[HN Gopher] A call to minimize distraction and respect users' at...
___________________________________________________________________
A call to minimize distraction and respect users' attention (2013)
Author : cratermoon
Score : 334 points
Date : 2021-07-07 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.minimizedistraction.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.minimizedistraction.com)
| teawrecks wrote:
| I honestly can't tell if this is a joke. It's got some good
| ideas, but the way it's presented violates all of their
| suggestions.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I know right? "Let users know how long of a commitment they're
| making" and then not one progress bar or slide counter like
| 1/23,085 .
| [deleted]
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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).
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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?
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > 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.
| aresant wrote:
| This presentation is wonderful for its PR value "people here
| care" but naive 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.
|
| Full stop.
|
| (1) http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
| tomaskafka wrote:
| This. In a long term, company will never do anything against
| incentives their business model sets up.
|
| Google is the ad company. Don't work for ad conpany.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| Tell that to the many SF tech workers optimizing for profit.
| Swizec wrote:
| I am an SF tech worker. Lots of companies here selling
| pickaxes.
|
| Twilio, for example, doesn't need engagement. Last I heard
| they were swimming in money.
| tolbish wrote:
| But then if I don't work for Google, how can I write a blog
| post patting myself on the back for finally having the guts
| to leave Google?
| bluGill wrote:
| Someday I need to write a blog post patting myself on the
| back for never having worked for Google.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > 11 years ago PG
|
| ...
|
| > 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.
| asiachick wrote:
| 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
| cratermoon wrote:
| Youtube?
| [deleted]
| Swizec wrote:
| 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".
|
| Feels nice to be aligned
| zarkov99 wrote:
| I like your way of thinking. What companies do you think fit
| that goal?
| Swizec wrote:
| 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.
| RGamma wrote:
| 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)
| musicale wrote:
| 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.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| > 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.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| > That's not a logical argument, that's a straight-up ad
| hominem and a complete distraction
|
| That was just a remark, not a substantiation of the arguments
| above. I'm sorry, I mixed it up.
|
| > This is like saying that no one is ever allowed to change
| their mind
|
| Everyone is allowed to change their mind, but it is helpful
| to know why and how they did change their mind.
| [deleted]
| cratermoon wrote:
| > 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.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| > 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?
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Human nature were exploited for thousand years
|
| "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.
| xk7 wrote:
| Trite cliches over stock photos, is this parody?
| bingidingi wrote:
| 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.
| lamontcg wrote:
| 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.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| 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.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| 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.
| Bjartr wrote:
| > 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]
|
| [0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-
| center/guidance/can...
|
| [1] i.e. it's not to inform you a something happened in the
| app/site e.g. you have a notification or some action you
| initiated has completed
|
| [2] in practice, a link with text "Unsubscribe" at the bottom
| of the email is sufficient.
|
| [3] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
|
| [4] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/faq/faq-search/spam
| lamontcg wrote:
| > CAN-SPAM[0] does exactly that for US businesses.
|
| No, I said make it illegal, and I meant exactly that.
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| 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.
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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?
| superjan wrote:
| Hey Google, if you're still into this, how about disabling
| autosuggest and autoplay for anyone on youtube?
| polynomial wrote:
| 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.
|
| [*the year before this presentation, actually]
| charleshan wrote:
| PDF version of the slides:
|
| https://www.slideshare.net/paulsmarsden/google-deck-on-digit...
| SebastianKra wrote:
| Thanks. Could you upload it for people without a LinkedIn
| account?
| [deleted]
| cmehdy wrote:
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| 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.
| bqui wrote:
| "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.
| ssivark wrote:
| And it broke the back button! There seems to be no way to go
| back a slide if you forwarded by tapping accidentally!!!
| david_allison wrote:
| The left arrow key does this
| perihelions wrote:
| If anyone wants the plain text transcription of the slides,
| this site appears to have that:
|
| https://digitalwellbeing.org/googles-internal-digital-wellbe...
|
| > _" 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."_
| musicale wrote:
| 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.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I'm afraid the same happened for me. I just couldn't get to the
| end. It was, uh, distracting me.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| 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.
| mountainb wrote:
| It's a great format for reaching functional illiterates,
| which accurately describes huge portions of the white collar
| workforce.
| novok wrote:
| 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.
| epivosism wrote:
| The enforced ~500ms loading time between slides is a killer.
| Why not preload and display them immediately?
| anonydsfsfs wrote:
| 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:
| function increment(){ if(imgNum < 141){
| imgNum++; }else{ imgNum = 1; }
| url = "url('img/vrg_google_doc_final_vrs03-"+imgNum+".jpg')";
| document.getElementById('pic').style.backgroundImage=url;
| }
|
| 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.
| waterhouse wrote:
| 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.
| emaro wrote:
| On mobile, the slides switched instantly. On Firefox Desktop
| it's like from hell.
| epivosism wrote:
| 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.
| leereeves wrote:
| For me, using Firefox on a Mac, the slides also switched
| instantly.
| neogodless wrote:
| On Firefox for Windows 10 - instant slide transitions.
|
| Ryzen 7 2700X, 32GB, 300/300 mbps connection.
| [deleted]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
| iseethroughbs wrote:
| It's easy to be right. But to be right is not the same as being
| useful.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "Easy to be right"?? Good to know. But why isn't everyone
| doing it, then?
|
| Maybe _you_ have a useful idea on regulating attention-
| sucking? Please share.
| neogodless wrote:
| There's too much to type on a phone but...
|
| 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?
| SimeVidas wrote:
| Is the presentation un-scrollable just for me?
| andygcook wrote:
| I was surprised to see this is an internal Google presentation.
|
| FYI the way to advance it on mobile is to click the slides. It
| took me a few seconds to figure that out.
| jeffkeen wrote:
| 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.
| musicale wrote:
| "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?
| zmix wrote:
| 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.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Go back to the website and append in the address bar "/img/"
| without the quote marks on the end and boom you get a full list
| of slide. Enjoy.
|
| Very easy to find since it only took 5 sec to load up the
| console and bam it is right there.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I generated a PDF using img2pdf. It's 4.8MB.
| dorkwood wrote:
| 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.
| mindwok wrote:
| 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.
| acituan wrote:
| 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.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| 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!
| SantalBlush wrote:
| They're not impulse purchasing a ride, but you can bet they
| will be thinking of Uber when the time comes that they _do_
| need a ride.
| caturopath wrote:
| It's galling that using notifications for ads is allowed by the
| marketplaces.
| rdiddly wrote:
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| Endless nitpicking turns everything into infighting and makes
| everything suck. Can we have a conversation about substance at
| some point?
| IlliOnato wrote:
| I had exactly the same thought.
|
| But perhaps the author wanted to drive the point home :-)
| neolog wrote:
| It's a slide deck from a presentation, not an essay.
| Andrex wrote:
| It seems like this is a leaked internal presentation from
| Google, not meant for public consumption.
|
| That's what I take away from "Google Confidential and
| Proprietary" in the bottom right.
|
| Some more context over what this is and who wrote it would be
| immensely valuable.
|
| Edit- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764579
| cratermoon wrote:
| Some additional context previously on HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27671055
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27585602
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27535584
| novok wrote:
| This was made in 2013:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Harris
| an1sotropy wrote:
| thanks for this info. I recognize him now from the Social
| Dilemma movie.
| baby wrote:
| I don't understand how I can go back one slide
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| This is a really inspiring presentation and I am going to be
| spreading this one around!
| ultimoo wrote:
| 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.
| r00t4ccess wrote:
| I did this years ago as well, my phone rings when i get a call
| and texts/imessages from contacts get an alert nothing else
| does
| [deleted]
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
|
| We're all addicted and distracted.
| rglullis wrote:
| 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...
| agency wrote:
| 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.
| notriddle wrote:
| Tristan Harris, the author of this presentation, wound up
| leaving the company.
|
| I guess it didn't work.
| Layke1123 wrote:
| Speak for yourself, but some of us don't have social media.
| DevKoala wrote:
| It would never happen because social media would convince users
| to vote against their own interests. Like Facebook did with the
| Apple debacle.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2013)? come on
|
| plenty of discussion more recently than that about the topic:
|
| _The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is
| damaging our minds_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098847
|
| _We live in an age of distractions, dealing with constant mental
| stimulus_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26207184
|
| _My year with a distraction-free iPhone_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251334
|
| _The Death of Social Reciprocity in the Era of Digital
| Distraction_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643928
|
| _GhostWriter is a distraction free Markdown editor_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26252472
| dang wrote:
| What's wrong with 2013? Historical material is welcome here,
| and I assume one interesting point about the OP is how
| relatively early it was.
| marto1 wrote:
| Decentralize so you won't have to beg your master to cut you some
| slack. Anything else is just talk imho.
| ubicomp wrote:
| Also see calmtech.com
| [deleted]
| ubicomp wrote:
| Also see the principles of calm technology at calmtech.com
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| If memory serves, this presentation was created at Google years
| ago by Tristan Harris, who also had a huge part to play in The
| Social Dilemma.
| zmix wrote:
| 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.?
| ConcernedCoder wrote:
| FYI: Title of website reads: "A Call To Minimize Distration",
| should be: "A Call To Minimize Distraction"
| dang wrote:
| The submitted title is the title that appears on the first
| slide of the presentation. That's legit.
| [deleted]
| vkat wrote:
| Off topic: Snakes creep the hell out of me and I can't even look
| at my computer if there is an image and these slides have 4 or 5
| of them.
| iudexgundyr wrote:
| This presentation distracted me from my work. :))))
| Zelphyr wrote:
| 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!
| scotty79 wrote:
| When you are in finances I think you hear "money" quite often.
| musicale wrote:
| 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.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| I hate "engagement".
|
| I am a weird person who, when I used to go to a movie theater,
| stayed and watched the credits at the end. There would be some
| nice closing music, and 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 after watching the movie and acknowledge
| everyone involved.
|
| 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 some 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.
|
| This "engagement" makes me want to see a shrink.
| tchalla wrote:
| > 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| mpv will often allow that.
|
| This of course is predicated on a site supporting MPV,
| often meaning the content is independently downloadable,
| even if not officially.
|
| Industry's track record with user-specified anti-dark-
| pattern preferences (DNT, prefers-reduced-motion, etc.) is
| not encouraging.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| You are my hero of the day!
|
| I did find that setting for YouTube, but I didn't realize
| that Amazon had it too.
|
| To change it, go to Prime Video, click the gear icon in the
| top right, select Settings, then the Player tab to turn off
| Auto Play.
|
| Bada Bing!
|
| Now I won't feel like I should whack somebody after each
| episode.
| [deleted]
| kmstout wrote:
| Likewise radio stations' playing songs back to back without a
| gap. "Stairway to Heaven" deserves a second or two of silence
| after finishing.
| m_ke wrote:
| 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.
| musicale wrote:
| > 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.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| > 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!
|
| "Cargo cult marketing"?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Fads are a sociological information-theoretic emergent
| dynamic.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin.
| ..
| dkarl wrote:
| 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.
| abraae wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| > 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.
| musicale wrote:
| "Look how many hours our users spend watching Netflix on our
| new refrigerator and using our connected mobile fridge app!"
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| > 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.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| > 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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.
| emaro wrote:
| Funny enough that the presentation loops (at least on my phone)
| and just shows the first slide after the last one without any
| indication of it.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
|
| Almost cinematic.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Trace a line from that to this basically
|
| https://wellbeing.google/
|
| _Great technology should improve life, not distract from it_ (3
| years ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17023917
| zestyping wrote:
| 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.
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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?
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Digital Wellbeing on Android was one major example of
| something that seemed to have come from this. I believe iOS
| also built something similar.
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| 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.
| valw wrote:
| A shameless-because-related plug:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/patient_hackernews/
|
| A Hacker News mirror biased in favor of thoughtful discussion, by
| enforcing that you cannot comment on something in less than 24
| hours.
|
| This might help you spend less of your attention on Hacker News,
| by: 1. Showing you a subset of hot posts 2.
| Enforcing high response delays (thus suppressing the impulse to
| frantically refresh for new comments).
|
| This particular post can be discussed here:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/patient_hackernews/comments/ofqb6n/...
|
| Please give feedback!
| crackercrews wrote:
| Reddit won't even let me see either page without downloading
| the app. I'm used to the annoying prompts but have never been
| outright blocked before.
| ottomanbob wrote:
| I've been dying for a tool like this. Just want to sort hacker
| news by week / months. So I could stop checking everyday. Will
| give feedback
| perihelions wrote:
| _" Just want to sort hacker news by week"_
|
| HN has hidden functionality for that:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/best
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I think the first thing they could do is make ALL notifications
| on Android opt-in.
|
| Most notifications that I get are SPAM.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/10/17333574/google-
| android-p...
| epivosism wrote:
| 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;" />');
| preloader.attr("src","img/vrg_google_doc_final_vrs03-"+n+".jpg');
| $('body').prepend(preloader); }
|
| the js in the source of the page: var imgNum =
| '1'; function increment(){ if(imgNum < 141){
| imgNum++; }else{ imgNum = 1; }
| url = "url('img/vrg_google_doc_final_vrs03-"+imgNum+".jpg')";
| document.getElementById('pic').style.backgroundImage=url;
| preload(imgNum+1) //PRELOADING }
| germandiago wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2021-07-07 23:00 UTC)