If thats accurate, it's freaking me out while thinking about Facebook's role in the Myanmar genocide https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
BTB is quite inflammatory, but the host eloquently puts together a lot of really damning and shocking stories from inside Facebook's doors.
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH76CZbqoqI
[1] if the line between dys- and u-topia depends upon prevalence of man-portable SIGINT devices: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572
Further playing "bot or not?" we have the Stasi (human) vs NSA (automated): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24470017
It got my father. Living in rural area, cable/satellite TV became too expensive and low quality. So, us kids paid for an internet connection for him. Given only YouTube to inform him, he went from a generally relaxed redneck to talking about how "black community is a lost cause" and "we need to glass (nuke) the middle east and take their oil" in a very short time.
We got Netflix for him and he's calmed back down some. But, definitely not back to where he was before.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo...
https://www.asam.org/Quality-Science/definition-of-addiction
The Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 [1] had no statistical impact on the rate reduction of smoking - the rate of decline of smokers is the same now as it was in 1965.
The tobacco industry is more profitable than ever and they are diversifying into nicotine delivery vehicles like vapes, gum [2]. So the underlying goal - increase nicotine dependence across the global population and capture the nicotine consumption market is still going strong.
Much like the desire to be intoxicated, the desire to influence people will never go away. It's baked into our biology. Everyone in this thread interacting with each other is trying to influence everyone else. Facebook etc... is just doing successfully what Bernays dreamed of.
You can beat these platforms all you want - just like the tobacco industry was beat. The problems will just surface elsewhere in a different form.
Attack the root issue - ban advertising. oh and do it in a way that allows for "free speech." The challenge of the century.
[0]https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
[2]https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tobacco-industry-rebounds-f...
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-tea...
With social media, anecdotal accusations abound of negative impacts on mental health or political polarization. Yet the most carefully conducted research shows no evidence that either[1][2] of these charges are true to any meaningful degree. Simply put the academic evidence is not contagious with the journalistic outrage.
What's more likely is the panic over social media is mirroring previous generations' moral panic over new forms of media. When the literary novel first gained popularity, social guardians in the older generation worried that it would corrupt the youth.[3]
The same story played out with movies, rock music, video games, and porn among other things. The dynamic is propelled by old media having a vested interest in whipping up a frenzy against its new media competitors. In almost every case the concerns proved unfounded or overblown. I'd be pretty surprised if social media proved the exception, when we've always seen the same story again and again.
[1]https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1217307200517033986 [2]https://twitter.com/degenrolf/status/986146855007539201 [3]https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/01/20/an-18th-century-mo...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/19/problem-gamb...
For example, simply providing an alternative to pay walled article is a recurring task people do here. It's easy to automate and doesn't raise eye brows. It raises someone's perception of the profile if they were to do a quick check. Another one include providing alternative to products. It's easy. Search through product hunt or other sites for results or wishing someone on their product launch/show HN which again doesn't require contextual understanding to the same degree.
Big tech, philosophical, news media, etc threads are predictable. T5 and electra models from Google are good at filling the blanks (in contrast to gpt which generates texts in forward fashion) so they can be used to make unique sentences following a pattern. They are more meaningful at the cost of less randomness.
Many posts on HN appear first on lobster, small subreddits, GitHub trending, and popular twitter accounts. You could simply fetch the links at a random interval within a timezone and post unique links here.
You can target a demography who is least likely to suspect it's a bot. HN is siloed in many small parts despite having the same front page. You can predict which users are likely to post in certain threads and what their age demography is i.e Emacs anything. Database of HN is available on big query.
You can train a response to suspicious comment calling them a bot: That hurts. I am not a native English speaker. Sorry, if I offended you. or Please check the guidelines...
There are many techniques to make a sophisticated bot. ;)
https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/02/exploring-transfer-learnin...
https://github.com/fuzhenxin/Style-Transfer-in-Text
https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/03/more-efficient-nlp-model-p...
https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...
It wouldn't surprise me if a non significant number of users here were bots.
I am more interested in the question: Does the difference matter especially in text as long as a bot user is a more useful user?
https://www.pharmacytimes.com/contributor/timothy-aungst-pha...
Yes, because I wanted to narrow down my originally too broad statement before picking on the generalization will derail the subthread (as it sometimes happens on HN).
> What do you see as the difference between "manipulative advertising" and regular "advertising", and how is either (or both) malicious?
I'm glad you asked! I wrote an essay on this very topic the other day: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.