Comment by ceejayoz
1 month ago
It seems likely that'd result in even worse suggestions becoming the norm as people adopt the third-party that gives the quick dopamine rush. It's like suggesting tastier heroin to fix drug addiction.
1 month ago
It seems likely that'd result in even worse suggestions becoming the norm as people adopt the third-party that gives the quick dopamine rush. It's like suggesting tastier heroin to fix drug addiction.
There's a difference between addictiveness and enjoyment, and definitely between addictiveness and satisfaction.
While the thing that gives you quick dopamine might win in the very short term, you can still step back and recognize when it's not satisfying in the long term and you're not even enjoying it that much.
And people aren't stupid. Junk food exists, yet lots of people choose to eat more wholesome food as the majority of their diet.
The problem with instagram or youtube is that you can't separate the good from the bad.
It's like if every time you went to store Y to buy milk, you would be exposed to highly manipulative marketing trying to get you to buy junk food. You would probably want to go to a different store instead.
What I'm suggesting is the possibilities of different stores, with different philosophies and standards, so that people can choose where they go. Corner stores (where almost everything is junk food) exist, yet people still choose to go to real supermarkets.
> It's like if every time you went to store Y to buy milk, you would be exposed to highly manipulative marketing trying to get you to buy junk food.
But that's very much the norm at supermarkets?
Parent poster has some… interesting and popular but entirely false views on neuroscience. Specifically, an extremely outdated view on concepts like the role of dopamine and dopaminergic neuronal populations in human cognition. Rather than an understanding based on science and the idea that incentice salience and valence is modulated by such populations, he is attributing pleasure and enjoyment to them because of a meme.
Certainly not. People don’t want the slop they push, the anxiety provoking, salacious, clickbaity spam that it has devolved into. Anybody that used YouTube before the last few years can tell you the difference is pretty major. This is not content people want, it’s content that maximizes clicks and ad sales.
People don't want to want it. But it's not obvious that merely allowing a choice of recommendation algorithms would allow people to escape the slop. Isn't anyone strong enough to choose a less addictive algorithm necessarily strong enough to not scroll Instagram for hours in the first place?
>Isn't anyone strong enough to choose a less addictive algorithm necessarily strong enough to not scroll Instagram for hours in the first place?
Absolutely not. It's much easier to make a one-time switch than to be continuously resisting temptation. Changing the things in your environment is an important tool to break bad habits. The book "Atomic Habits" talks about this at length.
I mean, the court case is about these platforms being addictive to kids, so if they said "accounts for users under X years have the algo and time caps delegated to their parents' account by default" it'd go along way to negate what they're being accused of.
They've already built all the tools they need around this at the moment, it's just they give them to advertisers rather than end-users.
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> People don’t want the slop they push…
That's also true for heroin. Plenty of people really want to break the addiction.
The slop exists because people are attracted to it.
Heroin is a different business model than advertising. Respectfully, you are wrong.
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