[kevinflo]

It's not youtube. It's not facebook. It's not twitter. You can write this article about any company these days.

It's a deeper fundamental devil's cocktail of monetized attention + modern (intensely and immediately metrics driven) product development + our buggy brains. Any company who wants to make money from the attention of human beings will find the same extraordinarily rapid pull to extremism. That's what we click. Our brains love these extreme things. The companies are just molding themselves to our brains in real time.

So much of public discourse these last few years has been pulled towards these most base human bugs. Fear of the "other", violence, tragedy, banal comedy, sexual deviancy, cute shiny this or that, inspirational platitudes. Even worse, the content production itself is now being hooked up directly to the metrics creating a machine learning feedback loop spinning out of control.

Any company who wants to fight against this needs to sign up for public, immediate, and painful metrics hits. We saw this happen so directly with facebook last quarter. These problems are so fundamental that if one company tries to fight against it and turn back the dials, another won't and the company attempting integrity will flat out start to lose. Our best shot is to create completely different incentive structures. In the current overarching architecture of media and technology, this hell is the clear winner.

[m_ke]

I agree with you but if anything is going to be done about it we need to keep youtube, facebook, twitter, reddit, etc accountable.

[UrukParthian]

Accountable for what? We have a disastrous dietary culture in this country, a never ending bomb of acute illnesses that waste trillions to merely mitigate symptoms that could have been avoided with better information.

An obese nation literally has the quality of cognition tuned down. Persistent inflammation, insulin resistance messing with the brain, eventual diabetes...

Instead of making people into strong kingdoms, we give more advanced tools to kingdoms of the body and soul blighted by people who think ideals matter more than diet and habit.

[_nalply]

Well said. I wonder however what makes these companies different from traditional information outlets like newspapers. They also compete for attention but they seem to maintain a more balanced view of the world. Is it because they don't have the possibility to individually target consumers?

Edit: What I did here was rubber duck problem reasoning. I realised this: Some tabloids are also quite extreme. They target a group of consumers. They offer a sensationalistic view of the world. The consumers put themselves in that group by buying the tabloid.

[jh925142]

Wonderfully said. Though, I think Facebook's efforts this quarter are worthwhile. They have billions of users and a near unfathomable fraction of the world's people logged in. When they turn back the dials, are they really more likely to lose than to make a difference in the world?

[candiodari]

> It's a deeper fundamental devil's cocktail of monetized attention + modern (intensely and immediately metrics driven) product development + our buggy brains.

You know, radicalization and retreat into conservative values has happened literally hundreds of times in history. There have been many "causes". Military confrontations, even accidental ones. Resources. War. Disease. Large-scale accidents. Assassinations. Drugs. And now, of course, "social media".

However if you go and examine those periods, the same thing is always apparent. These things always happen after the end of a period of economic prosperity and at the start of a period of economic regression. Many people, especially those with an agenda, say that the economic damage is being done by extremism and retreat into conservatism, but upon closer examination it becomes clearer and clearer that the economic damage came first, then the retrenchment, then comes the extremism.

Now I get it, this is the 100th or so time that we see this regression happening, and once again you see very clearly very large scale economic events immediately precede it: the "great financial crash" of 2008, which really ran from 2008 well into 2011, and for many people there has still not been a recovery. And that's in the US. For quite a few people outside of the US, is hasn't even stopped crashing. In many places 2008-2018 was a lost decade. A decade that was spent on nothing other than damage control.

I get that all these new things appear to be playing a big role in people's lives and therefore "must" be responsible, but they're not. They don't matter. They are the "big thing" that's different when comparing 2018 with 2007. Sure. I'm with you. But what about the 70s versus the 50s and especially 60s ? Social media ... what role did they play ? How about the late 30s and 40s in europe versus the 20s and early 30s ? Can't get much more extreme than that, and yet, I don't see Facebook's fingerprints anywhere. And all of those pale in comparison to what happened at the end of the 19th century.

At which point do we say that, no, is't not youtube, facebook, twitter, or companies. It's that the government is unable to keep the economy growing, or perhaps we should say unwilling. For instance, people being forced out of the Bay Area because for their education no opportunities exist and they haven't landed a job paying half as much as the one they had until 2009, they're going to be resentful and maybe even extremist. This economic marginalization is happening everywhere.

Now I will say, social media and youtube are making it clearer quicker that this is what's happening, but they're not a cause. Completely destroying them would do nothing but slow it down slightly.

But the real problem the government sees is the need to start a big anti-opium program. Not directly opium, or drugs, but they want to prevent Americans from taking pain medicine. Not, of course, by providing the care that would take away the pain, but simply by taking anti-pain measures away from them, making them expensive. Of course, nobody sees the obvious result coming: more extremism, more alcohol abuse. If you've got a hernia that you can't get treated because it's too expensive, no amount of good intentions will get you off pain medication. And if you can't get an opiate or pain treatment (or better yet: an operation), you WILL use alcohol. Especially in a cold climate. Willpower will delay this, by a few months, but no more.

It's the economy, stupid. What's happening is that the overcapacity built in China since 2003 or so has been overwhelming the world economy and is forcing this move backwards. Trump is doing more to counter it than Hillary would have, but even he is merely tinkering at the edges.