It’s like… I keep imagining what if I were a Manchurian Candidate CEO and tried to destroy the entire value of my company as surely as possible before being found out, what decisions would I make? And I must say, what spez and musk are doing keeps surprising me at every turn, because even in my imagination I have not come up with schemes as effective as theirs.
Whatever happens to Particle A will instantly affect Particle B, no matter how far apart they are!
Well ok, maybe for some specific sense of “whatever happens” you could describe it this wa-
If we could create this connection reliably and stably, we could potentially use it send information across distances nearly instantaneously!
Nope! You’ve gone too far! This is provably impossible, and the proof is even called the no-communication theorem 😄. Don’t give our 5-year olds false hope that will take years of study to beat out of them later.
So, will saving half the prep time translate to free or reduced-price guac when or if Autocado gets beyond the prototype stage? Sorry: The company told The Register that it intends to maintain the same pricing for the green stuff.
In capitalist economics, the price of a product has no relation to the cost of producing it. The price is always whatever the market will bear. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we can stop asking silly questions and start asking correct ones. The robots could lower production costs to literally zero, and the menu price will not budge one cent. It is only on the macroeconomic scale, when you consider multiple competitors going in and out of business, that the cost of supply starts to matter and only the most efficient producers come out on top.
This is also why every company tries hard to avoid any competition by branching out into niche products. Chipotle has many fast-casual food competitors, but how many of them offer guac as a specific menu item?
From a game theory of greedy agents point of view, what is the number value of a worthless app? As in, if Reddit offered to buy Apollo for $1 right now, what greedy reason would there be to refuse?
Currently the key provisioning system is really only meant for developers, key requests have to be manually approved by reddit admins. You couldn’t have millions of users jump in to request their own keys. This uncertainty is why the 3pa devs considered and discarded the option of letting users provide their own keys, choosing to shut down their apps entirely. Making the system official and automated via Reddit Premium would have solved that.
All the 3pa’s shut down business the moment the actual API prices were announced. This wasn’t a protest move, the prices were simply 20 times higher than what they were promised and impossible to work into their business model. Reddit couldn’t have overcharged and continued as normal - it was a deliberate move to kill off 3pa while pretending they are not. Reddit COULD have charged this API price to users directly via Reddit Premium, but failed to do so.
All they had to do was offer API keys with Reddit Premium. Plug-and-play into your 3rd-party-app of choice. Can’t believe those dum-dums chose to kill off their golden goose instead.
There is no way they’d pay $2 having grown used to getting it for free.
Everyone should be applying to be a mod, then keeping the subreddits closed :D spez said that they will not force communities to reopen, only that they will be replacing mods
Right! I was trying to model u/spez as sincere, but with views so diametrically opposed to mine as to sound insane. “Lawyercats” was an actual reason he has cited previously. I agree that the much more likelier explanation is that reddit execs are lying out their ass and are simply deliberately killing off 3rd party apps to make their IPO look better somehow, and using the fuck-you pricing as a convenient excuse. The execs must have been drinking their own start-up cool-aid, having forgotten that the real value of reddit is not in them but in the community. u/spez keeps calling it HIS data that 3rd party apps are profiting off, when it is really OUR data. Or maybe they are aware, but are expecting that they can bend the community to their will regardless.
I am fascinated by how the experience of other people can be completely different from mine, alien even. We can look at the same situation and come up with exactly opposite conclusions. I keep trying to put myself in the shoes of the other, figure out how they think. The behavior of u/spez is abhorent to me, but here’s how I would imagine he thinks about the community list of demands:
<AH mode>
Bringing the API pricing down to the point ads/subscriptions could realistically cover the costs.
The costs are reasonable and down to earth! We’ve been extremely generous. Our prices are in line with industry standards. The app devs are greedy and do not want to pay. In fact they are so greedy they are choosing to shut down and go out of business rather than pay their fair share! Also some apps are ahem inefficient. Those devs could stay profitable if they just code their apps better.
Reddit gives the apps time to make whatever adjustments are necessary
The apps had plenty of time. We’ve been perfectly transparent. The API changes were announced months in advance. The first bills do not arrive until months from now in August, and are not due for another month after that. The apps have enough time if they are serious about working with us.
Rate limits would need to be per user+appkey, not just per key.
Rate limits are for the free tier. The paid tier is a flat fee per 1000 API calls without rate limit.
Commitment to adding features to the API; image uploads/chat/notifications.
We are always working on new and exciting features! We have so many mod tools in the pipeline. All the hottest features will appear in our native app first, which is where we can best ensure everything stays compatible. Have you tried using that?
Lack of communication. Why were disabled communities not contacted to gauge the impact of these API changes?
We are always in communication with our communities! We’ve been discussing these API changes for months, collecting community input, and interacting with our users in AMAs!
You say you’ve offered exemptions for “non-commercial” and “accessibility apps.” Despite r/blind’s best efforts, you have not stated how they are selected.
We communicate with developers on an app-by-app basis. We have already confirmed the inclusion of two accessibility apps! We support accessibility for blind people!
Parity in access to NSFW content
Cannot be done for lawyercat reasons.
Now that we have addressed all of the listed community concerns, we are looking forward to welcoming all of you back to reddit!
</AH mode>
P.S. the fact that u/spez specifically stated that “old.reddit.com isn’t going anywhere” confirms in my mind that old.reddit will be gone within 9 months. Screenshot this.
There will be some cat-and-mouse games with blockers and anti-blockers, but the “Nash equilibrium” end result of online ads is that they will be spliced with the content into a single video stream before being sent to you. It’s not done now because it’s less work for youtube servers not to re-encode, but it can and will be done if youtube clients/browsers with addons keep ignoring downloading the ad video files, or download them but lie about playing them. We’ll come full circle back to television yet!
You’ll need a DVR for your YouTube. Ironically, when DVRs were a thing for TV, the most reliable method for automatically skipping commercial breaks was cutting out segments with increased sound volume profile XD
The other alternative is total DRM and a war against general computing. We already have HDMI with HDCP encryption in place, next YouTube will demand that only trusted code (that guarantees ads are played) authenticated via a TPM on authorized devices can access their video streams. Netflix and Amazon are already doing it. I can’t play either because my devices are too “free” for them.
Thank you for agreeing that Asch conformity experiment falls under human experiment ethics considerations and informed consent requirements! I am surprised though that you consider the reddit experiment unlike the Asch experiment (I personally see reddit as the worse one actually!). Could you explain how in your mind, Asch does carry a risk of causing harm in a way that reddit does not? Asch is just looking at a bunch of lines on a page after all! How can a bunch of lines cause harm? I also find it odd your cavalier attitude towards the word “should”.
General statements about the purpose of the research, as well as a full description of the research tasks and activities, should be provided in the consent form. (emphasis, should, not must).
If “should” isn’t prescriptive, why even have any “should” statements in our guidelines if you are just going to ignore them all? And yet again your link disagrees with you:
- The risk must be no more than minimal. “Minimal risk means that the probability and magnitude of harm or discomfort anticipated in the research are not greater in and of themselves than those ordinarily encountered in daily life or during the performance of routine physical or psychological examinations or tests.”
- The rights and welfare of the subjects will not be adversely affected.
- The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver. This does not mean that it would be inconvenient to conduct the study without the waiver. It means that deception is necessary to accomplish the goals of the research.
Ameliorating Deception
Protocols must include procedures for ameliorating possible negative effects of deception. In addition to thorough debriefing that explains the need for deception, emphasis should be placed on correcting any false feedback given to participants about their performance, competency, or other personal characteristics.
Participants whose behavior was recorded without their knowledge, such as during a fake “break” in study, should be given the opportunity to request that the recording be destroyed.
If a study was designed to provoke negative behaviors, participants should be told that most people react the way they reacted and that their behavior was a normal response.
Debriefing
Debriefing for participants who were deceived includes a description of the deception and an explanation about why it was necessary. The discussion should presented in lay language and should be sufficiently detailed that participants will understand how and why they were deceived. If the study included multiple deceptions, each should be addressed. If participants were filmed without their knowledge, they must be given the option to ask that the researchers do not use the film
Reddit never had any intention to ameliorate the deception, to debrief the participants, or to give them an opportunity to delete their experiment records after the fact. Reddit never implemented alternative practical research methods like opt-in studies. Are you seriously arguing that because the page says “should” and not “must”, reddit was perfectly ethical simply not doing any of this at all? This isn’t some RFC, this is normal people language!
Or if you are saying this wasn’t deception, then why link to the entire Duke deception page at all? The only relevant sentence here to you is:
If, in order to counter the demand effect, researchers cannot disclose their research hypotheses, the failure to disclose is not considered deception.
And it only refers to the disclosing the research hypothesis itself, not the very fact that you are taking part in some experiment! And you agree that it is not impossible to perform usage experiments without informing participants in advance (I brought up Firefox as a better example alternative), it is just more laborious. Moreover, reddit did engage in actual deception beyond simply keeping the fact of the experiment secret:
being unable to view a website without logging into an account is not anything more than minimal risk. And even then, it is important to emphasize that the failure to disclose the research hypothesis to counter the demand effect is NOT deception.
What happened went beyond that. If you read the reddit OP:
I’m logged in on my phone (iOS) but I use a browser, not the app. As of an hour ago, the mobile view is showing that I’m logged out, with no option to log in and a permanent “this looks better in the app” banner on the page.
This isn’t some simple A/B testing of things like text size or link color. This isn’t like Facebook or Instagram blocking everyone equally from seeing communities without logging in. OP was logged in. Reddit lied to them saying they were not logged in when they were. Reddit lied to them saying there is no way to log in. Reddit lied to them saying the only way to see the content was to download the app. This is the deception part. This is the part that’s similar to Asch and the people in the room with you lying that they are participants like you. You think you are in a normal situation but you are not. You’ve been singled out and no one believes you.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
You, uh… dropped a backslash there. Here’s an extra one for you: \
I would also point out that “legally authorized representative” in this phrasing refers to people who are legally designated as a representative of the subject, and not the admin of the site in question.
Right, sorry. I understood it meant legal guardian in the other contexts, but misread this line in particular
For example, this is how Indiana University guides researchers for making exempt determinations when reaching out to their IRB. University of South Carolina’s IRB provides explicit examples.
Again, you are posting links that tell me that the type of research done by Reddit and Facebook would not be covered. “Exempt” in these links means exempt from the full scope of requirements of the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects for research that presents no more than minimal risk and falls into one of one of predefined categories. “Exempt” research may still require informed consent. Your prior link was for exemption to informed consent specifically. In my view, the Reddit experiment satisfies neither the conditions for “exempt” research nor the conditions for “informed consent exemption”.
It may be hard to keep track of all the legalese flowcharts, all the AND and OR conjugated lists of preconditions, but I think I got it right. To take a look at UCSB flowchart for example, how would I argue that my Reddit-like experiment is “exempt”? I would still need to meet with the IRB to determine whether that my research is exempt in the first place (Reddit Inc has no IRB), and to do so I’d have to show that ALL of these are true:
Then I would pick a predefined category, probably Exempt Category 3 - Benign Behavioral Interventions with Adults, and show that I meet at least ONE of these is preconditions:
- a) information obtained is recorded in such a manner that human subjects cannot be identified, directly or through identifiers linked to the subjects
- b) any disclosure of the human subjects’ responses outside the research could reasonably place the subjects at risk of criminal or civil liability or be damaging to > the subjects’ financial standing, employability, or reputation
- or c) information obtained is recorded in such a manner that human subjects can be identified, directly or through identifiers linked to the subjects and if the IRB conducts a limited review for provisions for protecting privacy and maintaining confidentiality.
Embarrassingly, b) is probably a typo, since on every other site the language used is that the responses would NOT reasonably place the subjects at risk of criminal or civil liability, but whatever. Assuming we want to keep track of as much PI as possible (whether or not you agree that any username-related information online is PI at all), we’ll take the (corrected) option b) since there is no criminal liability for the user from our experiments. Then we have to follow all of these example rules:
- This category does not include minors.
- Benign behavioral interventions must be brief in duration, harmless, painless and not physically invasive and there is no reason to think the interventions will be offensive or embarrassing.
- Interventions should not have a last significant adverse impact on the participants.
- Research involving deception is allowed if the participant is prospectively informed, and agrees to, that they will be unaware of, or misled regarding the nature or purpose of the research.
Reddit violates ALL of these example rules.
So you see, even your own examples of specific IRB guidelines disagree with you.
The examples of research listed under Category 3 are:
The Reddit experiment goes beyond these, as it is designed to specifically manipulate the user’s emotional state, to deliberately frustrate the user to see whether they would download the native app or abandon reddit entirely when their web access is blocked. It is much more similar to the Facebook shadowbanning experiment (which you agreed can shove it) than to these examples above. I’d say the level of frustration and embarrassment is similar to the Asch conformity experiment, which if you wanted to repeat it now I was taught under modern rules DOES require IRB review, DOES require informed consent (if not with details of the deception then at least with the very fact that an experiment is taking place), DOES require post-experiment debfrief, all because it DOES present a risk of causing emotional harm.
Can you find instances of modern Asch experiment research papers that specifically show they are “exempt” research and/or that have received an exemption from collecting informed consent prospectively and/or retrospectively? If you do, it will help convince me that that’s how modern research ethics really works.
Thank you for providing examples of specific language used in regulating research ethics! It confirms my suspicion that the type of experiments done by big companies on their users violates most if not every single one of these requirements. Here’s my take on it:
The research involves no more than minimal risk to the subjects;
If it were A/B testing of simple things like whether the “buy now!” link is underlined or not, I’d agree. But the situation linked in OP is exactly of a user who was so upset by unexpected behavior secretly thrust upon him that he had to go online to ask others for help, wondering whether he was just stupid and doing something repeatedly wrong. Yes, he was not literally infected with syphilis by shady doctors, but emotional harm is very much real, and risk of it in hindsight was not minimal. Or that experiment Facebook did with shadowbanning people at random to see whether their feelings of depression would increase - WTF?
The research could not practicably be carried out without the requested waiver or alteration;
Research involving deception is carried out all the time and researchers still manage to get consent in advance. They just don’t tell you ahead of time exactly what kind of deception will take place. In tech, the companies definitely have the option for an OPT-IN experiment program. Firefox for example has a “nightly” version for users who opt in to download it and want to test out the latest features and sometimes participate in A/B experiments. The companies CHOOSE not to do it, preferring to experiment on innocent unwitting users at large, because *gasp* there is no law stopping them.
Whenever appropriate, the subjects or legally authorized representatives will be provided with additional pertinent information after participation.
The victims of corporate A/B testing are typically never informed after the fact. Again there is no law requiring it. The user in OP only found out because he started asking around online, and one of the admins just happened to see it. Don’t kid yourself hoping he would have been informed afterwards otherwise. The admin was not acting as a pertinent legally authorized representative for purposes of this question. Much more likely he was acting beyond his authorization, and would be disciplined for this unauthorized disclosure and his response would be deleted if it ever became trouble for the company.
Each subject (or legally authorized representative) will be asked whether the subject wants documentation linking the subject with the research, and the subject’s wishes will govern;
Was never asked, does not apply.
That the research presents no more than minimal risk of harm to subjects and involves no procedures for which written consent is normally required outside of the research context;
More than minimal risk of harm, unless you are sociopathic enough to believe emotional harm is not real. Also odd that corporations that love to thrust EULA missives at you to sign all the time just happen to choose a written-consent-to-experiment-form as not “normally required”. A consent to random experiments on page 132 of EULA is not informed.
If the subjects or legally authorized representatives are members of a distinct cultural group or community in which signing forms is not the norm
Does not apply.
Research that only includes interactions involving educational tests (cognitive, diagnostic, aptitude, achievement), survey procedures, interview procedures, or observation of public behavior
Watching server logs for traffic patterns is fine. It counts as observation of public behavior for me. Actively interfering with users by thrusting them into atypical situations like randomly shadowbanning them is not.
a question of whether the research contributes to generalizable knowledge
True, if it’s not for generalizable knowledge then it’s not “research” covered under 45 CFR 46.101. Which is why what the corporations are doing is not literally illegal. But if I walk around testing how close I can swing my fist to passersby’s noses without hitting them, I’m not in the clear based on “hurr durr technically it’s not research because it’s not generalizable so it’s not covered by ethics standards”, I’m just an asshole.
By the way, here’s how the link defines minimal risk:
(j) Minimal risk means that the probability and magnitude of harm or discomfort anticipated in the research are not greater in and of themselves than those ordinarily encountered in daily life or during the performance of routine physical or psychological examinations or tests.
Is the “reddit mobile web not working for no reason causing me discomfort” typical in ordinary daily life? It would be a very cynical outlook on the quality of their own product for reddit admins to claim that it is! :D
If I tried to do these experiments in an academic setting I would be run out of the university by the IRB, but apparently if you experiment on humans for “business” it’s A-OK.
It never kicks in for me when it should, but I figured out I can force trigger it manually with the magic SysRq key (Alt+SysRq+F, needs to be enabled first), which instantly recovers my system when it starts freezing from memory pressure.