[HN Gopher] A call to minimize distraction and respect users' at...
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A call to minimize distraction and respect users' attention (2013)
Author : cratermoon
Score : 704 points
Date : 2021-07-07 17:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.minimizedistraction.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.minimizedistraction.com)
| jwmoz wrote:
| I hate what Facebook became and stopped using it years ago.
| 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.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| 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.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| Selling pickaxes for companies building engagement human
| traps? :)
|
| How far are you not afraid to look?
| yupper32 wrote:
| 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.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| I don't disagree with you, if anything I'm in a similar
| camp.
|
| The incentives just so happen to end up supporting
| features like the ones this post refers to.
| 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?
| filleduchaos wrote:
| 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).
| [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?
| [deleted]
| 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.
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| "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:
|
| https://getamna.com
| o8r3oFTZPE wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| Bjartr wrote:
| 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?
| lamontcg wrote:
| 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.
| Bjartr wrote:
| Would you still allow people to decide that they _do_
| want to get such email, or should people not be allowed
| to make that decision?
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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'.
| 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.
| Bjartr wrote:
| 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.
| 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?
| tpoacher wrote:
| A lot of these problems would go away if ECMA started charging
| businesses for any client's use of javascript by the function
| call :p
| [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
| ssivark wrote:
| On mobile. (Firefox on iOS, in case it matters)
| 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."_
| hinkley wrote:
| Wait, isn't Tristan Harris pseudo-famous for walking/running
| away from Google and starting a tech ethics company?
|
| He's one of the stars of the Social Dilemma, right?
| eloisius wrote:
| He's the founder of the Center for Human Technology[1]
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Harris
| 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.
| lolive wrote:
| Aka Death By PowerPoint
| 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.
| fmajid wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil
| /...
|
| https://mondaynote.com/bezos-a-ceo-who-can-
| write-2f368ee3659...
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| 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?
| mountainb wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| test_epsilon wrote:
| Would be kind of clever if it was actually intended to
| waste time and frustrate people.
| 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]
| xtiansimon wrote:
| I immediately thought about the workplace. Darn. I was hoping for
| a flag or at least a logo.
| 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.
| eloisius wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| savingsPossible wrote:
| He/she probably meant "its easier to point a real problem
| than to find a real, stable solution"
| iseethroughbs wrote:
| That's what I meant.
| iseethroughbs wrote:
| 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.
| 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?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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!
| edmundsauto wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
| danybittel wrote:
| Maybe it's more like sugar?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28835408/
| 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.
| dbtc wrote:
| When I first read this earlier today, my thoughts were that it
| was for the user to choose good tools and learn to use them well.
|
| But now I've modified that opinion to:
|
| Not everyone has 'what it takes' (to guard their flow, etc.), but
| everyone benefits if those who do help the rest.
| 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?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Criminalization of dark patterns?
|
| 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.
| dcposch wrote:
| 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.
| lioeters wrote:
| > Lina Khan running the FCC
|
| I think you mean the FTC.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/biographies/lina-khan
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| > 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.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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.
| aabbcc1241 wrote:
| Maybe another wave of dark pattern consent prompt to click
| agree?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
| grecy wrote:
| 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.
| totetsu wrote:
| > New Zealand billboards are illegal.
|
| - yeah right.
| Mandatum wrote:
| > In New Zealand billboards are illegal.
|
| Yeah right.
|
| Billboards are everywhere, not sure where you got that
| idea.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/20/ban
| -ou...
|
| (Generally: respond to the points or assertions, if you
| have evidence of falsity, provide it. If you find a claim
| unsupported, request references.)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| 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?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
|
| Google have a an "opt-out" standard for SSID identifiers,
| which really ought to be criminal: https://support.google.com
| /maps/answer/1725632#how_opt_out&z... (HN discussions:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27518415
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7347397
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22466447)
|
| 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| +1 Upvoted and favorited; thank you for the DDG links and
| for articulating my precise sentiments so clearly.
| birksherty wrote:
| > 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.
| squiggleblaz wrote:
| > Criminalization of dark patterns?
|
| 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.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| I don't believe the distinction you make between criminal
| and regulatory actually exists.
| drc500free wrote:
| I believe they are confusing intent to perform an act
| with intent to break a law. In most cases, ignorance of
| the law is not a criminal defense.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Does the same standard apply to, say, robbery?
|
| Small time crooks who steal $100 go to jail, but corporations
| who steal $millions go unpunished.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
|
| http://www.fma.alabama.gov/HomeProc.aspx
|
| 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).
| jpadkins wrote:
| > (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...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_func
| tions_...
| spoonjim wrote:
| 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.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| That's only true until a prosecutor needs to make a
| political campaign.
|
| ADA is enforced (abusively) by private claims, not
| regulators, at least in CA.
| KeepFlying wrote:
| 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.
|
| They shouldn't have to rely on getting lucky
| 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.
| zmix wrote:
| Yeah, that's what I said: You have to open up the dev-
| console. Which sucks for a document download.
| 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!
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| greyface- wrote:
| https://developer.apple.com/app-
| store/review/guidelines/#4.5... 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.
|
| In practice it's not enforced, though.
| eloisius wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27459256
| 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.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Hmm, maybe, presentations are a distraction?
| 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.
| soumyadeb wrote:
| 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 :)
| pnt12 wrote:
| I'd argue that the value you get from a movie or TV show is
| higher than social media posts or memes, so it's not an
| apples to apples comparison.
| baby wrote:
| I don't understand how I can go back one slide
| gavanwoolery wrote:
| 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.
| danybittel wrote:
| Isn't it ironic, that google initially beat the competition, by
| being a distraction free, no bullshit search engine?
|
| People _DO_ care about this stuff. It is a question on how much
| they put up with, if there 's an alternative and how difficult it
| is to change.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| 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.
| snailysnooze wrote:
| 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)
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| >I don't quite recollect how email went from an asynchronous
| mode of communication to a near real-time mode of communication
| .
|
| When Blackberries and push email took off in the late 2000s.
| 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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
| 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.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| If you want real old school, films began with shorts and
| newsreels.
| eru wrote:
| Netflix already has a 'skip credits' and 'skip intro' button.
| abtom wrote:
| Reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI7JDTlixb8
| Talanes wrote:
| 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.
| majewsky wrote:
| I don't know any ones that require a button press, but
| usually those are unskippable because the game is loading in
| the meantime.
| Talanes wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > 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.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| We pay to watch ads for 15 min and we can't leave, yet
| somehow YouTube's 5 seconds ads are unacceptable.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Both are unacceptable.
| [deleted]
| codeproject wrote:
| 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?
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| 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.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| > but does it really neccessary to use 137 pages to illustrate
| a very simple issue?
|
| No, but the issue wasn't that simple in 2013.
|
| > half millions time already, if the maker use the slides
| carefully, wouldn't it save a millions of hours user's time.
| And life?
|
| hundreds of thousands by that math, it also took me about 20
| minutes to read through it.
|
| > The presentation itself is a huge distraction.
|
| I think Tristan Harris was aware of that and that also probably
| is the point.
| codeproject wrote:
| >I think Tristan Harris was aware of that and that also
| probably is the point.
|
| Then the guy must have a sense of humor. that is nice point.
| thanks for the comment.
| 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. :))))
| peerless-app wrote:
| 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/
| 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. 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.
|
| This "engagement" makes me want to see a shrink.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I don't use Amazon but some of the services I use even minify
| the video and put up a next video countdown -- before the
| episode has ended.
|
| Probably the start of credits is automatically determined
| (guessed at) there based on percentage completed with a
| minimum absolute time.
|
| In any case - pretty annoying.
| 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 have to feel like I should whack someone after
| each episode.
| wdutch wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| relativ575 wrote:
| > 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.
| 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.
| rablackburn wrote:
| 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.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| Or playing the beginning of one song over the end of
| another. Or talking over the last 15 seconds of a song.
| suyash wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| Consumption just makes me think this person has tuberculosis.
| 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.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| 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.
|
| That's how advertising works.
| hanspeter wrote:
| > 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.
| elihu wrote:
| 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".
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| jpadkins wrote:
| 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.
| abraae wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| grishka wrote:
| At least you could buy a smart appliance but never give it an
| internet connection. It would most probably still perform its
| main function just fine.
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| Engagement is a number you can game. Makes me wonder if they
| have their 'gamification' and 'game theory' wires crossed.
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Google won't reform, distraction is their business.
|
| Lately Microsoft has decided to stuff 'news' and similar
| distractions in Windows and they might listen to criticism
| because they get paid anyway.
| 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.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| That's rather uncharitable - Digital Wellbeing has more
| features than just the notification, which is an
| entrypoint not the entire product.
| 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.
| fmajid wrote:
| 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.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| Exactly. When we become aware of our instincts and know to
| take advantage of them, in addition to baseline human
| ability, it's even worse.
| c-cube wrote:
| .
| robmay wrote:
| I'm a VC who wrote a post about a similar thesis, and I'd love to
| chat with anyone working on solutions. https://medium.com/inside-
| pjc/the-pjc-notification-thesis-we...
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| https://i.reddit.com/r/patient_hackernews/
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/patient_hackernews/
|
| https://teddit.net/r/patient_hackernews/
|
| I'm not endorsing Reddit's increasingly user-hostile,
| disrespectful, and contemptuous UI/UX.
|
| I _am_ pointing out that there are altnernatives, both by
| Reddit and others.
| 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
| CryingSofa wrote:
| 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.
| bckr wrote:
| Algolia might do that for you
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/
| 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...
| [deleted]
| textmode wrote:
| 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.minimizedistr
| action.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
|
| More details on yy025 and yy056 here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769701
| 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 }
| madrox wrote:
| 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.
| acituan wrote:
| > 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.
| madrox wrote:
| > 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.
| acituan wrote:
| > 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.
| jpadkins wrote:
| > 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.
| acituan wrote:
| > 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 hear you. Our games were mostly indie though and
| computers weren't connected to the internet, and when it
| did, it wasn't to _this_ internet.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| > TV stations are mostly run by white men, too.
|
| Your point?
| solaceb wrote:
| 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
| madrox wrote:
| I don't think I'm conflating them at all. One definitely
| drives the other.
| soheil wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| 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 2021-07-08 23:02 UTC)