The solution to all of Big Tech's monopolies is actually pretty simple: Interoperability must become a law - this includes using custom algorithms or allowing other platforms (like your own app) to access YOUR data on whatever platform 'hosts' it.

Cory Doctorow wrote a great article on it:

"Interoperability Can Save the Open Web" https://spectrum.ieee.org/doctorow-interoperability

> While the dominance of Internet platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon is often taken for granted, Doctorow argues that these walled gardens are fenced in by legal structures, not feats of engineering. Doctorow proposes forcing interoperability—any given platform’s ability to interact with another—as a way to break down those walls and to make the Internet freer and more democratic.

Most notably, he retells how early Facebook used to siphon data from its competitor MySpace and act on user's behalf on it (e.g. reply to MySpace messages via Facebook) - and then when the Zuck(er) was top dog, moved to made these basic interoperability actions illegal by law to prevent anyone doing to him what he did to others.

This seems like a clever (but perhaps overly clever) amendment to Section 230 protections for social media.

However, I've always thought that it's pretty bizarre for Section 230 protections to apply when the social media company has extremely sophisticated algorithms that determine how much reach every user-generated piece of content gets. To me there's really no distinction between the "opinion" or "editorial" section of a traditional media publication and the algorithms which determine the reach of a piece of user-generated content on Twitter, YouTube, etc.

I think a better solution would be to repeal section 230 protection for any kind of personalized or algorithmic feed. The algorithm makes you a publisher, and you should be liable for what you publish.

That would make it very hard, nigh impossible, for a platform like YouTube or TikTok to exist as it does today, and would instead favor people self-curating mechanisms like RSS readers etc.

That’s like saying the solution to cigarettes is that tobacco shops must be forced to sell clove cigarettes as a not-addictive alternative.

Anything that’s a premium paid feature will be irrelevant. Most people don’t subscribe to YouTube premium, even though they know their kids are watching a ton of ads. Adoption has also been incredibly brisk on the ad tiers of the formerly ad-free TV services like Netflix and Hulu.

I realize “less addictive algo” is a different thing to pay for than removing ads - but it’s, if anything, an even harder sell - I think the layperson wouldn’t even acknowledge that they are vulnerable to being psychologically manipulated. They think they spend so much time on these apps because it’s so enjoyable.

From most parents’ point of view, paying a monthly bill for their children to have a less toxic experience on TikTok, or YouTube will be considered an extravagance instead of a responsible safety expense.

It seems likely that'd result in even worse suggestions becoming the norm as people adopt the third-party that gives the quick dopamine rush. It's like suggesting tastier heroin to fix drug addiction.

Or just stop suggesting content. The landing page is just a matrix of already followed accounts with the text "Start by following some accounts you like..." as a placeholder if it's a new account.

I’m quite bullish on disintermediating the algorithms. AI makes it very easy to plug in your own. We just haven’t figured out the plumbing yet.

I’d be strongly in favor of interoperability laws to pry open the monopolies.

(One dynamic you do need to be careful about especially at first - interoperability also means IG can pull your friend graph from Snapchat, so it can also make it easier for big companies to smother smaller ones that are getting momentum based on their own social graph growth due to their USP. I don’t think this is insurmountable, just something to be careful of when implementing.)

> Before Spotify became popular, people would integrate Last.FM into their media players

I still scrobble to Last.fm from Spotify (and other media players). I rarely use it for discovery anymore, but it's occasionally interesting to look at my historical listening trends.

If the default algo/behavior is allowed to persist, it's going to be effectively no real change.

Drop the algorithm altogether? I subscribe to channels for a reason.

Third-party recommendation algorithms would be interesting, but I think they'd only address one layer of the addictive design the verdict is actually about. Autoplay, infinite scroll, notification timing, the variable reward patterns from likes and comments -- those are all independent of which algorithm picks the next video. You could swap in the most wholesome recommendation engine imaginable and a kid is still gonna sit there for hours if the UI is designed around endless content with no natural stopping points.

99.9% of these would just be malicious spyware that people are tricked into agreeing to.

Bluesky does this. In fact, the For You algorithm is a community built algorithm and way more popular than the native Discover algo.

How do you prevent a Cambridge Analytica exfiltration situation with third party algorithms?

And how does this prevent addictive algorithms which will win through social selection?

That's called a "feed generator" on Bluesky.

The real solution is going back to a chronological feed of people you actively choose to follow.

Yes please. Algorithms should be plug-in-and-play and not endemic to the app. You should be able to take popular algorithms and plug them into any app

Virtually nobody would choose to pay a subscription for the non-addictive app version, and I'd even say this suggestion is a bit insulting to anyone who isn't high-income.

Or algorithms have to be submitted and approved by a government body before being allowed to be implemented and are frequently audited

It probably helps when you suppress research that shows you’re harming children and allow human traffickers to fester on your platform with 17 warnings or whatever.

I think there is a fourth portion that is probably more important:

Actively ignoring harm caused by your product. TV/radio has sold attention, but there were pretty strict rules on what you can/can't broadcast, and to whom. (ignoring cable for the moment) Its the same for services, things that knowingly encourage damaging behaviours are liable for prosecution.

I would argue that no app/website should be selling itself to kids. No corporation should be trying to tether its ARR to children's attention.

I think there's a little more nuance than that, but it seems roughly correct.

Wouldn't it be better if apps/websites targeting kids didn't use A/B testing to be more addictive?

A/B testing is one way to make things “addictive” but you can also make addictive products without it.

A really good designer could make a highly engaging app or an editor can write clickbait headlines all with without testing.

Probably not much other than scale. Facebook is large enough that they can hire behavioral researchers to make this stuff more addicting while looking the other way and raking in the money. I think Roblox is just as bad (maybe worse) regarding addiction for kids. I’ve played hundreds of hours with my sister’s kids and the way all these low quality slop games handle grinding, progression, and pay gating is honestly disgusting.

But then again, I manage to get myself addicted to a video game usually once a winter for a few weeks, and don’t play games for the rest of the year. There’s really no solution to this, but I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is hopelessly addicted to shallow digital experiences.

How’s this different than tv that a kid might see that has ads and programming targeting kids?

I watched 80s horror movies when I was in elementary school and had nightmares for years. Should I sue now?

How about parents be held responsible for how they care for their kids or not? Maybe a culture that judged parents more strongly for how they let their kids spend their time would be an improvement.

Correct, selling attention inevitably leads to harm.

I guess ultimately it depends on if the app/website authors do so "negligently" or not.

> Jurors were charged with determining whether the companies acted negligently in designing their products and failed to warn her of the dangers.

So if you do so while providing warnings and controls for people, that might make it OK in the eyes of the law?

Because most are just no where near as good and effective at ruining a kid's mind as meta. If others were as good as meta at destroying whole generations of cognitive development, they'd probably also be liable.

algorithm would be the key word I think.

It sounds like an adult was awarded $6 million because she watched a lot of youtube/instagram as a kid. Literally any social media site would be guilty of this; I hate to say it but we need better corporate protections if cases like this are allowed to enter court.

At least legal experts are critical of the decision: '“I don’t think it should have ever gotten to a jury trial,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law'

A/B testing is very, very different to handing over control of your content to a reward function that optimizes for time spent over any other criteria.

We had 10 years+ plus of having products like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, hell even LinkedIn with a basic content model of "you build your own graph of people who you pull content from" and their job was to show it to you and puts ads in there to fund the whole enterprise. If I decided to follow harmful content? That was a pact between me and the content creator, and YouTube was nothing more than a pipe the content flowed through. They were able to build multi-billion dollar businesses off of this. That's really important, this was enormously profitable. But then the problem happened that people's graphs weren't interesting enough, and sometimes they'd go on the thing and there were no new posts from people they followed, and this was leaving money on the table. So they took care of that problem by handing over control of the feed to the reward function.

More accurately, especially for Meta products: they completely took control away from you. You didn't even have the option to retain the old, chronological social graph feed anymore. And it was ludicrously profitable. So now the laws of capitalism dictate that everyone else has to follow suit. I now have extensions on my browser for Instagram and YouTube to disable content from anything I don't follow - because I still find these apps useful for that one original purpose they had when they blew up and became mainstream. Why are these browser extensions? Why can't I choose to not see this stuff in their apps? That's the major regulation hole that led to this lawsuit, imo.

It's the same thing you see with people blaming smartphones for brainrot. We've had 15 to 20 years of smartphones with more or less the same capabilities as they have today and for the vast majority of that time my phone didn't make books less interesting or make me struggle to do chores or manage my time. For a full decade or more I saw my phone as a net positive in my life, was proud to work for Twitter and generally saw technology like the Louis CK bit about the miracle of using a smartphone connected to WiFI on an airplane. But in the last five years or so, things have noticeably and increasingly gone to shit. Brainrot is a thing. All my real life friends who are the opposite of terminally online or technical are talking about it. I don't use TikTok but it seems like that is absolutely annihilating attention spans. The topic of conversation over drinks is how we've collectively self-diagnosed with ADHD and struggle with all kinds of executive function.. but also are old enough to remember a time when none of this existed. Complete normies are reading Dopamine Nation and listening to Andrew Huberman trying to free themselves.

I don't know what the exact solution is, but there's at least a simpler time we can point to when we all had smartphones and we were all connected via platforms and we all posted and consumed stupid pictures of each other and it wasn't.... _this_.

That "show fewer shorts" button doesn't do a damn thing. I click it, refresh the page and whala, shorts.

There's also Prodigy which schools push on kids to practice math has the same thing including pay to win mechanics.

As someone who maybe fired about Roblox once like three years ago, what does Roblox do that is way more addicting than YouTube and Instagram, and also I guess they're ignoring reports showing the harm even more than YouTube and Instagram, if I understand you correctly?

If we want to compare it to alcohol/cigarettes, then kids shouldn't be allowed to use this either.

We have health warnings for food that contains lots of sugar, fat and/or sodium in Canada

Just a tangent, interesting that you brought up Blippi. Any issues that you have with Blippi if you don't mind me asking? :D

my thoughts exactly... this "verdict" came with very suspicious timing.

otherwise know as mandatory identification

Good. Long overdue

Since these are civil lawsuits, it just takes more people coming forward to sue. There are plenty of cases where a jury found a defendant liable for damages only for the defendant to continue the bad behavior and subsequent juries awarding ever-increasing and compounding punitive damages. Big Tobacco and Purdue Pharma (went bankrupt) are examples of this pattern. Monsanto was famously hit hard with massive "repeater" damages after they continued selling and marketing Roundup despite prior judgements.

The exact same can happen to Big Tech. The goal is to get them to stop the bad behavior now.

I feel the same way. They're just going to appeal the case until they find a layer of the legal system where they have leverage.

You mean it's the first of many appeals, I assume.

Trial courts will decide pretty much anything. Then the case gets appealed over whether the trial court correctly interpreted things you probably perceive as uncomplicated, like the 1st Amendment.

It's a huge deal because it was the bellwether case for over 1,000 other similar cases.

Right, but adults are assumed to be somewhat more responsible for themselves. This is why we don't let kids (legally) smoke or drink, but we do let adults do so. We expect that adults can, in general, say no, and that children are less able to do so.

But it's not absolute. Some drugs are illegal for adults as well, for example. Why? Because they're too addicting.

So are Instagram and Youtube just nicotine, or are they heroin?

How old is your child? Younger than 6-8 it's easy to monitor what they're watching and enforce limits. By age 9-10 it isn't just about what they access in the home. Many schools in America are giving kids computer and tablet access, and kids are smart or curious enough to access social media there.

I agree that a big part of this is educating children about these hazards, but that also doesn't mean we should allow these companies to data science the shit out of our attention and will power. Many adults have concerning relationships with social media too -- exposure, pressure, and manipulation are key ingredients that are difficult for anyone to deal with.

> Parody: I let my child have cocaine and now they're addicted!!!!! Hilarious.

Cocaine is illegal because it is addictive.

Parent poster has some… interesting views on addiction. Specifically, an extremely narrow view of what counts, that rules out things like gambling and porn addiction.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=superkuh%20addiction&type=comm...

Yeah, people keep making the comparison to cigarettes but to me this is wildly different.

Cigarettes directly cause physical harm and even death. Social media can sometimes, under certain circumstances, depending on who exactly you're interacting with on social media, indirectly contribute to emotional harm.

Cigarettes are also physically addictive. Your body actually becomes dependent on them and will throw a fit if you try to stop using them. Social media is only "addictive" in the loose sense that all fun, mentally engaging activities are.

I'm not saying social media is fine for kids and we shouldn't do anything to reduce their use of it (TV and video games can be equally unhealthy IMO). I'm not even necessarily against legislation on the subject. But there's a huge difference between fining a company for breaking a law, and fining them for making a perfectly legal product "too fun" because you let your kids spend all their time on it and that turned out to be unhealthy.

This type of civil litigation where the courts effectively create and enforce ex post facto laws based on their opinion about whether perfectly reasonable, 100% legal actions indirectly contribute to bad outcomes is not a great aspect of our legal system IMO.

One could argue that the ultra processed food industry is doing exactly what the tobacco industry did wrt to making their food addictive.

There is a difference in creating a food that tastes good vs creating a food that tastes good, but instantly wants you to eat the whole bag.

Normally I don't see people walking down the street staring at their Doritos

addictiveness != enjoyment

Although to some extent they're correlated, sometimes the things that are most enjoyable you wouldn't describe as "addicting" and vice-versa.

Eating a nice full meal is more enjoyable than eating doritos on your couch, but you wouldn't describe it as addicting.

If anything, I find my experience of youtube today to be less enjoyable than in the past

Is that completely based on their expressions and reactions? I mean, you might be right, but I feel like an expression of reaction is too little to base such a damning statement on.

Body language analysis of strangers is bunk pseudoscience and a great way to reinforce your prejudices.

I thought the same thing. I took solace in the fact that it may be appealed, and that I suspect lawyers and taxes will take a large chunk out of the settlement

If you deliberately design your platform to be addicting then you can't say people who become addicted are "using it wrong" though.

Personal responsibility is important. But at the same time, we don't let people open up a heroin shop and then claim it's your personal responsibility to not buy it and use it. We don't put slot machines in schools but tell kids that they need self-control to not get addicted to gambling.

I don't know what the answer is, but it feels wrong to lean _entirely_ on personal responsibility. We live in a world in which we were simply not evolved to live in. People literally make a good living by engineering and exploiting our weaknesses for profit.

> raise everyone with the forethought to know what might be addictive, the self-awareness to realize when you are addicted to something, and the self-control (and support systems if and when necessary) to stop

If only it were that easy. If you've ever known somebody who struggles with a serious addiction you'll know that even when they know it's destroying their life they still can't stop.

I’m glad you went through that and came out ok.

It seems though, increasingly, that the ability to avoid addiction is less about pulling one up by one’s own bootstraps, and in many ways determined more by genetics. That is to say, what might have been possible for you is much harder for others.

Look no further than GLP-1. People who have struggled for years - decades - with overeating are almost immediately able to cut back on addictive eating. It’s not that they suddenly discovered willpower. It’s a biochemical effect.

It’s no wonder then that kids are more susceptible to addictive building behaviors. Their minds are pliable and teachable.

Why would we not legislate things that take advantage of that?

Maybe this applies more towards adults, but I don't think the correct answer for kids is only "just have self-control," something kids are notorious for not having. Certainly there's a lot of parental responsibility here but we can simultaneously hold companies responsible for their part too.

The problem is that internal communications inside these companies raised concerns about the manipulativeness, and even deceptiveness of the algorithms and tactics they were using.

They weren't just consciously creating an attractive platform, they were consciously creating a manipulative platform.

Yes, personal responsibility is important. That doesn't mean we need to allow companies to attempt to addict as many people as they can.

The question we should be asking: are these technologies a net-positive to society?

If they are liable of making the thing addictive, it does mean it is their fault. In this case, it specifically says it's designed to be addictive to children, whose personal responsibility is probably not expected.

We can't raise other people. We can prohibit the addicting things like newsfeeded Facebook.

Everyone should at least be a conscientious junkie.

On one hand: sure.

On the other, it's very different when companies explicitly design their products to be as addictive as possible.

We've been through this with Big Tobacco already. Nicotine and other tobacco substances are addictive on their own, but tobacco companies were prosecuted for deliberately making cigarettes as addictive as possible, besides also marketing to children. The parallels with Big Tech and social media are undeniable.

Don't blame yourself! You had an encounter in the world and were greatly affected. Anyone who had the same predisposition and same exposure as you would of fallen in the same situation, just as they would have pulled themselves out of it the same way.

It is not, like, a moral thing to become addicted to something. And the ability to pull yourself out of it is determined, whether you are conscious of it or not, by your broader circumstances and by the same predispositions that brought you there in the first place. At the end of the day we are all fucked up animals reeling from the ongoing consequences of prematurational helplessness..

We should feel together in our problems like this, not distinguish ourselves by how we might individually overcome them. You are not "better" finding yourself standing over a beggar addict, you are lucky, never forget that. If for no other reason that it's not a sustainable world view otherwise, it leads to insecurity, anger, and relapse.

The dark truth of the world is that everyone is doing the best they can. How could they not? Why would they not? What is this thing that separates you from the addict or murderer? Unless you have maybe some spiritual convictions, I can't imagine what it is..

Just really, I know you had a powerful personal journey, but don't let it establish to you that we are all fundamentally alone, because we are not, and its good to help people who maybe need more help.