Oh wow, that's from 8 years ago. And then it got leaked outside of Google 3 years ago it seems -- this article [1] provides a ton more context.
Just for context, and before people start accusing Google of hypocrisy or anything -- these slides never represented an official (or unofficial) Google position or anything. They're not PR. They're just a single employee's opinion in slideshow form, an opinion he was trying to build support for internally.
Whether you think it made any kind of impact is a fun thought question though.
In the 8 years that have elapsed since this pitch was made at Google, one conclusion is absolutely crystal clear: the industry has as little self-regulatory control over its use of such dark patterns as the public has over avoiding them.
Regulation, taxation, and where necessary, criminalisation, are obvious and necessary.
I'll note that for once, the patterns are not entirely synonymous with massive tech monopolies, though it is the monopolists who have the greatest resources and capability to tune their attention-diverting practices to the absolute maximum degree.
The naivete Tristan reveals here is rather charming, however.
It’s not impossible to imagine — intentionally tricking a user is sometimes called fraud — but I’m not sure we’ve thought through the implications of criminalizing website design.
The biggest companies are the ones least affected by regulation, because they can invest resources into complying. Small startups sometimes can’t. A teenager in their bedroom usually can’t. And that’s no small loss.
The scale argument against regulation is a frequent one. I'd like to see regulation have specific mandates for increased responsibility with size. There are examples of this elsewhere, e.g., exceptions from food inspecition and licensing regulations for home cooks, even for sales at relatively informal markets such as farmers' markets.
The case for the Internet is an interesting one, as there are numerous cases where a single individual does in fact provide services used widely (Alexandra Albakyan of Sci-Hub, and Chet Ramey of OpenSSL come to mind). Defining "scale" and commensurate "responsibility" does require some nuance.
The overregulation trope is a frequent one of the Libertarian movement, and appears frequently at (and on HN, from) Reason.com, among other sources. One suspects that Koch Industries and ilk would like to be similarly exempted from such onerous requirements as the individual hairdresser they so often performatively defend (often with a gross ignorance of the issues involved in hair care, beauty treatments, and hygiene).
> (often with a gross ignorance of the issues involved in hair care, beauty treatments, and hygiene).
wait.. you seriously going to defend hairdresser regulations? Care to enlightenment me on why they are a net good for society?
I always thought they are a punching bag for libertarians because they are such an obvious net negative for society...
Public-facing intimate-touch services carry numerous risks of hygiene, chemical exposure, techniques, identifying potentially hazardous conditions in the client, and more.
I'm not going to argue that all regulations and licensing within the industry are sensible, that's simply never the case. And there is self-serving regulation for all the usual reasons (guilds, education, limiting competition and entry, all of which you can find in, oh, to pick a random example, the tech sector).
But the case is also not nearly as black and white as Reason would like to have you believe.
More generally, in my view, in any technology, the greatest elevation of knowledge and expertise comes not in applying the basics and in positive effects of the methods and systems involved, but in what I've called hygiene factors: the unintended consequences, side effects, complex interactions, and risks.
The notion of manifest and latent functions was developed by sociologist Robert K. Merton.[1] In discussing these, Merton makes the perceptive observation that because latent functions are not immediately apparent, obvious, or significant, they represent a greater increment of knowledge and understanding than manifest functions, which are obvious, evident, easily understood and communicated, etc.
TL;DR: there are nonevident hygiene and side-effect factors.
The standard solution is to exempt small organizations.
It's why, for example, you can start a company with minimal accounting. When you hire your first employee, your requirements increase. Then above 50 employees the IRS considers you a Large Employer, etc.
It would be reasonable to apply basic consumer protection laws to any service with more than, say, a million users. "Any subscription entered into online must be cancellable online," that kind of thing. Laws against dark patterns. Dorm room startups remain totally unencumbered.
The fact that it's 2021 and a lot of very low-hanging-fruit protections like this don't exist, is evidence that our legislative apparatus is degraded. Maybe in a future decade we'll have better functioning institutions--it has happened before--but not today. Lina Khan running the FCC is a hopeful sign.
This is a great point; I forgot entirely about exemptions.
Do you happen to know of any existing regulation-with-exceptions that I can cite, to persuade others (and incidentally myself) that regulation isn't such a bad idea? Ideally something related to FAANG, but any software regulation with reasonable exemptions would be a fine example.
To be honest, I'm worried that politicians would muck things up during the legislative process, and that the right exemptions won't get applied. Or that we'll run into yet another law where you're required to pop up a banner saying "This site uses cookies, just like everyone else, lol." But if it's been done successfully, I'd like to know about it.
> Or that we'll run into yet another law where you're required to pop up a banner saying "This site uses cookies, just like everyone else, lol."
Is there any such law? I always understood that to be a widespread misunderstanding. Just like the way every website pops up a dialog box asking you to approve tracking or click through some complex flow to disapprove. They aren't required to do that. But business people are trying to make regulation seem like a burden on users to discourage legislators from creating new regulations.
Mm, I think as long as you’re not using the cookies for advertising purposes, you don’t have to pop up a banner. But if you’re using any kind of cookie for ads, you do.
GitHub recently published a post called “no cookie for you” or some such, which made that distinction clear. They said they were able to get rid of the popup by not doing any ads.
But still, it feels… wildly unhelpful to inform users that cookies are being used for ads. I’d love to understand the other viewpoint, though.
Criminalisation is actually better than regulation. Regulation is about what you do. Criminalisation takes into account what you did and what you intended to do.
One year ago, you followed every website design of the time, and made the "Please respect my privacy" button look like a the text in some terms and conditions, but the "Please sell all my data in a way that will increase my costs and make you many many dollars" look like a get-rid-of-this-inconvenience button.
Since then, regulations came up that banned this behavior. You didn't hear about it and you got sued by the regulation agency. Bummer.
Since then, criminal law changed that banned this behavior. You didn't hear about it and there's plenty of evidence that you were just acting in good faith - including the fact that you never actually sold the data because you're too busy attracting paying customers. You're alerted to the issue and immediately in good faith ask what they recommend and implement that. Your behavior before, during and after the event all showed a complete lack of intent. So why would you be criminally prosecuted?
It's the business who have the resources to do A/B testing on barely known features who mysteriously have no data about this interface that every user comes into contact with at least once, who need to be worried about this. There would be good reason to suspect that they tried to cover up their misdeeds. Even in the absence of positive evidence, it would be evidence of bad faith if they are a business that makes more money of user data than entire countries make off everything they do and don't consider the laws around user data.
The bigger issue is that it would be a pretty major change of direction.
A ton of laws are written to accommodate the resource of the companies/individuals subjected to them. You're not subject to the same paperwork if you have 2 employees or 2000.
Now to be honest, I am not sure why startups and teenagers shouldn't be punished if there is proof of willfully crossing the line where users get harmed. Feels to me like arguing that food poisoning shouldn't be criminalized because lemonade stands won't have the means to comply.
Depends on the regulation. Some things should be obvious: don't collect people's contacts and then send them spam without warning. Don't collect a credit card for a free trial and then start charging it without explicit user action once the trial is over.
But you might argue that doesn't cover all or even most dark patterns, and you'd probably be right.
We've made laws against plenty of thing in the advertising world.
- In Australia advertising cigarettes is illegal.
- In New Zealand billboards are illegal.
- In Australia there are very strict "truth in advertising laws" and breaking them has big penalties.
If we really care enough about this issue, we could absolutely make laws preventing certain dark patterns on the web. Given it seems likely that all commerce will move online in the next decade, it starts to be more important than those old modes of advertising I mentioned above.
Do you have a cite for the NZ outdoor advertising ban?
Best I can find (see down-thread) is one that applied in Auckland, though not the rest of the country. It's peculiarly little-referenced online, and I suspect has lapsed.
There is or was a ban in Auckland, specifically. Few mentions online so I suspect it may have expired or been repealed, but it's mentioned in this 2012 Guardian article:
Possibly unpopular opinion, but I don't see why so important to protect "small startups" from regulation in any situation.
If you serve a million users then those million users will be affected by your mistakes and your unethical business decisions, no matter how many people are on your payroll.
If you don't have the resources to comply, why are you serving a million users in the first place?
The answer is just below the surface: most people prefer laws apply only to people not "like them". It's the old "other people are immoral, but my friends and I are a victim of circumstances" pattern.
Just apply harsher standards the bigger the scale. Billion dollar corporations should be subjected to a lot more scrutiny than teenagers in their bedrooms. These two are not equal and must not be treated equally in matters of law.
Most regulators do not charge teenagers in their bedrooms except for the most egregious criminal acts. If you are a teenager operating a website from your bedroom, you functionally do not need to worry about ADA, GDPR, etc.
I get what you're saying but that's only because teenagers in their bedroom are unlikely to get enough attention, not because they don't have enough influence.
It's totally possible for a bedroom-made startup to grow to the point where the lack of GDPR enforcement could be directly harmful to customers, for example. True it's unlike they'd get noticed, but I don't think that's a strong argument here.
I want reasonable widespread application of GDPR, ADA, etc with explicitly carved out safeguards for small operations like this teenager.
In addition to fraudulent pretenses for collection, there are practices which are simply predatory or harrassment.
Numerous sites present various dialogues on every visit (more so if you use incognito mode as a rule, I do), or treat Tor access highly differently from direct access (denying access entirely, raising GDPR blocks, putting various nags in the way, or popping up often-impenetrable CAPTCHA dialogues).
There's the case of sites which mandate javascript use to present any content, even if no interactive elements are used.
There are the repeat nags to use apps and such. Twitter's dialogue offers the options "Switch to the app" and that won't-take-no-for-an-answer-creepy-stalker "Not now". (Disabling JS breaks the site fully, reminding me that I actually want to use whatever Nitter site(s) are not yet rate-limited: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances)
There are buttons and other tools which follow users across the Internet and devices.
There are tools that track and correlate multiple signals, including audio tracking (embedded signals in commercial music and advertising broadcasts), MAC address, device ID, Bluetooth ID, SSID locations, etc.
DuckDuckGo provides counterexamples to several of these, handily illustrating several practices I'd like to see far more widespread:
- There's a no-JS site which works fine in console-mode browsers. I use that for a bash-function CLI search-engine tool (actually, several leveraging DDG's bang searches). Two, actually: https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite and https://duckduckgo.com/html (standard formatting, but HTML-only functionality).
- There's a "no-nag" URL so you can pop up the search page without any prompt to set DDG as your primary browser: https://start.duckduckgo.com/ (This is a particularly elegant solution IMO to the company's need to convert users to defaulting the search engine, and not annoy those who've long since done so.)
- The site Just Works on Tor. There's an Onion address as well: http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/ I've certainly never encountered a CAPTCHA.
(DDG isn't perfect, the recent Tank Man image censorship resulting from the site's major reliance on Bing for Web and Image search being a notable recent issue.)
A major problem with normalising dark patterns is that they become acceptable, people cannot even conceive that they have an alternative, and that as technologies evolve from early-adopter toy (or secret advantage) to mass-public necessity for commerce, business, government, culture, and social essentials, there is simply no alternative but to be subjected to these patterns. Criminalising these, especially after an initial warning or finding (Because Reasons, regulators often seek relatively modest initial remedies, there are critics of this practice, and many, myself included, would strongly appreciate second offences and further to carry much deeper bite).
The trade and exchange in third-party data and information should be fully and completely outlawed where not specificly and directly authorised and necessary for transactional fulfillment.
> This is a particularly elegant solution IMO to the company's need to convert users to defaulting the search engine, and not annoy those who've long since done so.
There is no need for prompt, just a text box below search box should be enough. But the way web uses the dark patterns, it's now considered ok to have such annoyance everywhere.
The distraction of notifications, or "sign up for our email news letter" distractions I'm certainly against. But, the fact of having my time wasted (getting a notification I don't care about) has highlighted other things that waste my time such as
Movies that start with 1-3 minutes of company logos. An animation of "A Scott Free Production", followed by an animated logo of "Bad Robot", followed by yet another animated logo of "20th Century Fox" and all that is then followed by card that says "Scott Free Production of a Bad Robot movie published by 20th Century Fox". I want to reach and and shake the people silly "QUIT WASTING MY TIME!"
The same with both movie trailers and game trailers. I go to see the game trailer and there's 30 seconds to 2 minutes of logos. For games, I want to click the video and see gameplay IMMEDIATELY. I don't want some 5 minute CG movie nor do I want to see the publisher or developer's names. Those are solely
there to stroke their own ego. The user/player/viewer as absolutely no need for it. They aren't respecting my time.
Of course those things have been around forever but the fact that my devices and apps waste my time in so many ways as highlighted other ways my time is also wasted.
I think those things nowadays serve the role of easing you into the film, allow everyone to settle down, finish what they're doing, etc - a lot of films start with something important right away.
And it's better than it used to be, older films used to have a long reel of credits before the film started.
Anyway, services like Netflix should be able to add a skip button for those.
> The same with both movie trailers and game trailers. I go to see the game trailer and there's 30 seconds to 2 minutes of logos.
> They aren't respecting my time.
Imagine going to a movie theather, paying to watch a film, only to be subjected to over 15 minutes of trailers for other movies and advertising for local businesses before what I want to watch finally starts. I don't go there anymore.
I'm a little surprised you didn't mention the production cards that pop up when you start a game. Those are the worst offender; especially the ones that are unskippable or require a separate button press to skip each of the multiple title cards.
Anything other than a single button press to reach the start screen is excessive.
Digging for a specific memory, I realized I might just be angry that my favorite childhood game made me click past a PSA about vandalism between the production logo and start screen.
For other readers: this seems to be an internal google presentation made public to tell engineers to respect users' attention.
I guess as a user of the website it didn't respect my attention enough to make me want to click through the whole thing. I dropped out after twenty or so clicks, having read less and less stuff after a few slides.
>"A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users’ Attention."
>"by Tristan Harris."
>"I’m concerned about how we’re making the world more distracted. And my goal with this presentation is to create a movement at Google to create a new design ethic that aims to minimise distraction and I’d like to get your help."
That is so much better. Slide shows like this are an annoyingly distracting waste of people's time and attention!
Like a simple list of 10 items which is made into ten web pages that you have to click through individually - wasting your time and attention to trick you into viewing more advertising.
Agreed. Ironically, the slideshow format is extremely 'low density', and frustrates my ability to quickly read what they have to say. I didn't get all the way through it either.
It's meant to be clicked through quickly in a live presentation, like a tv show, not the 'book page' style that most people have a harder time with absorbing. It's not a blog article.
Amen. For more on that, see Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint". It's no wonder Jeff Bezos insists on his subordinates bringing 2-3 page length essays, not slides, to decision meetings.
Regarding the first link, which (perhaps ironically) I've only skim-read: much of it seems to be attacking bad slideshows, rather than inherent problems with the format.
A slideshow isn't meant to be read in the absence of a speaker giving a presentation. It exists to support the speaker in their presentation. If the intent is to offer a resource which can act as a substitute for attending a presentation, a slideshow is an inappropriate choice.
A good lecture typically makes effective use of a slideshow. Lectures are mostly non-interactive, but this needs no apology, contrary to what the article seems to imply. Perhaps other kinds of presentations should be more interactive, but I don't see that non-interactivity is always a failing.
Similarly, a good slideshow can make effective use of bullet-points. Bullet-points don't always mean you're skipping over important detail, or that you've failed to properly structure the content.
> The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA
Right. A slideshow is not a substitute for a proper write-up, it's just a presentation aid.
In some contexts you might get away with not doing a formal write-up, but certainly not in a life-and-death context like the one mentioned in the article.
> For serious presentations, it will be useful to replace PowerPoint slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, images together.
I can see that might work well, but I can see this might degrade into just rewriting a technical paper to fit the flow of the presentation. It might make more sense to just say For more detail, see the formal paper. Certainly a slideshow is not a substitute for a proper paper, but even a handout will presumably lose some of what the full paper has to say. If the full information is already there in the paper, why not refer people to it?
Education, for around two thousand years, used to focus around training rhetorical excellence in all students. Relatively recently, it's become more affordable and practical than ever before to supplement rhetoric with written text.
Bullet points and visual aids are crutches that detract from the quality of a speech. However, our culture has this habit of sending adults completely unprepared into high pressure environments armed with what would have been seen as baby level waste-of-time education by any generation before the boomers.
PPTs are water wings for adults who would otherwise drown from the rational terror that they have about public speaking in a professional context. The problem is less related to the format and more related to the notion that it is kind to throw people into the deep end without training them how to swim. It's not a coincidence that most people are terrified of public speaking: it's hard, it's high stakes, and it requires a lot of practice to become comfortable with.
There isn't a fixed 500ms loading time. It advances slides by changing the background image of the central "pic" element. This is the JS to advance the slide:
The reason you see a flicker is because it takes time to load the next image, and until it loads you're going to see the black background. As you mentioned, the preloading images would solve this.
I resorted to holding the up-arrow key to trigger loading of a bunch of slides, then holding down-arrow to get back to where I was, and finally getting a smooth transition experience.
Weird, how does that work? Is the mobile browser simulating the click and then noticing the next image to be loaded? Maybe the js is simple enough to prove that it's safe to do so, but wow.
That was my reaction. Terrible UI with grainy graphics, took a long time to get to the point. Talk about wasting time! I gave up about 20 slides in too.
"Terrible UI", is that a concern for you ? this world should go to shit, that man put himself in a uncomfortable situation to give the world a preview.
All I've heard for the past 12+ years is "engagement". The singular focus on that one word to the exclusion of everything else is astounding to me. As if it is some magic incantation on the part of BizDev (or whatever they're called these days) that instantly transmogrifies users into profits.
At one company I worked at, we had a digital product that was part of a suite of services our company provided. It was useful to our customers but it's clear, if you see it, that they want to get in, get done what they need to do, and get out. It's a tool to help them do their jobs and nothing more.
You'd think that simplicity and efficiency would be celebrated. The number of times I heard "engagement" and "gamification" used about that product from the marketing team, however...
Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears.
I should note that, we didn't make any more money the longer someone spent on that product. There was no advertising model associated with it--it is a per-seat hosted solution. So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing!
I am a weird person. When I used to go to a movie theater, I stayed and watched the credits at the end. There would be some closing music, and maybe a few outtakes. It was always interesting to see how many people it took to make a movie and what they all did. A nice way to unwind and acknowledge everyone who created the movie.
Lately I've been watching The Sopranos on Amazon. As soon as the end credits roll, a "Next Episode" box pops up in the corner and I am in a race against time to click the teeny Cancel button. I think they give me five whole seconds before auto-starting the next episode.
It pisses me off every time! If I were Tony Soprano, I'd be tempted to hit that corner of the screen with a pointed heavy object just to make it stop haunting me: "You really want to watch the next episode right now. You do NOT want to sit quietly and enjoy the end credits and the cool music the showrunner chose."
But then I would have to buy a new monitor, so I restrain myself.
> Lately I've been watching The Sopranos on Amazon. As soon as the end credits roll, a "Next Episode" box pops up in the corner and I am in a race against time to click the teeny Cancel button. I think they give me five whole seconds before auto-starting the next episode.
There should be a global setting to switch Autoplay Off in your settings.
I had an "I feel old" moment stood at the front of my classroom trying to figure out how to turn autoplay off on youtube (shockingly enough, after showing a carefully chosen video to my class I don't want it to start showing videos of Disney's Elsa).
I clicked the gear icon and went through all the settings looking for the autoplay option. Then my TA pointed out the option is on the video itself.
The UX is confusing because all the options there are specific to that one video but autoplay is global. I would have never thought to look there. Now it's right there where some sneaky kindergartener can switch it right back on when my back is turned...
This is one small piece in the feeling that's been growing in me since leaving the tech industry that tech is hostile to me and the best interests of the children I teach.
Turning off autoplay is helpful, but it'd still be nice for it to not shrink the credits to try to entice me to watch something else.
Almost as bad as when I went to the cinema recently and the projector turned off when the end credits started scrolling. Ugh, turns out there was a mid credits scene I missed too.
My understanding of this is that it’s done deliberately to prevent listeners from recording the full track. Made more sense when the radio was _the_ way to listen to new music. Less so now.
There are places in the world where the DJ will literally come on in the middle of the song and play their station ident for the same reason.
> It pisses me off every time! If I were Tony Soprano, I'd be tempted to hit that corner of the screen with a pointed heavy object just to make it stop haunting me: "You really want to watch the next episode right now. You do NOT want to sit quietly and enjoy the end credits and the cool music the showrunner chose."
Sorry that's me. I click Next Episode as soon as possible when binge watching, or exit if it's a movie. Occasionally I watch the credits when I want to know more about the actors/actresses, or music, or script. But only rarely.
I guess you're the minority. Amazon cater to the majority, as they should, although perhaps it should be longer than five secs.
> So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing!
> we didn't make any more money the longer someone spent on that product. There was no advertising model associated with it--it is a per-seat hosted solution.
Are you sure that time spent on product does not affect sales? E. g. is it possible that if people don't spend time with product, they will renew the subscription next year?
> So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing!
Perhaps it is the issue of the marketing department of that organization is that their bonuses are not tied to any performance metrics.
In proper organizations (like Google) marketing director get paid if their marketing efforts give the company more revenue than the company spends on marketing, and fired otherwise.
> Are you sure that time spent on product does not affect sales?
It may have, but not dramatically. The product wasn't what we were known for. Customers came to us for other services that we were known for (and, I should add, this company is very good at what they do) and this digital product sold as a sort-of upsell.
> Perhaps it is the issue of the marketing department of that organization is that their bonuses are not tied to any performance metrics.
I don't know for sure, not having any insight into that part of the business, but knowing that company I would bet you are right.
> E. g. is it possible that if people don't spend time with product, they will renew the subscription next year?
For most tools (and the GP does make it seem to be the case), usage count is roughly correlated with added value, and time/usage to added cost.
So, are you asking if total time spent on it is correlated with added value? Well, maybe. You are just making a very bad question, and may get any random answer. If you are using this as a metric, all the easy ways to increase it add costs, not value.
> Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears.
Considering how hard it is to find decent, non-smart appliances these days, it seems to have fell on deaf ears at LG as well.
In a similar vein, I've discussed with customers why it's not a good idea to slavishly follow conversions, in our case on our hosted corporate careers site product.
If job seekers are not well matched to a job, then we don't want them applying (i.e. a conversion)! That wastes everyone's time and good will. Instead, we want them to leave the process as quickly as possible.
It's not unknown to have one person at the customer banging on about realistic job previews, to discourage unsuitable candidates as soon as possible ("if you take this job, you'll be standing and lifting boxes in the warehouse for 5 hours a day"), while someone else is banging on about why/how the site's conversion rate could be increased.
one could argue that your conversions are not defined well enough. Define conversion as a qualified lead. Or define conversion as a job application that results in a callback. Then you can go back to obsessing over conversions :-) Not enough people push back when a bad KPI is set.
It's a fair point, but really best practice would be to class a conversion as someone who applied for the job, was successful, and then performed at a high level for the next two years.
Not practical for many reasons and hard to convey to someone hunched over their Google analytics dashboard.
There's a point though, where you are telegraphing perfectly good reasons someone would not want to work for you while they are desperate to fill positions even if it means tricking people into working there.
We got to pitch a bunch of top VCs for a (wellness/health) consumer app that we were building and it made me really sick that the only thing that they cared about was engagement. DAU/MAU, time spent in app and growth were the only things that mattered.
The thing that frustrates me about the idea of optimizing for engagement, is that the winning strategy seems to be to make the interface worse. If it's hard to navigate and find things, then people spend more time using the product.
I assume that web developers have some techniques to determine whether people are spending more time on the site because it's legitimately useful and they're getting a lot of value out of it versus blundering around and not finding what they're looking for, but the whole idea of "engagement" seems like it could be summed up as "we don't think the distinction between those two things is important".
> Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It fell on deaf ears.
This is brilliant; too bad your marketing department was apparently run by broken robots.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
LG's business model is to earn a one off payment by selling an appliance. It doesn't earn any incremental payment each time a consumer accesses the appliance.
Facebook and Google have different models. They sell ads each time a consumer engages with their products.
To change the behaviour of people who work at Google and Facebook, first think of a way for them to get paid more if they make the changes you want. Then, get their attention with your message and hope they listen and obey you. If you don't get their attention the first time, try again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
At my previous company the magic word was "consumption" and goal for everyone seem to be drive consumption of our services at any cost. Now you can understand what that would lead to. User preferences and best interest is generally last thing on everyone's mind.
> So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement
Without arguing against that your marketing team was just following industry trends blindly, I would claim it's hard to imagine a product where increased engagement is not a benefit to the business.
Being top-of-mind as a product and a brand is a big advantage, and even with no direct sale, ad revenue or referrals happening from the engagement, you will see increased conversions from word-of-mouth and increased resell/upsell on the product or associated products.
Marketing contributes to decisions about what features to build next, and they use engagement to vindicate their recommendations. They also use engagement to brag about the success of your products and new features within your products when trying to drum up interest in your company's offerings.
Which makes it even more puzzling that marketing would insist on something that burns the company's money and the customer's money with zero (or negative) benefit.
Watching "Social Dilemma" on Netflix (a movie made by Netflix) was quite an irony. Most people "waste" more time on Netflix than all other social platforms combined.
Yet, "Social Dilemma" covered/blamed every company except Netflix :)
A great thing I did couple months ago was to turn off iOS notifications for email and gmail. I don't quite recollect how email went from an asynchronous mode of communication to a near real-time mode of communication where people often respond within minutes of getting email.
Changing my notification settings have reduced a large number of interruptions and I still end up opening the email app a number of times during the day and responding in a timely way. Highly recommend.
It's pretty easy to just force the browser to preload images a few early, which would eliminate all of the variable, ~2-500ms delay between frames. This would increase the impact of this presentation.
function preload(n)
var preloader = $('<img style="display:none;" />');
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Absolutely. I recently switched my bookmark to https://news.ycombinator.com/best and I get much more high-quality links in the list. Now, I read about 60% of the stories. Previously it was more like 10%.
Also, links stay on the page for ~3 days, so I spend much less time scrolling because I already saw almost everything.
Having heard this call for years, I've come to the conclusion that this is the 21st century's "TV rots your brain." We've replaced channel surfing with doom scrolling. TV stations are mostly run by white men, too.
At best, I can say that there's a fundamental human need to stare into space for a while. We could delete all technology tomorrow, and we wouldn't magically be less distracted. At least now, there's a hope of seeing things we care about, instead of what we got in the 80s that was designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Sitting through toilet paper commercials are actually the worst.
I think you’re conflating cultural phenomenon (people like to dissociate by losing themselves in consumption) with biological fact.
Humans 10,000 years ago may have spaced out and daydreamed. But this daydreaming was probably very different in psychological effect from scrolling feeds. The two are not even close to the same
> I've come to the conclusion that this is the 21st century's "TV rots your brain." We've replaced channel surfing with doom scrolling.
The difference with the TV is that TV didn't have individual, high granularity demographic and usage data to conform to its users' most exploitable side that ultimately drives mindless "engagement". TV ratings had coarsely sampled data at household levels and whatever broadcast was what everyone saw.
> I can say that there's a fundamental human need to stare into space for a while. We could delete all technology tomorrow, and we wouldn't magically be less distracted.
You're right that mild distraction is conducive to insight generation and as such can be thought as a need, but not all distraction is equal. Unlike a walk in the nature which has low-key wonder, expansiveness with a degree of indifference, youtube doesn't want you to be too indifferent at the risk of losing "engagement" and is pretty damn opinionated about what will keep you hooked. The latter is more like the mindless obsessive shuffling of zombies towards brains.
In other words, it would be like saying humans always consumed food for pleasure, and equivocating our modern, hyper-palatable industrial food that drives the obesity epidemic with a 14th century invention like kebabs of the Levant.
> The difference with the TV is that TV didn't have individual, high granularity demographic and usage data to conform to its users' most exploitable side that ultimately drives mindless "engagement". TV ratings had coarsely sampled data at household levels and whatever broadcast was what everyone saw.
I agree. I fail to see how what we have now is inherently worse...especially for cultural minorities. Exploiting psychological weakness to keep people's attention goes back a long, long way. That's never going away.
I also find your analogy to be a bit of a straw man. For it to work, there would have to be evidence of mental "obesity" that somehow began with social media and did not exist before. I don't see it, and you'd have to give me more than anecdote to change my own anecdotal views at this point. If you're saying it did exist before, but now we've crossed some line and now it's too much...well, we're back to what our grandparents said about television again.
> I fail to see how what we have now is inherently worse...especially for cultural minorities. Exploiting psychological weakness to keep people's attention goes back a long, long way. That's never going away
The "attack surface", so to speak, is larger with individualized content consumption. With TV at max we have N channels that can broadcast N different viewpoints with the intention to rile M people up, at most in N different ways. Youtube can rile M people up in M different ways. M is orders of magnitude larger than N.
There is an economical model somewhat analogous to this; price discrimination. Charging the absolute highest price every individual consumer would individually pay yields the absolute maximum profit. In contrast, having a visible price tag that makes everyone pay the same price leaves a lot of those profits on the table. In youtube's case, riling everyone up individually with their particularized content maximizes the engagement. Trying to rile groups of people with the same content doesn't yield the same engagement.
> There would have to be evidence of mental "obesity" that somehow began with social media and did not exist before.
You're right, references to information obesity goes back to Baudrillard. That said keep in mind absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence, even if our grandparents were complaining about a similar phenomena it doesn't mean our intuition about it is as inflated nor the phenomenon are in comparable scales. Not only that, credibility of past grievances go both ways; it took a long while to get cigarettes classified properly carcinogenic.
As for hard evidence, we could use non-work screen time as a proxy, which increases especially in younger demographics. It is still not a perfect comparison because different screens have different information densities and user interaction modalities.
As an indirect evidence I would suggest an increase in intensity and multi-valency of culture wars.
Current phase of the internet is at best a decade old, so there is also going to be an availability bias when looking for evidence.
I also couldn't help noticing you working in high profile media companies like Disney and Twitch in the past, I don't think you would assert it wouldn't ever affect your neutrality on this matter.
> As for hard evidence, we could use non-work screen time as a proxy,
To play devil's advocate, screen play time (i.e. video games) has inspired a whole generation of computer engineers to follow this career. I would argue that screen play time is essential to a child's development in the 21st century, and is just as valid as 'outside' play time or 'social' play time. Of course, all things in moderation still applies.
A friend of mine worked at a company that at one point was searching for "that red light feature"— meaning, a feature in their app that would get users to check their phones while they're stopped at a red light.
Thanks, I hate it. I wish everyone would embrace the Humane Tech ethos (https://www.humanetech.com/), but it turns out there's a lot of money in being an asshole.
"Red light feature" is an astonishing term that I'd never heard before.
It could also be called a "Traffic death feature" - what's a feature that is so compelling that it will increase traffic deaths when users can't help but check their phones while driving?
I received a notification from Uber on the weekend. It said something to the effect of "it's a nice day today, why don't you take a ride?" I've never told my phone to fuck off faster.
How many people out there were in the middle of an important task, only to have their phone ask them if they wanted to take a car somewhere for no reason? The collective man-hours of distraction being generated must be staggering; years of work and progress lost every day so that Uber can presumably see a small uptick in engagement.
Makes me wonder what these kind of notifications are really worth. All they do is make me immediately mute the app from ever notifying me again, and leave a bad taste in my mouth. How many people are really seeing this and impulse purchasing an Uber ride somewhere? I suspect close to zero.
I would guess the number of people who have opted-out of the notifications are either not reported, or the aggregate opt-out ratio doesn't make a ding on overall notification conversion rates.
In other words, people don't have a uniform frustration tolerance to irrelevant push notifications, and losing the most irritable segment might be 'worth' it if the majority of the population is still getting them.
An alternative explanation is opt-out burn-out; people might just give up on the possibility of a high signal/noise ratio notification space.
Yeah, I know this is an anecdote but most people in my life just put up with a constant stream of buzzing and pinging. I’m very much in the habit of not allowing any notifications to begin with, especially in my browser, but I’m in a minority I think.
Emails are even worse, I unsubscribe from the vast majority and block the ones I can’t (Hermes are utterly revolting for this noise generation, three non-unsubscribable emails and three texts per delivery!). The pathetic signal to noise ratio of email makes it utterly worthless as a means of communication for me, if it were up to me I’d do away with it altogether!
I remember sitting at a restaurant some time pre-covid, and watching this young couple a few tables over with their phones on the table. Every 1-2 seconds or so, something dinged or buzzed, or the screen lit up. It was like Las Vegas on their phone. Beep beep beep ding ding flash. And like Pavlov's dogs, every time the phones lit up, they interrupted whatever they were doing (talking, eating, whatever), picked up their phones and started playing around with them. I would be an insane basket case after 30 minutes of this, but they somehow managed to get through an entire meal with essentially a casino light and sound show erupting on their phones. How do people's brains manage this without melting down?
For me? Mute + Do Not Disturb mode 24/7. No notifications, no texts, no phone calls, no sounds, period. I use my phone on my own terms, not when some app summons me. I can't imagine my brain surviving any other way.
4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and
should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information.
Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing
purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent
language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for
a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may
result in revocation of your privileges.
Dear god I wish they would, or segregate notifications into channels that can be subscribed to, or require developers to submit a template for each notification[0], or let me match with a regex. Anything. Notifications should strictly be for notifying me about things I asked to be notified about. Not spam. It seems sort sighted for Apple to let their notification system become a spam tube, it just devalues their platform.
I enabled screentime/parental controls on my iPhone and gave control of the passcode to my wife.
At first I could not wrangle it to block the things I wanted (was this an intentional move by Apple or just poor design?). What I ultimately settled for was disabling downloads of new apps, then deleting every single social media app, game, web browser, and other distraction from my phone.
Yes, that is right, my iPhone has no web browser capability (why not just buy a dumb phone? Because I often use services like maps, music, etc).
Is the problem me? Do I just not have self control? No - I decided its not. These products were carefully designed around the metric of "engagement" - whereas I had no choice over my design.
I also blocked other distractions in my desktop / work area via the hosts file. I would like to do it at the router level but use of VPN makes this impossible, unfortunately.
This is what it has come to, which...is ridiculous, in my opinion.
The SF product designers have the power to influence billions, but there are no consequences. So long as there are no consequences, we'll keep asking questions and merely propising these hypothetical limiters to prevent the world from being distracted.
I have a feeling that the mechanisms of addiction are tied to evolved human instinct, and we will have to essentially fight back against our own genes to have any chance at succeeding. I like to view the author's suggestions as that being a part of that fight.
The fact that we were directly responsible for wiping out tens of thousands of species of life while remaining unaware of the destruction we wrought thousands of years ago should indicate that some kind of a limiter against instinctual human reward mechanisms is needed, technological or otherwise. We are going to eat ourselves.
They don't have any power in this area. Those big companies hire industrial psychologists and neuroscientists to calculate precisely how often notifications should be issued to give you that little squirt of dopamine and be hooked. The notifications are not an accident, they are by design.
This is great and all of it true, but the needs of these companies are counter to the goals presented here.
Ad funded products need to steal time and attention to be profitable. Apple might be in a position to do something, but Facebook, Twitter, and Google depend on ad revenue. Even subscription companies like Netflix are hyper focused on engagement.
I was daydreaming yesterday about a national mandate to shut down social media on the first of every month. (Phone calls and texting are okay, but absolutely nothing else.) Something like that will never happen, but I think the world would collectively realize what this stuff is doing to us if we had to step away.
I agree with your overall point, but I believe that this could (and hopefully will) change without any top-down mandate. I think we just need a minority group of people who are unbreakable in their intolerance of ad-funded services, much like RMS and the first FOSS developers were intolerant of running any type of proprietary software.
It dawned on me with the whole WhatsApp thing of fucking around with the privacy policy: I didn't mind using it before, but that was the final nail in the coffin. I uninstalled it and I told my friends/family that whoever wanted to reach me could do with Matrix, phone or plain email. I also would gladly help set an account for them on my communick group plan. Of course not all of them did, but the ones who did realized that it was not the end of the world to use a new app and were glad to be able to say that they were not enslaved to whatever Facebook had to offer. Some of these friends even signed up for their own plan, so they could invite more people on their own, etc...
Yeah to be honest this feels like a Googler trying to deal with their guilty conscience by starting a "movement" that fundamentally cannot go anywhere because it runs entirely counter to the economic incentives that animate ad tech companies.
“Add a speed bump to the way you work”. I like that a lot. People work better when they pause, and I think one way to do that is being intentional. In fact, it’s not about getting to a place fastest at the cost of leaving it just as fast.
A project I’ve been working on is amna. Imagine, before you open your browser, you need to state your task. Just a little bit of friction to slow you down from jumping mindlessly and overwhelming yourself. Feel free to give it a try:
Interesting idea. I had a similar idea for HN comments. (@dang: take note.) Impose a delay from the point when a person first makes an HTTP request for a thread, i.e., first reads a thread, before they are allowed to comment in it. This would prevent "real-time" back and forth but it would also prevent knee-jerk comments. Before commenting, a reader would have time to digest the OP and the comments and think about them. A cool-off period. This might produce better comments. It would also prevent people from just jumping into threads that have activity to post mindless commments. It would provide an incentive to dig deeper into HN than only the first page. Digging depper into HN past the front page would give the reader more potential threads she could comment in, should they become active discussions. HN already has a limit on how fast people can comment, i.e., number of comments in a given period.
Below is a short script that downloads and makes a PDF from the image files. No browser required.
The script uses a feature of HTTP/1.1 called pipelining; proponents of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 want people to believe it has problems because it does not fit their commercialised web business model.
As demonstrated by the script below, it has no problems.
It's a feature that simply does not suit the online ad industry-funded business model with its gigantic corporate browser, bloated conglomeration web pages and incessant data collection.
Here, only 2 TCP connections are used to retrieve 141 images.
Most servers are less restrictive and allow more than 100 requests per TCP connection.
Pipelining works great. Much more efficient than browsers which open hundreds of connections.
IMHO.
(export Connection=keep-alive
x1=http://www.minimizedistraction.com/img/vrg_google_doc_final_vrs03-
x2(){ seq -f "$x1%g.jpg" $1 $2;};
x3(){ yy025|nc -vvn 173.236.175.199 80;};
x2 1 100|x3;
x2 101 200|x3;
)|exec yy056|exec od -An -tx1 -vw99999|exec tr -d '\40'|exec sed 's/ffd9ffd8/ffd9\
ffd8/g'|exec sed -n /ffd8/p|exec split -l1;
for x in x??;do xxd -p -r < $x > $x.jpg;rm $x;done;
convert x??.jpg 1.pdf 2>/dev/null;rm x??.jpg
ls -l ./1.pdf
The presentation itself is a huge distraction. I understand the good intention behind it. but does it really neccessary
to use 137 pages to illustrate a very simple issue? I think
5 pages is more than enough to explain it clearly. I read
this minimize distraction slides have been viewed half millions time already, if the maker use the slides carefully, wouldn't it save a millions of hours user's time.
And life?
A simple issue? This isn't a simple issue. I challenge you to cover it in 5 pages.
And spending a time on something that could potentially save everyone tons of time, and improve lives? That's exactly what people should be spending their time on. All of us.
It's funny how almost all the comments are about technical aspects of the presentation or how he said it, and not what he said.
He's right, FWIW. How many times have I had to yell "Hel-LO!" at some bozo staring at his phone & not watching where he's walking?
However, how would you regulate this? If you created a metric of "attention-sucking" and set a legal limit on it, the web giants would immediately game it.
Assuming it's possible to fix this through government action, it'd probably be by enforcing education that teaches values and mindful decision-making. Right now I think what we get is a collective mindset of enduring education, enduring the workday, and then distracting ourselves into oblivion. The things that suck our attention are the best pastimes because we can do them morning to night and never stop to deal with how sucky life and being self-aware are!
I don't think you can regulate how engagement is turned into dollars. But that engagement is addictive, and we are weak to it. So can it really be solved?
Let's contrast two addictive and harmful phenomena in order to see what's controlled them and what hasn't:
1) Cigarette smoking: In the last 50 years, the % of adults who smoke has fallen dramatically. WIN.
2) Slot machines: I don't have revenue numbers, but I'd be surprised if the $$ figures have fallen by anything like smoking's. LOSS.
Internet addiction (and smartphone addiction) IS harmful. If you disagree with that, you can probably stop reading.
If you're still here, we can agree it would be very good to decrease addiction, even if it'll never disappear entirely. How?
For smartphone addiction, we can publish a few articles like OPs, or make fun of addicts, but it'll probably turn out like slot machines. The addicts don't care what we think of them.
For smoking: cigarettes were never actually outlawed -- adults can still buy them. So what worked and how could it be replicated?
1) Massive public pressure and education, so smoking became uncool. This has barely started on smartphone addiction, so bring it on.
2) Outlawing smoking in all public places. Covered below.
3) Restricting for youths. Also covered below.
4) Taxes: a pack of cigarettes is massively taxed.
5) Lawsuits, like the state attorneys general filed against the tobacco companies.
Now, for public places: it's possible that certain apps could be rated by some agency, public or private, as "addictive" or "distracting." The app makers would fight it like hell, but too bad. The literature on how they're addictive is pretty voluminous now.
Once we have a legal designation of Instagram or TikTok as "addictive" the way is open for indoor spots or schools to prohibit them, make them illegal to use while driving, or for the app makers to restrict them for children.
Would this work on its own? Pretty imperfectly, but the effect of social apps being rated "addictive" even if some are not rated yet, combined with the education program, would be large.
I haven't covered (4) and (5) yet, but this posting is already pretty long!
Aren't you using a somewhat circular definition? The trick is to differentiate smartphone usage from addiction, which is determined by whether it's harmful.
I don't think it's circular. There are articles (I can't point to them now, sorry) about the effect on the brain of intermittent rewards, and how that IS addiction.
Although certainly not identical to that of heroin, which is well-studied.
So no, I don't agree that "the trick is to differentiate smartphone usage from addiction." It's to define a (probably) new type of addiction.
Good question. "Sugar addiction" has some serious scientific attention [1].
If "gambling addiction" is a real thing (just search the web for it), then "social media addiction" can be, too. Casinos don't let kids under 18 gamble.
I just recently learned this, but in Taiwan it's a fineable offense to use your cellphone while walking on the street. It doesn't seem to be widely enforced, but I was very surprised that it's on the books at least.
Everyone is doing it. At the pub after work. They take turns being right about politics, being right about sports, being right about their boss, being right about the state of society and Susan the receptionist. They're spot-on right about her.
And if they skip the pub, they take out their phones and go being right online on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Hacker News.
not the particular year but rather the age; that there's been much development and thought on the topic since then, that particular presentation slide deck referenced multiple times since then as work that inspired things that came etc. Don't want to keep reverting to having the discussions all over again about topics that have been expanded on and discussed in threads afterwards
Ouch! Nothing changed and it got worse, dare I say. He mentions a point, I have had for years, and that is, that these 25-35 year old nerds from the Bay area define too much of out every day's culture.
Just look what happened to HTML: once a document system, manageable by everyone, now a more and more complex app system, dare I say WASM, etc.?
This presentation is from 2013. It's a historical artifact that helped kick off the movement to fight distraction in its early days, not the state of the art thinking of the current day.
Obviously, a lot of the concerns it expresses are still very relevant.
What is the state of thinking currently? What's changed? The presentation was created eight years ago and leaked three years ago, but it has never appeared on HN before. What progress has been made?
Oh, a notification that tells me a distracting device has been distracting me for too long, and that I should take a break. That's effectively nothing: it hasn't challenged the attention model itself. It's like if a casino had scantily-clad women wandering the floor offering men at the slot machines a free drink. They aren't doing that to help the gentlemen, they are just adjusting the incentives.
For how long are we going to moan and groan about companies doing this "to us"? Come on people, we're not helpless. We're far more powerful than the tech companies. I know all their tricks and literally wrote the book on how they get you "Hooked." These tactics are good, but they're not THAT good. See this article if you want to "hack back": https://www.nirandfar.com/distractions
I wouldn't hold out for the tech titans to stop exploiting us for our attention. I think we each need to be aware of how we're being influenced and protect ourselves.
Realizing this is difficult for many, I am building a tool to help people combat the influence of social media and online advertising. We'll soon be beta testing. If anyone is interested, there is more information here: https://becomepeerless.com/
JTN, this was actually what Medium led with when they originally started* (minimizing distractions) to clear all the rubbish out of sight when you are reading a single article, and not have other content & CTA's competing for your attention.
Of course, it turned out that alone doesn't imply you actually respect your users' attention, as we saw what Medium turned into.
Make junk mail and spam e-mail illegal to start with.
Then start doing something about regulating advertising.
In an ideal world intrusive advertising would be banned and we'd have to go looking for ads to find them instead of them constantly demanding that we pay attention to them.
But that'd entirely blow up Google's whole business model.
> Make junk mail and spam e-mail illegal to start with.
CAN-SPAM[0] does exactly that for US businesses. Any email from a US business that is for advertisement or otherwise promotional (as distinct from transactional[1]) then it:
* Must not have false or misleading from/to/reply-to
* Must not have a deceptive subject
* Must be labeled an ad
* Must include a valid physical postal address
* Must have a clear and conspicuous[2] way to opt-out
* Must have a working opt-out process within 10 business days of the user opting-out
* Must follow all these rules, even if the business contracts out their email marketing
Obviously, fly-by-night businesses and scams aren't going to follow these rules, but by-and-large all legitimate businesses do because each individual email that violates this rule can incur a $40,000+ fine
The FTC has a site[3] for reporting fraud violations, and CAN-SPAM violations fall under the "something else" category in the generic fraud violation report form according to the FTC's FAQ[4]
I remember when the CAN-SPAM act was in Congress. All of us who were following the issue looked at it and said, "this just legitimizes spam, puts a nice picket fence around it, and make sure that any company that wants to spam you knows exactly where the boundaries are so they can do so with impunity". As we expected, it didn't reduce spam at all, but now we have and industry and entire companies dedicated to mass unsolicited email. But they aren't breaking any laws.
I rarely get any mail from legitimate companies that I'm not genuinely interested in, because if I ever end up on their list because I signed up or bought something, I just click the unsubscribe link in the email, and then I stop getting them.
If you get a bunch of mail you don't want, but don't click unaubscribe, you shouldn't be surprised when they keep aending you mail.
There are few exceptions where a legit business will continue to mail you after unsubscribing.
All that said, it did take a few months of diligently clicking unsubscribe on every promotional email I got to actually clean up my inbox, but since then it's been very smooth sailing.
CAN-SPAM is a law. If you violate it, you are penalized by the legal code. That's fulfills my definition of "illegal", but clearly not yours. Mind sharing your definition so we're on the same page?
CAN-SPAM does not make spam (unsolicited email) illegal, it simply sets parameters for what's allowed and not. That's why, back in the day, we called it the "yes companies CAN go ahead and SPAM everyone" law, playing on the double meaning of 'can'.
Don't send any marketing e-mail to anyone. Everyone is opted-out immediately and permanently. End the right that businesses think they have to endlessly distract people.
Due to dark patterns, I'd prefer to have it all banned. If you give corporations any kind of loophole they have shown that they're bad actors and will exploit it.
Junk e-mail is not an issue at all (at least in GMail, not sure about other providers): they go by default into "Promotions" folder (not visible by default), and it's not hard to go to that folder once a day to click "report spam" on those which are not important, and that's enough for train Google classifier to send them to spam next time.
Unfortunately then you and everyone you email are sucked into google's ecosystem. I've never had great success when self-hosting email to filter out the junk mail anywhere nearly as successful as google can.
This! I moved to duckduckgo, it also has some very nice features calculating weight/length conversions and time shifts. It's super clean. Type in "Jupyter notebook keyboard shortcuts" and it just gives you the table. It's wonderful. If google would still be that clean and gave me features that I need, I would return. But, 90% of my searches are now with a competitor.
hot damn, just try "tmux cheat sheet" and it's nice to see the result. I'll try it for a few more weeks but DDG seems to not have the "tournament widget" at the moment (as in searching for copa america or wimbledon will show recent results and future matches)
This presentation is wonderful for its PR value "people here care" but naïve bordering on malicious in its approach and understanding of Google's business.
11 years ago PG called the iPad the "hip flask" of the internet (1) and it's 10x worse today than it was then.
The incentives of every major ad-supported tech platform are the same - maximize engagement to maximize profit.
Every dollar of profit, every promotion, every individual incentive is tied to that metric outside of some lip-service like this to keep HRs job manageable.
If you don't like it, quit and work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement.
Your comments make no sense to me in relation to Google. Google of all companies seems to follow this rule of no distractions. which of their apps/services does anything to distract and waste your time? At least for me gmail, photos, docs, Android, maps, are all good stewards of not distracting me.
Compare to Twitter that's always trying to get me to follow people they want me to follow ans giving me no way to opt out of types of tweets I don't care about like "so-and-so liked:"
Same with Facebook. My feed is full of stuff I don't care about like "so-and-so commented:"
Instagram is the worst in that sometime in the last 12 months my feed switched from only posts by my friends to just th newest posts by my friends followed by Instagram shovelling popular crap at me in an attept to get me waste more time on the app
Other apps like Uber, Lyft send me notification ads I can't opt out of except to turn off all notifications at an OS level.
Dating apps like Tinder waste my time everyday sending me a notification to "Plese Use the app today". I can't turn that off and turning off notifications at an OS level effective makes the app useless.
The only Google property that might arguably be a distraction would be YouTube with it's ads but unlike all the other services YouTube actually provides a "pay for no ads" option which lots of HNers wish other services provided
AFAICT this presentation or at least its ideal has been upheld by Google
I don't really understand how YouTube distracts people, or maybe my viewing habits are just weird. I go to YouTube to watch exactly what I want to - usually either a livestream or a VOD from the handful of streamers that I follow - and then I leave. That's it.
Maybe this is easy for me because my watch history is already so tailored that all the videos YouTube throws at me are things I've already seen (and decided to watch/not watch).
Not optimizing for profit is a very privileged position to be in.
Are people with poor backgrounds supposed to think that selling some ads is worse than having your family suffer? I can make a third as much and maybe do something better for society, but what happens then if the industry collapses?
I'm not coding killer drones. I'm working for an ad company.
Oh I agree that there are companies selling pickaxes and not doing business realm of Facebook and Google (if we are sticking to the subject of ads). However, hopefully anecdotally, just go take a look a metrics and sentiments from tech employees on Blind.
If Google is paying more than Twilio, there will be droves of people grinding to get in.
> work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected from engagement.
Reddit is a YC company. Amplitude is a YC company. Segment. Mixpanel. Optimizely. The list goes on. All of these companies in some way benefit from maximizing "engagement". I wonder if PG has a smart phone now.
If iPad is the hip flask, the smartphone is the needle and TikTok the heroin.
I sometimes wish I had gone without the internet the past 10 years. Emotionally I can no longer quite feel it due to many small increments of change, but intellectually I know the culture shock would be massive today.
So much activity is generated and has converged on so few platforms, most of it passive consumption. Communication is quick and fleeting, the feeds reign. The search engines full of subtle forms of (blog)spam I'm increasingly having trouble identifying. No distinction between off- and online anymore. (There's always exceptions)
The knowledge of who does what when is centralized in black box institutions with massive conflict of interest to reveal anything about it, so nobody outside really knows what's going on. All we can see are the shadows on the wall.
Business is failing to self-align with (what I and apparently this Googler think are) civic/enlightenment values and societies were hit by this like a truck out of nowhere and they're still playing catch-up, trying to make sense of it.
And meanwhile so many brains will be rewired.. We haven't seen the end of whatever this is yet.
BTW check out this comment saying this specific presentation was a leak, not a PR move: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764710 (doesn't preclude other posturing around this issue of course)
At the dawn of my career I made myself two commitments:
1. Only projects/companies you enjoy
2. Only projects/companies where users are the customers
So far so good. It’s amazing the cool stuff you can build when engagement-at-all-cost is the opposite of your goal. When the goal is “Provide so much value users are beyond delighted to pay”.
B2B companies are an obvious example. Find expensive problem, solve it, add sales team. Iterate.
DDOG comes to mind as a recent very successful example. Salesforce as well. AWS falls into this category. As does Twilio. Huge huge space :)
Personally I like working on B2C SaaS. That path is harder.
B2C usually takes the shape of a freemium model. Strava is a good example here, as is Robinhood. Uber and Lyft are here also.
There’s also the indie/freelance market that sits between B2B and B2C – consumers who think of themselves as a business.
Examples here include ConvetKit, the Adobe suite, Quickbooks, Shopify, Teachable, etc. Again you’re charging users for value provided, based on the revenue they can generate using your platform.
I used to work for an EdTech company, that was nice. We had almost a gym membership model where we wanted you to use the app as little as possible to increase margins. Currently working with a health care startup and that’s taking off like a rocket.
Honestly a lot of this is now just being done by Apple eg. bundling notifications, setting different modes like work mode on the new iOS without distractions, one app at a time this has always been the case on the iOS mainly ignoring iPad.
I would never camp on HN, hoping for tasty feed. Never.
That said, FOMO is a very odd emotion. I can relate to it in the past but I increasingly find I would prefer less things not more, so I want more MO not fear it.
Would this had ever existed if Apple did not start to protrct users fr the same problems?
Apple does not live from exploiting data as much as Google.
There is a lot of truth in all this. But there is even more marketing. Google is a corporation, and if Apple is doing something about it it's not bc they are good. It is bc they do not care about exploiting data as much. Because they are competing.
This proposal would have never existed without competition.
Started great, but then veered off into attacking the identity of the purported perpetrators. Might be cool at a conference, but in the real world you're losing lots of people.
What specifically is the objection? The companies mentioned are the key players, the people that run them determined, and still influence, the product direction. Why shouldn't that be part of the discussion?
Ironically this slide show wastes my time and attention by forcing me to click through it rather than simply presenting all the slides on one page. I also can't download it as a pdf to read later.
Being made to nibble little bites of text one at a time is a distraction. Images depicting clumsy or irrelevant metaphors of easily understood things are a distraction.
I kind of like it. No complex UI showing forward/back, how many slides deep you are, etc. Just the slides themselves.
It reminds me of "minimal" UIs in video games that remove health bars, stats, etc. so that the content is front and center. Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, etc.
Very nice document, speaks from my heart. But the document's format sucks! I do not even get an address in the addressbar in Vivaldi. I would love to download this as PDF or in any other presentation format, but it seems to be impossible, without going through the code.
I don't see how calling out the demographics of the designers making the decisions has anything to do with the larger implications of societal impact. There are terrible things done by people of every demographic to millions of people, as well as great things. It's also less and less true (tho probably more so in 2013 when this was created), yet the problems still exist because the incentives are there (the real issue).
Why shouldn't that be part of the discussion? The actions of a few people with a certain common worldview having an impact on billions of peoples and the effects of that worldview ought to be examined, what's the objection to that?
> the problems still exist because the incentives are there
Yes, and who determines the incentives and provides the rewards?
It’s worthwhile to note the impact that few people have, but I don’t see how calling out demographics has any impact on YouTube video recommendations as a design pattern. Are we to believe a team of elderly Pacific Islander females wouldn’t make such choices, when the high level business goal is to retain people’s attention for as long as possible?
The incentives and rewards are provided by the market in the form of capital returns on clicks and viewership… globally across all demographics.
> Are we to believe a team of elderly Pacific Islander females wouldn’t make such choices, when the high level business goal is to retain people’s attention for as long as possible?
The business goals were defined by the people in question. Your hypothetical group of Polynesian women might not even entertain that goal. The people who started Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon all had a common worldview which informed the goals they set. The attention economy model is just an expression of that.
> The incentives and rewards are provided by the market in the form of capital returns on clicks and viewership… globally across all demographics.
That particular formulation is part of the neoliberal economic consensus. It has nothing to do with how a group of people with no particular fealty to that world view would act.
I wish. I feel like this is the epitome of a specific type of slide-based presentation. This information could be covered in a single page of text, but ironically no one has the attention span to actually read... so instead we get low-density presentations with memes and cliches.
Presentations like these assume people are dumb animals not being able to control their lives. They need to artificially constrained to help them live. Saying bluntly, they need a nanny.
I'm an active user or Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and all of them. I turned off GMail notifications for non-important mails. I unsubscribe/report spam promotional e-mail. YouTube autoplay is off (simply because the recommender is not good enough, but I'd happily turned them on otherwise). I unsubscribed from junk groups on Facebook, but the connections on Facebook is very important since I can't meet with most of my friends in person. My Twitter notifications are off, and I do mute often, but the remaining Twitter suggestions are quite interesting. Almost all notifications are off on my phone, but remaining are very helpful. And so on.
The largest distraction in my life is a chat app which is used by my employer. But this is not service provider/product problem: it's company decision to use that application instead of e-mail. Other chat apps I'm used for communication with my friends are not distracting.
The suggestions by the presentation author is irrational: let's stop business growth assuming it will make people more happy. This is not how the world works: if a company start making less efficient product, it will die, and not because of ads revenue, but simply because users will leave for someone who knows how to retain attention.
That guy Tristan Harris who did the presentation is morally dishonest person: he wants to his cake and eat it. He got his millions from Google, and then decided to play good guy by virtue signalling with this presentation and by playing in Social Dilemma: working against the same companies which made him wealthy enough to not worry about money for the rest of his life.
> That guy Tristan Harris who did the presentation is morally dishonest person: he wants to his cake and eat it. He got his millions from Google, and then decided to play good guy by virtue signalling with this presentation and by playing in Social Dilemma: working against the same companies which made him wealthy enough to not worry about money for the rest of his life.
This is like saying that no one is ever allowed to change their mind, and also that the person's point is wrong because they benefited by the very thing they are criticizing? That's not a logical argument, that's a straight-up ad hominem--character assassination, to be honest--and a complete distraction.
> Presentations like these assume people are dumb animals not being able to control their lives
You're vastly underestimating the potential to exploit human nature. Just by being here ranting like this shows that the topic bypassed your rational executive function and fired up your sympathetic nervous system.
> You're vastly underestimating the potential to exploit human nature.
Human nature were exploited for thousand years, and humans are still doing fine. I didn't see strong arguments why current megacorp mind control is worse than usual.
> Just by being here ranting like this shows that the topic bypassed your rational executive function and fired up your sympathetic nervous system.
I didn't get it. Are you stating that commenting here is irrational? Or that my arguments are irrational?
"Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems." - Stewardship of global collective behavior https://www.pnas.org/content/118/27/e2025764118 [emphasis added]
> Are you stating that commenting here is irrational? Or that my arguments are irrational?
Neither. Just that your attention is here, not on your work, your family, your hobbies, or literally anything else that deserves your attention.
Just for context, and before people start accusing Google of hypocrisy or anything -- these slides never represented an official (or unofficial) Google position or anything. They're not PR. They're just a single employee's opinion in slideshow form, an opinion he was trying to build support for internally.
Whether you think it made any kind of impact is a fun thought question though.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/10/17333574/google-android-p...