[nessup]

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.

[closeparen]

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.

[losteric]

> 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)

[rayuela]

This sounds pretty great actually. Do you have this up on github or anywhere I might be able to grab this from you?

[losteric]

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.

[silentguy]

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.

[losteric]

Absolutely. HN doesn't have direct messaging, so just keep an eye out I guess :)

[zamber]

Please notify me too if your "Show HN" doesn't pass 150 upvotes ;).

[vaughngh]

I am interested in this as well! Let us know if it's ever released publicly :)

[losteric]

I will! I wish HN had direct messages for this kind of thing..

[grwthckrmstr]

I would absolutely love to use such a system for myself as well! Upvote

[0x445442]

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.

[mercer]

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?

[incompatible]

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.

[CamelCaseName]

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)

[closeparen]

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.

[incompatible]

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

[ygaf]

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).

[baq]

> 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.

[kaffeemitsahne]

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.

[closeparen]

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.

[KirinDave]

> 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.

[adrianratnapala]

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.

[KirinDave]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[incompatible]

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.

[orthoganol]

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.

[kaffeemitsahne]

Sounds like any old-school internet forum.

[orthoganol]

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.

[cma]

Or BBS.

[tradersam]

See: this.

[dcow]

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.

[pmoriarty]

"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

[jancsika]

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.

[moultano]

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.

[rublev]

Anything but deleting all your social media is the wrong answer.

[paganel]

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.

[adrianratnapala]

How do you know?

How can anyone know?

[rublev]

Never needed it before, don't need it now. Pretty simple.

[yladiz]

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.

[quickben]

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.

[yladiz]

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.

[rublev]

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.

[im3w1l]

> 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.

[im3w1l]

Instead of saying the emperor is naked, he asks for the AC to be set to freezing.