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> A person has a need; a company wants to satisfy it. Whether the offering is actually good for the person in long term is said persons' decision to make. A co

> A person has a need; a company wants to satisfy it. Whether the offering is actually good for the person in long term is said persons' decision to make. A company doesn't "want" to satisfy anything; it needs to make money. We're talking mega-corporations with armies of psychologists and data scientists, pouring billions of dollars and collective man-centuries into learning to manipulate people to act in certain ways, irrespective of their own self-interest, on a massive scale... versus individual human beings with inherently limited time and access to information and, on average, predictable behavioral patterns. The most successful ad isn't the most helpful, informative, or even honest, it's the one which acts the most like a mind virus.

golergka 10y ago
Still, the critical thing here is _personal_choice_. Any kind of interaction is, in some respect, manipulation; you just used a lot of scare tactics right now to inflate the role of manipulation in this particular one. May be fair, may be not; having worked in an industry that usually gets a rep for being manipulative (free2play gamedev), I don't believe in the black magic power of the game designers and marketers anymore, but I don't have enough information about topic at hand. But regardless - we have to make a clear distinction between somewhere, because otherwise we would be on a slippery slope to forbid any kind of interaction where parties have conflicting interests at all. And in my opinion, the perfect way to make distinction is whether the person is making the decision out of a sane state of mind and voluntarily.