[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.