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If the internet is addictive, why we don't regulate it?
- teekert 11y agoI only skimmed over the article as I find the beginning already horribly patronizing. Why don't we deregulate drugs and treat drug addicts like we treat internet addicts, by offering help and counseling? Find the holes in their lives and try to fill them with non-self-destructive habits.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoAnd the example some one who doesn't know how to work with mail its an asynchronous medium FFS. The journalist needs some advice on time management and possibly a PIP Plan.
- pdkl95 11y ago> Facebook This sounds like yet another case of someone confusing Facebook (plus a few related businesses) with the internet. Regulate the endpoints, if you must, instead of blaming the internet for letting you talk to that endpoint.
- Zekio 11y agoThis is probably the case
- JoshTriplett 11y ago> Regulate the endpoints, if you must Only one relevant endpoint, namely the human sitting at the computer, and they're quite capable of self-regulating. If they choose not to, fine.
- austerity 11y agoNo. Next question please. Seriously if anyone is treating humans like pigeons here it's the author by posing this question.
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- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoYou can tell just from the capsule bio what the authors agenda is.
- onion2k 11y agoIn the case of Twitter they probably don't know how often you're checking it. It's a stream that's constantly pushing updates to your computer whenever you have a client open. If you open it and put it the background and only check it a few times a day that looks the same as if you open it and keep it in the foreground checking every tweet.
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- ucaetano 11y agoBetteridge's law of headlines clearly applies in this case. "No". Next question?
- tajen 11y agoMany answers here say "No" because it talks about regulation. But the article is an interesting study: What website features could be disabled because they're systematically addictive? The article suggests: > 1. To forbid infinite scroll, > 2. Sites should be required to flag users who display especially compulsive behaviours, > 3. Certain sites or browsers would be required to include tools that let users monitor themselves – how long they’ve been on a site,... I'm an addict of 9Gag. I'm also to a lesser level a compulsive reader of HN, fb, commitstrip, my sales dashboard, support tickets and emails. I'm not sure however what would be the solution. Actually it all started because the compilation time (60-90s) is just long enough to lose focus from programming and let me wander onto other topics (and if it were not fb, I'd find something else like my bank account). During compilation time, do you think it's possible to let your mind stay idle, as to avoid distraction and internet compulsive disorder?
- Legogris 11y ago> Do you think it's possible to let your mind stay idle during compilation time, as to avoid distraction and internet compulsive disorder? Meditation is a good start.
- eterm 11y agoI at first read this as "Medication is a good start" and I'm relieved to see on second reading it wasn't that. I suffer from the same problem though, the 1-2 minute compilation times are just long enough that I constantly distract myself opening and closing HN probably hundreds of times a day, often the content is identical to the previous time of opening, but the occasional nugget is enough that my brain clearly gets something from just opening HN even to just close it immediately that it has become ingrained in my working life. I'm interested to hear how you use meditation to break that?
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- mnx 11y agoFunny, HN already does 3... Maybe not a bad idea after all.
- dmichulke 11y agoBecause "regulation" is not a solution, it is merely the process of delegating the power of each individual to choose to a selected few.
- tremon 11y agoRegulation, when implemented correctly, is the process of delegating power from a self-selected few to a democratically controlled body.
- dmichulke 11y agoTwo points: Who are the self-selected few in substance or gun regulation? "when implemented correctly" is a very strong condition, I suppose my start-up would be worth billions and my country would only ask for 10% taxes if they were implemented correctly.
- tremon 11y agoIn the case of illegal drugs (assuming that's what you mean with substance), the "self-selected few" are the traffickers and producers (including middle-men): they fully control pricing, availability and quality. In the case of gun regulation, it's more or less the same, but there's another component: the items themselves are a means of asserting power, so the regulation has to account for the entire product lifecycle more than with other areas (yes, drugs can also be used to assert power, but in those cases it's the supplier who has power over the user, and with guns it's the user who has power over a third party). I included "when implemented correctly" only to avoid having to discuss regulatory failures such as market capture (e.g. FCC) or rubber-stamping (e.g. FISA) as fundamental arguments against regulation. We don't use Volkswagen's recent troubles as arguments against cars in general, yet somehow that line of reasoning is valid when discussing regulation.
- dmichulke 11y agoIn the drug case people are not self-selected, because anyone can easily become a trafficker himself. Same for the gun regulation case. However, as soon as there is a legal structure that exerts regulation, it's very hard, basically impossible, to enter the regulatory institution. This staticness is one of the reasons, regulatory institutions fail after some time - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
- khabaal 11y agoThe whole question sounds wrong from the beginning. It is not 'the internet', which is being addictive but certain services, who use the internet to provide their service. I do not think that it is questionable, that, for example, facebook or online games like world of warcraft have a huge potential to be addictive, but this is not a problem of the internet itself. You would not blame drug addiction to transport infrastructure, calling for its regulation, just because it is involved in bringing the addicted and their dealers together.
- lmorris84 11y ago> Should we blame Michael S for wasting hours of his life hitting a small button? We could. Yep we could, and we should. I'm all for personal responsibility, and this feels like setting up a massive excuse for someone wasting their day on Facebook or Reddit. Unlike the Pigeons in the story, you're not locked in a box and are free to not use the internet if you so wish.
- tremguy 11y agoYes, you are also free to choose your food at the supermarket, but there are still regulations in place to prevent selling of potentially harmful stuff. Although I agree, the author has somewhat missed the point here as Facebook != Internet.
- tikhonj 11y agoThat's a great example, actually: there are regulations that prevent actively, unexpectedly harmful stuff. There are no regulations preventing stuff that tastes great, is easy to eat but not entirely healthy. We should take the same approach to the internet: prohibit the actively harmful (malware, scams) but not "addictive" content.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoActually, the most addictive content would under this example get banned too - as it should be (or rather, addictive content delivery methods should be). There are no regulations preventing stuff that tastes great, but there are regulations preventing companies from adding addictive substances to the food.
- tremguy 11y agoI think there might be some that apply to your criteria, for example at least in some European countries, sugary foods are controlled by taxation. I mean something like the idea of banning infinite scroll that someone mentioned earlier might be worth considering.
- hliyan 11y agoPerhaps we should consider regulating false advertising (in and out of the Internet) before trying such strange measures as "forbidding infinite scroll". Perhaps such regulation should include the form of false advertising we call click-bait (of which this article is, perhaps, a borderline case).
- tremon 11y agowhy do you consider this article click-bait? The content-to-link ratio of that page is extremely low. I agree that the HN link title is a bit sensationalist, but I'm a bit puzzled why the article itself would be bait-y.
- hliyan 11y agoPerhaps click-bait was too strong a word. Reading the article, I got the feeling the author crafted both the title and the content to stir up feelings on both ends of the opinion spectrum.
- tremon 11y agoCan someone please fix the link title? The article is very interesting, but I almost skipped it because of the miscontructed sentence. The only reason I opened it was to check whether the article itself had that headline... (edit: actually, the target page title is grammatically correct)
- gtpasqual 11y agoFact of the matter is that these services are not addictive, they just make it easier for mundane individuals to do certain things. For example, Facebook just makes it easier to spy on others' lives. Before that, a lot of time was spent of rumors and gossip.
- te_chris 11y agoThere's a lot of head-in-the-sand, kneejerk appeals to individual responsibility here, which is understandable on a forum populated by the people who are perpetuating the most egregious examples of the behaviour the author is lamenting. This ignores the author's point, which I'm assuming is the point of these responses. Instead of just making some abstract appeal to 'individual authority', how about actually engaging with what they're saying? "A handful of corporations determine the basic shape of the web that most of us use every day. Many of those companies make money by capturing users’ attention, and turning it into pageviews and clicks. They’ve staked their futures on methods to cultivate habits in users, in order to win as much of that attention as possible." This seems like a salient point that is worthy of proper discussion and analysis. I've recent been reading a great book [1] about it, that is forcing me to reconsider a lot of positions I took for granted, as one of those building the web, complicit in a whole bunch of this madness. I highly recommend looking into this more, as, in my opinion, we're becoming victims of our medium in the most McLuhan-esque sense. [1] The World Beyond Your Head - http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-World-Beyond-Your-Head/dp/0374292981 http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-World-Beyond-Your-Head/dp/037429...
- teekert 11y agoHave to admit, I am one of the kneejerkers but I come here for comments like yours ;)
- karmacondon 11y agoOk, let's discuss the ideas presented in the article. The two forms main forms of regulation suggested near the end of the piece seem to be letting users control the amount of content/notifications that they consume, and flagging users who seem like they are exhibiting signs of addiction. Most sites do offer options to control the number of notifications, etc, but most people just stick with the defaults anyway. Even if there were an option for "Disable infinite scroll for me because I can't control my procrastination", how many people do you really think would use it? Likewise, if Zynga et al did implement some kind of flag for users who play too much, do you think it would make a difference? If someone is willing to invest 5 hours clicking a Farmville button, then a popup that says "We noticed that you spent the whole day clicking a button, don't you have something better to do?" probably isn't going to be epiphanic for them. Casinos and some gambling websites are required to do this now, and it hasn't cured gambling addiction yet. Just like adding a perfunctory "Please drink responsibly" to the end of beer commercials has had a small effect. What could work? In some parts of Asia, security officers will forcibly remove people from cybercafes if they're showing signs of addiction. But most people in the west use home internet, which would make physical enforcement cost prohibitive. Laws could be passed that outright ban certain types of games. But a politician would look pretty silly taking a stand against Mafia Wars on the floor of a legislative body, especially given recent world events. There might be a great solution, maybe offered in your book recommendation (thanks for that, btw). But it's hard to see what can practically be done about this problem, other than people exerting more self control in a changing world.
- pimterry 11y agoI really like this article, it's full of good points and it's definitely a huge real problem, but I do think better tools for users are the better (and easier) route to fixing this. Personally I find every time that my biggest problem beating this is that it makes distraction totally automatic; I open facebook without even thinking about it. I have a reasonably good level of willpower when I'm actively making the decision, but I find as soon as I'm a bit bored or distracted or doing something I don't really want to do then suddenly I'm on my third buzzfeed article that somebody posted on facebook, and half an hour's disappeared down the drain. Painful. It's the constantly compulsive going to check facebook part that's the real problem, imo, rather than the staying on it too long. I'm not too sure how regulation is really going to help you pull that back, even with the ideas proposed here. Excellent point about the existing tools not being accessible to the non-tech crowd though, even though the problem is universal; that's definitely been my impression of the current audience. Not sure why though; any idea what they're doing wrong? What do we need to do to get everybody using Build Focus/RescueTime/ForestApp/etc to help your average person stop losing time to facebook too, instead of just the productivity hackers? [Disclaimer: I'm actually the creator of Build Focus (http://www.buildfocus.io http://www.buildfocus.io), so I do have a little skin in this game]
- vlehto 11y agoMy take on drugs is that kids should not use them. Not because I say so or because some of them are dangerous. But because I hope they really don't need to self medicate broken psyche. So the best way to dump addiction is not to ban alcohol from yourself. It's finding some meaning for your life before you turn into chronic alcoholic. ...and here I am, browsing HN because I'm absolutely terrified to make few phone calls. Not because of the calls themselves, but because I don't know what will happen afterwards.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI don't think regulations are the most effective things on the Internet, but the knee-jerk rejections of the very concept miss one crucial thing: addictive services are not something you can make people resist by willpower. Why? Because they're optimized to be as addictive as possible by malicious people who get paid boatloads of money for being good at it. If people can resist them, they'll be improved until they again can't be resisted. Right now, in many conference rooms worldwide, there are professionals sitting and talking about how to make their websites more addictive and life-sucking. Of course they don't call it that way. They use euphemisms like "user engagement", "retention", "user satisfaction", "conversion funnels", and picture things in terms of company growth. The addictive Web didn't happen all by itself. It was engineered this way on purpose, by people who don't care about others. So whatever regulation there is, I wish it would be something that would allow to strike back, and not just attempts to shield users. If you're adding heroin to food to make it addictive, you will find yourself in front of a judge who will send you to jail. And so should be if you're making media addictive on purpose, to the detriment of health of the consumers. We can't forget in those discussions that we're fighting living, sentient opponents, who are going to try and counter every coping mechanism we develop - and who are better at this game than we are.
- bsbechtel 11y ago>>addictive services are not something you can make people resist by willpower Yes, you're right, but to your first point, drugs are addictive too and the War on Drugs (regulation) has widely been seen as a major failure. I'll admit I didn't read the article, but I get a little annoyed when I see articles that reach thousands of people calling for regulation because one journalist/writer found some problem they deem a societal problem that can be best solved by regulation. For many, many of our problems, there are literally thousands of options to solve them before resorting to regulation. The problem with regulation is there is no guarantee that it is the best solution, but by it's very nature, it kills the possibility of better solutions being tried out later on.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago> drugs are addictive too and the War on Drugs (regulation) has widely been seen as a major failure. That's why I'm not jumping on the regulations bandwagon. We had enough such examples around banning addictive substances to prove that regulations can hurt people much more than they're helping. You're right that regulation isn't the best default solution. They have a lot of momentum; once enacted, they get very hard to remove. This actually reminds me of pg's insight from his very relevant essay[0]. He argues that society develops antibodies against addictive things, and that the law actually follows - not precedes - social customs that change to protect us. But he also points out that technology seems to be outpacing the rate at which society can adapt itself. [0] - http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
- cafard 11y ago1. I spent half an hour the other day helping someone get Websense running again. Some places do regulate internet use. 2. I remember from many years ago the sense of disgust at knowing that I had wasted hours of a perfect Colorado afternoon in watching an old mediocre movie on TV. That, I think would have been before even DARPANET.
- Grue3 11y agoBut so is coffee, Coca-Cola and a lot of finer things in life.
- mseebach 11y ago[Novel-reading is] "one of the more pernicious habits to which a young lady can become devoted. When the habit is once thoroughly fixed, it becomes at inveterate as the use of liquor or opium. The novel-devotee is as much a slave as the opium-eater or the inebriate." Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, 1882. (Yes, the cornflakes-guy). https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1ocgQy4hQA8C&lpg=PA37&ots=tlqQiTD6FD&pg=PA37#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1ocgQy4hQA8C&lpg=PA37&ot... There exists well-know literary mechanisms by which to make a book "addictive" and those mechanisms are used by unscrupulous authors and publishers to profit on getting people hooked on their books and to buy them and their endless sequels. Make an argument that also includes regulating certain plot-devices in pulp-fiction novels (that doesn't make you throw up a little in your mouth), then we'll talk.
- sukulaku 11y agoHow about just treating adults as adults? There's no need to "regulate" everything, and who's "we" anyway?
- ducuboy 11y agoI like the notion of organic web. But the parallel between food and web in terms of consumption doesn't stand. The currency for food is money and organic food is more expensive, while the currency for web is generally time spent, and so the junk web is more expensive. And no, we should not regulate either. Just promote the more valuable and healthier options. By the way, besides tools such as Freedom which only reduce the intake of junk web, what services do you think would fit in the category of organic web?