> I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them
You know it? I sincerely hope you don’t and that it’s not really “most” of us. That would be incredibly sad. Tracking model releases and discussing “every parameter weight” is very far from intellectually curious discussion (what HN is ostensibly about).
> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with (…)
> Curse of knowledge and all.
If there’s one thing many of us on HN suffer from, however, is intense hubris. The juxtaposition of claiming “curse of knowledge” while admitting to not having known the most elementary principle of designing for people is a tad tone deaf. Yes, of course most people just stick with the defaults, that’s why dark patterns work and hiding settings is a thing. The industry has been using those strategies to manipulate people for years and years.
Not every company is publicly traded, so they don’t have shares nor shareholders. Also, not every company is a massive behemoth who only cares about profit above all. Plenty of people start companies with the goal of providing something useful and good at fair prices and value their customer relationships.
We should really stop with this cynical view that every company is run by greedy bastards who have active contempt for their customers and using it to excuse the behaviour of the worst offenders.
Every company has at least 1 shareholder. In some categorizations shareholders are called members but its the same function. But, who said companies are run by greedy bastards? Every company tries to make profits so they can continue their business, otherwise they would go bankrupt. If someone starts a venture with the goal of providing a good or service for no profit we have a classification for that. Its called a non profit.
I don't totally disagree with you, but although I loathe the "public companies are legally required to maximize profits above all else" meme, I do think that it's where to companies tend to end to in the absence of other factors, and those other factors tend to be fairly rare for public companies. That's why I view the solution to a company causing more harm to be regulation; the alternative is just trusting them to do better and self-police, which seems like a poor strategy if you already think that a company is causing harm and not doing anything about it.
Obviously people will disagree with how much harm is enough to be worth regulating, and I'm not trying to make a claim here about whether it's necessary for what we're talking about around search results. My point is that the fact that public companies can theoretically put social good above profits doesn't really change the fact that in practice few do, and the common pattern is worth taking into account.
People bring up Dodge Vs Ford but Ford's crime wasn't refusing to pay shareholders, it was refusing to pay shareholders because the shareholders were raising money to compete with him and he wanted them to have less money so they couldn't do that. Anticompetition law, not shareholder primacy.
> Users can choose to opt in to having their default feed include personalised content recommended by the algorithm. Alternatively, users can opt out of personally recommended content in their default feed and see the friends and creators they choose to follow.
Does that mean they are giving platforms the choice of what’s going to be the default? That doesn’t seem like a wise plan.
> You can already do this on youtube by not allowing history.
And what a bliss that is! I love it how YouTube thinks it’s punishing me by turning off the home page recommendations if you disable history (it didn’t always do that) while it’s in fact a favour. In my country (and I assume most/every country), the default home feed is such a cesspool of vomit-inducing clickbait garbage that it boils my blood to even glance at it.
> That's great however after seeing their feed being empty people will switch back.
But yes, I have no illusion that everyone shares my aversion. Removing control from the companies will hopefully have some impact, though.
You are massively underrepresenting the situation. This is not “girls have cooties”, this is full-on women bashing. This is calling all women subhuman whores who don’t deserve respect. For crying out loud, there are massive “influencers” out there whose whole job is to degrade women online. You might’ve heard of a couple of wildly popular brothers who have just been arrested for literal human trafficking who forced women to be cam girls while making money publicly bragging about it, and those guys are (again, publicly) connected to the president of the USA.
Let’s please not pretend this is even comparable to the 90s. Scale is a quality of its own, and the scale of the current situation, both in severity and reach, is very different.
Yeah, it has gone further. You wouldn't hear "kill all men" at a uni in the 90s either. But I am not convinced that this is social media because hardline feminism predates it significantly.
But could it be that formerly unrealistic levels of exposure has normalised these things that always existed, and now they are mainstream and affecting kids __due to social media__ ?
Bingo. And algorithmic social media feeds reward fringe opinions—the more hateful the better—because those drive “engagement” which translates to attention, fame, money. Which means people are incentivised to be as controversial as possible. They don’t even have to fully believe what they preach, they just have to ensure they can enrage a large enough number of people. Which in turn brings the people who really believe those things out of the woodwork and the slime ball of hate gets bigger and rolls faster.
Social media as a technology isn’t necessarily the root cause of all those problems. But it is the medium by which those were allowed and incentivised to proliferate at an ever increasing pace.
Oh, this was not parody… Looks to be just a bad faith argument about abortion from a “Pro-Life Catholic Mother” rage baiter who loves guns, is against women voting, and is “just asking questions” on the street.
I just do not understand though why the submitter thought this should be adequate for these pages. What should we be informed of? Why is this of special interest? Where is the intellectual relevance?
There seems to always be an encoded loophole, eh? Though while marking anyone an “enemy” is subjective to interpretation, “armed” not so much. Unless, of course, you bring a sandwich with you to the polls.
Exactly. This (the argument you’re replying to) is basically the same as when some new tech is introduced to the public (e.g. LLMs) and on day one you get hundreds of hot takes on how some company (e.g. Google) is DOOMED. As if they’ll just roll over and die at the first sign of trouble.
It’s like smacking a tennis ball to the other side of the court and immediately thinking you won, completely ignoring there’s a person on the other who’ll just smack it back.
It boggles the mind how people still fall for the promises of these giants about what a wonderful world they’ll create and all the amazing things you’ll be able to do. Whoever was caught off guard by (for example) LLM providers introducing ads hasn’t been paying any attention.
This. I think the generation that grew up and became adults alongside the Internet (so, early techie millennials) already lived through this illusion. And yes, some of the initial dreams/promises actually became true but most turned sideways given enough time, and the same will happen again.
You know it? I sincerely hope you don’t and that it’s not really “most” of us. That would be incredibly sad. Tracking model releases and discussing “every parameter weight” is very far from intellectually curious discussion (what HN is ostensibly about).
> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with (…)
> Curse of knowledge and all.
If there’s one thing many of us on HN suffer from, however, is intense hubris. The juxtaposition of claiming “curse of knowledge” while admitting to not having known the most elementary principle of designing for people is a tad tone deaf. Yes, of course most people just stick with the defaults, that’s why dark patterns work and hiding settings is a thing. The industry has been using those strategies to manipulate people for years and years.
reply