This is what I think The Social Dilemma missed. I worked at one of these companies and did not see anybody evil looking to enslave users in front of their screen. Instead we built new features and celebrated when time spent in our app went up or a new feature was used because we assumed the user must be getting value. After some time we switched metrics from time spent in app or daily active users to Net Promoter Score but at the end of the day if analytics didn’t show that a feature was used it was dropped and if it was being used we’d double down on making it “better” (used even more).
I did not see any evidence of malicious intent towards our users but a genuine belief we were enabling them to be more productive.
This really puzzles me. Productivity can roughly be defined as (output / time). How can increasing "time" possibly increase productivity? Of course the catch with advertising-funded products and services is that "time" is what gets you paid.
Good point. We built paid products. Advertising was not a major driver of revenue. People wanting to buy/renew the product was.
Maybe a good analogy here is building a calculator. People buy your calculator and use it (the assumption is because it saves them time). Initially your calculator only does basic arithmetic and you add square root, exponential function, etc. Now people buy and use your calculator for even more. They spend more “time” with the calculator but still save even more “time” not having to use pen and paper, so it’s a productivity gain. Soon a movie on Netflix comes out called “The Calculators” which blames the fact that people are no longer able to do basic arithmetic in their head on a calculated decision by your company to profit from people while making them dumber. It paints your company as making people dependent on your calculators and robbing them of their cognitive abilities.
This was never your intent when creating the calculator. Now it’s something you will have to address, but the narrative here is one of unintended consequences not a deliberate plan.
I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.
1. Relative timestamps are just a more useful way of telling people when something happened. It's how most humans communicate time to each other.
2. Infinite scrolling is just what happens when you're not constrained by physical pages. The only reason we used to see paged content was because it was technically easier. Facebook and Instagram even put up a big "You're all caught up" sign when you hit the end of where you were last.
3. Before Facebook had likes people would just add a comment like "+1" or "This." It didn't add anything to the conversation and just made things worse. Internet points are useful for filtering content and showing people more useful information.
Yes, all of these things have negative consequences but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad.
The medium is the message. We've been talking about this for decades - the structure of the thing you are interacting with determines how you interact with it. Substantive debate is difficult in 140 characters, so substantive debate does not often happen on Twitter. Infinite scroll and auto-play video eliminates the "decision points" where people would otherwise reconsider if they want to continue, so people spend more time on those sites than they would otherwise. Maybe the attributes of these mediums aren't "inherently bad," but they absolutely do influence the way that they are used and it is up to us to make the judgement of whether that has good or bad outcomes. And a lot of us think the results of infinite scroll is a bad outcome.
My understanding is that Hacker News currently paginates comments but they’re working hard to put them all on one page.
Maybe the intent is so you can use find in page to search all the comments at once or maybe something else but they will also inevitably lead you to read more comments and spend even more time on here.
> Substantive debate is difficult in 140 characters, so substantive debate does not often happen on Twitter.
When it comes to politics, Twitter is the absolute worst. When you have only 140 characters, there's no room for nuance or actual discussion, so arguments get boiled down to short 1-sentence zingers that are often nothing more than really bad straw men.
I think that's kind of an overagressive interpretation. It's not ignorance of evil; there's a genuine feeling that good is being done, even if the parent commenter seems to acknowledge that good might not have, in fact, been done.
They don't necessarily need to look evil. "Evil" doesn't sell and probably won't make you work for them. They have to look like a sane environment in which you can't pinpoint anything (philosophically, morally or ethically) wrong.
It's just a matter of language (how they communicate what the company is trying to do), with slogans like "making the world a better place by doing X". But if you think that at the end of the day, all they care about and all the trouble is just for the mighty Dollar, with a little change in perspective you can elucidate:
"time spent in our app": time lost in our app.
"user must be getting value": while getting even more value out of an unaware user.
"feature ... making it “better” (used even more)": more addictive? costing less for the company? costing more for the user?
"to be more productive": productive as in "making money faster but for someone else, while being paid the same".
I did not see any evidence of malicious intent towards our users but a genuine belief we were enabling them to be more productive.