Google and Meta are surely more open than a classified missile project. So it would really be beyond the pale for someone to not realize that what they are working on is an additive platform, sure I am willing to bet they didn't say "Addictive" and instead cleaned it up in tidy corporate product management lingo, "highly engaged users" or something like that. But its just impossible.
Nobody would talk about whether the product is now “addictive” because that suggests crossing a finish line to completion, and we can’t ever be done.
If you want to be an accountant, lawyer, surveyor et cetera, one has to learn about ethics, and violating ones professional institute's code of ethics may result in you being unable to practice in future.
From my understanding, software engineers are a long away out from this still but perhaps we'll get there once the dust settles on more of these sorts of lawsuits.
Same way amazon being big in india isn't just great because of the vast talent pool and 'low' costs in India (even if many if most indian programmers are subpar, they got over a billion people), they basically ensure that the government in India can never turn against Amazon, because these jobs are concentrated in a specific region and India isn't a unified state. Amazon can try many getting into many different things in India without having the risk associated some small foreign company breaking into India would have.
You don't think that is true in other professions? You don't think I could get my accounts done in India, or a bridge designed in China? The regulatory environment in my country would still apply. Your answer is just exceptionalism
In order to fix this we need the individuals in charge to be held legally accountable without hiding behind a corporation.
In the software industry management rarely ever listens to concerns brought up by engineering even if it's technical concerns.
Having regulation, or standardisation is a step toward producing a common language to express these problems and have them be taken seriously.
Leadership gets a strong signal - ignoring engineers surfacing regulated issues has large costs. Company might be sued and executives are criminally liable (if discovered to have known about the violation).
Engineering gets the authority and liability to sign off on things - the equivalent of “chartership” in regular fields with the same penalties. This gives them a strong personal reason to surface things.
It’s possible that this is harder for software engineering in its entirety, but there is definitely low hanging fruit (password storage and security etc).
Yet they have to listen to a Chartered Accountant or a Chartered Engineer. Maybe it would be as much in the engineers interest to have a professional body as it would for the public
The gap isn't education, it's accountability. Engineers building engagement loops know exactly what they're doing. They just don't have a professional body that can revoke their license for it.
> We don't even need formal regulation to start — just honest internal conversation
> They just don't have a professional body that can revoke their license for it.
What internal conversations could lead to a professional body that can revoke anyone's license? I'm sorry, but your comment doesn't make much sense.
Edit: Dammit, I realize now I think I fell for vibebait, leaving for posterity so others don't fall into the same trap.
And no, not vibebait — just a poorly structured comment from a guy with a fever typing on his phone.
Though I guess disbarment is a thing, but requires very specific infractions to be triggered.
I would just as soon call myself a software doctor or software lawyer. Or software architect.
As a degreed engineer myself, this was a bit jarring to me when I first entered the workforce, seeing co-workers who had never been to college calling themselves engineers. But fortunately I got over it.
I've yet to see an ethics module that covers ethics from the perspective of ethics over profit.
I refused the pressure to be unethical when I was pushed, even when I knew I would be fired (which I was). I was able to discuss it with old mentors, who made time to meet with me, even when I hadn't worked at their company for years.
Lastly I disclosed why I was fired at interview for a new job (without the confidential details), and was hired partly on the strength of it by a person who had been through much the same.
And I didn't learn it at University, I learnt it on my professional qualification, that was around 3 years long and was postgraduate level, although had non-degree based entry routes for technicians. It also required a wide range of supervised experience.
Maybe we should have Gavin Belson's Tethics be more widely taught???
Interestingly many accountants in the UK never did a degree (very many more did a degree in something unrelated), but came through the technician route of evening, weekend or day release study. Many do their chartered training at weekends.
Intelligence is not particularly correlated to ethics or morality. Probably sounds obvious when I say it directly, but it is clearly something that you have banging around in the back of your mind. Bring it forward out of the morass of unexamined beliefs so you can see that it is clearly wrong, and update the rest of your beliefs that are implicitly based on the idea that intelligence somehow leads to some particular morality as appropriate.
Are people really not aware of what the company's overall mission, product and impact is? I'm finding that hard to believe. If you accept employment at Facebook, regardless of what department you're in, you know exactly what kind of company you're contributing your time, energy and effort into.
Yes? Why not? If I'd join a company and figured out what I did actually harmed more than helped, I'd leave that place, absolutely. I'm a software engineer, even with the lowest possible position in a random company I'd earn better than most people in the country and live a better life, even just the bottom 30% of earners in software in the country (not counting outsourcing obviously). Especially at that time it was very easy to find new jobs.
Edit: Thinking about it, your comment actually made me more frustrated than I realized. I've been poor enough to having to be homeless at some points in my life, and yes, I've worked for immoral companies too, because I need food and shelter. But once you move up in life to the comfy jobs like software engineering, you don't have any excuse anymore that it's just about "feeding your family" when you literally have a sea of jobs available. It might be an excuse you tell yourself to justify your reasoning for getting paid more, but if you truly did care about it, you'd make a different choice, and still be able to feed your family, and I'm almost confident your family would be OK with you making that choice too, unless they also lack the empathy you seem to be missing.
And if you're wrong, and shit hits the fan for whatever reason, who's going to fix that? You? No, he's going to have to fix that, because nobody else is going to step in.
It's easy to tell others that it's going to be OK, but put your money where your mouth is. Put $1M in a fund that he can access should he no longer be able to find employment. Then he'll have absolute certainty that it's going to be OK.
Something tells me you're not going to do that. Something tells me that what you would do if shit hits the fan, is you're going to tell him that he should find solace in the fact that while he's working for 1/5th of his former total comp, putting in more hours at the same time, seeing his kids less, not putting his kids through private school to give them the best chance at the best education, that, at least, some kid out there isn't watching 6-7 videos on the tablet that their parents use to do less parenting.
Yes, again the context is software engineering, the floor of what we earn as software engineers is above what other careers has as their maximum, and if you've been a developer since 2018 (almost ten years of experience) you're not having a tough time finding a new job, especially if you were at Google.
People get comfortable with their new living standards, that's natural. But they said they were able to get out, just took time, I'm guessing that's about vesting something, not because it's hard to find new opportunities.
let's be honest
everyone working as a software engineer at facebook is perfectly capable of finding employment elsewhere
working there is a deliberate decision to prioritise comp over the stability of the world
We're talking about software engineers here, not "cleaner taking up any job you can". Literally one of the most well paid jobs considering the amount of effort you put into it. People slave away on fields picking berries for less, with more impact on their life expectancy, if there is any career you can almost jump between jobs in just a few weeks, software engineering is one of them.
Typically, intelligent people get so much joy out of being able to do something (such as addicting the masses), they do not stop to think whether that's a good idea. Especially when that's the very thing that's fuelling their extremely lavish lifestyle.
I've heard "well, you have to change things from the inside" before.
And a lot of people have been there for a while, it wasn't always... quite as bad even if a lot of the warning signs were absolutely there.
I was actually just thinking to myself this morning that I literally have no idea what these feeds look like at this point, but more and more people seem to be looking at me with envy when I say I don't have any lol. I'm kind of curious and might ask my friends if I can see what they're looking at day to day if they'll show me.
Given you probably don't earn that today, say you got paid that now instead of whatever you earn, what would you spend that money on in reality?
What I am trying to say is that I am on your side - as of this moment it is incredibly unlikely that I would ever see this kind of money. That makes it an easy position to take in a online conversation. But I have seen decent people throw out morals for a 100th of what we are talking about.
No, I'm sorry, but fuck that. I've been one of the players, and it's definitively possible to not play the game, especially when you see what's going on around you, and still live a perfectly fine life that is above the living standards of most others in your country, if you're working as a software engineer. And I'm saying this as someone who never came close to FAANG salaries yet was lucky enough to paid enough to live better than I thought I'd ever do, but initially had really shit living situation and have had to steal at one point to feed myself. I've had chances that could mean I'd live a life of luxury earlier than what it ended up being, but I couldn't live with myself if I did those things, when I had anything resembling of a choice.
There is almost always a choice, and "hate the game not the player" is such a bullshit excuse for people to just participate because everyone else is. It's spineless and the answer of a chicken who doesn't want to consider the consequences of their actions.
Hate the players and the game.
This makes two of us. Nice to see a similar-minded person. Cheers to you!
At this point I would be more worried about working for a US company, than which one exactly - (not totally serious of course, but also not entirely inaccurate)
I say this to make it clear that I didn't make this decision free of consequences, and it was unthinkable at the time for many from better backgrounds than I. I have experienced worse conditions than most of my peers ever will and my soul is still not for sale. There is no excuse. Selling heroin on a street corner is more ethical than what is going on at Google and Meta.
Money.
This affects the brightest of the bright and the less talented alike.
Its easiest to think of tech firms as a tale of 2 different dichotomies. Internally, the firm is split between the people who are told to do best for their users and the people who are told to do best for the next quarterly earnings call.
So you may have a bright and shiny idea, but its not really going to increase time on site. And if you don't increase ToS, then that other social platform which is nibbling at your lunch, will starve you into an early grave.
The other strange juxtaposition is between tech firms trying to suggest actually better policy, while also sitting on data that they dont want to share because they are afraid it will get used against them. Which it absolutely will, because when people understand how the sausage is made, they are absolutely aghast.
This leaves regulators mostly in the dark, and then they are forced to act. At which point lobbying comes into play once again.
You wouldn't be alone in thinking this whole story sounds similar to Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
Surely it's this, right? I just had what I would consider an intelligent conversation with someone wherein we eventually settled on a core ideological difference between us is that I thought all humans have equal value (infinite and immeasurable), while he believed a human's value is only as much as said human can generate money within capitalism (basically, if their salary or net worth is low, they must not be very valuable people, and we shouldn't do things for them like give them healthcare).
I think it's a bit of a dangerous fallacy to assume that intelligence naturally leads people to arriving at your own personal ideology. There were plenty of highly intelligent Nazis or Imperial Japanese. They either didn't care about the regimes they supported or leveraged their intelligence to rationalize it (requiring fallacy to do so of course - or perhaps not, if they really did just want their subgroup to dominate all others and believed it was possible to do so).
For me it's not smarts alone to define my value system. It can't be purely rationality, since the premise of deciding good and bad is subjective and dependent on what you value. You can argue these things rationally and use logic to determine outcomes, but at the end of the day there's a messy human brain deciding good/bad, important/not important, relevant/not relevant.
https://writeforfun.mataroa.blog/blog/the-brightest-of-the-b...
Essentially a thought dump. Hope you can read it and we can discuss it.
Have a nice day!
I wrote the 6 minute mark to think of how long it took me to write the comment which was around ~50 minutes ish. And I mentioned you many times in the comment-ish because I had written something first and then wrote something on top of it & thus many initial mentions.
Anyways I have now removed the mentions and honestly a lot of this is just transparency efforts.
I literally just write whatever I am thinking :)
I would argue that we fail completely at doing this (historically, too, see e.g. leaded gas).
This incentivizes companies toward net-negative behavior until it is fully regulated despite knowing better, because it is clear that it won't be really punished anyway and remain a net-positive for them.
It is a difficult problem though.
I do think Instagram in particular has been a boon for small businesses, providing them visibility in the marketplace that was previously unavailable to them.
Social media has also been a way for communities to connect organically with discoverability features missing on the old web.
There are positives and negatives - if it was only negatives people would be quicker to abandon the platforms.
Although I'm not familiar with the case at hand, I agree there's potential there for real harm, especially to children.
The guy is worth a quarter trillion dollars and doesn't seem intent on calling it a day, and insists on destroying society's youth so he can make more money. Intelligent or not, that's a mental disease.
Imagine having that sort of money where if 99% was taken away, you'd still have over 2 billion dollars to your name....and you refuse to just walk away and focus on things like your family, making the world a better place, or just enjoying your life. Tom took the money for MySpace and actually seems to enjoy time with his family, traveling, doing photography, etc.
For all his (many) faults, Gates took a look at the polio virus and said "I'm bigger than you" and pretty much spent until it was wiped out. Doesn't counteract the bad or the Epstein stuff at all, but wiping out polio has helped people.
Mark's done jack shit to genuinely help people besides his shareholders and his immediate family. One might argue that his whole bunker thing is an indicator that he's realized he's done tremendous damage to society, but instead of fixing it, he's insulating himself for when the proverbial bomb goes off.
A confectionary company invented a type of bubble gum (called "Umpty Candy") that became addictive not because it had any drugs in it, but because they kept optimising the taste until it became too delicious to refuse.
Seems that might solve your problem
You can do a "best" top submissions with a minimum of upvotes which ends up not being that many per day.. and you still stay up to date
I’m starting to think that we need to push for more of the internet going behind paywalls, which is weird because I’ve always been somebody who claimed to hate walled gardens and supported “information should be free”.
Same with search, or AI, clearly there's value, but it's hard to become a $1T company, while still be ethical. We need the world to be okay with much much small, less valuable tech companies.
The ease of creation of digital data has lead to the creation of an infinite sea of bullshit. Ads/attention economy are just the newest layer of this asymmetry. Curated datasets are a solution to the problem, as this was how old media worked. The problem is then how will it be paid for.
When you define "addiction" as anything people who at a level you consider excessive, the word expands to cover every domain of life and so becomes worse than useless.
It’s pretty clear it’s designed that way—otherwise, its effectiveness wouldn’t be nearly as troubling as it is.
Advertising absolutely has overlap as of that of propaganda, and engagement remains the central focus of the millions of apps that populate stores and devices (along with the constant stream of ads that accompany them).
Working in transitional housing brings a unique perspective that’s often unshared with the vast majority of everyday people. When you do this for a time, you start to recognize patterns and the overlap in environments around you. In the case of addiction, it certainly applies to a whole swath of life that most never notice.
This is not about Alice liking or disliking it. This is about allowing Mark to engineer a system where statistically too many Bob's and Charlie's can't refuse (for the same reasons gambling is more common in poor communities), making the society worse off at a result.
It is not a fair fight and to act like this is anything less than a corporate-run legal addiction machine is way too generous to these companies given what we know now. Sometimes I feel like people only consider something addictive if it involves slot machine mechanics or an actual narcotic. But we know now it’s much broader than that.
Your argument held water in 2010. Not in 2026. We know better now.
Seems not so far back the Sacklkers were proven(?) to have profited and fueled the oiod crisis while colluding with the healthcare industry - and last i heard they were haggling over the fine to pay to the state. While using various financial loopholes to hide their wealth under bankrupcy and offshore instruments.
What then the trillion dollar companies that can drag out appeals for decades and obfuscate any/all recommendations that may be reached.
I recall Philip Morris pivoting their main business when it began hemorrhaging money. Essentially this pivot came in the form of becoming the largest “box-to-mouth” food producers in the world, of course applying the same addictive principles that fueled their tobacco empire to maintain profitability.
I doubt, however, social media corps like Meta will follow suit today—mostly because accountability feels more like a suggestion these days.
> He contended the A was for addicting, the B for brains and the C for children.
I gotta admit, I find this really trivial and silly that this is how court cases go, but I understand that juries are filled of all sorts of people and lawyers I guess feel the need to really dumb things down? Or maybe it's the inner theater kid coming out?
The lawyers are performers in a play, to some extent. Theatricality can pay off, in the right amounts.
In my (extremely limited) experience, the latter two are probably true but not necessarily the first one. I've been called for jury duty exactly once so far, and it happened to coincide with a period where I wasn't particularly happy with my job situation and was pushing for some changes with my manager, which made me motivated to try to get picked so that I could stall a bit to see if my situation changed. As far as I could tell, almost everyone in the room full of like 40 people who were in the pool for the civil trial they put me in the room for first was trying to get out of it, and I ended up being the first person picked (out of I think 8 overall; there were only six jurors needed for this trial and if I recall correctly there were two alternates). It genuinely seemed to me like the lawyers were basically happy to have someone who actually wanted to do it rather than have to force someone to go who wasn't going to want to actually pay attention or take it seriously.
My guess would be that they don't want someone who's enthusiastic because they have a particular agenda that's against the verdict they're looking for. If you're a prosecutor, you're probably not going to want to pick someone who's obviously skeptical of law enforcement, and if you're a defense attorney, you're probably not going to want someone who's going to convict someone because they "look guilty". I'm not convinced that someone who really wants to be on a jury because they thought it looked fun on TV or something but otherwise doesn't have any clear bias towards one side or another would get weeded out, especially for most civil cases where people probably won't have as much concern about either letting a guilty person go free or putting an innocent person behind bars.
The same will happen with expert witnesses; both bring in people willing to say virtually anything, for the right pay.
Whereas for jury members, the only people who could do that are other jury members, who would be just as clueless.
(I get that you don't want a jury with wildly different levels of domain knowledge. e.g. if you had one "expert" and the remainder being laymen, the expert could quickly dominate the entire jury - and there would be no one there to call out any bias from them)
How can you tell if you're not also an expert?
> the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation
Yes, and when the science is beyond the experience of the jury, experts giving opposite opinions will be as hard to distinguish as conflicting non-expert witness testimony (or even the testimony of the defendant compared to the accuser or litigant).
This is absolutely not the case.
> and the other party can also interrogate them and try to show holes in their argumentation
Sure, and now the jury - with zero domain knowledge - sees two very confident sounding experts who disagree on a critical point... and you wind up with it coming down to which one was more likeable.
It’s also not a great sign that they’re relying on such tricks and props to hook the jury. In stronger cases they’ll rely on actual facts and key evidence, not grand but abstract claims using props like this.
I don’t know how the rest of the opening remarks went, but from the article it looks like Meta’s lawyers are already leaning into the actual evidence (or lack thereof) that their products were central to the problems:
> Meta attorney Paul Schmidt countered in opening remarks to the jury that evidence will show problems with the plaintiff's family and real-world bullying took a toll on her self-esteem, body image and happiness rather than Instagram.
> "If you took Instagram away and everything else was the same in Kaley's life, would her life be completely different, or would she still be struggling with the same things she is today?" Schmidt asked, pointing out an Instagram addiction is never mentioned in medical records included in the evidence.
Obviously this is HN and we’re supposed to assume social media is to blame for everything, but I would ask people to try not to be so susceptible to evidence-free narrative persuasion like the ABC trick. Similar tricks were used years ago when it was video games, not social media, in the crosshairs of lawyers looking to extract money and limit industries. Many of the arguments were the same, such as addicting children’s brains and being engineered to capture their attention.
There’s a lot of anger in the thread about Discord starting to require ID checks for some features, but large parts of HN aren’t making the connection to these lawsuits and cases as the driving factor behind these regulations. This is how it happens, but many are cheering it on without making the connection. Or they are welcoming regulations but they have a wishful thinking idea that they’re only going to apply to sites they don’t use and don’t like, without spilling over into their communication apps and other internet use.
I feel like this must be an indication of an inherent flaw with a society designed around the idea that litigation originates in an individual's singular harm received from a company, outside of I guess class action lawsuits, which to be fair, I don't know much about. But I'm reminded of the McDonald's coffee case, when McDonald's was able to leverage their incredible capital power to make that woman look like such a crazy litigious hysterical lady that people to this day use it as an example of how Americans are just inherently trivially litigious, when in reality, that coffee was just way too hot.
Nobody can stand up to the might of a trillion dollar company. The resources they have at hand are just too vast.
Which is why Americans need to curb the lobbying power and communications power of trillion dollar corporations, and limit the rights corporations have versus the rights of human citizens.
Or if a company is too big to be held accountable, it needs to be broken up aggressively.
Social media technology, according to former employees, is intentionally engineered to capitalize on dependency, unbeknownst to the user, came with no rating system or warnings, and hosts real interactions not simulated ones.
I think they have a much better case here.
I thought it was Always Be Closing.
> I guess feel the need to really dumb things down?
Or making things simple, emotional and memorable?
These are opening remarks, Perhaps we should wait until they actually present evidence.
And yet some people have the opposite response. They get hooked.
I suspect it’s the same here. The tactics that are wildly addictive dopamine pumps for their largest cohort actively repel you and me.
I suppose all "gacha" games use this pattern. I find it interesting that gachapon machines are so ingrained in Japanese culture because it is basically culturally approved gambling.
Then again, the West had similar with sports trading cards, which are less popular now. Then again, again, NFTs kinda brought this back for a bit with the randomized drops.
Heavily redacted document talking about the mass notifications: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
Here's reporting on this and other documents: https://techoversight.org/2026/01/25/top-report-mdl-jan-25/
HN discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902512
I think this may also be why there is so much sugar in American food. People buy more of the sweet stuff. So they keep making it sweeter.
I'm not sure who should be responsible. It kinda feels like a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation.
The C-suite has learned not to put so much incriminating stuff into writing (after Apple/Google etc. got caught making blatantly illegal anti-poaching agreements in personal emails from folks like Jobs), so proving that is probably gonna be tough.
I can kill a person with a car either intentionally or unintentionally. Of course one is worse than the other, but both are ultimately bad and you should face justice for either of them, even if the punishment might be different because of the motivation/background. But neither should leave you as "innocent".
Every comment people can prove you made.
They learned putting it in email isn't ideal, for that reason.
https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/steve-jobs-told-g...
I'm sure these days when Apple and Google want to set up this sort of clearly illegal deal, their CEOs meet in person, or at least use phone/Signal.
If the lawsuit is about children getting addicted to your apps, who else could be held responsible? The children?
1. The restaurant isn't lacing your food with cocaine
2. The author is incentivizing reading, which is generally a good thing
You are right, it is our job to control our information diet but when the ability to control is diminished through the consumption, then we have a problem which doesn't fit into the model of "get your shit together".
There's also a social responsibility you inherit when you start selling products that have harmful side-effects. Auto manufacturers have to comply with emission testing, drug makers have to prove efficacy, air conditioning manufacturers have to adhere to air quality standards etc. What do social media companies have to do? Very little if anything, and that's the problem. We've yet to find a counter-balance that works and protects the consumer, so we're in this era where we're trying to find out what we can do, but the landscape is changing so fast that we're trying to hit a moving target.
Not everyone goes to social media for entertainment, and there's no way to maintain hygiene apart from just going off it.
Don't consume your own product.
"I smoke weed to get high, it's not the weed that gets me high"
"Social media is addicting, it's not the social media that makes it addictive."
That gives big techs the power to do whatever, and once power is granted, it hardly ever is revoked.
The traditional answer is "engagement," but there is a strong argument to me made that intentional engagement (engagement by conscious, willful choice) is not possible, repetitively, for a vast smorgasbord of content spinning by at short intervals
“We see that you’re slightly conservative. Next up: a Nazi sympathizer video! Enjoy your ragebait!”
What I don't find plausible is the specific kind of harm alleged in the case discussed in the source article, where having videos attuned to your interests constantly fed to you causes you to become depressed and suicidal.
Why couldn't it?
Start with funny videos, like clips of animals doing silly things.
Then have the occasional cringy video of a person being funny but slightly cringe in there, something akin to you've been framed.
Then have people who are being cringe but its carefully framed, a well edited video of some left wing student pushing for a policy but in a clumsy way, being embarrassing the way all teenagers are.
After a while longer, your feed is nothing but clips of BEN SHAPIRO PUBLICALLY EXECUTES THIS SOCIAL JUSTIC WARRIOR ON THE ALTAR OF FACTS AND LOGIC.
BEN SHAPIRO CLIP COMPILATION - OWNS THIS TRANS ACTIVIST- FACTS DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS!
Then you suddenly are getting people talking about their concerns™ about trans people in sports, how there might be unaddressed issues, and then Helen Joyce and the like are appearing in your feed, sounding calm and reasonable while they politely and civilly discuss how all trans people are inherently vile sexual predators engaged in a global conspiracy to sterilize your children.
More and more right wing content, drip drip drip, absolutely no one step that is that distinguishable from the previous, until eventually your feed is nothing but Q-Anon if you are lucky, and outright Nazism if not.
People used to be addicted to watching TV, right? Well, nobody was made responsible for that. If it is addiction, and I am not necessarily saying this is not, then all websites would fall under the same category IF they are designed well enough to become addictive. Most games would fall under that category too. I don't think this is a good category at all. Both Meta and Google should pay simply for wasting our time here, but the "you designed your applications and websites in an addictive manner" ... that's just weird.
The interns at work talk incessantly about gambling. It’s just weird and wrong.
social media platforms however, ...
Cigarettes were 100% engineered for addiction.
>I do not imagine these companies to build these products in a way that maximises their addiction.
Holy hell, you need to go watch the big tobacco trials of the past to see the CEOs knew exactly what they were doing. And then how much they spent on outright buying scientists to say bullshit so they could drag the matter on for years.
Tobacco set the stage for companies to use doubt of every kind to hide their intentional actions.
If the answer is "well, they keep using them". Then by that same definition, people like slot machines, cocaine, and over-eating junk food.
Is it a good, useful definition of "like" if it describes behavior that people feel compelled to do but are remorseful about after?
Why aren't you asking: why is it possible for an iPad to raise a child? Why is the iPad keeping the child's attention for so long? Is it not because it was designed to? Why was it designed to?
I find myself in the uncomfortable position of sympathizing with both sides of the argument - a yes-but-no position.
1) You can't stalk someone deliberately and persistently, using any means, or medium; even if you're a company, and even if you have good intentions.
2) You can't intentionally influence any number of people towards believing something false and that you know is against their interest.
These things need to be felony-level or higher crimes, where executives of companies must be prosecuted.
Not only that, certain crimes like these should be allowed to be prosecuted by citizens directly. Especially where bribery and threats by powerful individuals and organizations might compromise the interests of justice.
The outcome of this trial won't amount to anything other than fines. The problem is, this approach doesn't work. They'll just find different ways that can skirt the law. Criminal consequence is the only real way to insist on justice.
I thought it was kind of pathetic how quickly they shoved ipads into schools with no real long term data, no research whatsoever. Just insane really. And now here we are yet again.
I'd argue that we basically incentivise companies to cause harm whenever it is unregulated and profitable because the profits are never sufficiently seized and any prosecution is a token effort at best.
See leaded gas, nicotine, gambling, etc. for prominent examples.
I personally think prosecution should be much harsher in an ideal world; if a company knows that its products are harmful, it should ideally be concerned with minimising that harm instead of fearing to miss out on profits without any legal worries.
1. We sell ads to make money 2. If we keep eyeballs on our apps more than competing apps, we can increase the price for our ads and make more money 3. Should we implement limits to kick kids off the app after they've been doomscrolling for an hour? Absolutely not, that would violate our duty to our shareholder. If parents complain, we'll say they should implement the parental controls present on their phones and routers. We can't make choices to limit our income if parents don't use the tools they already have.
I'm sorry that social media has ruined so many kids' lives, but I don't think the responsibility lies with the tech companies in this case. It lies with the society that has stood by idly while kids endured cyber-bullying and committed suicide. This isn't something that happened recently- the USA has had plenty of time to respond as a society and chosen not to. Want to sue someone? Sue Congress.
Google and Meta are rational actors in a broken system. If you want to change something you should change the rules that they operate under and hold them accountable for those rules going forward. Australia (and Spain) is doing something about it- now that social media is banned for kids under 16 in those countries, if social media companies try to do anything sneaky to get around that you actually have a much stronger case.
Now if there were evidence that they were intentionally trying to get kids bullied and have them commit suicide then by all means, fine them into oblivion. But I doubt there is such evidence.
1. We sell cigarettes to make money
2. The more people crave cigarettes, the more money we can make
3. Should we make cigarettes less appealing to children? Absolutely not, we would make less money. Parents should just stop their kids from buying cigarettes.
Also, people in there last few decades have been using “duty to shareholders” as a way to excuse bad behavior, as if it’s a moral imperative higher than all others. I don’t really see why it would.
Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech's "top priority"
If you think its not and just "similar to addiction", just try blocking these sites in your browser/phone and see how long you last before feeling negative effects.
What's amazing here is the Google and Facebook lawyers think they have a chance to persuade members of the public otherwise.
I am not saying that Facebook didn't try. I am just saying that only having access to screens, they would inevitably fail. Screens are very unlike addictive drugs and cannot directly alter neurochemistry (at least not any more than a sunset or any perception does). I strongly dislike the company and have personally never created a Facebook account nor used the website.
Mostly not. That's the lawyers' job. The jury listens.
> outside of their medical context
Well, sure. It's a legal context now. The defense get to make the medical argument, if they like. I think it's a losing one.
How do you know what the jury are saying?
>outside of their medical context
That's because medicine doesn’t own the language. People do. If the jury hear words used wrongly then, as speakers of the language, they can interpret it as they wish. They are about to hear from another attorney who will say the opposite to the first one, and they will decide which was most persuasive.
Screens are able to show you things which give you small short dopamine hits, enough to keep you engaged enough to try get more. This is exactly how addictive drugs, gambling etc all work.
Yes, but also often are not actively in control of them.
People are also in control of whether or not they gamble their last dollar instead of buying some food, or whether or not they put that needle into their veins.
History has shown human nature can be dangerously out of control and people will happily destroy their own lives given the opportunity.
Therefore society tries to protect those vulnerable people with legislation.
Thats why we have voting and a legal system which builds upon previous laws. You and I do not need to decide where the line in the sand is drawn, the majority of the population does that via the political and legal framework society has created.
Never met a narcicist?
We're talking about words and images. Addiction cannot enter the body through the eyes and ears.
Enjoy your doubleplus goodthink.
So you think it's fine to cheat or con somebody? Just a bad choice by the person conned?
The key thing you are missing here is that companies like Google and facebook aren't some passive actor just 'placing choices' before people.
The allegation is they are were actively working to knowingly harm for their own interests.
You pretend to be advocating for a world full of individual responsibility - yet somehow that doesn't extend to the actions of large companies or the people who run them.....
Please tell me what planet your from, 'cause it ain't earth.
-Addiction is a reinforcement-learning pathology driven by dopaminergic reward circuits. Sensory input alone can trigger it.
Please for god sake learn about how addiction actually works.
When I worked there every week there would be a different flyer on the inside of the bathroom stall door to try to get the word out about things that really mattered to the company.
One week the flyer was about how a feed video needed to hook the user in the first 0.2 seconds. The flyer promised that if this was done, the result would in essence have a scientifically measurable addictive effect, a brain-hack. The flyer was to try to make sure this message reached as many advertisers as possible.
It seemed to me quite clear at that moment that the users were prey. The company didn't even care what was being sold to their users with this brain-reprogramming-style tactic. Our goal was to sell the advertisers on the fact that we were scientifically sure that we had the tools to reprogram our users brains.
200ms isn't enough time for significant information to be transmitted to a person and for them to process it. You don't 'get to the point' in 200ms.
That means that the way to the user's brain and attention is with some irritating little jingle, a picture of a bunny beating a drum, cartoon bears wiping their asses with toilet paper, a picture of a caveman salesman or a picture of an absolutely artifical thing that looks like food but isn't. Stuff that stands out as unnatural.
But that isn't enough. You gotta pair it with spaced reeitition. Let them think about this every time they take a shit in the office. Hammer them with the same shrill sounds and garish images on every commercial break. Or after every couple of songs they're trying to listen to on youtube. Or in institials that are algorithmically optimized to pop up in their feed as they mindlessly scroll looking for gossip about their neigbhours to scratch that social group animal itch in all of us.
You will likely be unable to click the screen in response to a box turning green faster than 200ms. To hook somebody on something within 200ms is largely appealing to casino like stuff where every single jingle, color, flash of light, and other aspect of their games is carefully researched in order to maximize addiction on a subconscious level.
I think the point of the flyer is that, surprisingly, it is.
The point of the flyer is that you need to get the person to process one bit of information in the first 200ms: scroll or stay. GP's point is that that has little, if anything, to do with the ostensible purpose of advertising, informing people about a product.
That is to say organizations have always had this edge on individuals.
There might come a day when advertising is too flawless for a human mind to resist it, but we're not there yet.
And advertising largely relies on this ignorance of its effects, or otherwise most of everybody would go to much greater lengths to limit their exposures to such, and governments would be more inclined to regulate the ad industry as a goal in and of itself.
This is such a naive view of advertising that if you're really this unaware of how manipulative ads are, you can't possibly have defenses against them. You should seriously spend some time looking into the secret magic of dark psychology they use to manipulate people because while knowing about their tactics won't make you immune to them, it really can help to be aware of how they work and to train yourself to recognize when they're being used against you.
Let me know what I'm missing.
The manipulation goes beyond even the content of the ads themselves. For example, one of the reasons companies are spending so much money collecting/buying/storing/securing every scrap of data they can get about you and your life is so that they can target ads at you at specific times when they know you'll be more vulnerable such as times when they know you'd normally be tired, or when they think your medication may be wearing off, or during periods where you're under high stress, or when you might be entering a manic phase, or when you're intoxicated, etc.
Like I said, understanding the many many ways that you are vulnerable to their tricks can help but it won't stop them from working on you. It's kind of like how you can't not see certain optical illusions even though you know you're interpreting them incorrectly. The conclusion I've come to is that it's best to do everything you can to avoid exposure to advertising where possible and to keep an eye out for when those tricks are being used against you elsewhere.
"You'll be happier if you purchase this thing"
"You're not good enough as you are now, but you will be if you purchase this thing"
"Other people you admire or respect have purchased this thing, and if you do too you'll be more like them"
"Other people will like you more if you purchase this thing"
"You'll be more attractive if you purchase this thing"
"This thing will be worth more in the future so if you purchase this thing it will make you money"
"This is your only chance to purchase this thing, so if you don't it now you'll miss out on this price"
I don't think any of them has to do with how awesome "the thing" itself is. Obviously there's more to, say, an expensive watch, than its ability to tell time
Like, if you sell a luxury handbag. When people buy it, they know 70% of the value comes from the advertising saying "this is a high value product" as a status signal. I think that's really dumb, but that's what people want.
It also existed a long time before ads itself did.
Oh, okay. Well if you say so.
Seattle area, they're brainwashing my children to celebrate the "seahawks" team. They came home yesterday being excited that team won the superbowl. I ask "why do you care? You don't like to watch football, none of your friends like to play it". Hard to influence when the kid is there 6.5 hours every day.
Celebrating a local sports win is about as apolitical and low-harm as possible when it comes to promoting a shared cultural bond for a community.
We haven’t talked in years.
It's not embedded in a specific ad, but the entire operation of the promotion algorithms.
Measuring human behavior and exploiting it for some hope at profit has been an obvious part of my job description for many years. Yet I've had friends and acquaintances that are shocked when they accidentally realize they're part of an A/B test "Wait, Amazon doesn't show the same thing to everyone!?" I've seen reddit conversations where people are horrified at the idea of custom pricing models (something so mundane it could easily be an interview question). I had a friend once claim a basic statement about what I did at work was a "conspiracy theory" because clearly companies don't really have that much control.
To your point, at work the fact that we're manipulating people algorithmically isn't remotely a secret. Nobody in the room at any of my past jobs has felt a modicum of shame about optimization. The worst part is I have drawn a line multiple times at past jobs (typically to my own detriment), so there are things that even someone as comfortable with this as I am finds go to far. Ironically, I've found it's hard to get non-technical people to care about these because you have to understand the larger context to see just how dangerous they are.
I have ultimately decided to avoid working in the D2C space because inevitably you realize you aren't providing any real value to your user (despite internal sloganeering to the contrary) and very often causing real harm. In the B2B space you're working with customers who you have a real business relationship with, so crass manipulation to move the needle for one month isn't worth the long term harm.
And if laqmakers are silent, then publicising, collecting, and sharing this knowledge to all ends of the earth through mainstream and independent journalism, paying a few hundred dollars out of their Silicon Valley salaries to put up billboards shining a light on the misdeeds of tech companies towards their own customers and society.
Per your examples, when the average person is made aware of the injustice, stalking, and tracking of them, they are not in any way happy with it, and want things to change.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't think this the average person will care as much as you think. Even on HN you get plenty of folks who think that tracking is ok or even a benefit since it provides a more personalized experience.
> I'm always a bit surprised that people that work in tech can be so passive in regards to their civic duty. Instead of going to lawmakers and legislators and trying to stop their employers from destroying society they just quietly watch from the sidelines.
Snowden was almost 15 years ago. The only punishment meted out as a result of him coming forward was for Snowden himself. Why would anyone else assume that coming forward would result in substantive change?
If something as crude as flyers in bathroom stalls is effective
But then drugs being profitable isn’t really news
That was part of something else I loved about their culture: there was room for anyone to move up if they could show they were creating value for the company. Other companies felt like everyone was competing for the same two promotions, but Facebook did not.
In retrospect though this also kind of looks like an unaccountability machine. If each employee must take independent action to justify their own paycheck in terms of their value to the company, most ethically questionable outcomes are the result of cumulative choices made by rank and file employees who know which side their bread is buttered on.
Like I say, maybe everyone else is accustomed to this idea, but if you have any pictures of them I think a lot of people would be interested in seeing it, unless I'm misunderstand what it is
The insight is actually pretty similar to Google's core business model: when you're going to the bathroom, there isn't a whole lot else you're doing, so it's the perfect time to put up a 2-3 minute read to reinforce a message that you want people to hear but might not get attention for otherwise.
If they were a day late the amount of pestering they would get until the did that weekly job was hilarious. We all got a kick out of them.
Your toilet time can be yours, just don’t fucking read them lol. Back then razr phones were the hotness, nobody sat on a smartphone and had ads blasted at them while they took a shit.
While I've not seen this in every single place I've worked, it's very common.
Every high traffic flat space on the wall would be covered with a poster, most of them with designs lifted from US WWII propaganda, many hard to tell if satire or not. I was surprised there was never one about carpooling with der füher.
Stuff like how to reduce nesting logic, how to restructure APIs for better testing, etc.
People usually like them. I can't say I've seen what the parent post described so I imagine it's "the other" FAANG mentioned here.
That and nice washing toilets.
I wonder if anyone considered the bias of this communication channel towards women, or did they also post them above the urinals?
Food is actually a great place to think about social media, because there was a time where the FDA didnt exist. Its need was felt after cities grew larger and the food supply chain became longer. At that point food could be adultered and the old systems which people relied on to know the provenance of their food failed.
Some of the things that changed this was when people started doing indepedent testing and finding out exactly how much adultery was actually taking place.
Eventually we got rules about what was to be done, which we don't consider anymore since its part of daily life.
No, good software is and feels empowering. It should scream the developer understood what YOU want to do at that specific point. Most notable, the faster the job is DONE the better.
Putting up flyers in the toilet isn't to enhance your toilet experience. It is the opposite, if we want to enhance the flyer engagement the easiest way is by de-optimizing all parts of the toilet UX. Say we remove all but one toilet rolls and make the side a bit wet. If some of the locks don't work we could dramatically enhance the number of walls and doors people look at. Ideal would be to lock everyone in the stall until the next prey arrives. Should release them just early enough that they don't inform the next victim.
What it is is the consequence of the power existing. 200 years ago nobody was arguing about how to hook people in the first 0.2 seconds of video, but it's not because nobody would have refused the power it represents if offered. They just couldn't have it. It's humans. People want this power over you. All of them.
I really don't know. In my experience, it can about private property when talking about housing, it is about markets when talking salaries and work conditions, and it's just about having no idea of what capitalism even is and just vaguely pointing at economics the vast majority of the time.
"Capitalism" can be safely replaced with "the illuminati" or "Chem trails" in the vast majority of complaints I hear and read and the message would ultimately make as much sense. There's not a lot of how or why capitalism doesn't work, but by God there sure is a lot of what it seemingly does wrong.
Just because you don't know what capitalism is, doesn't mean other people do not know.
Just because you only read sources from capitalist media platforms doesn't mean there isn't a lot of "how" or "why" capitalism doesn't work.
My main message was about the profit motive incentivizing the creation of addictions for the profit of tech companies. The invisible hand may expand the development of tech, but the visible hand needs to make people addicted and unhappy.
Think a little before you speak, please. Or read a little more.
Nearly all of the poor countries on earth are capitalist. World war 1 was a war of capitalist reorganization, Fascism was a capitalist economic system, therefore WW2 was initiated by capitalist nations. Nearly all wars being fought today are all fought by capitalists on both sides of the conflict. The poorest countries on earth are capitalists. Drug cartels are organization of drug manufacturing and transporting capitalists. Capitalist nations are proven to be the most corrupt countries on earth.
Capitalism has a vested interest in making nations poor for the sake of maximizing profits in resource extraction. Capitalism has waged more war and caused more destruction than any system before it and its only been around for ~400 years.
You really want me to believe that the system that makes money from doing heinous shit is good?
Look into the primary sources behind the things you believe to be true about communism. Many, many are very shaky and were just "cold" war propaganda pieces. I've done exactly that to come to my conclusions.
What I know to be communism, through research, and reading of primary sources, is just the natural conclusion of the democratization of society. People controlling the production they need through councils that they themselves organize into a peoples state.
Your toothbrush and clothing are personal property. The family farm is private property.
Corporatism is not a thing. Capitalists hold fundamental power over society, they collectively are the state.
They own the things the rest of the people need to survive. Assuming you are a worker/proletariat: Can you survive right now, today, without interacting with a capitalist entity?
Can you make your living as in food, money, housing, etc, right now, solely from your own property? Statistically not. Capitalists own most of what you require.
"Corporatism" is just capitalism. Capitalists use their media platforms to say the government oppresses them equally to us. When it is proven time and time and time again that they have almost total control and influence over the government.
And you buy the narrative.
There is no "pure capitalism", bro. Capitalism will ALWAYS evolve into this. It's baked into the rules. This is very plain to see.
Go to any main news platform, of any country, on the side of any political wing, of any other capitalist nation on earth and type "corruption" in the corresponding language. You'll be met with a flood of articles.
I am against private property of production, because I know the people who need said production can also democratically run it.
You can't survive from your own property in a communist society either because the state own all of it. Instead of power accruing in the hands of a few capitalists, it accrues in the hands of a few politicians/dictators. What's the fundamental difference here? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
In a communist society YOU control production through democracy. The whole point is for the people to be their own governing force. That is why communists mention "state control", but another, ultra important aspect that is conveniently not mentioned by capitalist propaganda, is council democracy.
You are your local state. You and your neighbors organized in a council form your local state.
You and your neighbors make sure that no single individual or minority controls your production.
YOU and your neighbors form your own executive, legislative and judicial branches.
This is in reality what communist literature is about. The american mind cannot comprehend democracy, i swear.
And if system were to results in a small group of people holding power and using production to make money, well, that would a capitalist system. Words have meaning.
Democracy is not based on trust, like the political system we have right now. Don't trust me, do your own god damned research. Don't trust millionaire connected politicians either. And don't trust capitalist media either. Democracy is based on control.
It's sociopaths and narcissists which want it.
And as Atlas667 pointed out, it's also a direct consequence from a capitalistic world view, where it has replaced your morals.
This is not in relationship to state propaganda. Multiple things can cause abhorrent behavior, and just because we've identified something as problematic doesn't inherently imply that other unrelated examples are any better.
There are certainly well adjusted people that would like to fix things they feel are inefficiencies or issues in their government, especially when those issues are directly related to their areas of expertise. Thinking well adjusted people wouldn't want to be in a position of power is exactly how you ensure that only bad people end up with power.
At least an unhealthy amount of them. I have no desire to have power over people, except I would like it if my kids actually listened to me...
People do have this power right now, they are called capitalists, they are a part of the tech/info/policing industry.
You don't have this control, I don't have this control. It's not humans in general, it's literally the capitalists. Right now, today. Try and "timelessly universalize" that.
It's the people who make money from this who want it.
I would rather that no one particular person or group of people have that much power, and I would rather help organize society to collectively and democratically decide what goes on with this tech but I guess that proudly makes me a communist.
“Most” people won’t act badly to attain this power, “some” will. Being placed into a position and choosing harm is not the same as pursuing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dominance_hierarchy_sp...
One could try to argue that some of us are special exceptions. But, there's no evidence for that.
(The delightfully ironic humor of it is that people who presumably have your same point of view are down-voting me into negative)
I think a coerced assumption you may have of capitalism is that corruption is an unintended side effect, but it actually follows from its principles.
How is a society to maintain unmarred democratic institutions when its elements are fundamentally unequal? Put more clearly: How can people have the same amount of political power when one class (capitalist) OWNS the production of what the other class (workers) need?
The mythology of capitalist society paints both them as equals and the state as neutral. This is a tactic to preserve the appearance of a democratic backbone. They afford this mythology because capitalists own the air waves and they have, and can have, the most influence in the state. In fact, due to this fundamental inequality capitalists are, for all practical purposes, capitalists are the state.
Capitalist societies put political power up for auction; Corruption has its highest manifestation within capitalist societies.
Now to your point. Greed will never "magically melt away". Greed can only be controlled through democratic control of what permits greed in the first place.
Communism/socialism isn't about magically doing or undoing anything, it's the science of creating firm and unalienable working class power. It must start with democratic control of production and local peoples councils. Greed will not magically melt away, greed must be constantly cut out by everyone by everyone HAVING the political power to cut it out. This means peoples councils will be convened at the neighborhood level, peoples courts will be manned, not by professional judges, but by rotating locally elected citizens. Council delegates will be bound by law to only, and exclusively, be messengers at higher level councils, etc. This is just a small picture of what democracy is. It is not me to say specifically how, of course, but communism does not involve blindly and powerlessly trusting political candidates, like capitalist society requires.
There is a reason communism is demonized by the people who control our society.
Is this even possible??? It takes me *at least* 2 seconds to see if a video game clip is interesting to me. That is kinda crazy.