[HN Gopher] A call to minimize distraction and respect users' at... ___________________________________________________________________ A call to minimize distraction and respect users' attention (2013) Author : cratermoon Score : 334 points Date : 2021-07-07 17:47 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.minimizedistraction.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.minimizedistraction.com) | teawrecks wrote: | I honestly can't tell if this is a joke. It's got some good | ideas, but the way it's presented violates all of their | suggestions. | TheJoeMan wrote: | I know right? "Let users know how long of a commitment they're | making" and then not one progress bar or slide counter like | 1/23,085 . | [deleted] | azinman2 wrote: | I don't see how calling out the demographics of the designers | making the decisions has anything to do with the larger | implications of societal impact. There are terrible things done | by people of every demographic to millions of people, as well as | great things. It's also less and less true (tho probably more so | in 2013 when this was created), yet the problems still exist | because the incentives are there (the real issue). | dang wrote: | " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of | what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to | criticize. Assume good faith._" | | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | cratermoon wrote: | Why shouldn't that be part of the discussion? The actions of a | few people with a certain common worldview having an impact on | billions of peoples and the effects of that worldview ought to | be examined, what's the objection to that? | | > the problems still exist because the incentives are there | | Yes, and who determines the incentives and provides the | rewards? | azinman2 wrote: | It's worthwhile to note the impact that few people have, but | I don't see how calling out demographics has any impact on | YouTube video recommendations as a design pattern. Are we to | believe a team of elderly Pacific Islander females wouldn't | make such choices, when the high level business goal is to | retain people's attention for as long as possible? | | The incentives and rewards are provided by the market in the | form of capital returns on clicks and viewership... globally | across all demographics. | cratermoon wrote: | > Are we to believe a team of elderly Pacific Islander | females wouldn't make such choices, when the high level | business goal is to retain people's attention for as long | as possible? | | The business goals were defined by the people in question. | Your hypothetical group of Polynesian women might not even | entertain that goal. The people who started Twitter, | Facebook, Google, and Amazon all had a common worldview | which informed the goals they set. The attention economy | model is just an expression of that. | | > The incentives and rewards are provided by the market in | the form of capital returns on clicks and viewership... | globally across all demographics. | | That particular formulation is part of the neoliberal | economic consensus. It has nothing to do with how a group | of people with no particular fealty to that world view | would act. | aresant wrote: | This presentation is wonderful for its PR value "people here | care" but naive bordering on malicious in its approach and | understanding of Google's business. | | 11 years ago PG called the iPad the "hip flask" of the internet | (1) and it's 10x worse today than it was then. | | The incentives of every major ad-supported tech platform are the | same - maximize engagement to maximize profit. | | Every dollar of profit, every promotion, every individual | incentive is tied to that metric outside of some lip-service like | this to keep HRs job manageable. | | If you don't like it, quit and work for somebody else whos | business model is disconnected from engagement. | | Full stop. | | (1) http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html | tomaskafka wrote: | This. In a long term, company will never do anything against | incentives their business model sets up. | | Google is the ad company. Don't work for ad conpany. | aiisjustanif wrote: | Tell that to the many SF tech workers optimizing for profit. | Swizec wrote: | I am an SF tech worker. Lots of companies here selling | pickaxes. | | Twilio, for example, doesn't need engagement. Last I heard | they were swimming in money. | tolbish wrote: | But then if I don't work for Google, how can I write a blog | post patting myself on the back for finally having the guts | to leave Google? | bluGill wrote: | Someday I need to write a blog post patting myself on the | back for never having worked for Google. | cratermoon wrote: | > 11 years ago PG | | ... | | > work for somebody else whos business model is disconnected | from engagement. | | Reddit is a YC company. Amplitude is a YC company. Segment. | Mixpanel. Optimizely. The list goes on. All of these companies | in some way benefit from maximizing "engagement". I wonder if | PG has a smart phone now. | asiachick wrote: | Your comments make no sense to me in relation to Google. Google | of all companies seems to follow this rule of no distractions. | which of their apps/services does anything to distract and | waste your time? At least for me gmail, photos, docs, Android, | maps, are all good stewards of not distracting me. | | Compare to Twitter that's always trying to get me to follow | people they want me to follow ans giving me no way to opt out | of types of tweets I don't care about like "so-and-so liked:" | | Same with Facebook. My feed is full of stuff I don't care about | like "so-and-so commented:" | | Instagram is the worst in that sometime in the last 12 months | my feed switched from only posts by my friends to just th | newest posts by my friends followed by Instagram shovelling | popular crap at me in an attept to get me waste more time on | the app | | Other apps like Uber, Lyft send me notification ads I can't opt | out of except to turn off all notifications at an OS level. | | Dating apps like Tinder waste my time everyday sending me a | notification to "Plese Use the app today". I can't turn that | off and turning off notifications at an OS level effective | makes the app useless. | | The only Google property that might arguably be a distraction | would be YouTube with it's ads but unlike all the other | services YouTube actually provides a "pay for no ads" option | which lots of HNers wish other services provided | | AFAICT this presentation or at least its ideal has been upheld | by Google | cratermoon wrote: | Youtube? | [deleted] | Swizec wrote: | At the dawn of my career I made myself two commitments: | | 1. Only projects/companies you enjoy | | 2. Only projects/companies where users are the customers | | So far so good. It's amazing the cool stuff you can build when | engagement-at-all-cost is the opposite of your goal. When the | goal is "Provide so much value users are beyond delighted to | pay". | | Feels nice to be aligned | zarkov99 wrote: | I like your way of thinking. What companies do you think fit | that goal? | Swizec wrote: | B2B companies are an obvious example. Find expensive | problem, solve it, add sales team. Iterate. | | DDOG comes to mind as a recent very successful example. | Salesforce as well. AWS falls into this category. As does | Twilio. Huge huge space :) | | Personally I like working on B2C SaaS. That path is harder. | | B2C usually takes the shape of a freemium model. Strava is | a good example here, as is Robinhood. Uber and Lyft are | here also. | | There's also the indie/freelance market that sits between | B2B and B2C - consumers who think of themselves as a | business. | | Examples here include ConvetKit, the Adobe suite, | Quickbooks, Shopify, Teachable, etc. Again you're charging | users for value provided, based on the revenue they can | generate using your platform. | | I used to work for an EdTech company, that was nice. We had | almost a gym membership model where we wanted you to use | the app as little as possible to increase margins. | Currently working with a health care startup and that's | taking off like a rocket. | RGamma wrote: | If iPad is the hip flask, the smartphone is the needle and | TikTok the heroin. | | I sometimes wish I had gone without the internet the past 10 | years. Emotionally I can no longer quite feel it due to many | small increments of change, but intellectually I know the | culture shock would be massive today. | | So much activity is generated and has converged on so few | platforms, most of it passive consumption. Communication is | quick and fleeting, the feeds reign. The search engines full of | subtle forms of (blog)spam I'm increasingly having trouble | identifying. No distinction between off- and online anymore. | (There's always exceptions) | | The knowledge of who does what when is centralized in black box | institutions with massive conflict of interest to reveal | anything about it, so nobody outside really knows what's going | on. All we can see are the shadows on the wall. | | Business is failing to self-align with (what I and apparently | this Googler think are) civic/enlightenment values and | societies were hit by this like a truck out of nowhere and | they're still playing catch-up, trying to make sense of it. | | And meanwhile so many brains will be rewired.. We haven't seen | the end of whatever this is yet. | | BTW check out this comment saying this specific presentation | was a leak, not a PR move: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764710 (doesn't preclude | other posturing around this issue of course) | musicale wrote: | Ironically this slide show wastes my time and attention by | forcing me to click through it rather than simply presenting all | the slides on one page. I also can't download it as a pdf to read | later. | asteroidbelt wrote: | Presentations like these assume people are dumb animals not being | able to control their lives. They need to artificially | constrained to help them live. Saying bluntly, they need a nanny. | | I'm an active user or Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and all of | them. I turned off GMail notifications for non-important mails. I | unsubscribe/report spam promotional e-mail. YouTube autoplay is | off (simply because the recommender is not good enough, but I'd | happily turned them on otherwise). I unsubscribed from junk | groups on Facebook, but the connections on Facebook is very | important since I can't meet with most of my friends in person. | My Twitter notifications are off, and I do mute often, but the | remaining Twitter suggestions are quite interesting. Almost all | notifications are off on my phone, but remaining are very | helpful. And so on. | | The largest distraction in my life is a chat app which is used by | my employer. But this is not service provider/product problem: | it's company decision to use that application instead of e-mail. | Other chat apps I'm used for communication with my friends are | not distracting. | | The suggestions by the presentation author is irrational: let's | stop business growth assuming it will make people more happy. | This is not how the world works: if a company start making less | efficient product, it will die, and not because of ads revenue, | but simply because users will leave for someone who knows how to | retain attention. | | That guy Tristan Harris who did the presentation is morally | dishonest person: he wants to his cake and eat it. He got his | millions from Google, and then decided to play good guy by virtue | signalling with this presentation and by playing in Social | Dilemma: working against the same companies which made him | wealthy enough to not worry about money for the rest of his life. | titzer wrote: | > That guy Tristan Harris who did the presentation is morally | dishonest person: he wants to his cake and eat it. He got his | millions from Google, and then decided to play good guy by | virtue signalling with this presentation and by playing in | Social Dilemma: working against the same companies which made | him wealthy enough to not worry about money for the rest of his | life. | | This is like saying that no one is ever allowed to change their | mind, and also that the person's point is wrong because they | benefited by the very thing they are criticizing? That's not a | logical argument, that's a straight-up ad hominem--character | assassination, to be honest--and a complete distraction. | asteroidbelt wrote: | > That's not a logical argument, that's a straight-up ad | hominem and a complete distraction | | That was just a remark, not a substantiation of the arguments | above. I'm sorry, I mixed it up. | | > This is like saying that no one is ever allowed to change | their mind | | Everyone is allowed to change their mind, but it is helpful | to know why and how they did change their mind. | [deleted] | cratermoon wrote: | > Presentations like these assume people are dumb animals not | being able to control their lives | | You're vastly underestimating the potential to exploit human | nature. Just by being here ranting like this shows that the | topic bypassed your rational executive function and fired up | your sympathetic nervous system. | asteroidbelt wrote: | > You're vastly underestimating the potential to exploit | human nature. | | Human nature were exploited for thousand years, and humans | are still doing fine. I didn't see strong arguments why | current megacorp mind control is worse than usual. | | > Just by being here ranting like this shows that the topic | bypassed your rational executive function and fired up your | sympathetic nervous system. | | I didn't get it. Are you stating that commenting here is | irrational? Or that my arguments are irrational? | cratermoon wrote: | > Human nature were exploited for thousand years | | "Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding | how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the | way individuals generate and share information. In humans, | information flows were initially shaped by natural | selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging | communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social | networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast | distances at low cost. _The digital age and the rise of | social media have accelerated changes to our social | systems, with poorly understood functional consequences._ | This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge | to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address | global crises. We argue that the study of collective | behavior must rise to a "crisis discipline" just as | medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a | focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and | regulators for the stewardship of social systems. " - | Stewardship of global collective behavior | https://www.pnas.org/content/118/27/e2025764118 [emphasis | added] | | > Are you stating that commenting here is irrational? Or | that my arguments are irrational? | | Neither. Just that your attention is here, not on your | work, your family, your hobbies, or literally anything else | that deserves your attention. | xk7 wrote: | Trite cliches over stock photos, is this parody? | bingidingi wrote: | I wish. I feel like this is the epitome of a specific type of | slide-based presentation. This information could be covered in | a single page of text, but ironically no one has the attention | span to actually read... so instead we get low-density | presentations with memes and cliches. | lamontcg wrote: | Make junk mail and spam e-mail illegal to start with. | | Then start doing something about regulating advertising. | | In an ideal world intrusive advertising would be banned and we'd | have to go looking for ads to find them instead of them | constantly demanding that we pay attention to them. | | But that'd entirely blow up Google's whole business model. | asteroidbelt wrote: | Junk e-mail is not an issue at all (at least in GMail, not sure | about other providers): they go by default into "Promotions" | folder (not visible by default), and it's not hard to go to | that folder once a day to click "report spam" on those which | are not important, and that's enough for train Google | classifier to send them to spam next time. | em3rgent0rdr wrote: | Unfortunately then you and everyone you email are sucked into | google's ecosystem. I've never had great success when self- | hosting email to filter out the junk mail anywhere nearly as | successful as google can. | Bjartr wrote: | > Make junk mail and spam e-mail illegal to start with. | | CAN-SPAM[0] does exactly that for US businesses. Any email from | a US business that is for advertisement or otherwise | promotional (as distinct from transactional[1]) then it: | | * Must not have false or misleading from/to/reply-to | | * Must not have a deceptive subject | | * Must be labeled an ad | | * Must include a valid physical postal address | | * Must have a clear and conspicuous[2] way to opt-out | | * Must have a working opt-out process within 10 business days | of the user opting-out | | * Must follow all these rules, even if the business contracts | out their email marketing | | Obviously, fly-by-night businesses and scams aren't going to | follow these rules, but by-and-large all legitimate businesses | do because each individual email that violates this rule can | incur a $40,000+ fine | | The FTC has a site[3] for reporting fraud violations, and CAN- | SPAM violations fall under the "something else" category in the | generic fraud violation report form according to the FTC's | FAQ[4] | | [0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business- | center/guidance/can... | | [1] i.e. it's not to inform you a something happened in the | app/site e.g. you have a notification or some action you | initiated has completed | | [2] in practice, a link with text "Unsubscribe" at the bottom | of the email is sufficient. | | [3] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ | | [4] https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/faq/faq-search/spam | lamontcg wrote: | > CAN-SPAM[0] does exactly that for US businesses. | | No, I said make it illegal, and I meant exactly that. | cratermoon wrote: | I remember when the CAN-SPAM act was in Congress. All of us | who were following the issue looked at it and said, "this | just legitimizes spam, puts a nice picket fence around it, | and make sure that any company that wants to spam you knows | exactly where the boundaries are so they can do so with | impunity". As we expected, it didn't reduce spam at all, but | now we have and industry and entire companies dedicated to | mass unsolicited email. But they aren't breaking any laws. | ibejoeb wrote: | Started great, but then veered off into attacking the identity of | the purported perpetrators. Might be cool at a conference, but in | the real world you're losing lots of people. | cratermoon wrote: | What specifically is the objection? The companies mentioned are | the key players, the people that run them determined, and still | influence, the product direction. Why shouldn't that be part of | the discussion? | superjan wrote: | Hey Google, if you're still into this, how about disabling | autosuggest and autoplay for anyone on youtube? | polynomial wrote: | JTN, this was actually what Medium led with when they originally | started* (minimizing distractions) to clear all the rubbish out | of sight when you are reading a single article, and not have | other content & CTA's competing for your attention. | | Of course, it turned out that alone doesn't imply you actually | _respect_ your users ' attention, as we saw what Medium turned | into. | | [*the year before this presentation, actually] | charleshan wrote: | PDF version of the slides: | | https://www.slideshare.net/paulsmarsden/google-deck-on-digit... | SebastianKra wrote: | Thanks. Could you upload it for people without a LinkedIn | account? | [deleted] | cmehdy wrote: | For other readers: this seems to be an internal google | presentation made public to tell engineers to respect users' | attention. | | I guess as a user of the website it didn't respect my attention | enough to make me want to click through the whole thing. I | dropped out after twenty or so clicks, having read less and less | stuff after a few slides. | jrochkind1 wrote: | That was my reaction. Terrible UI with grainy graphics, took a | long time to get to the point. Talk about wasting time! I gave | up about 20 slides in too. | bqui wrote: | "Terrible UI", is that a concern for you ? this world should | go to shit, that man put himself in a uncomfortable situation | to give the world a preview. | ssivark wrote: | And it broke the back button! There seems to be no way to go | back a slide if you forwarded by tapping accidentally!!! | david_allison wrote: | The left arrow key does this | perihelions wrote: | If anyone wants the plain text transcription of the slides, | this site appears to have that: | | https://digitalwellbeing.org/googles-internal-digital-wellbe... | | > _" A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users' | Attention."_ | | > _" by Tristan Harris."_ | | > _" I'm concerned about how we're making the world more | distracted. And my goal with this presentation is to create a | movement at Google to create a new design ethic that aims to | minimise distraction and I'd like to get your help."_ | musicale wrote: | That is so much better. Slide shows like this are an | annoyingly distracting waste of people's time and attention! | | Like a simple list of 10 items which is made into ten web | pages that you have to click through individually - wasting | your time and attention to trick you into viewing more | advertising. | chris_wot wrote: | I'm afraid the same happened for me. I just couldn't get to the | end. It was, uh, distracting me. | MaxBarraclough wrote: | Agreed. Ironically, the slideshow format is extremely 'low | density', and frustrates my ability to quickly read what they | have to say. I didn't get all the way through it either. | mountainb wrote: | It's a great format for reaching functional illiterates, | which accurately describes huge portions of the white collar | workforce. | novok wrote: | It's meant to be clicked through quickly in a live | presentation, like a tv show, not the 'book page' style that | most people have a harder time with absorbing. It's not a | blog article. | epivosism wrote: | The enforced ~500ms loading time between slides is a killer. | Why not preload and display them immediately? | anonydsfsfs wrote: | There isn't a fixed 500ms loading time. It advances slides by | changing the background image of the central "pic" element. | This is the JS to advance the slide: | function increment(){ if(imgNum < 141){ | imgNum++; }else{ imgNum = 1; } | url = "url('img/vrg_google_doc_final_vrs03-"+imgNum+".jpg')"; | document.getElementById('pic').style.backgroundImage=url; | } | | The reason you see a flicker is because it takes time to load | the next image, and until it loads you're going to see the | black background. As you mentioned, the preloading images | would solve this. | waterhouse wrote: | I resorted to holding the up-arrow key to trigger loading of | a bunch of slides, then holding down-arrow to get back to | where I was, and finally getting a smooth transition | experience. | emaro wrote: | On mobile, the slides switched instantly. On Firefox Desktop | it's like from hell. | epivosism wrote: | Weird, how does that work? Is the mobile browser simulating | the click and then noticing the next image to be loaded? | Maybe the js is simple enough to prove that it's safe to do | so, but wow. | leereeves wrote: | For me, using Firefox on a Mac, the slides also switched | instantly. | neogodless wrote: | On Firefox for Windows 10 - instant slide transitions. | | Ryzen 7 2700X, 32GB, 300/300 mbps connection. | [deleted] | AlbertCory wrote: | It's funny how almost all the comments are about technical | aspects of the presentation or how he said it, and not what he | said. | | He's right, FWIW. How many times have I had to yell "Hel-LO!" at | some bozo staring at his phone & not watching where he's walking? | | However, how would you regulate this? If you created a metric of | "attention-sucking" and set a legal limit on it, the web giants | would immediately game it. | iseethroughbs wrote: | It's easy to be right. But to be right is not the same as being | useful. | AlbertCory wrote: | "Easy to be right"?? Good to know. But why isn't everyone | doing it, then? | | Maybe _you_ have a useful idea on regulating attention- | sucking? Please share. | neogodless wrote: | There's too much to type on a phone but... | | Assuming it's possible to fix this through government action, | it'd probably be by enforcing education that teaches values and | mindful decision-making. Right now I think what we get is a | collective mindset of enduring education, enduring the workday, | and then distracting ourselves into oblivion. The things that | suck our attention are the best pastimes because we can do them | morning to night and never stop to deal with how sucky life and | being self-aware are! | | I don't think you can regulate how engagement is turned into | dollars. But that engagement is addictive, and we are weak to | it. So can it really be solved? | SimeVidas wrote: | Is the presentation un-scrollable just for me? | andygcook wrote: | I was surprised to see this is an internal Google presentation. | | FYI the way to advance it on mobile is to click the slides. It | took me a few seconds to figure that out. | jeffkeen wrote: | A friend of mine worked at a company that at one point was | searching for "that red light feature"-- meaning, a feature in | their app that would get users to check their phones while | they're stopped at a red light. | | Thanks, I hate it. I wish everyone would embrace the Humane Tech | ethos (https://www.humanetech.com/), but it turns out there's a | lot of money in being an asshole. | musicale wrote: | "Red light feature" is an astonishing term that I'd never heard | before. | | It could also be called a "Traffic death feature" - what's a | feature that is so compelling that it will increase traffic | deaths when users can't help but check their phones while | driving? | zmix wrote: | Very nice document, speaks from my heart. But the document's | format sucks! I do not even get an address in the addressbar in | Vivaldi. I would love to download this as PDF or in any other | presentation format, but it seems to be impossible, without going | through the code. | Isthatablackgsd wrote: | Go back to the website and append in the address bar "/img/" | without the quote marks on the end and boom you get a full list | of slide. Enjoy. | | Very easy to find since it only took 5 sec to load up the | console and bam it is right there. | cratermoon wrote: | I generated a PDF using img2pdf. It's 4.8MB. | dorkwood wrote: | I received a notification from Uber on the weekend. It said | something to the effect of "it's a nice day today, why don't you | take a ride?" I've never told my phone to fuck off faster. | | How many people out there were in the middle of an important | task, only to have their phone ask them if they wanted to take a | car somewhere for no reason? The collective man-hours of | distraction being generated must be staggering; years of work and | progress lost every day so that Uber can presumably see a small | uptick in engagement. | mindwok wrote: | Makes me wonder what these kind of notifications are really | worth. All they do is make me immediately mute the app from | ever notifying me again, and leave a bad taste in my mouth. How | many people are really seeing this and impulse purchasing an | Uber ride somewhere? I suspect close to zero. | acituan wrote: | I would guess the number of people who have opted-out of the | notifications are either not reported, or the aggregate opt- | out ratio doesn't make a ding on overall notification | conversion rates. | | In other words, people don't have a uniform frustration | tolerance to irrelevant push notifications, and losing the | most irritable segment might be 'worth' it if the majority of | the population is still getting them. | | An alternative explanation is opt-out burn-out; people might | just give up on the possibility of a high signal/noise ratio | notification space. | BoxOfRain wrote: | Yeah, I know this is an anecdote but most people in my life | just put up with a constant stream of buzzing and pinging. | I'm very much in the habit of not allowing any | notifications to begin with, especially in my browser, but | I'm in a minority I think. | | Emails are even worse, I unsubscribe from the vast majority | and block the ones I can't (Hermes are utterly revolting | for this noise generation, three non-unsubscribable emails | and three texts per delivery!). The pathetic signal to | noise ratio of email makes it utterly worthless as a means | of communication for me, if it were up to me I'd do away | with it altogether! | SantalBlush wrote: | They're not impulse purchasing a ride, but you can bet they | will be thinking of Uber when the time comes that they _do_ | need a ride. | caturopath wrote: | It's galling that using notifications for ads is allowed by the | marketplaces. | rdiddly wrote: | Being made to nibble little bites of text one at a time is a | distraction. Images depicting clumsy or irrelevant metaphors of | easily understood things are a distraction. | titzer wrote: | Endless nitpicking turns everything into infighting and makes | everything suck. Can we have a conversation about substance at | some point? | IlliOnato wrote: | I had exactly the same thought. | | But perhaps the author wanted to drive the point home :-) | neolog wrote: | It's a slide deck from a presentation, not an essay. | Andrex wrote: | It seems like this is a leaked internal presentation from | Google, not meant for public consumption. | | That's what I take away from "Google Confidential and | Proprietary" in the bottom right. | | Some more context over what this is and who wrote it would be | immensely valuable. | | Edit- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764579 | cratermoon wrote: | Some additional context previously on HN: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27671055 | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27585602 | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27535584 | novok wrote: | This was made in 2013: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Harris | an1sotropy wrote: | thanks for this info. I recognize him now from the Social | Dilemma movie. | baby wrote: | I don't understand how I can go back one slide | ElijahLynn wrote: | This is a really inspiring presentation and I am going to be | spreading this one around! | ultimoo wrote: | A great thing I did couple months ago was to turn off iOS | notifications for email and gmail. I don't quite recollect how | email went from an asynchronous mode of communication to a near | real-time mode of communication where people often respond within | minutes of getting email. | | Changing my notification settings have reduced a large number of | interruptions and I still end up opening the email app a number | of times during the day and responding in a timely way. Highly | recommend. | r00t4ccess wrote: | I did this years ago as well, my phone rings when i get a call | and texts/imessages from contacts get an alert nothing else | does | [deleted] | echelon wrote: | This is great and all of it true, but the needs of these | companies are counter to the goals presented here. | | Ad funded products need to steal time and attention to be | profitable. Apple might be in a position to do something, but | Facebook, Twitter, and Google depend on ad revenue. Even | subscription companies like Netflix are hyper focused on | engagement. | | I was daydreaming yesterday about a national mandate to shut down | social media on the first of every month. (Phone calls and | texting are okay, but absolutely nothing else.) Something like | that will never happen, but I think the world would collectively | realize what this stuff is doing to us if we had to step away. | | We're all addicted and distracted. | rglullis wrote: | I agree with your overall point, but I believe that this could | (and hopefully will) change without any top-down mandate. I | think we just need a minority group of people who are | unbreakable in their intolerance of ad-funded services, much | like RMS and the first FOSS developers were intolerant of | running any type of proprietary software. | | It dawned on me with the whole WhatsApp thing of fucking around | with the privacy policy: I didn't mind using it before, but | that was the final nail in the coffin. I uninstalled it and I | told my friends/family that whoever wanted to reach me could do | with Matrix, phone or plain email. I also would gladly help set | an account for them on my communick group plan. Of course not | all of them did, but the ones who did realized that it was not | the end of the world to use a new app and were glad to be able | to say that they were not enslaved to whatever Facebook had to | offer. Some of these friends even signed up for their own plan, | so they could invite more people on their own, etc... | agency wrote: | Yeah to be honest this feels like a Googler trying to deal with | their guilty conscience by starting a "movement" that | fundamentally cannot go anywhere because it runs entirely | counter to the economic incentives that animate ad tech | companies. | notriddle wrote: | Tristan Harris, the author of this presentation, wound up | leaving the company. | | I guess it didn't work. | Layke1123 wrote: | Speak for yourself, but some of us don't have social media. | DevKoala wrote: | It would never happen because social media would convince users | to vote against their own interests. Like Facebook did with the | Apple debacle. | ChrisArchitect wrote: | (2013)? come on | | plenty of discussion more recently than that about the topic: | | _The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is | damaging our minds_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16098847 | | _We live in an age of distractions, dealing with constant mental | stimulus_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26207184 | | _My year with a distraction-free iPhone_ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251334 | | _The Death of Social Reciprocity in the Era of Digital | Distraction_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643928 | | _GhostWriter is a distraction free Markdown editor_ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26252472 | dang wrote: | What's wrong with 2013? Historical material is welcome here, | and I assume one interesting point about the OP is how | relatively early it was. | marto1 wrote: | Decentralize so you won't have to beg your master to cut you some | slack. Anything else is just talk imho. | ubicomp wrote: | Also see calmtech.com | [deleted] | ubicomp wrote: | Also see the principles of calm technology at calmtech.com | throwaway3699 wrote: | If memory serves, this presentation was created at Google years | ago by Tristan Harris, who also had a huge part to play in The | Social Dilemma. | zmix wrote: | Ouch! Nothing changed and it got worse, dare I say. He mentions | a point, I have had for years, and that is, that these 25-35 | year old nerds from the Bay area define too much of out every | day's culture. | | Just look what happened to HTML: once a document system, | manageable by everyone, now a more and more complex app system, | dare I say WASM, etc.? | ConcernedCoder wrote: | FYI: Title of website reads: "A Call To Minimize Distration", | should be: "A Call To Minimize Distraction" | dang wrote: | The submitted title is the title that appears on the first | slide of the presentation. That's legit. | [deleted] | vkat wrote: | Off topic: Snakes creep the hell out of me and I can't even look | at my computer if there is an image and these slides have 4 or 5 | of them. | iudexgundyr wrote: | This presentation distracted me from my work. :)))) | Zelphyr wrote: | All I've heard for the past 12+ years is "engagement". The | singular focus on that one word to the exclusion of everything | else is astounding to me. As if it is some magic incantation on | the part of BizDev (or whatever they're called these days) that | instantly transmogrifies users into profits. | | At one company I worked at, we had a digital product that was | part of a suite of services our company provided. It was useful | to our customers but it's clear, if you see it, that they want to | get in, get done what they need to do, and get out. It's a tool | to help them do their jobs and nothing more. | | You'd think that simplicity and efficiency would be celebrated. | The number of times I heard "engagement" and "gamification" used | about that product from the marketing team, however... | | Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our | customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does | trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It | fell on deaf ears. | | I should note that, we didn't make any more money the longer | someone spent on that product. There was no advertising model | associated with it--it is a per-seat hosted solution. So I never | could figure out why our marketing team was all about engagement | other than they kept hearing that word said about other digital | products and, so, naturally it applies to ours as well and we | must do what everyone else is doing! | scotty79 wrote: | When you are in finances I think you hear "money" quite often. | musicale wrote: | Which makes it even more puzzling that marketing would insist | on something that burns the company's money and the | customer's money with zero (or negative) benefit. | Stratoscope wrote: | I hate "engagement". | | I am a weird person who, when I used to go to a movie theater, | stayed and watched the credits at the end. There would be some | nice closing music, and it was always interesting to see how | many people it took to make a movie and what they all did. A | nice way to unwind after watching the movie and acknowledge | everyone involved. | | Lately I've been watching The Sopranos on Amazon. As soon as | the end credits roll, a "Next Episode" box pops up in the | corner and I am in a race against time to click the teeny | Cancel button. I think they give me five whole seconds before | auto-starting the next episode. | | It pisses me off every time! If I were Tony Soprano, I'd be | tempted to hit that corner of the screen with some pointed | heavy object just to make it stop haunting me: "You really want | to watch the next episode _right now_. You do NOT want to sit | quietly and enjoy the end credits and the cool music the | showrunner chose. " | | But then I would have to buy a new monitor, so I restrain | myself. | | This "engagement" makes me want to see a shrink. | tchalla wrote: | > Lately I've been watching The Sopranos on Amazon. As soon | as the end credits roll, a "Next Episode" box pops up in the | corner and I am in a race against time to click the teeny | Cancel button. I think they give me five whole seconds before | auto-starting the next episode. | | There should be a global setting to switch Autoplay Off in | your settings. | dredmorbius wrote: | mpv will often allow that. | | This of course is predicated on a site supporting MPV, | often meaning the content is independently downloadable, | even if not officially. | | Industry's track record with user-specified anti-dark- | pattern preferences (DNT, prefers-reduced-motion, etc.) is | not encouraging. | Stratoscope wrote: | You are my hero of the day! | | I did find that setting for YouTube, but I didn't realize | that Amazon had it too. | | To change it, go to Prime Video, click the gear icon in the | top right, select Settings, then the Player tab to turn off | Auto Play. | | Bada Bing! | | Now I won't feel like I should whack somebody after each | episode. | [deleted] | kmstout wrote: | Likewise radio stations' playing songs back to back without a | gap. "Stairway to Heaven" deserves a second or two of silence | after finishing. | m_ke wrote: | We got to pitch a bunch of top VCs for a (wellness/health) | consumer app that we were building and it made me really sick | that the only thing that they cared about was engagement. | DAU/MAU, time spent in app and growth were the only things that | mattered. | musicale wrote: | > Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our | customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does | trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It | fell on deaf ears. | | This is brilliant; too bad your marketing department was | apparently run by broken robots. | KhoomeiK wrote: | > So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all | about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said | about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to | ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing! | | "Cargo cult marketing"? | dredmorbius wrote: | Fads are a sociological information-theoretic emergent | dynamic. | | https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin. | .. | dkarl wrote: | Marketing contributes to decisions about what features to build | next, and they use engagement to vindicate their | recommendations. They also use engagement to brag about the | success of your products and new features within your products | when trying to drum up interest in your company's offerings. | abraae wrote: | In a similar vein, I've discussed with customers why it's not a | good idea to slavishly follow conversions, in our case on our | hosted corporate careers site product. | | If job seekers are not well matched to a job, then we don't | want them applying (i.e. a conversion)! That wastes everyone's | time and good will. Instead, we want them to leave the process | as quickly as possible. | | It's not unknown to have one person at the customer banging on | about realistic job previews, to discourage unsuitable | candidates as soon as possible ("if you take this job, you'll | be standing and lifting boxes in the warehouse for 5 hours a | day"), while someone else is banging on about why/how the | site's conversion rate could be increased. | monocasa wrote: | > Finally I said, "Look. We shouldn't be trying to make our | customers spend more time in this product any more than LG does | trying to get us to spend more time in our refrigerators." It | fell on deaf ears. | | Considering how hard it is to find decent, non-smart appliances | these days, it seems to have fell on deaf ears at LG as well. | musicale wrote: | "Look how many hours our users spend watching Netflix on our | new refrigerator and using our connected mobile fridge app!" | asteroidbelt wrote: | > we didn't make any more money the longer someone spent on | that product. There was no advertising model associated with it | --it is a per-seat hosted solution. | | Are you sure that time spent on product does not affect sales? | E. g. is it possible that if people don't spend time with | product, they will renew the subscription next year? | | > So I never could figure out why our marketing team was all | about engagement other than they kept hearing that word said | about other digital products and, so, naturally it applies to | ours as well and we must do what everyone else is doing! | | Perhaps it is the issue of the marketing department of that | organization is that their bonuses are not tied to any | performance metrics. | | In proper organizations (like Google) marketing director get | paid if their marketing efforts give the company more revenue | than the company spends on marketing, and fired otherwise. | Zelphyr wrote: | > Are you sure that time spent on product does not affect | sales? | | It may have, but not dramatically. The product wasn't what we | were known for. Customers came to us for other services that | we were known for (and, I should add, this company is very | good at what they do) and this digital product sold as a | sort-of upsell. | | > Perhaps it is the issue of the marketing department of that | organization is that their bonuses are not tied to any | performance metrics. | | I don't know for sure, not having any insight into that part | of the business, but knowing that company I would bet you are | right. | marcosdumay wrote: | > E. g. is it possible that if people don't spend time with | product, they will renew the subscription next year? | | For most tools (and the GP does make it seem to be the case), | usage count is roughly correlated with added value, and | time/usage to added cost. | | So, are you asking if total time spent on it is correlated | with added value? Well, maybe. You are just making a very bad | question, and may get any random answer. If you are using | this as a metric, all the easy ways to increase it add costs, | not value. | emaro wrote: | Funny enough that the presentation loops (at least on my phone) | and just shows the first slide after the last one without any | indication of it. | echelon wrote: | I kind of like it. No complex UI showing forward/back, how many | slides deep you are, etc. Just the slides themselves. | | It reminds me of "minimal" UIs in video games that remove | health bars, stats, etc. so that the content is front and | center. Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, etc. | | Almost cinematic. | ChrisArchitect wrote: | Trace a line from that to this basically | | https://wellbeing.google/ | | _Great technology should improve life, not distract from it_ (3 | years ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17023917 | zestyping wrote: | This presentation is from 2013. It's a historical artifact that | helped kick off the movement to fight distraction in its early | days, not the state of the art thinking of the current day. | | Obviously, a lot of the concerns it expresses are still very | relevant. | cratermoon wrote: | What is the state of thinking currently? What's changed? The | presentation was created eight years ago and leaked three years | ago, but it has never appeared on HN before. What progress has | been made? | throwaway3699 wrote: | Digital Wellbeing on Android was one major example of | something that seemed to have come from this. I believe iOS | also built something similar. | cratermoon wrote: | Oh, a notification that tells me a distracting device has | been distracting me for too long, and that I should take a | break. That's effectively nothing: it hasn't challenged the | attention model itself. It's like if a casino had scantily- | clad women wandering the floor offering men at the slot | machines a free drink. They aren't doing that to help the | gentlemen, they are just adjusting the incentives. | nonbirithm wrote: | The SF product designers have the power to influence billions, | but there are no consequences. So long as there are no | consequences, we'll keep asking questions and merely propising | these hypothetical limiters to prevent the world from being | distracted. | | I have a feeling that the mechanisms of addiction are tied to | evolved human instinct, and we will have to essentially fight | back against our own genes to have any chance at succeeding. I | like to view the author's suggestions as that being a part of | that fight. | | The fact that we were directly responsible for wiping out tens of | thousands of species of life while remaining unaware of the | destruction we wrought thousands of years ago should indicate | that _some_ kind of a limiter against instinctual human reward | mechanisms is needed, technological or otherwise. We are going to | eat ourselves. | valw wrote: | A shameless-because-related plug: | https://www.reddit.com/r/patient_hackernews/ | | A Hacker News mirror biased in favor of thoughtful discussion, by | enforcing that you cannot comment on something in less than 24 | hours. | | This might help you spend less of your attention on Hacker News, | by: 1. Showing you a subset of hot posts 2. | Enforcing high response delays (thus suppressing the impulse to | frantically refresh for new comments). | | This particular post can be discussed here: | https://www.reddit.com/r/patient_hackernews/comments/ofqb6n/... | | Please give feedback! | crackercrews wrote: | Reddit won't even let me see either page without downloading | the app. I'm used to the annoying prompts but have never been | outright blocked before. | ottomanbob wrote: | I've been dying for a tool like this. Just want to sort hacker | news by week / months. So I could stop checking everyday. Will | give feedback | perihelions wrote: | _" Just want to sort hacker news by week"_ | | HN has hidden functionality for that: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/best | | https://news.ycombinator.com/lists | gwbas1c wrote: | I think the first thing they could do is make ALL notifications | on Android opt-in. | | Most notifications that I get are SPAM. | crazygringo wrote: | Oh wow, that's from 8 years ago. And then it got leaked outside | of Google 3 years ago it seems -- this article [1] provides a ton | more context. | | Just for context, and before people start accusing Google of | hypocrisy or anything -- these slides never represented an | official (or unofficial) Google position or anything. They're not | PR. They're just a single employee's opinion in slideshow form, | an opinion he was trying to build support for internally. | | Whether you think it made any kind of impact is a fun thought | question though. | | [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/10/17333574/google- | android-p... | epivosism wrote: | It's pretty easy to just force the browser to preload images a | few early, which would eliminate all of the variable, ~2-500ms | delay between frames. This would increase the impact of this | presentation. function preload(n) var | preloader = $('<img style="display:none;" />'); | preloader.attr("src","img/vrg_google_doc_final_vrs03-"+n+".jpg'); | $('body').prepend(preloader); } | | the js in the source of the page: var imgNum = | '1'; function increment(){ if(imgNum < 141){ | imgNum++; }else{ imgNum = 1; } | url = "url('img/vrg_google_doc_final_vrs03-"+imgNum+".jpg')"; | document.getElementById('pic').style.backgroundImage=url; | preload(imgNum+1) //PRELOADING } | germandiago wrote: | Would this had ever existed if Apple did not start to protrct | users fr the same problems? | | Apple does not live from exploiting data as much as Google. | | There is a lot of truth in all this. But there is even more | marketing. Google is a corporation, and if Apple is doing | something about it it's not bc they are good. It is bc they do | not care about exploiting data as much. Because they are | competing. | | This proposal would have never existed without competition. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-07-07 23:00 UTC)