What I've noticed is that Instagrams recommendation algorithms are creepily accurate.
If you like browsing pictures of butts you'll get lots of butts and of the exact kind that you'd like. I'm not sure how they do it. I don't even post on Instagram. And yet I'm addicted now to the Explore tab. They've genuinely managed to build something addictive in a way that other networks are not.
Also Instagram is completely sanitized of politics and any other hot button stuff. So its just a space where you zone out.
Instagram is the crack cocaine of social media. A cocktail of addiction and narcissism refined into its most potent form. I predict that Instagram will continue to grow and might one day rival Facebook itself.
Oh woah, definitely not sanitized of politics. Probably because I follow some politicians, I get recommendations for these crazy, aggressive political meme pages. I see some very very hot button stuff on my feed.
Count yourself lucky that Instagram looks politically sanitized!
I mean, you can't escape politics on Instagram if you're actively searching & subscribing to the topic. I think the point is, even if you just follow close friends on Facebook, your news feed is almost still guaranteed to have daily political posts/memes/ads. The lack of ability to post links & easily repost/share on Instagram deters those types of groups from posting clickbait in the hopes to drive people to their ad-heavy pages. Instagram is a refreshing break from it in that regard.
I don't have a Facebook account (never did) but eventually "had" to create an Instagram account.
I was baffled when I saw their recommendations: They recommended me some old classmates and my university without having any direct interaction from me.
I understand how cookie syncing/matching works and I know Facebook probably knows a lot about me even without an account, but that still got me by surprise.
It's not just that.. anyone you know who ever imported their contacts list would be connected to you. With enough data points about them, FB/IG can infer quite a few things about you pretty easily.
If your university's alumni association imported their contact list, it's even worse.
No, I post and look at almost exclusively photos of the outdoors in the western USA. I have no recommendations for butts, and few for photos of people of any kind -- they accurately point me to other nature and landscape photographers, and not much else.
I never see butts on instagram :/, but I just use it to occasionally share photos I'm proud of, and that's usually the only time I also happen to browse what my friends have posted. I have zero interest in any social/communication aspect that instagram may offer.
The overall way the author frames the discussion is putting the cart before the horse and ultimately Procrustean. The author's argument is a bit like a person with his head in a bucket of water claiming that human beings are "outdated" because we have this "primitive" need to breathe that's preventing us from being able to deal with having our heads stuck in buckets full of water. Maybe we shouldn't be sticking our heads in buckets of water? Maybe breathing is good?
There is a pathological strain of individualism divorced from reality that understands freedom not as freedom from all those things that are opposed to human nature (and especially our own vices), but as the right to arbitrarily will and do anything with no reference to human nature. Indeed, there is a hostility to the very idea of human nature because it is seen as an impediment to freedom.
I don't get your point. The author just used some funny metaphore to explain how our brain works. And yes, our brain still works with ancestral habits, this is not a big news after all.
I've been reading a lot about this "ancestral hijacking" lately and have tried to cut out on a lot of them. My phone now only has two possible notifications: phone calls and Things app. I have 0 social apps or games. I am also slowly cutting out sugars and extra carbs. I think you guys should read about supernormal stimulus [1].
There is this comic [2] about supernormal stimulus that shows how man, and man alone, has the ability to overcome it.
There are times, when I can't honestly claim that my behavior is any smarter than that of the houseflies that die in front of the window, or the salmon that spends the remainder of its life searching for a way past a dam. The environment might be more complex, but the behavior is not. It is helpful to have a name for the system that is responsible, makes it much easier to recognize and derail it.
I believe Sir Mix-A-Lot studied the problem thoroughly in the 1990s, but in the end, had to concede that he was unable to take control of his own reptile brain.
One of the books that really allowed me to think differently and sometimes overpower my train of thought is called "The Power of Now". The rhetoric can be super flowery at times (especially in the beginning), but the point he tries to get across was incredibly novel to me and there's strategies in there to help you control your brain and use it more as a tool.
I often think that salmon has it better than us humans. The salmon is focused on doing what it's doing at the moment, and doesn't have the time or capacity to build a sense of 'self' that they are proud or ashamed of, that colors their actions and gives them pain in the moment because it wasn't what they wanted or thought it would be. They just want to get up stream.
That's because you value your power over your peace of mind, which is fine and true for most people. I think they just meant in terms of a purely happiness based value system.
Honestly, as an enthusiast of all things callipygian, Sir Mix-A-Lot's treatise (BGB) was groundbreaking.
To your point about being unable to control his own reptile brain, however, I don't know how much I buy that. From the get-go, SMA acknowledges that "[he] cannot lie", which I think is a concession to determinism more so than one to biology.
Seems the author's intentions are good but it's such an odd way to frame it. He outlines that many companies are explicitly designing products in such a way as to exploit ("hack") people's brains at great detriment to those people. But his response is to frame it as that we should place blame on our own brains rather than on the people doing these things or the social structure that rewards them. Feels like he could think a little bigger here.
I thought it was quite interesting after a bit of introspection.
I expected to pick holes in it and make critical comments here. Then as I read it, I realized that while I am not too addicted to posting shit on Facebook, I get the same dopamine release when I post responses here. Sure I feel a bit smarter because its usually involves a bit more reasoning than a selfie on Faceboook, but the end effect is the same. The reading of the article was the first step in chasing that dopamine hit.
In society we have an endless amount of social warnings, "Don't drink too much, you'll get ill. Don't do drugs, you'll become an addict. Don't drive without your seatbelt, you can die. Don't watch too much TV, it's not good for you."
But we still lack any sort of warning in the greater contemporary society about the risks of overuse of the hyper stimulus that comes along with social media. I am definitely beginning to see this take shape in our society (with people rejecting social media applications, articles like this, the way people speak to the overuse of such platforms)
Nobody will even bother to listen to me talk about social media anymore, because I am always telling people it is unhealthy and they should get off it (and yet I'm here). It is the worst fast food imaginable for our human need to socialize, transient and shallow.
I think comparing a discussion on HN to liking photos, and notifications on Instagram. Is a bit far fetched. You can easily argue about the addictiveness of an online forum, and social interaction. We are social creatures after all. But social media sites like IG, Facebook, Twitter, specifically target those weaknesses in our brain.
There are good and really useful comments on here. But there's also a lot of fluff. Beyond that, the way things are set up encourages compulsive behavior. If you take several hours to comment on something, there's a good chance your comment will get buried. Wait a few days, and there's a good chance no one will read it. After making a comment, there's a certain urgency to check to see who's replied to you, because if you wait too long chances are the person has moved on.
You'll also notice that people start making the same comments and having the same conversations over and over again. Instead of having an ongoing conversation about, say, space exploration, you have the same beginning of a discussion happening whenever the topic comes up, and then stopping before it really matures.
That's not to say that the comment section here is bad, but it's still worth paying attention to some of its drawbacks. Particularly because it shares the urgency and compulsive aspects that permeate a lot of current sites.
HN certainly isn't a utopia, and a lot of the problems mentioned are just inherent to online forums.
The only real addictive bit is the points system on HN. I'd be fine with that just going away. It wouldn't be the first time I've refreshed posts I've made repeatedly to see the tally go up.
> HN certainly isn't a utopia, and a lot of the problems mentioned are just inherent to online forums.
The old style of forums didn't have the same kind of compulsive pressure, since you could always respond the next day/week/month and the topic would bump back up to the top of the post. If you don't respond on HN or Reddit quick enough, no one is going to see your comment. I frequent some sites that has the older system, and I'll find myself occasionally saying "This isn't that important; wait a few days and see if you feel like responding." But that's not really much of an option here - how many people are going to read your comment if you make it several days later?
And it wouldn't be hard to devise a system that actively discourages compulsive posting behavior. If you, say, had a web forum where everyone could only post once a week, you'd have much less of that urgency (and you'd get a discussion with more users, not just the fraction that habitually post everywhere).
Yes, HN and Reddit are very-high-traffic forums, so it is mostly read-once--write-once--do-not-come-back. Not only the comment go by hundreds on each thread, but the threads themselves have a life expectancy of 24 hours only, 48 hours max, before they are buried and reject to the infamous page 2 where no one goes. So there's generally no point in coming back.
The fact that the 'shape' of the threads changes all the time does not help either (the way the messages are ordered, depending on the upvotes, the freshness, and whichever mysterious other criteria may be involved).
Conversations at a depth higher than 5 or 6 levels is also difficult to follow, so I think not many people read them, let alone take part in them (on Reddit, such deep threads even suffer a penalty twice, and the second one, which requires opening a new tab or window if you don't want to have to reload the whole page once you come back, is probably fatal to almost all of the readers).
(I won't tell how much I miss Usenet and newsreaders once more, I promise :-D )
Do you think it would help to have a comment reply notification built into HN? Most of the time if I decide not to add a follow-up comment it's because the user I'm replying to has no way of being notified that I did. Or do you think it would just exacerbate the urgency issues?
That might be somewhat useful, but the thing is after a few hours your conversation with the other person is going to be no better than a private message (since no one else is going to see the topic). Web forums bump the topic back to the top, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the "news" angle. It might be interesting separating the two - have the submissions act like they do know, but have the comments for the submissions be in individual threads in a separate discussion forum.
>It's nearly impossible to keep up with anything but recent conversations
It's been implied that this is an intentional means of keeping engagement low, as the quality of comments tends to diminish over time, while the likelihood of flamebait and spam increases as comment distance diverges from the root. This is also apparently the reason there are no notifications for new comments. I don't know if it's true or one of those features the community is reading too much meaning into, which only exists as it does because pg wasn't interested in expanding on it.
In any case, I really hope they consider adding more ways to sort the threads - sorting by time rather than karma would be very helpful. They could even keep the karma sort the default so no one else has to complain about the layout changing.
It's not completely far-fetched, at least not with Reddit. Part of facebook and instagram is social, sure, but Reddit and HN has that with their comments sections too. Another really important part of these sites is novelty seeking, which all of these sites do well.
Yeah whatever damage (if any) HN does is child's play compared to the big players. Being explicitly about technology and related news rather than yourself makes a huge difference already. With consideration to the lack of aggressive personalization/click manipulation makes it hard to claim its even in the same game. It still is a social network at the end of the day though, least how I see it.
Providing a feature designed to make you use a product less is the antithesis of what the major social media sites do. Really inspires confidence in HN's motivations being pure.
Just as different kinds of processed food vary in how bad they are, so do different social media sites. I think HN is like pizza: yeah, it's not perfectly healthy, but which of us is going to live a perfectly healthy lifestyle, and pizza still contains a good deal of nutritional value. It's certainly a lot better than cookies.
I've completely quit facebook and noticed that I just replaced its usage entirely by reddit. With facebook I usually just saw what my friends were up to; with reddit, I just see a bunch of strangers and recurring figures, and threads where everyone is an keyboard comedian. I think my reddit usage is extremely unhealthy because I just browse the same things over and over again in my free time. But most of the time I feel like I just don't know what to do (or don't have time to do what I know I should) on the internet anymore.
Reddit is horrible, I gave up on that a while ago for the exact reasons you stated. It's a massive time sink, with zero benefit. Fast food of online forums.
Its difficult to want to be too critical about this since I think the author's motives are only good in that he seems to genuinely be trying to impart good advice; but so what, I'll criticise anyway. This reads like parody of a certain time, peppered as it with trendy buzzwords and ideas; it just happens that the time it is unintentionally parodying is right now. There's a faint air of desperation about the whole thing: the banality of a life punctuated by 'cheat days' rather than one lived with dietary equilibrium; the tacit assumption that the world is right and we are primitive; the unspoken message that we are effectively living in a world that is hostile to us, but that the problem is not the world, and we should rather learn to adapt to it instead of bending it to serve our interests as human beings.
There's an interesting page where they show the results of 200,000 users of an app called Moment[1] where you can see which apps make people the least happy. Additionally, you can see the time limits at which users start to feel happy about their usage.
I came upon the movement after incorporating suggestions from Tristan Harris' "How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist[2]" into my every day life.
The post is just material copied from Hooked (which is a creepy book worth reading!), plus observations that have already been made (social media causes us to compare ourselves to everyone else's highlight reel), followed by a bunch of generic, currently popular fads/lifestyle advice (keto diet, exercise, meditate, stoicism).
A far simpler solution is available to all of us: stop using Instagram.
>A far simpler solution is available to all of us: stop using Instagram.
Easier said than done, no? That's basically saying "opt out of modern society," which I personally agree with, but it's not a reasonable solution. These companies that spend b/millions on psychological research to condition consumers is not going away anytime soon.
> That's basically saying "opt out of modern society,"
Hahahaha... oh man... at what point did a photo sharing social media website become "modern society"?
> These companies that spend b/millions on psychological research to condition consumers is not going away anytime soon.
Look, if you're already considering drastic measures like fundamentally altering your diet, your exercise regime, or the very way you perceive the world and interact with people, I think it reasonable to suggest smaller, more achievable changes like opting out of the very things that are making you unhappy.
Simply removing the apps from your phone, which will take you mere seconds, would go a long long way by limiting exposure. Disabling or deleting your account entirely takes only seconds more, if you're willing to take the leap. This isn't like trying to kick a crack habit. You have a choice.
Almost all males I know are not on instagram, and I'm in my early twenties. It's not like Facebook in that you might "miss out" on things like invitations to events or participation in groups. It's just a photo sharing website. Calling it "modern society" is just ridiculous hyperbole
None of the males in my circle of friends (spanning mid 20s to mid 30s) who aren't single are on social media at all. The two single ones are only on social media because that's where they coordinate dates/hookups. Events and get-togethers are organized ad hoc over text or instant messaging (Whatsapp). I don't even know what possible use I'd have for Instagram or Facebook.
Pretty sure you'll still have access to the rest of modern society if quit a social media site. It's not like your phone will become disabled, or the lights will go out.
You're deliberately ignoring the idea of addiction, consumerism, and conditioning to feel superior because you think you can "quit" being influenced by our culture and society.
Tldr: diet, exercise, sleep, meditation, relationships, and self reflection will improve your life because that's how humans have always thrived. It's a little wordy but on point. Since I stared focusing on these things, I have felt better, been less depressed, much more energetic, etc.
Instagram follows the same path as Facebook when it comes to curating content to the core of user's likes and dislikes. When a content that is tailored to the user's preference starts to surface more on the feed ,it tends to keep the user engaged passively even if not active, leading to ad revenue for the company. Once you are out of the platform and exposed to different, if not opposing views,people find it tough to handle and lead to depression.
Definitely. But the information I get from here makes my life productive. I am a civil engineer and sometimes I have no idea what half the words are that people say around here. But I get to learn something new everyday. It's just a guarantee.
But with social media, their business model is to make me click on or look at things. That's just where it ends for them. And the productivity value is just not there. Yes, you can find helpful information, but I have to sift through so much noise.
Yes HN has it's fair share of social media problem (I am definitely too keen to check for upvotes myself, for that sweet cheap validation) but avoids the worst of it by not seeming to try to get anything out of its users, instead being dedicated to actually facilitating civil intelligent discussion.
Also, the minimal design, and the lack of an algorithm targeting my personal preferences with the express intention of tricking me into reading more stories makes a huge difference.
I really enjoyed commuting by bike, to the point I would go to certain places solely for the bike ride, and leave within a few minutes. I was also addicted to smoking. HN is like my bike addiction, while FB and Twitter feel more like my smoking addiction.
Every week, news articles and people here on HN say that neural nets can be easily fooled by adversarial images. Yet human behavior has the same flaws. Apparently there are adversarial triggers for unintended/undesired human behavior.
Why are people treating engagement as a new thing?
AdTech companies use the same strategies that newspapers used to use. Yellow journalism has become fake news. Tabloids are now blogs fueled by rumor mills. Newspapers trying to promote celebrities are the same as having a twitter / snapchat / instagram account.
This rose has a much tighter action-reward loop, both for consumers and producers. Yellow journalism, tabloids, etc were taking advantage of the same human tendencies, but the speed and volume of the message is orders of magnitude greater than in the past.
To read the original post (OP), I had to look up the meaning of the acronym PPL -- "push, pull legs".
I never did see what "the 'gram" meant.
Uh, we have the Roman alphabet, the English language we can write using the Roman alphabet, and dictionaries where we can look up words in the English language written with the Roman alphabet. Commonly we can also use Google to look up such meanings.
Then acronyms such as PPL and abbreviations such as "the 'gram" are not in an English dictionary and, thus, are obscure and poor means of communications. Similarly for icons.
So, in the interest of clear communications, ease of use, and a good user experience (UX), the Web pages for my startup are in English using the Roman alphabet and have no acronyms, abbreviations, or icons, obscure or otherwise.
I tried 80% fat diet and blood ketone monitoring for a few months. I felt more energetic and happy. My girlfriend tried the same thing, she felt lethargic. I think individual customization based on genetics and lifestyle is necessary if you want to do any effective biohacking.
Agreed.. I recently discovered I specifically don't react well to legumes... nothing huge, just some upset stomach etc... but when I avoid them successfully, I do much better... I falter (get fast food fried in "vegetable" ie soybean oil), it's worse every time.
I did a year of very low carb, and was pretty good after about the first couple weeks. I just really like pasta, bread, etc. I've been heading in that direction again, as I did a lot better on beef, bison, elk, etc than poultry or legume sources. Also have noticed the effects of secondary animal products and what they're fed more than I expected.
I just wish soy free eggs weren't so much more difficult to find... and making my own mayo/ranch isn't so bad, just time consuming for a product that spoils relatively quickly. But I feel a lot better when I don't have the stuff.
Aside: trail mix is a whole new level of fun when you can't have legumes (peanuts), and are badly allergic to cranberries. Have to make my own.
Someone must have the most likes. But it's true for the rest of us. If there are disconnected graphs, they'll have a local king of the popularity hill.
To be honest I found instagram much more real than other social media platforms. Especially the story modus seems to make people more open to show their real emotions even when they are unhappy.
For more on cultural evolution and the impact on evolution of our brain, check out Joseph Henrich's "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution". There are many youtube videos of the author discussing the book as well. The ideas in the book give deeper context to cultural evolution discussed in the Wait But Why Neuralink article.
> Today, we live in a completely different world as our ancestors. Yet, our biology is still exactly the same.
Is that really true? I've heard this kind of argument so many times that it seems right, but I've rarely seen any scientific evidence to back it up. Surely our bodies have evolved in some subtle and diverse ways over many thousands of generations?
Our ancestors couldn't digest cow milk as adults. We've only had farming for around 10,000 years, but people in regions that practiced dairy farming have already developed lactose tolerance.
Maybe born the same, but looking at the people around me that sit down 14 hours a day and eat "modern food" our physique certainly is different to their great grandparents, it wouldn't surprise me that brains differ too.
'Exactly the same' is surely an exaggeration, but I see no way we could have changed significantly considering the timescale and nature of our evolutionary pressures.
While not conclusive, I think the easiest way to reason this is that evolution needs a much longer timespan than a few thousand years, assuming ancestors means sometime after "civilizations" started
I don't know what the "right" thing to post on social media is. I don't want to brag, nor complain, nor talk about how average my day is. I usually just end up posting cool articles and never anything personal. I thought about automatically posting the #1 HN article to my timeline every day, for the likes.
If you like browsing pictures of butts you'll get lots of butts and of the exact kind that you'd like. I'm not sure how they do it. I don't even post on Instagram. And yet I'm addicted now to the Explore tab. They've genuinely managed to build something addictive in a way that other networks are not.
Also Instagram is completely sanitized of politics and any other hot button stuff. So its just a space where you zone out.
Instagram is the crack cocaine of social media. A cocktail of addiction and narcissism refined into its most potent form. I predict that Instagram will continue to grow and might one day rival Facebook itself.