alt Hacker News> This is exactly the problem.
What problem, exactly?
Helping me find new music to enjoy?
I’m beginning to think some people have forgotten what we’re supposed to be angry about and now we’re just angry at all things tech.
Spotify recommending new music to me or continuing to play music suggestions when my playlist runs out is in no way harmful. It improves my life. I lose nothing to it. I gain new exposure to music.
It’s fine. Let people enjoy things.
> This is a clear indicator that these things are addictive and are in fact gambling.
I assure you I am neither addicted nor am I gambling when I listen to new music on Spotify.
What are we even doing here? Is this some puritanical push against all things that people might enjoy?
Replies
Yes. It's like the prohibitionists. They couldn't see any problem that couldn't be solved by banning alcohol.
The poster is implying the reinforcement at play is the problematic thing at issue, and they are assigning the word "gambling" to represent it, or so it looks like to me. I think you aren't parsing their meaning correctly because what they seem to be aiming for is extinguishing the automatic reinforcement.
You're claiming it's making your life better, ostensibly by a relative report of the hedonic response a newly introduced piece of music auto delivered to you by the recommendation algorithm invokes. The problem they hint at though is the passive nature involved. You aren't finding that new piece, it's getting pushed. That pushing incentivizes optimizing for continued engagement, an act children, intellectually and developmentally disabled individuals, as well as those in the throes of cognitive decline/impairment, are not at all well equipped to self-regulate against when pitted against paid behavioral psychologists designing maximally engagement encouraging interfaces.
The incentive, and the existence of predatible populations is the problem I take away from it. I can agree you should be free to opt-in mind, but I can also see the wisdom in a by default interface wherein engagement hacking is forbidden being the norm, and that norm coming with a minimally controversial algorithm boiling down to "chronological feed of known/subscribed to sources", followed by a link of some sort to open an interface to the recommendations.
Facebook/Insta/Shorts are absolutely not that non-engagement farming interface. Hell my grandmother toward the end was about driven mad by it, and it was all I could do to just try to remind her that just because the machine had it on offer doesn't mean she had to partake, but her community centric character made that a bit of an ordeal for her.
There is absolutely a pathological pattern to the way tech companies hunt for eyeballs to monetize, and it is a damn shame it's taken this long to start getting traction to even talk about it.
> Helping me find new music to enjoy?
Is it helping you find new music or is it feeding the same thing it has been feeding you in a reinforcement loop? Are you really searching or are you mindlessly taking what's on offer?
> Spotify recommending new music to me or continuing to play music suggestions when my playlist runs out is in no way harmful.
In both Netflix and Spotify any real discovery is quite well hidden, nearly all of the feeds you can get are algorithmically generated for you to consume what is beneficial to them. You get an interface pretending to offer you a choice and an algorithm behind, designed and fine-tuned by behavioral psychologists to get you coming back for more. An apparently it is doing it's job so well that you keep defending it.