[codysc]

I just watched this last night. A lot of the content will already be well known to the HN audience. There was one big light-bulb moment for me. One of the speakers was clarifying the "If you're not paying then you are the product" idea.

He refined it to, (rough quote), "Changes to your behavior and actions are the product"

That distinction made the insidiousness much more clear than the former statement.

[moksly]

I work as en external examiner for various CS students, and in my country they do a couple of internships at real companies as part of their degree. At some point around five years ago, or perhaps a little before that, there started being psychology students on some of the courses. A trend that has since grown quite a bit, especially if you happen upon a group project involving mobile gaming.

It’s something I would have likely never met in my my career, but there is an amazing amount of social engineering going on a these places. 20 years ago if you got the odd group of students who did anything gaming related, it would typically be very nerdy, terribly executed and often a very socially awkward exam even for CS standards. These days it feels like I’m very likely examining a group of people out of which two or three are likely to be my executives in a decade if they chose to pursue a career in the public sector.

It’s really interesting how the humanities have crept in and in some way taken over, isn’t it? And all because we didn’t want to pay a coffees worth of money to have the online yellow pages. It’ll be even more interesting to see what happens to this sale of social engineering once legislation eventually catches on.

[ASlave2Gravity]

Blimey, that's super interesting. The ad model needs to die IMHO. We need regulation from a super-national level if you ask me. Bitcoin should pay the way for a paid-for internet. Anything to get ads off the web.

[rauhl]

Ads are definitely a large part of the problem, but they are not the only problem. Ads are what turn us from customers into cattle, yes, but I think that online services could be almost as bad if we paid for them. Indeed, micropayments might actually result in many of the same issues as ads do: in a world with micropayments for each page load, publishers would still want to increase engagement, because that would directly increase their bottom line.

What we need is precisely the thing so many of us do not want: we need subscriptions. Subscriptions provide a buffer. They give a publisher room to breathe: he can predict what his next month will look like; he can model what his next year will look like; and he can allocate his resources appropriately. The problem is that subscriptions are high-friction, and cannot compete with ad-driven ‘free’ content and services.

[thu2111]

Ads don't turn people into cattle. That is a huge exaggeration, or at least, you should only speak for yourself.

The sort of ads that make the big bucks for companies like Google and even Facebook are niche or local firms buying very simple ads that let people know they exist. Brand advertising on publisher websites is not the biggest source of value, and these tech firms started out by trying to get rid of it entirely. AdSense's entire reason for existence was to chip away at the terrible brand ads that littered the web beforehand, and of course, those are the only kind of ads that you get on other media so they above all others have done more to rid the world of that kind of thing.

Publishers can use subscriptions today if they want to. That's no solution to psychological manipulation. Look at how many cable or satellite TV news channels there are which spend all day trying to create as much outrage and hate as possible, all paid for by subscription.

I haven't watched it but the documentary is probably junk. Seeing the Sundance Festival logo and reading the blurb is enough to get the gist of what it'll be like - a bunch of social activists who want you to feel weak, useless, sheep-like and filled with hate towards people who dare to make and give you useful services. No thanks.

[randomsearch]

Can’t believe this didn’t get downvoted more. Is this a joke?

Watch the film. The speakers are mostly ex-employees of the big tech firms.

Your take is completely incorrect, unsurprisingly, given you haven’t even seen it.

[soylentcola]

Examining my own behavior, I do see a lot of the last part of your comment. Even as someone who recognizes the potential for abuse when you have incredibly detailed models of people and can use them to manipulate behavior, it's not as obvious as another subscription fee.

I have a strong bias against any sort of automatically recurring charge. In some ways I'm very illogical about it--yearly subscriptions like Amazon Prime or my VPN aren't too bad because I can see the cost and not worry about it for a while. But I've just been trained through experience to see anything monthly (or less) as a way to disguise the real cost through stretching it out (even if I can easily do the arithmetic and see the annual cost.

Regardless, knowing about the potential for abusing the data compiled on my behavior is enough to make me feel a bit "icky" or mildly uneasy. It's enough to make me avoid using anything from Facebook, for example. But it's not enough to keep me from checking my subs on YouTube or using Google navigation when I drive somewhere new.

If it was as simple as paying $100/year to use Google services without data collection it would be easy, but then what stuff would stop working? A good bit of the usefulness of Google nav or whatever comes from how it collects usage data or ties in with my calendar to remind me when I need to leave to make it to an appointment on time.

And then what about all of the other things I interact with that collect data? Do I need to figure out what they all are and pay them a yearly fee as well? What about the ones who decide it's still easier and more profitable to skip the whole thing and keep making their money by profiling my behavior?

Instead, I end up avoiding Facebook properties, blocking ads, never using rewards cards, trying to ignore the OG offenders (credit card companies), and still feeling uneasy about all the info being analyzed about me daily.

[ASlave2Gravity]

What if we actually got paid for the data collection? Like UBI through the tech giants. Maybe then you have an issue where it's like the more you use the more cash you get, or maybe it's just a flat payment i.e. if you have even a single facebook account and they've used your data in some way, you get the payment?

God, this is when the lawyers get involved! YUCK!

[satotious]

The system has been built to track you in order to show you more relevant ads. Whilst micropayments wont solve every problem pointed out in the documentary, it will offer an alternative business model which doesn’t require pervasive tracking to work. We are working on this problem, shameless plug: satotious.com

[tomp]

> Bitcoin should pay the way for a paid-for internet.

Simple economics tells you that this will never happen. Companies simply have much more money to spend than consumers do.

Indeed, if you ban “ads”, companies will simply invest in “non-ads” to influence your behaviour - fake news, real news (more-or-less thinly veiled PR disguised as news, a la Paul Graham’s “submarine”) or buying whole news outfits (hint hint Bezos).

The only way to stop competition in marketing is to (re-)start competition in product / technology - but that seems a very difficult problem (we’re in the midst of a physics/tech stagnation).

[lcamach84]

I agree with you, but I will mention that Netflix is a paid service but nevertheless it uses similar strategies to keep us hooked.

[randomsearch]

Incorrect. Netflix does not attempt to change your real world behaviour.

[TeMPOraL]

Advertising needs to be targeted directly. Otherwise, companies rightly reason that why should they opt for direct payments only, when they can take direct payments and shove ads in anyway?

[rtx]

Do you happen to know what titles they go by?

[gundmc]

> "Changes to your behavior and actions..."

Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services.

There are plenty of paid services that are riddled with ads as well. Movies, Cable TV, airline flights, etc. The fact is that people and organizations are _constantly_ trying to influence your behavior. It's not obvious that's only a bad thing.

[soneca]

I believe the extra step of social media is that they are not satisfied by changing your behavior from not buying a product to buying a product. They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more and be subject to more advertising on the future. So they make you more fanatic or more extremist or more polarized, because it will lead you to stay more time on their site.

They want you perpetually in the state of looking into a rabbit hole rather than feeling that you are satisfied with your knowledge of something and ready to move on with your life.

The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications, and that we interact with other people (often friends) makes it fundamentally different from a TV or a magazine.

[amurthy1]

> They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more

How is this different than any other kind of media like TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.? All of them are trying to make their product engaging so that you consume more of their media and more of their ads. Just because those services also charge a subscription fee, doesn't change the dynamics of what they're trying to do. Social media has maybe just been more successful in doing so, partially because

> The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications

So the dynamics have always existed in previous platforms, it's just been ratcheted up to a higher level with social media.

[inglor_cz]

The word "just" in your last sentence does not paint the full picture of the situation.

Imagine two villages. In one of them, it is customary to drink a glass of wine with dinner. On holidays, two.

The other village has a habit of drinking themselves stupid every single evening with gin.

Now: this is really only a difference in quantity. Both are consuming alcohol for pleasure. But the first village will probably be OK; there are tons of such villages in France, Spain and Greece, where people live to be 90.

The second village has a huge, deadly problem.

[soneca]

Other platforms never leveraged opinions, pictures, life facts from people I know, like friends, family, acquaintances, coworkers, etc to induce behavior change.

And things change a lot with scale. Even if the intent or the principle is the same, dynamics are different if it is in a scale orders of magnitude larger.

I don’t think we should be dismissing new understandings of how social media affect our lives on the grounds that other media in the past tried to do the same.

[FooHentai]

Putting aside for a moment the much tighter feedback loop and way more in-depth metrics that allow much greater tuning and targeting...

With broadcast media, you can turn off the TV, radio, or put down the magazine. The social punishment cost of this is limited - If someone asked you about current affairs or the latest show etc, you might have to deal with being out of the loop.

But with smartphones and social media, everyone's a content publisher and it's all intertwined. Stepping back/checking out has a much higher social cost as you're not reachable and you're gonna miss those life updates from friends and family if you're not sitting on the same communication channels as them.

[godelski]

Simply, your TV doesn't turn back on and tell you that all your friends are watching a certain show. When you turn your TV off, it is off.

[ldubost]

> So the dynamics have always existed in previous platforms, it's just been ratcheted up to a higher level with social media.

I remember a friend saying the "optimization is killing us". The whole economy is getting better at what it does and as it happens there are many side effects.

Those with no ethics will manage to harvest the social media technology for their profit and not for society. It applies also to taxes where companies are getting master at dodging them. Liers are getting masters at lying and we have to fight to rebuke the lies (the documentary has a quote about how much more effort is required to fight disinformation than to create it)

He also argues that optimization is poison to yourself ! But that's off subject.

[TeMPOraL]

Optimization per se isn't the problem, much like thinking isn't (and arguably one is quite likely synonymous to the other at a fundamental level). The problem is with what you optimize for, and how hard.

So most companies aren't optimizing for a goal of "maximize our pockets AND maximize world happiness AND maximize the value our users get from us" with a proviso to not optimize too hard, so that unknown but desirable values that aren't expressed in the goal function don't get optimized away. No, they just optimize for "maximize our pockets", and do it hard. And when they do it like this, any sense of ethics or dignity is one of the first to fly out of the window.

Similarly, the optimization being "poison to yourself" is not as much a danger of optimization per se - wanting to improve yourself is a useful and noble desire! The problems usually start when you focus on a narrow goal too hard, to the exclusion of everything else in your life.

As for the market and how things are: my belief is that we're in a tipping point where the market, as an optimizer, is getting out of control and needs to be reined in. It's worth remembering that the main force behind market optimization is competition - I'll find a new trick to undercut you, you'll find a new trick to undercut me further, etc. until we reach diminishing returns, and the price of goods/services settles at barely above costs. Here are things I strongly believe to be true (and rather self-evident) about competition:

1) In a competitive environment, once one party figures out a trick that gives them advantage, everyone else has to do the same or risk getting outcompeted.

2) You don't have to compete only on production efficiency - you can also compete on quality (in the direction of getting away with lower quality for the same, or slightly lower, price), on business models, on ethics (any ethical principle you can skirt will open up new avenues for free profit), on advertising, on adherence to laws, etc.

So over the past centuries, the market had a lot of low-hanging fruits to pick. New materials, new processes, economies of scale, innovations in transport - all allowed to provide better goods for less. But now, I believe, we've run out of these easy wins - most competition happens on the grounds of lowering quality, business models (Everything as a Service, DRM, razor-and-blades, etc.), ethics (see e.g. social media companies), advertising (better RoI than making marginally better product), legality (Ubers and AirBnBs of the world running on a "break laws, and use VC money to keep regulators at bay until the market is cornered and competitors are destroyed").

The market is no longer optimizing us for giving us best possible goods at lowest possible price. Instead, it gives us worst sellable crap at highest possible price, by tacking on hidden and indirect costs.

That's why I'm increasingly in favor of regulating some business models out of existence - particularly the ad-subsidized everything, razor-and-blades everything, and "move fast and break laws" ones. The market's role in society is to make our lives better. The market has optimized past that. So the easy and socially destructive tricks need to be cut off, so that the market can return to optimizing for betterment of consumers.

[thu2111]

they just optimize for "maximize our pockets", and do it hard

That's not the case.

Consider the purest examples: Google routinely incorporates factors beyond short term profit into their ranking functions. For instance they ranked SSL using websites higher than non-SSL using websites, to encourage use of encryption. The ads "quality score" system penalises advertisers whose ads appear to be low quality, defined by users not finding them useful. The constant shovelling of social justice themes into the search engine homepage.

The biggest problem these firms have is that they are not focused exclusively on maximising profit. Profit is an excellent metric! It is the sum of all the happiness and utility you are creating across all your customer and userbase, minus effort expended, in a single quantifiable number. Think of all the happiness created by Apple, Amazon, Google and yes even Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of millions of people use the services of these firms, often for free, and they use it because they like it.

The problem big tech firms have is they explicitly got on board with "let's maximize world happiness" as a goal. Dumb dumb dumb. Nobody agrees what world happiness is, but there sure are a lot of activists who will always be convinced you're not doing enough about it. Once you go down that path you'll never stop walking, and the further you walk, the more abusive the activists get. It's so subjective and unquantifiable you can never tell if you've done enough.

my belief is that we're in a tipping point where the market, as an optimizer, is getting out of control and needs to be reined in

Isn't that just a classical Marxist or Malthusian collapse proposal? People have been predicting that capitalism will somehow collapse in on itself for hundreds of years, it never has because it's a fundamentally natural, evolved and stable system. The alternatives, not so much.

[stocknoob]

Comparing newspapers to Facebook is likening a cup of water to the ocean ("just water, scaled up"). People aren't reading an ever-changing, infinite-supply, A/B tested, microtargeted newspaper.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

In terms of behavior changes: Don't forget alcohol, tasty food, the whole sex industry, fashion, and even many aspects of the shelter industry. There isn't a seller on earth who passes up the opportunity to engender eagerness to buy.

[nsb1]

>How is this different than any other kind of media like TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.? All of them are trying to make their product engaging so that you consume more of their media and more of their ads. Just because those services also charge a subscription fee, doesn't change the dynamics of what they're trying to do. Social media has maybe just been more successful in doing so, partially because

I think this trivializes the problem. The issue isn't that these things have existed for ages and are simply getting better, the problem is that we have gone from mass-marketing designed to appeal to a broad audience to personalized marketing designed to appeal to just you. With that in place, the more data that gets collected about you, the more precise the message delivery can be. The more sophisticated the algorithms that input all that data get, the more susceptible you'll be to their messaging because they are designed to capitalize on human psychological weaknesses.

[tilolebo]

The problem isn't only the dynamics, but the regulation that comes with the technology.

In many countries, TV is highly regulated: can't advertise for alcohol or cigarettes, political speech time is measured to make sure each "camp" get the same exposure, etc.

There's no such thing on social media.

Same goes for Uber, Airbnb & co, by the way, although this is easier to regulate.

[maigret]

TV, magazines have to choose _one_ editorial line at a given time. Social media can present everyone their own bubble, and so it has bad side effects. When you have a forum, everyone is presented the same content. For example, this results in administrators being aware of bad content most of the time (at least in the few forums I follow). Everyone on HN see the same ranking. Social media and recommendation engines though, will send you into your own rabbit hole of a handful of interests. I advise you to view the documentary, this will answer your question best.

[agumonkey]

It's also blurring the line. Ads were clearly ads, now you can't really tell where or when you're tracked.

[ldubost]

> > "Changes to your behavior and actions..."

> Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services.

I believe it was "the product is the 'ability' to change your behavior"

So the difference here is that not only the sell it but it actually works because it can adapt to the people in realtime. This is probable what is scary..

Standard advertisement is already manipulation but it's more easy to know when it is advertisement (though it's arguable that there are also tricks to get around this for TV).

In my view it is indeed the advertisement industry going too far and being allowed anything. Social Media just build a product for its client and none of them have any doubt and limits when it comes to choosing between profits and ethics.

Advertisement is ok when it is honest and not manipulative.

In addition the product is sold for politics which is even more scary.

There are regulation in many countries about what's allowed or not in advertisement. In some cases it's not allowed to blatantly lie. Or it is not allowed to hide advertisement as content, etc...

It is possible to forbid micro-targetting and manipulative AI algorithms or other methods. Users & Regulators need to understand what is being done, and how the effects are harmful to society.

[gfxgirl]

Well, for movies/tv it's well known they were used to get people to buy wedding rings, cigarettes, and many other things. Not the ads, the actual movie/tv show. When you see some character light up a cigarette with a cool pose IIRC that whole idea was started by the tobacco companies to the point now that most people just seem to assume you show someone smoking to make them appear cool. It's portrayed as cool either because of the way the shot is made the person acts, or because knowing their bad for you clearly this person likes take risks, live dangerously, so they're exciting.

https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/history

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...

[joshocar]

When we watch ads it's pretty clear that the advertiser is trying to manipulate us. With social media it's different. They are manipulating us to keep us engaged so thay we see more ads. With TV, the network is trying to create a great show that engages people so that they can get more advertising money. I get that, most people get that, it's a win win. We get entertaining shows and they get more eyeballs for afs. With social media, they are doing it in a different way. They use algorithms that create silos of information meant to keep us scrolling. This leads to all kinds of negative effects on society. I would argue that cable news and social media are more alike than different in this respect.

[shajznnckfke]

Not just advertising, but any communication. You wrote this comment to influence me and everyone who else who read it.

[Ygg2]

Dose makes the poison.

There is a difference between someone telling you Band A is good, and someone hooking you on drugs and promising more drugs if you buy Band B.

[adamsea]

You would reduce it all to atoms.

[shajznnckfke]

I’m just trying to take the ideas in this thread seriously. If we are going to argue that it’s bad to try to influence people’s behavior, we ought to think through what that means when applied to entities other than Facebook. That will help us figure out if we really mean what we are saying. Is it an actual value we hold, or only a rhetorical point when we are taking about a few tech companies?

[maigret]

No it is fine sending a comment expressing opinion. There are so many qualitatives differences:

- This is human to human communication, not an optimised algorithm.

- People here are not sending you 10 comments and looking at the one which you engaged the most time, because they don't have the metrics. Social media knows how many seconds you looked at a post and classify it with AI, they can make a profile of your current sentiment.

- The poster probably didn't analyse your whole past discussion history with algorithms before answering in a way that would be best calibrated for your way of thinking.

Interactions, discussions between people, even conflictual (not violent), are fine. Communication is fine. Mass communication is mostly fine (traditional advertising, broadcast...). What's not fine is manipulating people by mass-communicating while adjusting the message given metadata that those people are not even aware about.

[shajznnckfke]

In a conversation, you subconsciously build a model of the mind of person you are talking to, and your words are tuned to fill the gap between what they know and are thinking and the ideas you are trying to express. If I think back through my life, the communication that has affected me most as been from humans in face-to-face conversations, not on websites. But I could be bad at objectively evaluating this.

I think for Facebook to be more effective than humans at influencing behavior, they have to implement theory of mind, which might require AGI.

[bickeringyokel]

A single person generally has orders of magnitude less power to influence than the the biggest companies in the world. That's surely not a fair comparison.

[TeMPOraL]

Intent matters. Intent of 1:1 conversations between people is usually win-win, or at least win-neutral. Advertising beyond the point of informing that a product exists is exploitative; it's intent is very much win-lose.

Put another way: if your friend came to you and started manipulating and pressuring you the way ads do, for the reason ads do, they'd very quickly stop being your friend.

[gfxgirl]

I don't think that quiet puts the finger on the distinction.

Apple trying to sell me an iPhone claiming it's more secure and more privacy respecting might be true so if buy one it's a win-win if (a) it is true and (b) I actually wanted those features.

> Advertising beyond the point of informing that a product exists is exploitative

Okay, so, Apple showing silhouettes dancing was exploitative? The should only say "we made a device, it plays music, it's this size, the batteries last this long"?

Was the 1984 ad exploitive? I'm just trying to think of famous ads. Is the Ikea add "Time To Leave Home" ad exploitive?

I guess I don't see them as win-lose.

[adamsea]

"Influence" is a big word.

Context and details matter. As does intent. Saying that all discussion is really "influencing", isn't useful, imho.

In the context of our discussion about Facebook, IMHO these are the defining qualities specific to Facebook:

1. Massive, global scale and scope - behavior via Facebook can influence culture, politics, etc.

2. An algorithm driving the bus, as opposed to people (albeit people choose what the algorithm does or doesn't do).

3. Facebook's primary motivation in influencing is to profit via increased user engagement - they currently have no financial incentive to care about the particular nature of said engagement.

4. Facebook's poor track record when it comes to acknowledging critique or concerns around the power its platform has, and Facebook's denial that it should exercise a degree of responsiblity (or be legally held accountable in some way) for said power.

5. The somewhat covert nature of how Facebook functions; as this documentary shows, while how Facebook functions may have been "in the open", it's not something most non-tech folk are aware of, and it's not something Facebook has been, in good faith, forthright and transparent about.

6. The particular power and impact of computers/the internet as a medium of mass communication, which we are still learning about.

6.5 As a subsection of item 6, the viral nature of the internet/social media which means stuff spreads very quickly, unlike other modes or media of human communication.

So sure, a parent "influences" their child, a teacher influences a student, newspapers influence people, and so do Coca-Cola commercials, but not the same way that Facebook has "influence", which I've attempted to describe above.

[everdrive]

Local influence is not nearly as pernicious or destructive as social media. Yes, every person in the world influences others, and there is no escaping this.

But to compare it to what has been proven to be possible via social media is absurd.

[api]

None of this is new in principle. The difference we are talking about here is more between a hunting rifle and an M-16. The depth, pervasiveness, and insidiousness of persuasion is so much greater with social media. It’s a wider channel, a bidirectional, channel, and a one on one channel.

Now when tech similar to GPT-3 gets out there it’s going to be like hunting rifle vs atomic weapons. Pretty soon we will have what I am calling “mechanized con artistry.” We are almost literally inventing the medieval demon whispering into everyone’s ear. Mass surveillance plus big data plus generative AI will be like the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.

[adamsea]

For anyone unsure like me, GPT-3 is a deep-learning based model which can be trained to produce human like written language (text).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3

Unsettling indeed.

[ppod]

Also there is an underlying class thing going on with "you are the product". Choosing to pay for a service is not just an equal alternative to a free service for most people. Most people have to work hard to afford paid services, many of them at low wages. Sneering at people who choose to use a free service rather than sell their time for $15 an hour is not a great look.

[andrepd]

Exactly, it's a class thing. People who can't afford to pay for services have less "trouble" with being exploited in return for a free product.

[mattgreenrocks]

Can’t they just not use the thing? Usually this critique is applied to social media, which is not an essential human need. Ubiquitous and handy, yes. But not essential.

[kordlessagain]

The choice to not use a device which is intended to elicit interaction is not available to all, and in that case the only people that can make the choice are the others that know better.

[dominotw]

social contact is a need. I don't think i can actually survive without watsapp.

[hervature]

I'll be the first to tell you that humans are social beings that need social contact. I'll also be the first to tell you that social media is not necessary for that. I assume you're being hyperbolic with Whatsapp being vital for life, but do you honestly not know how humans got their fill of social interaction 12 years ago? And no, the answer isn't Facebook.

[closeparen]

It’s no longer socially acceptable to make unprompted PSTN voice calls, unless you and the recipient are on very familiar terms.

Even with my parents, we always arrange a time via messaging first.

[CaptArmchair]

It's hyperbole, but it still indicates a hidden very real and well known social dynamic: humans have an intrinsic drive to belong to a tribe.

This is a very real behavioral mechanism which was essential to human survival as early as the paleolithicum and the emergence of the first hominid species. Not belonging to a tribe meant being exposed to hardships that you might not survive.

Feeling lonely is part of that mechanism. That's your subconscious kicking you into high gear and go seek companionship in order to ensure your chances to survive as an individual.

Kurz Gesagt explains this dynamic in more detail. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Xv_g3g-mA

Modern technology, industrialisation and social advancements in healthcare, politics, law enforcement and agriculture have created circumstances in which you don't need to physically belong to a tribe 24/7 in order to survive. You can perfectly live alone and have your basic needs covered.

However, that drive for social connection is still there. That's hard wired into us. And that's what social media companies are exploiting.

Fear of missing out is exactly that. You don't want to be "out of the loop", you don't want to miss out on what's going on, you don't want to find yourself "outside" of a group. Think about how it was when you were in school, and you found out your friends had a get-together over the weekend and you weren't invited: it totally sucked. Well, that's basically that primitive part of your brain kicking into high gear, warning you that your survival may be at stake.

12 years ago, few people were on social media. And the vast majority of your friends contacted each other via cell phones, e-mail or MSN and such. You were less likely to miss out because you knew that the available channels didn't cater to 24/7 real time action with video and audio, plugging you in the middle of the action remotely.

Today, that's totally different. Modern communication is literally that: 24/7 high intense social contacts with video/photo/audio fragmented across dozens of group chats, group calls,.. and dozens of channels to keep track off.

Net result? Studies indicate an increased prevalence in anxiety, depression, loneliness, suicide, self harm and so on. There's a clear correlation between the two. As is shown in the documentary.

The trade off of weaning off from all of that, for many, is having to battle with and against those engrained behavioural changes that make one grasp for their smartphone every other minute. And that's, basically, the very definition of addiction.

Moreover, unlike other addictions, there's a very real chance that if you don't look at your smartphone for a day that, yes, you will miss out on information the in-crowd - peers at school, friends, co-workers with watercooler talk,... - deems important to know.

[maigret]

I moved most of my critical contacts to Signal. Not done yet though to be able to delete WhatsApp, but near there.

[dgudkov]

As my ex-colleague says "Any advertisement is propaganda".

[hapticmonkey]

I prefer David Foster Wallace's description of advertising:

"It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

[lozf]

I always liked: "Advertising robs you of your dignity, and sells it back to you at the price of the product."

[TheOtherHobbes]

With the arguable exception of therapy/counselling, you can never retrieve your dignity and self-worth by buying a product.

So all it really does is sell the promise.

[adamsea]

True. As a side point, IMHO, therapy and counseling are not products.

They’re services, and, even more so, should be a service bound by a medical code of ethics, which, since the healing professions go way back, imho makes therapy and counseling distinct from many other services.

:)

[rexpop]

So advertisements deplete dignity, with no recompense or amelioration? No wonder our society's replete with indignity.

[cassianoleal]

I believe in most Latin languages there isn't a separate word.

At least in Portuguese and Spanish, both advertisement and propaganda are simply "propaganda".

[yesenadam]

Not true. In spanish, "ad" is usually anuncio, or sometimes comercial or publicidad. Propaganda can also be used, but is less common than those i think, I've never heard it used.

I once read an original edition of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) with its title in a jaunty typeface on the cover, before the word had a negative connotation.

Pic of its cover here: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/edward--bernays/p...

[cassianoleal]

I have definitely heard "propaganda" in South American Spanish-speaking countries. Perhaps a regional quirk?

[rbanffy]

You can also use "publicidade" in Portuguese, but "propaganda" is not used exclusively for "political propaganda".

[rexpop]

And all propaganda is political.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Right, except in this case Google and Facebook are not paying the people who create the content (so-called "users")^1, however Google and Facebook are the ones getting paid by the advertisers. The so-called "users" are also paying for the internet access and bandwidth over which the ads are delivered.

In sum, the "users" are the ones paying for the costs of this particular advertising vector (the internet and web).

1. In most cases. There are exceptions where original authors can get a cut of Google/Facebook's take.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Actually, Facebook does not share any of their ad revenue with their Facebook "users".

[swader999]

The implications for election advertising are that votes and even revolutions are available to the highest bidder.

[dbtc]

The advertisers are the buyers, the platforms are the sellers whose product is your well-trained eyes.

[sriku]

The Jaron Lanier quote (with the first part paraphrased but the rest exact) is this -

"that we are the product being sold to advertisers is too simplistic. It is the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product."

Yes manipulation is also the goal of all advertising, however the power to manipulate is not mostly in the hands of advertisers. The platform owners wield tremendous power and can decide what gets shown when and what gets priority over what. It means their political leanings influence people whether or not those advertise on the platform. We've never had this kind of concentration of power over the collective mind I think.

[asta_2223]

I am sure there would be regulation and consequences that would apply to Movies, Cable TV, airline flights if misinformation being pushed about Earth being flat to commercially engage them.

[bernardlunn]

There is a world of difference - not just one word - between between contextual & tracking advertising; contextual only knows that somebody reading/watching this content is interested in this subject. Social media tracks everything about YOU. It is totally different

[intended]

This is taking the comment out of its context.

Yes its benign taken out of that context.

In the context of social media and tech, this is no longer the case, or it is the case that people are not comfortable with its untrammeled evolution and utilization.

[nothis]

Yea, but it's never spelled out like this.

[jdc]

I was with you until the last sentence.

[neilk]

That was Jaron Lanier.

http://www.jaronlanier.com/ if you're interested in more. He was an early pioneer in VR tech, and is a person with generally interesting ideas. He is more known today for his critiques of the tech industry and Silicon Valley culture.

[nickjj]

> There was one big light-bulb moment for me.

Mine was seeing the AI / algorithm visualized as 3 humans trying to figure out what the best plan of action was to make you engage.

That really made me think about how it's another group of humans out there trying to take time away from me for the sole purpose of making their company more money. That's a much stronger mental image than a vague algorithm that we all knew existed.

That concept of the documentary alone made it worth watching.

[mavsman]

It never occurred to me until now that Hacker News is free and this statement could be applied here as well, though I'm not exactly sure in what way.

[yashap]

It’s content marketing for Y Combinator itself, like a blog on steroids. Y Combinator wants to market to the following groups:

- startup founders, that could apply to YC

- investors, that could invest in YC companies

- potential customers for YC companies

- potential employees for YC companies

HN brings all of these people into a YC controlled community, and gets them thinking about YC frequently. It’s outstanding marketing, and like all great content marketing, it also provides value to the people being marketed to.

[vowelless]

Of course. Remember that Dropbox started here [0]. It inspires lots of people to apply to YC. YC founders participate in these forums. It raises everyone's value in general. HN members often are the early adopters on many YC products, giving important feedback (for free) to these companies.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[snypox]

Oh, how funny is it, that the top comment would be still the top comment today.

[surround]

> This is one of the few places where a tech outsider can be exposed to some of the topics that are on the minds of insiders. The caveat is that criticism of any of the conceptual bodies orbiting the starry notion of "tech startup" (social ramifications, diversity and discrimination, wealth and income, etc.) are heavily frowned upon. Now, are mods going through and sweeping away every comment that proclaims, "Tech bad."? (Mostly) no. But no one wants to bite the hand that feeds it, particularly when so many have usernames easily tied to their public personas. So it's disappointing but not surprising to see people hostile to or tip-toeing around said criticism.

> In any case, the basic dynamic is interesting: the less you pay for things directly, the more power you give up to those who do. The abstraction is largely symbolic for ads (consumers pay advertisers in higher product costs), but apparently where and when money exchanges hands matters to who ultimately has influence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22513699

[TeMPOraL]

> The caveat is that criticism of any of the conceptual bodies orbiting the starry notion of "tech startup" (social ramifications, diversity and discrimination, wealth and income, etc.) are heavily frowned upon.

Perhaps in the US time zone :). I read and comment mostly when EU is awake, and I assure you, I haven't seen a place more deeply cynical and reserved about tech startups than HN (and having the reasons and reasoning to back the cynicism up) :).

I wonder if anyone did an analysis of how HN sentiments change during the day, as people from different parts of the world are participating?

[identity0]

To change your behaviour to look more favourably on Ycombinator startups. (/s?)

[unishark]

Unless they're just losing money on it.

An apartment building I once lived in had free candy in the lobby sometimes. I rather doubt it was driven by any measurable profits for them by doing it.

[ducttapecrown]

YCombinator companies advertise here for jobs?

[shaklee3]

All the time. You'll frequently see front page titles like "My company (YC19) Hiring Engineers"

[disown]

> He refined it to, (rough quote), "Changes to your behavior and actions are the product"

That's true of all media. Doesn't matter if you pay for it or not. Even netflix. Even this post.

What is the "documentary" trying to achieve? Change behavior.

Who is behind the social media campaign?

"Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468533

> That distinction made the insidiousness much more clear than the former statement.

Just as insidious are "documentaries". They are just as sneaky and agenda driven as facebook algorithms.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Documentaries are made a clear statement of narrative intent. You can disagree with the positioning, but a documentary never pretends to be something other than a documentary.

What is Instagram? Is it a tool for sharing photos, or is a social engineering experiment intended to increase competitive anxiety and narcissism?

What is Facebook? Is it a way to stay in touch with friends and family, or is it a social engineering experiment designed to promote "engagement" through ever-increasing political and emotional extremism?

If I want to make a documentary I can use the camera in my cellphone and maybe a cheap lapel microphone, buy some cheap studio lights, and edit it with cheap software. The research would be harder to buy, but still not impossible for someone with good basic journalism skills.

If it's not defamatory I can post it on YouTube. If it's solid journalism with an original and interesting angle there's even a fair chance I'll be able to sell it a media network.

If I want to create my own global social network - that's a slightly more challenging project.

[disown]

> Documentaries are made a clear statement of narrative intent. You can disagree with the positioning, but a documentary never pretends to be something other than a documentary.

Except that the masses believe "documentaries" = truth. I know I did when I was younger. No documentary claims to be "agenda ridden 'movie' from biased individuals funded by even more biased individuals".

> If it's not defamatory I can post it on YouTube. If it's solid journalism with an original and interesting angle there's even a fair chance I'll be able to sell it a media network.

Except that you still depend on social media. You depend on youtube or netflix to give you preferential treatment.

> If I want to create my own global social network - that's a slightly more challenging project.

It's also challenging to get the money, not only produce the film, but get netflix to it special treatment and of course buy the "ad" push we see on social media ( ironically enough ).

"The Social Dilemma" isn't just a "documentary". It's a part of a well funded propaganda campaign. There is obviously political and financial backing for this behind the scenes. Not that I'm against the sentiment because social media monopolies or any monopolies are a threat to society. And I also include netflix as a monopoly threat.

[Sebb767]

> Documentaries are made a clear statement of narrative intent. You can disagree with the positioning, but a documentary never pretends to be something other than a documentary.

But you could describe this as propaganda with anti social media agenda. I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but this argument can easily be flipped and feels a bit like going no true Scotsman [0] since there very much are documentations (as listed) with doubtful or undefined intent.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

[burkaman]

> What is the "documentary" trying to achieve? Change behavior.

But will the filmmakers profit if they succeed? They don't make any money by successfully changing your mind.

[adnzzzzZ]

You can profit in more ways than just with money. For instance, you can gain status in your sphere by successfully changing people's minds with your documentary, and I would assume that's partly what motivates people working on these projects.

[colinmhayes]

Well yea they will make money if they succeed because that means they made a good documentary and will be paid to make more.

[jolux]

Well, we typically consider films to have intrinsic value that scam ads for boner pills and clickjacking attacks don't.

[YarickR2]

Exactly. Exactly. So many of those are thinly veiled lies in disguise ; and when creators are being pointed to inaccuracies, their response is "we shot this not to accurately convey the sequence of events, but to raise awareness and to start public debate". Obviously, no debate is started, because general public likes to consume, not to analyze what is being consumed. Sorry for the rant, I'm fed up with documentaries being mocumentaries

[iRomain]

I really liked the futures analogy. On top of my head:

> there are pork chops futures, oil futures, and now human futures.

This is so full of sense in all degrees.

[qppo]

I feel like they edited that quote a little too far away from the final(?) statement she gave, which was along the lines of "these markets should be banned, just like we have banned markets in human organs and human slaves."

[app4soft]

> "If you're not paying then you are the product" idea

To be honest, "Even if you're paying you are the product too".[0,1]

[0] https://time.com/5596033/lawsuit-apple-selling-itunes-listen...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/28/its-mid...

[tqi]

"Changes to your behavior and actions"

Is there an industry anywhere that is not in the business of influencing behavior or actions? Why do you think that doesn't apply to news, education, healthcare, whatever?

[jhardy54]

There's a big difference when you take informed consent into account.

When I go to the doctor I understand the scope and goals of my healthcare provider. I'm not surprised when my behaviors are changed to enhance my health.

When the average person uses social media to connect with friends they aren't informed on the scope or goals of the social media provider. When I RSVP to a birthday party I only expect that my response will be sent -- I don't expect that I'll have birthday gifts suggested to me or have my relationships tracked by surveillance organizations.

[kenjackson]

> When I go to the doctor I understand the scope and goals of my healthcare provider.

Are you sure about that? The fact that I have to sometimes argue for a test, and their counter argument isn't "the test isn't useful or even worse", but rather "the test is expensive" makes me wonder what their goal is. I'm paying for the test (or my insurance is), aren't I? It seems they're trying to optimize for something, but I'm not sure if its my health.

[nradov]

Physicians have an ethical obligation not to order unnecessary treatments, especially those that could cause iatrogenic harm. That applies regardless of who is paying. Most tests produce some level of false positives, which can potentially lead to more unnecessary treatments.

From an evidence-based medicine standpoint, how likely are those tests to actually optimize your health?

[kenjackson]

In this case the doctor explicitly said it was to reduce costs, although the other test is preferable from a diagnosis perspective. Like I mentioned previously, if the reason the doctor gave was that the more expensive test was also less useful or had other negative consequences I didn't think of, then I'd appreciate that. To simply rule out the more expensive test based on cost seemed at ends with what I wanted - again as insurance was paying the tab.

[jhardy54]

You should ask your doctor! I don't have enough information to give you a confident guess, but my intuition is that theyre trying to save you money when an expensive test is unlikely to be helpful.

Many people struggle to make ends meet, so it makes sense to avoid superfluous medical costs. If you tell your healthcare provider that money is no object I'd imagine that they'd be able to weigh the financial aspect more accurately.

[loteck]

The customers of those industries are showing up for roughly the "changes" they are receiving.

Customers of social media are showing up for pictures of grandkids and are receiving disinformation & outrage, because that content hacks the brain & will ensure the eyeballs come back more reliably, and for longer.

[dalbasal]

In my experience, the best way to get people who have only seen the consumer side is in the third person.

We tend to underestimate the influence advertising (and media, etc.) have on us, but are relatively objective in observing the effects of advertising on other people, society, and such. Being influenced by advertising reads as being duped to most people, and we resist this conclusion.

This is a little different to many subjects, where we tend to empathize more with examples that have us as the object.

[gfxgirl]

not as catchy but much better than "If you're not paying then you are the product". Wikipedia free. Linux in all its flavors are free. Libre Office, Firefox, LLVM, gcc, python. Lots of things are I'm not paying and don't make me the product.

[brailsafe]

It's an interesting counterpoint, but I'd argue that none of those are really businessman or are expected to have revenue models. The exception being Firefox, which I believe is paid by Google for search engine placement and does make you the product.

[brailsafe]

businesses*.

[nikki93]

This is interesting. I wonder what it's like also to kind of... Not really make it about that at all. Say you're hanging out with your friends IRL, and you're not paying them to hang out with you, or didn't pay the grass to hang out with them among it. Are you still being a "product"? I think in that case we don't dig into it because it all seems part of some natural order of things. I guess we just need to keep living till we get there.

I feel like it seems worthwhile to have an angle that doesn't dichotomize your actions into product/non-product ones; maybe you just act in a space orthogonal to it and/or use your understanding of it to inform yourself but aren't driven by needing to be product or non-product. Capitalizing on that last desire is I think how the language ends up becoming too much ends and not means.

[bsanr2]

https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...

This may or may not be related, because I'm finding it difficult to parse your comment.

[nikki93]

Honestly, I love it! Thanks for that. :) Yeah I care about this: we have scaled bakeries that make lots of stuff, and we've industrialized it and commercialized it and ... etc. And that's great! But we also bake at home in our kitchen, for our families. We do things in between: small businesses that serve their communities. I want that we do that with software, and I want it to be as widespread as is with things we take that more for granted about like cooking. We're doing it already: when you write a blog post, you are producing a software experience for someone else. I hope that over time we spread the empowerment of creation of more kinds of software experiences across more people, and also without needing to make everyone feel like it needs to be about scaling: gardening, not necessarily agriculture.

[buovjaga]

Seems to be in line with the history of PR and advertising presented in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

[amitnme]

True I had heard many versions of this inference but this came in as a rational explanation.

[mitchdoogle]

This kind of wording is conspiratorial mumbo jumbo. A social media's product is it's platform and software. Their revenue comes from advertising. No one ever told someone watching network TV in the 80s, "you are the product", because that would be ridiculous. It's no less ridiculous to do that with websites and phone apps.

Why can't we just have a frank discussion about advertising and privacy without this kind of manipulative language?

[manapause]

“Talking past each other” is now the norm; culture is not a solution of molecules that can settle back down - how the crap do we unbake a cake?

This sounds like fluff: appreciating the art, style, aesthetic of the work/entity we are talking to should be #1 goal.

Engaging in the appreciation of art is to jettison our judgement of the subject to focus on the choices “why” and “how.”

I don’t know if this groks with anyone else....that’s kinda part of it too.

The prospect of work being judged by peers negatively is the pain amplifier on all our hands.

There are some of us out there - good people that are just broken.

Their path has made them feel it as if it’s on all the time, and they are as unstable and judgemental as they arw talented.

I have no idea how to fix the broken - I am just trying to paint myself whole again, one human interaction at a time.

[etripe]

A social media's product is its platform/software only if it manages to sell those or extract rent. That could apply to "Facebook at Work" and LinkedIn, but they're the exception. For other social media, the platform and software are infrastructure, not the product.

The key difference between network TV in the 80s and social media now is the former had content to offer. As such, you could call the ads supplemental. TV also has dual income streams: subscriptions and advertising.

A social media platform has no content to offer, except the content provided by its users. If you provide content for free and the company benefits through increased eyeballs and therefore ad revenue, in a sense you're an unpaid employee. That makes you the product as shorthand for you providing the product.

Based on main revenue streams, network TV is either in the entertainment or advertising sector (I haven't looked up the numbers), but social media are squarely in the advertising sector. That makes the user's data the product, and "you are the product" a totum pro parte.

[cmehdy]

Nielsen ratings[0] have been a thing since the 1930s, so in a way people's attention has indeed been commoditized for a while now - only with an increasing granularity that has now reached some of an individual's metrics (and we're continuing to go along that path with smart devices and addition of sensors).

I'm not sure why saying to people that their attention and subsequent changes in behaviours were the fundamental parts of entire markets would be conspiratorial, but I might be misunderstanding you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings

[1propionyl]

Two key differences:

1. Nielsen boxes were and are opt-in.

2. You were and are compensated for keeping one.

[cmehdy]

1. Social media is opt-in

2. You are compensated by accessing an incredibly complex system and network for free where otherwise you would have to maintain or pay for some kind of infrastructure.

(I am playing the devil's advocate here because it is interesting to me to understand in what way other than granularity this would be any different from the way the media has been communicated to us for a long time)

[izacus]

What was once "analyitcs" is now called "spying" on HN as well, which pretty much shows how much nuanced debate is now possible here - any kind of attempt at talking about certain products just brings out extremist rhetoric which kinda defeats constructivity on both sides.

[donny2018]

In the 80s you weren’t individually targeted based on data collected on you personally.

[shi314]

Ever Heard of Nudge Economics?

[HeavyStorm]

Agree, that was the biggest insight in the movie.

I do question whether it's a problem. No one likes the idea of being manipulated, but... Aren't we being influenced by others all the time? What is really genuine and what is external influence?

[simonebrunozzi]

That was, if I recall correctly, Jaron Lanier [0].

Well worth reading stuff he wrote, of recordings of his past speeches, if you haven't done so already.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

[thelittleone]

This is literally what many parasites do. In the case of GI parasites they make you crave what they want.

[wdr1]

Isn't that true of all advertising, be it TV, billboards, magazines, or digital?

[gauravkumar552]

No

[pbw]

For the last 5000 years advertising has tried and succeeded at making people change their behavior and actions. It's not all that insidious, it's just how advertising works, that's its entire purpose.

The doc was not awful, it's good to get people talking, but it was more one-sided than a facebook feed, which I found very ironic. Every well lit talking head had the same point of view, they presented their mic drop line and then there was no discussion, no counterpoint, no follow up.

[sriku]

Agree. That was a sharp observation by Jaron Lanier (father of VR?)

[sleepysysadmin]

The pigs on the farm don't pay rent.

[samuraiV]

my light bulb moment was when they compare Wikipedia with Facebook and Google. I took a moment of pause and probably thought about for the first time in my life how this changes the whole narrative. Facebook and Google actually manipulates you to give you a different picture of the reality and basically dividing us even on the subjects of prime importance like global warming, corona virus etc where we can't afford to form different opinions. They shouldn't be allowed to do that sometimes its the question of life and death.

[dwd]

So...essentially the product they sell is your metadata; which is also the data the surveillance state finds valuable.

[lowdose]

If you don't pay you obey!

[disambiguation]

in much the same way the documentary was designed to do!