Comment by some_random
Comment by some_random 4 days ago
That's mostly true and it's a good thing for the US to prevent hostile, autocratic, foreign powers from gaining undue cultural power.
Comment by some_random 4 days ago
That's mostly true and it's a good thing for the US to prevent hostile, autocratic, foreign powers from gaining undue cultural power.
I have been coming around to the idea that we should ban all* algorithmic content surfacing.
It's taken a while, but the longer we go down this path, the more clear it seems that it is impossible to design a content algorithm that does not have significant negative cultural side effects. This is not to say that content algorithms don't have benefits; they do. It's just that they can't be useful (i.e., designed to optimize for some profitable metric) without causing harm.
I think something like asbestos is a good metaphor: Extremely useful, but the long-term risks outweigh any possible gains.
> It's just that they can't be useful (i.e., designed to optimize for some profitable metric) without causing harm.
That's not the pattern I've seen, as close as you are to it.
I've seen lots of platforms be wildly useful. Digg was good for a while; StumpleUpon, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit and even Facebook all had periods at the start where they added real value to people's lives.
At some point they start to "optimize for some profitable metric" - and quickly become heinous.
The problem isn't the algorithm; it's that it gets twisted toward profit. And that's basically a tautology - once you start trying to suck money out of the equation for yourself, that juice has to come from somewhere.
I can envision a platform that isn't based on profit being far more useful than harmful - if it can only ward off the manipulations of the yacht class.
> if it can only ward off the manipulations of the yacht class.
The inevitable enshittification of goods and services once they reach a certain level of maturity (i.e., profitability) basically guarantees that the yachted-classes will be involved.
Given this de-facto inevitability, the original premise (that algorithmic content is eventually a bad thing) makes more sense
It's not inevitable though.
Emails, torrents, Mastodon, VLC, Blender, Linux - They're all either solid, or even getting better over time.
Why? Because the capital class were explicitly denied, by design or by principle.
Like with healthcare, transport, post services, housing, and much else, there's simply areas where the public good is too important to give the profit motive too strong a foothold. I believe social media is one of those areas.
I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.
Don't believe me, we've got lots of data correlating the rise of social media and mental health crisis. As time moves on the evidence linking the two continues to become stronger.
I guess the counterpoint here is that we have lots of data how external actors (e.g. Russia) is influencing large parts of the political landscape in Europe right now.
> having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us
Dogs kill more Americans than lions, but that doesn't mean that we should be letting people have lions as pets.
I'd personally be happy to see something like Australia's recent restriction of teen use of social media in the US, but bringing that up now is just a whataboutism.
uh... "... worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us"... yet. this is only true because we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation-- up to now, the U.S. has had a monopoloy on social media giants and the like. it is absolutely not guaranteed that this will hold true, and there are many reasons to suspect that it won't be true. given how china views about U.S. sovereignty when it comes to setting up their own (secret) de facto government, police state, etc. on U.S. soil, it would be shocking if they didn't put their thumb on the scale.
and none of that is to say that i agree with the ban-- i think the mere fact of how unamerican, frankly, taking possession of foreign assets for american gain at others' expense is as blatant a signal as possible that we shouldn't be doing it. if we are trying to protect america, western values, etc., if we don't act in accordance with those values, what are we even protecting? the way to protect the american way of life is not through becoming more "unamerican".
in my personal opinion, the so-called "decline of western values", or whatever, has nothing to do with imperialism, nor to do with those values being short-sighted or wrong. it is because of our collective crisis of confidence in these values because of the (many) mistakes we have made along the way. the moral compass still points essentially in the same direction; it's just that for whatever reason we seem to have convinced ourselves that we don't want to go North after all, and instead prefer to just wander around the map aimlessly (all the while shitting on how the compass isn't taking us where we want to go). and so now we have people who unironically defend organizations like Hamas at the expense of the United States as though believing in universal freedom and equality of opportunity is merely a "cultural" value, rather than an absolute one. and, more insanely, that these values are somehow subordinate to the political issue du jour. these values don't give anyone carte blanche to coerce others who don't share them, but the idea that they are somehow subjective or relative-- that they are negotiable-- is the height of insanity.
how would you describe musk's control of twitter, or Zuckerberg's over facebook and instagram?
there's no democracy involved in the running of social media websites. the rules are what the boss says. sometimes the autocrat is benevolent, sometimes not. the CCP has been more better social media autocrat than musk has, and there is at least more people involved in decision making
> I think you've been propagandized because having autocratic private institutions having undue cultural power is proving to be worse for our culture than anything a foreign country has done to us.
That's pure, shameless whataboutism, and one that desperately tries to hide the fact that totalitarian regimes are using social media service as a tool to control you and your opinions.
You can bring up any bogeyman you'd like, but you are failing to address the fact that these totalitarian regimes clearly are manipulating you to act against your own best interests.
> How are you not doing the exact same thing?
I'm not trying to distract people away from discussing how totalitarian regimes are abusing services like TikTok to manipulate people from Democratic countries to act against their best interests and in line with the totalitarian regime's interests.
Now, can we go back to discuss how the CCP is using the likes of TikTok to manipulate people to do their bidding? Or is the subject being discussed verboten?
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. A foreign enemy keeps us from focusing on our own domestic policies. Turns out, if you look into it, we're the baddies.
In addition to widespread data collection and social manipulation, we also intentionally shove our culture down the throats of other nations in order to maintain cultural supremacy.
> A foreign enemy keeps us from focusing on our own domestic policies.
The nice thing about fiction is that you can make anything sound plausible. Ironically, what people consider the most prosperous time of America happened to be the time when America was opposing a vague foreign adversary. If anything, nihilist platitudes like this that have created a void in civic engagement that megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill in.
> Ironically, what people consider the most prosperous time of America happened to be the time when America was opposing a vague foreign adversary.
It happened to be at a time when the rest of the world's industrial capacity had been almost completely destroyed by a devastating world war which hardly touched US infrastructure.
The US is a hostile autocratic power with undue cultural power on our own citizens, so even if it's a given that TikTok is mostly a propaganda platform (which I completely, categorically disagree with), wouldn't it be better to at least have a choice? Or be able to compare between them? You are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't capable of making their own decisions which is about as autocratic as it gets.
"You are speaking as if US citizens don't deserve/ aren't capable of making their own decisions" - the overwhelming majority of HN users would support U.K style ISP blocking of websites and apps deemed hostile to the government.
Endless comments about reciprocity, as if the American citizen doesn't have freedom of expression rights vastly different than Chinese citizens.
Yeah I think you're right. Unfortunately I'm coming to appreciate that many of the users here are heavily pro-censorship / "protect the children" types. Never thought I would see it happen. Feel like I'm waking up from a coma realizing everything's changed. It's so antithetical to the HN I knew and loved.
i would argue, if it’s that powerful, it should be illegal for anyone to have that sort of power. from china to musk to zuckerberg to religions.
we really should ask ourselves why we’re continuing to allow some to continue these abuses…. there should be laws in place to stop all of them.
The type of power China has is very different than Zuck's. You aren't going to get taken to a black site for talking about Tianamen Square on Facebook. (or something like the Tusla Race Massacre may be a better example, since that is embarrassing to the US similarly to Tianamen Square in China)
We should return the favor then and shut down the psyops divisions like this (and these are just the public ones):
https://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/specialty-careers/sp...
It would be nice if they could also prevent hostile autocratic domestic(ish) powers from leveraging their current cultural power. But they didn't, so naturally those in power are going to build their moat to maintain it.