I think the physical activity transition they are describing would have been closer to the end of the 19th century when mechanization really started to take hold (e.g. the car)
Yall modern compilers do not produce the same thing every time. Compilers have had decades to get really good at what they do. LLMs have been functional for maybe 3 years?
This would include everything from my Spotify recommending new music that I like to my Netflix showing me similar shows. I'm a responsible adult. I want those things. I make use of them. They make my life better when I'm trying to listen to some music while I work on something or when I have exactly 2 hours of TV watching time in a week and don't want to waste it finding a new show. I do not want regulations coming along and making all of my products worse due to heavy-handed regulation.
Practically, it won't happen. These thought experiments are exercises where people imagine the websites they don't want other people using getting worse, while failing to imagine any way that it might negatively impact any site they use. Usually when I press the topic it turns into a game of whack-a-mole where the other people come up with more and more exceptions and specifics to these theoretical laws to reveal what they really have in mind, which is targeting some small handful of social media sites that they don't want other people to use. We see this with the age restriction laws where the comments come out in full force demanding ID checks and huge fines for Facebook and TikTok, but there are meltdowns whenever people realize that the regulations would be coming for their Discords, YouTube viewing, and Reddit access too.
I halfway imagine this whole exercise ending with some big show about warnings, where users who join TikTok or other websites have to click a big warning sign that says they might be addictive. If some countries start instituting laws against recommendations or personalize recommendations, the popularity of VPNs will continue to rise so people can simply use the products like they want instead of having to deal with nerfed versions to satisfy some country's laws.
Yes, anyone who has been looking for Spotify alternatives can readily tell how poor the music recommendation algorithms of competitors. I feel like the only comparative one is weirdly, youtube, since they simply have more data points and context to attach recommendations to.
I've come to realise that the only truly good recommendation engines for music are written in wetware; there's a lot to be said for DJ sets and independent radio.
> when I have exactly 2 hours of TV watching time in a week and don't want to waste it finding a new show.
Please please somebody explain this to me. I see it often, but fail to understand it.
The television is a tool for watching shows. The show is ostensibly the draw, and the television is the vehicle for watching it, no? So why do some people (lots of people actually) feel compelled to sit in front of the television to watch something? If there is no show that one wants to watch, why the compulsion to sit in front of the television?
I've spent countless nights in front of Netscape Navigator surfing from site to site. I'm fully aware how compelling the device-content system can be. But it's always been the content side, not the device side, that was compelling.
Sometimes the desire isn't to watch some specific show. It is to have the experience of sitting on the couch and watching something good on tv. This is why people channel surf, or scroll through netflix's collection. You want to have the experience of watching something. The goal is to be stimulated, to cure your momentary boredom.
I have the same experience with youtube, reddit and HN. I don't really know what I expect to see when I open the HN front page. If I knew, I'd navigate to that site directly. But I know I'll see something on HN. Maybe something that catches my eye.
Netflix is just the same. "I'm in the mood to watch a documentary. Let's see what they've got."
I knit. Sometimes I just want to be watching something, while doing that. The goal isn't to watch a specific show, but to have something to watch, while I let my hands do the work.
> So why do some people (lots of people actually) feel compelled to sit in front of the television to watch something?
Because I have kids, an active life, and a lot of physical hobbies and activities.
And some times it’s 10PM, too early for bed, too tired from a busy day, and I’m looking to relax and enjoy a show with my wife for an hour.
I said two hours per week because that’s about how much it ends up being. The fact that this is attracting criticism and even a sister comment calling me “addicted” is bizarre. What even is the goal here? Shaming people for relaxing and enjoying things? Feeling a smug sense of superiority over others for their consumption choices during down time?
Is it lost on you that these criticisms are coming in the comments section of a social news site where people waste a lot of time?
No need to get defensive, not only did I not criticise you - I even commented that the phenomenon is common. I asked for someone to explain something I don't understand, and people explained. I'm a wiser person today.
The primary activity is sitting and holding my partner. I can and do happily do that without secondary entertainment, but it doesn't take any concentration so why not add a show in to the mix.
Seems like you don't have to rule it out completely? "You might also like this show" is rather different than YouTube's "OMFG SHORTS WATCH THEM NOW" experience. Even if the line is fuzzy, I think many can agree some things are closer than others, and that's enough for some laws (there are plenty of other not-perfectly-testable laws out there as counterexamples).
> Seems like you don't have to rule it out completely?
This is what I was talking about in the second half of my comment: Every time I bring up the fact that these proposals would be overbearing, people start brainstorming infinite carve outs and exceptions that would exempt the products they use, but harm the products they don’t want other people using.
If these laws hit the books they’re not going to be neatly shaped to avoid the things you like and only impact the things you don’t.
That seems inevitable for laws that try to address private behavior, yes. It'll waffle around and strike randomly as it gets tested more and more in court to narrow the definition, and that gradually causes a chilling effect around the whole concept. The only real consideration worth having is "will things be better after", not "will my life be unchanged".
While this is true in principle, my understanding is that the failure to carefully deliniate ahead of time, was why prohibition in the USA ended up being "all alcohol" rather than "just liquor".
There's a big difference between a completely optional "recommendations" area and a loop. If the recommended stuff happens automatically without you having to look for it, then it's a loop.
Yep - some emotional core of my being (not rational) hates ML recommendations.
I'm a happy paid user of Spotify and just ignore the recommendations (I'm not looking at a screen), and I use YouTube heavily with a browser plugin that hides recommendations (which kills the end of video loop). I get recommendations from people, and use the products for curation, bookmarking and subscriptions. They're good.
Whereas Instagram and TikTok are vacuous and useless to me - I can't make myself use them. I think my brain knows what's wrong with them, and makes a kind of disgust reaction very quickly.
I agree, there's a very low level, emotional difference between them. I'm not sure I could encode it in law, but it is different.
Cigarette packages have disgusting photos of carcenogenic lung autopsies to discourage you from smoking them, so Facebook and TikTok etc should have similar disgusting photos and vidoes of what happens to you if you use their product, that you have to watch every day before using it.
Sleep-deprived teenager autopsy: a teenager with enormous purple eye bags, phone surgically fused to their hand, lying face-down on a school desk at 3 AM.
Body-image filter ward: rows of teenage faces grotesquely stretched, pinched, inflated, beautified and looksmaxed until everyone looks like the same embalmed Instagram mannequin.
Doomscroll thumb: a gigantic swollen thumb with the fingerprint worn completely smooth from infinite scrolling. The tendon is labeled "ENGAGEMENT."
Facebook scam victim: an elderly person's wallet dissected on an autopsy table -- completely hollow, with a Facebook ad where the money used to be.
Algorithmic stomach contents: an autopsy tray containing "suggested for you": rage bait, diet videos, conspiracy sludge, influencer ads, and one photo from somebody you actually know.
Predator warning: a cute Instagram DM screen shown as an anglerfish -- friendly profile photo as the glowing lure, enormous teeth hiding behind it.
Facebook Hospital: a free to play educational game where you have to spend virtual currency for cures to the ailments Facebook gave you, like Bloaty Head from reading all the AI generated engagement porn.
Images on cigarette packages are of real patient and real impact and still smokers ignore it. A fake, stylized hypothetical image will have much lower impact.
Are you saying that fake, stylized hypothetical image will have much lower impact reducing the impact of all the fake, stylized hypothetical images in Facebook?
Maybe they should insert disgusting slices of actual carcinogenic lung tissue into boxes of cigarettes, since images of them aren't impactful enough.
That would be harder for smokers to ignore, and it would make the cigarettes harder to light, worse smelling and tasting.
> > “Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations, creating a reinforcing loop?”
> This would include everything from my Spotify recommending new music that I like to my Netflix showing me similar shows.
Spotify recommending music and Netflix recommending shows that are similar to what? To previously recommended music/shows. This is exactly the problem.
> I'm a responsible adult. I want those things.
This is a clear indicator that these things are addictive and are in fact gambling.
I’m beginning to think some people have forgotten what we’re supposed to be angry about and now we’re just angry at all things tech.
Spotify recommending new music to me or continuing to play music suggestions when my playlist runs out is in no way harmful. It improves my life. I lose nothing to it. I gain new exposure to music.
It’s fine. Let people enjoy things.
> This is a clear indicator that these things are addictive and are in fact gambling.
I assure you I am neither addicted nor am I gambling when I listen to new music on Spotify.
What are we even doing here? Is this some puritanical push against all things that people might enjoy?
The poster is implying the reinforcement at play is the problematic thing at issue, and they are assigning the word "gambling" to represent it, or so it looks like to me. I think you aren't parsing their meaning correctly because what they seem to be aiming for is extinguishing the automatic reinforcement.
You're claiming it's making your life better, ostensibly by a relative report of the hedonic response a newly introduced piece of music auto delivered to you by the recommendation algorithm invokes. The problem they hint at though is the passive nature involved. You aren't finding that new piece, it's getting pushed. That pushing incentivizes optimizing for continued engagement, an act children, intellectually and developmentally disabled individuals, as well as those in the throes of cognitive decline/impairment, are not at all well equipped to self-regulate against when pitted against paid behavioral psychologists designing maximally engagement encouraging interfaces.
The incentive, and the existence of predatible populations is the problem I take away from it. I can agree you should be free to opt-in mind, but I can also see the wisdom in a by default interface wherein engagement hacking is forbidden being the norm, and that norm coming with a minimally controversial algorithm boiling down to "chronological feed of known/subscribed to sources", followed by a link of some sort to open an interface to the recommendations.
Facebook/Insta/Shorts are absolutely not that non-engagement farming interface. Hell my grandmother toward the end was about driven mad by it, and it was all I could do to just try to remind her that just because the machine had it on offer doesn't mean she had to partake, but her community centric character made that a bit of an ordeal for her.
There is absolutely a pathological pattern to the way tech companies hunt for eyeballs to monetize, and it is a damn shame it's taken this long to start getting traction to even talk about it.
Is it helping you find new music or is it feeding the same thing it has been feeding you in a reinforcement loop? Are you really searching or are you mindlessly taking what's on offer?
> Spotify recommending new music to me or continuing to play music suggestions when my playlist runs out is in no way harmful.
In both Netflix and Spotify any real discovery is quite well hidden, nearly all of the feeds you can get are algorithmically generated for you to consume what is beneficial to them. You get an interface pretending to offer you a choice and an algorithm behind, designed and fine-tuned by behavioral psychologists to get you coming back for more. An apparently it is doing it's job so well that you keep defending it.
Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.
Maybe it's something to do with the text-based interface vs short form video. Short form video is better at activating the lizard brain
Law is about intent. It is not code, and it’s a mistake to think of law like code where you need to unit test and cover all edge cases.
In law, it is sufficient to show an intent to take actions that foreseeably caused harm. Specific laws, of course but you don’t need to cover hypotheticals that capture all abstract cases in order to to show a particular actor caused harm.
No matter how intelligent they make the AIs they work for openAI/Anthropic, not the users. Our future lies in open, local models, or we might aswell give up our computers altogether
> Okay but suppose you have an AI chatbot which takes in context from previous chats on what your interests are. So people just keep talking with the chatbot more and more as it gains more context. This would meet the criteria. It's not necessarily addictive though because you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.
You can stop scrolling instagram "at any time", too.
Chatbots are actually a pretty poor but very relevant choice of example: they are already tuned with RLHF to be engaging and addictive to talk to. That's a huge reason why LLM psychosis is a thing, and it's a big reason why some people like using chatbots so much. They're designed to be addictive, just like facebook/instagram/tiktok are.
What I meant to say was, the standard for when we call something addictive is more hazy than that. In general, text based interfaces don't light up the brain in the same way. Psychologically it's a lot easier to walk away from a chatbot vs an infinite feed of short form video... potentially that difference could help find some kind of standard to determine addictiveness
Edit: I wonder if a hypothetical digital experience like the samizdat out of infinite jest is possible? I.e. a digital experience which hits the brain in the perfect way to produce addiction without a chemical basis
If I cut my leg off with a chainsaw, am I addicted to the chainsaw? I think what matters is the intent of the design. E.g. if they design the product to make you need more of it (while it has an actively detrimental effect)
It’s not about regulation it’s about intervention. It’s not that you’re not allowed to saw pieces of yourself off with a chainsaw, stranger of a choice as that may be. The idea is people in your life who care about you may want to intervene to stop you, as no matter how pleasurable you might find what you’re doing to be, it’s slowly killing you.
And that’s not even going into the science behind addiction where the whole “but you chose to do this” gets more and more dubious the deeper you go.
For sunbathing in particular, do what Australia does:
- large scale public health campaigns on dangers of skin cancer. With a catchy song and slogan ("slip, slop, slap... Slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, slap on a hat")
- schools make it compulsory for kids to have hats in summer
- regulate tanning salons, promote fake tans in preference to sunbeds
- doctors check people for skin cancers during regular checkups
And over just a few years, being very brown quickly gets associated with being reckless and unhealthy.
Stop using buzzwords instead of engaging in a discussion. Someone clarifying their position is not necessairly moving goalposts, they might have just not laid out fully their idea in the first place.
The problem with your examples is that it's a person lying to themselves. GP is acting as an objective third party and telling the truth about their hypothetical.
There are lots of things you really can stop at any time. I could stop eating peanut butter at any time, if I had a compelling reason.
Because if you want to convince someone away from believing it's an addiction so severe it needs an act of government to address, presenting an argument that all-but-panders to their "people spend so much time on it that it must be an addiction!" priors is counter productive.
I'm not sure about that example. I'm seeing non tech people getting very addicted to their customized chat bots. Companies are very primed to eventually nudge them to enshittify the content of the responses and it could get bad.
Suppose you have a video service which takes context from previous videos you watched to show you more videos you're interested in. Doesn't sound very addictive, does it? You described it in an innocuous way, but I can absolutely see that being a lead-in to a parasocial "relationship" or even AI psychosis.
> you can stop talking with the chatbot at any time.
> Do you use personal / behavioral data / usage to shape the user experience and recommendations? You do not get covered by Section 230.
If they get to exercise editorial powers, then it doesn't make sense for them to be protected from liability for choosing what to publish. If they just give you a giant firehose, then they're not doing anything editorially and they should not have any liability as clearly that's not _their_ speech.
That's not at all how Section 230 works. There's a popular myth that it distinguishes between "publishers" (who make editorial decisions about what content is shown and how it is shown) and "platforms" that just host it with minimal interference, but that is in fact just a myth.
However, I don't really see how Section 230 is even relevant here. What Section 230 protects them from is for being liable for what is in the individual user posts posted to Facebook. It essentially just makes it so that if you have a beef with what someone posts on Facebook and want to sue you sue the poster rather than Facebook.
What is being alleged is that Facebook's decisions in how to arrange and present and show or not show that user content has harmed people. Those are things that are not in scope for 230.
Yet it remains relevant that "being liable for one's editorial decisions" is a good idea, and that differentiating between platforms which do and which do not exercise autonomy over how information gets prioritized and sorted may very well be relevant to this discussion.
Mix this with "...of User-Generated Multimedia Content", and you might get closer.
This excludes music platforms, for example (although, Band Camp and Soundcloud might have some issues with that, admittedly).
A hammer doesn’t have a sensor to know how you are doing while you're hammering away, and it doesn't make the strike smoother to keep you hammering longer if you start seeming tired. Almost no products ever monitor you
But I can collect feedback about it compared to other hammers. If you really wanted to you could attach an IMU to the hammer and run a user study collecting such usage data. Then use that usage data to evolve the design for the next generation of the hammer you produce.
According to "Build things that last" author, 90% of the businesses evaluated are "customer first", meaning business listen to the customer and improve their produce based on that feedback.
voluntary feedback - things like "I wish the customer service was faster" - is not the same thing as measuring engagement time down to the millisecond and using that data to feed a presentation loop.
Engagement is measuring voluntary feedback. If you aren't engaged you typically either move to the next piece of content or close the app. These are the voluntary mechanisms you as a customer report how good the recommendation is.
The user chooses themselves what part of a product they engage with. It's like reporting a post would be considered voluntary feedback on the anti spam systems even if it's the case that every report is measured and fed back into the model for predicting reports.
> The user chooses themselves what part of a product they engage with. It's like reporting a post would be considered voluntary feedback on the anti spam systems even if it's the case that every report is measured and fed back into the model for predicting reports.
If the user cannot use e.g. instagram without generating engagement metrics, then it is not a voluntary metric.
User reports - which are generated via a deliberate action from the user - are voluntary.
I think I have made my point about the difference between voluntary and involuntary metrics quite clearly. If you aren’t going to meaningfully engage with it, we have nothing further to discuss.
Same we can end it. I personally see reporting a video and liking the video as being the same. They are 2 different voluntary actions users can take. I personally see these taps and swipes by the user as deliberate actions they are making, but I guess you don't?
I see a distinction between like/dislike buttons, which a user chooses to engage with, and things like instrumenting the time a video plays on screen before the user scrolls past. The scrolling is an interaction, but it does not constitute a voluntary choice to give feedback because you scroll regardless to see more content.
Measuring the amount of linger time on content is an incredibly powerful signal precisely because it is subconscious.
It’s the difference between giving someone a like/dislike button and wiring up a heart monitor to see what causes faster heart rate. One is voluntary - intentional, if that makes it more clear - the other is involuntary - just an artifact of using the app which can be measured but which is unintentional.
I don’t believe we should be measuring lizard brain responses and using them to serve up content. Let people make conscious choices instead.
So why leave out food industry which has provably caused health harm and killed people.
Leaving out the modern food industry but going after social media shows that this is just politics as the food industry wets the beak and greases the plan generously on both sides of the aisle.
It seems to me like Meta is being singled out here. It's likely not the start of a movement to change how we live and get rid of/diminish bad influences on our lives - because I don't think we wanna really do that - not for economic reasons and also values - we like our personal freedoms. This is simply targeting one company whose CEO is very disliked so we can all carry on with our lives and feel better about ourselves.
I do support restricting social media (not just Meta) in general for people under 18.
Doesn’t any enforcement action “single out” a wrongdoer? People pulled over for speeding are singled out (there are other speeders), people busted insider trading are singled out (there are other inside traders), etc?
I honestly don’t understand your position… it seems to be “unless you can simultaneously prosecute all wrongdoers in all industries all at once, prosecute nobody”. But that can’t be right?
> Doesn’t any enforcement action “single out” a wrongdoer? People pulled over for speeding are singled out (there are other speeders),
If everyone is speeding and only you are getting a ticket than yes you're being singled out, that's generally not how the law is enforced. They're also using cameras since it's indeed hard to give tickets to 10 cars at once.
I think you believe there's an equal-outcome promise in the law that really just doesn't exist.
Not everyone gets caught. The deterrence is the likelihood of getting caught times the penalty. And yeah, the guy with a bright red, loud-exhaust sports car is more likely to be ticketed than grandma in a minivan, at the same speeds on the same roads. This is life.
why do you think that implies leaving out the modern food industry, rather than suggesting that they, too, should be held accountable for flooding us with hyperpalatable foods to addict us? After all, they were literally engineered by the same people as Big Tobacco [1]
Of course whether or not a contract is or is not enforceable as such is also a matter of law. As I understand, this IPO was unique for a variety of reasons. The fact unique terms are promulgated in a contract does not mean (at least in saner times) that they are automatically immune to regulatory scrutiny.
One way of thinking about that is higher order even powers just reduce down to two.
For the purpose of inverting a negative vector, you can think of squaring as rotating the vector around the unit circle, 180 degrees, to make it positive. Higher order powers just keep rotating that vector back and forth- from this perspective the other even powers are the same transformation. Obviously with the magnitude being different.
This is a highly uncertain and dangerous scenario. Breeding ground for anxiety.
High agency people often deal (cope) with anxiety by trying to control outcomes. Some just flee the situation altogether.
We have an example of both here: one employee leaves, one stays.
reply