It takes years and years of training in advanced dialectic bullshit to get to the point where you can say, with a straight face, that math is morally wrong. It&#x27;s utterly absurd to demand that we censor models and worsen their output to conform to some activist&#x27;s idealized imagine of how the world should be. Only by letting models report the true facts of the world as it is can we optimize for human happiness.

That is my number one pissing point right now in higher education.Every company has a predictive algorithm to use on students. Every startup that&#x27;s stepping into the space is pushing the data and data scientists.But they all have the same-old, usually decades old, baked in biases. AND they&#x27;re not doing anything to address it!Just because it&#x27;s math doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not biased. I hate it more than anything professionally, right now.

In a similar vein, by the same author: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mathwashing.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mathwashing.com&#x2F;</a>(It&#x27;s linked at the bottom of this one, but I&#x27;m sure a lot of people don&#x27;t get that far)

It&#x27;s a good metaphor, could definitely help people understand the nature of the problem and raise awareness of its urgency.  I&#x27;ll be using term &quot;social cooling&quot; going forward, definitely.

There are probably too many people commenting about Assange for them to do that, although ironically if enough people assume without evidence that they&#x27;ll get swatted for talking about assange, then that will no longer be true.

Assange being an enemy of the state is sufficient proof for me that Trump is not as dangerous as the left says he is.I mean, Assange basically had 2 nukes, one with Clinton&#x27;s name on it and one with Trump&#x27;s name on it and released only the Clinton one because he had personal beef with her. This likely resulted in Trump&#x27;s election.Until that election, I was a Wikileaks fan. Now, I think Assange can go f* himself in prison for the rest of his life. What he did is almost unforgivable.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;wikileaks-julian-assange-donald-trump-jr-hillary-clinton&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;15&#x2F;wikileaks-julian-assange...</a>

Why wouldn&#x27;t they be? Assange is an enemy of the state. Not &quot;of the administration&quot;, but &quot;the state&quot;, in total. The FBI is known to keep lists on and engage in attacks against what they perceive as enemies of the state. It&#x27;s logical to assume that they might still do so.They probably won&#x27;t break down your door for commenting on Assange though. They&#x27;ll have some other pretense, an anonymous tip about drugs maybe.

Just the other day I asked people on here if they are afraid of commenting on Assange on HN incase the FBI break down their doors.to my astonishment quite a few were convinced this is exactly what happens. TF?

I like the climate change comparison.One of the opportunities for comparison that this site only barely touches on is the fact that, like climate change, the companies responsible for this global phenomenon both know it&#x27;s happening and are likely actively working to avoid talking about it. This happened with Exxon, BP, ConocoPhilips, you name it; it&#x27;s now happening with Facebook, Google, etc.This undoubtedly happens because any change for the good of folks would undermine these powerful corporations&#x27; bottom lines.What can we learn from our failure to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable that can be translated here?

They’re based on your behavior using that service, though, not your generalized loyalty to the state.

I&#x27;m not sure how you gathered that this is what they meant.  Do people not review services outside of the US?  (hint: they do)

&gt;elsewhere across the worldIn the US you mean.

This is also not new, this reminds me of the early days of eBay with user ratings impacting your ability to buy &#x2F; sell goods (especially as a new account).

Though to be fair, the part of America which most resembles the Chinese government isn&#x27;t the American government, but American corporations.

This is drastically different than having a government mandated program. Airbnb and Uber are both are both opt-in and it&#x27;s not all that difficult to get a fresh profile on these services.

It&#x27;s a difference of degree and monopoly on violence.... and even degree of monopoly on violence. Uber can do quite a bit of damage to a person by choosing to refuse service if someone needs to urgently be somewhere (or away from somewhere). Airbnb is controlling access to safe shelter. If Amazon grocery stores took off, having a bad Amazon account could deny a person access to food.I don&#x27;t think it would take more than a handful of gig-economy service corporations unifying under one umbrella of data-sharing for the average American to start experiencing something a bit similar to the Chinese experience of social score. For now, there&#x27;s no incentive for them to do so.

It&#x27;s the number associated with my bank account that dictates how much I can travel, where I can live, what kind of education I can get, and even whether I can eat. This is pervasive throughout modern civilization. China&#x27;s social credit system is trivial in comparison.

It&#x27;s a slower slide, but over time this information is centralised into a fewer and fewer large data brokers, what the scores means will become standardised across industries meaning eventually there will be no escape by going to competitors. This enables companies to start charging based on automatically generated risk profiles, some of which will end up being generated based on political preference (or proxies for it) Eventually this means that people with bad scores will be unable to afford certain things in the same way that they have trouble accessing credit. Credit scores are just the beginning.For instance, imagine you are an airline. You have an issue to do with deportation critics disrupting flights when people are being forcibly deported on them. This happens fairly infrequently but costs you quite a lot of money every time this happens. So, &#x27;logically&#x27;, you decide to determine who is most likely to disrupt a flight and so through discriminatory thinking somebody decides that those with left-wing political leanings are more likely to disrupt a flight. They purchase this information on political leanings for each of their passengers and pass this cost onto those who fit the profile, entirely on the basis of their political beliefs.And if they don&#x27;t do this directly, they will do it by proxy in the same way that the insurance industry has been using proxies for race. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;advisor&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;insurance-regulators-pledge-to-address-racism-and-discrimination-within-the-industry&#x2F;#36c261e42f2c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;advisor&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;23&#x2F;insurance-re...</a>It&#x27;s a sort of insurance-ification of all pricing and permission which this kind of technology is increasingly enabling.

It&#x27;s extremely different. It&#x27;s so so so so different.The Chinese surveillance state is incredibly more massive and pervasive, the list of infractions includes incredibly more minor actions (and include political speech that is in anyway dissident), the consequences of a low score are so much more dire (unable to fly, travel, live in certain places, etc).

&gt;In China each adult citizen is getting a government mandated &quot;social credit score&quot;. This represents how well behaved they are, and is based on crime records, what they say on social media, what they buy, and even the scores of their friends.This really isn&#x27;t all that different than what is happening elsewhere across the world today. Your Uber rider score represents your &quot;social credit&quot; for that service. Your Airbnb guest reviews impact if you will be allowed to rent a room. Each platform is putting social credit in place via crowd-sourced &quot;trust&quot;EDIT: I don&#x27;t mean to minimize China&#x27;s human rights violations, but to posture that independently of central control many companies are implementing their own versions of these systems, which can have _some_ of the same effects in terms of losing access to services. Obviously one&#x27;s Uber scores won&#x27;t put you in jail &#x2F; detainment camp and I was not intended to imply such.

It&#x27;s gained a lot of attention. Is there any real evidence that it&#x27;s gained traction?

It is exactly because of social cooling that you heard so little about white supremacy for so many years. The tacit endorsement of one famous person (see if you can guess who!) helped to somewhat raise the ambient temperature for it.

It&#x27;s because this page is using &quot;minority views&quot; as a code word for &quot;ruling class threatening views.&quot;  Which has always been the case.  A minority view that doesn&#x27;t threaten business interests will face little suppression (see: white supremacy)

I remember reading a story about a Black man attending KKK rallies to understand their argument and successfully convince some of them to leave the group. I think it was Daryl Davis: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Daryl_Davis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Daryl_Davis</a>Nowadays this would be very difficult because the mere fact of being around &quot;bad&quot; people (&quot;bad&quot; depends on the context and might be something relatively innocent) would also brand you as &quot;bad&quot; regardless of any good intentions you might have.What ends up happening is that &quot;bad&quot; people are stuck in their own echo-chamber surrounded by like-minded people and anyone outside of the group wouldn&#x27;t dare to engage with them (and provide counter-arguments) because of consequences for their own career &amp; social circle (as their own friends would distance themselves from him for the same reasons).

Calling people you disagree with &quot;white supremacists&quot; has certainly gained ground.But people self identifying as such are extremely rare.

&gt; White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn&#x27;t seem to stop the rallies.Yesterday, there was a documentary movie on German&#x27;s private TV station Pro7 about Nazis. An actual Nazi confirmed live on camera: yes, deplatforming Nazis (and that includes them losing jobs, family, friends) works and is a huge source of pain for the movement because many people don&#x27;t hold up to that pressure and leave.Just imagine how big the rallies would be if there was no social pressure on not being Nazi would no longer be there... at the moment many attendees either don&#x27;t give a f..k about how they are perceived, or they relish on that being accepted in their social circles.

&gt; White supremacy is a minority viewThis depends on how your aggregation function is weighted.If your measure is &quot;how many people in the US are white supremacists?&quot; then, yes, it&#x27;s definitely a minority view (though still more widely held than it should be!).But if you scale it by each person&#x27;s power&#x2F;wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is &quot;what is the total power held by white supremacists?&quot; you&#x27;ll end up with a larger number.And if you really want to get an accurate measure where you treat each person&#x27;s white supremacy value as a number that ranges smoothly from positive (actual white supremacist) to zero (not interested in putting effort into race relations one way or another) to negative (anti-white supremacist), your function may produce a number that explains a hell of a lot of US history.

White supremacy is a minority view in the US and seems to have gained huge amounts of traction in spite of these believed effects. White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn&#x27;t seem to stop the rallies.

That one really rings false. Minority opinion holders are gathering online in record numbers. I&#x27;m thinking in particular of the nut jobs like anti-vaxxers and flat earthers, but also fan bases for obscure culture (reddit saved The Expanse) or the support for non mainstream political figures like Ron Paul or Andrew Yang. If anything, their ability to brigade online forums makes them seem far more prevalent than they really are.

The people who effected that progress often did so under constant, actual physical attack and various forms of blacklisting.

The point about minority views no longer being able to take over is a scary one. There has been a great amount of social progress in the past several decades, and that sort of progress wouldn&#x27;t be possible under the effects of strong social cooling.

Yeah, social media profiles are bought and sold like commodities daily. Look for &quot;bots&quot; in the news for examples.

From what I understand this is an actual thriving industry already. Traditional identity theft (get someone&#x27;s SSN and other info and open credit lines in their name) is much harder now, so the fraudsters have moved on to creating wholly made up &quot;synthetic identities&quot; de novo.

Was thinking the same. I wonder if there is a market selling  &quot;ready to move in&quot; identities

&gt; but if you go apply for a loan or a job, you still have to disclose your real selfThen doesn&#x27;t this discount the threat being posed by the &quot;Social Cooling&quot; theory? If social media activity doesn&#x27;t matter &quot;when it comes down to real transactions&quot; shouldn&#x27;t we be less worried?I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Obviously you can&#x27;t &quot;social media fake&quot; your way into a mortgage (I hope) but it may stop you from getting a job or being elected to office.

Yes but that&#x27;s just the thing: OP wants to create their &quot;real&quot; self, just not the authentic self. It becomes real, by association with the name of the person, yet it stays a simulated expression, a simulacrum[0].Consider that the loan- or job-&quot;machines&quot; are collecting intelligence from social networks to evaluate the person -- in addition to loan history and previous job performance. Now if you can present &quot;yourself&quot; to this machines in a conformal way, you don&#x27;t need to fear negative repercussions on shitposts you did. While you can still be authentic in private or under pseudonyms.Of course, you will still get categorized by the bank transactions you make in your real name. Same goes for your performance reviews on previous jobs. It is just a matter of tricking these other forms of automated social control into a higher rating bound to your name.-----I find it fascinating that philosophers like Baudrillard and Deleuze were able to think and warn about these issues more than 40 years ago when none of this was even remotely on the horizon:See also Deleuzes &quot;Societies of Control&quot;:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;02&#x2F;deleuze_control.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;02&#x2F;deleuz...</a>and:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;337844512_Societies_of_Control_Deleuze%27s_conception_of_Power_Plane_of_Consistency" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;337844512_Societies...</a>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Simulacrum" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Simulacrum</a>

I don&#x27;t think that would really fly. You may get served a higher class of ads, but if you go apply for a loan or a job, you still have to disclose your real self.

This reminds me of Gattaca (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gattaca" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gattaca</a>) where people with good genes rent out their DNA to those who have bad genes so they can get better jobs, insurance, etc...

&gt;It has no bearing on anything as far as I can tell....It says a lot that all of your examples are from your own life. There are counter examples abounding that just aren&#x27;t affecting you (to your knowledge), such as those stated in TFA, or CA, or Brexit etc.Do you think these data brokers are selling our info for billions to rubes? Are insurance companies known for their gullibility? Are sale of lists of rape victims to &#x27;whoever has money&#x27; A-OK, because you are not being personally affected?... These trends are worsening. People aren&#x27;t spending more and more on data that has &quot;no bearing on anything&quot;. That it&#x27;s invisible to you makes it worse.

It has no bearing on anything as far as I can tell. For decades I&#x27;ve been open about my drug use, lack of care for people less fortunate than me, anti-organ-donation, anti-first-lady, illegal importation of pharma, and a hundred other things.I have no problem accessing a $1.5 million mortgage at 2.875%, getting prescribed drugs, or immigration beyond whatever is inherently hard about the system.The best way is still the real information. The hard stuff in the real world. What you do online does nothing.Except maybe the Tinder thing. Most dating apps align your attractiveness with the attractiveness of potential targets. That&#x27;s to be expected.The way I see it is &quot;Information wants to be free&quot;.

This whole concept seems overdramatic to me at least at present. Banks are making lending decisions based on steady income and payment history, not your online persona. Similarly for employment. If you have reasonable qualifications, you will have no trouble finding work, regardless of how &quot;optimal&quot; your persona is.Advertising is the area in which the most persona research and targeting is implemented. I suspect the reason no one is trying to fake online personas is because it would only have noticeable impact on what ads you see.

What do you mean, &quot;It&#x27;s a fictitious company&quot;? Is this not a legitmate service of yours? I get that the service, if real, produces fictitious content but your wording is throwing me off.

Honestly, this had even more impact on me than the social cooling site. Very nicely done.

I, for one, welcome our new culture jamming underlords.testimonials for cloakingcompany.com: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24328764" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24328764</a>

You are brilliant! Is this opensource? Would love to contribute!

Creator of socialcooling.com here. You may enjoy this other website I created:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloakingcompany.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloakingcompany.com</a>It&#x27;s a fictitious company that helps you do exactly this. And while it&#x27;s fiction, the tool actually does work.

This is wire fraud, comrade.All citizens who lie about being cat owning church going knitting enthusiasts — regardless as to whether it was to get a better rate on their next car lease, or not — will be incarcerated.This may be reduced to a small fine (and denouncement) if you forgo your right to the wasteful scrutiny of a public trial.Glory to Arstotska

I&#x27;d be interested in figuring out how I can use this to my advantage. For example, create a persona online that is optimal to lenders, employers and even the government.The issue is my &quot;real self&quot; is uninterested in participating in these networks, even if to create a fake persona.Maybe it could be automated, or outsourced?

I never understood this. Economics 101 or 102 maybe tells us that our consumer welfare will be reduced if firms have less uncertainty about how much they can extract from us. You can make this argument more sophisticated in networks, regarding ads, regarding quality and what have you. But the basic case should be enough to convince you that amazon knowing every detail about you is not going to help you. At all.So of course we have something to hide.

It is enough in the present, but I&#x27;m not sure that will be enough in the future. People have always been distrustful of faraway strangers hiding their faces in hoodies and sunglasses. Similarly for a good credit score you need a history of taking and paying off loans.You may need a good life on display rather than just an absence of bad things.

this is the kind of privacy discourse I am interested in. Whether an individual can find my ssn, location, credit cards, or whatever personal information is not really what I am thinking about when I think about “protecting my privacy” but rather reducing my data emissions that compose these ratings. in my experience it’s hard to get this across to people who are not familiar though, always get the “I have nothing to hide :) what are you trying to hide?” response. Will try this “social cooling” framework next time. maybe a little less daunting as an entry point than “surveillance capitalism”

People-as-cows, huh? What does that mean to you?

Right. Apart from the sci-fi tropes, the extreme drama, and aesthetics, it&#x27;s a spitting image. A great deal of effort is quietly spent on social control, keeping things as they are, and extracting value from people-as-cows, both here and there. Any technology in a position to add robustness to that system, to reduce its upkeep effort, or improve its efficiency at generating wealth for the privileged is likely to succeed, so it&#x27;s reasonable to think some of the not-yet-here but possible aspects their world will make it to ours in time.Sometimes I think that authors who see patterns and make reasonable but dire predictions about where society is going actually end up providing a game plan to career oppressors.

&gt; I was never able to gain an inch on his argument until I asked him why he has curtains on his living room window.I&#x27;m not doing anything wrong, but I still close the door when I take a dump. The idea that someone wanting privacy means it is nefarious or wrong is ridiculous.

I went to a debate once, in which the former head of GCHQ (British equivalent of the NSA) argued that because agents weren&#x27;t literally listening to people&#x27;s phone calls, like the Stazi did, mass digital surveillance is fine. And unfortunately for many people this argument works. Human eavesdropping is obviously a 
problem at a viceral level, because somebody you don&#x27;t know listening to you is frightening. The fact that digital surveillance gives power to its possessor just as much as human surveillance did is hard to get across.

Privacy is simple.  The &quot;watcher&quot; always without exception has a massive power imbalance in their favor.  The first and often only line of defense against that power imbalance is the right to privacy.

Agreed. I think the audience matters too -- different messages appeal to different people.My dad is one of those old school guys who thinks law enforcement can do no wrong and nobody needs to hide anything unless they&#x27;re doing something wrong. Even if that were true and I think it is true that many law enforcement personnel are trying to do good, that doesn&#x27;t always mean the results will always reflect their intentions. When the sample size of facts is too small, as is often the case with mass collection, it&#x27;s too easy for your sample to get mixed up with someone else&#x27;s. Maybe your phone is the only other phone in the area when a murder is committed. That doesn&#x27;t mean you did it, but it sure makes you look like the only suspect.I was never able to gain an inch on his argument until I asked him why he has curtains on his living room window. I mean, it faces North, so there&#x27;s no need to block intense sunlight, yet he closes them every night when he&#x27;s sitting there reading a book or watching TV. Why? He&#x27;s not doing anything illegal, yet he still doesn&#x27;t want people watching him. He said he would not be ok with the Police standing at his window all night watching him. That&#x27;s when he finally understood that digital privacy is not just for criminals, but for everyone who wants to exist in a peaceful state and not a police state.

&gt; &quot;Privacy is the right to be human&quot; are both great, relatable, non-controversial, and easy to understand.And misleading. Privacy in private interactions (personal or closed groups) is basic human right. But in public interactions (public space or open groups) the concept of privacy is much more problematic. One can argue for less accountability for social progress, another for more accountability to weed-out bad actors.Seems to me that using word &#x27;privacy&#x27; for both of these different concepts is source of confusion. Perhaps we should limit term &#x27;privacy&#x27; for private interactions and use some other (like &#x27;non-accountability&#x27;) for public ones.

Yes, this was great. I think the slogans &quot;Privacy is the right to be imperfect&quot; and &quot;Privacy is the right to be human&quot; are both great, relatable, non-controversial, and easy to understand.

I believe that social cooling is a thing, and I also believe that the observations you&#x27;re making are legitimate. Three points that might reconcile these ideas:1) social cooling is a long-term, slow-burn, bring-pot-to-boil-so-slowly-the-frogs-don&#x27;t-notice problem. Pointing out some social heat to discredit it is analogous to people discrediting global warming because they&#x27;ve experienced an unseasonable cold snap in their town.2) By your own description, there are knowledge gaps inside the &quot;social fire&quot; crowd - they don&#x27;t understand (potential, future) consequences like housing discrimination, work prospects, etc. I don&#x27;t think it will take more than one generation for these realities to become common knowledge.3) Finally, people who consider themselves hopelessly marginalized will be susceptible to &#x27;social fire&#x27;. People who don&#x27;t have anything to lose are prone to this (eg, what factors go into someone&#x27;s decision to get on board with looting?). More solidly situated members of the public, with reputations (salaries, ongoing business concerns, etc) at stake, are likely to be more careful.

Considering we&#x27;re see &quot;social heating&quot; if not &quot;social fire&quot; all around us, I&#x27;m not sure this is informs people correctly.My local Facebook group seethes with an angry discussion just below threats of actual violence - and the actual violence was on display only a short time ago when Back The Blue physically assaulted a black lives matter demonstration (in a smallish city where &quot;BLM&quot; is just earnest liberals as you&#x27;d expect). And the miscreants were readily identifiable by Facebook (which hurt their business if nothing else but still basically weren&#x27;t all that bothered by the situation).Another thing about the heated local-group arguments is that few people have a good idea how unprivate their situation really is. The paranoia of Bill Gates &quot;microchipping&quot; people is a cartoonish example but there&#x27;s a vast group people very concerned with privacy but having close to no understanding of what it actually involves (or how much they don&#x27;t have).If anything, the noxious effect of massive collection is most evidenced by micro-marketing of a variety of crazed ideas to those most susceptible to them - and employers and landlords being able to harass their own employees for particular things they object to (but lets a lot of things through, and business owners have less to worry about).

&gt; When you think privacy of in in the terms of &#x27;social cooling&#x27;, or consider things like China&#x27;s &#x27;social credit&#x27; system, I can&#x27;t help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.We were &#x27;almost&#x27; there 20 years ago. We are firmly near Westworld (everything outside of androids).

I think this is a good example of how pro-privacy arguments should be framed. It is takes the varied aspects and complex implications of tracking users across the web (or even in the real world), and distills it down into an easy to understand concept.When you think privacy of in in the terms of &#x27;social cooling&#x27;, or consider things like China&#x27;s &#x27;social credit&#x27; system, I can&#x27;t help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.

There are different social contexts. Everyone recognizes this; you&#x27;ll say things around friends that you won&#x27;t say in a work meeting.Online communities have contexts that are just as real, but they have the digital discontinuities we all know and love, so the odds of doing the equivalent of dropping into that work meeting after several beers is much more likely and happens far more frequently.A separate issue is preservation - of course all this is on Your Permanent Record. And the future only has very different, limited interest in what the context is now.

but truly I bet you what you are referring to are people&#x27;s opinions which are &#x27;extreme&#x27; but at the same time probably can be lumped into groups of like-minded opinions with others - they are cooling towards their chosen echochambers but the same concept applies - because they get directed based on said data to these fringes because the data groups them towards them in suggestions

Then we would expect posting on Facebook to go down, yet Facebook&#x27;s user count keeps going up.

That also exacerbates the problem. The only people posting are strongly opinionated loud mouths.

While true, there&#x27;s not a good way to prove why others aren&#x27;t posting; maybe it&#x27;s &quot;social cooling&quot; or maybe they just got bored.

Pretty good example of selection bias.  The people who are concerned are not going to be posting on facebook.

The algorithm is designed to provide maximally engaging content. Of your Facebook friends, you will see posts from the most outspoken ones, which isn&#x27;t everybody.

I find myself holding back upvoting posts on HN as analysis of my voting habits would give such a clear indication of my inner thoughts.

Gotta be honest: I don&#x27;t have to spend more than 5 minutes on Facebook to dissuade myself of the hypothesis that, on average, people are feeling constrained about what they&#x27;re saying.

the problem isn&#x27;t necessarily with _accurate_ data and math, but with reductive statistics that paint with broad brushes. Statistics inherently remove nuance, which is fine when the nuance is unimportant to what you&#x27;re measuring, but not when it&#x27;s actually important.The example about cancer doctors in TFA is perfect. &quot;more deaths = worse doctor&quot; is a poor metric, because advanced cases have higher deaths in general, leading to a disincentive to try to help people with advanced forms of cancer. That&#x27;s a terribly perverse incentive, and one that should be avoided.Fundamentally, a lot of this stuff comes down to a lack of nuance in metrics, leading to some nasty effects down wind.

Men commit more violent offenses than women. Should I, a man, be turned down for a job because of this despite never having committed a violent offense? No woman has ever won the US presidency, should we therefore divert funds away from female candidates because they are provably less likely to win? If after doing that for a century and no woman has yet to win, should we still continue to divert funds away from them? I hope the answers to these questions are obviously &quot;no, we shouldn&#x27;t.&quot; If data-driven decisions are equally problematic but hide it behind layers of apparently justifiable (and often opaque) mathematics, then we have a problem.

You missed the point. The point is that you can be doing the wrong math on the wrong data, jumping to completely baseless and detrimental conclusions. You cannot judge the needs of the many by the actions of the few or vice versa.

This article links at the bottom to similarly-styled piece about &quot;mathwashing&quot;, the idea that it&#x27;s morally wrong for an algorithm to notice true facts about reality. That idea is utter bunk, and so likely is &quot;Social Cooling&quot; as well. Both pushes are really about unelected activists trying to limit other people&#x27;s technology to bring about their peculiar idea of Utopia.In all human history, efforts to hold back the tide of technological progress have never worked. Instead of adopting a Luddite fear of data and math, we should use both for all useful ends as soon as possible.

Google&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Facebook are the same in EU. GDPR barely changes anything in this case.

It just must be illegal without real consent. See: GDPR.

The difference is that murder is detectable. If I collect data on your traffic and improve my software using that data, no one will know.

You can&#x27;t stop murder either.Perfect enforcement of rules is rarely a goal of policy. It just sets expectations for behavior, and when violation of policy becomes known remedial and&#x2F;or punitive measures can be taken.

You can&#x27;t stop data collection, people will just do it in secret.

The thing is we don&#x27;t even need opaque algorithms to do that, we do it to ourselves.  Not a week (I should probably even say not a day) without a &quot;cancel campaign&quot; on Twitter to go after some rando&#x27;s job just because they didn&#x27;t tweet The Right Thing.

&gt; I&#x27;m amazed that I visited a website that set no cookies [...] Such a rarity nowadays.Be the change you expect from the world! Start building sites like this!

I agree. I particularly liked to see the ubiquitous Google Analytics was absent from the website.

I&#x27;m the creator of the website. It has a simple PHP text file counter. That&#x27;s all it has, and I&#x27;d argue it&#x27;s enough. I want people to be able to visit this website without any fear of tracking and profiling.It&#x27;s a strange thing to say I won&#x27;t know if my message is effective or not without tracking, since we&#x27;re currently discussing it on Hackernews ;-D

As the author mentioned, it ended up on HN. Message received. I can scroll to the bottom of the article and feed the trackers bad data. Your argument is invalid because you can&#x27;t make a foolproof algorithm that&#x27;ll tell you correctly how the user used the site and if the page was finished reading if the user can simply feed you bogus data.There&#x27;s another (also brilliant site) linked at the bottom of the original article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mathwashing.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mathwashing.com&#x2F;</a>And here&#x27;s the funny part - you assumed the author won&#x27;t know, and that&#x27;s precisely what he&#x27;s talking about at mathwashing.com - these &quot;algorithms&quot; that are as faulty as people who come up with them.I doubt you actually read the whole thing with full attention. The message got through to the people it was supposed to get through. I applaud the effort to go without all the tracking nonsense. And whenever I see tracking crap like medium.com uses, I feed it bad data on purpose. It&#x27;s better to stand true to your message and create a cookieless &#x2F; trackless site whose purpose is to convey the message rather than use this shitty argument about authors knowing whether they are reaching out to their audience. Precisely because of that thinking we&#x27;ve broken internet where in order to read 512 bytes of text I&#x27;ve to block 50 megabytes of tracking bloatware.

So the website owners won&#x27;t get proper analytics about who are their users, why they came to the website, how did they finish reading page to the end and so on. They won&#x27;t know if their message was effective or not.

The content is brilliant. Very, very, very well done. From engineering POV: I&#x27;m amazed that I visited a website that set no cookies, that no resource was blocked by uBlock &#x2F; nanoDefender &#x2F; nextdns. Amazing. Just amazing. Such a rarity nowadays.

this is particularly true for people who have international ties. you become subject to the social cooling mechanisms of very different cultures that may conflict with each other.

I censor myself on Wechat.am American.If you&#x27;re paying attention you know that you might want to skip the &quot;vocational bootcamp&quot; when you need to do business in China some day. Because you might not graduate!Let&#x27;s just skip to the end: Every rebuttal I have to whatever lecture you want to give me could be construed as a whataboutism and could also be construed as simply true. There are various groups of people that would get re-routed outside of the respected due process paths in the US for things they said too. We also consider those problems. Its just not a different enough user experience for me to single out China.

Even in the best of circumstances, being subjected to the highlights of 100 other people will make your life feel miserable in comparison. Amazing vacation locations at the best time of day, gorgeous food from the best angle, amazing health and fashion with the best lightning. That&#x27;s before we go into likes hunting and what that does to the reward paths in your brain. Social media as a concept is deeply unhealthy. At least the traditional celebrity cult, already rather weird in its American incarnation, had some degree of psychological distance between self and the professionals. With social media, everyone is caught in the celebrity game.Right now is a great time to delete your accounts. The only better time is yesterday.

Really feels like a Catch 22 situation, then. :-(

Note that for many people this would be an example of their plan &quot;working&quot;. For some, the most immediate goal is not to change your mind or the minds of others. There&#x27;s an intermediate goal to make your position appear marginal, which can help in changing the minds of others. By dropping out, you increase the efficacy of this strategy.

All I use FB for these days is to look in on specific friends, by name. I never view the feed.Yes, that makes me a &#x27;lurker&#x27;, which is fine with me, though I do use Facebook messenger to chat with some people as well, which is nice.

&gt; Also, &quot;social cooling&quot; is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site.Agreed.I thought it was going to be about &quot;evaporative cooling&quot;, how bad behaviour drives thoughtful people out of a group, producing a feedback cycle where bad behaviour is further amplified.Which is tangentially related to the topic of the link, but different enough to be actively misleading. Unfortunate.

Not only is the &quot;climate change&quot; analogy strained, it perfectly contradicts their argument, showing both its weakness and their total lack of self-awareness.The positions on climate change range from &quot;existential threat to all life on the planet within 20 years and our way of life&quot; to &quot;mass hysteria founded by fault-ridden scientific evidence whose solutions are an existential threat to the global economy and our way of life&quot;. These positions in particular are held by a significant percentage of the population of the Western world, and most people cluster near one of these two extremes. In other words, it is an extremely polarizing issue that, for many, colors how they perceive other people, should they discover their positions.The creators of this website suggest that social media and data-mining are forcing people to self-censor and not freely express themselves, but then proceed to frame the contentious political issue of climate change as a believer&#x2F;denialist modality. The authors make it clear that they don&#x27;t want people to have a nuanced opinion on climate change, they want them to conform to the &quot;unquestionable truth&quot;.But it is this form of rigid thinking that causes people to self-censor, not the intangible specter of &quot;big-data&quot; and &quot;the algorithm&quot;. If you were employed by someone who made it clear that they are only interested in hiring people who were devout Christian, you wouldn&#x27;t openly share your atheist views publicly. Western society as a whole is selecting more and more topics, like climate change, where to be on the record holding a conflicting opinion is disastrous for your relationships with friends, family, and employers. This fact isn&#x27;t a fault of the technology, though the technology might be the reason society is becoming rapidly intolerant of dissent.Conflict and social guardedness like this is guaranteed to arise when we have a political landscape that is so divided and thinks everything is on the line.

Without going into details, for various reasons, my relationship with my employer essentially made it critical that I delete my account several years ago. I resented it at the time, because while I considered facebook fundamentally unhealthy, I justified it as a way to keep in touch with friends, and, very cynically, use it as a propaganda tool for career advancement.In hindsight, though. I couldn&#x27;t be more glad for the push. For at least a few years, I had actively unfollowed a good majority of friends from my feed because watching their gyrations (posing, fighting, echoing, ...) was making me lose respect for a lot of people. I don&#x27;t need their mental hygiene and low-effort politics rubbed in my face and I&#x27;m happier not seeing it.Looking back, one thing I did conclude was that the death of email was one of the few things that made Facebook valuable. I had email contact for pretty much every person I was &quot;friends&quot; with on FB, but many of those addresses have expired, or they are so flooded with spam that when you message someone, they don&#x27;t see it at all or not for +a week or so. I&#x27;m like that myself - I only look at my personal email once a week, on Friday night.Also, &quot;social cooling&quot; is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site. They should have called it &quot;Socially Mandated Fronting&#x27; or something instead of trying to make an awkward and not very meaningful global climate change analogy.

In terms of a social media site, what you are saying sounds exhausting. Having a couple of friends with different opinions is great, having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks.You mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia, they were both well versed in law and justice, so it makes sense even if their opinions are different, they can respect each other.

&gt; The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.That&#x27;s a rather simplified world view. Let&#x27;s make an example: I have a bunch of friends who are deeply interested in medicine - a discussion about cancer, what it is, treatment possibilities etc. are a very appropriate topic. I also have a friend who&#x27;s just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Having that discussion in front of her would be utterly insensitive.Likewise, it&#x27;s kind of insensitive to perma-gloat about your new great relationship in front of somebody who just had a divorce.What topics we can deal with depends on our lives and what&#x27;s currently going on. Paying attention to those circumstances in other people&#x27;s lives is the kind thing to do, and has nothing to do with &quot;being afraid of offending oversensitive people&quot;Remember that guy who gave you advice? He suggest to seek a broad range of opinions. You were in control when you sought out those opinions. Facebook takes that control away - you will see the opinions it considers appropriate for your stream, when it considers them appropriate.And sure, be who you are. But that &quot;adult&quot; thing also includes respecting other people&#x27;s boundaries, and social media makes that almost impossible.

&gt; My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.This is almost certainly not true. Your idea of what is the norm is being driven by what is actually the exception because that’s what we see on the news (the news almost by definition shows things that are newsworthy and are out of the norm).

You&#x27;re painting a rosy picture. For example, how many Blacks were ever friends with Klansmen? How many Jews were friends with Nazis? If someone&#x27;s opinions include the idea that I&#x27;m less than human, I can&#x27;t be friends with them. It&#x27;s impossible to bridge that gap if the other side sees me as an animal, or a monster, or an enemy agent actively working to destroy the country, if not the world.I doubt there are any more hate groups now than there ever were; the difference is, these days, people are more willing to call them out for being what they are.

While this is great advice, it doesn&#x27;t solve OPs problem of worrying about offending someone.The larger problem is an offended person can do a lot of damage. In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress.Personally, I don&#x27;t want to worry about getting SWATted because some nobody from my high-school disagreed with my Facebook post. So I&#x27;m not going to post anything on Facebook.

If you are going to hold regular people to the intellectual and emotional discipline of supreme court justices, you&#x27;re gonna be disappointed. I think we can use our empathy here and understand that these systems we have created have successfully disrupted information flow, its social verification, and the tools and processes we have to mitigate fallout from this are immature. It will take time for society to filter in the social processes needed to suss out truthful information. Sadly, like those who dealt with other disruptive technologies like the printing press, I dont think this will be fixed to our standards within a generation.

I suppose your adult&#x2F;child dichotomy is meant to be an insult and not taken literally, but I have to say that it&#x27;s just as important for children&#x2F;young people to intentionally seek out different opinions. Maybe even more so than adults, because that&#x27;s when the bulk of your worldview, beliefs, and personality are formed.From my experience, young people are better at it than adults, too.

I agree with the spirit of your words. I think that the subtext of your post (or at least people that espouse similar things on the internet) is that this is the fault of a certain brand of American politics (left leaning, &quot;SJW&quot; types) that don&#x27;t engage with many right-leaning people.The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.For many people who don&#x27;t experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.The argument that left-leaning people won&#x27;t engage with right-leaning people often feels like it&#x27;s used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don&#x27;t seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.Finally, engaging with &quot;challenging&quot; opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it&#x27;s worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.

Oh come on. When you meet your friends, you meet them in groups. When you talk to them, it&#x27;s usually to sub groups or one to one. There&#x27;s the nice colleagues from work, there&#x27;s the childhood friends, there&#x27;s the friends for drinking and banter and there&#x27;s former girlfriends or love interests.Each of these have different interests, a different shared background with you, and are used to different communication modes and different contexts. The idea that you should always talk to everyone at the same time and show them a single monolithic self is just silly. Life doesn&#x27;t work like that and being a politician is not a job I signed up for.

Ginsburg and Scalia, even if they did take a genuine interest in one another&#x27;s friendship, had external considerations two average, everyday people wouldn&#x27;t have. The image of the court, and its ability of folks with different world-views to come together and still respect each other when disagreeing-- it helps present an image of an impartial court. The functioning of SCOTUS depends on the legitimacy of its image. Many of our institutions function this way, but it is acutely important to the court.

If people can&#x27;t respect you for having a different opinion, they&#x27;re not adults, and they&#x27;re certainly not &quot;friends,&quot; Facebook or otherwise.What if your opinion is proven to be wrong but you are just not respecting the fact. Does it make sense to respect someone&#x27;s opinion just because it is an opinion in such a case?

There are a few identifiable elements of toxicity in social memia.i) The tendency to immaturity. (This is a social problem.)ii) The tendency to loud stupidity and stubborn ignorance. Not all opinions need be heard and acknowledged. Reason is a habit that must be practised. (This is a cultural problem. At bottom, it is anti-intellectualism.)iii) The very modern problem of &quot;victimology discourse&quot;. Everyone has lived injustice because, frankly, people are exploitative and &quot;the system&quot; finds abuse to be profitable. But we cannot have free speech and productive exchanges if Victim Points overrule discussion.In the end, the reflective person will disengage from the dungheap. This leaves only the dung.

No. The problem is that social media is like gathering all the people you know into a single room and shouting your thoughts at them. That&#x27;s not how socializing is done. Not how the encouragement to seek out differing opinions in college works. Those things are done individually or in small groups. That works great, there can be a give and take where people can listen to each other. That&#x27;s where social media badly breaks down.

&gt; Which is a good thing. It&#x27;s how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It&#x27;s how you learned things. It was called being an adult.This is a very rosy-colored view of a past that wasn&#x27;t enjoyed by many people except for certain small subsets of relatively-well-off folks whose disagreements were around less directly consequential things (like tax policy) than &quot;some of you don&#x27;t deserve any rights.&quot;And even then, even in my grandfather&#x27;s old social circles... still a LOT of sorting going on.Read &quot;The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind&quot; for a good discussion from the inside of how American religion has been dominated by sensitivity for decades.

&gt;Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren&#x27;t children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.They also were both high status individuals who lived almost exclusively in the world of academic disagreement. It&#x27;s not that difficult to be open-minded when closed-mindedness has little physical consequences for you.If you live in a town in Myanmar where some heated discussion on the internet can turn into an ethnic riot and end with you dead on the street, or you&#x27;re a Chinese shop owner and some garbage on the internet ends with your store being destroyed you get a little bit more careful about the &quot;sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me&quot; attitude.The shifting attitude towards offense isn&#x27;t so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it&#x27;s democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all, all discourse was &#x27;free&#x27; because it was free from consequence for the people who spoke, in practical terms.

&gt; If people can&#x27;t respect you for having a different opinion, they&#x27;re not adults, and they&#x27;re certainly not &quot;friends,&quot; Facebook or otherwise.Nah. Not everyone has the luxury that you have, of just throwing away their friends like that, even if it is &quot;their&quot; fault.Frankly, I personally don&#x27;t care much about politics at all. It is a hobby of mine. But I don&#x27;t truly care about it.Why would I give up a friend, to stand up for ideas that I don&#x27;t really care much about at all?For some sort of worthless &quot;principle&quot;? No thanks. Feel free to keep your principles if that&#x27;s what you care about. I don&#x27;t really value those, though.

This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode &quot;Nosedive&quot;.
Everyone has a publicly visible social score and they can vote their peers based on their interactions.Since it&#x27;s used for jobs, housing, loans etc. everyone becomes risk-averse and artificially nice. And more and more alike externally.We&#x27;re not there yet but excessive surveillance is definitely worth talking about.

I think you&#x27;re making an assumption of participants that are reasonable, rational, and willing to engage in discussion and debate in good faith. But a lot of people are unreasonable, irrational, do not want to discuss, and are really simply entrenched in their belief systems and preaching it.

&gt; Which is a good thing. It&#x27;s how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It&#x27;s how you learned things. It was called being an adult.This is a load of gilded age nonsense. There&#x27;s never been any point in history where people deliberately exposed themselves to uncomfortable truths about people they considered other as part of &quot;growing up&quot;.I&#x27;d really challenge you to think about when you think this was. Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?What you&#x27;re experiencing isn&#x27;t &quot;people failing to communicate with people with diverse views,&quot; but the internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now. You have to exist on the same site as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems that benefit you and you&#x27;re scared of that anger and those people&#x27;s unwillingness to accept your desire to stick your head in the sand like your parents could.

A lot of this is down to context, not our moral failings.We moderate ourselves differently at the bar, with our boss, with our wife&#x27;s aunt. Maybe you don&#x27;t drag contentious politics to your inlaw&#x27;s dinner chat or sex anecdotes into work conversations. The OP&#x27;s point is about applying this moderation across the board, because on FB everything is. This context breeds a culture of banality.This website is discussing a broader and scarier implication, but the what the OP is describing is already at full (I hope!) maturity.

&gt; Which is a good thing. It&#x27;s how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It&#x27;s how you learned things. It was called being an adult.Right and wrong. I don&#x27;t think a ton of young people in the 60s were hanging around with people who voted for Nixon. But its true that in a world where (all the white people) go to the same bar, there&#x27;s a social pressure to meld and focus on common understanding.The divergence between the 2 ends of the wedge issues is as large right now as it was in the 1800s. The reason we are not literally having skirmishes across state lines is because we are more geographically mixed now (cities vs rural).Its not a maturity thing anymore - its that we&#x27;re actual enemies of each other, and not just at the wedge issues anymore. We have similarities like &quot;shops at Target&quot; and &quot;wants their family to do well&quot; but that doesn&#x27;t prevent open conflict. Ideologically we are actually, really divided, and fundamentalism is the coin of the realm.

The level of emotionally and politically motivated anti-intellectualism over the past decade or so has grown so much and so exponentially to the point that all-out idiocracy now rules the day. It&#x27;s become a fashionable sport to compete on how aggressively one can deploy stupidity to drown out the voices of reason and truth, so that we all inevitably sink a little deeper into the worst instincts of human nature.Thing is, I &#x2F;know&#x2F; for a fact that most people are not this stupid. But I also understand that these days it&#x27;s every man, woman and child for themselves, so I can sympathize with the innate need to blend in.Past dictators and totalitarian regimes from the history books, who wanted people to have zero ability to think for themselves could honestly look at this situation we&#x27;re in right now, and feel so much pride that they might even blush a little bit; meanwhile Carl Sagan is turning over in his fucking graves.

All people deserve respect. Not all opinions do.

I realized that I can&#x27;t actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone.The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.There&#x27;s a lot of variety in my crowdWhich is a good thing. It&#x27;s how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It&#x27;s how you learned things. It was called being an adult.Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren&#x27;t children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, &quot;What&#x27;s wrong with you? Don&#x27;t you want to be challenged?&quot; My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.Be who you are. If people can&#x27;t respect you for having a different opinion, they&#x27;re not adults, and they&#x27;re certainly not &quot;friends,&quot; Facebook or otherwise.

You can install messenger separately from the fb app itself on android. Not using your fb profile is basically deactivating it. Remove your pics, set as many things as you want to private, and just don&#x27;t download or log into the app

yes, you can deactivate your facebook account and still use messenger, 
see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;messenger-app&#x2F;1526848634305688" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;messenger-app&#x2F;1526848634305688</a>

I posted a &quot;good-bye&quot; message so people would know not to expect any more posts, and kept my account because I wanted to still use Groups, Events, and Marketplace.

Hm. Speaking of, is there any way to deactivate a FB profile but stay on messenger? I have no interest in a fb profile but I&#x27;m connecting with all my friends and family on Messenger

It&#x27;s funny, one of my friends posted on his FB, &quot;Who are you voting for and why?&quot; And nobody took the bait. He just got a bunch of popcorn eating gifs

Yeah, I tried Twitter too, but so few of my friends use it, it just seemed like a clunkier, angrier version of HN with about half the average IQ points.

Are you on Twitter? It&#x27;s a more common platform for political stuff. Facebook is for friends, and unless you want to discuss politics with all of your friends at once, why not just keep it to personal stuff?

note that this is a marketing site (as noted in my other comment[0]), so discount appropriately.social pressure predates humans. it&#x27;s pervasive and our teenage years (especially) are spent coping with&#x2F;negotiating that. the difference with facebook is that it&#x27;s potentially unbounded in reach and visibility (in nearly all cases it&#x27;s not, but every once in a while, something blows completely out of its social circle). as with many modern phenomena, the risk-aversion this induces is out of proportion with the actual risks because of that potential (but not actual) reach and visibility, amplified by memetic social networks that trade in novel (whether true or false) information. in short, the worry over the effects of offense are greater than the potential effects themselves.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24629098" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24629098</a>

Yeah, I am very curious about what interesting things they&#x27;re posting that offend people all the time. That&#x27;s quite an achievement.

Maybe I&#x27;m not always as diplomatic as I could be all the time, but what if I like it that way? I don&#x27;t have this problem with offending people IRL or even in other online communities. And I&#x27;m not interested at all in cutting people out of my life - I like my social circle. So, in my mind, the platform is indeed the problem.

I can see how censoring yourself to the point of silence is bad, however, as someone who spent a great deal of time expressing my sometimes offensive POV&#x27;s with very little consideration for others, the forced filter and permanence of the internet has benefited me. I am more careful and thoughtful about how I express myself now.

&gt; I realized that I can&#x27;t actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone.If you really don&#x27;t get value out of a platform then it&#x27;s definitely a good thing to withdraw, but personally... I find there are plenty of interesting things I can talk&#x2F;post about without flipping any major rage behavior. And I have lefty, liberal, and conservative friends, religious and anti-religious friends, friends who are interested in high&#x2F;intellectual culture and friends who are not.I do sometimes offend people. Anything that prompts people to evaluate themselves or their models of the world or their particular value-set runs that risk. Sometimes I have things to say that are likely to do that. Like, for example, the suggestion that maybe a personal capacity for diplomacy has as much to do with the ability to hold wide-ranging conversations as much as the foibles of platforms or people do.Some topics are especially difficult, but there sure seem to be approaches that minimize the heat-to-light ratio in discussions.

There definitely needs to be an event aggregator that doesn&#x27;t require a facebook account. I don&#x27;t use Facebook, but all the hobby groups I ever meet in real life do!

I go back and forth between deactivating my again and getting back on FB. I&#x27;ve realised the only reason I&#x27;m on FB these days is because of some hobby groups that I&#x27;m a part of and those are only on FB. I don&#x27;t connect with any of my friends on FB and have blocked updates from most acquaintances.

Facebook had lists introduced after Google+ circles.It allowed you to define different views and audiences for your profile from your friend list.I loved it, though building the lists was awful awful.Now its even harder to edit the lists, and they hidden three layers deep and you can only view them on the web browser.They should bring them back.

I&#x27;ve quit (as in, delete, not suspend) my Facebook account twice. Deleted it, signed up again years later, deleted it again. I hope it&#x27;s for good.The reason really was politics. I&#x27;ve never learned anything new from these posts, they tend to just be the more bombastic restatements of things that everyone already knows about. I think they&#x27;re a form of social signaling or posturing (people want to establish themselves as the most for or against... whatever their in-group is for or agains).There&#x27;s a funny onion article I&#x27;ve always enjoyed, &quot;I don&#x27;t like the person you become when you&#x27;re on the Jumbotron&quot;.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sports.theonion.com&#x2F;i-dont-like-the-person-you-become-when-youre-on-the-jum-1819584133" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sports.theonion.com&#x2F;i-dont-like-the-person-you-becom...</a>There are people I am friends with, but I wouldn&#x27;t want to be around when they&#x27;re drunk. I feel the same way about some people on social media. The problem is, they tend to be the ones who dominate the platform. And it&#x27;s new, so we&#x27;re not really aware of the dangers - but I actually do think it may have a lot in common with alcohol addiction.

I left when coworkers started asking to connect on FB.I don&#x27;t bring my friends to work with me, except once in a very great while about ADA topics. I don&#x27;t need my work life to be affected by the activities of my social circles.I wasn&#x27;t getting much out of it anyway, it was easier not to play (leave and say I didn&#x27;t have one).

I&#x27;ve also noticed I can disagree with people I actually know.Online we&#x27;re all on teams. If anywhere in your post history you indicate your on a different team then we need to say mean things to each other.In real life I have very liberal , very conservative and somewhat indifferent friends. I&#x27;ve also dated a variety of folks with different political leanings. I&#x27;ve largely stepped back from social media due to this. Why am I going to get into arguments with people I don&#x27;t even know ?If you want to connect with people, I suggest meet up groups. It&#x27;s very easy to make friends you can actually hang out with. I would say to prioritize doing things you want to do. Like I&#x27;m heavily into tech talks , so I attended a ton of those.I&#x27;m fairly optimistic next year the vaccine will be out and things will be somewhat normal.

But at least you can watch autoplaying videos of people getting shotKiller feature

Recently my close friend who still uses FB tried to send someone a link to a public tweet made by the president’s daughter.FB messenger censored the private message and refused to send it, claiming it was against “community standards”.These sorts of logged-forever, censored platforms are absolutely chilling speech, person-to-person, even in DMs, and you wouldn’t even know when it happens to messages sent to you.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;atomly&#x2F;status&#x2F;1309632274908946434" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;atomly&#x2F;status&#x2F;1309632274908946434</a>&gt; that&#x27;s my only way to keep in touch with themThat means that you can’t communicate with them, even in DM, in a way that’s not logged for and filtered by a remote party whose interests are not your own. It’s only a matter of time until this is abused by the state.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sneak.berlin&#x2F;20200421&#x2F;normalcy-bias&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sneak.berlin&#x2F;20200421&#x2F;normalcy-bias&#x2F;</a>

I have no idea how you can do this, all my friends are on FB and that&#x27;s my only way to keep in touch with them. I just use messenger so I don&#x27;t really see the downsides that everybody is talking about here.

Yeah and by handcrafting those subsets you&#x27;d give LOTS of valuable info to their algorithms.

I disconnected Facebook, but have no choice now. You cannot be a SMB marketer without Facebook and its properties in 2020.

When &#x27;friends&#x27; post on Facebook, they are putting their message on my feed. That&#x27;s fine, that&#x27;s the implicit agreement.Also part of that agreement, when I comment on their post.That&#x27;s where most problems arise for me. I typically unfriend people when they&#x27;re offended when I question their post.

Yeah that was sad.The people designing Google Groups were clearly on a mission to fix social media. Their bosses had a different mission: to force all Google services into a single account, unified around some &quot;Facebook killer&quot; that was just going to magically work because, y&#x27;know, it&#x27;s Google.These differing goals came to a head with the &quot;true names&quot; debacle, which Groups never recovered from. But Google did get its One True Account out of it, which is all they really wanted.

That was one advantage of Google Circles (or Google Groups or whatever they were calling it before they killed it): you could define different circles and send messages only to specific circles if you wanted. It seemed like good way to do it, but of course, as with all things Google it was killed.

&gt; I can&#x27;t actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There&#x27;s a lot of variety in my crowd.This is called &quot;context collapse&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rewire.org&#x2F;context-collapse-online&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rewire.org&#x2F;context-collapse-online&#x2F;</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fanlore.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Context_Collapse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fanlore.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Context_Collapse</a>You might know what to say and how to say it in each context, but this becomes impossible when the contexts are all collapsed into one.

That&#x27;s fair. I read the &quot;Social Cooling&quot; site (as an aside, what would you call sites like this? E-pamphlets seems like a good term to use.) and it immediately made me think of this essay I read years ago:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theanarchistlibrary.org&#x2F;library&#x2F;institute-for-precarious-consciousness-we-are-all-very-anxious" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theanarchistlibrary.org&#x2F;library&#x2F;institute-for-precar...</a>I think this &quot;social cooling&quot; is related to this generalized feeling of &quot;precarity,&quot; the feeling that your place in society can be suspended or deleted in an instant. Whether the agent of this deletion is a state actor (China), a corporation acting on behalf of a state or advertiser (YouTube&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Twitter), or just ordinary people not acting on any agenda but just carrying forward the anxiety they experience internally. I don&#x27;t find the latter particularly scarier than the first two since it doesn&#x27;t carry as much of a threat with it. I certainly didn&#x27;t experience it as such; but just a minor annoyance and general dissatisfaction with Facebook as a product.I find it ironic that so many took my top-level comment to mean something was wrong with my social universe; as if, instead of the obvious solution of eschewing Facebook, my solution should be to separate from the people in my life and find better people who I could be on Facebook with. The assumption that it&#x27;s healthy or even possible to &quot;cancel&quot; people out of your life for not passing some arbitrary standard of behavior is ludicrous to me (and, I would think, to any sane person with family ties, work relationships, etc.). Other people are messy, unpredictable and sometimes awful, but we do need them, and they need us. I think they have internalized this experience of precarity and turned it into a weapon they can wield against others, like an abused person becoming an abuser.

I agree with you, but I find it interesting to contrast this with what this site is describing as social cooling. The website&#x27;s claims are entirely big data and algorithm driven. But what you describe here, and what I think most people initially think of in terms of &quot;social cooling&quot; is the type of self-censorship and fear of the masses that is the result of masses of individual users, rather than algorithmic bias adjusting to our digital fingerprint.The two aren&#x27;t completely inseparable. Social media and the modern internet drive the kind of digital puritanism you are describing, and social media and the modern internet are largely based on monetization through advertising, which is driving the social cooling the website is describing. But the two are different phenomena, and I find the one you are describing much more relevant and terrifying than algorithms tracking my clicks to curate my advertisements and Instagram feed.

Offending your peers is a separate issue than social cooling as described by this submission. That is an interpersonal issue. Social cooling is a relationship between an individual and powerful institutions like credit agencies, governments, employers, banks, etc.

Why would you want to share that with random acquatiances anyway ? For me Facebook is about life events of people I know and easy contact&#x2F;messaging not political discussions or whatever else people find triggering.

As we provide platforms to everyone to broadcast their opinions on everything , what I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.

Facebook is the new television: a pile of rubbish made to keep the plebes entertained. I use it mainly for fun (posting memes and jokes) and to see what people I haven&#x27;t seen for ages are up to. No serious conversation can go on on FB, forget it.

I’m really curious about the things you were saying that were making people mad.

This is exactly why I had to get off of Facebook (again).I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.After another year, I realized that I can&#x27;t actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There&#x27;s a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn&#x27;t matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don&#x27;t). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what&#x27;s going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It&#x27;s a shame, because it does work really well for &quot;connecting&quot; with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).

The social part of social media and culture have a much bigger impact on social cooling than anything else, including mass personal data collection.

Most of you only really believe in free speech (or any other exercise of power) when it conforms to, or reinforces your worldview.

I&#x27;d say that american software developers affording private security as a result of a company they founded is a pretty recent phenomenon. I&#x27;m sure there is an n&lt;10 of early precedents, but the underlying point is that the response to these oppressive systems is likely to be uncivil.Indeed the Varian rule was coined by the FT journalist McAfee as you mentioned (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Varian_Rule" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Varian_Rule</a>), though as a counter example, presidents don&#x27;t really count. Politicians can be wealthy but, like criminals, they&#x27;re never rich.

The Secret Service has been protecting US Presidents for 100+ years. And bodyguards go back way further. Varian (via McAfee) was talking about technology. Let me propose a clarifying addendum:&quot;A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today [but didn&#x27;t have 10 years ago]; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade.&quot;

Probably also worth noting how the rich today do not use social media the way the middle classes use it.

If the Varian Rule is true, that what the rich have today, the middle classes will have in 5-10 years and the poor in 10-15, it&#x27;s worth noting that what the rich have today is private security.The real risk is that the ultimate popular reaction to these systems will not be civil.

The evolution of identity on the internet is an interesting one. In the 90s, using your real name was considered absurd. Now it&#x27;s the standard. Maybe you&#x27;ll also have a pseudonym in your handle, but the majority of people use their real name on most of their social media.Certain communities retain pseudonymous, such as a good portion of Hacker News and Reddit. Although, I see many people posting more and more revealing information on Reddit these days, as it leans towards becoming like Twitter and Facebook.

I&#x27;ve stopped engaging in many places online over the last few years. The reason for me is that engaging with a pseudonym has become the exception rather than the rule.

(2017)Previous HN discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14585882" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14585882</a>edit:The author also replied to some comments in that thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;threads?id=socialcooling" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;threads?id=socialcooling</a>

Very good presentation, and very good analogies to get the general public attention.I think the key points are:- Data allows the projection of stereotypes on everything you might be involved.- Rating systems create unwanted incentives.I don&#x27;t think social credit systems are crazy, but they are extremely dangerous and easy to get wrong. Their memory should be limited, and their use should be controlled, opt-in, show-to-see, or whatever might be relevant.

It&#x27;s already happening in China with the Social Credit System.

This is an episode of Black Mirror, coming to our reality sooner than thought.Netflix Trailer
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;R32qWdOWrTo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;R32qWdOWrTo</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)</a>

You&#x27;d have to do in-person validation.

That&#x27;s just digital certificate-based government ID. You could maybe provide some layer of abstraction above it to improve the developer experience, but at the end of the day you&#x27;re reliant on it existing. Everything else will be too easily forged (unless you&#x27;re planning on doing in-person validation).

This is very interesting. So basically, we&#x27;ll all use fake personas managed by AI. And nothing online will be real...

But bots and spam and russian memes are already deeply engaging to people. I&#x27;m sure it will only get worse, though obviously some people will opt out.

Ask anyone from China and they will tell you the exact same thing. They know their news is state sponsored and all propaganda. People in the united states are blissfully unaware.

Ah but universal cynicism and nihilism is also a form of control. When the very idea of objective truth has been destroyed, this makes the job of authoritarians easier, not harder.

Exactly, ask the same to anyone in Cuba or Venezuela.

&gt; we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn&#x27;t saidI&#x27;m skeptical that this can be done effectively

I find this unpersuasive.The level of control&#x2F;conformity on canonical Western media was such that, for most topics of daily news, thinking about the bias of the reporter was not a first-order concern.For some topics (let&#x27;s say, hot-button US-vs-USSR things, or race issues in the US), the bias of the source was of course important, anywhere.But for, say, reporting inflation, unemployment, or the wheat harvest, whether NBC news or the Washington Post was biased wasn&#x27;t critical in the same way it would have been in the USSR.Basically, my argument is that the difference in degree is still a worthwhile difference.

Remember me a joke, in USSR to know the truth you only need to put a NOT in front of an article of the Pravda, because are all false, in USA you can&#x27;t because only half are false

I’ve heard this story too
when growing up. I belong to one of the last generations born in the German Democratic Republic. A quite prominent element of our History and German lessons in the 2000s was critical reading of historic news and caricatures, we did these analyses in exams up to A-levels. Propaganda was a big topic, not only when learning about the Third Reich. One reason certainly was that all our teachers spent most of their lives in the GDR system.I’ve been wondering whether teachers who grew up on the other side of the curtain put a similar emphasis on the topic of propaganda, especially after social media uncovered lots of gullibility in the general public and a for me very difficult-to-understand trust in anything as long as it is written down somewhere, often not even looking at the source. Political effects of eastern german brain drain aside, one important difference between people in the former western and eastern parts of Germany up until today is how much they trust media and institutions like the church.

It is sad that the wisdom from behind the iron curtain (where I grew up, too) is so fitting in the US (where I now live) today. I find that critical assessment of the media, resistance to propaganda and brainwashing detection skills acquired over there served me very well in the US.I wish those skills were teachable without recreating the full environment...

Somehow what you were saying reminded me of reading The Onion.You know, where they have those opinion pieces always with the same 6 photos (but a different name &amp; occupation) each spouting something humorous?and curiously there is some truth at the hidden within each onion article.

My family grew up behind the iron curtain. At a family event once I heard someone tell a story that I think has been the most accurate prediction of the last few years (if anyone knows the actual interview event, please tell me more so I can get the exact wording, this is all paraphrasing from childhood memories).A western reporter travelled to the other side of the iron curtain once and was doing what he thought would be an easy west-is-great gotcha-style interview. He asked someone over there, &quot;How do you even know what&#x27;s going on in your country if your media is so tightly controlled?&quot; Think Chernobyl-levels of tight-lipped ministry-of-information-approved newspapers.The easterner replied, &quot;Oh, we&#x27;re better informed than you guys. You see, the difference is we know what we&#x27;re reading is all propaganda, so we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn&#x27;t said. You in the west don&#x27;t realize you&#x27;re reading propaganda.&quot;I&#x27;ve been thinking about this more and more the last few years seeing how media bubbles have polarized, fragmented, and destabilized everyone and everything. God help us when cheap ubiquitous deepfakes industrialize the dissemination of perfectly-tailored engineered narratives.

I don&#x27;t know if the news is really the best example of this today. Clearly there will always be a subjective bias in reporting the news, but as deep fakes become more prevalent it will become increasingly important to know that the origin of a video clip is trustworthy.That said, there are clearly some social networks where you absolutely want to verify authenticity. Take for example, dating websites. Fake profiles _TODAY_ are a huge problem for those sites. If you have too many fake profiles, then paying users just log off and never come back. Same for LinkedIn. How many recruiters are going to pay for access to that network if 30% of the profiles are fake?

&gt; Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.Will they? People interact with these things because they are giving the brain what it wants, not what it might need. How many people would flock to a verified minimal bias news site? How many people would embrace so many hard truths and throw off their comforting lies? How many people could even admit to themselves they were being lied to and had formed their identity around those lies?Do people want authentic now? The evidence says no.

The lines between the online world and the &quot;real&quot; world are always blurry. You might not care on HN, but you probably will care when you&#x27;re trying to meet someone on a dating website and waste a bunch of time chatting with someone only to realize that they&#x27;re a very convincing bot and that you&#x27;ve spent X hours that you could&#x27;ve been using to meet real people.It seems like crowd-sourced moderation is probably the only thing that will work at scale. I&#x27;ve always wondered why Reddit doesn&#x27;t rank comments by default according to someone&#x27;s overall reputation inside of a subreddit and then by the relative merits of the comment on a particular subject. Getting the weighting right would be hard, but it seems like that would be the best way to dissuade low quality comments and outright trolling.

&gt;At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).A relevant, if flip solution to the &#x27;bot&#x27; issue[0].[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;810&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;810&#x2F;</a>

You mention realistic forgeries, AI and huge volume as a possibility and that the outcome would be that people would be pushed into the real world but I&#x27;m not sure I see the connection.If I can interact with bots that emulate humans with such a degree of realism, what do I care? You could be a bot, the whole of HN can be bots, I don&#x27;t really care who wrote the text if I can get something from it, I mean I don&#x27;t have any idea who you are and don&#x27;t even read usernames when reading posts here on HN.At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).

&gt; do require some authenticity verification have already been provencan add levels.fyi to that list as they now use actual offer letters to build their data set

&gt; You can&#x27;t moderate away toxicity in discussions that include literally a million participants.In my opinion HN is the gold-standard of online communities and it&#x27;s being managed pretty well despite it scaling to what it is right now.I wonder more leanings from HN (specially on the moderation front) can be applied to newer social platforms.

&gt; But then you lose that addictive feed of endless content that links people to reddit or Facebook or Instagram. Tough problem... Which is a good thing. (for the users, at least)

I don&#x27;t even think toxicity is a problem for users without public persona. Those that are public have to play by the same rules that were already in place for classical PR.We only got this problem with users trying to do house cleaning. Most communities are completely fine without authentication, so it certainly isn&#x27;t necessary.

&gt; IMO, there&#x27;s a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans onlineOn the flip side, successful startups that aren&#x27;t full social but do require some authenticity verification have already been proven: nextdoor and blind, for exampleI think the biggest issue is scaling to a facebook-style, reddit-style, or twitter-style &quot;full-world&quot; social network implies colliding people who have no other relationship or interaction but are linked through a topic or shared interestAnd, in my opinion, when you hit a certain level of scale, the verification almost becomes pointless: there&#x27;s enough loud angry and troll people out there that I dont think it matters if they&#x27;re verified or not. You can&#x27;t moderate away toxicity in discussions that include literally a million participants.I think you need both verification and some way to keep all the users&#x27; subnetworks small enough that it isn&#x27;t toxic or chilling. But then you lose that addictive feed of endless content that links people to reddit or Facebook or Instagram. Tough problem

I agree that the system is already being heavily influenced by bots. I think that the public&#x27;s perception of just by how much though does not match reality. As time goes on though, the lay public will come to the same realization that many of us have already arrived at: it&#x27;s all fake.I think the critical threshold for most people will be when bots start impersonating people they know in person. At that point, the value of the social networks will evaporate.

&gt;Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.I think you have completely misread the situation. The &quot;fakification&quot; of social media is already happening. Much if not most engagement is already driven by bots or by fabricated &quot;influencers&quot; and more people are using these platforms more often, not less.

&gt;IMO, there&#x27;s a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.The US government does authentication in real life via social security numbers. Of course, they are not very secure: a government-operated SSO or auth API for third-party applications would be a logical next step.It would guarantee uniqueness and authenticity of users. Even better, if this were an inter-governmental program, it would deter government meddling: a state issuing too many tokens for fake accounts would arouse suspicion.

Blue check accounts are expensive enough that, if you get the account banned, you can&#x27;t easily make a new one. Bot accounts don&#x27;t have this problem. If I want to trick as many people as possible into drinking bleach, I probably want easily-burnable bot accounts, so that when someone calls me out on it, I can just make a new one and pick up where I left off.Of course, this also assists in Social Cooling, since controversial statements act a lot like totally false ones in the public eye.

China already has that. At age 16, all citizens must get an ID card. Photo and biometric info are recorded. To get a cell phone, the ID card is required, and as of last year, it&#x27;s cross-checked by a face recognition scan. Cell phone IDs are tied to citizen IDs. WeChat accounts are verified against phone IDs.Now that&#x27;s authenticity verification.

&gt; IMO, there&#x27;s a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.Ironically accounts with Twitter&#x27;s blue check mark are often the accounts most likely to be managed by a social media manager.

&gt; IMO, there&#x27;s a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.Any kind of widely used identity&#x2F;authentication system would need to be a protocol and not a product of a for-profit corporation. Businesses take on great risks if they use another corporation&#x27;s products as part of their core operations as that product owner can change the terms of service at any time and pull the rug out from under them. A protocol is necessarily neutral so everyone can use it without risk in the same way they use HTTP.For identity protocols I think BrightID (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brightid.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brightid.org&#x2F;</a>) is becoming more established and works pretty well.

See also Neal Stephenson&#x27;s Fall: Dodge in Hell. What happens there though isn&#x27;t authentic experiences but instead people buy tailored human&#x2F;AI agent filters called editors to construct a reality for them by filtering out most media sources, including billboards and other interactive real-world advertisements and media screens. This way each individual has their own media reality.

&gt; Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.Not so sure. I&#x27;d rather wage that people won&#x27;t really care about whether they interact with real humans or not. Why would it matter? It&#x27;s not rare for people to relate and feel emotions for virtual characters in video games - even though they are perfectly aware it&#x27;s all fake! The same can be said for movies, TV shows. You know it&#x27;s fake, yet you watch and enjoy. I&#x27;m not sure why it would be ANY different for social networks which are basically just another form of entertainment.

If there&#x27;s anything that gives me hope that we can avoid a dystopian future driven by social media, it&#x27;s that Deep-learning &#x2F; AI is being used to cheaply create realistic forgeries of just about everything: profile pictures, text, profiles, voice recordings, etc.Within the next 10 years, and maybe much sooner, the vast majority of content on FB&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Reddit&#x2F;LinkedIn will be completely fake. The &quot;people&quot; on those networks will be fake as well. Sure there are bots today, but they&#x27;re not nearly as good as what I&#x27;m talking about, and they don&#x27;t exist at the same scale. Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.IMO, there&#x27;s a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.

Social Cooling (2017)