• 1 Post
  • 50 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 20th, 2024

help-circle


  • There was a TED talk by Zeynep Tufekci in 2017 (“We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads”) – (YouTube*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI) that briefly talks about this:
    (*I’m aware of the irony in linking there)

    So in 2016, I attended rallies of then-candidate Donald Trump to study as a scholar the movement supporting him. I study social movements, so I was studying it, too. And then I wanted to write something about one of his rallies, so I watched it a few times on YouTube. YouTube started recommending to me and autoplaying to me white supremacist videos in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more extreme and autoplayed that one, too. If you watch Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays conspiracy left, and it goes downhill from there.

    Well, you might be thinking, this is politics, but it’s not. This isn’t about politics. This is just the algorithm figuring out human behavior. I once watched a video about vegetarianism on YouTube and YouTube recommended and autoplayed a video about being vegan. It’s like you’re never hardcore enough for YouTube.

    So what’s going on? Now, YouTube’s algorithm is proprietary, but here’s what I think is going on. The algorithm has figured out that if you can entice people into thinking that you can show them something more hardcore, they’re more likely to stay on the site watching video after video going down that rabbit hole while Google serves them ads.

    These days it might also be about politics, but the motivation to capture attention to serve ads is still the priority.










  • The Amazon situation was the first I’d heard about this problem so I assumed it was the same reason it happens on WM (and elsewhere). And while I certainly don’t expect Walmart to actually read reviews, I would think they would be concerned about potentially losing sales due to projecting a bad image and try to at least (poorly/cheaply) implement a system to address it.

    Assuming it’s not like an email based feedback system but something with an asynchronous connection, it can’t be too hard to look for a handful of keywords (dent, missing, broken, spilled, delivery …) then throw up a Clippy-style message - “It looks like you’re talking about a problem with your order, would you like customer service to assist?” and then route the message/user in that direction.

    I know I’m expecting a lot from our primitive technology in 2025 but I refuse to stop dreaming, dammit!





  • From The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu:

    Later, other Adventists based their hatred of the human race on other foundations, not limited to issues such as the environment or warfare. Some raised their hatred to very abstract, philosophical levels. Unlike how they would be imagined later, most of them were realists, and did not place too much hope in the alien civilization they served either. Their betrayal was based only on their despair and hatred of the human race. Mike Evans gave the Adventists their motto: We don’t know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.