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by cirgue 2690 days ago
> Furthermore, outside of media companies and the HN bubble, people _do not care_. Your average person doesn't care about decentralization, preventing social media addiction, gamification, or polarization of online communities.

My parents, who are deeply not the HN crowd, are starting to care, and this is not my doing. They didn't two years ago, but they're starting to have the same sense of something being wrong that started to show up here 6-ish years ago. They're behind, but they're on the same arc.

1 comments

I too have struggled to get people to care. Partially because the public has such little insight into how these things can used to manipulate and shred privacy.

I posted a few of my recently successful talking points to get people's attention on these issues here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19010553

and am always looking to hear from others how they explain important issues they actually understand and listen to.

for example, some older people don't care if fbk steal the photos from their phone (they don't have many, and none that are 'naughty') - however when bringing up that these apps can steal the pics from their daughter's phones without explicit knowledge, and send them to how many non-perv people to manually inspect? And forward them to how many agencies etc.. they start to have ears perk up.

also the psych tricks to random hit notifications and such - these things show a company that is trying to game and use the users, not a company that is just trying to make it easy to send holiday pics to the family.