One of my personal hobbyhorses is that the problem Matt is outlining – use of AI and ML to optimize for people's short-term desires, overriding their longer-term goals and ethics – is exactly how I think a hypothetical AI takeover is going to go. Not Skynet terminating us all, but a soft obliteration of most people's ability to function meaningfully, outside of maximizing whatever engagement metrics were calibrated last before they became too powerful for the average person to resist.
Sure, a few people will complain loudly, but they'll be written off as cranks. And a few people will profit mightily, but hasn't it ever been thus? And the rest of us will drown in customized, optimized, individualized food and entertainment, in between whatever shift work we do that's too expensive to automate.
Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but I view this as a much more likely outcome of failure to align AI than being turned into a paperclip.
I actually think it takes quite a bit away from Matt’s point that TV seems as addictive and more destructive than Facebook in so many ways, that so many good thinkers already delivered this critique about TV, and that few of us actually have any real experience of life without such a supposedly pernicious soma.
Doesn’t deal it a fatal blow by any means but I don’t think these previous generations of ‘old man shouting at cloud’ cast the argument in a favorable light.
There is certainly a potential role here for some social shame. And, by the way. we could also make some individual and collective social choices (not taxes) to help people eat less or ‘better’.
Well, were all the critiques of TV wrong? I think that, for instance, Fox News has probably done more harm than the golden age of television has done good. Generally speaking, if you heard that a family watched significantly more TV than average, you would assume that to be unhealthy, right?
No, I didn't mean to imply that the TV seized hold of them out of nowhere. But the fact that the TV is addictive (we don't think there are as many families who deal with their problems by playing music or reading, say) suggests that it wasn't clouds the people in the past were yelling at.
Yes. Not a particularly groundbreaking post, although I think generic TV has been less harmful than the combo of Murdock / Facebook / smartphones. I’m reminded of the quote from AO Wilson about society having Stone Age emotions, mid evil institutions and god like technology.
While TV may have been "less harmful than the combo of Murdock [sic] / Facebook / smartphones" that is not a particularly high bar. TV is no slouch when it comes to damaging society and weakening societal norms. The average slow boring reader probably eschews the most damaging programming and thus underestimates the pernicious impact of TV on American society. "Cops", a particularly dangerous program, has survived for an astonishing 33 seasons!
I believe some research shows cable and network news still ultimately have an outsized impact on public perceptions over primary internet sourcing on social media, etc. IMO, Social media's main influence on the public is second order via it's converage decision impact of journalist on those platforms.
In light of that, i ask folks to consider who spread misinformation about Q Anon more. Folks logging onto 4Chan or Facebook...or snoody newscatsers going to Trump events hunting for "crazies" to spar with so they could highlight that "good tape" on the evening news.
Engagement with a fringe topic to "fact check" or "debunk" it ultimately spreads it and the viewer can (and often) chooses to ignore your additional context or commentary added to the source.
TV was great at this given its limitations - but algorithmic media isn’t limited by the availability of only a few channels of airwaves and fixed broadcast schedules that had to work for everyone. Instead each of us gets our own channel that streams exactly when we can get it.
It seems to me that you are presenting many of TVs strengths as weaknesses. It was quite powerful for the medium that a small number of channels were so dominant and held up as making it ideal for example at ‘manufacturing consent’
Yes different things are different and it’s possible this old saw could find new purchase in our current feared medium (or one element of it in particular, algorithmic content service). But I am wary.
my main criticism of Postman is that he nostalgicly romanticizes the pre-television era in such a way that he presumes all to most those folks sitting at the fair watching Lincoln and Douglass debate were "critical thinkers" about the content, rather than just folks picking sides based on oral cadance, looks, and overall performance (or how many where just there because they had nothing better to do...like reading a shampoo bottle label when trying to use the bathroom in the pre-mobile phone days). Seems awfully presumptuous.
Stuff like this really gets me too - that famous Henry Ford quote about giving the people what they want.
"If I had asked people what they want, they would have wanted faster horses."
It feels like the innovative promise of the connected Internet has given way to algorithms optimized to give people small drip hits of dopamine.
Where the internet as a whole used to be a billion small parts loosely joined now it is concentrated in these monoliths that cater to our short term desires.
The internet can be a wonderful magical place, but not when it's concentrated on these platforms, especially when these platforms turn out instinctive desires against our long term goals.
I dunno, doesn't seem like the ML and AI are all that powerful if Facebook and Instagram are basically on the decline after one settings change from Apple....seems premature to bring up the paperclips again.
I don't mean this mean-spiritedly, but it is notable to me that the person who regularly advocated for honest-to-god open borders is also the person who doesn't have a problem with mindless short-term-focused hedonism without concern for the long-term.
Those two things seem to go together pretty well. =)
Interesting - I would have assumed the opposite connection. Closed borders seem to be the thing that make short term sense because they hold back the long term concern for everyone and keep it out of sight. But I haven’t thought much about a potential connection here.
If the only options are completely open or closed borders, then I'd say neither is a good long-term option.
I'd say that open borders relative to our current system is more short-term oriented because it would undermine social cohesion in exchange for temporary economic gains of an expanded labor pool.
The original comment had the flavor of brave new world to me. It seemed quite fair to the algo ‘god’ and much better than a wire. Dissent is possible and tolerated. If in some far flung future a minority of humans stand out and feel the majority is wasting their lives on an endless sea of personally tailored distractions, that’s really not so bad. Actually kind of hard to see many better outcomes that leave ‘humanity’ as we find it. An imperfect creature, to be sure, and quite likely to be spending time either trying to stay alive or wasting it on some pursuit a talented minority considers unworthy.
Ehh, you can find that future palatable all you want, I think it's pretty clear that most people don't and would prefer that this "minority" of which you speak work to head it off at the pass.
US brands (even in this era of highly strained Sino-US relations) are unbelievably dominant in the PRC. Truly no other country's even come close. Mind you it's the case that most of it gets produced over here (in China) so it doesn't do much for our trade numbers. But it does plenty for our current account.
Many times the thought has occurred to me that there'd be a lot less support in the US for trade wars in general if Americans had a grasp of just how well their country's firms do internationally. I get the impression (and Trump seems to have thrived on spreading this BS) that a lot of Yanks believe virtuous, innocent US companies are being badly bullied overseas by mean, duplicitous foreigners, while America in turn is the platonic ideal of a nation that always welcomes foreign companies and their products to our shores with open arms. What a crock.
Not many Americans have lived abroad, and a week in London or Aruba doesn't really convey the full picture. We should amend the constitution to require presidents, cabinet heads and members of Congress to have spent at least six months living outside North America. We'd be a better country for it.
While I agree that for a society as a whole to function optimally the people in it need to feel bound to each other by a common sense of responsibility and community, I'm very skeptical of takes like this that say the solution for regulating a particular industry is for the people in it to be better and more "ethical", rather than trying to write neutral, clear laws and making compliance with them the standard -- or use the old common law approach of building up the legal standard incrementally, case-by-case (which section 230 short-circuited here). Ethical scoldings aren't a realistic substitute from the standpoint of competitive dynamics within the industry, or of overcoming self-justifying, motivated reasoning. People are very good at convincing themselves that what they're doing is right.
As a example, look at the double standard our own host applies to Meta and Twitter. Perhaps even more than Facebook, Twitter is a noxious dump that has damaged and coarsened our public discourse. It rewards shallow, snarky, tribal patterns of thinking and behavior, and exacerbates rather than ameliorates incivility and division, suspicion and distrust rather than extending good faith and the benefit of the doubt. But it's very easy for those who gain the most from Twitter to overlook it's net bad effect and justify it.
This take is basically “we as a society should stigmatize working for meta unless they change in certain ways.” I think that is a reasonable thing to say if you’re not sure what tweak to the legal code would address your concerns.
Interesting piece. Thanks. This quote seems to be relevant:
"Third, employees in vilified industries are often in a position to do valuable things. Swapping from cigarettes to risk-reduction products is a net gain for people’s health. Widespread suspicion of genetically engineered crops ignores the copious evidence that they are safe and useful. And a rapid decline in the number of new petroleum engineers in America will seem less desirable if a shortfall in expertise holds back carbon-sequestration projects."
This would suggest Meta employees would be well positioned to make positive changes, which will only happen if people talk about what changes need to be made.
This is why I don’t love this article. Obviously FB is junk food and would love one of the most prominent opinion writers in the country to lay out public policy thoughts on how this could be mitigated but he doesn’t do that he gave us an article that is like “FB is junk food and the executives should recognize this and guess what the people that work there should go work somewhere else to be more ethical.”
I think this is directionally correct - laws are better than scolding. But as the crypto folks keep learning, you can’t build a functional society on laws alone; not even crypto supporters are willing to excuse hacks as “working as intended”, even though the hacks are “legal” according to the code. IMO ethics are becoming a bit underrated these days relative to incentives.
Well, the reason to write about being ethical is not just to encourage reflectiveness on the part of Meta employees (though I think you underrate the potential of moral awakening), but also to make a certain sort of social point.
As a talented software engineer in 2022 I might have a few options. I could go work for a social media giant and make a ton of money. I could go work for the defense industry and make less money and also everyone I know will judge me but I get to work on cool systems. Or I could go into video game development and make still less money and have worse working conditions, but everyone I know will think I'm cool.
The general perception of whether a particular job is socially valuable and desirable factors in heavily to the internal utility function of a laborer considering competing options. So if that first social media option suddenly comes along with social stigma, it doesnt seem quite so attractive.
“ I could go work for the defense industry and make less money and also everyone I know will judge me” this is very annoying. Our fellow liberals can be idiotic sometimes. One would have hoped that Ukraine would have woken some of them up to notice that History is still happening. *sigh*
As someone who works for the Department of Defense, I think contributing to establishing credible deterrence of our adversaries is much more beneficial than optimizing the Facebook news feed. But obviously YMMV
Incidentally, and they didn't pay me to say this, for anyone that's a SWE working at Facebook, consider working for Microsoft or even AWS instead. They are both an incredibly important component of the defense industrial base.
I entirely disagree. The continued military supremacy of America and her allies relies on overwhelming technological advantage, and the peace and prosperity of the entire world rest on that continued supremacy.
Hegemonic power for a totalizing autocracy that's actively engaged in genocide pretty much out of sheer pique at foreigners daring to ask what's going on, in this case.
If you thought Iraq was bad, just wait until the multipolar world you're functionally advocating for arrives and a true great power conflict or proxy war breaks out because China no longer feels credibly deterred by American prowess.
Whoever manufactured chemical weapons for World War I killed a few million people. Whoever manufactured fentanyl for the drug cartels is likely going to end up killing far more. Giving people the addictive means to harm themself is likely worse than giving them the means to attack each other, in terms of actual harm done.
I don't think chemical weapons killed millions in WWI (more like 1% of that number). Unless you treat the Nazi gas chambers in WWII as an extension of that
Yeah, I was trying off the cuff to guess what was the right number there. I knew that some individual battles in WWI had millions of deaths, and the total number was quite large, and I figured chemical weapons were likely a significant fraction of that. If my initial estimate of chemical weapons deaths was an overestimate, then the fentanyl thing has already exceeded it, rather than having to wait a few more years at current rates.
Not necessarily related to the point you are making, but this is a good video about the man you are referring to in your first sentence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvknN89JoWo
Not in IT but really find Matt’s take on people (not just executives from my reading) at Meta making some sort of yukky decision by having their career there rather than, say, Tesla. Don’t want to get into a back and forth and high level logical argument about but IMO he’s being condescending and sanctimonious with this line of thinking. Smugness factor a little too high on this.
Agree. Matt reasonably takes a “blame the system, not (just) the people” approach to overeating and/or Facebook binging, but paradoxically takes a “blame the people, not the systems of culture or capitalism” for people choosing to work in high-paying, high-prestige positions at Facebook.
(And as I wrote below, I agree that Twitter likely has a much larger toxic effect on the fabric of society, despite its smaller user base, because its power users are in positions of exponentially higher cultural power than the heaviest Facebook users. Twitter rots their brains and the rest of media as we know it goes down with them.)
I don't think I see a paradox. It's of a piece with his work on charities and EA. Obviously we can't mandate that everyone give a certain amount to charity, and while some people think that we should do away with charity entirely by just taxing more, I think few people here would share that view. Given all that, it's perfectly coherent to write a piece encouraging people to give more of their income to charity and to particularly give to the charities likely to help people the most. Sure, there are systematic things we could change—we could make certain not-very-helpful donations no longer tax deductible, for instance—but we're talking about a zone where the law will be of limited use to us so we need to rely on norms and social pressure. Similarly, while there are regulations we could impose to put more of a cost on Meta and Frito-Lay for the harms they do, there's nothing incoherent about encouraging people who have the choice of different careers to choose one that they can reasonably be proud of.
I’m skeptical that Twitter has caused comparable harm to FB/IG, partly considering how many fewer people use it and partly because I think that, while your critiques have a basis, there’s more good going on than you think. But I certainly could be wrong.
Mainly, I think that the “if it’s bad, make it illegal or stop wasting our time” approach (apologies if that’s not a fair depiction of your point!) is too limited. As a society we’re not going to be able to handle everything through the legal code. A huge amount of what steers us towards the good and away from the bad is going to have to be principles and norms. People who try to help those principles along are doing society a service, if they’re good principles.
I'm skeptical how much any of these things cause genuine "harm" in any meaningful way, but I'd submit that any negative impact from Twitter considerably exceeds what one would expect given the comparative size of its userbase because Twitter has uniquely infiltrated and influenced media and political elites in a way Facebook and other social media outlets don't seem to have come anywhere close to approaching.
I agree re: relative impact of Twitter. Twitter-style discourse and Twitter-generated us-vs-them animosity spills over heavily into professional spaces.
But I think, as our host exemplifies, Twitter is more heavily used by people in highly influential media positions. It certainly has an amplified effect on the tone of media writ large, much more than FB.
I'm certainly not suggesting that people shouldn't feel free to preach and proselytize their preferred vision of morality and virtue, and there's a long tradition of preachers and social reformers criticizing purveyors of vice and other in-their-eyes-sinful industries.
But particularly in a pluralistic society as diverse and large as the US, the law *is* our public moral, ethical code. America's whole schtick is that it's a land where individuals can do, be and believe whatever they want, within the bounds of the law. So even leaving aside questions such as competitive pressure and motivated reasoning, a lot of people just genuinely don't see eye-to-eye on many moral questions. The law is a lowest common denominator public moral code for our society, and if there isn't enough consensus on how a particular industry should conduct itself for it to be encoded into law, there's probably not enough of a consensus for moralizing that isn't written into law to really matter either, unless/until that view wins enough converts to be written into law.
Which, to your point, is not to say it doesn't matter; but public moralizing that isn't linked to and aimed at building support for some proposed legal change seems empty, if not downright sanctimonious. If I wanted to hear preaching I'd go to church.
I made this analogy elsewhere in this thread, but did Matt's posts on effective altruism strike you as preaching? He wasn't calling for a law banning donations to rich colleges, and I'm sure he'd think such a law would be a bad idea. He was suggesting that donors, as individuals, should try to direct their donations to where they will clearly improve people's welfare. If that strikes you as sanctimonious, fair enough; to me, trying to influence individuals is an obviously appropriate use of a public platform.
As a liberal, I was dismayed when, starting in 2014 or so, I started seeing liberals and progressives say that "free speech" only refers to the First Amendment, and that anything that isn't about government restrictions isn't about free speech at all. I was dismayed because the principle that it's basically wrong to suppress speech even when it's legal has been a cherished one of mine, and I thought of my political movement, all my life. You can say that, if there's no national consensus that suppressing speech is wrong (and boy, is there not!), then any normalizing to that effect isn't going to matter. But if Matt decided to ban you from this comment section for implying that he was being preachy, I think a lot of us would be angry on your behalf and would maybe even question whether we wanted to keep subscribing, even though there's nothing in the law or Substack's policies prohibiting him from doing that. Protecting that norm matters a lot on the margins.
Then there are laws that are on the books but very hard to enforce, and thus depend on norms anyway. I read a New Yorker article about how in Moscow, the norm is (or was at the time) that you always go into an intersection when you have a green, even if you're going to get stuck in the intersection and block traffic when the other light turns green, and that partly as a result of this Moscow has impassable traffic. In the US, we mostly stick by the norm of keeping the intersection clear, with the consequence that our traffic problems are less bad than they would be. Where I live, the norm used to be that dogwalkers bag up their dogs' waste; now that seems to be eroding. I can say "scoop your dog's poop," or I can say "scoop your dog's poop—it's the law," but either way I'm really relying on the norms, on getting people to agree that making this sacrifice will contribute to a better society overall. The line between what's permitted and what's not is not only enforced by law, in other words.
If the discussion of personal responsibility, virtue, morality, or whatever is tied to some to theory of good citizenship, ie, republican citizenship, and what personal attributes citizens should have and be inculcated with to promote the functioning of a self-governing democratic republic, that's a discussion I think fits and is worth having in a publication on politics and public affairs.
But generalized theories of what it means to be a good person, whether couched in the language of EA, Catholic social doctrine, or what have you, are something else, and not something I'm particularly interested in. People are of course free to discuss and proselytize their preferred ideas in that area, but it's not the kind of publication I'd be inclined to support.
I agree. The Headline of MY's post should have been "A Case against Meta" because if it is "The Case" then history shows it isn't likely to do much. MY brings up the food industry and animal production in particular as analogy. I know a great many people in those industries, I've never met one who thinks themselves evil. It has nothing to do with showing them your evidence, either. Both sides can debate and argue until they are winded enough to join Blue Man Group. But in food production or meta, I can only see change happening when either consumers demand change or when the industry itself demands change (this latter is not as uncommon as one may think. Federal food regularity grades and standards, for example, were initially proposed by the industries themselves to guard against poor products sullying the market for everyone). There needs to be more than *The* case against Meta and MY's particular case may very well be the most desperate as I do worry our starship is unknowingly headed to Talos IV.
This kind of is consumers demanding change, right? It’s a small effort to get people to think about these companies and their goals in a negative light.
I genuinely feel frustrated that social networking websites have done a ton of good for me as an autistic person at getting me to socialize and leading to events and causes to work for that I literally never would have without them and everyone treats engaging with them as a thing to be avoided.
I’m not saying they are free from problems at all, but my Facebook is full of groups and events for engaging in things recipes and pet and baby pictures by my active use of filters. I’m a bit of an addict but like my pre-Facebook social interaction was basically nothing and that doesn’t seem so bad.
This is the best promise of the socially connected Internet - connecting people who are normally isolated. LGBT, minority, other groups that aren't like their surroundings need spaces where they can meet others like them and see they're not alone. This is why you can't just burn it all down.
But with that positivity you get the Q Anons and adrenochrome people meeting each other too. It's a double-edged sword.
As an employee (a senior eng on ads) I find I actually agree with this critique. And I do not think Matt will find this convincing, but just want to make the point.
If we didn’t do it, someone else would, sure. But it’s also more complicated than that. This is a larger trend that does not originate with us and we are trying to survive. That trend is what’s interesting.
Matthewmatosis (video game reviewer) once made a point about the convergent evolution of video games, as all get leveling systems and RPG elements and free roaming elements. This is happening as people try to make their products more appealing and borrow popular elements. Sometimes there are paradigm shifts where either consumer preferences change or are revealed, and then other products start evolving along those lines instead.
He makes the analogy that if you went back in time and released DOOM again, but with RPG elements, it would do *better* than DOOM most likely. Even though it would sully the purity of what DOOM was. Even if the developers of DOOM refused, someone else could just come along and make DOOM + RPG elements and profit.
I think that analogy works for social media. They are all evolving towards short form video, and while any one company probably would say it’s bad, *all* of them are doing it. Not just Meta. There is no world where meta saying no results in this not happening.
Think a bit about the history of this. Tiktok is not original. Vine came first, and showed everyone the power of short form video. But then it died for finance/monetization reasons, not because the format lacked appeal, and the surviving competitors in the attention space did not go full short form video (probably for a mix of principle about their original product purpose and bad business sense). IG/FB/Snapchat/YouTube all in theory took steps at the time to compete, but stopped the convergent evolution when Vine went away. Then years later, TikTok emerges to essentially complete the evolution towards people’s revealed preferences. And now here we are.
I do not think this should make Meta blameless or anything, but I do not see a world where we (now the internet using public and not the company) can internet shame the relevant companies into not reacting in the way other companies react to a moneymaking product innovation.
So I’d be curious to know what Matt thinks we *should* do. Stop existing? I am sympathetic. Try to be like Twitter and occupy our non-money making/doomed niche? Perhaps. Because I think social media will convergently evolve to be short form video selected by algorithm, whether meta is involved or not. None of this makes me feel good. But shaming individual players does not solve the revealed preference problem.
(My answer, not that I have sway, is to make it easier for people to *make* and *share* short form video to post/story but not build a whole product around it. And instead lean into more friend specific and ephemerality specific features. Try to emphasis what makes IG unique instead of chasing short form video)
How about optimize on a slightly different metric; “do humans say this is good for them?” rather than “does this increase engagement?” It’s a bit less convenient than “time on the app”, but collecting a sizable dataset addressing that question wouldn’t be too hard.
IIRC Facebook already occasionally asks me a question like that. Do those results point in the same direction as “maximize engagement”? Are they used?
Btw what’s wrong with short video? I would’ve thought the issue was more “which short videos” rather than the medium itself.
Sure, you probably wouldn’t want to completely throw out “engaging” (and the company won’t, so no worries there). But probably mixing in some “good” would be helpful. IMO the tough parts are defining “good” and “helpful” in a credible and scalable way.
Fwiw we do measure this but it does not get nearly the same billing at the end of the day. We were doing a better job of prioritizing it when the stock price was doing better.
I mean... "stop existing" is pretty damned compelling.
At the companywide level, to be clear, not on a personal basis.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly the endgame here; unless the "kids" prove dramatically better at handling this than we think they're going to be, various nation-states are simply going to kill off social media within their borders above the level of comment sections and uncurated long-form video repositories. They'll play whack-a-mole for a while and eventually almost all nations will drift in that direction.
At which point we'll have interesting headlines like "US and China conduct joint strike against Somali black-market social media firm", lol.
Technical talent is a very scarce resource, especially high-end technical talent with legal permission to work in America. On the margin, if many skilled engineers opted out of Meta and Meta-related activities, that sector would on the margin "optimize itself" slightly slower and the places they migrated to would "optimize themselves" slightly faster, to a clear net benefit to American society.
To use your analogy to video games, even if "leveling systems and RPG elements and free roaming elements" are the entropic inescapeable end state of videogames [a big if], visionary video game creators choosing to do other things does on the margin increase diversity in the videogame industry.
Extending that analogy to Facebook -- over its short lifespan we've seen that these addictive loops seem to saturate and then start to decline unless new niches are found to expand into. Expanding into new niches takes a lot of work and talent, and depriving the sector of some technical talent on the margin slows its rate of discovery of the next addictive niche and therefore reduces the actual number of hours lost to addiction-suck.
>So I’d be curious to know what Matt thinks we *should* do. Stop existing?
Historically when a new communications technology has developed that could impact the functioning of civil society, the government has stepped in to heavily regulate it so that it broadly aligns with civic values.
For example, when television was invented the federal government controlled the airwaves, limited content production to three networks, and mandated that those networks air news programs and that the programs give airtime to all (mainstream) points of view.
So I think government regulation of all recommendation engines is what the solution will end up looking like, including some content being mandatory in an eat-your-vegetables way.
A key difference between internet content and broadcast TV is that the airwaves are a rivalrous good; two broadcasters cannot occupy the same frequency, in the same region, at the same time. In order for the public to benefit from broadcast communication someone had to regulate broadcasting.
No such analogy exists for the internet and it’s thereby going to be harder for liberal governments to justify regulating content platforms. Particularly for the US with the first amendment.
That’s a key point: The federal government most certainly had a role in regulating frequencies, broadcast power, technical standards, and the like for the purposes of ensuring radio broadcasting worked *at all.* The rest came about since those in power said, “Hey, since you guys have to ask us for a license, we should have some say in what you broadcast.”
The same thing is playing out now with social media except the excuse will be based on some novel antitrust theory or something like that. But the real reason is because people with power want more power.
My view is that that the fundamental problem is the business model for all these companies. Nothing will change until the business model is forced to change. Changing the business model requires regulation to give individuals ownership over their own information.
Matt says this pretty explicitly in his post: you should switch to a subscription-based monetization model. Ad-supported businesses must optimize for continued viewer attention, whereas subscription-supported businesses must optimize for viewer satisfaction during renewal season.
Short-form video vs. non-short-term video is an orthogonal concern.
I think it's pretty hard to credit the idea that the most powerful social media company in existence has no influence over how social media evolves. But also, you personally could make a different choice.
Even the most powerful companies in an industry don't have much control when faced with competition and low switching costs. Netscape and AOL once dominated internet access but they had zero influence over how that market evolved. Meta, similarly, has very little control over the future of social media.
Meta may individually have very little control over the future of social media, but the sector has a whole can influence how fast that future arrives. If the sector has slightly less technical talent lavished on it, the future arrives slightly more slowly and so billions of addiction-hours are not spent in the meantime.
Technical talent is a scarce resource; the scientists at the Manhattan project / Human Genome Project / Apollo project could have made more money by working somewhere else, but they chose to devote their technical talent to something that mattered.
You envision a world where Meta refuses to do short video and then survives profitably? Not even mark thinks that (hence the VR stuff that’s a whole different can of worms).
>One thing I like about being in the subscription newsletter business is I don’t think you can make money doing this on a guilty pleasure basis. Because people need to actually opt in and pay money, it only works if people feel proud to be a Slow Boring subscriber.
Agreed! And I think this also extends to the Slow Boring comment section. I believe the paywall has led to higher quality user comments and more engaging conversations. Since users have to opt in to reading and participating in the Yglesias-verse we get a better form of social media.
Further, I’ve found myself spending far less time on other social media due to having this superior alternative. And that makes me think there could be some potential for a paid social media offering. That might even become a key selling point of many substack subscriptions.
Continuing the publication analogy from the article, Twitter and Facebook could be the low-quality tabloids; a guilty pleasure that many still engage in. Alternatively, the paid social media would be comparable to the higher-quality print publications.
Sometimes getting into a heated debate on a Slow Boring comment section over student loan forgiveness or the pros/cons of ubiquitous pornography seems like a guilty pleasure.
I definitely feel this. I have days where I spend hours procrastinating on work by commenting on Substacks, that a few years ago would have gone to Reddit wars and Facebook threads.
Feels like the BBS and early Internet forums here. Those could still have awful people saying awful things (you don't want to know what was said by some Serb and Croat users during that war) but there were enough barriers to entry that human moderation and personal relationships could right the ship. It was still addictive but still recognizably human. You can still get this today on social media but you have to stay away from the algorithmic scroll.
Totally agree! I sometimes use Twitter as a news aggregator/way to find ideas to use in freelance work or just think about. But it makes me feel so crappy I completely tune out for long periods of time, even years sometimes, and I find that hanging out here gives me a lot of what I'm looking for there.
I think people who are good at using Twitter regularly have a carefully cultivated workflow that involves blocking and muting (words, not just users).
I find following some people on Twitter useful, but also the commentary (QTs, trolls, hate followers) around it very quickly turn into an obnoxious time sink. I never figured out something that works for me. So I built my own RSS feed generator (one post per day per user I follow) that can be read on apps like Feedly or Substack without ever having to visit Twitter itself: https://bsravan.in/feeds/twitterss.html
This may be a naive question, but why would you read the Twitter commentary? For example, I enjoy reading Matt's tweets but I almost never look at the comments. What value do they offer?
On social media, and even Substack, the numbers (likes, quotes, replies, e.g.) have an appeal. When a number is high, I am often tempted to click on it. It takes a non-zero conscious effort to not click, than to click. The way I avoid such clicks is by avoiding the website altogether.
Sometimes smart people comment. I wish I could filter comments to only responses that the tweet author or someone I follow liked or who the tweet author follows.
It’s at least not algorithmically optimized to be addictive to me, even though it is in practice really effective. The people are trying to engage on the substance rather than on what engages me.
Maybe I’m just old (school?) but I personally don’t struggle with algorithmic distractions but mostly self selected ones (e.g. wanting to read too many books or blogs). My sense is that this is a minority thing and that algorithmic distractions are worse but I think that a big part of it is simply that the level of abundance we have on the internet (and back in the days of cable TV) is intrinsically challenging for most humans.
Abundance in domains where we are adapted to scarcity is perhaps one of the central ways to characterize a class of contemporary problems. (Different from the problems of dealing with giant bureaucracies that Kafka and others noticed a bit over a century ago.)
Social media was basically invented when I was in college and I remember the sudden impact it had on myself and my peers. I remember the first breakup I went through on social media, it was weird and very uncomfortable. That experience always made me dislike how social media made my private life public, it made it harder to live my life in a non toxic way.
I don’t engage with social media at all now except for business related things. Sometimes it impacts my awareness of certain events but it’s worth it for my mental health, I’ve just been a happier person since I closed all those accounts.
I was on Facebook pretty early (college student only phase), and got into it for maybe 2 years, then realized it was mental poison and a total waste of time.
Yeah I feel bad for kids today having to live out their lives so publicly. They just won't have an opportunity to know what that world was like. Sometimes it is nice to just let the past be the past and not have an algorithm constantly say "HEY, REMEMBER THIS!?". Lot's of life is difficult and emotionally draining, for me at least, it was better to not create a permanent remembrance machine to shove documented evidence of trauma or misfortune at me constantly. It was a blessing to let the knowledge of how others are living be part of your imagination and not something you could constantly check on.
There -were- ways to do it, but it was moderately complicated and cyber security expert brother-in-law said it usually creates enduring vulnerabilities.
> When I say that I want to stop eating random snacks, that is my authentic preference — and when I go to a party and see some chips and tell myself “just one won’t hurt,” that is self-deception
I disagree that these stated preferences are more authentic than the revealed ones. I think that incorrectly separates the rational mind from irrational impulses. Instead, I believe the mind is a combination of conscious thinking and subconscious impulses, with the latter including emotions and intuitions. There can commonly be conflicts between the two, but neither is more authentic.
In terms of addressing the conflict, I believe the rational mind can construct a better environment for the subconscious mind to operate into. For example, to consume a healthy diet I don’t keep any snacks nor alcohol in my home to remove these temptations. I also do a fair amount of meal planning to minimize the risk of overeating. As a result, I don’t find much of a conscious/unconscious conflict with regard to diet since the environment in which my subconscious operates doesn’t include these unhealthy temptations.
But I think you might be underrating how hard it is for some people to not buy snacks or booze, or to plan meals! I'm like you in many ways: I'm a goal-oriented person who actually likes vegetables, enjoys exercise, hates feeling intoxicated (despite a strong family history of alcoholism), and has no interest in Facebook. It took me a long time to realize that this was a huge stroke of psychological luck on my part, and I try to be sympathetic to people who are wired differently (I often fail at this, but I keep trying).
I disagree that it is hard for people to resist buying snacks or booze ahead of time for future consumption. Instead, I would say that those people rationally think that the benefits of consuming those indulgences outweighs the costs. They might not have thought much about it, but the fact that they consistently buy these goods ahead of time suggests that the planning part of their mind finds snacks and booze to be a rational choice.
Respectfully disagree, especially about the "rational" part. When I do dumb things, at least part of my brain is usually aware that something bad is going to happen, but the emotion/fatigue/whatever swamps that. From my perspective, that seems like the opposite of "rational."
Speaking from personal experience, a good portion of the junk food I buy is bought compulsively and then half eaten in the car on my way home from the store. The only solution I've found to this problem is to just build up more willpower (and the only effective way I've found to do that is to maintain a pretty strict cardio exercise habit). I think you might be overestimating the amount of rational thought going on in the grocery store.
At the risk of offering a suggestion you didn't ask for and don't want:
Does your grocery store offer curbside pickup purchasing? It's got it's inconveniences ("dangit, I just forgot one thing!") but it might make it harder to impulse buy.
We also have a "always have a spare" for anything we use often enough/non-perishable to help with the convenience (e.g., we have a cooking oil in progress and an unopened one, and put cooking oil on the list as soon as we open the unopened one)
This _definitely_ requires more mental planning in advance, but maybe that helps?
I personally like Amazon's subscribe and save for non-perishable goods. I think I have roughly 30 goods on subscription, some sent as frequently as monthly whereas others are on a 6 month schedule. I get a monthly email reminder to check my subscriptions and skip/delay stuff as appropriate.
And there's a discount of between 5% to 15% for goods order through this service. But personally, I'd pay a premium for the service since it means I don't have to think about this stuff.
This wouldn't work for me because I have a visceral aversion to any sort of recurring subscription, as I fear that's what the sellers want the most, to suck you into a "set it and forget it" mentality that silently drains your bank account. If you're one of the very few sellers that can make my recurring subscription list, it means that I *really* like your product. And much to Matt's pleasure, that does include this site.
The “always have a spare” thing is a good summary of shopping strategies I have developed in the past few years. (Especially for things like full fat unflavored yogurt that often aren’t in stock.)
Rarely keep beer at home bc it just ends with me downing the six pack before the weekend even gets here. It is hard for people to understand the mistake is as much at the buying part as it is at the consuming part. Don’t have a TikTok app loaded but when I did I scrolled through it daily I’m genuinely surprised how I eliminated that part of my life so effectively. Shouldn’t be surprised necessarily, but I am. Anyway so I’m disagreeing I think I wasn’t making a rational decision to drink so much beer I was underestimating how, subconsciously, I have much less willpower when I walk in after work than I feel like I do when I’m at the grocery store. Poor affective prediction and poor willpower prediction.
Agreed. I've come across plenty of people who I think are making bad decisions in their lives, but I can also tell that they are making active, affirmative decisions in that regard, and those that changed made similar active, affirmative decisions.
I can assure you that is now how it feels from the inside and not sure why you would model a pile of thinking meat modules glued together by evolution to make decisions in a completely different environment.
Also, with booze, in particular, remember it is an increasingly inebriated and less rational version of you who is deciding whether to have your second, third, fourth and nth drink as well. Murder Gandhi, etc.
Classic dispute between whether it is good to be paternalistic and push/nudge towards making better choices, or whether to provide choices and trust that people can make their own.
Politically, there is also a tension where traditionally Democrats don't want to talk about values but do want to nudge people towards making better outcomes.
My opinion has changed over time, but also hasn't settled into a satisfactory answer.
I think Matt sort of acknowledged this when he said it was a conflict between first- and second-order desires.
The key idea I think is that helping people get the higher-order things they believe they want is probably better than feeding an addiction in lower-order desires.
I’m not intellectual enough to understand all the subconscious talk, but yes… dieting is not hard if you just don’t keep bad shit around. It’s why I’m much stricter on my eating when I’m traveling. Unfortunately at home…. My wife likes to tempt me with evil.
I don't think I've ever disagreed with a Slow Boring piece as comprehensively as I disagree with this one. For one thing, NewsFeed is not the only Facebook product; they also make Facebook Messenger, which is my main communications medium for three close friends. And Facebook has refined their definition of what counts as interesting content before, notably by downgrading sites that people clicked onto and then immediately left – e.g. Upworthy, whose clickbaity headlines I think were the reason Facebook made this change.
But fine. Meta doesn't need me to defend them. I'm mostly worried about the deeper paternalistic implications of the principles set out here. I'm a big fan of revealed preference, for one thing – I think revealed preference is really important when the *government* tries to find out what people want. I certainly wouldn't claim revealed preference is always genuine preference, and if you're just a private actor selling a product, the distinction might matter, but I definitely don't want the government telling me what I do and don't want. I also think revealed preference is a valuable measurement for art, where I think entertainment value really is paramount. I'm just not sure how it's coherent to argue that art can have a value that exists outside people's reaction to it.
And even when it comes to selling products in the private market, I don't really think workers should be generalizing their own affective experience of things to other peoples'! I think the comparison to eating habits is instructive because I would not describe my eating habits as healthy by any means, but I'm in good shape because of genetics, social class (i.e. what foods my parents exposed me to as a kid and what I can afford) and exercise. How unhealthy a given habit is really does vary from person to person, which makes it risky to conclude that it's just common sense that a given consumer product is a net utilitarian loss.
So on one level, fine; if everyone working for Meta decides they don't like making the thing they make and they leave, I won't be too much worse off. But if that principle started extending to Ben & Jerry's, I'd be pretty put out.
I don't think I see the paternalism here. Matt stops very far short of calling for government action against Facebook, or Frito-Lay or whomever. When he says that there's more to assessing value than looking at revealed preference, he's not relying on his own value judgments—"sure people use Facebook and say they like it, but we all know it's junk"—but on people's own reports that they're happier when they aren't using Facebook, that they'd like to eat less junk food, etc. It's hardly condescending or paternalistic to take these people at their word, and suggest that working to *defeat* these preferences by encouraging compulsive behavior is not a good use of one's talents.
Regarding art, I think you're right that any measure of art's value has to be based on the effect it has on people. But it doesn't follow that revealed preference—gross revenue, basically—is the best or even a very good measure of art's value, because not all effects are created equal: the quality of people's reaction, not just the quantity of people who seek it out, is important, as is an artwork's continued ability to affect people over time. (There were plenty of books in the 1880s that outsold Huckleberry Finn, but you wouldn't want to read almost any of them today.) And this isn't even considering that consumers don't have free choice of any imaginable artwork, but are limited by what's brought to market. I watched Predator the other night, the kind of movie I miss today, and people's revealed preference at the time was to see it—movies like that did great business; it's not like taut R-rated action thrillers were unprofitable so the studios had to make comic franchise movies instead to get back in the black. Rather, they found that rushing CGI effects, attaching established IP, and marketing for all ages and all nations was more profitable, so that's what they do now. The fact that Predator only made millions while MCU films make bajillions doesn't show that the MCU is better art or better entertainment, just that it's a better commercial product. Bemoaning that discovery doesn't make us paternalistic.
It's true that I'm going a little beyond what Matt is actually arguing in this piece, but he's argued in the past for consumption taxes on junk foods, so I don't think I'm totally off base in detecting an underlying principle.
But you make a good point that he's not just saying "everyone knows" social media or Doritos are bad for you, that people actually say they'd like to consume less of those things. But at least the nominal purpose of Facebook – staying in touch with friends and acquaintances – is something I think a lot of people want. I think you could just as easily take from those preferences the lesson that Facebook should be *perfected* to be more like in-person social interaction, rather than abandoned.
As for the arts, I guess I'm more cynical about the idea that longevity proves enduring relevance. The Mona Lisa is by far and away the most famous work of art in the world, and as far as I can tell this owes a lot to the fact that it was stolen in the early 20th century, and the theft was widely reported in newspapers worldwide, with reproductions of the painting itself on the front page. The amount of visitors it gets seems wildly disproportionate to anything inherent to the painting. I think the longevity of certain works of art comes down more to the snowball effect of contemporary critics praising a work, then more critics reading those critics, then teachers picking it for inclusion in secondary school curricula, and so on and so forth.
I didn't mean to say that the only thing that counts is longevity or that long-lasting works are inevitably worth it. But if I had to choose just one measure to establish the value of an artwork, I'd choose longevity in a heartbeat before I chose the gate receipts. A long-lasting work at least has demonstrated some ability to be popular outside of momentary fashions.
But also I am a little confused about how your position on the Mona Lisa jibes with what you said about the entertainment value of art. You're basically saying that it's overrated, and as it happens, I more or less agree with you—I think the Mona Lisa is a great painting (check out what Walter Pater wrote about it, and that was in the 19th Century, before the theft and before it was widely popular), but it's not my favorite painting in the Louvre and I agree that a lot of its popularity is due to its status as the most famous painting. But on the revealed preference scale, it's off the charts: even though you can barely get a good view of it what with the crowds and the thick glass, people are desperate to see it. I'd bet that lots of visitors to the Louvre would rather see Mona Lisa and miss everything else than the other way around. Doesn't that show that they get a lot of entertainment value out of going? Now, you say that that's due to something outside the work and I agree, but that seems to argue that "revealed preference," "entertainment value," etc. are not very reliable measures for the quality of an artwork.
Just my 2c, but I genuinely don’t think there have been many Slow Boring posts I’ve agreed with as comprehensively as this one. I’m very much a skeptic of the pervasive influence of social media and algorithmic engagement, and I think Matt depicted the issue of selectively promoted revealed preferences very well. I doubt many could make the case better, in fact.
Then again, I think it would be a genuine net good to society (close to Pareto optimal, in fact) to ban Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of algorithmic engagement optimizers altogether. I hold this opinion strongly, and I am unlikely to change it anytime soon. That puts me in a realm far more outside the mainstream than Matt’s (mildly paternalistic) tut-tutting.
Matt, all you need to know about the people who work at Meta is they are a tiny slice of the tech world and they make the top pay in the industry. Total comp for most of its software teams ranges from $500k-1.5M per year, which is quite a bit higher than the alternatives.
People self-select into Meta, and Meta does actually have a horrible reputation - most people in industry wouldn’t work there, and they have some challenges recruiting people compared to other big tech firms. But saying “the workers should care” is wasting your breath. The people who decided to work there went in knowing full well what Meta is about and decided that they don’t care, the money is worth it.
Median salary in US according to the first google link I check is around 54k. Now I know you said comp. so it's not apples to apples. Nevertheless these numbers are insane. I do wonder how many of our political issues come out of these insane salary gaps, before we even talk about wealth gaps and the truly super rich (which, though of outsized influence, are numerically very small).
Taxes in this country really are progressive, and they’re going to be well over 40% total effective rate on an income like that. Then another 20-30% for a home most middle class people would consider disappointing. That’s making generational wealth for the specific NIMBY who previously owned your home, and the community broadly by paying all of the property taxes (as much as 10 incumbent neighbors thanks to Prop 13). The tech worker pockets some of it, but the wealth gets around.
To the extent that we see major political resentments against tech workers it is ironically in their capacity as the huddled masses: crowded apartments, bohemian bike infrastructure, scary thug-infested transit encroaching on the serene rural and small town vibes of Silicon Valley, whose legitimate heirs are the owners of $5m detached houses, whose sun-soaked gardens the invaders might ruin with their shadows, whose children’s childhoods Tech will ruin with its density. The urban gentrification discourse problematizes their wealth, but a city of 700k is ultimately a sideshow in a suburban metro of 7m. The suburban discourse problematizes their poverty. If they cannot afford to fit in with our (land intensive) way of life, they don’t belong here.
Personally I've noticed that I feel much less bad about spending time on social media when using apps that don't involve algorithms. Is there any way for society in general to promote that over more algorithm focused options? Interested to hear what people think.
One idea might be paring back the legal protections of Section 230, which (per my understanding) is what shields firms operating in the US from the legal liability they'd otherwise be exposed to because of user-generated content.
In other words, allow that section to stand per the status quo (it's needed in my view for robust ecommerce), with the exception of *algorithmically-generated* content. Once a firm opts to shove something in front of your eyeballs because it thinks it'll make money doing so, they lose that legal shield.
This is because (in my view at least) the problem with bad or dangerous content online mostly isn't the badness of the content itself, but rather its virality: exhorting someone to dangerous behavior online is a shitty thing to do, but it's not necessarily that much of a threat to society. But when it gets in front of three million sets of eyeballs, it becomes a whole lot more dangerous!
So, if Meta and Twitter and Tik-Tok and whoever else want to use the inherent virality of the internet to drive profits, they ought to shoulder the legal risk of not acting responsibly (or, better yet, they should act responsibly!).
Full disclosure: I'm neither a lawyer nor a software guy, so I'm well aware I may be overlooking obvious legal or technical flaws in my proposal. Just a layperson spitballing, as usual...
The legal system is ill designed to address small wrongs. What are my damages from seeing bad content? Even if I kill someone, it’s very hard to prove I wouldn’t have killed them otherwise.
The cases that would actually be litigated would be ones where someone was maimed or killed and there was some, possibly really tangential, connection to a well funded algorithm using company. You would basically be paying a bunch of lawyers to partake in an arid debate about causation.
Yeah it doesn't seem like this could be done through private litigation, which is what Section 230 is really about, unless the idea is simply to *ban* algorithmic content rather than to just remove its protections. In that case I suppose you could create some sort of statutory damages amount.
Perhaps not a lot would be accomplished. I’m not really sure. But the point is, because of section 230, tort lawsuits driven by the use of dodgy, viral content by profit-seeking internet firms really don’t happen *at all*. My hunch is this arrangement has not served our society well.
Every regulatory approach has its costs and benefits, but one of the benefits of the common law system where judges are the first line regulators, subject to legislative override, is that the law can develop incrementally and carefully in rapidly changing areas where it's not clear to anyone what the legal standards should be, beyond basic general rules like don't lie and cheat or unreasonably injury other people by your actions. It relieves lawmakers of the need to be omniscient in thinking of every scenario in advance, but still leaves a way for those gaps to be filled case by case.
Look at the types of cases that 230 blocks -- a lot of them involve conduct that companies could, would, and should be held responsible for by judges, if 230 did not block it.
>> One idea might be paring back the legal protections of Section 230, which (per my understanding) is what shields firms operating in the US from the legal liability they'd otherwise be exposed to because of user-generated content.
Most of the protections in Section 230 are already provided by the first amendment, so repealing it wouldn't be as big of a deal as people think. Repealing 230 would mainly just open up a lot of litigation and uncertainty for a while until the supreme court settles a handful of of first amendment loose ends having to do with content moderation that were never fully resolved.
The desire for Section 230 came after a decision against Prodigy for moderating content to provide a more family friendly experience. A prior decision in a case against Compuserv had already made clear that platforms were not liable for third party content that isn't moderated. This decision was based on long-standing court precedent that bookstores, libraries, and magazine stands aren't liable for the content of the publications they sell or the decisions they make about how to arrange that content in their stores. The prodigy case was a lower court decision that hinged on the idea that any content moderation made a platform a publisher. Many First Amendment scholars believed this ruling would have been overturned had it made it to the supreme court (eg bookstores and magazine stands have absolute protection even though they moderate content by choosing what they sell and how they display their goods).
>>Most of the protections in Section 230 are already provided by the first amendment, so repealing it wouldn't be as big of a deal as people think<<
I don't want 230 repealed; and as I wrote above, I deem it a reasonable measure in a lot of contexts. I don't think Matt or Substack should be sued if someone posts something damaging or dangerous in these comments! But as far as I know neither Matt nor Substack are trying to get our many hot takes to go viral in an effort to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
In my view it is the combination of *virality* (which is turbocharged by algorithms) and the broad shield of 230 that is a bad mix. I have no doubt our constitution would prohibit Congress from curtailing the ability of websites to enable their users to post and repost and forward content. But when said websites are assisted by algorithmic software, all hell breaks loose. So I'd be interested in seeing if the threat of legal liability might prompt them to deemphasize this particular aspect of their business model.
I follow Haidt's work on this and I really do believe he's onto something when he points out that the problem isn't content moderation, but rather, it's algorithms optimized to produce rage and anger that make these platforms toxic to society.
The challenge though, at least from my non-lawyer viewpoint, is that many first amendment scholars seem to believe platforms already have a constitutional right, not connected to 230, to decide which content they promote and which content they hide or shadow ban. This isn't very different from settled first amendment law that prohibits the government from telling bookstores which titles they're allowed to put in their windows versus which must be hidden in the back room (btw - this constitutional protection for bookstores comes with a built-in liability shield).
If the constitution says the government can't tell bookstores or libraries how and when they can promote or hide published works, how can it tell twitter or facebook which published works they're allowed to promote and which they must hide in the back room?
I have a similar instinct (revoke section 230 protections for algorithmically curated feeds) but whenever I think about more I can't see how it actually works. After all, "display posts in chronological order of when they were posted" is still an algorithm. So is, show the most-upvoted content higher in the feed. I realize this sounds like sophistry but I think there really is a deeply hard problem here. Obviously you can just specify which algorithms are acceptable w/r/t section 230 (chronological is OK, etc) but then you get into things like spam filters. Is gmail algorithmically curated since they have a spam filter and anything marked as spam goes to a separate folder? If the phone company started implementing "spam filters" to help deal with the barrage of scam callers we all get constantly (something I desperately wish they WOULD do), would that count as algorithm curation?
At the end of the day, recommendation engines of one sort or another are the price we have pay for having access to massive amounts of information.
I don’t think there’s a silver bullet here, but “what counts as a recommendation algorithm” *is* the kind of problem the common law system is pretty good at fumbling its way toward. At a first pass, you say that chronological is a safe harbor, and chronological *minus* some things (spam filters, the original moderation 230 was intended to protect) is protected, any anything else loses the 230 shield.
If you make that rule only kick in above some revenue threshold, I think the downside risk is pretty limited. The cost of a false positive is a big social network has to pay out a libel claim? They’re good for it. The point is the use the risk of liability in extreme cases to make them take editorial judgment seriously.
There's also a major difference between serving up algorithmically-curated content that cannot be forwarded or reposted—in other words made to go viral—and that which can. Advertisements fall in the first category. I have no objection if WaPo.com or Slate use an algorithm to guess which advertisements I'm likely to find relevant.
An outfit like Facebook—which relies a lot on user-generated content—has a business model that is obviously extremely vulnerable to being manipulated by truly bad actor-users who generate potentially quite damaging content. FB (and likely Twitter and Tiktok) is just too big to effectively police itself. Forcing their business model to move away from virality is the only way to go in my view.
(Of course, my suggestion about 230 would primarily address the problem of societally-dangerous content such as fake medical advice, exhortations to violence, etc; I doubt it would do much to address internet addiction and related ills like depression on the part of users who get hooked).
This is far from a practical solution, but I coded my own custom Twitter feed that just returns all tweets (including replies, RTs and QTs) in strict reverse chron order from a handful of accounts that I follow and trust (Matt of course being one). It's been a great way for me to read Twitter for going over a decade now.
If it’s just cat videos, fine. But very often it veers into videos about things you feel are important and outrageous and you can’t get enough outrage, so you need to see what happened this minute at Mar-a-Lago or else democracy will die in darkness.
I think people would be surprised how different their Facebook and Twitter feeds would be if they only engage with things that make them feel good. After a few years away, I returned to Facebook with the intention, "I'm here to click Like on things, and only share things I like." Much better experience than my first time around.
I strongly agree that the Facebook experience reflects what you put into it. It's quite rare for me to get political stuff in my feed (the main exception, amusingly enough, was Michael Bloomberg in 2020 whose primary campaign apparently told Facebook that they were buying ALL the advertising regardless of what the algorithm recommended) and I would attribute that to the fact that I don't engage with political content. I mostly get ads for crowdfunding boardgames, books, and gadgets presumably because those are things I click through.
I haven't tried this per se, but I've noticed a similar algorithmic problem with Spotify. A few months ago, my partner started sometimes using Spotify to play ambient music while doing yoga or taking a bath, and now it's very difficult to get the "Discover Weekly" or "Daily Mix" playlists to be upbeat. I wish there was an easy way to tell Spotify that the ambient listening was on a different profile, but since all our listening is really through telling Alexa to play Spotify, this is difficult.
I think music presents an even harder problem, and I don't think algorithms will beat curation anytime soon. BTW, for ambient music, I subscribe to Hearts of Space.
I largely accept this take, but have a small reservation about the idea that we can infer that major tech CEOs have “iron will”because they’re thin. There can be at least two alternative explanations: 1. Different people are tempted by different things. I’m a great food lover. Restaurants are one of the things I greatly enjoy on trips, cooking at home etc. and yet I never snack and that’s never a struggle. I’m simply never “tempted” to eat beyond my hunger. By contrast I’m definitely tempted by other things and do them beyond what I’d like (eg commenting too much here sometimes) so it’s not that my willpower is necessarily stronger than other people’s, nor that I don’t greatly enjoy food.
2. Environment matters tons: we know obesity inversely correlated to wealth. Beyond that I expect that even when something tempts you it’s always situational: take away my wi fi or my spare time and I won’t comment here. By the same token I won’t be surprised if the lifestyle of the tech billionaire ceos leaves them literally fewer opportunities for food temptations even if they’re the tempted type AND gives them enormous opportunities to compensate (personal trainers, optimized diets etc).
I'm not sure I agree with you on this one. Some products are for the masses. Like those mealy pale tomatoes that are used in fast food restaurants. They are a bad product, but they do serve a purpose. But their existence and prominence in the culinary world caused a resurgence of terrific heirloom tomatoes. That's how the market corrects itself. A variety of investors try to stoke different parts of the market for both their psychic and monetary benefit. People interested in producing a product of quality, will always operate in a variety of niches. That's because the big money will always push a business towards appealing to the lowest common denominator, where your business seeks to take advantage of the fact that people are unhappy being treated like they are part of the LCD. That's how capitalism works. The problem is social media footprints are so large and the market is so new, they are still in the process of optimizing the LCD and niche markets like Substack and other delivery processes are still developing. Meta will never become the product you would like it to be. But some of the people who work there will go on to create the social media version of heirloom tomatoes.
Agreed. And I think there is a potential social media market disruption in terms of paid social media. Personally, I’m finding the comment section of my paid substack subscriptions a superior form of social media and it’s taking market share from my use of Twitter and reddit. (I elaborated on this idea in another comment on this article.)
Counterpoint: "Heirloom tomatoes" are what we used to just call "tomatoes". A situation where the new, popular thing is bad and the old, good thing is a niche product seems suboptimal.
Suboptimal for sure. But there are actually tomatoes available (or in Matt’s old example, ikea furniture is much more accessible than durable heirlooms, even if worse).
This seems to presume that a natural and unregulated market is the default and the ideal. But markets are a policy choice. We could, for example, require that apps actually enforce an age minimum of 18 or a maximum daily use level for people under 21. Heck, we could really disrupt things by not permitting a social media company to operate across state lines. You can throw up your hands and say whatever needs people have will be satisfied by the market but we impose and enforce rules on, e.g., the kinds of gambling people are permitted to do. And while in some areas policing of desires is impractical, the urge to use a social media app isn't exactly something you can get from a trenchcoat-wearing figure in a dark alley.
My point wasn't to say that there shouldn't be regulations and attempts by outsiders and government to make the product better. I was merely stating what is likely to happen and that any improvement that Meta is forced to make will likely come from competition. Unless they are happy abandoning that segment of the market which is another potential outcome.
...do we feel the same way about alcohol and cigarettes? Just as discriminatory. Or sex or marriage?
I was just throwing out examples, not setting forth my preferred regime, necessarily. But just trying to take your question seriously: as a general matter societies tend to be more comfortable limiting the liberty of people who have not reached the age of maturity. It's not just about the risk of harm to others. We are more comfortable being paternalistic toward young people who may be less equipped to judge for themselves what decisions are good for them. For example, in China there are limits on online gaming for young people. Maybe that's "random and kind of discriminatory" or maybe some people see merit in steering the behavior of young people away from potentially addictive/unproductive enterprises.
Except there are major First Amendment issues with limiting even under-18 year olds' access to information, let alone limiting the access of legal adults in the 18-21 range.
I agree that the consumption of bad social media can have dire consequences to society. But I am not sure that there is another way to correct it other than the random nature of the way the market works. If you can show me a time in history where businesses acted for the public good and not for profits, I will buy you a Big Mac. Even Substack wouldn't exist if there weren't a market for it.
Of course markets are the most important thing. I agree. On the the margins though, it could be good to talking about how bad Meta is and asking some questions about our blindspots regarding social media, so our most talented people don’t work there. Altria used to come recruit on my college campus, and everyone looked at you weird if you just went up to their booth and acted interested in selling cigarettes, even though it was a high paying job.
But that didn't happen until the government got involved and forced the cigarette manufacturers to put warning labels on their packaging. It took close to 100 years for that to happen. Personally, I think the best we can hope for is that criticizing Meta inspires someone to create something better. But Meta will always do what is best for their shareholders, not their users.
This is far afield, but I’d love if we pushed on that angle too. Some countries mandate codetermination, where a percentage of the board of directors are elected by workers. Maybe mandates are too strong, but we should experiment with lighter regulation (broader 230?) and maybe lower taxes for corporation with single-class shares that have some percentage of the board elected by users.
One policy hook here is the terms of service and laws like the DMCA prevent users from bringing their own algorithmic curation to existing networks. If you write a Facebook client that serves a re-ordered feed, they’ll revoke your API access, and if you write a browser extension that does the same thing they’ll ban you for life and threaten to sue. We should make it easier for people to cultivate heirloom tomatoes.
The other part is the damages from algorithmicly amplified libel, even to people not using the networking product, are a big unpriced externality. That moves us out of a pure consumer choice model into something more like pollution, like maybe those bland tomatoes have to be grown with toxic fertilizer.
I think the discussion of revealed preferences is key here. As someone in computing, I encounter lots of people who have the idea that revealed preferences are the only true preferences, and everything else is delusion. This is obviously unworkable as a theory of human psychology once you learn anything at all about how people work but it's nonetheless very common. And it underwrites a lot of problematic ideas ranging from Reels to car design.
I never see this, except from extreme libertarians. Can you link to somebody making this argument (not that I don't believe you, just sort of intrigued by the weird POV you are describing)?
This touches on an idea I've wanted to write up for some time. I think the notion of 'preference' as a single, unitary thing has been particularly pernicious, and is demonstrably false. We do not have a single, discernible preference for one thing over another in all circumstances, and that preference is very certainly not revealed by our behavior.
This becomes obvious with a straightforward thought experiment: Consider the obese person who would like to be thin. They are presented with a cookie. They claim they want to be thin, but they eat the cookie anyway. The naive economist says "Well, their revealed preference is to eat the cookie, so obviously they prefer consumption to thinness".
However, what if there existed a pill that would disable the craving for the cookie. This very same person would probably take that pill and *choose* to switch off their craving for the cookie, and then make a different choice the next time they were in that situation. What this reveals is that this isn't an issue of *preference*, at least not in the naive sense. It is an issue of choice architecture, in this case mediated by the available technology.
Given the current state of cookie-desire technology, cookie-related choices have to be made on an individual basis, in the moment. And choices made on an individual basis, in the moment, give more strength to the "lower" (metaphorically, and maybe also literally) parts of our brains. However, that very same person's "higher" executive decision making apparatus may very well make the exact opposite choice.
I think the question we need to start asking of technology: digital, pharmaceutical, and otherwise is: How can we create a world in which we can shift more of our everyday decision making to our executive apparatus and away from our lizard brain? This is a pathway to a better world, for everyone. And the first step on that path, I think, is understanding that preference is not one thing, and it is definitely not something that can be simplistically revealed by behavior.
Many of the famed Obama-era digital wizards went on to work at Meta and other silicon valley click-generators. I guess H.L. Mencken was right: "Democracy [and Meta - editor] is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
One of my personal hobbyhorses is that the problem Matt is outlining – use of AI and ML to optimize for people's short-term desires, overriding their longer-term goals and ethics – is exactly how I think a hypothetical AI takeover is going to go. Not Skynet terminating us all, but a soft obliteration of most people's ability to function meaningfully, outside of maximizing whatever engagement metrics were calibrated last before they became too powerful for the average person to resist.
Sure, a few people will complain loudly, but they'll be written off as cranks. And a few people will profit mightily, but hasn't it ever been thus? And the rest of us will drown in customized, optimized, individualized food and entertainment, in between whatever shift work we do that's too expensive to automate.
Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but I view this as a much more likely outcome of failure to align AI than being turned into a paperclip.
Per Amusing Ourselves to Death (by Neil Postman in the mid-80s, an excellent book), the Huxleyan outcome...
Also a major theme of Infinite Jest
Reading it right now. While written about TV, it rings even more true for social media.
I actually think it takes quite a bit away from Matt’s point that TV seems as addictive and more destructive than Facebook in so many ways, that so many good thinkers already delivered this critique about TV, and that few of us actually have any real experience of life without such a supposedly pernicious soma.
Doesn’t deal it a fatal blow by any means but I don’t think these previous generations of ‘old man shouting at cloud’ cast the argument in a favorable light.
Slight difference: I remember our best and brightest being dismissive toward the TV hive mind. They seem much more captives of our Twitter hive mind.
There is certainly a potential role here for some social shame. And, by the way. we could also make some individual and collective social choices (not taxes) to help people eat less or ‘better’.
Well, were all the critiques of TV wrong? I think that, for instance, Fox News has probably done more harm than the golden age of television has done good. Generally speaking, if you heard that a family watched significantly more TV than average, you would assume that to be unhealthy, right?
If you give me only that info I’d say there is some other problem that tv addiction is a solution to not that tv addiction just ate this family
No, I didn't mean to imply that the TV seized hold of them out of nowhere. But the fact that the TV is addictive (we don't think there are as many families who deal with their problems by playing music or reading, say) suggests that it wasn't clouds the people in the past were yelling at.
Yes. Not a particularly groundbreaking post, although I think generic TV has been less harmful than the combo of Murdock / Facebook / smartphones. I’m reminded of the quote from AO Wilson about society having Stone Age emotions, mid evil institutions and god like technology.
While TV may have been "less harmful than the combo of Murdock [sic] / Facebook / smartphones" that is not a particularly high bar. TV is no slouch when it comes to damaging society and weakening societal norms. The average slow boring reader probably eschews the most damaging programming and thus underestimates the pernicious impact of TV on American society. "Cops", a particularly dangerous program, has survived for an astonishing 33 seasons!
very fair.
I believe some research shows cable and network news still ultimately have an outsized impact on public perceptions over primary internet sourcing on social media, etc. IMO, Social media's main influence on the public is second order via it's converage decision impact of journalist on those platforms.
In light of that, i ask folks to consider who spread misinformation about Q Anon more. Folks logging onto 4Chan or Facebook...or snoody newscatsers going to Trump events hunting for "crazies" to spar with so they could highlight that "good tape" on the evening news.
Engagement with a fringe topic to "fact check" or "debunk" it ultimately spreads it and the viewer can (and often) chooses to ignore your additional context or commentary added to the source.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay3539
Yeah I think there’s a richer post here both pro and con about smartphones and being ‘always online’ in general.
TV was great at this given its limitations - but algorithmic media isn’t limited by the availability of only a few channels of airwaves and fixed broadcast schedules that had to work for everyone. Instead each of us gets our own channel that streams exactly when we can get it.
It seems to me that you are presenting many of TVs strengths as weaknesses. It was quite powerful for the medium that a small number of channels were so dominant and held up as making it ideal for example at ‘manufacturing consent’
Yes different things are different and it’s possible this old saw could find new purchase in our current feared medium (or one element of it in particular, algorithmic content service). But I am wary.
It's incredible how prescient it was. I felt the same way about David Foster Wallace's essays about TV.
Yes. His longed for sincerity has returned, but mixed with postmodernism in a way that I think strips it of the appeal that it had for him.
my main criticism of Postman is that he nostalgicly romanticizes the pre-television era in such a way that he presumes all to most those folks sitting at the fair watching Lincoln and Douglass debate were "critical thinkers" about the content, rather than just folks picking sides based on oral cadance, looks, and overall performance (or how many where just there because they had nothing better to do...like reading a shampoo bottle label when trying to use the bathroom in the pre-mobile phone days). Seems awfully presumptuous.
Well this was a bummer to read on a Monday morning
Stuff like this really gets me too - that famous Henry Ford quote about giving the people what they want.
"If I had asked people what they want, they would have wanted faster horses."
It feels like the innovative promise of the connected Internet has given way to algorithms optimized to give people small drip hits of dopamine.
Where the internet as a whole used to be a billion small parts loosely joined now it is concentrated in these monoliths that cater to our short term desires.
The internet can be a wonderful magical place, but not when it's concentrated on these platforms, especially when these platforms turn out instinctive desires against our long term goals.
This seems like pretty well aligned AI idk
Seems to me we pretty much already live in this reality, or very, very close to it.
I dunno, doesn't seem like the ML and AI are all that powerful if Facebook and Instagram are basically on the decline after one settings change from Apple....seems premature to bring up the paperclips again.
I don't mean this mean-spiritedly, but it is notable to me that the person who regularly advocated for honest-to-god open borders is also the person who doesn't have a problem with mindless short-term-focused hedonism without concern for the long-term.
Those two things seem to go together pretty well. =)
Interesting - I would have assumed the opposite connection. Closed borders seem to be the thing that make short term sense because they hold back the long term concern for everyone and keep it out of sight. But I haven’t thought much about a potential connection here.
If the only options are completely open or closed borders, then I'd say neither is a good long-term option.
I'd say that open borders relative to our current system is more short-term oriented because it would undermine social cohesion in exchange for temporary economic gains of an expanded labor pool.
I would say that if it does undermine social cohesion, it would only be doing so in the short-term but improve that cohesion in the long term.
The Brain Wire is your friend, general.
You'll starve to death while frantically pressing the button to stimulate your pleasure center directly, but the Brain Wire is your friend.
The original comment had the flavor of brave new world to me. It seemed quite fair to the algo ‘god’ and much better than a wire. Dissent is possible and tolerated. If in some far flung future a minority of humans stand out and feel the majority is wasting their lives on an endless sea of personally tailored distractions, that’s really not so bad. Actually kind of hard to see many better outcomes that leave ‘humanity’ as we find it. An imperfect creature, to be sure, and quite likely to be spending time either trying to stay alive or wasting it on some pursuit a talented minority considers unworthy.
Ehh, you can find that future palatable all you want, I think it's pretty clear that most people don't and would prefer that this "minority" of which you speak work to head it off at the pass.
“…without concern for the long-term”
A society built on that will soon enough get rolled by one that focuses on the long-term.
Except continuing to delay gratification at a societal level doesn't just result in hoarded wealth sitting their uselessly.
It builds it up for following generations.
I'd say that's the main mechanism in how civilizations become great in the first place.
And -remain- great.
I'd also say that we are already too hedonistic, and it is going to result in China dominating us if it isn't addressed.
US brands (even in this era of highly strained Sino-US relations) are unbelievably dominant in the PRC. Truly no other country's even come close. Mind you it's the case that most of it gets produced over here (in China) so it doesn't do much for our trade numbers. But it does plenty for our current account.
Many times the thought has occurred to me that there'd be a lot less support in the US for trade wars in general if Americans had a grasp of just how well their country's firms do internationally. I get the impression (and Trump seems to have thrived on spreading this BS) that a lot of Yanks believe virtuous, innocent US companies are being badly bullied overseas by mean, duplicitous foreigners, while America in turn is the platonic ideal of a nation that always welcomes foreign companies and their products to our shores with open arms. What a crock.
Not many Americans have lived abroad, and a week in London or Aruba doesn't really convey the full picture. We should amend the constitution to require presidents, cabinet heads and members of Congress to have spent at least six months living outside North America. We'd be a better country for it.
"In some ways" is doing an awful lot of work here. Cockaigne's hedonism is a fairly minor strain within Utopian visions.
While I agree that for a society as a whole to function optimally the people in it need to feel bound to each other by a common sense of responsibility and community, I'm very skeptical of takes like this that say the solution for regulating a particular industry is for the people in it to be better and more "ethical", rather than trying to write neutral, clear laws and making compliance with them the standard -- or use the old common law approach of building up the legal standard incrementally, case-by-case (which section 230 short-circuited here). Ethical scoldings aren't a realistic substitute from the standpoint of competitive dynamics within the industry, or of overcoming self-justifying, motivated reasoning. People are very good at convincing themselves that what they're doing is right.
As a example, look at the double standard our own host applies to Meta and Twitter. Perhaps even more than Facebook, Twitter is a noxious dump that has damaged and coarsened our public discourse. It rewards shallow, snarky, tribal patterns of thinking and behavior, and exacerbates rather than ameliorates incivility and division, suspicion and distrust rather than extending good faith and the benefit of the doubt. But it's very easy for those who gain the most from Twitter to overlook it's net bad effect and justify it.
This take is basically “we as a society should stigmatize working for meta unless they change in certain ways.” I think that is a reasonable thing to say if you’re not sure what tweak to the legal code would address your concerns.
Unclear that this works
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/08/11/why-employees-want-to-work-in-vilified-industries
(Paywalled)
A few things I remember from reading it:
1) Industries may turn out not to be so bad later (e.g. disdain for arms manufacturers dropping with support for Ukraine)
2) Can create a bit of a rally-round-the-flag result where employees feel even prouder/more tightly knit.
Suggests that you have to be careful about the level of scolding.
Interesting piece. Thanks. This quote seems to be relevant:
"Third, employees in vilified industries are often in a position to do valuable things. Swapping from cigarettes to risk-reduction products is a net gain for people’s health. Widespread suspicion of genetically engineered crops ignores the copious evidence that they are safe and useful. And a rapid decline in the number of new petroleum engineers in America will seem less desirable if a shortfall in expertise holds back carbon-sequestration projects."
This would suggest Meta employees would be well positioned to make positive changes, which will only happen if people talk about what changes need to be made.
This is why I don’t love this article. Obviously FB is junk food and would love one of the most prominent opinion writers in the country to lay out public policy thoughts on how this could be mitigated but he doesn’t do that he gave us an article that is like “FB is junk food and the executives should recognize this and guess what the people that work there should go work somewhere else to be more ethical.”
I think this is directionally correct - laws are better than scolding. But as the crypto folks keep learning, you can’t build a functional society on laws alone; not even crypto supporters are willing to excuse hacks as “working as intended”, even though the hacks are “legal” according to the code. IMO ethics are becoming a bit underrated these days relative to incentives.
Well, the reason to write about being ethical is not just to encourage reflectiveness on the part of Meta employees (though I think you underrate the potential of moral awakening), but also to make a certain sort of social point.
As a talented software engineer in 2022 I might have a few options. I could go work for a social media giant and make a ton of money. I could go work for the defense industry and make less money and also everyone I know will judge me but I get to work on cool systems. Or I could go into video game development and make still less money and have worse working conditions, but everyone I know will think I'm cool.
The general perception of whether a particular job is socially valuable and desirable factors in heavily to the internal utility function of a laborer considering competing options. So if that first social media option suddenly comes along with social stigma, it doesnt seem quite so attractive.
“ I could go work for the defense industry and make less money and also everyone I know will judge me” this is very annoying. Our fellow liberals can be idiotic sometimes. One would have hoped that Ukraine would have woken some of them up to notice that History is still happening. *sigh*
As someone who works for the Department of Defense, I think contributing to establishing credible deterrence of our adversaries is much more beneficial than optimizing the Facebook news feed. But obviously YMMV
Incidentally, and they didn't pay me to say this, for anyone that's a SWE working at Facebook, consider working for Microsoft or even AWS instead. They are both an incredibly important component of the defense industrial base.
I entirely disagree. The continued military supremacy of America and her allies relies on overwhelming technological advantage, and the peace and prosperity of the entire world rest on that continued supremacy.
But we're an "empire", you see.
Empires are bad.
Depends on the alternative. :)
Hegemonic power for a totalizing autocracy that's actively engaged in genocide pretty much out of sheer pique at foreigners daring to ask what's going on, in this case.
This point of view is less popular in Iraq
If you thought Iraq was bad, just wait until the multipolar world you're functionally advocating for arrives and a true great power conflict or proxy war breaks out because China no longer feels credibly deterred by American prowess.
But becoming more popular in Taiwan.
Whoever manufactured chemical weapons for World War I killed a few million people. Whoever manufactured fentanyl for the drug cartels is likely going to end up killing far more. Giving people the addictive means to harm themself is likely worse than giving them the means to attack each other, in terms of actual harm done.
I don't think chemical weapons killed millions in WWI (more like 1% of that number). Unless you treat the Nazi gas chambers in WWII as an extension of that
A couple million sounded high but only tens of thousands sounded low.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiSv4-vyOz5AhVLF1kFHZ1BAlsQFnoECAkQAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.opcw.org%2Fdocuments%2Fpractical-guide-medical-management-chemical-warfare-casualties-web&usg=AOvVaw0lFa5Ei5-vdbb9iSrpOs85
This source thinks it's 100,000 deaths + a million casualties in WWI?
Yeah, I was trying off the cuff to guess what was the right number there. I knew that some individual battles in WWI had millions of deaths, and the total number was quite large, and I figured chemical weapons were likely a significant fraction of that. If my initial estimate of chemical weapons deaths was an overestimate, then the fentanyl thing has already exceeded it, rather than having to wait a few more years at current rates.
Not necessarily related to the point you are making, but this is a good video about the man you are referring to in your first sentence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvknN89JoWo
Not in IT but really find Matt’s take on people (not just executives from my reading) at Meta making some sort of yukky decision by having their career there rather than, say, Tesla. Don’t want to get into a back and forth and high level logical argument about but IMO he’s being condescending and sanctimonious with this line of thinking. Smugness factor a little too high on this.
Agree. Matt reasonably takes a “blame the system, not (just) the people” approach to overeating and/or Facebook binging, but paradoxically takes a “blame the people, not the systems of culture or capitalism” for people choosing to work in high-paying, high-prestige positions at Facebook.
(And as I wrote below, I agree that Twitter likely has a much larger toxic effect on the fabric of society, despite its smaller user base, because its power users are in positions of exponentially higher cultural power than the heaviest Facebook users. Twitter rots their brains and the rest of media as we know it goes down with them.)
I don't think I see a paradox. It's of a piece with his work on charities and EA. Obviously we can't mandate that everyone give a certain amount to charity, and while some people think that we should do away with charity entirely by just taxing more, I think few people here would share that view. Given all that, it's perfectly coherent to write a piece encouraging people to give more of their income to charity and to particularly give to the charities likely to help people the most. Sure, there are systematic things we could change—we could make certain not-very-helpful donations no longer tax deductible, for instance—but we're talking about a zone where the law will be of limited use to us so we need to rely on norms and social pressure. Similarly, while there are regulations we could impose to put more of a cost on Meta and Frito-Lay for the harms they do, there's nothing incoherent about encouraging people who have the choice of different careers to choose one that they can reasonably be proud of.
I’m skeptical that Twitter has caused comparable harm to FB/IG, partly considering how many fewer people use it and partly because I think that, while your critiques have a basis, there’s more good going on than you think. But I certainly could be wrong.
Mainly, I think that the “if it’s bad, make it illegal or stop wasting our time” approach (apologies if that’s not a fair depiction of your point!) is too limited. As a society we’re not going to be able to handle everything through the legal code. A huge amount of what steers us towards the good and away from the bad is going to have to be principles and norms. People who try to help those principles along are doing society a service, if they’re good principles.
I'm skeptical how much any of these things cause genuine "harm" in any meaningful way, but I'd submit that any negative impact from Twitter considerably exceeds what one would expect given the comparative size of its userbase because Twitter has uniquely infiltrated and influenced media and political elites in a way Facebook and other social media outlets don't seem to have come anywhere close to approaching.
I agree re: relative impact of Twitter. Twitter-style discourse and Twitter-generated us-vs-them animosity spills over heavily into professional spaces.
But I think, as our host exemplifies, Twitter is more heavily used by people in highly influential media positions. It certainly has an amplified effect on the tone of media writ large, much more than FB.
I'm certainly not suggesting that people shouldn't feel free to preach and proselytize their preferred vision of morality and virtue, and there's a long tradition of preachers and social reformers criticizing purveyors of vice and other in-their-eyes-sinful industries.
But particularly in a pluralistic society as diverse and large as the US, the law *is* our public moral, ethical code. America's whole schtick is that it's a land where individuals can do, be and believe whatever they want, within the bounds of the law. So even leaving aside questions such as competitive pressure and motivated reasoning, a lot of people just genuinely don't see eye-to-eye on many moral questions. The law is a lowest common denominator public moral code for our society, and if there isn't enough consensus on how a particular industry should conduct itself for it to be encoded into law, there's probably not enough of a consensus for moralizing that isn't written into law to really matter either, unless/until that view wins enough converts to be written into law.
Which, to your point, is not to say it doesn't matter; but public moralizing that isn't linked to and aimed at building support for some proposed legal change seems empty, if not downright sanctimonious. If I wanted to hear preaching I'd go to church.
I made this analogy elsewhere in this thread, but did Matt's posts on effective altruism strike you as preaching? He wasn't calling for a law banning donations to rich colleges, and I'm sure he'd think such a law would be a bad idea. He was suggesting that donors, as individuals, should try to direct their donations to where they will clearly improve people's welfare. If that strikes you as sanctimonious, fair enough; to me, trying to influence individuals is an obviously appropriate use of a public platform.
As a liberal, I was dismayed when, starting in 2014 or so, I started seeing liberals and progressives say that "free speech" only refers to the First Amendment, and that anything that isn't about government restrictions isn't about free speech at all. I was dismayed because the principle that it's basically wrong to suppress speech even when it's legal has been a cherished one of mine, and I thought of my political movement, all my life. You can say that, if there's no national consensus that suppressing speech is wrong (and boy, is there not!), then any normalizing to that effect isn't going to matter. But if Matt decided to ban you from this comment section for implying that he was being preachy, I think a lot of us would be angry on your behalf and would maybe even question whether we wanted to keep subscribing, even though there's nothing in the law or Substack's policies prohibiting him from doing that. Protecting that norm matters a lot on the margins.
Then there are laws that are on the books but very hard to enforce, and thus depend on norms anyway. I read a New Yorker article about how in Moscow, the norm is (or was at the time) that you always go into an intersection when you have a green, even if you're going to get stuck in the intersection and block traffic when the other light turns green, and that partly as a result of this Moscow has impassable traffic. In the US, we mostly stick by the norm of keeping the intersection clear, with the consequence that our traffic problems are less bad than they would be. Where I live, the norm used to be that dogwalkers bag up their dogs' waste; now that seems to be eroding. I can say "scoop your dog's poop," or I can say "scoop your dog's poop—it's the law," but either way I'm really relying on the norms, on getting people to agree that making this sacrifice will contribute to a better society overall. The line between what's permitted and what's not is not only enforced by law, in other words.
If the discussion of personal responsibility, virtue, morality, or whatever is tied to some to theory of good citizenship, ie, republican citizenship, and what personal attributes citizens should have and be inculcated with to promote the functioning of a self-governing democratic republic, that's a discussion I think fits and is worth having in a publication on politics and public affairs.
But generalized theories of what it means to be a good person, whether couched in the language of EA, Catholic social doctrine, or what have you, are something else, and not something I'm particularly interested in. People are of course free to discuss and proselytize their preferred ideas in that area, but it's not the kind of publication I'd be inclined to support.
Fair enough!
I agree. The Headline of MY's post should have been "A Case against Meta" because if it is "The Case" then history shows it isn't likely to do much. MY brings up the food industry and animal production in particular as analogy. I know a great many people in those industries, I've never met one who thinks themselves evil. It has nothing to do with showing them your evidence, either. Both sides can debate and argue until they are winded enough to join Blue Man Group. But in food production or meta, I can only see change happening when either consumers demand change or when the industry itself demands change (this latter is not as uncommon as one may think. Federal food regularity grades and standards, for example, were initially proposed by the industries themselves to guard against poor products sullying the market for everyone). There needs to be more than *The* case against Meta and MY's particular case may very well be the most desperate as I do worry our starship is unknowingly headed to Talos IV.
This kind of is consumers demanding change, right? It’s a small effort to get people to think about these companies and their goals in a negative light.
I genuinely feel frustrated that social networking websites have done a ton of good for me as an autistic person at getting me to socialize and leading to events and causes to work for that I literally never would have without them and everyone treats engaging with them as a thing to be avoided.
I’m not saying they are free from problems at all, but my Facebook is full of groups and events for engaging in things recipes and pet and baby pictures by my active use of filters. I’m a bit of an addict but like my pre-Facebook social interaction was basically nothing and that doesn’t seem so bad.
This is the best promise of the socially connected Internet - connecting people who are normally isolated. LGBT, minority, other groups that aren't like their surroundings need spaces where they can meet others like them and see they're not alone. This is why you can't just burn it all down.
But with that positivity you get the Q Anons and adrenochrome people meeting each other too. It's a double-edged sword.
As an employee (a senior eng on ads) I find I actually agree with this critique. And I do not think Matt will find this convincing, but just want to make the point.
If we didn’t do it, someone else would, sure. But it’s also more complicated than that. This is a larger trend that does not originate with us and we are trying to survive. That trend is what’s interesting.
Matthewmatosis (video game reviewer) once made a point about the convergent evolution of video games, as all get leveling systems and RPG elements and free roaming elements. This is happening as people try to make their products more appealing and borrow popular elements. Sometimes there are paradigm shifts where either consumer preferences change or are revealed, and then other products start evolving along those lines instead.
He makes the analogy that if you went back in time and released DOOM again, but with RPG elements, it would do *better* than DOOM most likely. Even though it would sully the purity of what DOOM was. Even if the developers of DOOM refused, someone else could just come along and make DOOM + RPG elements and profit.
I think that analogy works for social media. They are all evolving towards short form video, and while any one company probably would say it’s bad, *all* of them are doing it. Not just Meta. There is no world where meta saying no results in this not happening.
Think a bit about the history of this. Tiktok is not original. Vine came first, and showed everyone the power of short form video. But then it died for finance/monetization reasons, not because the format lacked appeal, and the surviving competitors in the attention space did not go full short form video (probably for a mix of principle about their original product purpose and bad business sense). IG/FB/Snapchat/YouTube all in theory took steps at the time to compete, but stopped the convergent evolution when Vine went away. Then years later, TikTok emerges to essentially complete the evolution towards people’s revealed preferences. And now here we are.
I do not think this should make Meta blameless or anything, but I do not see a world where we (now the internet using public and not the company) can internet shame the relevant companies into not reacting in the way other companies react to a moneymaking product innovation.
So I’d be curious to know what Matt thinks we *should* do. Stop existing? I am sympathetic. Try to be like Twitter and occupy our non-money making/doomed niche? Perhaps. Because I think social media will convergently evolve to be short form video selected by algorithm, whether meta is involved or not. None of this makes me feel good. But shaming individual players does not solve the revealed preference problem.
(My answer, not that I have sway, is to make it easier for people to *make* and *share* short form video to post/story but not build a whole product around it. And instead lean into more friend specific and ephemerality specific features. Try to emphasis what makes IG unique instead of chasing short form video)
How about optimize on a slightly different metric; “do humans say this is good for them?” rather than “does this increase engagement?” It’s a bit less convenient than “time on the app”, but collecting a sizable dataset addressing that question wouldn’t be too hard.
IIRC Facebook already occasionally asks me a question like that. Do those results point in the same direction as “maximize engagement”? Are they used?
Btw what’s wrong with short video? I would’ve thought the issue was more “which short videos” rather than the medium itself.
“Do humans say this is good for them?” doesn’t get you a sustainable product that actually displaces bad things. At best it gets you CSPAN.
Sure, you probably wouldn’t want to completely throw out “engaging” (and the company won’t, so no worries there). But probably mixing in some “good” would be helpful. IMO the tough parts are defining “good” and “helpful” in a credible and scalable way.
Fwiw we do measure this but it does not get nearly the same billing at the end of the day. We were doing a better job of prioritizing it when the stock price was doing better.
What if “what humans say is good for them” doesn’t line up well with “what gets our company money”?
This is especially true if “what humans say is good for them” is less addicting than your competitor’s product.
This is a weird comment to make when we don’t know what the optimization metric is in the first place...
I mean... "stop existing" is pretty damned compelling.
At the companywide level, to be clear, not on a personal basis.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly the endgame here; unless the "kids" prove dramatically better at handling this than we think they're going to be, various nation-states are simply going to kill off social media within their borders above the level of comment sections and uncurated long-form video repositories. They'll play whack-a-mole for a while and eventually almost all nations will drift in that direction.
At which point we'll have interesting headlines like "US and China conduct joint strike against Somali black-market social media firm", lol.
Technical talent is a very scarce resource, especially high-end technical talent with legal permission to work in America. On the margin, if many skilled engineers opted out of Meta and Meta-related activities, that sector would on the margin "optimize itself" slightly slower and the places they migrated to would "optimize themselves" slightly faster, to a clear net benefit to American society.
To use your analogy to video games, even if "leveling systems and RPG elements and free roaming elements" are the entropic inescapeable end state of videogames [a big if], visionary video game creators choosing to do other things does on the margin increase diversity in the videogame industry.
Extending that analogy to Facebook -- over its short lifespan we've seen that these addictive loops seem to saturate and then start to decline unless new niches are found to expand into. Expanding into new niches takes a lot of work and talent, and depriving the sector of some technical talent on the margin slows its rate of discovery of the next addictive niche and therefore reduces the actual number of hours lost to addiction-suck.
>So I’d be curious to know what Matt thinks we *should* do. Stop existing?
Historically when a new communications technology has developed that could impact the functioning of civil society, the government has stepped in to heavily regulate it so that it broadly aligns with civic values.
For example, when television was invented the federal government controlled the airwaves, limited content production to three networks, and mandated that those networks air news programs and that the programs give airtime to all (mainstream) points of view.
So I think government regulation of all recommendation engines is what the solution will end up looking like, including some content being mandatory in an eat-your-vegetables way.
A key difference between internet content and broadcast TV is that the airwaves are a rivalrous good; two broadcasters cannot occupy the same frequency, in the same region, at the same time. In order for the public to benefit from broadcast communication someone had to regulate broadcasting.
No such analogy exists for the internet and it’s thereby going to be harder for liberal governments to justify regulating content platforms. Particularly for the US with the first amendment.
That’s a key point: The federal government most certainly had a role in regulating frequencies, broadcast power, technical standards, and the like for the purposes of ensuring radio broadcasting worked *at all.* The rest came about since those in power said, “Hey, since you guys have to ask us for a license, we should have some say in what you broadcast.”
The same thing is playing out now with social media except the excuse will be based on some novel antitrust theory or something like that. But the real reason is because people with power want more power.
I think the obvious lever for social media is section 230. "You can keep your liability shield, but only if you meet XYZ conditions..."
Thanks for the perspective.
My view is that that the fundamental problem is the business model for all these companies. Nothing will change until the business model is forced to change. Changing the business model requires regulation to give individuals ownership over their own information.
Matt says this pretty explicitly in his post: you should switch to a subscription-based monetization model. Ad-supported businesses must optimize for continued viewer attention, whereas subscription-supported businesses must optimize for viewer satisfaction during renewal season.
Short-form video vs. non-short-term video is an orthogonal concern.
I think it's pretty hard to credit the idea that the most powerful social media company in existence has no influence over how social media evolves. But also, you personally could make a different choice.
Even the most powerful companies in an industry don't have much control when faced with competition and low switching costs. Netscape and AOL once dominated internet access but they had zero influence over how that market evolved. Meta, similarly, has very little control over the future of social media.
Meta may individually have very little control over the future of social media, but the sector has a whole can influence how fast that future arrives. If the sector has slightly less technical talent lavished on it, the future arrives slightly more slowly and so billions of addiction-hours are not spent in the meantime.
Technical talent is a scarce resource; the scientists at the Manhattan project / Human Genome Project / Apollo project could have made more money by working somewhere else, but they chose to devote their technical talent to something that mattered.
You envision a world where Meta refuses to do short video and then survives profitably? Not even mark thinks that (hence the VR stuff that’s a whole different can of worms).
>One thing I like about being in the subscription newsletter business is I don’t think you can make money doing this on a guilty pleasure basis. Because people need to actually opt in and pay money, it only works if people feel proud to be a Slow Boring subscriber.
Agreed! And I think this also extends to the Slow Boring comment section. I believe the paywall has led to higher quality user comments and more engaging conversations. Since users have to opt in to reading and participating in the Yglesias-verse we get a better form of social media.
Further, I’ve found myself spending far less time on other social media due to having this superior alternative. And that makes me think there could be some potential for a paid social media offering. That might even become a key selling point of many substack subscriptions.
Continuing the publication analogy from the article, Twitter and Facebook could be the low-quality tabloids; a guilty pleasure that many still engage in. Alternatively, the paid social media would be comparable to the higher-quality print publications.
Sometimes getting into a heated debate on a Slow Boring comment section over student loan forgiveness or the pros/cons of ubiquitous pornography seems like a guilty pleasure.
Listen, if I was going to get into a surprisingly heated discussion about porn, I think the version that took place here is one of the best possible!
The space of possible outcomes is just, sadly, not terribly positive.
Fair enough
I definitely feel this. I have days where I spend hours procrastinating on work by commenting on Substacks, that a few years ago would have gone to Reddit wars and Facebook threads.
Of course a few years before that they would have gone to blog arguments, which were the best of both worlds (intelligent + free)
Yes. This comments section, when I post, has a habit of scratching the itch of political hobbyism for the day.
Feels like the BBS and early Internet forums here. Those could still have awful people saying awful things (you don't want to know what was said by some Serb and Croat users during that war) but there were enough barriers to entry that human moderation and personal relationships could right the ship. It was still addictive but still recognizably human. You can still get this today on social media but you have to stay away from the algorithmic scroll.
BBS, man. The time I whittled away on "Legend of the Red Dragon", boy.
Totally agree! I sometimes use Twitter as a news aggregator/way to find ideas to use in freelance work or just think about. But it makes me feel so crappy I completely tune out for long periods of time, even years sometimes, and I find that hanging out here gives me a lot of what I'm looking for there.
I think people who are good at using Twitter regularly have a carefully cultivated workflow that involves blocking and muting (words, not just users).
I find following some people on Twitter useful, but also the commentary (QTs, trolls, hate followers) around it very quickly turn into an obnoxious time sink. I never figured out something that works for me. So I built my own RSS feed generator (one post per day per user I follow) that can be read on apps like Feedly or Substack without ever having to visit Twitter itself: https://bsravan.in/feeds/twitterss.html
This may be a naive question, but why would you read the Twitter commentary? For example, I enjoy reading Matt's tweets but I almost never look at the comments. What value do they offer?
On social media, and even Substack, the numbers (likes, quotes, replies, e.g.) have an appeal. When a number is high, I am often tempted to click on it. It takes a non-zero conscious effort to not click, than to click. The way I avoid such clicks is by avoiding the website altogether.
Sometimes smart people comment. I wish I could filter comments to only responses that the tweet author or someone I follow liked or who the tweet author follows.
Paywalled and niche. Still tons of trolls on major pay sites as the trolls go where the eyeballs are.
It’s at least not algorithmically optimized to be addictive to me, even though it is in practice really effective. The people are trying to engage on the substance rather than on what engages me.
Maybe I’m just old (school?) but I personally don’t struggle with algorithmic distractions but mostly self selected ones (e.g. wanting to read too many books or blogs). My sense is that this is a minority thing and that algorithmic distractions are worse but I think that a big part of it is simply that the level of abundance we have on the internet (and back in the days of cable TV) is intrinsically challenging for most humans.
Abundance in domains where we are adapted to scarcity is perhaps one of the central ways to characterize a class of contemporary problems. (Different from the problems of dealing with giant bureaucracies that Kafka and others noticed a bit over a century ago.)
I literally stopped reading the comments during the day so that I can get more work done lol. I just skim them in the evening afterwards
Social media was basically invented when I was in college and I remember the sudden impact it had on myself and my peers. I remember the first breakup I went through on social media, it was weird and very uncomfortable. That experience always made me dislike how social media made my private life public, it made it harder to live my life in a non toxic way.
I don’t engage with social media at all now except for business related things. Sometimes it impacts my awareness of certain events but it’s worth it for my mental health, I’ve just been a happier person since I closed all those accounts.
Their is great country song about seeing you ex girl on social media and feeling bad.”i bet breaking up was easy in the 90s”
Same here. It was a shock to the social system.
I was on Facebook pretty early (college student only phase), and got into it for maybe 2 years, then realized it was mental poison and a total waste of time.
But compared to now, it was basically benign.
Yeah I feel bad for kids today having to live out their lives so publicly. They just won't have an opportunity to know what that world was like. Sometimes it is nice to just let the past be the past and not have an algorithm constantly say "HEY, REMEMBER THIS!?". Lot's of life is difficult and emotionally draining, for me at least, it was better to not create a permanent remembrance machine to shove documented evidence of trauma or misfortune at me constantly. It was a blessing to let the knowledge of how others are living be part of your imagination and not something you could constantly check on.
We have to treat social media the same way we treated soda.
Mix it with booze?
I LOL'ed at that one!
I like using it organize things like meet my d and d group there. Facebook has replaced calendars and phone books for casual friends.
I like using it for finding like minded people who want to hang out.
My kid’s school uses it, and we drive one another crazy. I keep emailing to get information that they’ve made available (only) on Facebook.
My wargaming group uses it to organize things, so my refusal to use it is a pretty significant detriment in that regard.
I think I could control my usage, but I just don't want Facebook or anything related to it on my phone.
I switched from a Samsung to a Pixel almost entirely because Samsung wouldn't let me delete Facebook.
“Samsung wouldn't let me delete Facebook”
Holy smokes.
There -were- ways to do it, but it was moderately complicated and cyber security expert brother-in-law said it usually creates enduring vulnerabilities.
It's not on my Galaxy S20, and I'm pretty certain I actively uninstalled it as soon as I bought it.
This was about 6 years ago. Galaxy S...6? 7? I forget.
Here is something I found with a quick Google search.
https://time.com/5497200/samsung-facebook-app-delete/
Time has lost a lot of gravitas, but it's probably trustworthy on something verifiable like this.
It said Galaxy S8, a version I think I skipped. Hopefully the backlash proved effective.
> When I say that I want to stop eating random snacks, that is my authentic preference — and when I go to a party and see some chips and tell myself “just one won’t hurt,” that is self-deception
I disagree that these stated preferences are more authentic than the revealed ones. I think that incorrectly separates the rational mind from irrational impulses. Instead, I believe the mind is a combination of conscious thinking and subconscious impulses, with the latter including emotions and intuitions. There can commonly be conflicts between the two, but neither is more authentic.
In terms of addressing the conflict, I believe the rational mind can construct a better environment for the subconscious mind to operate into. For example, to consume a healthy diet I don’t keep any snacks nor alcohol in my home to remove these temptations. I also do a fair amount of meal planning to minimize the risk of overeating. As a result, I don’t find much of a conscious/unconscious conflict with regard to diet since the environment in which my subconscious operates doesn’t include these unhealthy temptations.
*edited to add quoted text
But I think you might be underrating how hard it is for some people to not buy snacks or booze, or to plan meals! I'm like you in many ways: I'm a goal-oriented person who actually likes vegetables, enjoys exercise, hates feeling intoxicated (despite a strong family history of alcoholism), and has no interest in Facebook. It took me a long time to realize that this was a huge stroke of psychological luck on my part, and I try to be sympathetic to people who are wired differently (I often fail at this, but I keep trying).
I disagree that it is hard for people to resist buying snacks or booze ahead of time for future consumption. Instead, I would say that those people rationally think that the benefits of consuming those indulgences outweighs the costs. They might not have thought much about it, but the fact that they consistently buy these goods ahead of time suggests that the planning part of their mind finds snacks and booze to be a rational choice.
Respectfully disagree, especially about the "rational" part. When I do dumb things, at least part of my brain is usually aware that something bad is going to happen, but the emotion/fatigue/whatever swamps that. From my perspective, that seems like the opposite of "rational."
Speaking from personal experience, a good portion of the junk food I buy is bought compulsively and then half eaten in the car on my way home from the store. The only solution I've found to this problem is to just build up more willpower (and the only effective way I've found to do that is to maintain a pretty strict cardio exercise habit). I think you might be overestimating the amount of rational thought going on in the grocery store.
At the risk of offering a suggestion you didn't ask for and don't want:
Does your grocery store offer curbside pickup purchasing? It's got it's inconveniences ("dangit, I just forgot one thing!") but it might make it harder to impulse buy.
We also have a "always have a spare" for anything we use often enough/non-perishable to help with the convenience (e.g., we have a cooking oil in progress and an unopened one, and put cooking oil on the list as soon as we open the unopened one)
This _definitely_ requires more mental planning in advance, but maybe that helps?
(The trade-off may legit not be worth it)
I personally like Amazon's subscribe and save for non-perishable goods. I think I have roughly 30 goods on subscription, some sent as frequently as monthly whereas others are on a 6 month schedule. I get a monthly email reminder to check my subscriptions and skip/delay stuff as appropriate.
And there's a discount of between 5% to 15% for goods order through this service. But personally, I'd pay a premium for the service since it means I don't have to think about this stuff.
We used something like this for diapers and similar products when the twins were young(er).
This wouldn't work for me because I have a visceral aversion to any sort of recurring subscription, as I fear that's what the sellers want the most, to suck you into a "set it and forget it" mentality that silently drains your bank account. If you're one of the very few sellers that can make my recurring subscription list, it means that I *really* like your product. And much to Matt's pleasure, that does include this site.
The “always have a spare” thing is a good summary of shopping strategies I have developed in the past few years. (Especially for things like full fat unflavored yogurt that often aren’t in stock.)
Rarely keep beer at home bc it just ends with me downing the six pack before the weekend even gets here. It is hard for people to understand the mistake is as much at the buying part as it is at the consuming part. Don’t have a TikTok app loaded but when I did I scrolled through it daily I’m genuinely surprised how I eliminated that part of my life so effectively. Shouldn’t be surprised necessarily, but I am. Anyway so I’m disagreeing I think I wasn’t making a rational decision to drink so much beer I was underestimating how, subconsciously, I have much less willpower when I walk in after work than I feel like I do when I’m at the grocery store. Poor affective prediction and poor willpower prediction.
Agreed. I've come across plenty of people who I think are making bad decisions in their lives, but I can also tell that they are making active, affirmative decisions in that regard, and those that changed made similar active, affirmative decisions.
I can assure you that is now how it feels from the inside and not sure why you would model a pile of thinking meat modules glued together by evolution to make decisions in a completely different environment.
Also, with booze, in particular, remember it is an increasingly inebriated and less rational version of you who is deciding whether to have your second, third, fourth and nth drink as well. Murder Gandhi, etc.
Classic dispute between whether it is good to be paternalistic and push/nudge towards making better choices, or whether to provide choices and trust that people can make their own.
Politically, there is also a tension where traditionally Democrats don't want to talk about values but do want to nudge people towards making better outcomes.
My opinion has changed over time, but also hasn't settled into a satisfactory answer.
I think Matt sort of acknowledged this when he said it was a conflict between first- and second-order desires.
The key idea I think is that helping people get the higher-order things they believe they want is probably better than feeding an addiction in lower-order desires.
I’m not intellectual enough to understand all the subconscious talk, but yes… dieting is not hard if you just don’t keep bad shit around. It’s why I’m much stricter on my eating when I’m traveling. Unfortunately at home…. My wife likes to tempt me with evil.
“I disagree that these stated preferences are more authentic than the revealed ones”
Aw, that’s just your false consciousness talking.
I don't think I've ever disagreed with a Slow Boring piece as comprehensively as I disagree with this one. For one thing, NewsFeed is not the only Facebook product; they also make Facebook Messenger, which is my main communications medium for three close friends. And Facebook has refined their definition of what counts as interesting content before, notably by downgrading sites that people clicked onto and then immediately left – e.g. Upworthy, whose clickbaity headlines I think were the reason Facebook made this change.
But fine. Meta doesn't need me to defend them. I'm mostly worried about the deeper paternalistic implications of the principles set out here. I'm a big fan of revealed preference, for one thing – I think revealed preference is really important when the *government* tries to find out what people want. I certainly wouldn't claim revealed preference is always genuine preference, and if you're just a private actor selling a product, the distinction might matter, but I definitely don't want the government telling me what I do and don't want. I also think revealed preference is a valuable measurement for art, where I think entertainment value really is paramount. I'm just not sure how it's coherent to argue that art can have a value that exists outside people's reaction to it.
And even when it comes to selling products in the private market, I don't really think workers should be generalizing their own affective experience of things to other peoples'! I think the comparison to eating habits is instructive because I would not describe my eating habits as healthy by any means, but I'm in good shape because of genetics, social class (i.e. what foods my parents exposed me to as a kid and what I can afford) and exercise. How unhealthy a given habit is really does vary from person to person, which makes it risky to conclude that it's just common sense that a given consumer product is a net utilitarian loss.
So on one level, fine; if everyone working for Meta decides they don't like making the thing they make and they leave, I won't be too much worse off. But if that principle started extending to Ben & Jerry's, I'd be pretty put out.
I don't think I see the paternalism here. Matt stops very far short of calling for government action against Facebook, or Frito-Lay or whomever. When he says that there's more to assessing value than looking at revealed preference, he's not relying on his own value judgments—"sure people use Facebook and say they like it, but we all know it's junk"—but on people's own reports that they're happier when they aren't using Facebook, that they'd like to eat less junk food, etc. It's hardly condescending or paternalistic to take these people at their word, and suggest that working to *defeat* these preferences by encouraging compulsive behavior is not a good use of one's talents.
Regarding art, I think you're right that any measure of art's value has to be based on the effect it has on people. But it doesn't follow that revealed preference—gross revenue, basically—is the best or even a very good measure of art's value, because not all effects are created equal: the quality of people's reaction, not just the quantity of people who seek it out, is important, as is an artwork's continued ability to affect people over time. (There were plenty of books in the 1880s that outsold Huckleberry Finn, but you wouldn't want to read almost any of them today.) And this isn't even considering that consumers don't have free choice of any imaginable artwork, but are limited by what's brought to market. I watched Predator the other night, the kind of movie I miss today, and people's revealed preference at the time was to see it—movies like that did great business; it's not like taut R-rated action thrillers were unprofitable so the studios had to make comic franchise movies instead to get back in the black. Rather, they found that rushing CGI effects, attaching established IP, and marketing for all ages and all nations was more profitable, so that's what they do now. The fact that Predator only made millions while MCU films make bajillions doesn't show that the MCU is better art or better entertainment, just that it's a better commercial product. Bemoaning that discovery doesn't make us paternalistic.
It's true that I'm going a little beyond what Matt is actually arguing in this piece, but he's argued in the past for consumption taxes on junk foods, so I don't think I'm totally off base in detecting an underlying principle.
But you make a good point that he's not just saying "everyone knows" social media or Doritos are bad for you, that people actually say they'd like to consume less of those things. But at least the nominal purpose of Facebook – staying in touch with friends and acquaintances – is something I think a lot of people want. I think you could just as easily take from those preferences the lesson that Facebook should be *perfected* to be more like in-person social interaction, rather than abandoned.
As for the arts, I guess I'm more cynical about the idea that longevity proves enduring relevance. The Mona Lisa is by far and away the most famous work of art in the world, and as far as I can tell this owes a lot to the fact that it was stolen in the early 20th century, and the theft was widely reported in newspapers worldwide, with reproductions of the painting itself on the front page. The amount of visitors it gets seems wildly disproportionate to anything inherent to the painting. I think the longevity of certain works of art comes down more to the snowball effect of contemporary critics praising a work, then more critics reading those critics, then teachers picking it for inclusion in secondary school curricula, and so on and so forth.
I didn't mean to say that the only thing that counts is longevity or that long-lasting works are inevitably worth it. But if I had to choose just one measure to establish the value of an artwork, I'd choose longevity in a heartbeat before I chose the gate receipts. A long-lasting work at least has demonstrated some ability to be popular outside of momentary fashions.
But also I am a little confused about how your position on the Mona Lisa jibes with what you said about the entertainment value of art. You're basically saying that it's overrated, and as it happens, I more or less agree with you—I think the Mona Lisa is a great painting (check out what Walter Pater wrote about it, and that was in the 19th Century, before the theft and before it was widely popular), but it's not my favorite painting in the Louvre and I agree that a lot of its popularity is due to its status as the most famous painting. But on the revealed preference scale, it's off the charts: even though you can barely get a good view of it what with the crowds and the thick glass, people are desperate to see it. I'd bet that lots of visitors to the Louvre would rather see Mona Lisa and miss everything else than the other way around. Doesn't that show that they get a lot of entertainment value out of going? Now, you say that that's due to something outside the work and I agree, but that seems to argue that "revealed preference," "entertainment value," etc. are not very reliable measures for the quality of an artwork.
I’m waiting for the “Upworthy was good actually” takes. Sure, it was hardcore optimized clickbait, but it was at least a bit uplifting and positive.
Just my 2c, but I genuinely don’t think there have been many Slow Boring posts I’ve agreed with as comprehensively as this one. I’m very much a skeptic of the pervasive influence of social media and algorithmic engagement, and I think Matt depicted the issue of selectively promoted revealed preferences very well. I doubt many could make the case better, in fact.
Then again, I think it would be a genuine net good to society (close to Pareto optimal, in fact) to ban Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of algorithmic engagement optimizers altogether. I hold this opinion strongly, and I am unlikely to change it anytime soon. That puts me in a realm far more outside the mainstream than Matt’s (mildly paternalistic) tut-tutting.
Matt, all you need to know about the people who work at Meta is they are a tiny slice of the tech world and they make the top pay in the industry. Total comp for most of its software teams ranges from $500k-1.5M per year, which is quite a bit higher than the alternatives.
People self-select into Meta, and Meta does actually have a horrible reputation - most people in industry wouldn’t work there, and they have some challenges recruiting people compared to other big tech firms. But saying “the workers should care” is wasting your breath. The people who decided to work there went in knowing full well what Meta is about and decided that they don’t care, the money is worth it.
Median salary in US according to the first google link I check is around 54k. Now I know you said comp. so it's not apples to apples. Nevertheless these numbers are insane. I do wonder how many of our political issues come out of these insane salary gaps, before we even talk about wealth gaps and the truly super rich (which, though of outsized influence, are numerically very small).
Taxes in this country really are progressive, and they’re going to be well over 40% total effective rate on an income like that. Then another 20-30% for a home most middle class people would consider disappointing. That’s making generational wealth for the specific NIMBY who previously owned your home, and the community broadly by paying all of the property taxes (as much as 10 incumbent neighbors thanks to Prop 13). The tech worker pockets some of it, but the wealth gets around.
To the extent that we see major political resentments against tech workers it is ironically in their capacity as the huddled masses: crowded apartments, bohemian bike infrastructure, scary thug-infested transit encroaching on the serene rural and small town vibes of Silicon Valley, whose legitimate heirs are the owners of $5m detached houses, whose sun-soaked gardens the invaders might ruin with their shadows, whose children’s childhoods Tech will ruin with its density. The urban gentrification discourse problematizes their wealth, but a city of 700k is ultimately a sideshow in a suburban metro of 7m. The suburban discourse problematizes their poverty. If they cannot afford to fit in with our (land intensive) way of life, they don’t belong here.
Personally I've noticed that I feel much less bad about spending time on social media when using apps that don't involve algorithms. Is there any way for society in general to promote that over more algorithm focused options? Interested to hear what people think.
One idea might be paring back the legal protections of Section 230, which (per my understanding) is what shields firms operating in the US from the legal liability they'd otherwise be exposed to because of user-generated content.
In other words, allow that section to stand per the status quo (it's needed in my view for robust ecommerce), with the exception of *algorithmically-generated* content. Once a firm opts to shove something in front of your eyeballs because it thinks it'll make money doing so, they lose that legal shield.
This is because (in my view at least) the problem with bad or dangerous content online mostly isn't the badness of the content itself, but rather its virality: exhorting someone to dangerous behavior online is a shitty thing to do, but it's not necessarily that much of a threat to society. But when it gets in front of three million sets of eyeballs, it becomes a whole lot more dangerous!
So, if Meta and Twitter and Tik-Tok and whoever else want to use the inherent virality of the internet to drive profits, they ought to shoulder the legal risk of not acting responsibly (or, better yet, they should act responsibly!).
Full disclosure: I'm neither a lawyer nor a software guy, so I'm well aware I may be overlooking obvious legal or technical flaws in my proposal. Just a layperson spitballing, as usual...
The legal system is ill designed to address small wrongs. What are my damages from seeing bad content? Even if I kill someone, it’s very hard to prove I wouldn’t have killed them otherwise.
The cases that would actually be litigated would be ones where someone was maimed or killed and there was some, possibly really tangential, connection to a well funded algorithm using company. You would basically be paying a bunch of lawyers to partake in an arid debate about causation.
Yeah it doesn't seem like this could be done through private litigation, which is what Section 230 is really about, unless the idea is simply to *ban* algorithmic content rather than to just remove its protections. In that case I suppose you could create some sort of statutory damages amount.
Perhaps not a lot would be accomplished. I’m not really sure. But the point is, because of section 230, tort lawsuits driven by the use of dodgy, viral content by profit-seeking internet firms really don’t happen *at all*. My hunch is this arrangement has not served our society well.
Every regulatory approach has its costs and benefits, but one of the benefits of the common law system where judges are the first line regulators, subject to legislative override, is that the law can develop incrementally and carefully in rapidly changing areas where it's not clear to anyone what the legal standards should be, beyond basic general rules like don't lie and cheat or unreasonably injury other people by your actions. It relieves lawmakers of the need to be omniscient in thinking of every scenario in advance, but still leaves a way for those gaps to be filled case by case.
Look at the types of cases that 230 blocks -- a lot of them involve conduct that companies could, would, and should be held responsible for by judges, if 230 did not block it.
>> One idea might be paring back the legal protections of Section 230, which (per my understanding) is what shields firms operating in the US from the legal liability they'd otherwise be exposed to because of user-generated content.
Most of the protections in Section 230 are already provided by the first amendment, so repealing it wouldn't be as big of a deal as people think. Repealing 230 would mainly just open up a lot of litigation and uncertainty for a while until the supreme court settles a handful of of first amendment loose ends having to do with content moderation that were never fully resolved.
The desire for Section 230 came after a decision against Prodigy for moderating content to provide a more family friendly experience. A prior decision in a case against Compuserv had already made clear that platforms were not liable for third party content that isn't moderated. This decision was based on long-standing court precedent that bookstores, libraries, and magazine stands aren't liable for the content of the publications they sell or the decisions they make about how to arrange that content in their stores. The prodigy case was a lower court decision that hinged on the idea that any content moderation made a platform a publisher. Many First Amendment scholars believed this ruling would have been overturned had it made it to the supreme court (eg bookstores and magazine stands have absolute protection even though they moderate content by choosing what they sell and how they display their goods).
>>Most of the protections in Section 230 are already provided by the first amendment, so repealing it wouldn't be as big of a deal as people think<<
I don't want 230 repealed; and as I wrote above, I deem it a reasonable measure in a lot of contexts. I don't think Matt or Substack should be sued if someone posts something damaging or dangerous in these comments! But as far as I know neither Matt nor Substack are trying to get our many hot takes to go viral in an effort to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
In my view it is the combination of *virality* (which is turbocharged by algorithms) and the broad shield of 230 that is a bad mix. I have no doubt our constitution would prohibit Congress from curtailing the ability of websites to enable their users to post and repost and forward content. But when said websites are assisted by algorithmic software, all hell breaks loose. So I'd be interested in seeing if the threat of legal liability might prompt them to deemphasize this particular aspect of their business model.
I follow Haidt's work on this and I really do believe he's onto something when he points out that the problem isn't content moderation, but rather, it's algorithms optimized to produce rage and anger that make these platforms toxic to society.
The challenge though, at least from my non-lawyer viewpoint, is that many first amendment scholars seem to believe platforms already have a constitutional right, not connected to 230, to decide which content they promote and which content they hide or shadow ban. This isn't very different from settled first amendment law that prohibits the government from telling bookstores which titles they're allowed to put in their windows versus which must be hidden in the back room (btw - this constitutional protection for bookstores comes with a built-in liability shield).
If the constitution says the government can't tell bookstores or libraries how and when they can promote or hide published works, how can it tell twitter or facebook which published works they're allowed to promote and which they must hide in the back room?
I think Jonathan Haidt has proposed this as well.
to clarify, by “apps that don't involve algorithms” I mean ones that use chronological feeds, or separate subreddits etc.
I have a similar instinct (revoke section 230 protections for algorithmically curated feeds) but whenever I think about more I can't see how it actually works. After all, "display posts in chronological order of when they were posted" is still an algorithm. So is, show the most-upvoted content higher in the feed. I realize this sounds like sophistry but I think there really is a deeply hard problem here. Obviously you can just specify which algorithms are acceptable w/r/t section 230 (chronological is OK, etc) but then you get into things like spam filters. Is gmail algorithmically curated since they have a spam filter and anything marked as spam goes to a separate folder? If the phone company started implementing "spam filters" to help deal with the barrage of scam callers we all get constantly (something I desperately wish they WOULD do), would that count as algorithm curation?
At the end of the day, recommendation engines of one sort or another are the price we have pay for having access to massive amounts of information.
I don’t think there’s a silver bullet here, but “what counts as a recommendation algorithm” *is* the kind of problem the common law system is pretty good at fumbling its way toward. At a first pass, you say that chronological is a safe harbor, and chronological *minus* some things (spam filters, the original moderation 230 was intended to protect) is protected, any anything else loses the 230 shield.
If you make that rule only kick in above some revenue threshold, I think the downside risk is pretty limited. The cost of a false positive is a big social network has to pay out a libel claim? They’re good for it. The point is the use the risk of liability in extreme cases to make them take editorial judgment seriously.
There's also a major difference between serving up algorithmically-curated content that cannot be forwarded or reposted—in other words made to go viral—and that which can. Advertisements fall in the first category. I have no objection if WaPo.com or Slate use an algorithm to guess which advertisements I'm likely to find relevant.
An outfit like Facebook—which relies a lot on user-generated content—has a business model that is obviously extremely vulnerable to being manipulated by truly bad actor-users who generate potentially quite damaging content. FB (and likely Twitter and Tiktok) is just too big to effectively police itself. Forcing their business model to move away from virality is the only way to go in my view.
(Of course, my suggestion about 230 would primarily address the problem of societally-dangerous content such as fake medical advice, exhortations to violence, etc; I doubt it would do much to address internet addiction and related ills like depression on the part of users who get hooked).
Reddit is a bit of a human-in-the-loop algorithm optimizing for engagement through the upvote system, at least on the larger subs.
This is far from a practical solution, but I coded my own custom Twitter feed that just returns all tweets (including replies, RTs and QTs) in strict reverse chron order from a handful of accounts that I follow and trust (Matt of course being one). It's been a great way for me to read Twitter for going over a decade now.
If it’s just cat videos, fine. But very often it veers into videos about things you feel are important and outrageous and you can’t get enough outrage, so you need to see what happened this minute at Mar-a-Lago or else democracy will die in darkness.
I think people would be surprised how different their Facebook and Twitter feeds would be if they only engage with things that make them feel good. After a few years away, I returned to Facebook with the intention, "I'm here to click Like on things, and only share things I like." Much better experience than my first time around.
I strongly agree that the Facebook experience reflects what you put into it. It's quite rare for me to get political stuff in my feed (the main exception, amusingly enough, was Michael Bloomberg in 2020 whose primary campaign apparently told Facebook that they were buying ALL the advertising regardless of what the algorithm recommended) and I would attribute that to the fact that I don't engage with political content. I mostly get ads for crowdfunding boardgames, books, and gadgets presumably because those are things I click through.
This is surprisingly difficult!
I haven't tried this per se, but I've noticed a similar algorithmic problem with Spotify. A few months ago, my partner started sometimes using Spotify to play ambient music while doing yoga or taking a bath, and now it's very difficult to get the "Discover Weekly" or "Daily Mix" playlists to be upbeat. I wish there was an easy way to tell Spotify that the ambient listening was on a different profile, but since all our listening is really through telling Alexa to play Spotify, this is difficult.
I think music presents an even harder problem, and I don't think algorithms will beat curation anytime soon. BTW, for ambient music, I subscribe to Hearts of Space.
I largely accept this take, but have a small reservation about the idea that we can infer that major tech CEOs have “iron will”because they’re thin. There can be at least two alternative explanations: 1. Different people are tempted by different things. I’m a great food lover. Restaurants are one of the things I greatly enjoy on trips, cooking at home etc. and yet I never snack and that’s never a struggle. I’m simply never “tempted” to eat beyond my hunger. By contrast I’m definitely tempted by other things and do them beyond what I’d like (eg commenting too much here sometimes) so it’s not that my willpower is necessarily stronger than other people’s, nor that I don’t greatly enjoy food.
2. Environment matters tons: we know obesity inversely correlated to wealth. Beyond that I expect that even when something tempts you it’s always situational: take away my wi fi or my spare time and I won’t comment here. By the same token I won’t be surprised if the lifestyle of the tech billionaire ceos leaves them literally fewer opportunities for food temptations even if they’re the tempted type AND gives them enormous opportunities to compensate (personal trainers, optimized diets etc).
I'm not sure I agree with you on this one. Some products are for the masses. Like those mealy pale tomatoes that are used in fast food restaurants. They are a bad product, but they do serve a purpose. But their existence and prominence in the culinary world caused a resurgence of terrific heirloom tomatoes. That's how the market corrects itself. A variety of investors try to stoke different parts of the market for both their psychic and monetary benefit. People interested in producing a product of quality, will always operate in a variety of niches. That's because the big money will always push a business towards appealing to the lowest common denominator, where your business seeks to take advantage of the fact that people are unhappy being treated like they are part of the LCD. That's how capitalism works. The problem is social media footprints are so large and the market is so new, they are still in the process of optimizing the LCD and niche markets like Substack and other delivery processes are still developing. Meta will never become the product you would like it to be. But some of the people who work there will go on to create the social media version of heirloom tomatoes.
Agreed. And I think there is a potential social media market disruption in terms of paid social media. Personally, I’m finding the comment section of my paid substack subscriptions a superior form of social media and it’s taking market share from my use of Twitter and reddit. (I elaborated on this idea in another comment on this article.)
Counterpoint: "Heirloom tomatoes" are what we used to just call "tomatoes". A situation where the new, popular thing is bad and the old, good thing is a niche product seems suboptimal.
Suboptimal for sure. But there are actually tomatoes available (or in Matt’s old example, ikea furniture is much more accessible than durable heirlooms, even if worse).
This seems to presume that a natural and unregulated market is the default and the ideal. But markets are a policy choice. We could, for example, require that apps actually enforce an age minimum of 18 or a maximum daily use level for people under 21. Heck, we could really disrupt things by not permitting a social media company to operate across state lines. You can throw up your hands and say whatever needs people have will be satisfied by the market but we impose and enforce rules on, e.g., the kinds of gambling people are permitted to do. And while in some areas policing of desires is impractical, the urge to use a social media app isn't exactly something you can get from a trenchcoat-wearing figure in a dark alley.
My point wasn't to say that there shouldn't be regulations and attempts by outsiders and government to make the product better. I was merely stating what is likely to happen and that any improvement that Meta is forced to make will likely come from competition. Unless they are happy abandoning that segment of the market which is another potential outcome.
Why limit the length of time people under 21 spend on social media, specifically? Seems random and kind of discriminatory.
...do we feel the same way about alcohol and cigarettes? Just as discriminatory. Or sex or marriage?
I was just throwing out examples, not setting forth my preferred regime, necessarily. But just trying to take your question seriously: as a general matter societies tend to be more comfortable limiting the liberty of people who have not reached the age of maturity. It's not just about the risk of harm to others. We are more comfortable being paternalistic toward young people who may be less equipped to judge for themselves what decisions are good for them. For example, in China there are limits on online gaming for young people. Maybe that's "random and kind of discriminatory" or maybe some people see merit in steering the behavior of young people away from potentially addictive/unproductive enterprises.
Except there are major First Amendment issues with limiting even under-18 year olds' access to information, let alone limiting the access of legal adults in the 18-21 range.
Do you have a legal decision I can read to learn more about this?
Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, 564 U.S. 786 (2011) is the most recent SCOTUS decision that I know of off the top of my head. This pamphlet collects a number of sources including court decisions, but I haven't reviewed them closely: https://www.ala.org/aasl/sites/ala.org.aasl/files/content/aaslissues/bwad/KNOW_39_1_MinorsFirst_16-21.pdf
This is a good point, but I think it’s reasonable to worry more about the type of broad garbage social media consumption than like sorta bad tomatoes
I agree that the consumption of bad social media can have dire consequences to society. But I am not sure that there is another way to correct it other than the random nature of the way the market works. If you can show me a time in history where businesses acted for the public good and not for profits, I will buy you a Big Mac. Even Substack wouldn't exist if there weren't a market for it.
Of course markets are the most important thing. I agree. On the the margins though, it could be good to talking about how bad Meta is and asking some questions about our blindspots regarding social media, so our most talented people don’t work there. Altria used to come recruit on my college campus, and everyone looked at you weird if you just went up to their booth and acted interested in selling cigarettes, even though it was a high paying job.
But that didn't happen until the government got involved and forced the cigarette manufacturers to put warning labels on their packaging. It took close to 100 years for that to happen. Personally, I think the best we can hope for is that criticizing Meta inspires someone to create something better. But Meta will always do what is best for their shareholders, not their users.
This is far afield, but I’d love if we pushed on that angle too. Some countries mandate codetermination, where a percentage of the board of directors are elected by workers. Maybe mandates are too strong, but we should experiment with lighter regulation (broader 230?) and maybe lower taxes for corporation with single-class shares that have some percentage of the board elected by users.
I love the heirloom tomato analogy.
One policy hook here is the terms of service and laws like the DMCA prevent users from bringing their own algorithmic curation to existing networks. If you write a Facebook client that serves a re-ordered feed, they’ll revoke your API access, and if you write a browser extension that does the same thing they’ll ban you for life and threaten to sue. We should make it easier for people to cultivate heirloom tomatoes.
The other part is the damages from algorithmicly amplified libel, even to people not using the networking product, are a big unpriced externality. That moves us out of a pure consumer choice model into something more like pollution, like maybe those bland tomatoes have to be grown with toxic fertilizer.
Great piece. I do hope you realize that Twitter is not substantially different.
I think the discussion of revealed preferences is key here. As someone in computing, I encounter lots of people who have the idea that revealed preferences are the only true preferences, and everything else is delusion. This is obviously unworkable as a theory of human psychology once you learn anything at all about how people work but it's nonetheless very common. And it underwrites a lot of problematic ideas ranging from Reels to car design.
I never see this, except from extreme libertarians. Can you link to somebody making this argument (not that I don't believe you, just sort of intrigued by the weird POV you are describing)?
I think just searching Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com) for "revealed preference" will turn up lots of this.
This touches on an idea I've wanted to write up for some time. I think the notion of 'preference' as a single, unitary thing has been particularly pernicious, and is demonstrably false. We do not have a single, discernible preference for one thing over another in all circumstances, and that preference is very certainly not revealed by our behavior.
This becomes obvious with a straightforward thought experiment: Consider the obese person who would like to be thin. They are presented with a cookie. They claim they want to be thin, but they eat the cookie anyway. The naive economist says "Well, their revealed preference is to eat the cookie, so obviously they prefer consumption to thinness".
However, what if there existed a pill that would disable the craving for the cookie. This very same person would probably take that pill and *choose* to switch off their craving for the cookie, and then make a different choice the next time they were in that situation. What this reveals is that this isn't an issue of *preference*, at least not in the naive sense. It is an issue of choice architecture, in this case mediated by the available technology.
Given the current state of cookie-desire technology, cookie-related choices have to be made on an individual basis, in the moment. And choices made on an individual basis, in the moment, give more strength to the "lower" (metaphorically, and maybe also literally) parts of our brains. However, that very same person's "higher" executive decision making apparatus may very well make the exact opposite choice.
I think the question we need to start asking of technology: digital, pharmaceutical, and otherwise is: How can we create a world in which we can shift more of our everyday decision making to our executive apparatus and away from our lizard brain? This is a pathway to a better world, for everyone. And the first step on that path, I think, is understanding that preference is not one thing, and it is definitely not something that can be simplistically revealed by behavior.
Many of the famed Obama-era digital wizards went on to work at Meta and other silicon valley click-generators. I guess H.L. Mencken was right: "Democracy [and Meta - editor] is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."