Have you considered when the shadow-ban is triggered by an automated moderation system based on heuristics or ML which Google is known to use prolifically across their product range?
They intentionally created a system which resulted in a user being unintentionally shadow-banned. Creating a shadow-banning system isn't malicious. Creating a shadow-banning system that accidentally shadow-bans legitimate users is pretty obviously more a case of stupidity than malice. Just because they created the system intentionally, doesn't mean unintended behaviours in the system are intentional malice
> Google has no strong incentive to keep reviews honest
Have you actually thought about this at all? Why on earth would ANYONE bother reading reviews that they know to be categorically fraudulent? Without keeping the reviews honest, at least to a degree that the general public considers them honest and legitimate, Google Maps Reviews becomes worthless and a dead product. Fake reviews are a very real threat to their product's value and Google arguably has very good strong incentives to keep reviews honest so people keep using them.
Why does anyone read Yelp reviews? They're gamed, and also used to extort businesses. Why does anyone read Glassdoor reviews? They're completely gamed by the employers[0], and the company itself recently pivoted into brand management - which translates into fake reviews being their core product now. Why does anyone read Amazon/eBay reviews? They're gamed too! Why does anyone read reviews on random small e-commerce sites? Those often aren't even reviews, they just look like them!
It's because most people don't pay attention and didn't figure out yet that on-line reviews in general are worthless, thoroughly gamed bullshit. Those who did figure it out - they don't stop using Yelp/Glassdoor/Amazon/eBay/Google Maps anyway, because those services still offer enough value to customers compensate for broken reviews.
So if regular users will be there either way, and manipulating reviews - or allowing them to be easily manipulated - increases retention of paying customers (businesses), which way the incentives blow?
Yeah I just don't see this being a thing either. If Google allowed businesses to pay to moderate (i.e. censor) their own reviews at their own will then that destroys any legitimacy in the reviews of a business, eliminating any value of Google Maps reviews to the end-customer and killing the product.
Do they? I've never even heard it mentioned before other than in reference to controversies around them being dodgy. Maybe it's just not popular in my locale, but I've never heard of anyone using it or recommending it. By contrast I've used Google Maps reviews, and know of other people using it a lot
Yelp gave up on international reviews to focus on the US explicitly because they couldn't do internationalization. Google maps works quite well internationally except in Korea and China.
How is being recorded by your employer while on their premises giving away your freedom? It would be a different thing if they were tracking you out of work, but when you enter a premises owned by a business you kind of implicitly agree to be surveilled by them, as it is their right and freedom to protect their assets.
The thing I find hilarious is that microdosing is literally taking a dose so small that you don't actively feel or notice the effects, and this study decided to research to what degree the subjects feel the effects of a dose intended to be unnoticeable. The conclusions this "study" reached could also be arrived at by just reading what microdosing is.
> The conclusions this "study" reached could also be arrived at by just reading what microdosing is.
there's tons of anecdotal reports of people experiencing tangible benefits from subperceptual microdosing; this study is valuable in that it tests those hypotheses in a semi-controlled setting.
The thing is, those tangible benefits are all subjective and immeasurable. There is no way to measurably differentiate between someone feeling good because they're microdosing, or feeling good because they had a nice day, which is why data collected in this study would largely be just noise.
I think that since a strong placebo (e.g. a tripper feeling good as a result of thinking they're going to have some LSD) alone can produce far more profound effects on mood than actually microdosing, all this study really did is reaffirm the placebo effect's efficacy. Any changes that would have been a result of microdosing would be lost in the noise of the placebo effect on top of whatever else was going on in each participant's life at the time.
> There is no way to measurably differentiate between someone feeling good because they're microdosing, or feeling good because they had a nice day, which is why data collected in this study would largely be just noise.
i can only read this statement one of two ways:
a) you don't think that such a difference can be measured at all, which is antithetical to the entire premise of RCTs and statistical power.
b) you don't think such a difference can be measured among microdosers because microdosing is such a small effect. but this is exactly why we need the study - how else could you know that such an effect could not be measured?
the initial hypothesis that microdosing could have an effect on mood (or some other cognitive) was not some crazy unsupported idea. it had plenty of anecdotal support, i think? some mechanistic evidence, and there are plenty of other supplements which can have non-placebo cognitive effects without noticeable bodily effects. for example, caffeine has thoroughly-demonstrated improvements on alertness and attention, even at doses where many people will not feel an increased heart rate or other physical effects.
Because the only things it does tangibly effect are your mood and mental perspective, things that are entirely subjective and do not have concrete metrics that can be used for measurement, especially when comparing that between different subjects.
The only really noticeable effect of microdosing is at the end of the day you might notice you feel it was a really good day and you're happy. The thing is though this isn't distinguishable from someone simply having a good day and feeling happy. The data collected in this study would have essentially been irrelevant noise, based more on the aggregate of day-to-day experiences of the subjects rather than whether or not they received a placebo.
Microdosing inherently is indistinguishable from a placebo effect as far as empirical measurements go. If the participants who received a microdose were able to somehow measure their experience with a different result to those in the control group, then they weren't microdosing, they were actually tripping.
No measurable effect is not the same as volunteer's perception of it's effect. A comprehensive psychiatric evaluation uses a series of smaller evaluations that includes a self assessment as well as other assessments for memory, speech etc [0][1].
Wouldn’t a comprehensive psychiatric evaluation be looking for some sort of markers, or metrics, to determine a known vs unknown state or evaluation result? Per your link, psych eval is to determine known disorders or other mental states. By definition, there has to be criteria.
You said, no measurable effect is not the same as volunteers perception of the effect. But wouldn’t that still be a measurable effect, by the volunteers perception?
You are reading into microdosing as if it was homeopathy. This is not the case. Microdoses often have noticeable effects, just not a full-blown visual trip.
Incredible, who could have ever guessed that taking something in such a small dose that it's effects are imperceptible to the subject would reveal that the effects at such a dose are... imperceptible to the subject?
Can we do a study on whether water is wet or ice is cold next?
"imperceptible" refers to the actual psychidelic experience; microdosing is not supposed to produce the auditory or visual hallucinations of macrodosing. that such a dose would or would not have other effects is not analytically obvious.
Like USA, Australia's politics are dominated by two major parties most people feel compelled to vote for, and even if you do vote for some independent third party, our preferential voting system ends in your votes going towards one of the two major parties when the independent you actually voted for gets "knocked out" anyway. The two major parties nominate whoever they like to lead them, generally their candidates are whoever will obediently follow the party line and be a good patsy.
So similarly to the USA, every election cycle is a meaningless facade where we pretend we still live in a democracy and that we have any control at all over who our "elected" leaders are. I'm sure the majority of Americans don't want Biden as their leader, but they're stuck with him because ultimately the two major parties gave the voters two bad choices. Oh you wanted a national leader who wasn't an out-of-touch old white man beholden to the desires of his lobbyist benefactors? Well bad luck, because your only two choices are out-of-touch old white men beholden to the desires of their lobbyist benefactors.
In fairness to the USA, Biden was selected via the primary system. In fact voters very much did want 'out of touch old white men'. If the Democratic party had been able to simply pick the leader themselves it would be black women from here on out forever - see how Hillary ended up being nominated and losing to Trump for a taste of what the primary system usually manages to avoid.
I always thought Apple's slogan was hilarious because I basically interpreted it with emphasis on the "just". It just works. Like, only barely passes the bar for what could be considered working, only just.
Have you considered when the shadow-ban is triggered by an automated moderation system based on heuristics or ML which Google is known to use prolifically across their product range?