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We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement. This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digi

We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement. This isn't theoretical, it's happening right now. The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people, the shift from public feeds to private DMs, and the "Do Not Disturb" generation are all symptoms of the same thing. People are feeling the manipulation and are choosing to opt out, one notification at a time.

alganet 1y ago
> disengagement. That disengagement metric is valuable, I'm not gonna give it away for free anymore. I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works. > The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle". > People are feeling the manipulation They don't. Even manipulation awareness is a market now. I'm sure there are YouTubers who thrive on it. --- How far can you game a profiling algorithm? Can you make it think something about you that you're not? How much can one break it? Those are the interesting questions.
- notarobot123 1y ago
  The Algorithm doesn't care if you're illegible. How ever much you mess with it, you're still its plaything.
  - properclass 1y ago
    ineligible or illegible?
    - immibis 1y ago
      illegible. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State#Summary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State#Summary
  - pdimitar 1y ago
    The algorithm still can't make me buy or read rage-bait. Of course the machine will never stop trying. But with results decreasing gradually with time, the human will get discouraged and will turn it off. It happens at places, btw.
  - alganet 1y ago
    I'm not trying to shake it off.
- jagrsw 1y ago
  > I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works. Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window. Analysis: This user loses disengages during 75% of the time and belongs to a group of 5% who do the same. The expected revenue for this group over a longer period and with multiple users is 24% lower than for the average user. Action: Since 80% of theirs engagements last for at least 12 hours, ads should be shown and prices increased only within the first three hours. Hope this helps :)
  - alamortsubite 1y ago
    At which point the user disengages from the platform permanently. Great work.
  - _9ptr 1y ago
    He said randomly, which means the opposite of predictable or reliable. Sometimes he won't disengage for years and the algorithm would be non the wiser!
- afiodorov 1y ago
  There's nothing an algorithm can do against disciplined, intentional engagement. If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
  - vntok 1y ago
    What car you want to buy is just one tiny part of the transaction. The salesman can and will manipulate you on everything else from price to warranty, from payment schedule to cross-sale rebates, from maintenance subscription to registration fees, from additional options to spare tires.
    - afiodorov 1y ago
      You're right, they can try to manipulate you on a thousand tiny things. My counter-argument is that at a certain point, it's not worth the mental energy to fight over what amounts to pennies on the dollar. Anecdotally, when I bought my car recently, they forgot to even offer me the extended warranty they'd planned to push. I find it funny to think it was so minor, even they forgot to care.
      - ctxc 1y ago
        Tangential, but I think most extended warranties I've noticed are beneficial. Even last month I was kicking myself for forgetting to extend a 2 year warranty which costs 1/4th the one time repair cost I had to cough up.
        blincoln 1y ago
        Are you sure the extended warranty would have covered it? I paid for an extended warranty on the first car I ever bought. Turned out it didn't cover any of the things the salesperson cited as good reasons to pay for it, and to maintain the warranty, I'd have to pay the dealer for all maintenance - even oil changes. That car never needed any repairs, but seeing the list of exclusions convinced me to never pay for an extended warranty again.
        1y ago
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  > How far can you game a profiling algorithm? I think pretty far. I expect the future involves nonsense layer full of AI slop being read and written by AI's. Mapping it onto the actual humans will be difficult unless you have a preexisting trust relationship with those humans such that they can decrypt the slop into your actual communications.
  - alganet 1y ago
    I think it's more difficult than it seems. If I were an algorithm-profiling company I would try to anchor my profilings in the real world (what kinds of people I talk to, about what, what kinds of places I visit, what are the opinions of others on me, etc). LLM garbage would be just to draw voluntary participation in potential surveys. It takes a particularly paranoid and stubborn individual to make the necessary efforts to consider what kinds of profiling could be done with such anchored data, and even more effort to probe it enough to acquire some knowledge on how it works.
    - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      I agree that it's currently paranoid to hide your activities so that the algorithm profiling companies see you as several different people, or see the activities of millions as if they're just one... Automated misdirection on the part of the users is, so far, minimal. But the point of such a company is to sell data on individuals, and a problematic use case for such data is to kill the ones who say things that you don't like. As that becomes cheaper and easier to do I think we'll find that it's not so paranoid to hide.
      - alganet 1y ago
        Maybe the endgame is honesty. Not pretending you're several people, or other convoluted ways of misdirection and disguise. Just honestly acknowledge that profiling exists, and explicitly work against it. That should be enough to make any algorithm company that notices something is wrong to trip on its own wires, thinking some more elaborate form of hackery/covertion is being employed. The likelyhood of some company noticing a single user is quite low though, but if you are able to hook even a single person inside that company using nothing but honesty and no tricks, that is the best trick of all.
- spacemadness 1y ago
  Have you read anything by Mark Fisher? He spoke about capitalism absorbing all resistance which makes it almost impossible to ever escape from. Which is what you’re saying I think. Resistance becomes the next market and works through the same economic systems it’s attempting to resist.
  - willturman 1y ago
    David Foster Wallace made a similar argument about Television being able to absorb, re-contextualize, and subsequently market any effort opposed to it as a cause of malignant addiction and abdication of societal responsibilities in his essay E. Unibus Pluram. Today you can probably substitute television for YouTube, TikTok, etc, but the argument still holds up, perhaps better than ever.
    - _9ptr 1y ago
      It's sad he can't witness the death of television
- Levitating 1y ago
  > The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people >> That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle". The fact that there's such a market now, means something on it's own I believe. Regardless if it's a "lifestyle", it's a lifestyle people are choosing now. I know more and more people who either don't own a smartphone or have it on DnD at all times. It's the same for "manipulation awareness" or whatever. You can't will a market into existence, the market has to already exist because people are drawn to it. I am not saying that it will matter in the end, but I can say for a fact that there are people consciously disengaging from social media.
  - alganet 1y ago
    > there are people consciously disengaging from social media There are people _voluntarily_ disengaging. It is different. We're talking about manipulation, you have to consider the possibility of unconscious decisions.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  > Those are the interesting questions. Not to me. I don't want to manipulate the manipulators. I just want to not be manipulated. I want to be able to go through my day without having to fight off manipulation in order to do and be what I want to do and be. The goal is my freedom, not to "stick it to the man" in some way that won't actually matter to them.
praptak 1y ago
You cannot disengage from capitalism. The tricks you describe are perhaps useful to not be the slowest antelope in the herd but that doesn't mean you are fully free from being exploited.
- afiodorov 1y ago
  Let's be clear: it's entirely possible to leave the "herd". People can and do go completely off-grid and thus disengage from capitalism. The crucial point is that the vast majority of us choose not to. That choice is what makes your "slowest antelope" analogy so much more complex. An antelope's greatest desire is to be in the herd, because while it may contain a lion, the world outside contains a thousand wolves. We've built a herd—society—that is incredibly effective at holding those wolves at bay: famine, plague, and chaos. We willingly participate because it provides "shields" our ancestors could only dream of. The problem isn't the herd itself; it's the lion that we allow to stalk within it. What I am suggesting isn't to abandon this safety and comfort brought by modern capitalism. It's to improve the herd—to enjoy its protections while finding ways to tame, cage, or evade the lion of exploitation. What we're discussing here aren't futile attempts to escape, but vital tactics for building a better, safer herd for everyone.
  - pjerem 1y ago
    In essence, the lion is the monopolies and the ultra rich (who are consequences of monopolies … and inheritance). Sure capitalism offered us the herd. But too big companies/people are just a net negative. I hope someone today will have the courage to dismantle those big actors. Except, at least in the US, they now are protected by fascism.
  - zbentley 1y ago
    Sure, a choice to opt out technically exists. But that common argument ignores two things: First, the massive asymmetry of power involved in making people choose opting in (again and again, to greater and greater degrees). Second, the fact that unrelated penalties—severe ones—are attached to choosing to opt out, by people and systems who want to discourage this behavior. It’s not like saying “choosing to not eat means you might be hungry”. That’s an intrinsic consequence; it has to happen. It’s not even like “choosing not to eat again and again means you might stunt your growth.” That’s intrinsic too, whether or not it’s intuitive. No, the penalties we’ve attached to opting out are more like “choosing not to eat means you might go hungry, and also the people with hammers that specifically go after people that don’t eat will break your fingers.”
whilenot-dev 1y ago
> We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement. It's worth adding that "disengagement" does not mean "not giving a f*ck", and I worry that it isn't a good human response either. So what's the difference between "not giving a f*ck" and "disengagement"? I think where the former works on the individual level, the latter is supposed to work on the collective level. I'm no scholar on any social sciences, mind you, but I worry that disengagement can only lead to positive change in conjunction with the Broken windows theory[0]. Here's the bummer: A lot of us are already in said stage of disengagement. We somehow are in an atmosphere that makes it unpleasant for everyone and let the environment decay together, but the provoked collective change is just not happening. The dumbphone and digital detoxes are outliers. What happens instead is that the threshold for what's acceptable is systematically being lowered, and my biggest gripe is that it's done in the name of equality and inclusion while the imbalance between demographics is just growing. Tell me why? There was a movement after Occupy Wall street and the Arabic Spring where it got fashionable to Not Giving a F*ck[1]. It contrasted a movement of self-optimization, growth-hacking, and some data-driven lifestyle usually reserved for corporate marketing. Morphemes such as hyper/super/über got resurrected from a nostalgic sentiment of the economic boom in the 80/90s, the neoliberal free-market Accelerationism and Bitcoin certainly fit in there. While "not giving a f*ck" was a critique of the established attention-grabbing system to promote the individuality of citizens, it also got misinterpreted by political representatives and corporate operators that started to put more focus on their own career than the responsibility of their current role. They all "didn't give a f*ck" anymore in a world that got more and more connected, year after year. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving_a_Fuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving_a...
- 9dev 1y ago
  You can spell out "fuck" here, we’re all adults. And the president does it on live TV too!
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
genewitch 1y ago
they'll just go after the elusive "disengagement dollar" watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY linkhead removed for language and content, but you know what to do (and probably who it is)
burnt-resistor 1y ago
I've long since checked out (2012) from social media and apps that commodify and monetize every little aspect of life.

alganet 1y ago

> disengagement. That disengagement metric is valuable, I'm not gonna give it away for free anymore. I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works. > The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle". > People are feeling the manipulation They don't. Even manipulation awareness is a market now. I'm sure there are YouTubers who thrive on it. --- How far can you game a profiling algorithm? Can you make it think something about you that you're not? How much can one break it? Those are the interesting questions.

notarobot123 1y ago
The Algorithm doesn't care if you're illegible. How ever much you mess with it, you're still its plaything.
- properclass 1y ago
  ineligible or illegible?
  - immibis 1y ago
    illegible. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State#Summary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State#Summary
- pdimitar 1y ago
  The algorithm still can't make me buy or read rage-bait. Of course the machine will never stop trying. But with results decreasing gradually with time, the human will get discouraged and will turn it off. It happens at places, btw.
- alganet 1y ago
  I'm not trying to shake it off.
jagrsw 1y ago
> I'll engage and disengage randomly, so no one knows what works. Any predictable pattern, including when you disengage, is just another feature for the pricing model. If the model learns you reliably leave after 3 hours, it will simply front-load the surge pricing into that initial window. Analysis: This user loses disengages during 75% of the time and belongs to a group of 5% who do the same. The expected revenue for this group over a longer period and with multiple users is 24% lower than for the average user. Action: Since 80% of theirs engagements last for at least 12 hours, ads should be shown and prices increased only within the first three hours. Hope this helps :)
- alamortsubite 1y ago
  At which point the user disengages from the platform permanently. Great work.
- _9ptr 1y ago
  He said randomly, which means the opposite of predictable or reliable. Sometimes he won't disengage for years and the algorithm would be non the wiser!
afiodorov 1y ago
There's nothing an algorithm can do against disciplined, intentional engagement. If you know which car you want to buy it doesn't matter what the salesman has to say.
- vntok 1y ago
  What car you want to buy is just one tiny part of the transaction. The salesman can and will manipulate you on everything else from price to warranty, from payment schedule to cross-sale rebates, from maintenance subscription to registration fees, from additional options to spare tires.
  - afiodorov 1y ago
    You're right, they can try to manipulate you on a thousand tiny things. My counter-argument is that at a certain point, it's not worth the mental energy to fight over what amounts to pennies on the dollar. Anecdotally, when I bought my car recently, they forgot to even offer me the extended warranty they'd planned to push. I find it funny to think it was so minor, even they forgot to care.
    - ctxc 1y ago
      Tangential, but I think most extended warranties I've noticed are beneficial. Even last month I was kicking myself for forgetting to extend a 2 year warranty which costs 1/4th the one time repair cost I had to cough up.
      - blincoln 1y ago
        Are you sure the extended warranty would have covered it? I paid for an extended warranty on the first car I ever bought. Turned out it didn't cover any of the things the salesperson cited as good reasons to pay for it, and to maintain the warranty, I'd have to pay the dealer for all maintenance - even oil changes. That car never needed any repairs, but seeing the list of exclusions convinced me to never pay for an extended warranty again.
      - 1y ago
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
> How far can you game a profiling algorithm? I think pretty far. I expect the future involves nonsense layer full of AI slop being read and written by AI's. Mapping it onto the actual humans will be difficult unless you have a preexisting trust relationship with those humans such that they can decrypt the slop into your actual communications.
- alganet 1y ago
  I think it's more difficult than it seems. If I were an algorithm-profiling company I would try to anchor my profilings in the real world (what kinds of people I talk to, about what, what kinds of places I visit, what are the opinions of others on me, etc). LLM garbage would be just to draw voluntary participation in potential surveys. It takes a particularly paranoid and stubborn individual to make the necessary efforts to consider what kinds of profiling could be done with such anchored data, and even more effort to probe it enough to acquire some knowledge on how it works.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
    I agree that it's currently paranoid to hide your activities so that the algorithm profiling companies see you as several different people, or see the activities of millions as if they're just one... Automated misdirection on the part of the users is, so far, minimal. But the point of such a company is to sell data on individuals, and a problematic use case for such data is to kill the ones who say things that you don't like. As that becomes cheaper and easier to do I think we'll find that it's not so paranoid to hide.
    - alganet 1y ago
      Maybe the endgame is honesty. Not pretending you're several people, or other convoluted ways of misdirection and disguise. Just honestly acknowledge that profiling exists, and explicitly work against it. That should be enough to make any algorithm company that notices something is wrong to trip on its own wires, thinking some more elaborate form of hackery/covertion is being employed. The likelyhood of some company noticing a single user is quite low though, but if you are able to hook even a single person inside that company using nothing but honesty and no tricks, that is the best trick of all.
spacemadness 1y ago
Have you read anything by Mark Fisher? He spoke about capitalism absorbing all resistance which makes it almost impossible to ever escape from. Which is what you’re saying I think. Resistance becomes the next market and works through the same economic systems it’s attempting to resist.
- willturman 1y ago
  David Foster Wallace made a similar argument about Television being able to absorb, re-contextualize, and subsequently market any effort opposed to it as a cause of malignant addiction and abdication of societal responsibilities in his essay E. Unibus Pluram. Today you can probably substitute television for YouTube, TikTok, etc, but the argument still holds up, perhaps better than ever.
  - _9ptr 1y ago
    It's sad he can't witness the death of television
Levitating 1y ago
> The boom in digital detoxes, the dumbphone revival among young people >> That's a market now. It doesn't mean shit. It's a "lifestyle". The fact that there's such a market now, means something on it's own I believe. Regardless if it's a "lifestyle", it's a lifestyle people are choosing now. I know more and more people who either don't own a smartphone or have it on DnD at all times. It's the same for "manipulation awareness" or whatever. You can't will a market into existence, the market has to already exist because people are drawn to it. I am not saying that it will matter in the end, but I can say for a fact that there are people consciously disengaging from social media.
- alganet 1y ago
  > there are people consciously disengaging from social media There are people _voluntarily_ disengaging. It is different. We're talking about manipulation, you have to consider the possibility of unconscious decisions.
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
> Those are the interesting questions. Not to me. I don't want to manipulate the manipulators. I just want to not be manipulated. I want to be able to go through my day without having to fight off manipulation in order to do and be what I want to do and be. The goal is my freedom, not to "stick it to the man" in some way that won't actually matter to them.

praptak 1y ago

You cannot disengage from capitalism. The tricks you describe are perhaps useful to not be the slowest antelope in the herd but that doesn't mean you are fully free from being exploited.

afiodorov 1y ago
Let's be clear: it's entirely possible to leave the "herd". People can and do go completely off-grid and thus disengage from capitalism. The crucial point is that the vast majority of us choose not to. That choice is what makes your "slowest antelope" analogy so much more complex. An antelope's greatest desire is to be in the herd, because while it may contain a lion, the world outside contains a thousand wolves. We've built a herd—society—that is incredibly effective at holding those wolves at bay: famine, plague, and chaos. We willingly participate because it provides "shields" our ancestors could only dream of. The problem isn't the herd itself; it's the lion that we allow to stalk within it. What I am suggesting isn't to abandon this safety and comfort brought by modern capitalism. It's to improve the herd—to enjoy its protections while finding ways to tame, cage, or evade the lion of exploitation. What we're discussing here aren't futile attempts to escape, but vital tactics for building a better, safer herd for everyone.
- pjerem 1y ago
  In essence, the lion is the monopolies and the ultra rich (who are consequences of monopolies … and inheritance). Sure capitalism offered us the herd. But too big companies/people are just a net negative. I hope someone today will have the courage to dismantle those big actors. Except, at least in the US, they now are protected by fascism.
- zbentley 1y ago
  Sure, a choice to opt out technically exists. But that common argument ignores two things: First, the massive asymmetry of power involved in making people choose opting in (again and again, to greater and greater degrees). Second, the fact that unrelated penalties—severe ones—are attached to choosing to opt out, by people and systems who want to discourage this behavior. It’s not like saying “choosing to not eat means you might be hungry”. That’s an intrinsic consequence; it has to happen. It’s not even like “choosing not to eat again and again means you might stunt your growth.” That’s intrinsic too, whether or not it’s intuitive. No, the penalties we’ve attached to opting out are more like “choosing not to eat means you might go hungry, and also the people with hammers that specifically go after people that don’t eat will break your fingers.”

whilenot-dev 1y ago

> We should not underestimate the timeless human response to being manipulated: disengagement. It's worth adding that "disengagement" does not mean "not giving a f*ck", and I worry that it isn't a good human response either. So what's the difference between "not giving a f*ck" and "disengagement"? I think where the former works on the individual level, the latter is supposed to work on the collective level. I'm no scholar on any social sciences, mind you, but I worry that disengagement can only lead to positive change in conjunction with the Broken windows theory[0]. Here's the bummer: A lot of us are already in said stage of disengagement. We somehow are in an atmosphere that makes it unpleasant for everyone and let the environment decay together, but the provoked collective change is just not happening. The dumbphone and digital detoxes are outliers. What happens instead is that the threshold for what's acceptable is systematically being lowered, and my biggest gripe is that it's done in the name of equality and inclusion while the imbalance between demographics is just growing. Tell me why? There was a movement after Occupy Wall street and the Arabic Spring where it got fashionable to Not Giving a F*ck[1]. It contrasted a movement of self-optimization, growth-hacking, and some data-driven lifestyle usually reserved for corporate marketing. Morphemes such as hyper/super/über got resurrected from a nostalgic sentiment of the economic boom in the 80/90s, the neoliberal free-market Accelerationism and Bitcoin certainly fit in there. While "not giving a f*ck" was a critique of the established attention-grabbing system to promote the individuality of citizens, it also got misinterpreted by political representatives and corporate operators that started to put more focus on their own career than the responsibility of their current role. They all "didn't give a f*ck" anymore in a world that got more and more connected, year after year. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving_a_Fuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subtle_Art_of_Not_Giving_a...

9dev 1y ago
You can spell out "fuck" here, we’re all adults. And the president does it on live TV too!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

genewitch 1y ago

they'll just go after the elusive "disengagement dollar" watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY linkhead removed for language and content, but you know what to do (and probably who it is)

burnt-resistor 1y ago

I've long since checked out (2012) from social media and apps that commodify and monetize every little aspect of life.