True for videos, but not true for any type of "text claim", which were already plenty 10 years ago and they were already hard to fight (think: misquoting people, strangely referring to science article, dubiously interpreting facts, etc.).
But I would claim that "trusting blindly" was much more common hundreds of years ago than it is now, so we might make some progress in fact.
If people learn to be more skeptical (because at some point they might get that things can be fake) it might even be a gain. The transition period can be dangerous though, as always.
But today’s text manufacturing isn’t our grand.., well yesterday’s text manufacturing.
And pretty soon it will be very persuasive models with lots of patience and manufactured personalized credibility and attachment “helping” people figure out reality.
The big problem isn’t the tech getting smarter though.
It’s the legal and social tolerance for conflict of interests at scale. Like unwanted (or dark pattern permissioned) surveillance which is all but unavoidable, being used to manipulate feeds controlled by third parties (between us and any organic intentioned contacts), toward influencing us in any way anyone will pay for. AI is just walking through a door that has been left wide open despite a couple decades of hard lessons.
Incentives, as they say, matter.
Misinformation would exist regardless, but we didn’t need it to be a cornerstone business model with trillions of dollars of market cap unifying its globally coordinated efficient and effective, near unavoidable, continual insertion into our and our neighbors lives. With shareholders relentlessly demanding double digit growth.
Doesn’t take any special game theory or economic theory to see the problematic loop there. Or to predict it will continue to get worse, and will be amplified by every AI advance, as long as it isn’t addressed.
> We raised a decent amount of money from YC and other VCs, and despite that, the thing that helped us most for distribution
When one does not raise money you get questions like "how do we know you will be here in 6 months, how are you funded?". I doubt people will tell you directly "oh, we have seen you are funded we decided to give you a chance".
> raising money is sign that your business is not doing well
You can raise money to execute (a part of) a larger plans. There are various fields that have barriers to entry in terms of regulation and/or compliance. This can still be couple of FTE + costs before you can sign any deal.
> work on your startup as side project until it's already generating 1.5-2x your annual salary, in a stable way
This highly depends on the type of business. If you are for example in B2B you can't tell your customer "sorry I can meet only after 19:00 because of my other job" not to mention how you can be perceived.
I would add to reasons why you should raise money: make sure the startup has external feedback that you listen to. All founders are quite stubborn - which is good and necessary - and is hard to convince them they need to adjust/pivot/rethink things. Investors can do that, but best is to have some previous experience with the field, otherwise they can be just noise.
> When one does not raise money you get questions like "how do we know you will be here in 6 months, how are you funded?". I doubt people will tell you directly "oh, we have seen you are funded we decided to give you a chance".
The thing is, we did raise money, and we still go the same questions, and we replied saying these are the VCs that have funded us, and we still lost those kinds of deals. The deals we won, were mainly cause we solved some burning pain point of that specific user, who really didn't care about our funding status.
> You can raise money to execute (a part of) a larger plans. There are various fields that have barriers to entry in terms of regulation and/or compliance. This can still be couple of FTE + costs before you can sign any deal.
Agreed. But for most startups, people raise cause they need more money to survive.
> This highly depends on the type of business. If you are for example in B2B you can't tell your customer "sorry I can meet only after 19:00 because of my other job" not to mention how you can be perceived.
Agreed. It's not ideal, however if you are solving a big enough pain point for the user, I'm willing to bet they won't mind it.
> make sure the startup has external feedback that you listen to. All founders are quite stubborn - which is good and necessary - and is hard to convince them they need to adjust/pivot/rethink things. Investors can do that, but best is to have some previous experience with the field, otherwise they can be just noise.
Yup, I agree here as well. But, the best external feedback is not from your investors, but from your (potential) customers!!
> The article talks about how they’re doing better now, but it’s filled with so many admissions that they think a full-time job would have been a better path in general that it’s hard to unsee it.
My personal experiences taught me that things generally do no play out as one imagines neither for "startup" nor for "full-time job". There are advantages and disadvantages for each, best is to try (a bit) both and decide for yourself. Of course I get that for some this is not possible, just saying what I think it would be the ideal.
I think some discontent with one's current situation is healthy - to allow for progress - but I always find strange when people strongly project that "something else would be better" without having experience with it.
I would draw a line at user customized wall of content. All content on sites should be organized in a similar way for everybody (by date, by category, etc.). I think this would reduce a lot the problems that we see currently.
If you want to be bold and imaginative, although doubt this would ever pass, any platform that focuses or allows user content, should not be allowed to show advertisements. Then the incentive to have people stay more to watch more ads would disappear.
Do you have any data to back that "it is more socially acceptable to lie"? I looked a bit and could not find anything either way.
The impression can be a bias of growing up. Adults will generally teach and insist that children tell the truth. As one grows, it is less constrained and can say many "white lies" (low impact lies).
We do have more impact for some people (known people, influences, etc.) than before because of network effects.
There is this study that claims/proves that dishonesty/lying is socially transmittable and
The question of how dishonesty spreads through social networks is relevant to relationships, organizations, and society at large. Individuals may not consider that their own minor lies contribute to a broader culture of dishonesty. [0]
the effect of which would be massively amplified if you take into account that
Research has found that most people lie, on average, about once or twice per day [1]
where the most prolific liars manage upward of 200; you can then imagine that with the rise and prevalence of social media the acceptance/tolerance has also socially transmitted
So, while dishonesty can spread through social networks, does not address if the total dishonesty is larger or lower or equal to, for example 100 years ago, because there are many factors involved.
People that trust something without understanding at least the principles can cause quite some issues.
One of the issues that I think affects these people is that the scientific process can not guarantee that something is "correct" or "incorrect". Something that at a point was known to be correct can be later disproved by a later experiment or more specific conditions.
Some people want/need simple certainties, and as soon as they stumble upon something different, they will shift their trust to something "simple and clear". And they can do that again and again, as long as they don't need to accept some things are complex or unknown.
I do not know any school system (not that I am an expert or searched for it, just an impression) that emphasizes this dynamic nature of understanding, or that tries to make people accept the unknown.
Many protocols (even open) are complex, and partially undocumented.
It would be nice to have both (open source and open protocol), but I kind of agree that if we should push for one, an open (decently explained) standard will probably be easier, simpler and with longer term impact, not to mention the interoperability benefits between countries.
Renting for me generally sounds like a bad deal. On the same period the stock grew even more (ex: S&P x4.5 from 2000). So, if you want to say that if you lived 30 years ago in Munich AND did not save anything you would have lived better, I will have to answer that it was just delaying the issue of not being able to save - the ones that were able to save (maybe not living in Munich, maybe other ways), might at some point come and buy something in Munich. Accumulating wealth too much into some hands was the issue decades ago and remains an issue today. Just that decades ago people might not have been aware...
The electronics industries of a couple decades ago were producing stuff that are incomparable to what we have today. Taking that into account, I would say today is "better".
Renting is actually a better deal, financially, in Israel compared to purchasing. Rent is cheaper than the mortgage payment, by hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars a month, in a society where the average price of housing is more than 14x the average annual salary but most people are highly emotionally compelled to purchase housing as a symbol of stability and wealth creation - an emotional decision instead of a financial one.
We calculated when buying the house near Munich that we pay around 140000€ more than renting our flat forever with moderate rent increase. At the moment of signing we needed bigger apartment. Few years later we see, that despite heavy construction in the old house we will save at least 200000€ as buyers. Rents in German cities are out of control. Probably it’s different in regions with solid real estate supply. Here’s nothing.
While I agree that the world would be better without ads in their current form, we should think why are ads required and what are the benefits.
The main issue is how you discover a new product. The main benefit to society is/could be faster progress. The main downside to society could be unhappy people that consume crap.
I think smart people should think about alternative solutions, not just think "ads are the problem".
I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.
My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...
> I personally have the exactly same issues as above when I look for example for open source libraries/programs for a task. There are popular ones, there are obscure ones, they are stable ones, etc. The search space is so big and complex that it is never easy.
And adverts don't help determine what the best tool for your problem is. They determine which product spent the most on adverts.
So yes, adverts do not help you with decision making at all.
Open source software (mostly) don’t have ads, and that doesn’t seem to be a problem in practice. Good projects become known by word of mouth, people blogging about it, etc. If anything, it exemplifies that ads aren’t required.
> My personal preference would be a network recommendation system. I would like to know what people I know (and in my extended network) are using and like - being it restaurants, clothes or open source software. I have 90% of friends (or friends of friends) satisfied with something - maybe I should try. Of course it is not a perfect system, but seems much better than what we currently have...
I can think of a hacky solution where your friends can share their (trustpilot?) or alternative accounts username and then you can review what they are reviewing/what they are using etc.
The problem to me feels like nobody I know writes a trustpilot review unless its really bad or really good (I dont know too much about reviewing business)
I feel like someone must have built this though
Another part is how would you get your friends list? If its an open protocol like fediverse, this might have genuine value but you would still need to bootstrap your friends connecting you in fediverse and the whole process.
And oh, insta and other large big tech where your friends already are wont do this because they precisely make money from selling you to ads. It would be harmful to their literal core.
> My personal preference would be a network recommendation system.
Random question: do you have a personal site where you write about things you recommend? Because that's the solution IMO. And that's the network you're talking about: it's the web. You find enough people you trust and you see what they recommend. The issue is that in modern society 99% of the people consume and 1% are fucking influencers getting paid to promote crap.
I was thinking (theoretically) we should strive for a more efficient system that could include more people. There are plenty of simpler and less efficient to achieve the same goal.
For example I have for example a list of restaurants that I share with people that visit my city (plenty of tourist traps around), but it is cumbersome to manage/share. Does not feel like a solution.
I learnt Basic, C++ in that order because at the time there were the only options (Basic because of a computer like Sinclair that only had basic, C++ because there was the only thing offered as a course at a computer club around).
Programming languages are easier to discover because they are a reasonable number (tens) you can asses, they are very important (if you are in the field), so you can invest a lot of time in choosing and following the trends.
I will not spend the same amount of time deciding about everything...
One thing that I prefer something like ads/reviews (and in fact works well enough in my case): cultural events in the city I live.
Ok, but do you agree that we should put ads in designated places (and out of sight, generally) where people can look them up whenever they find it convenient rather than the other way around where companies just shove them in your face at random times?
I think it is largely a Marketer's fantasy that people get up in the morning with a goal of "discovering new products." I don't want to discover new products. I especially don't want to while I'm trying to do something else that I actually WANT to do. If I need a new product, I will deliberately go out and look for it. I don't need marketers doing drive-by product announcements while I'm just trying to live my life.
The question of "how do people spontaneously discover products" is invalid. It's just not something people want in their lives.
Oh man this is a nice idea, I will try to add on somethings which I can think about from the top of my mind
To be really honest, even if things were publicly broadcasted, The amount of choices of products we make in each day would be huge.
So no random stranger would go and look for your product choices. What would matter are the close friends and family or perhaps when one becomes really famous?
Would the fundamental idea of anonymity go away from all internet? Like if someone posts a youtube video or even a yt comment, would I get to know what they ate for dinner?
Can ads still be blocked? If my product choice is an LLM lets say, would my prompts be choices as well that will get leaked with the conversation to everyone?
To be really honest, Govt.'s (snowden showed us) already can know about your product choices pretty good enough and the internet/infrastructure behind it is pretty centralized nowadays as well
Sure there are alternatives but how many people do you see using beyond the tri-fecta of cloud and how those choices come downstream to us consumers if services run there
I feel like this is gonna be a classic example of Hawthorne effect (Had to look the term for that) meaning that people will behave differently now that they are being observed.
Also do you know that its not any technical limitation which limits it but financial incentives.
There is no incentive to having your product choices be publicly broadcasted but for the services, there is an incentive of money if they show you ads and which they end up showing to ya.
If there was an financial incentive for the servers to create this choice itself of opting out / public broadcasts option, they probably would be reality.
I doubt there is any other "optimal" approach, but do say what you would propose.
There will always be indirect interference anyhow (think social networks, books, press, people talking, tariffs, visas, etc.), so there is some possibility for states to push things in their direction.l
I think imagining there can be some "authority" that could decide when "direct interference" is allowed or not will be a disaster at some point, because even if at first is OK, as a society we don't seem to be at a point where we can have organizations that work well for hundreds of years.
But I would claim that "trusting blindly" was much more common hundreds of years ago than it is now, so we might make some progress in fact.
If people learn to be more skeptical (because at some point they might get that things can be fake) it might even be a gain. The transition period can be dangerous though, as always.
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