6 ms·

A Mindful Mobile OS

61 points by parsecs 5y ago

fsociety 5y ago
This still strikes me as a hardware device telling me what to do. I wish we would just consider (optionally) removing things instead of requiring the user to take more actions or read more disclosures.
madeofpalk 5y ago
> “Apps that are using persuasive design could be required to list all the techniques they use" Tracking disclosures are easy to do because they're all fairly objective data points. Either you collect personal data, or you don't. Ask Facebook and im sure they'll tell you they don't use "persuasive design"
- sneak 5y ago
  Also, if you care about such things, you can just uninstall the app, or, you know, pay attention while using it. These techniques are obvious. If you don't like companies nudging your behavior in a certain direction, just uninstall their apps and delete your accounts when you notice them doing it. Leaving your account active in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp makes it more attractive for your friends to make and preserve their accounts there.
  - LordDragonfang 5y ago
    These techniques gain use because for the vast majority of people, they're subtle and play into unconscious biases and subconscious parts of the brain's reward circuitry. You may be a more evolved and educated human who is aware of all their biases and conscientious of all the different dark and grey patterns apps can use, but the techniques are effective because most people aren't. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.
    - sneak 5y ago
      I think it's a logical error to think the "vast majority of people" to be entirely unaware of the nudges of the market. It's not like I'm some superman to notice this stuff. People know they shouldn't scroll IG all day or eat McDonald's for every meal. It might play into subconscious biases but ultimately people are consciously aware of their behaviors in the macro. What's disingenuous is to think that only smart/savvy people know that the app equivalent of junk food is bad. Personally, I grow really tired of this (seemingly pervasive) viewpoint that the everyman is clueless and helpless and will be totally fucked if we, the learned/savvy, do not intervene. (Apologies in advance if this is not your view - I am complaining about a wider problem more so than replying to your specific comment.) It's a seductive viewpoint, and one that seems to tickle the "but it's obvious" common sense. I don't think it's true, though, despite being very plausible. Casinos exist, with way more extensive and battle-tested addiction-response features than the Facebook app, and the vast majority of people in the cities in which they operate don't go broke pouring their life savings into the machines. Give the everyman some credit.
      - Hnaomyiph 5y ago
        Casinos also exist with way more extensive laws and regulations.
        sneak 5y ago
        The regulation is mostly around making sure the games are fair and that children can't use them, not that people can't dump their life savings into them if they want to.
      - dantondwa 5y ago
        I agree with this. Moreover, people who do fall into addicted behaviors are often very aware of the risks and dangers involved with their choices. However, the present desire or satisfaction that the impulse provides them overrides such awareness. As an ex smoker, this is apparent to me. I knew it was bad, I knew the details of what I was doing to myself, but I couldn’t help myself. It is not about stupidity or awareness. It is about finding satisfaction or motivation elsewhere. Educated people, rich people, poor people, ignorant people: all classes have their addictions.
Syonyk 5y ago
It's a good set of suggestions, but it doesn't touch on the key problem with "mobile" interfaces - notifications. The core evil (dark design?) of most mobile interfaces to various networks, social or not, is that they can use notifications to get the user into their app. While there's some ability to restrict notifications, there's still not huge support (at least that I know of... maybe it exists and I've missed it?) for levels of notification by default. You can go and turn some options off in an app, if it supports it, but in general, there are tiers of notifications. High priority is "The world is on fire." Be it your pager for work, or, more often in my case, "The hill I live on is on fire, again...", these are the things a mobile device is useful for. I'd argue that phone calls serve this purpose currently, because the cell network has made calls suck for everything else with latency... Most of the person to person communications (outside group chats) tends to fall into the "Important, but not immediate" category. This is what I tend to use my phone for, so my notifications are around this. Then there's the clutter of other notifications ranging from "Oh, hey, you got more spam email!" to "Please come check into our app again, we miss your eyeballs on our ads!" These are fairly unimportant and probably shouldn't exist, in most cases. But most of them are low priority. I'd like to be able to set things up so that notifications are batched over some period of time, instead of being immediate (unless it's high priority - if my wife is sending me a picture of A or B at the store, I need to respond to that quickly enough). But for other stuff, I'd love to see batched notifications on an hourly, or perhaps even daily basis. I simulate this on my devices by largely running "pull" instead of "push" for almost everything - outside direction communication from people, which is what I use my phone for, I have notifications turned off. I check my email often enough mostly that I don't need notifications for my primary account (it's not for anything time sensitive so if I check once or twice a day this is fine), though it does lead to some priority inversions in that infrequently used accounts actually do send prompt notifications. I don't have a way to queue these for once a day or something and still get notifications, and I tend to fail to check them otherwise. If you allow your devices to go back to "pull mode" instead of "push mode," you remove a lot of the evils of most of the applications in terms of attention vampire effects. But a more flexible notification system would be really, really useful.
- bityard 5y ago
  I can't speak to iOS because I've never used that platform but Android offers pretty fine grained control over notifications including the ability to modify the app's settings right from the notification itself. You can disable notifications for specific apps altogether.
solaceb 5y ago
I would support reterming persuasive design as coercive design, because to me that’s really what it is Or perhaps addictive design?
- sneak 5y ago
  This really strikes at the core social/philosophical divide: should people be free to choose to destructively engage in addictive goods and services? Ultimately we're not free if we're not free to destroy ourselves if we so choose. It seems that most people want to burn huge amounts of their time consuming ad-laden social media, just as they did with ad-laden tv before it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    > should people be free to choose to destructively engage in addictive goods and services? Should people be free to engineer addictive systems and services to extract more money from others? The irresistable donation machine...
  - _tulpa 5y ago
    A much less dishonest (or maybe just less naive) way to frame it is to ask whether we're okay with someone exploit systemic weaknesses in human nature en masse for personal gain and to the long-term detriment of those exploited. This watered down idealized absolute interpretation of 'freedom of choice' is just so goddamn naive, and ignores pretty much everything we know about systemic flaws in human behavior and decision making. We can do so much fucking better than that.
    - sneak 5y ago
      That's just it, though: giving people additional options and choices isn't exploiting them. Detriment is in the eye of the beholder.
surround 5y ago
Previous discussion on the original article (447 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27456500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27456500
sitzkrieg 5y ago
is it really so hard to not use mobile apps constantly? I am missing something despite using smartphones for over a decade like most
- ffhhj 5y ago
  I'm addicted to information. When I first got access to the Internet in the 90's stopped assisting to my university courses to read and try as much as I could from it. This might seem ridiculous but reading so much got me sick in bed for days. And my vision and general health have always been good. So I don't think the issue is related to apps, but to "information hunger", be it reading books, browsing the web, using apps, or whatever medium. How I combat my addiction? I just get as much as I can until I feel nauceous and move to something else, even watching the clouds pass by.
seltzered_ 5y ago
See also these works by Joe Edelman years ago: Design for Agency: http://nxhx.org/dfa/ http://nxhx.org/dfa/ Is anything worth maximizing for: https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-maximizing-d11e648eb56f https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-maximizin...

61 points by parsecs 5y ago

This still strikes me as a hardware device telling me what to do. I wish we would just consider (optionally) removing things instead of requiring the user to take more actions or read more disclosures.

madeofpalk 5y ago

> “Apps that are using persuasive design could be required to list all the techniques they use" Tracking disclosures are easy to do because they're all fairly objective data points. Either you collect personal data, or you don't. Ask Facebook and im sure they'll tell you they don't use "persuasive design"

sneak 5y ago
Also, if you care about such things, you can just uninstall the app, or, you know, pay attention while using it. These techniques are obvious. If you don't like companies nudging your behavior in a certain direction, just uninstall their apps and delete your accounts when you notice them doing it. Leaving your account active in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp makes it more attractive for your friends to make and preserve their accounts there.
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  These techniques gain use because for the vast majority of people, they're subtle and play into unconscious biases and subconscious parts of the brain's reward circuitry. You may be a more evolved and educated human who is aware of all their biases and conscientious of all the different dark and grey patterns apps can use, but the techniques are effective because most people aren't. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.
  - sneak 5y ago
    I think it's a logical error to think the "vast majority of people" to be entirely unaware of the nudges of the market. It's not like I'm some superman to notice this stuff. People know they shouldn't scroll IG all day or eat McDonald's for every meal. It might play into subconscious biases but ultimately people are consciously aware of their behaviors in the macro. What's disingenuous is to think that only smart/savvy people know that the app equivalent of junk food is bad. Personally, I grow really tired of this (seemingly pervasive) viewpoint that the everyman is clueless and helpless and will be totally fucked if we, the learned/savvy, do not intervene. (Apologies in advance if this is not your view - I am complaining about a wider problem more so than replying to your specific comment.) It's a seductive viewpoint, and one that seems to tickle the "but it's obvious" common sense. I don't think it's true, though, despite being very plausible. Casinos exist, with way more extensive and battle-tested addiction-response features than the Facebook app, and the vast majority of people in the cities in which they operate don't go broke pouring their life savings into the machines. Give the everyman some credit.
    - Hnaomyiph 5y ago
      Casinos also exist with way more extensive laws and regulations.
      - sneak 5y ago
        The regulation is mostly around making sure the games are fair and that children can't use them, not that people can't dump their life savings into them if they want to.
    - dantondwa 5y ago
      I agree with this. Moreover, people who do fall into addicted behaviors are often very aware of the risks and dangers involved with their choices. However, the present desire or satisfaction that the impulse provides them overrides such awareness. As an ex smoker, this is apparent to me. I knew it was bad, I knew the details of what I was doing to myself, but I couldn’t help myself. It is not about stupidity or awareness. It is about finding satisfaction or motivation elsewhere. Educated people, rich people, poor people, ignorant people: all classes have their addictions.

Syonyk 5y ago

It's a good set of suggestions, but it doesn't touch on the key problem with "mobile" interfaces - notifications. The core evil (dark design?) of most mobile interfaces to various networks, social or not, is that they can use notifications to get the user into their app. While there's some ability to restrict notifications, there's still not huge support (at least that I know of... maybe it exists and I've missed it?) for levels of notification by default. You can go and turn some options off in an app, if it supports it, but in general, there are tiers of notifications. High priority is "The world is on fire." Be it your pager for work, or, more often in my case, "The hill I live on is on fire, again...", these are the things a mobile device is useful for. I'd argue that phone calls serve this purpose currently, because the cell network has made calls suck for everything else with latency... Most of the person to person communications (outside group chats) tends to fall into the "Important, but not immediate" category. This is what I tend to use my phone for, so my notifications are around this. Then there's the clutter of other notifications ranging from "Oh, hey, you got more spam email!" to "Please come check into our app again, we miss your eyeballs on our ads!" These are fairly unimportant and probably shouldn't exist, in most cases. But most of them are low priority. I'd like to be able to set things up so that notifications are batched over some period of time, instead of being immediate (unless it's high priority - if my wife is sending me a picture of A or B at the store, I need to respond to that quickly enough). But for other stuff, I'd love to see batched notifications on an hourly, or perhaps even daily basis. I simulate this on my devices by largely running "pull" instead of "push" for almost everything - outside direction communication from people, which is what I use my phone for, I have notifications turned off. I check my email often enough mostly that I don't need notifications for my primary account (it's not for anything time sensitive so if I check once or twice a day this is fine), though it does lead to some priority inversions in that infrequently used accounts actually do send prompt notifications. I don't have a way to queue these for once a day or something and still get notifications, and I tend to fail to check them otherwise. If you allow your devices to go back to "pull mode" instead of "push mode," you remove a lot of the evils of most of the applications in terms of attention vampire effects. But a more flexible notification system would be really, really useful.

bityard 5y ago
I can't speak to iOS because I've never used that platform but Android offers pretty fine grained control over notifications including the ability to modify the app's settings right from the notification itself. You can disable notifications for specific apps altogether.

solaceb 5y ago

I would support reterming persuasive design as coercive design, because to me that’s really what it is Or perhaps addictive design?

sneak 5y ago
This really strikes at the core social/philosophical divide: should people be free to choose to destructively engage in addictive goods and services? Ultimately we're not free if we're not free to destroy ourselves if we so choose. It seems that most people want to burn huge amounts of their time consuming ad-laden social media, just as they did with ad-laden tv before it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  > should people be free to choose to destructively engage in addictive goods and services? Should people be free to engineer addictive systems and services to extract more money from others? The irresistable donation machine...
- _tulpa 5y ago
  A much less dishonest (or maybe just less naive) way to frame it is to ask whether we're okay with someone exploit systemic weaknesses in human nature en masse for personal gain and to the long-term detriment of those exploited. This watered down idealized absolute interpretation of 'freedom of choice' is just so goddamn naive, and ignores pretty much everything we know about systemic flaws in human behavior and decision making. We can do so much fucking better than that.
  - sneak 5y ago
    That's just it, though: giving people additional options and choices isn't exploiting them. Detriment is in the eye of the beholder.

surround 5y ago

Previous discussion on the original article (447 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27456500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27456500

sitzkrieg 5y ago

is it really so hard to not use mobile apps constantly? I am missing something despite using smartphones for over a decade like most

ffhhj 5y ago
I'm addicted to information. When I first got access to the Internet in the 90's stopped assisting to my university courses to read and try as much as I could from it. This might seem ridiculous but reading so much got me sick in bed for days. And my vision and general health have always been good. So I don't think the issue is related to apps, but to "information hunger", be it reading books, browsing the web, using apps, or whatever medium. How I combat my addiction? I just get as much as I can until I feel nauceous and move to something else, even watching the clouds pass by.

seltzered_ 5y ago

See also these works by Joe Edelman years ago: Design for Agency: http://nxhx.org/dfa/ http://nxhx.org/dfa/ Is anything worth maximizing for: https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-maximizing-d11e648eb56f https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-maximizin...