7 ms·

The Hook with sites like Reddit, HN, etc is that they ARE addictive. Actually addictive in the sense of gambling. In gambling addiction the gamblers aren't addi

The Hook with sites like Reddit, HN, etc is that they ARE addictive. Actually addictive in the sense of gambling. In gambling addiction the gamblers aren't addicted to winning, they are addicted to losing, or "almost winning". Now if they never ever won the addiction wouldn't form. If they ALWAYS won the addiction also wouldn't form. The old thing was email that people were addicted to checking because you MIGHT get an interesting email. It's the same way with training a dog. You don't always give them a treat for behavior. If you only randomly give them a treat they are more likely to perform the behavior because they don't want to miss the reward. If they know they will get the reward then they know the exact opportunity cost and can weigh that against performing the behavior. That's how social media and more specifically sites like reddit and HN are addictive. I think we all feel that we occasionally get some beneficial information from them. I know I do, and even this very post I feel has some benefit. But we also see it as time wasting because the majority of the time, that's what it is. But we are compelled to continually check because of the fear of missing out on some piece of beneficial information. If we were always presented with good information then we could more easily delay checking the sites.

nly 5y ago
So what you're saying is, you need to post great comments like this on every article so my addiction can be broken? Man, why are you holding out me? You're ruining my life!
ScoobleDoodle 5y ago
In the video game space they have intentional implementations of those: Loot boxes and the acronym FOMO (fear of missing out) in content that can only be obtained in a given game season (quarter.)
psychstudio 5y ago
Classical "variable reward". Manifests in all areas of life.
- uyt 5y ago
  I wonder if there's an evolutionary reason for that preference or if this is just an edge case in our rewards system that never mattered until it became heavily exploited by other humans in the modern world.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    I think it is a learning mechanism. The real world is very deterministic, if a process has seemingly random outcomes then most likely there is something about it you don't understand, so you repeat it over and over trying to make connections to understand why the different outcomes happens. You can see this a lot in gambling addicts trying to find different ways to beat the system etc, trying to predict which number will appear (even though it isn't possible) and so on. Our brains just aren't made to deal with lotteries since lotteries isn't a thing found in nature. Some things looks like lotteries, some nuts might be bad after you open them so was a waste of time, but then you open many nuts and think hard trying to predict which nuts will be bad, and then you no longer need to open the bad ones saving you lots of work. But the artificial nuts are just random, there is no system to solve, so people just get stuck.
    - carlmr 5y ago
      This should be a post
    - Trex_Egg 5y ago
      Nice explanations there.
  - mlac 5y ago
    Hunting and gathering. There may or may not be an animal when you Go out. Even if you track it, it still might get away. Animals may have made it to the berries before you did, so you need to keep looking to find the next patch.
    - Enginerrrd 5y ago
stavros 5y ago
> In gambling addiction the gamblers aren't addicted to winning, they are addicted to losing, or "almost winning". I disagree. I remember my DotA addiction, I wasn't addicted to losing or "almost winning", if anything I was addicted to "almost losing". Stomping the enemy wasn't fun, getting stomped wasn't fun, almost winning but losing in the end was VERY not fun, almost losing but winning in the end was a huge high, and that's why I'd play. To get that feeling again.
- michaelgrafl 5y ago
  It's not about fun, it's about what kind of activities cause addiction. You were addicted because when you played there was a chance of getting a high, but it wasn't certain. A certain high would not be as addictive, if at all.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    No, it is about both. If you don't have anything you want to do then everything with any fun elements at all become "addictive". Removing those "addictive" activities from such a person wont help them at all, it just makes their life more boring and they will take it up as soon as you give it back since they have nothing else to do. Some people have problems with addictive activities. But lots of people just do it since they lack alternatives. If you try to fix the second as if they were addicted then it will all feel frustrating and hopeless since you aren't addressing a real problem.
- baxuz 5y ago
  That's why I try not playing competitive video games anymore. Matchmaking is set up so that you have a 50/50 win/loss rate. When you take into consideration all the outcomes you mentioned, maybe 1/20 games was fulfilling. Not to mention the "can't quit on a loss, can't quit on a winning streak" mentality.
  - stavros 5y ago
    > Not to mention the "can't quit on a loss, can't quit on a winning streak" mentality. Yeah, I've spent 12 straight hours (on a workday, no less) playing because of that. Fuck that game.
NewEntryHN 5y ago
> If they know they will get the reward then they know the exact opportunity cost and can weigh that against performing the behavior. So you need to to randomize the value of the treat. Otherwise the dog knows the upper bound of the opportunity and the same reasoning applies.
- hattmall 5y ago
  Yeah, same for punishment too, or like a shock collar / geofence. If the dog knows the shock is always coming they can weigh it. Obviously not just dogs too, it's how humans in some cases stay in an abusive relationship. Every encounter is a roll of the dice and that variability creates an addiction.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
HN is addictive but I don't think it's deliberately designed to be that way. The posts and comments here really are interesting. Modern games are designed from the ground up to form habits. Steady random chance rewards, timers, daily tasks... Basically Skinner's box simulators designed to impose a schedule on players via psychological conditioning. Then it's a simple matter to hook up the reward button to the player's credit card.
soneca 5y ago
I think HN is very different from Reddit, in the sense that I don’t think is addictive at all (for me). HN doesn’t have infinite scroll, doesn’t have infinite pages with different posts. And that’s what I think would make something addictive. You keep finding new content, without leaving the site, as long as you want, until you get some reward. On HN I have to reload the page to see something new. And I would have to keep reloading the page for several minutes until I happen to see one new post in the front page. I want to keep up with everything that gets to the front page all I have to do is come back every hour. With a good chance of keeping up with everything checking just every 6 hours or so. There is no way to mindless get new content in front of you. Even keeping up with new comments is hard. HN is no where near Reddit and other social media sites in addictiveness.
- hattmall 5y ago
  I agree with that completely, I don't think it's designed to be addictive, neither was email. But the randomness of the reward can create that compulsion to check.
- ssully 5y ago
  Ehh, HN is just like any social media site in that the pleasure of using it is similar to that of IRL social interactions both good and bad. To be incredibly reductive, it's that you have a chance of having a really engaging conversation, or hearing some really awful takes (can you believe what he said earlier?!). HN isn't as bad as reddit for the reasons you stated, but it is addictive for the same core reason.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Yeah, from a UX perspective, HN is the same as Reddit, simply un-optimized.
    - soneca 5y ago
      That’s the point, it is un-optimized to the point where it’s addictiveness is an order of magnitude lower. Optimization is what generates addictive behavior in social media. Optimize to feed you with infinite new posts with minimal fraction. HN simply doesn’t feed you with infinite posts in a day and adds friction to find new posts (UX focus on a front page with 30 posts and pagination). Also, moderation plays a role. Social media addiction thrives in controversial topics while HN bans flame wars. The heated the discussion the heavier the moderation. HN is not in the same league of Reddit, IG and others regarding addictiveness.
ordu 5y ago
> I think we all feel that we occasionally get some beneficial information from them. I know I do, and even this very post I feel has some benefit. But we also see it as time wasting because the majority of the time, that's what it is. When a chess engine searches a billion of notes to find the best one, it wastes time, because the next move of the opponent will make the most of found nodes as unneeded. /s If I read random articles and one of ten is interesting for me, it doesn't mean that I wasted my time reading nine others. (Though I do not read random articles, I read headlines first, I click may be on one of 20, and then I do not read every article through.) Yeah, I know about addictive behavior in general and the gambling addiction in particular. But we shouldn't believe to an opinion that an addiction is inherently bad. It doesn't. If it was bad, it would be wiped out by an evolution. People just talk more about negative consequences of an addictive behavior, while positive consequences they tend to explain by a "dedication" or something like that. When some socially awkward nerd hiding from people in his basement did something great, no one is going to paint this story in a way that makes his awkwardness to be the reason of his achievement. People will appoint something else to a role of a cause, something that is considered "good", like his skills, brains, dedication, and so on. "Good" outcomes we like to explain by "good" reasons, while "bad" outcomes we like to explain by "bad" reasons. Addictive behavior supports us when we search for something valuable in a vain. It doesn't mean that addictive behavior is an inherently good thing. (This last sentence doesn't need a justification, so I'll skip it, to not talk about completely obvious things) So we have: addictive behavior is neither inherently good, nor inherently bad, it just is. But what the collective unconscious does next? It says "addictive behavior is fun, therefore it must be avoided". But it is bullshit. As addictive behavior is neither inherently good nor bad, so fun is neither inherently good nor bad. The very idea that we must consciously drive ourselves through the life, to think rationally and do not allow self to relax is a bad idea. We have no mental capacity to predict our life good enough. We are doomed to make choices that turns bad in a hindsight. So when we allow our mind to wander a little, to do some activity that have no rational justification, we are preparing ourselves to unexpected turns. We cannot know what information or skills will come useful for us. We do not know how different learned things interacts in our mind (does learning chess makes me a better coder or vice versa?) Therefore a "rational" behavior rejecting fun just rejects the evolutionary tools we have to keep ourselves adapted to a changing environment. We are rejecting our intuition (with its evolutionary roots and deep neural nets to see patterns), that uses "fun" to say what it predicts would be better for us. From other hand, just following fun is worse than rejecting it entirely. So a lot of people choose an easy way, they reject fun, because it is a guaranteed one step from the worst strategy. But I personally see it as a weakness: people are afraid of themselves, and doesn't dare to make the next step, because it may become a step back. Or, if we stop listening for what people say, and look at what they do, we'll see that they are exploiting a great strategy. They are using an idea that addictive behavior is bad to restrict it, but nevertheless allow themselves some fun of reading HN and commenting. =)

nly 5y ago

So what you're saying is, you need to post great comments like this on every article so my addiction can be broken? Man, why are you holding out me? You're ruining my life!

ScoobleDoodle 5y ago

In the video game space they have intentional implementations of those: Loot boxes and the acronym FOMO (fear of missing out) in content that can only be obtained in a given game season (quarter.)

psychstudio 5y ago

Classical "variable reward". Manifests in all areas of life.

uyt 5y ago
I wonder if there's an evolutionary reason for that preference or if this is just an edge case in our rewards system that never mattered until it became heavily exploited by other humans in the modern world.
- Jensson 5y ago
  I think it is a learning mechanism. The real world is very deterministic, if a process has seemingly random outcomes then most likely there is something about it you don't understand, so you repeat it over and over trying to make connections to understand why the different outcomes happens. You can see this a lot in gambling addicts trying to find different ways to beat the system etc, trying to predict which number will appear (even though it isn't possible) and so on. Our brains just aren't made to deal with lotteries since lotteries isn't a thing found in nature. Some things looks like lotteries, some nuts might be bad after you open them so was a waste of time, but then you open many nuts and think hard trying to predict which nuts will be bad, and then you no longer need to open the bad ones saving you lots of work. But the artificial nuts are just random, there is no system to solve, so people just get stuck.
  - carlmr 5y ago
    This should be a post
  - Trex_Egg 5y ago
    Nice explanations there.
- mlac 5y ago
  Hunting and gathering. There may or may not be an animal when you Go out. Even if you track it, it still might get away. Animals may have made it to the berries before you did, so you need to keep looking to find the next patch.
  - Enginerrrd 5y ago

stavros 5y ago

> In gambling addiction the gamblers aren't addicted to winning, they are addicted to losing, or "almost winning". I disagree. I remember my DotA addiction, I wasn't addicted to losing or "almost winning", if anything I was addicted to "almost losing". Stomping the enemy wasn't fun, getting stomped wasn't fun, almost winning but losing in the end was VERY not fun, almost losing but winning in the end was a huge high, and that's why I'd play. To get that feeling again.

michaelgrafl 5y ago
It's not about fun, it's about what kind of activities cause addiction. You were addicted because when you played there was a chance of getting a high, but it wasn't certain. A certain high would not be as addictive, if at all.
- Jensson 5y ago
  No, it is about both. If you don't have anything you want to do then everything with any fun elements at all become "addictive". Removing those "addictive" activities from such a person wont help them at all, it just makes their life more boring and they will take it up as soon as you give it back since they have nothing else to do. Some people have problems with addictive activities. But lots of people just do it since they lack alternatives. If you try to fix the second as if they were addicted then it will all feel frustrating and hopeless since you aren't addressing a real problem.
baxuz 5y ago
That's why I try not playing competitive video games anymore. Matchmaking is set up so that you have a 50/50 win/loss rate. When you take into consideration all the outcomes you mentioned, maybe 1/20 games was fulfilling. Not to mention the "can't quit on a loss, can't quit on a winning streak" mentality.
- stavros 5y ago
  > Not to mention the "can't quit on a loss, can't quit on a winning streak" mentality. Yeah, I've spent 12 straight hours (on a workday, no less) playing because of that. Fuck that game.

NewEntryHN 5y ago

> If they know they will get the reward then they know the exact opportunity cost and can weigh that against performing the behavior. So you need to to randomize the value of the treat. Otherwise the dog knows the upper bound of the opportunity and the same reasoning applies.

hattmall 5y ago
Yeah, same for punishment too, or like a shock collar / geofence. If the dog knows the shock is always coming they can weigh it. Obviously not just dogs too, it's how humans in some cases stay in an abusive relationship. Every encounter is a roll of the dice and that variability creates an addiction.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

HN is addictive but I don't think it's deliberately designed to be that way. The posts and comments here really are interesting. Modern games are designed from the ground up to form habits. Steady random chance rewards, timers, daily tasks... Basically Skinner's box simulators designed to impose a schedule on players via psychological conditioning. Then it's a simple matter to hook up the reward button to the player's credit card.

soneca 5y ago

I think HN is very different from Reddit, in the sense that I don’t think is addictive at all (for me). HN doesn’t have infinite scroll, doesn’t have infinite pages with different posts. And that’s what I think would make something addictive. You keep finding new content, without leaving the site, as long as you want, until you get some reward. On HN I have to reload the page to see something new. And I would have to keep reloading the page for several minutes until I happen to see one new post in the front page. I want to keep up with everything that gets to the front page all I have to do is come back every hour. With a good chance of keeping up with everything checking just every 6 hours or so. There is no way to mindless get new content in front of you. Even keeping up with new comments is hard. HN is no where near Reddit and other social media sites in addictiveness.

hattmall 5y ago
I agree with that completely, I don't think it's designed to be addictive, neither was email. But the randomness of the reward can create that compulsion to check.
ssully 5y ago
Ehh, HN is just like any social media site in that the pleasure of using it is similar to that of IRL social interactions both good and bad. To be incredibly reductive, it's that you have a chance of having a really engaging conversation, or hearing some really awful takes (can you believe what he said earlier?!). HN isn't as bad as reddit for the reasons you stated, but it is addictive for the same core reason.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Yeah, from a UX perspective, HN is the same as Reddit, simply un-optimized.
  - soneca 5y ago
    That’s the point, it is un-optimized to the point where it’s addictiveness is an order of magnitude lower. Optimization is what generates addictive behavior in social media. Optimize to feed you with infinite new posts with minimal fraction. HN simply doesn’t feed you with infinite posts in a day and adds friction to find new posts (UX focus on a front page with 30 posts and pagination). Also, moderation plays a role. Social media addiction thrives in controversial topics while HN bans flame wars. The heated the discussion the heavier the moderation. HN is not in the same league of Reddit, IG and others regarding addictiveness.

ordu 5y ago

> I think we all feel that we occasionally get some beneficial information from them. I know I do, and even this very post I feel has some benefit. But we also see it as time wasting because the majority of the time, that's what it is. When a chess engine searches a billion of notes to find the best one, it wastes time, because the next move of the opponent will make the most of found nodes as unneeded. /s If I read random articles and one of ten is interesting for me, it doesn't mean that I wasted my time reading nine others. (Though I do not read random articles, I read headlines first, I click may be on one of 20, and then I do not read every article through.) Yeah, I know about addictive behavior in general and the gambling addiction in particular. But we shouldn't believe to an opinion that an addiction is inherently bad. It doesn't. If it was bad, it would be wiped out by an evolution. People just talk more about negative consequences of an addictive behavior, while positive consequences they tend to explain by a "dedication" or something like that. When some socially awkward nerd hiding from people in his basement did something great, no one is going to paint this story in a way that makes his awkwardness to be the reason of his achievement. People will appoint something else to a role of a cause, something that is considered "good", like his skills, brains, dedication, and so on. "Good" outcomes we like to explain by "good" reasons, while "bad" outcomes we like to explain by "bad" reasons. Addictive behavior supports us when we search for something valuable in a vain. It doesn't mean that addictive behavior is an inherently good thing. (This last sentence doesn't need a justification, so I'll skip it, to not talk about completely obvious things) So we have: addictive behavior is neither inherently good, nor inherently bad, it just is. But what the collective unconscious does next? It says "addictive behavior is fun, therefore it must be avoided". But it is bullshit. As addictive behavior is neither inherently good nor bad, so fun is neither inherently good nor bad. The very idea that we must consciously drive ourselves through the life, to think rationally and do not allow self to relax is a bad idea. We have no mental capacity to predict our life good enough. We are doomed to make choices that turns bad in a hindsight. So when we allow our mind to wander a little, to do some activity that have no rational justification, we are preparing ourselves to unexpected turns. We cannot know what information or skills will come useful for us. We do not know how different learned things interacts in our mind (does learning chess makes me a better coder or vice versa?) Therefore a "rational" behavior rejecting fun just rejects the evolutionary tools we have to keep ourselves adapted to a changing environment. We are rejecting our intuition (with its evolutionary roots and deep neural nets to see patterns), that uses "fun" to say what it predicts would be better for us. From other hand, just following fun is worse than rejecting it entirely. So a lot of people choose an easy way, they reject fun, because it is a guaranteed one step from the worst strategy. But I personally see it as a weakness: people are afraid of themselves, and doesn't dare to make the next step, because it may become a step back. Or, if we stop listening for what people say, and look at what they do, we'll see that they are exploiting a great strategy. They are using an idea that addictive behavior is bad to restrict it, but nevertheless allow themselves some fun of reading HN and commenting. =)