I've been following Tristan Harris's work since he released Time Well Spent. I think he has a legitimate complaint, but his proposed solutions are terrible. For example, he suggests to Facebook:
> Imagine we replace the Comment button with a Let’s Meet button. When we want to post something controversial, we can have the choice to say, “Hey let’s talk about this” in person, not online.
Why would Facebook, or any "attention seeking" Internet company for that matter, do this? You can even tell the interviewer is skeptical. If he had suggested, say, that we should take our business to consumer companies whose business models don't rely on attention grabbing, that would've at least been a start. Instead he suggests we "become more self-aware" and "transform design." Which consumers should become self-aware? Why would entrenched companies change their design? The idealism is nice and all, but so far I think this has been a wasted opportunity to fix a real problem. The messaging could be far more specific and realistic. But at least we're talking about it.
FWIW, Facebook and messaging have not hijacked my mind anywhere near as thoroughly as HN and Reddit have. It's always fascinating to see such moral outrage about addictive internet companies on these far more addictive platforms.
What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time. To its credit, HN at least provides noprocrast.
> What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time.
This is exactly what I do.
I wrote a system that reads from multiple RSS feeds and screen scrapes non-rss sources into RSS feeds. Every article goes through some basic tagging before being indexed in a personal Elasticsearch instance and archived on-disk (my "personal Google").
Every morning I get an email with content filtered based on tags, prioritized based on my interests and upvotes (where applicable), and coarsely aggregated by theme (mostly for politics). I limit myself to 30 minutes of reading for each update, forcing myself to conscientiously prioritize. I occasionally click to the HN comments, but avoid Reddit like the plague.
Actionable articles get added to OmniFocus, but only if I will take action. Informative articles get added to Evernote, but only if I will reference them in the future.
It's imperfect, but still scratches that cave-man itch to constantly check the environment for new signals - I trust my software to do so on my behalf. Funneling content into action-items and references keeps me otherwise focused on doing things instead of reading things.
(I also abandoned Facebook/Twitter/etc because their mix of news/entertainment/communication was addictive - all I need is communication)
Not yet, but I'm actively working on it... my employer's FOSS policy is that all personal projects must receive corporate sign-off before they published.
This sounds absolutely fantastic. I've been thinking about similar workflows for years but I've been thinking about it more from the UI end; distilling as much information I deal with on a daily bases into a common UI paradigm like a feed or just email.
I've actually been wondering if it might not be a good idea for HN to be time-delayed in some way.
I've noticed that with hot-topic issues (like the Google memo), there's usually a flurry of divisive, and in my opinion uninformed and low-quality discussion over multiple submission, followed by (somewhat) more informed and reasonable discussion when the initial outrage dies down.
I wouldn't know what the best way to implement this would be, though. A community guideline? A 'too hot, let it cool down' button for users with a certain amount of karma? Active moderation?
I don't spend a lot of time on either site (HN or FB), and zero on Reddit. However, HN is apparently more engaging, since I make more comments.
My FB stream mostly consists of inane things that other people have clicked "like" on, and if FB thinks those are the things that interest me the most, they are failing big time.
I believe this reflects more on you than the platforms. The phrase "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people" seems applicable to HN (ideas), Reddit (events), and Facebook (people).
That sounds a little arrogant, but is my general experience. I see this in the submissions and comments where HN demands thought out posts. Jokes or comments that do not contribute are rarely at the top and often removed, while the opposite is true of jokes on Reddit (in general)
Having been an insider on at least two topics where the HN comments section consensus is confident and authoritative-sounding and detailed but way off the mark, I'm beginning to doubt this. (Not going to say which topics).
The "avoid gratuitous negativity" policy has helped, but we are still very much in a place of "most negative opinion wins" which pushes some discussions way off of reality. And those are just the ones I know about.
Turns out that sounding smart or righteously indignant (or usually, both) doesn't make something correct. Just a weird rabbit hole of darkly gratifying negativity. I guess I'm waking up to the fact that our flavor of "discussing ideas" might not actually be that more high-minded than Reddit or Facebook.
I'm not sure exactly how to quantify it. I think you'd have to look only at public discussions of IT-related topics on other sites, since that's all that's in scope for Hacker News. Facebook suffers with a clunky forum system that doesn't do threading particularly well, so you end up with a "flat" discussion with a lot of duplicate comments. I don't have a lot of confidence in the "like" moderation system either. I hope that's not gratuitous negativity. Example: https://www.facebook.com/arstechnica/posts/10154966971473753
Reduce HN's frontpage from 30 threads to 10 (then three interesting threads become one) and stop pages loading so fast; they need to become slower (I'm sure people have ideas how to achieve that).
> What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time.
Holy Usenet Batman.
This is exactly what I did when I had to pay per minute of dial up. Still ended up spending hours in front of a computer.
The only adaptation I can really see working in the long term is being very conscious of our behaviour, and simply not doing it. The choice to do or do not open a new tab and type news.yc.. in the URL bar is always your own.
Historically, this approach to addiction has performed poorly. You're not wrong, but this also isn't very useful.
I have found that putting some friction in front of the unconscious "tabbing to timewasting site" habit is really useful while trying to get something done.
> Why would Facebook, or any "attention seeking" Internet company for that matter, do this? You can even tell the interviewer is skeptical. If he had suggested, say, that we should take our business to consumer companies whose business models don't rely on attention grabbing, that would've at least been a start. Instead he suggests we "become more self-aware" and "transform design."
I think a lot of people are reluctant to take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion: that we've made a monstrous and unconscionable mistake.
Recognizing that mistake for what it is demands that we own our parts in its genesis and solution. Neither will be terribly profitable.
Still, the grain of truth that consumers themselves could radically change the landscape by changing their habits is not wrong. It's just not realistic either. The entire point of hyper-metrics-driven mobile and web app design is to figure out what makes users do what YOU want, not what they would normally do.
I think you will be less pessimistic if you asked yourself who this "we" is that made an uncosionable mistake. Each of us is an individual who can contribute to, but not control the whole of society. We often vent frustration on forums like this when the conversation is about solving public problems.
I'd say the "grain" of truth a about consumers being able to change the landscape by changing their habits is exactly right. It might be unrealistic for everyone to do it en masse (though such things have happend in the past and will happen again). But it is entirely realistic for indivduals the landscape around themselves.
For example I don't glue myself to my phone, and am no longer on Facebook so I can't bring myself to care much about the evil things that Facebook is said to be doing on peoples phones.
Certainly I've been guilty of it. It's part of why I'm so careful about who I work for.
I'm proud at least that we recognzed and stopped that behavior early on my project. But I didn't question the instructions I was given very directly without help from others, which I'm a bit ashamed of.
> Recognizing that mistake for what it is demands that we own our parts in its genesis and solution
I have many tremendously-fun discussions with my friends on Facebook. On current events, philosophy, their most-recent research paper or gadget or patent. A lot of social media hand-wringing involves people (a) treating unfiltered public commentary as person discourse and/or (b) under-filtering their feeds, thereby turning what should be a personal space into one dominated by unfiltered public commentary.
I suppose the quality of what you see in FB depends greatly on what sort of people you are connected to and how you relate to them. Perhaps I'd have found those discussions interesting too, but they aren't part of the open web, and my FB experience is completely different.
On the other hand, what you see in HN is what everybody else sees, it's not hidden and you can selectively read and comment about what you find interesting.
We need to build the "social network for people who are intelligent, non attention seeking, and want to discuss, socialize, and organize things".
a) no profile picture albums; no one gets to evaluate you based on what you choose to show off about your lifestyle, friends, the stuff you own, the fun you have, the trips you take, the people you date, whatever; those pictures may be interesting but it really is irrelevant to this network while being primarily attention-seeking, and is also the main source of anxiety and depression (especially for young people) related to using FB today. Obviously pictures of you or others pertinent to a discussion are fine, as is having a profile picture, just no concept of photo albums for the profile or otherwise.
b) there would have to be UI and features for organizing the entire network around discussions, wrt what's on your feed, what posts look like, how you interact with others, how you launch or join discussions, etc.
c) again, it's more than a HN with your real identity, it's still a social network, you still organize events, you still check in about things going on with each other, but "launch discussion" or "join discussion" are the primary features, not a generic "share", "update status", "like", "tag", "browse album" etc. Overall it's oriented around insights and mind more than stuff, lifestyle, and impulse thinking.
How? It's not randos, it's your actual connections. It's engineered and marketed as a replacement for FB, as the way to stay connected and engaged with your personal network, that erases what gets people depressed about with FB, that is not premised on FB's or Instagram's or whatever's modes of attention seeking.
Exactly. If his hypothesis is correct and we are better off without these attention-seeking platforms, then the true solution lies in building platforms that are better for humanity and migrating as consumers to these healthier platforms. Instead he's just groveling for CEOs of platform comeanies to issue some edict that will transform their business model and health metrics overnight to something that is less about attention and more about.. social value? Last time I checked shareholders and your bottom line don't care about social value unless that is the product you're in the business of providing. It's not Facebook's job to help me be a good person and frankly I don't want them pretending it is. If I want to meet you for beers and politics I'll make that happen, not Facebook.
I'm not particularly interested in finding the intersection of social health and Facebook's bottom line. But in terms of a theoretical social network:
What about just using client-based PoW to indicate how "loudly" one wishes to speak their post?
Casual posts probably would benefit very little. But at least fake news generators would have to pay some money if they want to get clicks by making your uncle angry.
Moreover, these companies exist in a market, and the proposal is a candy vs vegetables trade-off. If you only give people vegetables, it doesn't matter how much better it is for them, they'll leave and go to the person selling candy.
Having ancient phones for which is a PITA to use any social apps can also be pretty helpful. I'm still using my iPhone4 (it can still take great pictures), but I cannot longer use Instagram on it (no big loss), WhatsApp stopped functioning about 2 year ago (that was not that good at first but I got used to it) and the FB app is slow as hell. If someone messages me on FB I only conjure up the courage and patience to open FB in my browser after half an hour or so, and only if it looks like it's anything that needed a quick response (from the preview). HN still works and for reddit I need to use the i.reddit.com version, but I visit these 2 websites less and less from my phone (it really drains the battery). I carry a book with me everywhere I go, though, that makes up for me not using the phone anymore.
How would you keep in touch with a hypothetical friend who you cannot text because they live in another country and doesn't prefer email?
For most people, social media isn't strictly a necessity but it's essential for keeping in touch with friends, long distance family, and to see what's going on with those friends, e.g. events. So stating "deleting social media is the only answer" is counterproductive because it's a non-solution.
Not going into the 'social media' argument, but I don't think I can have a friend like that.
As I've gotten older, my tolerance for bullshit diminished. You don't have to be friend with everybody. If people are substantially different than you, chances are high you can't be best friends.
Writing messages through pigeon carriers may be entertaining for few days, but all of my friends are accessible through phone or email.
I am in my mid 20s, and while I don't think social media like Facebook is irreplaceable, it's damn near that because, without arguing semantics about the word friend, I have friends from all over the world (and even within the same country) who I want to keep in touch with or at least send the occasional, "Hey, how have you been?" Even more importantly, if I end up traveling, it's very easy to keep in touch with them whereas using email is not because they probably get too many emails a day and my email might fall by the wayside and phone is not possible. Beyond this, people change emails and phone numbers all the time, whereas their social media presence doesn't really change all that much.
Barring any circumstances other than the ones you mentioned, I don't keep in touch. If they can't be bothered to download some form of IM or email then what's the point? If they really want to hear from you they'd make somewhat of an effort.
Social media became 'essential' because the barrier to communication dropped drastically, effectively widening your net for useless connections and sucking you into a vortex of crap.
After deleting FB, I could only remember a handful of people that mattered, another few reaching out of their own accord who I'd forgotten about.
Can't for the life of me remember beyond 30~ people from my list out of 900~. I realized I truly did not give a fuck about Kristoffer from Norway that I met zip lining in Mexico in the summer of 08.
> Why would Facebook, or any "attention seeking" Internet company for that matter, do this?
You are of course right that that would be absurd. But sometimes it's good to demand what you really want even though it's unreasonable. I think in this case, that we all think this is absurd that they would do such a thing, is a very strong argument against our current society and how it works at a deep level.
I did something interesting this week. I teach high school, and this was our first week back at school. No students yet, just beginning of the year prep work.
I was checking my phone every 5-10 minutes half out of restlessness at sitting inside all day, and also to keep up with rapidly evolving events in the world. But I wanted to focus more, without turning my phone off. So I put my phone in my left pocket instead of my right pocket.
It worked. Every time I reached for my phone, I had to think consciously how to get it out. That interrupted the cycle of just pulling it out enough to make me only pull it out once in a while. It went back to being a tool I use to do lots of things, rather than something I use to fill time when there's nothing to do for 30 seconds. The first step he mentions, simply being aware of these habits and breaking the cycles, can go a long way in keeping these habits from becoming too entrenched.
I think that putting in just a bit of friction ("activation barrier") is a generally useful technique to make one's actions more conscious and deliberate. Some more examples, off the top of my head:
1. Deciding to use a social media website as a website rather than an app.
2. Using a long password which you have to manually type in every time.
3. Creating a separate browsing profile for a certain category of browsing. Eg: work profile -vs- fun profile
4. Leave the TV remote inside a drawer/shelf rather than just lying around on the couch.
I'm interested in hearing more suggestions!
PS: The counterpoint to this technique is to reduce friction for the things you would like to do more often.
> 1. Deciding to use a social media website as a website rather than an app.
> 2. Using a long password which you have to manually type in every time.
Yes! I do both of these for facebook and I rarely use it now. It's been great. The only downside is the friends who insist on group facebook messenger conversations (mbasic) which I won't see for a couple of days, and then need to repeatedly log in to keep up on an active topic or coordination/meet-up.
Smart idea. I get a similar effect when I logout of sites like Twitter and have to face a login page when I revisit. It breaks me from my unconscious loop and lets me decide that this is not actually how I want to spend my time. Do you think changing the pocket is enough, or rather its that you're switching your dominant/non-dominant hands?
It was really interesting to see what patterns switching pockets interrupted for me. One was the simple act of reaching for the phone - I had to consciously think about where it is. Then it feels unfamiliar to even start to pull it out of my left pocket. Then I have to decide to swipe and operate it with my non-dominant hand, or switch it over and use my right hand. There were more opportunities to break the cycle than I would have expected.
I was surprised to learn there are people who don't keep their phone in a particular pocket, who this wouldn't work for.
Doesn't work for me, I put my phone in any pocket and look for it in any pocket. Though if I want to stop using my phone it's easier to just uninstall apps that are distracting. Takes a lot more effort to install said app.
Do we confuse efficiency engineers (purpose, work, routing, training, outcomes) with inefficiency engineers(distraction, entertainment, inputs)? I cut some teeth on early laser printed govt report generation where every page has a minutes-to-read constraint for decision makers. That is efficiency.
Couchsurfing And Meetup make in-person local group formation and related discussions possible. DC here is a town where people talk for money, but many communities of Americans are very shy about meeting any strangers.
Masses of people burdened by kids and long commutes or old age mostly seek distraction. Those are yesterday's TV ad audiences ordering more pizza cheese.
I ignore my phone. Some nerdier people have "auditory agoraphobia" and tune in to music, podcasts or books on tape in lieu of chewing cud. I think that is good compared to listening to Howard Stern in a car.
Other people are just remarkably bored. I bothered to spend a few weeks asking people what they were they doing on their phones outside offices. I was surprised to learn how most women I asked were constantly catalog shopping. I was surprised because I use Amazon like preppies used LL Bean to avoid wasting time in retail shopping. Visually obsessed shoppers are problems few will pay engineers to solve.
I've ignored people around me while reading books as a kid, I've ignored people by sitting in front of a PC as a teenager, and now I ignore people while looking at a mobile phone. Whenever I try to spend less time looking at my phone, I just spend more time reading the newspaper or whatever else I can find.
Maybe technology has made the problem worse, but at least in my case the problem is me, not whatever distracts me.
There so many great things you can do when being offline. But it's definitely not reading a physical newspaper in 2017. This doesn't make sense (for me at least) and this is not about liking or hating technology. It's like using a phone booth for making phone calls. A newspaper is just an inferior medium for that use case.
As far as I can tell his point is that he suffers from a kind of “information addiction” and it prevents him from engaging with the people around him as much as he would like or accomplishing other goals, and that he switches reading a newspaper (still a form of compulsive solitary procrastination) if for whatever reason the internet isn’t available.
The guys is totally right but what he says is nothing new since Nir Eyal's Hooked and B.T. Skinner's Skinner-box. Besides, the web itself, yes just simple websites, has been highly addictive for decades. This ecosystem was just transformed to mobile and because the phone is always with you the addiction is even worse. Facebook on desktop was as addictive as on mobile.
He actually outlines a 3 step strategy for regaining control. Also, there's the non-profit he started that aims to make people more mindful on how shitty apps affect our mental states http://www.timewellspent.io/
I briefly went over the site before but haven't seen the 3 steps, guess I missed them, mind to tell them?
Edit: I just went another time to the site and still can't see any '3 steps' in text form. Would be great if you could enlighten us since you know the 3 steps.
From the transcript of the TED talk [1] mentioned in the OP:
> So how do we fix this? We need to make three radical changes to technology and to our society.
> The first is we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens? I think we need to see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like a new period of human history, like the Enlightenment, but almost a kind of self-aware Enlightenment, that we can be persuaded, and there might be something we want to protect.
> The second is we need new models and accountability systems so that as the world gets better and more and more persuasive over time -- because it's only going to get more persuasive -- that the people in those control rooms are accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee. And that involves questioning big things, like the business model of advertising.
> Lastly, we need a design renaissance, because once you have this view of human nature, that you can steer the timelines of a billion people -- just imagine, there's people who have some desire about what they want to do and what they want to be thinking and what they want to be feeling and how they want to be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions. And you have a billion people just tugged into all these different directions. Well, imagine an entire design renaissance that tried to orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those timelines to happen. And that would involve two things: one would be protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing, the thoughts that we wouldn't want to be happening, so that when that ding happens, not having the ding that sends us away; and the second would be empowering us to live out the timeline that we want.
Is the point supposed to be that his proposed solution is impossible to implement and flies in the face of market and incentive-driven behavior? When I think "three step proposal" I think of something actionable by an individual, not something that would have to be enacted on by basically a totalitarian government.
This is most relevant (and troubling) among younger people. While its just as possible for older people to get wrapped up with their smart phones and social media sites, at least they weren't completely absorbed their formative years when their brains were developing. We are in the midst of a massive social experiment with a generation of children being raised with these devices, social media, and all the many things that are entailed. How it is going to turn out anyone's guess.
I am bit older than average and completely disconnected with my phone. Did you know that if you don't unlock iPhone for 24 hours you have to enter code to unlock? Did you know that iPhone battery can last for a week if you don't use it?
I was a slave to my phone, for many years. It was needed for business. Today, I do have a smartphone, but I think it is in the car. I'm not actually sure where it is.
I have no apps, other than what came with it. In fact, that's one of the reason I picked a Windows phone. Nobody makes apps for it. Really, it does all I want.
I make calls, text, email, take pictures, and browse the web when I am bored and not home. I sometimes tether it and use a laptop. That's pretty much it.
It gets lost, the battery runs out, and I don't care. I'm okay with that. There are already a bunch of ways to communicate with me. I even have a landline.
It's not that bad, compared to what I witness others doing. I see people, out with others, and many of them remain glued to their phones. A friend recently informed me that people will use their phones, not as cameras, while having sex at those live cam sites.
I'm not actually sure how I'd feel if the missus pulled out her phone and was posting to Facebook during sex.
Speaking of Facebook, I don't have anything like that.
Anyway, it seems that we have all these outlets to communicate, but the majority of activities barely seems to meet that definition. But, I digress.
I guess I'm trying to say that I am also happy to not have a phone addiction. I don't even answer either of my phones, unless I have a reason to do so.
It has been about ten years that I haven't needed to give a phone permission to interrupt me. It feels pretty good.
Having a bicycle and a personal 'burner' phone works for me.
I do have some super-posh Pixel XL kindly provided by work but that does not fit in my pocket too well when cycling. Hence I still rock the 'burner' phone that does private chat, emails, txt and calls. There are maps and interwebs on there too, it is all I need when I am not at a computer.
I don't have a 'thousand Facebook friends' as I am not on Facebook. However, on my ride to work I will see plenty of faces I know walking their dogs, jogging or cycling like myself. I get real-world 'likes' and the 'thread' of conversation is in memory only, not scrawled out in txt-spk.
Having the 'big phone' in my bag means I can take decent photos if I want to, I can ssh in to servers and try those new exciting apps with it too. I don't have 'FOMO' issues because I have the latest-and-greatest phone there if I want it.
The other benefit of my 'burner' phone is that it has a big battery that charges quickly, it takes SD cards and, due to light usage, the battery lasts a long time between those charges.
I am always there for people on my 'burner' phone so I have not disconnected from my phone whatsoever. The only 'app' apart from Whatsapp! and a compass app that I have installed is an app that tells me how often I checked my phone over the last 24 hours. Normally I am around 10 'checks of phone' a day, I believe most people are at the 65 level.
My colleagues that commute in via tin-box means, be it train, bus or car, well, they may be getting the 'Facebook likes' to light up their dopamine receptors but this is fake, much like how class 'A' drugs work. I enjoy knowing real-world people in the real community, with no adverts to see on my cycle commute. I also think it is a two-way thing, those half-dozen people I exchange smiles and friendly words with probably also enjoy being out and about for the same reasons.
Now what if I decide to sell the bicycle and endure normal transport instead, stalking people on social media instead of interacting in the real world? What if everyone did that? Would we have any community at all? If this happens, who will say hello to the old folks that don't have computer skills? What human interactions will they have?
I think that we really should be starting to call social media what it really is. Let's start calling it 'anti-social media' because that is what is really going on with this phone obsession people have and the apps that lure them in to scroll their life away.
A great quote from the article: "Advertising is the new coal. It was wonderful for propping up the internet economy. It got us to a certain level of economic prosperity, and that’s fantastic. And it also polluted the inner environment and the cultural environment and the political environment because it enabled anyone to basically pay to get access to your mind.
I typically summarize this to fellow professionals shipping mobile apps as:
"We optimize for measurable engagment as a proxy for customer satisfaction, which is itself often suggested as a proxy for product value. This is a terrible mistake and it makes us optimize for novel forms of addiction."
I think the end user should be given the power to customise their experiences. For example I wrote an user script for Youtube to hide recommendations and to redirect to a blank page when a video ends. It was for my kids but I realise it's also good for me.
I'd like to read some more compelling arguments. Or for example, a story about how someone's life is influenced by social media and how it could have been better.
It's not that I cannot understand this, and see where things can go wrong. It's that I can't seem to convince others of it.
The same holds for privacy issues. The arguments are all true, but just not compelling enough.
Am I the only one that sees much danger in the 'meetup IRL' button mentioned in the middle of this?
While I very much agree that something needs to be done to encourage making real friends in real life (possibly some kind of sonar app based on short range peer to peer?), I think trying to get opposing sides in a heated debate together is less than wise.
Yes, let's separate people who disagree and avoid letting them talk about their disagreements in person. It's much safer to avoid anyone you disagree with, and minimizes hurt feelings.
"an interview on the Sam Harris podcast about all the different ways technology is persuading millions of people in ways they don’t see"
Tristan Harris is only mentioning some very recent manifestations and variations of a critique that has been around for a very long time.
The history of this critique is a complex and not easily summarized one,[1] but, to take just one example, in The Technological Society[2] Jacques Ellul[3] argued that it was the efficiency improvements in what Ellul called "technique" (which can be thought of as technology in a broader sense) were effectively irresistible and inevitable to society as a whole, as the adopters of less efficient techniques were inevitably out-competed by users of more efficient ones. For Ellul this was important because it meant the loss of humanity's freedom, as they are inevitably following where efficient technique leads them.
This was presaged by Heidegger[4] most famously in The Question Concerning Technology[5], and a whole field of Philosophy of Technology followed.[6]
A more recent and popular exploration of technology's influence can be found in the documentaries of Adam Curtis.[7]
In addition, Timothy Wu has written a book, The Attention Merchants: How Our Time and Attention Are Gathered and Sold, which describes the interaction of advertising and technology, especially the "three screens" (movies, television, and computer).
It really kinda sounds like this guy woke up one day, decided he didn't like technology, and began a crusade. I'm struggling to find anything novel in what's being argued unless you didn't already know that the incentives are not stacked in your favor as a user. The interview does make one good point: who does say what is best for me as a user and why is time spent on a given platform a bad metric (even if it's not originally born of a user-centric mindset--which is also arguable since many product teams are user-centric)? Perhaps I'm enjoying that time.
This is ignoring our finite attention and decision reservoir and something Cal Newport refers to as attention residue -- the time it takes to transition wholly to another task. It can be jarring to realize how fully these devices and distractions integrate into one's existence.
selling targeted advertising in front of curated information is not the cyberpunk future i was promised.
information needs to become transparent so addicts look through it rather than at it, with an augmented reality horizon. current mobile computing is incapable of providing immersive or useful experiences, the success of games shows the potential and inbuilt demand in connected movement devices. a mask is far more useful than a pair of glasses: identity tag, atmospheric filter, audio visual screen, trauma drug delivery system, human net, fashion and status symbol.
ideally you should wear your net/node like a second skin, after all it's the clothing of the 21st century. before we get there we need flexible integrated circuits, paper thin devices that are powered by light or heat. decades and decades away from mom and dad slipping on their iVide's.
I've been following Tristan Harris's work since he released Time Well Spent. I think he has a legitimate complaint, but his proposed solutions are terrible. For example, he suggests to Facebook:
> Imagine we replace the Comment button with a Let’s Meet button. When we want to post something controversial, we can have the choice to say, “Hey let’s talk about this” in person, not online.
Why would Facebook, or any "attention seeking" Internet company for that matter, do this? You can even tell the interviewer is skeptical. If he had suggested, say, that we should take our business to consumer companies whose business models don't rely on attention grabbing, that would've at least been a start. Instead he suggests we "become more self-aware" and "transform design." Which consumers should become self-aware? Why would entrenched companies change their design? The idealism is nice and all, but so far I think this has been a wasted opportunity to fix a real problem. The messaging could be far more specific and realistic. But at least we're talking about it.
FWIW, Facebook and messaging have not hijacked my mind anywhere near as thoroughly as HN and Reddit have. It's always fascinating to see such moral outrage about addictive internet companies on these far more addictive platforms.
What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time. To its credit, HN at least provides noprocrast.
> What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time.
This is exactly what I do.
I wrote a system that reads from multiple RSS feeds and screen scrapes non-rss sources into RSS feeds. Every article goes through some basic tagging before being indexed in a personal Elasticsearch instance and archived on-disk (my "personal Google").
Every morning I get an email with content filtered based on tags, prioritized based on my interests and upvotes (where applicable), and coarsely aggregated by theme (mostly for politics). I limit myself to 30 minutes of reading for each update, forcing myself to conscientiously prioritize. I occasionally click to the HN comments, but avoid Reddit like the plague.
Actionable articles get added to OmniFocus, but only if I will take action. Informative articles get added to Evernote, but only if I will reference them in the future.
It's imperfect, but still scratches that cave-man itch to constantly check the environment for new signals - I trust my software to do so on my behalf. Funneling content into action-items and references keeps me otherwise focused on doing things instead of reading things.
(I also abandoned Facebook/Twitter/etc because their mix of news/entertainment/communication was addictive - all I need is communication)
This sounds pretty great actually. Do you have this up on github or anywhere I might be able to grab this from you?
Not yet, but I'm actively working on it... my employer's FOSS policy is that all personal projects must receive corporate sign-off before they published.
Care to post here once it is ready. Many people would benefit from this kind of setup. I was thinking of having this setup for myself too.
Absolutely. HN doesn't have direct messaging, so just keep an eye out I guess :)
Please notify me too if your "Show HN" doesn't pass 150 upvotes ;).
I am interested in this as well! Let us know if it's ever released publicly :)
I will! I wish HN had direct messages for this kind of thing..
I would absolutely love to use such a system for myself as well! Upvote
This sounds absolutely fantastic. I've been thinking about similar workflows for years but I've been thinking about it more from the UI end; distilling as much information I deal with on a daily bases into a common UI paradigm like a feed or just email.
I've actually been wondering if it might not be a good idea for HN to be time-delayed in some way.
I've noticed that with hot-topic issues (like the Google memo), there's usually a flurry of divisive, and in my opinion uninformed and low-quality discussion over multiple submission, followed by (somewhat) more informed and reasonable discussion when the initial outrage dies down.
I wouldn't know what the best way to implement this would be, though. A community guideline? A 'too hot, let it cool down' button for users with a certain amount of karma? Active moderation?
I don't spend a lot of time on either site (HN or FB), and zero on Reddit. However, HN is apparently more engaging, since I make more comments.
My FB stream mostly consists of inane things that other people have clicked "like" on, and if FB thinks those are the things that interest me the most, they are failing big time.
I believe this reflects more on you than the platforms. The phrase "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people" seems applicable to HN (ideas), Reddit (events), and Facebook (people).
That sounds a little arrogant, but is my general experience. I see this in the submissions and comments where HN demands thought out posts. Jokes or comments that do not contribute are rarely at the top and often removed, while the opposite is true of jokes on Reddit (in general)
Having been an insider on at least two topics where the HN comments section consensus is confident and authoritative-sounding and detailed but way off the mark, I'm beginning to doubt this. (Not going to say which topics).
The "avoid gratuitous negativity" policy has helped, but we are still very much in a place of "most negative opinion wins" which pushes some discussions way off of reality. And those are just the ones I know about.
Turns out that sounding smart or righteously indignant (or usually, both) doesn't make something correct. Just a weird rabbit hole of darkly gratifying negativity. I guess I'm waking up to the fact that our flavor of "discussing ideas" might not actually be that more high-minded than Reddit or Facebook.
I'm not sure exactly how to quantify it. I think you'd have to look only at public discussions of IT-related topics on other sites, since that's all that's in scope for Hacker News. Facebook suffers with a clunky forum system that doesn't do threading particularly well, so you end up with a "flat" discussion with a lot of duplicate comments. I don't have a lot of confidence in the "like" moderation system either. I hope that's not gratuitous negativity. Example: https://www.facebook.com/arstechnica/posts/10154966971473753
Reduce HN's frontpage from 30 threads to 10 (then three interesting threads become one) and stop pages loading so fast; they need to become slower (I'm sure people have ideas how to achieve that).
> What would the adaptation for Hacker News or Reddit look like? For one thing, probably a controlled release of all new content in batches, so we get trained out of refreshing them all the time.
Holy Usenet Batman.
This is exactly what I did when I had to pay per minute of dial up. Still ended up spending hours in front of a computer.
The only adaptation I can really see working in the long term is being very conscious of our behaviour, and simply not doing it. The choice to do or do not open a new tab and type news.yc.. in the URL bar is always your own.
Historically, this approach to addiction has performed poorly. You're not wrong, but this also isn't very useful.
I have found that putting some friction in front of the unconscious "tabbing to timewasting site" habit is really useful while trying to get something done.
> Why would Facebook, or any "attention seeking" Internet company for that matter, do this? You can even tell the interviewer is skeptical. If he had suggested, say, that we should take our business to consumer companies whose business models don't rely on attention grabbing, that would've at least been a start. Instead he suggests we "become more self-aware" and "transform design."
I think a lot of people are reluctant to take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion: that we've made a monstrous and unconscionable mistake.
Recognizing that mistake for what it is demands that we own our parts in its genesis and solution. Neither will be terribly profitable.
Still, the grain of truth that consumers themselves could radically change the landscape by changing their habits is not wrong. It's just not realistic either. The entire point of hyper-metrics-driven mobile and web app design is to figure out what makes users do what YOU want, not what they would normally do.
I think you will be less pessimistic if you asked yourself who this "we" is that made an uncosionable mistake. Each of us is an individual who can contribute to, but not control the whole of society. We often vent frustration on forums like this when the conversation is about solving public problems.
I'd say the "grain" of truth a about consumers being able to change the landscape by changing their habits is exactly right. It might be unrealistic for everyone to do it en masse (though such things have happend in the past and will happen again). But it is entirely realistic for indivduals the landscape around themselves.
For example I don't glue myself to my phone, and am no longer on Facebook so I can't bring myself to care much about the evil things that Facebook is said to be doing on peoples phones.
Certainly I've been guilty of it. It's part of why I'm so careful about who I work for.
I'm proud at least that we recognzed and stopped that behavior early on my project. But I didn't question the instructions I was given very directly without help from others, which I'm a bit ashamed of.
> Recognizing that mistake for what it is demands that we own our parts in its genesis and solution
I have many tremendously-fun discussions with my friends on Facebook. On current events, philosophy, their most-recent research paper or gadget or patent. A lot of social media hand-wringing involves people (a) treating unfiltered public commentary as person discourse and/or (b) under-filtering their feeds, thereby turning what should be a personal space into one dominated by unfiltered public commentary.
I suppose the quality of what you see in FB depends greatly on what sort of people you are connected to and how you relate to them. Perhaps I'd have found those discussions interesting too, but they aren't part of the open web, and my FB experience is completely different.
On the other hand, what you see in HN is what everybody else sees, it's not hidden and you can selectively read and comment about what you find interesting.
We need to build the "social network for people who are intelligent, non attention seeking, and want to discuss, socialize, and organize things".
a) no profile picture albums; no one gets to evaluate you based on what you choose to show off about your lifestyle, friends, the stuff you own, the fun you have, the trips you take, the people you date, whatever; those pictures may be interesting but it really is irrelevant to this network while being primarily attention-seeking, and is also the main source of anxiety and depression (especially for young people) related to using FB today. Obviously pictures of you or others pertinent to a discussion are fine, as is having a profile picture, just no concept of photo albums for the profile or otherwise.
b) there would have to be UI and features for organizing the entire network around discussions, wrt what's on your feed, what posts look like, how you interact with others, how you launch or join discussions, etc.
c) again, it's more than a HN with your real identity, it's still a social network, you still organize events, you still check in about things going on with each other, but "launch discussion" or "join discussion" are the primary features, not a generic "share", "update status", "like", "tag", "browse album" etc. Overall it's oriented around insights and mind more than stuff, lifestyle, and impulse thinking.
Towards a better humanity.
Sounds like any old-school internet forum.
How? It's not randos, it's your actual connections. It's engineered and marketed as a replacement for FB, as the way to stay connected and engaged with your personal network, that erases what gets people depressed about with FB, that is not premised on FB's or Instagram's or whatever's modes of attention seeking.
Or BBS.
See: this.
Exactly. If his hypothesis is correct and we are better off without these attention-seeking platforms, then the true solution lies in building platforms that are better for humanity and migrating as consumers to these healthier platforms. Instead he's just groveling for CEOs of platform comeanies to issue some edict that will transform their business model and health metrics overnight to something that is less about attention and more about.. social value? Last time I checked shareholders and your bottom line don't care about social value unless that is the product you're in the business of providing. It's not Facebook's job to help me be a good person and frankly I don't want them pretending it is. If I want to meet you for beers and politics I'll make that happen, not Facebook.
"Last time I checked shareholders and your bottom line don't care about social value unless that is the product you're in the business of providing."
There's something called "Ethical Investing" (aka "Socially responsible investing", "sustainable investing" or "resposible investing").[1]
Its existence is clear proof that at least some investors do care about the social value of the companies and products they invest in.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_investing
I'm not particularly interested in finding the intersection of social health and Facebook's bottom line. But in terms of a theoretical social network:
What about just using client-based PoW to indicate how "loudly" one wishes to speak their post?
Casual posts probably would benefit very little. But at least fake news generators would have to pay some money if they want to get clicks by making your uncle angry.
Moreover, these companies exist in a market, and the proposal is a candy vs vegetables trade-off. If you only give people vegetables, it doesn't matter how much better it is for them, they'll leave and go to the person selling candy.
Anything but deleting all your social media is the wrong answer.
Having ancient phones for which is a PITA to use any social apps can also be pretty helpful. I'm still using my iPhone4 (it can still take great pictures), but I cannot longer use Instagram on it (no big loss), WhatsApp stopped functioning about 2 year ago (that was not that good at first but I got used to it) and the FB app is slow as hell. If someone messages me on FB I only conjure up the courage and patience to open FB in my browser after half an hour or so, and only if it looks like it's anything that needed a quick response (from the preview). HN still works and for reddit I need to use the i.reddit.com version, but I visit these 2 websites less and less from my phone (it really drains the battery). I carry a book with me everywhere I go, though, that makes up for me not using the phone anymore.
How do you know?
How can anyone know?
Never needed it before, don't need it now. Pretty simple.
How would you keep in touch with a hypothetical friend who you cannot text because they live in another country and doesn't prefer email?
For most people, social media isn't strictly a necessity but it's essential for keeping in touch with friends, long distance family, and to see what's going on with those friends, e.g. events. So stating "deleting social media is the only answer" is counterproductive because it's a non-solution.
Not going into the 'social media' argument, but I don't think I can have a friend like that.
As I've gotten older, my tolerance for bullshit diminished. You don't have to be friend with everybody. If people are substantially different than you, chances are high you can't be best friends.
Writing messages through pigeon carriers may be entertaining for few days, but all of my friends are accessible through phone or email.
I am in my mid 20s, and while I don't think social media like Facebook is irreplaceable, it's damn near that because, without arguing semantics about the word friend, I have friends from all over the world (and even within the same country) who I want to keep in touch with or at least send the occasional, "Hey, how have you been?" Even more importantly, if I end up traveling, it's very easy to keep in touch with them whereas using email is not because they probably get too many emails a day and my email might fall by the wayside and phone is not possible. Beyond this, people change emails and phone numbers all the time, whereas their social media presence doesn't really change all that much.
Aquitances :) and yes, I also have FB for people all over the planet.
I was just saying more on how we choose who we give our time to, rather than the medium.
As for Facebook/Gmail etc. They are fine tools for now, as all other software companies, they'll be gone one day.
Facebook probably faster than Google as it will be turning into a graveyard network at some point.
Barring any circumstances other than the ones you mentioned, I don't keep in touch. If they can't be bothered to download some form of IM or email then what's the point? If they really want to hear from you they'd make somewhat of an effort.
Social media became 'essential' because the barrier to communication dropped drastically, effectively widening your net for useless connections and sucking you into a vortex of crap.
After deleting FB, I could only remember a handful of people that mattered, another few reaching out of their own accord who I'd forgotten about.
Can't for the life of me remember beyond 30~ people from my list out of 900~. I realized I truly did not give a fuck about Kristoffer from Norway that I met zip lining in Mexico in the summer of 08.
> Why would Facebook, or any "attention seeking" Internet company for that matter, do this?
You are of course right that that would be absurd. But sometimes it's good to demand what you really want even though it's unreasonable. I think in this case, that we all think this is absurd that they would do such a thing, is a very strong argument against our current society and how it works at a deep level.
Instead of saying the emperor is naked, he asks for the AC to be set to freezing.
I did something interesting this week. I teach high school, and this was our first week back at school. No students yet, just beginning of the year prep work.
I was checking my phone every 5-10 minutes half out of restlessness at sitting inside all day, and also to keep up with rapidly evolving events in the world. But I wanted to focus more, without turning my phone off. So I put my phone in my left pocket instead of my right pocket.
It worked. Every time I reached for my phone, I had to think consciously how to get it out. That interrupted the cycle of just pulling it out enough to make me only pull it out once in a while. It went back to being a tool I use to do lots of things, rather than something I use to fill time when there's nothing to do for 30 seconds. The first step he mentions, simply being aware of these habits and breaking the cycles, can go a long way in keeping these habits from becoming too entrenched.
I think that putting in just a bit of friction ("activation barrier") is a generally useful technique to make one's actions more conscious and deliberate. Some more examples, off the top of my head:
1. Deciding to use a social media website as a website rather than an app.
2. Using a long password which you have to manually type in every time.
3. Creating a separate browsing profile for a certain category of browsing. Eg: work profile -vs- fun profile
4. Leave the TV remote inside a drawer/shelf rather than just lying around on the couch.
I'm interested in hearing more suggestions!
PS: The counterpoint to this technique is to reduce friction for the things you would like to do more often.
> 1. Deciding to use a social media website as a website rather than an app.
> 2. Using a long password which you have to manually type in every time.
Yes! I do both of these for facebook and I rarely use it now. It's been great. The only downside is the friends who insist on group facebook messenger conversations (mbasic) which I won't see for a couple of days, and then need to repeatedly log in to keep up on an active topic or coordination/meet-up.
Smart idea. I get a similar effect when I logout of sites like Twitter and have to face a login page when I revisit. It breaks me from my unconscious loop and lets me decide that this is not actually how I want to spend my time. Do you think changing the pocket is enough, or rather its that you're switching your dominant/non-dominant hands?
It was really interesting to see what patterns switching pockets interrupted for me. One was the simple act of reaching for the phone - I had to consciously think about where it is. Then it feels unfamiliar to even start to pull it out of my left pocket. Then I have to decide to swipe and operate it with my non-dominant hand, or switch it over and use my right hand. There were more opportunities to break the cycle than I would have expected.
I was surprised to learn there are people who don't keep their phone in a particular pocket, who this wouldn't work for.
Doesn't work for me, I put my phone in any pocket and look for it in any pocket. Though if I want to stop using my phone it's easier to just uninstall apps that are distracting. Takes a lot more effort to install said app.
Try what I did. Set do not disturb mode always on. Wife/family go through.
The rest, once in a while I'll open and see what tried to get my attention.
I'm one. Crap apps with tons of pointless notifications are many.
I own this phone and my time.
Do we confuse efficiency engineers (purpose, work, routing, training, outcomes) with inefficiency engineers(distraction, entertainment, inputs)? I cut some teeth on early laser printed govt report generation where every page has a minutes-to-read constraint for decision makers. That is efficiency.
Couchsurfing And Meetup make in-person local group formation and related discussions possible. DC here is a town where people talk for money, but many communities of Americans are very shy about meeting any strangers.
Masses of people burdened by kids and long commutes or old age mostly seek distraction. Those are yesterday's TV ad audiences ordering more pizza cheese.
I ignore my phone. Some nerdier people have "auditory agoraphobia" and tune in to music, podcasts or books on tape in lieu of chewing cud. I think that is good compared to listening to Howard Stern in a car.
Other people are just remarkably bored. I bothered to spend a few weeks asking people what they were they doing on their phones outside offices. I was surprised to learn how most women I asked were constantly catalog shopping. I was surprised because I use Amazon like preppies used LL Bean to avoid wasting time in retail shopping. Visually obsessed shoppers are problems few will pay engineers to solve.
I've ignored people around me while reading books as a kid, I've ignored people by sitting in front of a PC as a teenager, and now I ignore people while looking at a mobile phone. Whenever I try to spend less time looking at my phone, I just spend more time reading the newspaper or whatever else I can find.
Maybe technology has made the problem worse, but at least in my case the problem is me, not whatever distracts me.
> the problem is me
Is it a problem? You don't have to pathologize it.
I don’t consider it a major problem, but it is definitely a pretty annoying habit.
> I just spend more time reading the newspaper
There so many great things you can do when being offline. But it's definitely not reading a physical newspaper in 2017. This doesn't make sense (for me at least) and this is not about liking or hating technology. It's like using a phone booth for making phone calls. A newspaper is just an inferior medium for that use case.
The actual message of your post is good though.
Edit: Why the downvotes?
As far as I can tell his point is that he suffers from a kind of “information addiction” and it prevents him from engaging with the people around him as much as he would like or accomplishing other goals, and that he switches reading a newspaper (still a form of compulsive solitary procrastination) if for whatever reason the internet isn’t available.
Your comment is a non sequitur.
Maybe the people around you just aren't as interesting as the people who wrote the things you are reading.
Nope. Anything will distract me. In a pinch I’ll start reading nutrition facts on ketchup bottles.
The guys is totally right but what he says is nothing new since Nir Eyal's Hooked and B.T. Skinner's Skinner-box. Besides, the web itself, yes just simple websites, has been highly addictive for decades. This ecosystem was just transformed to mobile and because the phone is always with you the addiction is even worse. Facebook on desktop was as addictive as on mobile.
I miss a solution but he doesn't propose any.
He actually outlines a 3 step strategy for regaining control. Also, there's the non-profit he started that aims to make people more mindful on how shitty apps affect our mental states http://www.timewellspent.io/
I briefly went over the site before but haven't seen the 3 steps, guess I missed them, mind to tell them?
Edit: I just went another time to the site and still can't see any '3 steps' in text form. Would be great if you could enlighten us since you know the 3 steps.
From the transcript of the TED talk [1] mentioned in the OP:
> So how do we fix this? We need to make three radical changes to technology and to our society.
> The first is we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable. Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens? I think we need to see ourselves fundamentally in a new way. It's almost like a new period of human history, like the Enlightenment, but almost a kind of self-aware Enlightenment, that we can be persuaded, and there might be something we want to protect.
> The second is we need new models and accountability systems so that as the world gets better and more and more persuasive over time -- because it's only going to get more persuasive -- that the people in those control rooms are accountable and transparent to what we want. The only form of ethical persuasion that exists is when the goals of the persuader are aligned with the goals of the persuadee. And that involves questioning big things, like the business model of advertising.
> Lastly, we need a design renaissance, because once you have this view of human nature, that you can steer the timelines of a billion people -- just imagine, there's people who have some desire about what they want to do and what they want to be thinking and what they want to be feeling and how they want to be informed, and we're all just tugged into these other directions. And you have a billion people just tugged into all these different directions. Well, imagine an entire design renaissance that tried to orchestrate the exact and most empowering time-well-spent way for those timelines to happen. And that would involve two things: one would be protecting against the timelines that we don't want to be experiencing, the thoughts that we wouldn't want to be happening, so that when that ding happens, not having the ding that sends us away; and the second would be empowering us to live out the timeline that we want.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tr...
Is the point supposed to be that his proposed solution is impossible to implement and flies in the face of market and incentive-driven behavior? When I think "three step proposal" I think of something actionable by an individual, not something that would have to be enacted on by basically a totalitarian government.
Thanks!
This is most relevant (and troubling) among younger people. While its just as possible for older people to get wrapped up with their smart phones and social media sites, at least they weren't completely absorbed their formative years when their brains were developing. We are in the midst of a massive social experiment with a generation of children being raised with these devices, social media, and all the many things that are entailed. How it is going to turn out anyone's guess.
I am bit older than average and completely disconnected with my phone. Did you know that if you don't unlock iPhone for 24 hours you have to enter code to unlock? Did you know that iPhone battery can last for a week if you don't use it?
I am happy not to have phone addiction.
I was a slave to my phone, for many years. It was needed for business. Today, I do have a smartphone, but I think it is in the car. I'm not actually sure where it is.
I have no apps, other than what came with it. In fact, that's one of the reason I picked a Windows phone. Nobody makes apps for it. Really, it does all I want.
I make calls, text, email, take pictures, and browse the web when I am bored and not home. I sometimes tether it and use a laptop. That's pretty much it.
It gets lost, the battery runs out, and I don't care. I'm okay with that. There are already a bunch of ways to communicate with me. I even have a landline.
It's not that bad, compared to what I witness others doing. I see people, out with others, and many of them remain glued to their phones. A friend recently informed me that people will use their phones, not as cameras, while having sex at those live cam sites.
I'm not actually sure how I'd feel if the missus pulled out her phone and was posting to Facebook during sex.
Speaking of Facebook, I don't have anything like that.
Anyway, it seems that we have all these outlets to communicate, but the majority of activities barely seems to meet that definition. But, I digress.
I guess I'm trying to say that I am also happy to not have a phone addiction. I don't even answer either of my phones, unless I have a reason to do so.
It has been about ten years that I haven't needed to give a phone permission to interrupt me. It feels pretty good.
Having a bicycle and a personal 'burner' phone works for me.
I do have some super-posh Pixel XL kindly provided by work but that does not fit in my pocket too well when cycling. Hence I still rock the 'burner' phone that does private chat, emails, txt and calls. There are maps and interwebs on there too, it is all I need when I am not at a computer.
I don't have a 'thousand Facebook friends' as I am not on Facebook. However, on my ride to work I will see plenty of faces I know walking their dogs, jogging or cycling like myself. I get real-world 'likes' and the 'thread' of conversation is in memory only, not scrawled out in txt-spk.
Having the 'big phone' in my bag means I can take decent photos if I want to, I can ssh in to servers and try those new exciting apps with it too. I don't have 'FOMO' issues because I have the latest-and-greatest phone there if I want it.
The other benefit of my 'burner' phone is that it has a big battery that charges quickly, it takes SD cards and, due to light usage, the battery lasts a long time between those charges.
I am always there for people on my 'burner' phone so I have not disconnected from my phone whatsoever. The only 'app' apart from Whatsapp! and a compass app that I have installed is an app that tells me how often I checked my phone over the last 24 hours. Normally I am around 10 'checks of phone' a day, I believe most people are at the 65 level.
My colleagues that commute in via tin-box means, be it train, bus or car, well, they may be getting the 'Facebook likes' to light up their dopamine receptors but this is fake, much like how class 'A' drugs work. I enjoy knowing real-world people in the real community, with no adverts to see on my cycle commute. I also think it is a two-way thing, those half-dozen people I exchange smiles and friendly words with probably also enjoy being out and about for the same reasons.
Now what if I decide to sell the bicycle and endure normal transport instead, stalking people on social media instead of interacting in the real world? What if everyone did that? Would we have any community at all? If this happens, who will say hello to the old folks that don't have computer skills? What human interactions will they have?
I think that we really should be starting to call social media what it really is. Let's start calling it 'anti-social media' because that is what is really going on with this phone obsession people have and the apps that lure them in to scroll their life away.
A great quote from the article: "Advertising is the new coal. It was wonderful for propping up the internet economy. It got us to a certain level of economic prosperity, and that’s fantastic. And it also polluted the inner environment and the cultural environment and the political environment because it enabled anyone to basically pay to get access to your mind.
I typically summarize this to fellow professionals shipping mobile apps as:
"We optimize for measurable engagment as a proxy for customer satisfaction, which is itself often suggested as a proxy for product value. This is a terrible mistake and it makes us optimize for novel forms of addiction."
I think the end user should be given the power to customise their experiences. For example I wrote an user script for Youtube to hide recommendations and to redirect to a blank page when a video ends. It was for my kids but I realise it's also good for me.
any chance you can share that script?
Sure, but no guarantee given.
https://gist.github.com/nalply/6bcb91154df56b58974a65ebb3f0b...
I'd like to read some more compelling arguments. Or for example, a story about how someone's life is influenced by social media and how it could have been better.
It's not that I cannot understand this, and see where things can go wrong. It's that I can't seem to convince others of it.
The same holds for privacy issues. The arguments are all true, but just not compelling enough.
Am I the only one that sees much danger in the 'meetup IRL' button mentioned in the middle of this?
While I very much agree that something needs to be done to encourage making real friends in real life (possibly some kind of sonar app based on short range peer to peer?), I think trying to get opposing sides in a heated debate together is less than wise.
Yes, let's separate people who disagree and avoid letting them talk about their disagreements in person. It's much safer to avoid anyone you disagree with, and minimizes hurt feelings.
I think it's a double-edged sword; disagreements IRL are less likely to get nasty, but it they do get nasty things can escalate faster and end worse.
It's usually not a problem ... unless you live in a country where everyone has a gun.
"an interview on the Sam Harris podcast about all the different ways technology is persuading millions of people in ways they don’t see"
Tristan Harris is only mentioning some very recent manifestations and variations of a critique that has been around for a very long time.
The history of this critique is a complex and not easily summarized one,[1] but, to take just one example, in The Technological Society[2] Jacques Ellul[3] argued that it was the efficiency improvements in what Ellul called "technique" (which can be thought of as technology in a broader sense) were effectively irresistible and inevitable to society as a whole, as the adopters of less efficient techniques were inevitably out-competed by users of more efficient ones. For Ellul this was important because it meant the loss of humanity's freedom, as they are inevitably following where efficient technique leads them.
This was presaged by Heidegger[4] most famously in The Question Concerning Technology[5], and a whole field of Philosophy of Technology followed.[6]
A more recent and popular exploration of technology's influence can be found in the documentaries of Adam Curtis.[7]
[1] - For one easily accessible but analytically-flavored attempt at a summary, see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/
[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-Ellul/d...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger
[5] - https://www.amazon.com/Question-Concerning-Technology-Other-...
[6] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/
[7] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis
In addition, Timothy Wu has written a book, The Attention Merchants: How Our Time and Attention Are Gathered and Sold, which describes the interaction of advertising and technology, especially the "three screens" (movies, television, and computer).
https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Merchants-Tim-Wu/dp/1782394...
It really kinda sounds like this guy woke up one day, decided he didn't like technology, and began a crusade. I'm struggling to find anything novel in what's being argued unless you didn't already know that the incentives are not stacked in your favor as a user. The interview does make one good point: who does say what is best for me as a user and why is time spent on a given platform a bad metric (even if it's not originally born of a user-centric mindset--which is also arguable since many product teams are user-centric)? Perhaps I'm enjoying that time.
This is ignoring our finite attention and decision reservoir and something Cal Newport refers to as attention residue -- the time it takes to transition wholly to another task. It can be jarring to realize how fully these devices and distractions integrate into one's existence.
I wish I could get something like the Self Control app (that's on my mac) for iPhone. If tweetbot adds this to the app, it'll be very useful!
No one can hijack your mind without your consent. - Eleanor Roosevelt
Oh, if only.
today i deleted my Facebook account ... true story!
well done
I sensed that something felt wrong with the phone->human relationship about a year ago and stopped using it completely. Never looked back.
selling targeted advertising in front of curated information is not the cyberpunk future i was promised.
information needs to become transparent so addicts look through it rather than at it, with an augmented reality horizon. current mobile computing is incapable of providing immersive or useful experiences, the success of games shows the potential and inbuilt demand in connected movement devices. a mask is far more useful than a pair of glasses: identity tag, atmospheric filter, audio visual screen, trauma drug delivery system, human net, fashion and status symbol.
ideally you should wear your net/node like a second skin, after all it's the clothing of the 21st century. before we get there we need flexible integrated circuits, paper thin devices that are powered by light or heat. decades and decades away from mom and dad slipping on their iVide's.