[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.

[adamsea]

Don’t give them ideas! ;)

[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.