By who, exactly? It’s easy to call for regulation when you assume the regulator will conveniently share your worldview. Try the opposite: imagine the person in charge is someone whose opinions make your skin crawl. If you still think regulation beats the status quo, then the call for regulation is warranted, but be ready to face the consequences.
But if picturing that guy running the show feels like a disaster, then let’s be honest: the issue isn’t the absence of regulation, it’s the desire to force the world into your preferred shape. Calling it “regulation” is just a polite veneer over wanting control.
I’m surprised at how much regulation has become viewed as a silver bullet in HN comments.
Like you said, the implicit assumption in every call for regulation is that the regulation will hurt companies they dislike but leave the sites they enjoy untouched.
Whenever I ask what regulations would help, the only responses are extremes like “banning algorithms” or something. Most commenters haven’t stopped to realize that Hacker News is an algorithmic social media site (are we not here socializing with the order of posts and comments determined by black box algorithm?).
Most people on HN who advocate regulating social media don't only want to prevent those platforms from showing targeted inflammatory content, they want to make all algorithmic feeds other than strictly chronological illegal, as well as moderation of any legal content.
From that point of view, Hacker News is little different than Facebook. One could even argue that HN's karma system is a dark pattern designed to breed addiction and influence conversation in much the same way as other social media platforms, albeit not to the same degree.
At least HN karma is incremental and based on something approximating merit as opposed to being a slot machine where you never know which comment will earn Karma. More effort or rare insight, generally yields more karma.
That hasn't been my experience. How much karma you get is heavily dependant on how many people see the comment. The most insightful effort-filled comment at the bottom of a 4 day old thread isn't going to get you nearly as much, if anything, compared to a joke with just the right amount of snark at the top of a post currently at the top of the front page.
I would be astonished if a majority of people opposed to social media algorithms consider HN's approach to be sufficiently objectionable to be regulated or in any way similar to Facebook.
Hacker News doesn't use a strictly chronological feed. Hacker News manipulates the feed to promote certain items over others. Hacker News moderates legal content. Those are all features of social media algorithms that people are opposed to. It just isn't "objectionable" when HN does it.
And regulations of this kind always creep out of scope. We've seen it happen countless times. But people hate social media so much around here that they simply don't think it through, or else don't care.
> Most people on HN who advocate regulating social media...want to make all algorithmic feeds other than strictly chronological illegal
I don't buy that, at all. I think they want a chronological feed to follow, and they want the end of targeted outrage machines that are poisoning civil discourse and breeding the type of destructive politics that has led to our sitting U.S. president to call for critics to be hanged.
Comparing what Facebook has done to the U.S. with HN's algorithm is slippery slope fallacy to an extreme, and even if HN's front page algorithm against all odds was outlawed due to a political overreaction to the destruction Facebook has wrought, I'd call it a fair trade.
>Comparing what Facebook has done to the U.S. with HN's algorithm is slippery slope fallacy to an extreme, and even if HN's front page algorithm against all odds was outlawed due to a political overreaction to the destruction Facebook has wrought, I'd call it a fair trade.
You're trying to discredit my comment but it seems as if your anger just led you around to proving me right.
> But if picturing that guy running the show feels like a disaster, then let’s be honest: the issue isn’t the absence of regulation, it’s the desire to force the world into your preferred shape.
For example, we can forbid corporations usage of algorithms beyond sorting by date of the post. Regulation could forbid gathering data about users, no gender, no age, no all the rest of things.
> Calling it “regulation” is just a polite veneer over wanting control.
It is you that may have misinterpreted what regulations are.
> or example, we can forbid corporations usage of algorithms beyond sorting by date of the post
Hacker News sorted by "new" is far less valuable to me than the default homepage which has a sorting algorithm that has a good balance between freshness and impact. Please don't break it.
> It is you that may have misinterpreted what regulations are.
The definition of regulation is literally: "a rule or directive made and maintained by an authority." I am just scared about who the authority is going to be.
Control is the whole point. One person being in charge, enacting their little whims, is what you get in an uncontrolled situation and what we have now. The assumption is that you live in a democratic society and "the regulator" is effectively the populace. (We have to keep believing democracy is possible or we're cooked.)
By a not-for-profit community organization that has 0 connect/interest in any for-profit enterprising that represents the stable wellbeing of society with a specific mandate to do so.
Just like the community organizations we had that watched over government agencies that we allowed to be destroyed because of profit. It's not rocket science.
> By a not-for-profit community organization that has 0 connect/interest in any for-profit enterprising that represents the stable wellbeing of society with a specific mandate to do so.
Then you get situations like the school board stacked with creationists who believe removing the science textbooks is important for the stable wellbeing of society.
Or organizations like MADD that are hell bent on stamping out alcohol one incremental step at a time because “stable wellbeing of society” is their mandate.
Or the conservative action groups in my area that protest everything they find indecent, including plays and movies, because they believe they’re pushing for the stable wellbeing of society.
There is no such thing as a neutral group pushing for a platonic ideal stable wellbeing of society. If you give a group of people power to control what others see, it will be immediately co-opted by special interests and politics.
Singling out non-profit as being virtuous and good is utopian fallacy. If you give any group power over what others are allowed to show, it will be extremely political and abused by every group with an agenda to push.
- Ban algorithmic optimization that feeds on and proliferates polarisation.
- To heal society: Implement discussion (commenting) features that allow (atomic) structured discussions to build bridges across cohorts and help find consensus (vs 1000s of comments screaming the same none-sense).
- Force the SM Companies to make their analytics truly transparent and open to the public and researchers for verification.
All of this could be done tomorrow, no new tech required. But it would lose the SM platforms billions of dollars.
Why? Because billions of people posting emotionally and commenting with rage, yelling at each other, repeating the same superficial arguments/comments/content over and over without ever finding common ground - traps a multitude more users in the engagement loop of the SM companies than people have civilised discussions, finding common ground, and moving on with a topic.
One system of social media that would unlock a great consensus-based society for the many, the other one endless dystopic screaming battles but riches for a few while spiralling the world further into a global theatre of cultural and actual (civil) war thanks to the Zuckerbergs & Thiels.
That only treats the symptoms, not the cause. The purpose of algorithmic optimization farming engagement is to increase ad impressions for money. It is advertising that has to be regulated in such a way that maximizing ad impressions is not profitable or you will find that social media companies will still have every incentive to find other ways to do it that will probably be just as harmful.
Then lists at least four priorities which would require one multi page bill or more than likely several bills make their way through house, senate, and presidents desk while under fire from every lobbyist in Washington?
Recasting regulation as a desire for control is too reductive. The other point of regulation is compromise. No compromise at all is just a wasted opportunity.
By who, exactly? It’s easy to call for regulation when you assume the regulator will conveniently share your worldview. Try the opposite: imagine the person in charge is someone whose opinions make your skin crawl. If you still think regulation beats the status quo, then the call for regulation is warranted, but be ready to face the consequences.
But if picturing that guy running the show feels like a disaster, then let’s be honest: the issue isn’t the absence of regulation, it’s the desire to force the world into your preferred shape. Calling it “regulation” is just a polite veneer over wanting control.