthy. On one hand you have people who think less of women (putting it lightly) who are sexually active, and on the other people who treat them like they're children and believe there's no way they could be enjoying themselves as performers and that someone must be forcing them into it.

Women aren't any different from men wrt sex - some like to have a lot, some a little, some with different people, some outdoors, some with members of the same sex, and some with members of both sexes. Like green eggs and ham, kinda.

Secondly, what pattern? Dogs (and TIL dolphins) hump random things; hyenas are (in human terms) femdom sadomasochists; the male antechinus gets horny once in their life, then has as much sex as possible before dying of exhaustion; female ferrets literally die if they don’t have sex; bonobos have sex pretty much as a way of saying “hello”, “sorry”, or as a social favour; and pandas famously don’t mate enough for their own survival.

Herin lies the problem with moral crusading. I feel awesome after watching internet porn. Keep your opinions from bleeding into others' rights.

Well then... wait til you try cocaine!

Point being, because it is a matter of prudence on the part of civil authorities, I am not claiming that people have the right to these things as hedonists are wont to claim.

Some people can “handle” porn in that they don’t experience any negative effect from it. Some, unfortunately, cannot.

I now see frequent posts on /r/relationships about porn problems on various level.

It turns out that a small subset of humanity is incapable of controlling themselves regardless of the medium and all that really matters is how destructive the activity is when abused.

I'll be amazed if people are dating in 5 years at this rate.

Abstract:

Traditional factors that once explained men’s sexual difficulties appear insufficient to account for the sharp rise in erectile dysfunction, delayed ejaculation, decreased sexual satisfaction, and diminished libido during partnered sex in men under 40. This review (1) considers data from multiple domains, e.g., clinical, biological (addiction/urology), psychological (sexual conditioning), sociological; and (2) presents a series of clinical reports, all with the aim of proposing a possible direction for future research of this phenomenon. Alterations to the brain's motivational system are explored as a possible etiology underlying pornography-related sexual dysfunctions. This review also considers evidence that Internet pornography’s unique properties (limitless novelty, potential for easy escalation to more extreme material, video format, etc.) may be potent enough to condition sexual arousal to aspects of Internet pornography use that do not readily transition to real-life partners, such that sex with desired partners may not register as meeting expectations and arousal declines. Clinical reports suggest that terminating Internet pornography use is sometimes sufficient to reverse negative effects, underscoring the need for extensive investigation using methodologies that have subjects remove the variable of Internet pornography use. In the interim, a simple diagnostic protocol for assessing patients with porn-induced sexual dysfunction is put forth.

Essentially, yes, Porn on the internet seems to be a 'serious' problem in that it affects relationships and personal health in a measurably negative way.

But if you want some studies:

https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/brain-scan-studies-porn-user...

I'm raised with internet porn and I don't believe I have a problem. Why should I be banned from watching something I enjoy?

I don't buy the crap about porn changing people. Sure you can say that for yourself if you got addicted but you can't just throw that out as a general truth. Porn has been around for a long time now and I don't really see people behaving different today.

I see this said a lot but it's never described in what ways porn changes this, other than men suffering from sexual disfunction.

I would argue we simply live in a world where many people are frustrated, scared, unhappy or just bored. To change how they behave online we don‘t just have to police online better but affect social change in our physical realities. Change the dogma for what it means to be successful. Move from for-profit to for-positive-impact. Teach the benefits of cooperation + friendly competition over battle royale. Such change will carry over to the net. Imagine FB moving away from advertising and for-profit motives to a for-positive-impact poly-centric community governed network for communities, I bet people would behave differently there...

Discontent would be expressed somewhere, but yah, it's definitely encouraged to escape (no friction!) through Internet discussion.

If you come to this conclusion, you are living in a deep filter bubble in your real life. I often say to people (in Germany): Just go to work by tram at a later time (when hardly any people use the tram to go to work) and you will see how large amounts of "ordinary" people really are/look like.

So maybe your local culture is somehow worst then the rest of Germany?

By tying the things you say to you, and your reputation among your actual peers, you're more likely to think twice before posting something needlessly hurtful or provocative.

The ability to act anonymously online is obviously important in many contexts, such as seeking mental health advise or indulging in strange yet benign hobbies. But for political speech, communities requiring real names would seem preferable.

Take the other side of the issue. Anonymity means people can discuss controversial views without concern for what other people might think of them for holding such views. So for instance, consider Nazi Germany. The Nazis were never actually particularly popular in Germany [1] but managed to obtain a stranglehold in power largely because they made people afraid to say otherwise. It was difficult for people to speak against the Nazi party when all it took was saying such things to the wrong person to end up getting 'disappeared.' Without the ability to completely suppress free speech, the Nazis likely would not have managed to obtain power - and certainly not to maintain it.

And the above is something that is a constantly recurring theme in history. Those that would do bad things enable their actions by making people scared or otherwise unable to speak against said actions. This should sound familiar given recent events. It's increasingly seeming that sexual abuse is something that is completely systemic in Hollywood. But the powers that be were protected by the fact that their victims were unable to speak out. For instance Weinstein managed to kill a New York Times article that was being written about his abuse, 13 years ago. And in the past accusers of people like him would be putting much more than "just" their livelihood in jeopardy. But the internet allows these people to come together, have a much larger voice, and indirectly protect themselves and also substantiate their claims. A few isolated claims can be explained away - dozens, if not hundreds, of claims cannot.

I would argue that what we're seeing is an evolution of society, with some growing pains. Ultimately being upset about what somebody says on the internet is pretty pointless. I mean really we all should be seeing things that we disagree with, fundamentally and vehemently. If people were honest in real life - this would also be the case. I do not think that people censoring themselves, or making themselves somebody they are not, for the sake of social conformity is a positive trait. Yes it spares peoples feelings and helps things get along, but a social consensus (which defines our state of society) built on falsehoods and invisible pressure is no consensus at all. The reason the civil rights movement succeeded is because it happened long before the civil rights movement, as we know it, actually happened. The masses had long since changed their views, but social pressures prevented discussion of such.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15841818

like most graffiti in real life really. words usually don't materialize

> He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.

http://www.socialcapital.com/portfolio/

19 Enterprise software companies

10 Financial services companies

5 consumer companies

including companies like this: https://www.bustle.com/about

These companies are focusing on "real problems"?

6 Education

3 "Frontier"

13 Healthcare

That seems like a pretty healthy mix. By only providing select points of the complete picture, aren't you contributing to the problem he's describing?

> That seems like a pretty healthy mix.

Yes, these guys are very good investors, no doubt. As a fellow capitalist I too would have made the same bets. But that has nothing to do with my point - which is the vision of the fund is inconsistent with what I would consider the vision of the majority of the companies that are invested in.

> aren't you contributing to the problem he's describing?

How so?

"NEW FORCE IN MEDIA

...

Whether you’re searching for what’s happening in politics, what’s streaming this weekend, where to find size-inclusive clothing, ways to give back, or how much coffee to put in your coffee, we’re here to help you explore every topic that interests you."

From http://www.bustle.com/about

If you listen to the talk he says many times "Get the Money" then focus on the real problems

The key here is you have to get the money first, then you have the power and resources to make social change and fix the real problems

So his mix of investments does not have to 100% "real problems" like climate change, his (stated) goal is to get capital from those other projects and use that to fund other companies that focus on "Real Problems"

Oh well.

Chamath makes a very good point. Basically that the same brain you are using to respond to constant interruption from social media and its feedback loops is the same brain you are using to do supposedly great works. The former tasks train you brain to think in a pattern that is opposite to the way needed to do meaningful work. In other words, social media products "machine teach" your brain whether you like it or not. Take back control.

Boy they would send me emails with one-liner teasers of my friends posts hoping I would go back. They even sent me an email with one-click to immediately activate my account. So I simply filtered these emails to the trash.

They have texted me twice so far but I simply ignored it.

Been few months and it’s much better now.

> Same here. But different people value different things out of relationships. I prefer to have a handful of people close to me and don't seek out daily updates on everyone else.

> In fact, I enjoy running into those people or meeting up with them periodically even more because then they can tell me everything they've been going through in person. To me that's more fun than getting a stream of micro updates on everyone.

Keeping up-to-date with multiple people using FB is like trying to watch multiple shows in one line snippets concurrently mixed together. When you could just wait a bit and then watch it all as a contiguous story or have a real meaningful conversation with a person to catch up over dinner or something.

To his point, you've demonstrated the lack of patience and diligence he laments as a product of social media.

>"Responsible for overseeing core growth components, building new systems to maximize adoption and virality and growing Facebook adoption throughout the world."

Then he's quoted in the article saying:

>"The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

Yes its a global problem sir, why wouldn't it be? This was exactly your mission according to your LinkedIn summary.

It's interesting that these folks never seem to have moments or self-reflection or concerns for the greater good while they are sitting in strategy meetings and taking these company's money and stock options. How convenient for him that he can now make such headline-grabbing pronunciations for his own self-promotion.

However, what makes you decide to espouse this one rather than the one where he was younger and more naive, worked at the sausage factory for a while, and eventually realized the magnitude and dishonesty of what he was overseeing?

Both seem equally probable.

The issue has been gotten plenty of attention without him.

The HN crowd tends to be dismissive of social media (a lot of "get off my lawn types" around here), but I came from the world of BBSes, and to me social media is simply an evolution of what BBSes were. For years I tried to figure out how to reproduce the sense of community that BBSes brought about, but never found the right niche. Then I realized Facebook was actually a evolved version of a BBS.

I am friends on social media with complex people (who understand nuance) who tend to use social media carefully. They use it to share events, describe experiences (in pictures and words), and once in a while write insightful status messages. They usually don't have extreme views, and tend to debate issues in an even-handed way. I find being on social media with these folks to be enriching because I get to learn a thing or two.

If you follow the right folks on Twitter, you'll get to overhear a lot of conversations about the important issues in Python, R, or what have you, and gain a context that eludes most people who learn programming languages from books. Social media is good for that.

Less complex people tend to share on whatever they found on Reddit, their favorite political website or whatever trashy site that supports their preconceived notions. They tend not to write a lot of prose, and when they do it's not very well-thought out. Many of our older less tech-savvy relatives tend to fall into this category. We tolerate these people because we're related to them, but they are the ones who use social media in a somewhat unhelpful fashion. And before social media they found entertainment in forwarding fake news emails without verifying them on Snopes. But we mostly dismiss them because their believability factor is low anyway.

In the middle are the really dangerous folks, the really intelligent but extremely partisan folks. I won't name names, but if you follow certain celebrities in the AI world, they will often share partisan and unexamined articles that reveal their political bias. You would think the more intelligent someone is, the more of a critical thinker they would be, but it turns out that most people who are good at one thing aren't usually good at everything.

Beyond the very basic fact that people sometimes communicated with each other over BBSes, there is absolutely no comparison between them and what is happening right now.

Facebook is different. It is a scaffold built around your existing relationships. Like a scaffold, it appears to support that fundamental structure.

But unlike a scaffold, it tries to shape the underlying structure. Unlike a BBS, whose constraint was enabling people to access, it is optimized to maximize consumption of itself.

Facebook can be a community, and used to be more community like, but it’s designed to be something entirely different.

When the entirety of a platform is created with the intent to addict you, and ever color, line, word, behavior is designed with that intent, you have to be particularly strong-willed to resist it, much less even to notice it. Subtlety is the key, and these systems are getting very very good at making you believe you are willingly participating when really, you just can't make yourself stop.

Facebook has a place, and the way you've described your use of it is a great example. I try very hard to use it in much the same way.

But for most people, there's a great line I loved from Stargate SG-1 all those years ago that describes the path they must take to having a healthy life where social media is concerned:

"The only way to win is to deny it battle."

I've tried this a few times, but discoverability on Twitter is impossible. I don't know who's an authority, digging through someone's past posts is hard, following a discussion is really difficult. It feels like I'm tasked with digging through a SMS chat log looking for content. Am I just doing it wrong? I can't keep up with twitter. I follow 20-30 accounts and inevitably every time I open up the app and there's 600+ unread posts. I couldn't imagine following any more than that.

For instance, in R you will want to follow Hadley Wickham (tidyverse), figure out who replies to his threads and build out your list from there.

In Python, I started off following folks whose PyCon talks I liked. Certain names come up often in the Python world, names like Dave Beazley, Raymond Hettinger, Wes McKinney, Jake VanderPlas, etc. I started there and built out my list.

I'll admit some days there is low signal to noise because lots of folks interleave their technical tweets with tweets about their personal lives or tweets of (sometimes very funny) jokes. But I accept it because life is like that. When you meet people at a social gathering, you can only talk shop for so long. Software development is as much sociology as it is code slinging. It's often as important to know why (the motivations, use cases) something is done a certain way as it is how it is done (algorithms). There is explicit knowledge, and there is tacit knowledge, and the latter is harder to mine but gives one a deeper understanding of the whys as opposed to the hows.

Yes it is easily to be overwhelmed, but that is the price one pays for picking the brains of people who build the tools you use every day. Once in a while you pick up something valuable which makes it all worthwhile.

On consumption side, even if someone creates a long and thoughtful well-balanced post, on Facebook it's likely to be hidden with a "see more" link after the first sentence or two, so long and thoughtful doesn't get as heavy of distribution as short, witty and too often simplistic.

On creation side, the single-line text-field does not encourage a long and thoughtful point-by-point debate either, it's designed for "omg, lol, this sucks" type of feedback.

IME, many intelligent, successful people are merely manipulated in a different way, by appealing to their egos. They don't believe they are vulnerable to manipulation; they believe that they can detect if someone is lying and that if something is persuasive to them then it meets a high standard.

I've known salespeople who sell to the wealthy and successful; it's just a different sales pitch, AFAICT.

Sadly MSM did not help us in that matter as they adopted the "get it out first" and "clicks are the only thing that matters" point of view.

Finally I put a lot of blame on the Murdoch/Fox propaganda machinery which was very good at getting out media which was specifically designed to confirm the hateful opinions of their audience. It made it possible for people to embrace "double-think" - distrust of media while at the same time trust in their media.

If you create a product that is both an echo chamber for reinforcing your beliefs, while also tricking you into believing fake news, and a huge percent of the population is negatively effected by that - can you really keep blaming the people instead of the product?

Yes. Freedom of the press/media is an agreement that as adults we individuals are responsible for our own consumption.

Anything less is an extremely slippery slope usually leading to some form of official 'Ministry of Truth' which, in the current political regime, would be Fox.

I think that's a fair agreement for traditional media. Commercial social media, though, uses psychological research to optimize engagement and promote addiction. That is to say, that they are actively working around individual responsibility. Are adults as individuals responsible for their own cigarette consumption? Somewhat, but not entirely.

I don't think the solution is anywhere near requiring the commercial social networks to regulate content. I think that would produce the worst possible outcome. I think a better approach would be along the lines of banning optimization for engagement, requiring chronological timelines, or user-controlled, transparent timeline algorithms.

And ultimately, the goal needs to be to replace commercial social media with decentralized social media.

I can say a social media site is bad and it's creators should feel bad, and that's just another kind of critique. The critique might shape the behaviours of those who read the critique, and are able to reflect on whether the social media site is worthy of their time.

You're on Facebook, you have a baby, you post photos of your child on Fb and he/she becomes an entity in Fb's database. Your child grows up and eventually creates his own Fb/whatsApp/Instagram/whatever account and the cycle continues with his own children. This is just the beginning, folks.

However, that is related to the point you made.. though you seem to be trying to write it off as a non-concern by using the 8 year old with a pony example.

To your point, I wonder what happens to people psychologically when they have to be ‘on’ all the time. We’ve built up too much of a culture of judgementalism and one of the aspects of recording everything is that everyone knows your business. It’s like living in a small town. Which, incidentally, a lot of people move to the city so they could just be treated as a random person when they go into a store instead of Betty and Charlie’s boy.

Not saying I disagree with the overall position, but I feel like there's always something to point to that is "ripping apart society"...

Rock and roll was mostly deviating from the mainstream and going against some religiously motivated moral ideas, which is an idiotic reason to be afraid of something. TV absolutely did and still does rot people's brains, so to speak, because that is actually the goal of some of the actors behind it, and similarly for the antisocial networks of today.

I feel like this is where we are headed with social media now.. That's all..

I remember my early days on BBS's and IRC, when if you were an idiot you got called out for it. It was a generally more hostile atmosphere with less patience for idiocy, which at first doesn't seem like a positive, but by creating rules like the one HN foisted with little user input on us of arbitrary enforcement of "don't be unecessarily negative", I feel we actually create a worse space by coddling users. The same applies for users self-coddling via filter-bubbles they put on themselves, or filter-bubbles imposed on them by whatever company. (for example, reddit censorship and manipulation has been getting out of hand for years, and it's obvious they have been angling towards IPO, which will be their death I hope.)

This is why I still like irc and usenet to this day.

The secondary rot of social media is the surveillance dystopia it has created and is enabling.

Everyone I know who still is used by the service always reports their experience as some variation of outrage, gossip, fake news, distraction, attention draining, rumor, innuendo, hearsay, time wasting, conflict, narcissism, vanity, boasting, egotism, or at best some ultra staged portraiture intended to signal how wonderful someones life is in a completely artificial self-selected setting. Does any of that sound like a good thing?

Was there not a 60 minutes on this topic?

I wonder if being addicted to a smart phone will actually be a disease in the future.

Huxley

I can’t overstate how much of a positive change this has been for me. It was a level of life altering freedom and a return of free time and mental clarity in the ballpark of abstaining from alcohol.

The number of times it has inconvenienced me is precisely once. I still have messenger for those people who like to reach out that way. I still can log on and see events and notifications.

But the addictive news feed is gone from my life and I couldn’t be happier.

That’s my n=1 but I will never go back.

I really don't understand the point of stating your real identity on a social media. Internet security is already not perfect to this day, so what's the point? Facebook doesn't even let you meet new people outside your network, or even interact with friends of your friends in a trustful manner.

4chan is like the local pub, facebook is like a bar where everyone has their name and interests written on their face. Evidently 4chan seems more natural.

4chan is like a pub without regulars. You can't go there to meet specific people.

But what if social media, or some aspect of it, or online porn had the same cognitive, emotional, and/or physical effects on people as heroin? In fact, isn't that what online businesses spend so much on, and a generation of smart people work so hard on - addictive engagement? If someone developed engagement that powerful, do you think they'd stop themselves and say, 'this is too much'?

My point is not that social media and online porn have the same effects as heroin; they do not. Whatever their effects, they are at least different. My point is that we shouldn't dismiss their danger based on our preconceptions about the medium by which their effects are delivered.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook...

We simply have two nations with radically different belief systems in one nation.

The third one believes both those two belief systems suck.

According to voting data, the third system has more believers than the others.

Facebook is nothing like that anymore, and while there's certainly a lot that's changed, I think there are two specific things that turned it into what it is now.

1) Every single thing you do; posting videos, sharing your thoughts via text, leaving comments, joining a group, etc. runs on a point system. Everything is scored via "likes", and not only do you evaluate how good a post was based on the score it receives, but Facebook does too. The higher the score the higher your post will appear in other people's feeds and the more friends it will be shown to. Facebook even shows a post to a subset of your friends to judge how well it will perform, and if it receives a lot of likes it will be pushed out to a broader audience. You are, quite literally, playing a game.

Not only does that change your value system from "hey I found something that <friend> would like and I'm going to share it with them so we can talk about it" to "hey I found something that will get me a lot of points"; it also means that trivial content rises to the top. Cat pictures are kinda-neat to everyone but not extremely meaningful to anyone, while a thoughtful post on a specific topic probably doesn't appeal to everyone, but it will mean a lot to a few people. But with the one-vote-per-person rule, the thoughtful post gets buried.

2) Advertisements displace real content. YouTube, for all it's other flaws, has a very straightforward ad model. Ads essentially just piggyback on videos. If you make a really good video that means that lots of people will want to watch it, lots of ads can be shown, you get lots of views, and all three parties are happy without interfering with each other's interests. With Facebook, ads don't piggyback on other content, they replace it. If you are a company and you want to advertise yourself, you make a post and then pay have Facebook show it to more people and place it higher in their news feeds. Real content gets pushed down. And what's worse, there's no real distinction between ads and content. I believe you can even pay to boost your own posts, even as a normal user.

I think that there are going to be problems with any social platform, but Facebook is gross. It's a social game that exploits people's natural behaviors and ways of thinking, and does it without them realizing it to make a profit.

The problem is the idea of a "social platform".

We need social technology, not social platforms. We need technology that allows people to communicate and share, but we don't need a middleman that is semantically involved in any of this. Telephone networks don't care about the content of your calls, they simply allow you to talk to people. Parks and pubs don't have people who monitor what you are talking about, they simply provide you with a place to meet.

That is what the internet and technology building on it should provide.

Oh, it's good that he at least doesn't have a direct, personal financial interest in saying the things he does to the audience he's addressing.

Watch the interview.

https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk

He also pontificates and chastises social media yet he is a prolific on twitter.

This is a pretty absurd comment that would only really fly on a place like HN.

I too struggle with knowledge that I am bright, but that I may not be quite bright enough to be what I really want. Its a frustrating and lonely thought many of us in this field share. Expressing it though - even writing it in a public forum - is often an invite to the social monsters that prowl around here to say "then you obviously aren't that bright". Don't listen. Walk your path.

Just do your best and understand that luck and good timing means more than hard work and brilliance (ask any lotto winner). To say anything else is a like a banner ad for survivorship bias. None of us matter much in the scheme of things and all radical ideas are seen as trash to those "in the know" at some point.

I've started to grow disillusioned with the tech industry, how different is it from Wall Street at this point? I've grown a lot as a designer, a developer, a writer, a salesman but now I'm only interested in earning an honest living, not so much to 'save the world' like I felt when I was 20. It's tempting though, I struggle with the fact that I may live and die on this world without having had much consequence on anything. Yet I'm beginning to realize that in the end, all we may leave behind as a species is a lot of plastic, crumbling buildings, cigarette butts, and toxic landfills. There is the slight chance that we expand beyond the Earth but judging from geopolitics, I'm not sure we have our priorities right at the most critical time in human history.

I'm afraid that I am too meek to swim with the sharks and in the event I do succeed, then I have to be ready for the day when someone from my past will get jealous and exaggerate something from my past to some desperate media outlet trying to get views. I would much rather buy a cabin in the mountains and grow my own food, enjoy the simple things that have always made me happy. I'm content with a camper van, working remotely, and seeing what's left of the National Parks with my camera and my dog. I'm at the point now where I don't even think I want to get married or have kids, this is where I'm at age 27.

Isn't that impostor syndrome (something I've read about here like 100 times)?