12 ms·
This is the absolutely horrific next stage for social media platforms: - They're already well able to surface the most addictive short video for a specific use
by aubanel 2mo ago
This is the absolutely horrific next stage for social media platforms:
- They're already well able to surface the most addictive short video for a specific user out of millions of real videos.
- But these millions of real videos are just darts thrown into the space of "videos that could hook the user", in the end even the best-selected of them is not perfect.
- Now, behold! AI allows to generate the perfect video to surgically hit all the switches in the viewer's brain and turn it into a zombie hooked for days on end.
Let's hope our regulations hit these "social networks" hard enough so that never dare deploy this kind of technology.
- barrenko 2mo agoWe are doing to our brains and our children the same thing we are doing to pigs in cages, squezeeing every last cent until the planet burns down.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo ago> until the planet burns down. Common misconception. We won't kill the planet even if we tried to. Wed make it too hard to sustain billions of humans, sure. But they are very different things
- nonethewiser 2mo agoThis is a good distinction because its a common idea but its based on a conflation: human civilizationhealth and planet health. Planet health is hard to even think about apart from humans but the planet in no way “needs” us.
- Timon3 2mo agoIt's a silly distinction. Unless we're wiped out by a virus or something similar, whatever ends us is likely to also take down a huge part of the biosphere as well - as is already happening. "Burning something down" doesn't mean literally killing all life. But the unnecessary deaths of likely billions of animals in the long run should weigh enough to stop this nitpicking.
- therobots927 2mo agoSame could be said about any of the many mass extinction events in earth history. Not that I’m in favor of setting the planet on fire, but if you zoom out far enough it’s clear earth would bounce back from even a nuclear war coupled with climate change and microplastics.
- Timon3 2mo agoAnd that makes it somehow okay? You just don't care about billions of deaths? Like, do you think I'd argue that any of the previous mass extinctions were good?
- mf2hd 2mo agoWe might not be here without those mass extinction events. So yeah, they were good, fck the dinos.
- Timon3 2mo agoI think the mere fact that they resulted in comments like yours proves they were objectively not good.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoSo why are you upset that it might disappear? Make your mind up
- therobots927 2mo agoNot good but definitely inevitable. It’s sort of like a cache clearing mechanism for the sim.
- Timon3 2mo agoThe current mass extinction was in no way inevitable, it is caused by humans. We can still have an unknowably large impact on the number of lives lost. I don't know why we should pretend otherwise.
- barrenko 2mo agoWe won't kill it, but we can try to burn it. Conflagration comes to mind.
- alnwlsn 2mo agoLike a burned out brick building, a burned down planet is still there, but still also burned down. Of course it doesn't 'disappear'
- bratbag 2mo agoNot even close chief. Earth has been a rich, life sustaining planet in far hotter conditions then anything we are projected to take it to. We can kill billions of ourselves, but short of ww3 earth will crack on just fine. Social media emotional hot-takes dont match the numbers. We are still screwed though.
- peterleiser 2mo agoThere's always the Death Star angle.
- malfist 2mo agoYou say that, but run away greenhouse gases can sterilize the entire planet, like Venus.
- inigyou 2mo agoFortunately that particular extreme scenario doesn't seem likely. Radiance scales with the fourth power of temperature, and we're not filling the atmosphere with Venus levels of sulfuric acid. Our CO2 output will be self-limiting when it kills us and we stop outputting it.
- NoGravitas 2mo agoSure, it will "only" look like another one of the Big Five extinction events.
- inigyou 2mo agoThe planet will still be here even if it burns down. After London burned down, there was still London. It was just burned down.
- NoGravitas 2mo agoSure, and the planet survived the Permian-Triassic extinction event. Cold comfort to 70% of the terrestrial vertebrate species at the time.
- deinonychus 2mo ago>We won't kill the planet even if we tried to. Common misconception. The planet isn't alive. We can't kill it. It's a rock.
- soco 2mo agoDon't forget it's not "the platforms" doing this, it's people like you and me, maybe even people reading this message. We, they, are building this, and don't care about anything as long the paycheck comes. This is the reality.
- acessoproibido 2mo agoSpeak for yourself, I would rather clean toilets for a living than work on these mind-destroying technologies
- tartoran 2mo agoI suspect OP was referring to not only working for these platforms but also creating content or even consuming it.
- pixl97 2mo agoMoloch wins again https://medium.com/@darth.mark.23/the-moloch-dilemma-how-game-theory-reveals-a-hidden-force-behind-global-issues-8b21194ff16e https://medium.com/@darth.mark.23/the-moloch-dilemma-how-gam...
- sudb 2mo agoI am surprised that no comment has yet mentioned Infinite Jest (which I'm still yet to complete - it's been years since I started).
- acessoproibido 2mo agoCare to elaborate for those that haven't started tackling this tome yet?
- ripe 2mo agoI think parent is referring to the film in the novel, also named Infinite Jest. The film is so compelling that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die.
- inigyou 2mo agoThis occurred to rats who had levers wired directly to their reward centers.
- jerkstate 2mo agoif you're interested in completing it, check out the 30th anniversary audiobook, it just came out a few months ago, very accessible
- neon_diogenes 2mo agoCurious how the audiobook deals with the end notes? They are crucial imo.
- jerkstate 2mo agoit interleaves the end note in the text at the point where the endnote is referenced (by number), reads the endnote, and then sounds a bell to indicate that we've returned to the main text. Sometimes endnotes reference other endnotes and you have to wait until the point in the text, e.g. endnote 304 is referenced from earlier endnotes than it occurs in the text (rather late in the book) and you just have to wait until endnote 304 is read to find out what it is. that's a bit of a disadvantage, but infinite jest is the kind of book that you really need to read multiple times in order to get it anyways.
- QuantumGood 2mo agoCarfentanyl potentcy is roughly 10,000 times morphine. The pursuit of optimized technology usually far outpaces regulation or any kind of control. As technologies are controlled, even the lessened availability of more potent types causes an enormous overall issue. Humans are obsessive-compulsive optimizers, for good and for ill.
- anon373839 2mo agoSocial media is not even the worst threat vector, in my opinion. It’s Anthropic/OpenAI/Google, whom people are giving an unprecedented level of access to their innermost thoughts. We have not yet seen* the kind of large-scale, individually targeted psychological manipulation that cloud AI products can deliver. And I have no doubt the likes of Dario Amodei and Sam Altman will show us, if we give them enough time. * I suppose the GPT-4o sycophancy/AI psychosis crisis was a preview, but that was just blunt “engagement” tuning.
- fcarraldo 2mo agoThe largest social media company in the world by several orders of magnitude is Meta, who are both using data collected from their social media platforms to train their AI models and improve ad targeting. Meta also offers AI chat bots on their platforms (FB Messenger and WhatsApp), to capture those innermost thoughts. Don’t count out Zuckerberg, he’s very good at being a villain.
- sonicvroooom 2mo agoThe mother of social media is free TV. We tend to forget that both, the social and the media part, input and output, are interpersonal, first. Ad targeting doesn't need improvement. The incentives offered to people with an adverse attitude towards Ads are shit. Think of incentives as having effects and side effects. It's about intent. Free TV had that down ages ago. It was awesome. But they fucked market entry and whole population segments, more or less conservative and/or liberal as well as more or less authentic sub-cultural patchworks were left unserved. That wasn't even nonsense! MTV, suddenly going away? Uhm, guys, I only get Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee... beep boop bop beep boop bop beep... BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP... (pause) ...brr-ding... brr-ding... Krrrrrrrrrrr-shhhhhhhhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeee-awwwwwwwww-eeeeeeeeeee... Bong-bong-bong... KSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH (click). Silence ... around here, and then a lot of popups, ads, .... you know, the wild wild west of internet history ... We talked TV on the street and in school. And Video games. Now Netflix et al and your feed, too. Who's roofs is most of that media industrial complex under? Thinking Meta et al and their ads infrastructure and UX weighs as much as that of Free TV is falling for a rather simple Kansas City Shuffle. "New", only now native media still doesn't interface as well with the brain and our emotional processing as TV and "The News" do. And won't until Neuralink et al get their interfaces all the way up your ... lobes. Forget Zuckerberg et al and let them do their jobs. They don't need publicity, they need to filter for suitable test subjects, edge case pop segments whose needs & desires are yet to be fulfilled. There's still a lot of people out there with something to put on the market but they can't because a little something is missing and nobody seems to know why ... something double long running on the news maybe?
- lloydatkinson 2mo agoThere's actual real people working on this bullshit. Horrifying doesn't even come close.
- inigyou 2mo agoThey have information barriers to keep the non-sociopaths from understanding the horror they're working on. Military forces do the same thing. Even the German train drivers didn't know what kind of facilities their trains were going to or why.
- api 2mo agoStop calling them “social” media. They have not been that since algorithmic feeds driving infinite scroll replaced updates from your friends. That was more than a decade ago. There is nothing at all social about the latest generation like TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
- HPsquared 2mo agoAlgorithmic media
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoIf YouTube is social media, anything with a comments section is social media, even the old "guestbooks" of web 1.0 days were social media. It's a pointless term whoever uses it.
- krapp 2mo agoYoutube is very obviously social media. It is a platform that serves algorithmically sorted third party content based on user preferences and a network of accounts that a user follows, and it allows communication between users through comments. It has communities. It has memes. It is certainly addictive in all of the ways social media can be.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoForums are social media. Irc is social media. BBS is social media. They all qualify under your definition.
- krapp 2mo agoNeither IRC nor BBS* use algorithms to create feeds of third party content based on user preference, history and a network of subscribed accounts, but Youtube does. Forums can count, depending on their implementation - I don't think many people would argue that Reddit is social media, but it definitely suggests related content. More to the point, "social media" is not as strictly defined as many people on HN want it to be, because social media features have crept into numerous platforms and applications over the years, so it really can be subjective. * maybe some have, IDK.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoI think you're giving this a bit too much credence. And I think you also think there's something special about sorting videos by how often they're viewed in a recent timeframe (which is all you need to recreate evil social media algorithm)
- aubanel 2mo agoFeed algorithms are far from sorting videos only by strict decreasing order of trending factor. One example of that is that feeds are randomized: refresh the page, it changes completely. Another example is how it optimizes for bait content.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoIf it's randomised that's not malignant. Optimizing for bait content is just showing what's popular recently. The system only knows it's bait because so many people clicked it (and took the bait)
- Ntrails 2mo ago> Let's hope our regulations hit these "social networks" hard enough so that never dare deploy this kind of technology. You'd do as well to hope that people wake up and stop opening the damned sites
- pixl97 2mo agoAh, just like drug addicts put down their poppies...
- bpavuk 2mo agoyou really have to catch the moment to do this, and there must be someone else who is supportive of this idea. my mother recently got served a quite... disturbing video on Facebook. I won't get into details of the vid. what I can tell is that she was so dazed that she didn't even immediately understand me when I asked her, "delete Facebook and Instagram immediately or else they will think you like it and will serve you more." she kept replaying this video in her head. in a moment, I thought I wouldn't make her snap out. for context, she is a damned Reels addict with war-induced traumas. (Ukrainian here.) she agreed to delete Facebook but decided to keep Instagram. we frequently pick bones about her sending stupid Reels and me hating them with passion. and every time I said "delete Instagram and your life will go up," she brought up scandals until she talked to a therapist. EDIT: to quote a sibling comment, this is, indeed, like dealing with a drug addict.
- tpoacher 2mo agoIf you're relying on government regulation to solve this, I guess the obvious bigger question would be "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
- nonethewiser 2mo agoNow apply it to porn
- bsenftner 2mo agoSounds like some people are trying to develop Snow Crash.
- sajithdilshan 2mo agothere's not gonna be a regulation and even if there is, the damage would already be done. If you want to protect yourself, then best thing is to just delete the account and apps.
- Oarch 2mo agoAll glory to hypnotoad!
- speak_plainly 2mo agoThat would be ideal, but I think we're heading straight for Idiocracy's 'Ow! My Balls'.
- neuronexmachina 2mo agoYeah, I was surprised that they didn't list dlPFC or some other reward-associated area as one of their targets.