21 ms·

“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

• Aardwolf 6y ago
  Often something made in the name of user engagement makes me less addicted instead Say we have something that shows all expanded comments immediately: keeps me on that site Then they do an "engaging" redesign where only 10% of the comments actually show and requires lots of clicking to expand them, and lots of unrelated animated images show below: makes me want to close that tab and do something else
  • user-the-name 6y ago
    What you seem to be saying here is, "Imagine a thing that doesn't work. It doesn't work." That's... not an argument?
  • Ensorceled 6y ago
    Do you have an actual example website/app that does this “less addictive” thing?
    • Aardwolf 6y ago
      Reddit's redesign. 'Less addictive' for me. I'm sure there must be some target audience for whom this is more addictive, but I'm not the one, I just want to read the comments of the thread I choose myself in peace.
      • rhn_mk1 6y ago
        The page is so heavy now it makes it a chore to browse.
      • 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 6y ago
        Same here, also with Reddit refusing to show posts to me and trying to force me to install its App instead when browsing on mobile. I simply don't use it on mobile anymore.
        • dspillett 6y ago
          As well as not going there on mobile any more (or hitting back PDQ if I do end up following a link that goes there), I use it a lot less on desktop. If you are not logged in some things (just browsing comments) become a lot less convenient, for instance. So unless there is a link that sounds really compelling (I sometimes get sent links by friends - though usually I just bounce through reddit and on to the actual information which is probably one link away) I simply don't go. I certainly don't go to subreddits unprompted to look for content any more (which I used to). Yeah, old reddit still exists as some are fond of saying in these discussions. But other perfectly good information sources exist for what I want too (often better than reddit ever was - HN for instance). Youtube is heading the same way: I'm visiting it less and less. The more adverts they pile in, the less of their adverts I actually witness because I'm not there to see them at all. I should thank reddit, youtube, and their ilk, really, for saving me the time that I used to waste on their sites and can now enjoy wasting on other things instead!
      • Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
        I'm just glad that reddit still offers their old design through old.reddit.com, and that RES can force the old design. Honestly if reddit ever takes away the old design and a browser extension can't recreate it, my days at reddit would be over. The new design is awful.
• amelius 6y ago
  Yes, and "influencer" is code for psychological manipulator.
  • magicalhippo 6y ago
    It's not much of a code though is it? I mean, it's as subtle as "executioner".
    • amelius 6y ago
      I don't know, people, especially kids on YouTube, seem to be proud of the label these days.
      • luplex 6y ago
        Influencing people has always been a goal of many (see Dale Carnegie). It means being powerful. Influencing people to do a good thing is amazing. Being paid for any influence presumably feels also pretty good.
      • PhillyG 6y ago
        They might just be proud to be earning from something they don't find to be too much like work
  • croes 6y ago
    It is no coincidence that PR is a continuation of propaganda for another field.
  • colejohnson66 6y ago
    It’s always meant, “I’m paid to post ads”. Whether that’s psychological manipulation is up to you. (Yes, ads are designed to get you to interact with them, but on their own, I wouldn’t go as far as saying, “psychological manipulation”. I’ll admit the industry has tended in that direction, however. Your view may differ)
    • amelius 6y ago
• throwaway556179 6y ago
  I recently saw an FB "data engineer" talking about "experiment review sessions", where the - presumably engagement related - results of interface changes are discussed (he also expressed hope that all companies work that way). It's very rational. The user needs a good user interface, the best that can be built. What is the best? The one the user likes to use, day in day out. Is that a problem? Obviously not for the platform. When FB CEO announced that he want's to make users happy, he acknowledged his real intents: mass, aggregate control of behavior. I cannot deny that it carries a purely instrumental view of humans - but that's again only rational in the context of business.
  • tpxl 6y ago
    > What is the best? The one the user likes to use, day in day out. No. The road is most used when there's a traffic jam.
• YetAnotherNick 6y ago
  The author knew that adding a strong and clickbaity title is code for "addiction" still used it and published it in various places for getting the engagement. The companies and their managers are driven by same sort of metrics as the author.
  • Ensorceled 6y ago
    I also tell some of my cousins to get less of their news from Facebook and, in general, use Facebook less. On Facebook.
• s_dev 6y ago
  Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive. Including cheeseburgers and fun video games. >Most alarming is the “internet points”. On Reddit, this is called Karma. On Twitter, it’s likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score displays the community’s overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can vote! The reality is very different. Reddit, for example, has always obfuscated the true Karma score (“to prevent vote brigading”), and the position of a piece of content within the feed can be purposely decided by the Reddit home office, not by the community. This is incredibly, deeply sinister. Why is it 'deeply sinister' -- he just seems to assert it, reddit home office isn't putting other content there that isn't sponsored -- astro turfing exists and explains a lot of that but I don't think it's the reddit admins. The voting mechanism is pretty good at determining interesting content from uniteresting content. This whole article reads like a conspiracy theorist rant like some luddite against tech. There are negative behviors associated with modern technology but this article just asserts that without really elaborating exactly why. It just blankly gestures "you know -- bad tech, feedback loops, doom srolling" all the keywords!
  • goalieca 6y ago
    Reddit also has purchased up/downvotes (through click-farms/bots), opaque moderation, and the real-time public display of these promote mobs and groupthink even if it were actually organic. I don't think for a second their algorithms do a good enough job of mitigating these clickfarms.
    • s_dev 6y ago
      There is an arms race between reddit admins and spammers in general -- who will ruin any platform with eyeballs on it. This article does not address that all -- vote fuzzification apparently only serves "brigading" -- thast not what it's for. It's for spammers so they can't judge the effectivness of their bots. The author misses the wood from the trees. I'm not seeing valid criticisms either which means he didnt' even Google to see what others said of reddit, e.g. poor moderation tools for large subs.
    • asidiali 6y ago
• montenegrohugo 6y ago
  I'd add that algorithmic feeds are another part of the triad (quartet?), and probably the worst offender. Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time, a distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement will be those that call for outrage, which leads to radicalization [1]), and just in general a society where our information consumption is determined by black boxes with opaque goals that do not optimize for the common good. I attribute a significant part of the political rift and radicalization that has occurred in the western world in the past few years to specifically this feature, the algorithmically determined, engagement maximizing, feed. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00550-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00550-7
  • luplex 6y ago
    I think this is how AI takes over humanity. Humans are so short-sighted, we don't even need a superintelligence to outsmart us. We happily stand by and collect profits while letting the AI do whatever it wants. Really, we need regulation that makes companies care about side-effects of their AI technology.
    • skohan 6y ago
      I have sometimes mused about how we have worried about "sky net" since the 90's, but we've already let AI have power to control our lives to some extent. For instance, there are cases you can point to where some normal person on Twitter with a couple dozen followers posted the wrong thing, it blew up into an international story, and they eventually got fired from their real-world job for it. Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? In a lot of cases it was the algorithm: for whatever reason that tweet drew engagement, so a massive spotlight was put on this mostly-private individual. In a real way that's an example of an AI system deciding to take away someone's livelihood.
      • ramphastidae 6y ago
• jhunter1016 6y ago
  I agree with all of this. I also think Medium is a social media site (as is HN), guilty of the same things the author calls out.
  • rapnie 6y ago
    Well yes, there are addictive aspects to HN. But aren't they more like side-effects? The upvoting of submissions is needed to 'crowdsource' an interesting front page. You might do without the karma reputation system, but that will have negative impact on the quality of discussion. After you passed the first treshold (downvote privilege at karma 500) there seems to be no value to the system (no further privileges). But (forgot the game theory name) the 'punishment' of a downvote + karma decrease is probably a great help against shitposting. Is there a right way to set things up, and maintain high community standards and comment quality? Edit: Was it Loss aversion?
• Kaze404 6y ago
  I still haven't fully grasped that we reached this point of perversiveness online. We have brilliant minds and a ridiculous amount of money working on making Alabama's soccer moms click more ads, and we have reached the point of making people addicted to websites to reach that goal. Obviously this is nothing new, and the cigarette industry has been profitting off addiction for decades, but I never expected the same thing (except the very immediate threat of lung cancer) to happen to tools that could have been optimized for so much good instead. And the worst part is that some of it is just so incompetent. I've been trying to break away from Facebook for a while, and recently (the past year or so) I started realizing that my Facebook feed always shows me the exact same posts in the exact same order for days, to the point where I know exactly what post will be first when I open the website. Where is all the Facebook money going? What are these people working on? What are they doing?
  • thecupisblue 6y ago
    Fixing bullshit left by others, refactoring parts of the machine, copying other apps, working on pointless panels and ideas that will be killed in a hot minute or forgotten about, working on internal tools or mostly - fighting internal political battles to get a promotion/more money/authority/status. Most of the people are not there to innovate but to earn money and status for themselves by working at the big F***K
    • ketzo 6y ago
      You sound like you're speaking from experience, so I wanna ask: How genuinely true do you think this is? I'm always curious, about the FAANGs in general but Facebook in particular. Divorced from as much cynicism as possible, what % of level I-III software employees are just there for their resumes?
      • reducesuffering 6y ago
        From Amazon, and according to my extensive experience with the other FANG in Blind, I would very seriously say 90% are there simply for resume and money.
• SamuelAdams 6y ago
  Can't remember who this quote came from but it went something like this: "The only two things that call their clients 'users' is drugs and software."
  • rapnie 6y ago
    I try to avoid the term in docs and discussion, but find that - where I can't refer to stakeholder names directly - I fall back to "the people that use the software", which.. might be more efficiently named 'users'.
    • byecomputer 6y ago
      I mean, the play on words in the gp is cute, and gives one the big Hmmm, but the accepted term is 'user' and some hills aren't worth dying on
  • salawat 6y ago
    It actually depends a lot on circumstance and half the work of software engineering is figuring out your different use cases. Every aspect of a system can have a different beneficiary. Data analysts are interested in different things than end consumers, who are interested in different things than admins or sponsors... If you can't split a generic abstraction of 'users' down further, you're either umplementing a very generic tool, or you're simply not standing up a system where the idea of access control is important. The rub is how nefariously sneaky that access control abstraction can be employed as a fundamental tool.
• is_true 6y ago
  I work in a small company that helps news sites with engagement. Our aim is for our clients to be a place where the community can find as much info as possible for their daily life. Trying to offer readers all the info in the most easily digestible way. Everytime we get a new customer we have to discuss to explain to them that the real value is in providing the info people need as fast and simple as possible. Unfortunately we have to fight against some major forces, such as google ranking sites with longer content just because of that and not metrics related to value.
• WORMS_EAT_WORMS 6y ago
  I always thought it was pretty obvious when YouTube rolled out screen time reminders. It had nothing to do with anything but minimizing liability in case the general public ever catches on to what they are doing to kids mental health. What’s hilarious is they probably have some “data retention policy” and will get away with it. I guess it’s why SV engineers want to care about social issues so much. When you’re up in your $300k+ a year ivory tower built on something you know is dirty, you are exactly the type of person to be angry and project frustration. I saw on Reddit a screenshot of AOC dogging on old people in Congress for not understanding digital. She listed a bunch of modern day issues and this wasn’t one of them. If even she doesn’t know, we really are screwed.
  • Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    How is this that much different to similar "concerns" about kids watching to much tv back in the 60's 70's etc.
    • WORMS_EAT_WORMS 6y ago
      You make a great and difficult point. I’ll try to answer as best I can at least how I see it. Big TV’s goal is to broadcast as engaging as possible material to a general audience. This is broad and therefore not very addictive / effective. Big Tech’s goal is to broadcast as engaging as possible material to an individual. This is specific and therefore very addictive / effective. Regardless that the goal is the same, one is a heavier hitter, and we should have regulations to protect people against the bigger punches.
      • zests 6y ago
        Here is a rough ranking of information sources by amount of "user engagement". Books < TV < Video Games <= Social Media The rankings are potentially different per individual and each information source effects people in different ways. This is my mental model of different user engagement sources. The hard part is where to draw the line and the inevitable fact that pandora is already out of the box.
      • 6y ago
• spodek 6y ago
  The opening sentence: > There is something about social media that human beings are not psychologically prepared for. I would state it: Engineers and business people have distilled what creates craving and then satisfies it by creating more craving. No different than distilling the sugar, heroin, or cocaine from otherwise healthy, innocuous plants. We regulate some of that distillation. Even what we don't regulate, as a society, we generally look down on people that addict others. Why we reward programmers as we did the Sacklers doesn't make sense to me. I would think we would consider employees and investors of antisocial media companies villainous pariahs.
• hawktheslayer 6y ago
  For me the pandemic has actually allowed me to spend more time outdoors and with my children and as a result less time online. We have been taking walks daily and started gardening. I've cut down social media time to almost nothing on all major platforms (HN is my last "addiction"). The author claims the pandemic forced us inside and on social media--do people find this true for them?
  • raihansaputra 6y ago
    Really depends on where do people live. For example my surroundings are not the best to walk around in (very close to busy main roads), and the city as a whole have shopping malls as the main point of interests before the pandemic. Parks are closed, and walking infrastructure are available but not what I'd call enjoyable (the risk crossing a main road without stop lights just for a morning walk doesn't sit well with me). I'm definitely more locked into my devices compared to before the pandemic.
  • luplex 6y ago
    I go on more walks. But I also meet way fewer people and spend more days and evenings alone at home. Social media fills some of that time if you don't actively avoid it.
  • Kaze404 6y ago
    It definitely is true for me. I haven't left my house for anything but doctor's appointments in 11 months. The most exercise I get is when I walk to my condominium's garbage disposal room.
  • slothtrop 6y ago
    Owing to the HN audience there might be a bias against this being true, but I expect there was a boost in general population. I don't think I spend more time on social media than I did before, and not by conscious choice. What's interesting to me is, earlier in the pandemic I would hear more lofty plans for organizing online games and having more video calls between friends and family. It's amazing how quickly the motivation for this dissipated. Maybe because it's plainly cumbersome and awkward and just doesn't feel the same, and everyone I know still works. For my part I think I've retreated from video/audio correspondence considerably. I still write to strangers online, which is social media, but feel like this experience has made me retreat into my shell. No substitution for seeing people in person.
• m4r35n357 6y ago
  Similarly "User Experience"
• mromanuk 6y ago
  > It might be, for all we know, that the primary reason someone posts on social media is anger. If a proper study was done, I bet it would show exactly that. This is a low quality assertion. > “How could they have just scrolled and scrolled all day? Didn’t they know what it was doing to them?” Social media is the new cigarettes. Everyone does it, it’s addictive, it’s harmful, and you should quit. Scrolling is not different that sitting in front of your TV or consuming other types of information. I think social media is bad, but that's just my opinion, this article sounds like an unsubstantiated opinion, too.
  • xpe 6y ago
    There are weaknesses in the article, but the central claims ring true. It is good, in moderation, to be detail-oriented and skeptical. But don't let these qualities run amok and prevent you from considering the overall claims.
• luplex 6y ago
  I did an internship with a very profitable Swedish mobile game before the pandemic, and it was really interesting to see the doublethink: everyone knew we were making a drug, but people avoided speaking of it in that way. It was always "our most engaged players readily spend on in-game items", and never "the most addicted users spend money so they can continue playing" It was a great workplace, but I don't think it was adding much value to the world.
  • drchopchop 6y ago
    Yep, I spent many years at a large, public US mobile game company and it was the same. We had a considerable number of players who had total spend in the 5-figure range, and a few into the 6's. And that's on one single game. The constant rationalization around the office was basically something like: "They're paying for fun, it would otherwise be drinks/movies/real gambling/etc, we're just a different medium". This, of course, completely ignored the boatload of psychological exploitation tricks that we used to keep people playing (and paying). The game mechanics were literally a rigged slot machine. The meta-game was designed to constantly tantalize you with something just out of reach. The monetization was high-pressure, time-sensitive, and used false discounts to increase value ("Get this $20.00 pack for $1.99! Only for the next 60 minutes!") It got very draining after a while, and I'm much happier now that I've left the industry.
    • brnt 6y ago
      It may be an artifact of the division between body and mind, common in Western cultures. Any problem related to the psyche is treated differently (ie taken less seriously) from problems related to the body. I wonder how many millenia this ostensibly subtle difference in conception will keep on giving us pain and mental anguish. Its so deeprooted, I wonder what it will take to pull it out.
      • kingkawn 6y ago
        This division is on the verge of self destruction under the own weight of its inconsistencies.
• abbadadda 6y ago
  HOLY COW BATMAN! It is almost like these social media companies don't have the bests interests of their users at the core of their mission!
• minikites 6y ago
  Unfortunately, our economic system guarantees outcomes like this in pursuit of perpetual and ever increasing growth and profit. We either need to add regulations (short term fixes) or change our economic system (long term fixes). We can't continue to do nothing if we want to maintain a civil democratic society. Misinformation and propaganda are too powerful to leave unchecked.
• tppiotrowski 6y ago
  This is what I think The Social Dilemma missed. I worked at one of these companies and did not see anybody evil looking to enslave users in front of their screen. Instead we built new features and celebrated when time spent in our app went up or a new feature was used because we assumed the user must be getting value. After some time we switched metrics from time spent in app or daily active users to Net Promoter Score but at the end of the day if analytics didn’t show that a feature was used it was dropped and if it was being used we’d double down on making it “better” (used even more). I did not see any evidence of malicious intent towards our users but a genuine belief we were enabling them to be more productive.
  • scoutt 6y ago
    They don't necessarily need to look evil. "Evil" doesn't sell and probably won't make you work for them. They have to look like a sane environment in which you can't pinpoint anything (philosophically, morally or ethically) wrong. It's just a matter of language (how they communicate what the company is trying to do), with slogans like "making the world a better place by doing X". But if you think that at the end of the day, all they care about and all the trouble is just for the mighty Dollar, with a little change in perspective you can elucidate: "time spent in our app": time lost in our app. "user must be getting value": while getting even more value out of an unaware user. "feature ... making it “better” (used even more)": more addictive? costing less for the company? costing more for the user? "to be more productive": productive as in "making money faster but for someone else, while being paid the same".
  • deeeeplearning 6y ago
    >I did not see any evidence of malicious intent towards our users but a genuine belief we were enabling them to be more productive. The Banality of Evil, this is just a version of "We were just following orders"
    • ketzo 6y ago
      I think that's kind of an overagressive interpretation. It's not ignorance of evil; there's a genuine feeling that good is being done, even if the parent commenter seems to acknowledge that good might not have, in fact, been done.
• koonsolo 6y ago
  Could we introduce this kind of addiction in healthy things, like excising or healthy diet or anything like that? I've never seen it work in practice, so why are we not able to do that?
  • bdefore 6y ago
    I'm not an expert in cognitive behavioral therapy, but I believe much of what it advocates is along what you're describing. Reframing behavior you would otherwise avoid or be anxious about as something enjoyable, you might even say addictive. Developing habits that you derive more holistic/health pleasure from.
  • xpe 6y ago
    A good habit of exercise and diet is self-reinforcing. What is the difference between self-reinforcing and habit-forming? I see three differences. 1. Who is in control? A runner is in relatively more control, because the act of running does not require a gamified online experience. 2. What are the ethical ramifications? These are subjective. To be clear, subjective certainly does not mean unimportant. It means people may disagree. In my view, people largely disagree on the "margins" of ethics -- meaning there is a wide swath of common ground. 3. There are some physiological differences; I'm not an expert. It seems that both the runner's high [1] and social media involve dopamine, but they appear to use different mechanisms. ("Runner's high" seems to involve endorphins as a precursor.) [1] https://archives.drugabuse.gov/blog/post/chasing-runners-high https://archives.drugabuse.gov/blog/post/chasing-runners-hig...
  • theNJR 6y ago
    It’s very easy to get the dopamine loop going with sugar, nicotine, memes, rage-bait, and bikini photos. The brain loves it. Chicken breast, deadlifts and philosophy takes a lot of effort and the positive effects are delayed. The brain has to be trained to tolerate it. It will always prefer the latter.
    • frompdx 6y ago
      Absolutely. For the last year I have been weightlifting regularly. This isn't my first foray into being serious about lifting either. Every day I lift I have to "make" myself do it. I can't really imagine something that would make it more reinforcing. It's hard every time even if I like the results.
• nipponese 6y ago
  Future of humanity stuff aside, isn’t the doublespeak for addition actually “retention”? “Engagement” is a classification for a set of actions that drives addition, not measures it.
  • PhillyG 6y ago
    Retention can be that users/players actually like it and want to come back without the need for tricks
• u678u 6y ago
  My smartphone is a now a net negative for me. I need a token apps, maps, uber but everything else really is wasting my time. Sure I've tried a bunch of things but the addictive apps keep coming back.
• WaitWaitWha 6y ago
  Read 'The BITE Model Of Authoritarian Control: Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking And The Law' by Steven Alan Hassan or 'Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China' by Robert Jay Lifton (both readily available as PDF online)
• piyh 6y ago
  This guy is a consultant giving a talk to a mobile game company and has slides titled "Use of Coercive Monetization". It's pretty much an evil TED talk on dark patterns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zex3b2mDnUw&t=17m16s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zex3b2mDnUw&t=17m16s
• DevX101 6y ago
  I'm increasingly finding that I have to actively struggle to take ownership of my time and attention. Without an active, conscious, effort to reclaim your mental resources you WILL be caught up in the never-ending cycle of dopamine-dependency to novel information or visual stimulation. Your attention is a valuable resource and many companies have spent billions on figuring out how to farm it. Some of my more effective methods have included: strict site-blocking via OpenDNS, apps to implement time based blocking of information-novelty sites (Twitter, HN, reddit, instagram, CNN), almost complete disabling of notifications, with the exception of text messages and async work chat during business hours. All of these methods, I can undo, but it prevents or at least slows down the automatic, reflexive app/site opening when my reptile brain craves a dopamine hit.
  • Winterflow3r 6y ago
    I experience the same. I've noticed that if I start my day with a dose of Twitter, I tend to be much more absentminded and less focused on tasks that need to get done.
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• notacoward 6y ago
  Lots of good points here. I particularly like the "dark triad" bit, though I think a lot of nuance around different types of likes/upvotes/whatever is missing. It makes a difference whether those are shown to others and/or used to sort others' feeds. That last point is very close to montenegrohugo's about algorithmic feeds, with which I completely agree. Algorithmic feeds, especially those which show content from people/groups I don't even follow, definitely deserve a place in the Dark Tetrad. To illustrate these points, consider HN itself. Yes, HN uses an algorithm to determine story prominence. Yes, it has upvotes. Yes, it uses relative timestamps. OTOH, the upvotes are not shown to others and it doesn't have infinite scroll. I also wouldn't consider it a "feed" like Twitter or Facebook. On the third hand, even the features HN does have arguably contribute to echo chambers and audience pandering. I think this well illustrates that it's not easy to determine good vs. bad social media, and it would be hard to argue here that all social media are bad. ;)
  • wilsocr88 6y ago
    Great points. I suppose, in the end, that social media are like any mind-altering substance. But, it seems to me that we're not fully aware of just how "mind-altering" they really are. There are certain things that are so addictive and damaging that we ban them, because they make people unable to function. That's the conversation, I guess: Where's that line?
  • bscphil 6y ago
    Size plays a huge and underappreciated role here. Hacker News is small enough that if you wanted to you could read the comments on everything that interested you from the first two or three pages every day. It might take you an hour or so, depending on how many interests you have. Probably not worth your time, but not debilitating either. Metafilter is sort of an experiment of taking this to its logical extreme: anyone on the site (IIRC) is allowed to post directly to the front page, but you're a member of the community and expected to post thoughtful stuff that's going to be worth the time of most site members. Most social media platforms do the exact opposite, and intentionally at that. The whole point is that there's (practically) no end to how much you can consume, you can ruin your life on one site alone. Notably, HN and Metafilter don't have ads, but the incentives are clearly very different for almost any other social network.
• yawaworht1978 6y ago
  Yes all the social medias are addiction merchants. The people know full well that they sacrifice their data, but they do not care about that or ads. The people use them for gratification about likes and as a platform to be "heard" or voice their opinions. Society is punishing drug users and vendors, which might be the right thing to do or not, I am not a decision maker. But the addiction should be measured in dopamine emissions and withdrawal symptoms. Does not matter if the product is a recreational drug or a virtual saas. Do not let the addiction merchant hide behind marketing terms like social media. The corporations use social to tick a compliance box and mislead the customers. To make it sound harmless or less dangerous. Similar to vegan, bio labeled food. Social media is targeting the most vulnerable and young. Sounds drastic? I do not think so
  • jraph 6y ago
    > Similar to vegan, bio labeled food. What's with organic vegan food? It wrongly looks harmless? It targets most vulnerable and young? Vegan and organic are criteria/characteristics, not things meant to be addictive. It's not similar. Sure, they can be highlighted for marketing purposes, but what characteristic seen as positive can't?
• rkangel 6y ago
  Where is the line between engineering for addiction and engineering for a quality user experience? Everything we are told about building modern services is about optimisation. You have metrics, you experiment, you tweak things, you see what helps and what doesn't. This is as true for business models as it is for interface design. Some of this is good - it is positive to improve your UI to reduce friction and make it more usable by your customers. Some of it is fine - choosing a landing page design that gets more people to sign up. Some of it is bad - things you do that mean people don't close the app as readily. All these changes are the result of the same process, that is built into how modern businesses operate. How do you draw the line between optimising for good UI and optimising for addiction? If you're writing legislation, do you outlaw specific practices? If you're trying to operate companies ethically, do you just avoid certain metrics?
• znpy 6y ago
  Social media is one of those games where the only way not to lose is not to play at all.
• werber 6y ago
  I recently joined tiktok and their algorithm really freaked me out. It took maybe twenty minutes for it zone into some incredibly specific interests of mine. I enjoy the app, but I've never felt so pushed into the content I want to see so quickly. I'm quite A bit older than their average user but the mental impact on a child seems immense.
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• djoldman 6y ago
  Discussion of the addictive qualities of social media often strikes me as bizarre. Where is examination of the person doing the scrolling? Isn't the flaw there? (The following applies to adults): Ostensibly, the person should be allowed to spend their time as they like if they're engaging in legal activity. If people thought that engaging in social media was bad for them, they would stop. Are we really saying that people cannot stop using social media? Are we saying that people don't think it's bad for them? If people can't stop doing an activity that is definitely hurting them, don't they need professional help? Do all these social media users need professional help? What amount of time on social media is sufficient for it to have a negative effect? Is it anything besides zero? To be meta: if hackernews is social media and social media is bad, are we all hurting ourselves?
  • FFRefresh 6y ago
    I do think this is a worthy callout, that is often missing in discussions about social media and/or any sort of complex system. The general narrative implies (but would never say) that humans lack agency and the ability to act in their own self-interest. And if only we could remove the social media site/system, would we see an enlightened, more perfect human. Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly in favor of designing systems to bring out the best in humanity. But I think a lot of what we see on social media is a reflection of who we are as humans, and what we desire and want to see. And I don't see enough discussion at the individual level, and why we act the way we do. If the discussion was at the individual level, we'd start to see our common humanity, and the conversation about social media would be less about moderating out the 'bad content' (which always just so happens to be the content that our outgroup likes), and more about the philosophical considerations with designing complex systems that help humanity thrive (and what it means to thrive).
    • djoldman 6y ago
      >I think a lot of what we see on social media is a reflection of who we are as humans, and what we desire and want to see. Agreed. I'm curious why there aren't deep discussions about WHY people want to __insert convenient social media action__. Isn't the flaw that we have a fear of missing out, want to appear to have high status, want to belong to a group whose identity is tied into being against another group, etc.? I just see most of these discussions giving the above a pass as if that's just who we are and we bear no responsibility in engaging in such activity.
• api 6y ago
  There are two kinds of capitalism: value creation capitalism (also known as industrial capitalism) and value extraction capitalism. The latter includes quite a lot of financial capitalism, profit-driven warfare, and casinos and other addiction-driven products. The former creates value while the latter extracts and concentrates it while overall creating net negative value. Addicting people to Skinner boxes is destroying hours of what otherwise might be productive, rejuvenating, or enriching time. It's macroeconomically indistinguishable from killing people. One of the central problems of modern Western capitalism is that we fail to distinguish between the two. A businessperson is successful an a genius if they make money; nobody bothers to distinguish between those that make money by creating value and those that make money by merely extracting it and leaving a path of destruction in their wake. Maybe we can figure out a way to re-channel the impulses of "cancel culture" in this direction, cancelling those that promote addictive net value destroying products and services. Since the algorithmic timeline and other personalized recommendation engines are by far the largest pushers of fascist and neo-racist ideology, the original goals of "cancel culture" might still be indirectly achieved.
  • MayeulC 6y ago
    Well, I think capitalism can be summed up as "optimize for one metric: capital". In a capitalist world, if you want to change what companies are doing, make it more expensive to do so (alternatively, less lucrative). So I guess tax and fine companies, like GDPR does. I wish there was a simple way to add more metrics like pollution, social impact, health impact, etc. But those are rather hard to measure, usually not immediately available, and can be hidden in some way or another. It might be doable, though, as we were more or less able to do so with capital (track monetary exchanges, etc); which is a completely artificial metric. Disclaimer: I know nothing about actual economy theories.
  • tomjen3 6y ago
    Cancel culture is not something that is very effective against rich people, because you can’t fire somebody who don’t have a job.
• deleted 6y ago
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• lordlimecat 6y ago
  >“How could they have just scrolled and scrolled all day?" It would help if your article used more than just the middle 25% of my screen, thus requiring scrolling to read.
• taylodl 6y ago
  I'm blessed to be an older programmer who started my career back when we were selling products to people who had to make a business case for the purchase of our software systems. We were helping businesses achieve more. Most of the businesses my previous employers were helping were public utilities, communication companies, and manufacturers. You could feel good about your work and that you were contributing to a better world. Today I'm blessed to work for an electric utility. Whenever I'm having a bad day I remind myself that I'm helping to provide the foundation of modern civilization. It's much better for your soul than knowing that in the end you're just working for a drug dealer and contributing to the destruction of people's lives. I'm glad I'm close to retirement and don't have to do that kind of work just so I can put food on the table.
• xyst 6y ago
  this shit makes me angry af it's no wonder we have seen a decline in cognitive ability, as seen by various world events (election of the 45th president of the USA, "Brexit", climate denial, rise of neo-nazis, vaccination denial, Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, ...). we are just endlessly scrolling and spamming each other with our running commentary bullshit that masquerades as a modicum of insight. what happened to making the world a better place? the tech industry is no better than the tobacco or fast food industry.
• worker767424 6y ago
  Apps aren't drugs. I used to suck dick for coke. Now that's an addiction. You ever suck some dick for an in-game item?
  • xxs 6y ago
    dunno, about that. But I have heard hot chat and sending pics are both common tools.
  • retrac 6y ago
    Heh, I chuckled. I've got a dark sense of humour though. Because it's not really a joke. A man was recently arrested in my city for a scheme where he was trading sexual images from underage boys for gift cards for popular video games.
  • reducesuffering 6y ago
    This is a modified quote from the movie Half Baked. Not literal.
• nathias 6y ago
  This type of ad hoc pathologization of behaviour is itself very suspect, and isn't helping anyone. Not everything that's bad is violence or an addiction, there are plenty of different types and nouances of evil in the world.
• twobitshifter 6y ago
  Really some of these techniques are just scaling what is standard at arcades and bringing it online. Anyone who has ever been to an arcade knows how many tokens/quarters you can go through to keep playing and playing. The danger with mobile gaming is that you never really get to leave the arcade and you don’t have to intrinsically budget the way you used to at arcades. At the arcade you usually have a fixed number of tokens to spend and you always have the allure of other games pulling you away.
• gverrilla 6y ago
  so many misconceptions on this text. this author knows very little about mental health and is just repeating this narrative these recent documentaries have been spreading - which was created, by the way, by those same fellas who created those systems and feel guilty now. Also, as an UX designer, he's pretty much getting money to apply the same stuff to his own projects, most probably.
• soheil 6y ago
  So many truism and dogma it's really hard to take this person seriously, why so many upvotes for something that is just conjecture at best: > it harms our brains in a way that we don’t yet fully understand He even mentions "we don't yet fully understand" so why keep building on this narrative just to try to prove a point? That should have been the last sentence of this post but I guess that would have made for a pretty mediocre post one that doesn't tap into FUD of the reader.
• toss1 6y ago
  >> Relative timestamps (“3 hours ago” instead of “6:56 PM”). This creates IMMEDIACY. TIL... I've always thought this was SO annoying on Twitter, because I want to see the exact time (I'd even be ok if I could hover and see the actual timestamp), and thought they were just 'dumbing it down'. But it makes a lot more sense with that clue. Ugh
• deleted 6y ago
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• p2t2p 6y ago
  I was working in a mobile gamedev in 2013 before the whole thing about Facebook and stuff and after talking to one of the game designers I thought to myself "Drugs. We're making drugs and invent techniques to milk users for their money". I could never feel proud of what I'm doing after that and left shortly after to work for a telecom.
• euske 6y ago
  I, for one, want HN to have an option to hide my karma point next to my username. It's a distraction. It's okay for them to use that number for moderating purposes, etc. but I don't need to see it for every time.
• mparramon 6y ago
  I can’t find it now, but DHH wrote somewhere about optimising for engagement vs action. The idea behind Basecamp is to be a service that helps you manage a project in a faster and easier way, not a service that makes you stay "engaged" while not pushing the project forward. Having more engagement means it’s doing the opposite of of what it's meant to. This can easily apply for many other services. The purpose of an email client is to surface the important information (filtering and maybe inbox zero?) and let the user act on it (reply and write with the write context). The purpose of a dating website is to find a match and create a connection. The purpose of a social network, on the other hand, is much more debatable.
• jwalton 6y ago
  I don’t understand how people can stand to use Facebook. It was fun a long time ago. Then, when I didn’t use it for a few weeks, I started getting “notifications” that, instead of saying “someone commented on your post” or “someone liked your post” they were “someone commented on someone else’s post”, or “someone posted something”, and I thought “These are not notifications, these have nothing to do with me.” And that kind of turned me off, and I intentionally stayed away from Facebook for a bit, and now whenever I log in, there’s a ton of fake notifications clamouring for my attention, and my “feed” is 30-50% ads, and the content that isn’t ads is 30-50% memes. There’s very little actual content, and you have to work way too hard to find it. In an attempt to further force me to “engage” Facebook has turned their platform into something I can’t stand to use. I wonder if this is what social media looks like to anyone who “gets out” for a bit. Maybe we’re all like frogs in water that’s slowly getting hotter and hotter, not realizing that the water is boiling; Facebook keeps pushing more and more forced “engagement”, and no one who is in it realizes it’s turning into all ads and garbage.
  • boh 6y ago
    Haven't used it for seven years. Unless you're professionally dependent on social media, it's exclusively a net negative experience. Your attention is limited, your attention is your life experience, don't just give it to people just because they want it.
  • 29083011397778 6y ago
    To add insult to injury as far as comparing us to the frog in question: the frog likely left. Older experiments show a mix of the frog leaving or staying (unless lobotomized), though contemporary experimentation appears to confirm the frog will leave of it's own accord. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
• vonwoodson 6y ago
  You mark my words; this is how we will be taken advantage of: “Emotional Health” classes will be required in high schools. Where many things will be taught. And, somewhere around week 3 of the second semester will be an “avoiding addiction” module. A certain large group of citizens, with a mysteriously large advertisement budget, will vehemently oppose teaching children such “politically correct nonsense”. Thus, the program will be underfunded, and the curriculum poorly developed; like DARE, sex ed, biological evolution… Somehow, the same group of people are going to push for personal liability when it comes to managing your own addictions. The precedent set by the lawyers and courts, the litigation of which we won’t get to see, is that addiction management is a part of the core curriculum in high school and any accredited education facility. Therefore, “The Average Joe on the bus“ has already been equipped with the tools necessary to make educated decisions about what services they choose to participate in regardless of that service’s addiction-enabling behaviors and reinforced by a opaquely worded EULA’s. All of this being enabled by our cultural virtue of it “individual responsibility”. Oh, and something-something Free Markets... something-something Regulations...
• arendtio 6y ago
  > Fake internet points (clickable, often animated icons with incrementing numbers. Likes, reactions, upvotes, retweets, etc.). This creates ADDICTION. Sounds like the HN karma system ;-)
• eevilspock 6y ago
  aka The Drug Dealers Business Model