[eloisius]

I like your analogy. Maybe it's because I'm older than last time I cared about something this much, but this time I really don't have a solution that's consistent with any ideology that I have. For most of my adult life, I've leaned towards libertarian. I don't see the free market solving this one very well. I'm also skeptical of a government-sponsored ministry of truth, though. I'm at a loss for how to "fix" the effects of social media without causing far more damage with censorship. The closest stop-gap sort of damage control I can think of is to do everything possible to remove any barriers in the way of enabling private citizens to sue for damages when social media companies publish harmful material.

[542354234235]

It sometimes really scares me to think about. The power of algorithms combined with big data is showing itself to be scarily good at influencing behavior. It is basically exploiting quirks of our brains to get us to do certain things more (namely stay on a particular platform and engage with it). It is like those optical illusions that are made so that even if you are told what you are really seeing, you are incapable of getting your brain to “fix” the illusion. But what if almost everything around was an AI designed optical illusion that is constantly tweaked and improved until you are incapable of having an accurate visual understanding of the world around you. That is what our digital spaces are starting to feel like. But instead of just our visual centers, where we can just say “I know my eyes are playing trips on me”, it is a much deeper level of the brain, like our reward center, our values, our information processing.

And in the big scheme of things, algorithms aren’t even all that good yet. They are only going to get better at manipulating us and making us want and need it. Like the study with the mice that would compulsively push a lever to deliver drugs until they starved to death. Using digital stimulus to illicit the addictive biochemical reaction in our brain instead of a drug’s more direct chemical delivery method. Or maybe I’m just paranoid.

[eloisius]

You're onto something. I try to clamp down every unnecessary email, marketing message, notification, etc. that I receive and I still feel like I'm in a fog of "engagement spam." Instagram let's me know that some random person I might know just got on Instagram. Photos reminds me of some random dinner I had this day five years ago with an ex. Reddit says this random topic I don't care about is "trending." Facebook seems to have moved half the news feed into a parallel feed in the "notifications" area. "Someone you barely know just posted for the first time in a while, check it out!"

I'm borderline anal about managing which notifications I allow if a particular service lets you adjust them at all, but I feel like I'm constantly turning off some new one that they must have added and opted me into by default. I know I can turn them off for an app entirely, but sometimes I legitimately want a "ding" if a friend sends me a message. Yet I still feel like I'm in a constant haze of pointless "notifications" that are not about some event I need or even want to know about it. It's just attention theft, where a hostile computer program acts of it's own accord to cause my brain to have thoughts I didn't intend to have and waste my precious attention. I didn't ask for it to remind me of something, or let me know when a specific thing happens. This isn't even a "notification." It's just spam funneled into a channel that spammers know we haven't completely tuned out yet. They'll strip mine it until nobody bothers to pay attention to notifications anymore, and then they'll move to the next channel that still has any attention left in it.

If I could request any feature from Apple right now, it would be to treat "attention grabbing" as strictly as it has access to the device's camera or photos. Instead of a blanket "allow notifications," make developers register exactly which notifications they want to send with a predefined message template. Let me easily switch each of those templates on or off in the general settings app instead of having to hunt through the settings pages of the app itself (if it offers the option to tweak notifications at all).