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Engineered Addictions

• Grimeton 1y ago
  https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
  • vismit2000 1y ago
    Came here to comment this only after reading the first line!
• Bayanialthea 1y ago
  [dead]
• scottgg 1y ago
  I enjoyed this. It feels obvious doesn’t it ? But - it’s so hard to see anything grassroots changing here for exactly the same reason the apps become attention-gamified - how can some small organically-grown thing compete with the money ?
  • mistrial9 1y ago
    similar discussions around liquor and tobacco in days past?
    • zbentley 1y ago
      Kind of. Those examples are often trotted out as discussion killers a la “regulating these vices didn’t work, so don’t bother trying to regulate $whatever (addictive dark patterns in this instance)”. But that’s not exactly true, is it? Calling out alcohol and tobacco ignores all the vices that were made durably illegal all over the world: prostitution, blood sport, slavery, forced marriage, and so on—and yes, institutionalized slavery was a vice, an economic one rather than a habitual one, but every bit as behaviorally seductive for slavers as speculative investing, MLM, or subprime asset flipping are for some people today. Sure, not all of those things are illegal everywhere, and reasonable people may disagree as to whether illegality is appropriate for some of them (e.g. prostitution). But in total they do indicate that vice regulation can “stick” better than it did for alcohol and tobacco. Hell, we used to put cocaine in soda! Whether or not you believe that the current prohibition/penalty practices around that drug are good, I assume most folks agree that it’s better now that we can’t get addicted to it via products available at the supermarket. Even as addiction-engineered as current-generation hyper-processed foods are, it was once much worse, and that was pretty successfully addressed via regulatory prohibition.
    • nine_k 1y ago
      In most places liquor, while legal, is seriously regulated, and alcoholism is considered a sickness worth treating. Alcohol's effects are visibly debilitating, from poor driving to the very ability to stand without falling or speak coherently. Addictive games though don't show such easily detectable effects. So it's more like a discussion on gambling, casinos, etc, but the current forms of addiction-forming experiences are much more underhanded.
  • api 1y ago
    The right question is: how can some small organically grown thing compete for attention? If everyone is engaged with addiction machines nobody will use it. Engineered addiction is mind control. It is abuse. Hacking the human brain is violence — a term that has been robbed of its impact through overuse for things that are not violence, but this is. Engineering of addiction in any form should not be legal for the same reason that kidnapping someone and raping them or forcing them to do my labor is not legal. Fix this problem — remove the mind control and violence — and a market niche opens up for honest business models. As it stands nobody can compete with these platforms because volition can’t compete with violence and honest commerce can’t compete with slavery through dopamine system hacking. BTW if you work for these companies, quit. Ten to fifteen years ago ignorance was an excuse. I don’t think the original inventors of this nightmare knew quite what they were doing. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. If you are “optimizing engagement” in this context and in these ways you are a bad person.
    • andrei_says_ 1y ago
      It’s interesting that the examples you provided - kidnapping and forced labor - are somewhat legal in the U.S. in the context of the treatment of people of color by law enforcement and incarceration industry. Similarly, suppression of wages, taking away healthcare, food, employee protections (at-will employment), legally required vacation days and maternity leave, and any meaningful safety nets for employees, pushes the social contract for workers toward violent nonconsensual extraction. Maximizing extraction inevitably requires violence and cruelty.
      • zbentley 1y ago
        Yes. Given that, how can we do what GP suggested and move the perception and legal treatment of these behaviors towards “ethically repugnant” rather than “conditionally (and, as you pointed out, very unequally) socially permitted”?
  • ambicapter 1y ago
    By...not competing? As long as you're profitable (read: your expenses are lower than your incomes), what does competing to be "the best" (whatever that even means) provide you?
    • ngriffiths 1y ago
      I think in this context "competing" means having a meaningful market share, which would help reduce time the world spends on the alternative useless gamified/addictive apps
      • klabb3 1y ago
        And if it gets meaningful ”market share”, the business incentives are pulling in the direction of growth, which is the articles point.
    • HWR_14 1y ago
      In many segments, especially ones served digitally, only one or a few companies will survive. It's very much "grow or die".
      • aeve890 1y ago
        Pardon my ignorance but is that expensive to run a social platform?
        • DeathRay2K 1y ago
          Running a social media platform can be very expensive, and it only gets more expensive every day. Media takes a lot of storage and bandwidth, and you basically have unbounded costs if you want to meet user expectations for posting media.
      • ambicapter 1y ago
        That's a narrative that makes no sense. If a company is profitable, it doesn't "die". If customers like your product and their friends are on your platform, they have no reason to leave to another.
  • ngriffiths 1y ago
    I agree. I see this becoming a bigger and bigger problem unless someone steps in with significant regulation or major changes like the article says. The other challenge is the regulation part is much easier when the product is, say, heroin. Algorithms are technically complex (hard for policymakers to grasp), flexible (can be tweaked to work around guidelines?), and operating in the digital world (harder to monitor/block). Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?
    • rudolftheone 1y ago
      > Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop? Valid question - however I have a feeling that for shaping perception of such behaviors we need a stronger middle class - and my hope for it shrinks every day
• IAmGraydon 1y ago
  What this all boils down to is the major weak point of capitalism: profit over all. It’s a darwinistic system, and survival depends upon the ability to abandon ethics in the name of money. Not that ethics doesn’t have some value - it does - but only as a money generator as some customers are motivated to spend on it or at least the idea of it. By and large, however, ethics becomes a weakness in this system. So in my view, the solution has to abide by this law of the jungle, but also short circuit the psychological mechanisms that tech companies are using to harvest attention. Somehow, people will have to pay for their freedom, similar to how drug addicts can pay for rehabilitation once they see the damage the drug has done to their life. It’s still a business, but one that contributes to the greater good. Most of the solutions in this article require some kind of government intervention, which I don't see happening any time soon. Eventually, maybe, but probably only after society has nearly (or completely) ripped itself apart due to social media, the negatives are laid bare, and people start pushing for change.
• spenjuly 1y ago
  Going to recommend "Addiction by Design" here. Superb book about the addiction design dynamics in the gambling industry and very reminiscent of what we see in the smartphone/internet universe today. Shout out to the forgotten HN user who recommended it originally, one of the best and most salient books I've read in years.
  • charliebwrites 1y ago
    Also Nir Eyal’s Hooked, which used to be standard reading at tech startups in the “Growth Hacking” era
    • NickC25 1y ago
      His followup book, Indistractable, is also quite good.
• jiveturkey 1y ago
  Been going on long before Silicon Valley was even a thing. Sugar industry for example. > What might actually work This section is idealistic. I guess the author was too damaged by his own experience to actually study the wave of twitter replacements. I would love to see an analysis of those. "Different Funding Methods" is clearly required but perhaps not sufficient.
  • MobileVet 1y ago
    For sure… but digital distribution and deep understanding of the mental processes behind addiction make it even more accessible for new products / games today.
  • globular-toast 1y ago
    Indeed. The first thing I think of when I read "engineered addictions" is fast food like McDonalds and Subway. People work very hard to make sure the taste and smell is addictive but that the food is not satiating.
  • almost_usual 1y ago
    Alcohol, nicotine / cigarettes, sugar packed junk food. The digital realm of addiction is a new face of the same pattern. Cheap hits to increase pleasure centers in the brain that overall have a detrimental cost to humanity with entire industries to deal with the health consequences. This is the mining of wealth from health reducing the overall productivity of humanity for the sake of near term profits. Optimizing short term gains for long term progress.
  • zbentley 1y ago
    True. Regulatory prohibition has sometimes succeeded at addressing these problems, though. More info on that in my adjacent comment, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407009
• MobileVet 1y ago
  I remember when ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ came out by Nir Eyal. It came out the same year as ‘Addiction by Design’ and was rapidly adopted in the SV and HN circles. I heard somewhere he felt bad about the impact of Hooked… but I don’t have a source. Eyal wrote another book 5 years later trying to help people control their attention & not falling victim to the playbook he outlined in Hooked.
• asim 1y ago
  Honestly it always comes back to, we need a healthier relationship with our tools. The phone, social media, etc. It's all a tool. And yes it can be highly addictive but so are drugs, alcohol, TV, etc. all easily accessible and how we deal with it comes down to ourselves. It's what environment you put yourself in, and if that environment is one that includes a lot of screens then there's a sliding scale as to how corrupted you'll become by it. If you're at places where theres alcohol and cigarettes I mean it's highly likely you're going to smoke and drink. The only things that really beat all of this is a way of life that recognises that it can or is poisonous and many things must be avoided e.g get off social media. It was built to be addictive, that's not going to change. As someone who's a lifelong Muslim and even more dedicated to that in my late 30s and now at 40 I'll say we were put on this earth for a purpose. As engineers we need to understand our own design. We need to understand that all the things we constructed for ourselves isn't all for our benefit but actually a lot of it is harmful, whether it be the digital life or processed food. This is a more holistic way to live. The author obviously wanted to get people offline. I think the issue is when the algorithm of silicon valley is making money then anything inherently social becomes about addiction and gamification. There are alternative routes forward but probably by first getting offline or reassessing ones relationship with the world..
  • nine_k 1y ago
    > healthier relationship with our tools The point is that these are not tools, they provide a direct kick, which is a goal in itself. Whisky is not a tool.
    • echollama 1y ago
      agreed its like saying that jerking off makes you healthier
      • UncleOxidant 1y ago
        Wait, it doesn't? /s
        • 1y ago
• Narciss 1y ago
  My hope, and it may be a naïve hope, is that with the rise of AI will see more and more people be able to build the kind of digital experience that they envision, including social media experiences, because of the democratization of software engineering. That being said, what does it take to build a social media app using AI and also perhaps just as important to market it worldwide?
  • kurthr 1y ago
    It feels like this is the optimism of early internet where "information wants to be free". We got a solid 5 maybe 10 years of that (up through 2k)?
  • cornholio 1y ago
    If you can't build it with a bunch of junior coders, then AI won't help you. Social media is all about network effects and first mover advantage, one network turned textbook fascist and it's still going strong.
  • blendergeek 1y ago
    I "hope" that will happen as well. It is a naïve hope indeed. Almost all current AI systems and all future ones I foresee, are made by large corporations that are looking to turn a profit. Enabling, ordinary "people ... to build the kind of digital experience that they envision" does not maximise profit. Instead AI systems will work for their owners to maximize profits by extracting revenue from the users. Some of this revenu could come from advertising. AIs could build ads that are far more personalized and convincing than anything we can imagine now. AI agents will work first and foremost for their corporate owners and will only do the users bidding if it benefits the owners. There is absolutely no reason to believe that it will be different this time and that now corporations will happily hand out everything for free and users will be empowered. I don't doubt that open source and freedom respecting AI will exist and that some will be able to use it. The great thing about free markets is that those who want to will be able to opt out. But it will always be niche and small just like it is now.
  • DeathRay2K 1y ago
    Building the social media platform you want to see isn’t really the problem though. They are relatively easy to build, the hard part is making it valuable enough to attract users and earning enough to keep it running. Using AI introduces additional costs without solving the core challenge there.
• klik99 1y ago
  > Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook. It’s Stanford Prison Experiment stuff. I hate being reductionist, and I am posting this on a historically YC forum so of course there’s nuance, but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering. It sucks we’re seeing less grants and less security net to encourage risks under current administration, because it leaves investment as the quickest path to starting or scaling a company. Donate to open source, IMO
  • euroderf 1y ago
    Someone help out my memory here. I'm pretty sure that there was a case before the Supreme Court (or other federal court?) back in the late 1980s, where shareholders of a firm sued for the firm to focus exclusively on profit, when the company had been taking a broader view of stakeholders (community, workers, etc.).
  • sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders. We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously destructive.
    • throwawayoldie 1y ago
      I have a better idea: let's combat the notion that putting shareholder value ahead of the common good is moral.
      • 1y ago
• mouse_ 1y ago
  Last paragraph seems to speak without speaking. > We built these platforms. We can build better ones. But only if we're willing to abandon the economic models that made the current ones inevitable. Until we change those incentives, every attempt to fix social media will become part of the problem it’s trying to solve. We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t. > The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely. In direct language, what exactly is the author suggesting we do here?
  • jfengel 1y ago
    He's not. Anything he has in mind is socially unacceptable and he knows it. We'd all love to rebuild economics from the ground up. But as soon as you try you realize that everyone has a different idea and they can't agree on anything.
    • mouse_ 1y ago
      And then there's also https://preview.redd.it/hv628lvgpdva1.jpg?width=1574&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=43a8f92812487e96b86f64263236ba43898fdb19 https://preview.redd.it/hv628lvgpdva1.jpg?width=1574&format=... Which I'm pretty sure is an unsolved problem?
  • DeathRay2K 1y ago
    The author doesn’t suggest it, but the implicit solution is public funding for social goods. That could be through a robust grant process, providing funding for social media that is not supported other ways. Alternately, it could be through a UBI, giving people basic cash flow that could be allocated to paid social media platforms rather than everyone relying on ad-supported social media.
  • fullshark 1y ago
    Government regulation / laws
    • jay_kyburz 1y ago
• sneak 1y ago
  The moment you take VC money, you are obligated to attempt to achieve VC scale. It’s nothing to do with social media, and everything to do with the wrong KPIs.
• quaintdev 1y ago
  > We need a fundamental re-evaluation of what our phones should be for, whether these platforms can ever return to their original purpose of actually bringing us together instead of keeping us scrolling Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together. Let people meet each other in real life. Let the relationships flourish organically. No amount of tech will ever build the trust that face to face interactions can build. When people are in presence of each other they are just not exchanging ideas. There is so much of non verbal exchange through body language, tone of voice, facial expressions. I think all this helps in building trust. Social media on other hand just does the opposite unless the user is very conscious of the effects of social media.
  • UncleOxidant 1y ago
    > Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together. Agreed. Social networks not only didn't bring us together, they've actually done the opposite and made us more tribal. Excellent book on the topic is Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear us Apart by Nicholas Carr.
  • doctorwho42 1y ago
    I love that idea, I just wish I knew how to precipitate it in my local community beyond just trying.
    • appreciatorBus 1y ago
      My theory is that local community is "just trying".
  • amarait 1y ago
    This is an idealized version of real life. If youre autistic you know the pains of having to feign every time in order to not stand out because of your inexpressions or how you dont find what others say very interesting. On top of that, most things youre interested on are in some small forum on the internet where its the only small space where you find your peace. I agree with some things especially about how we spend so much time on unreal things but lets not idealize real life where if you dont talk about something, youre boring. And that something is most of the time about critisizing others all the time. We truly prefer being angry or very sad rather than alone. Thats basically why the algorithm works. It exploits our solitude. But its being built exponentially, its just the natural step on books, radio, tv , each medium more summarised, quick and polarising and monolithic than the previous one.
• b0a04gl 1y ago
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• closetkantian 1y ago
  I'll tell you what's been working for me: an e-ink phone. It's a Bigme Hibreak Pro. The interface is a bit clunky but it gets the job done. Social media is just not fun on this phone. It's still very usable if I need it, however. I'm also knocking out books at a rate that I haven't in years.
  • cushpush 1y ago
    Fascinating, bet the battery life is great. Probably no games on your phone but texting works like normal I'm guessing?
    • closetkantian 1y ago
      Battery life isn't as good as I expected, but I do leave the backlight on quite a bit. I'm not a big phone gamer, but some people do enjoy playing original (black and white) game boy games on them. Texting works very well. I'm typing this on the phone right now. It's one of the smoothest eink devices I've ever encountered.
  • braaileb 1y ago
    Can you use Android Auto with it? Props for the change
    • closetkantian 1y ago
      I'm not sure about this. I heard mixed reports. I don't have a car so I can't test it.
  • EvgeniyZh 1y ago
    Camera and video calls feels like two major drawbacks. Also I've heard there are NFC problems.
    • closetkantian 1y ago
      Camera isn't the greatest but it's fine for everyday needs. I haven't tried a video call yet. I imagine it will work okay, though. Tap to pay works fine for me, too.
• ruined 1y ago
  an article on the problems of social media with no mention of the federated platforms? seems like a huge omission
  • waveforms 1y ago
    it is. There are many websites and applications that I use, like wikipedia and linux / kde that could help if they picked an application like Mastodon and promoted it on their site. I only use social media about once a month so I am far from expert but an ad supported open source facebook clone that stayed non profit by sending its profits to other open source sites would be ideal.
• cushpush 1y ago
  Do you think a nonprofit model could work?
  • waveforms 1y ago
    yes, go ahead and have ads but any income over server fees can be shared with open source projects.
• egypturnash 1y ago
  yep, good luck figuring out how to make a social media site that is engaging enough for people to keep coming back, able to pay its hosting bills, and just generally sustainable, without falling into the dark patterns.
  • SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
    If it can’t exist, should it? Or are we arguing about which color of unicorn would be the best? In TFA… I guess he wants a government Unicorn, because surely there could be no issues with that and with strong regulation it will remain cool and competitive… everyone raves about how fucking awesome their water company is.
• fullshark 1y ago
  The proposed solution is hinted at in this piece but dare not spoken: government regulation.
  • kixiQu 1y ago
    FTFA: > Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms.
  • tadzikpk 1y ago
    Right, maybe social networks are a utility, like electricity or ISPs
    • SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
      You effectively need or greatly benefit from gas, water, electricity and an ISP. What do you really get out of social media? I mean other than most of you getting crippling anxieties about things that aren’t even real, of course. Sure sure, I know, everyone wants it because they need to share photos of the kiddos with grandma out of country. No one needs it because they enjoy the shallow bullshit and dopamine and snarky retorts that enforce their ideology.
      • rsaz 1y ago
        Social media is relied on by a lot of people for official notifications. When I was in high school, my only use for Twitter was checking if my school was closed or not on snow days. I'm sure there are lots of valid reasons for schools, hospitals, emergency services, garbage collection, official media networks etc. to have social media accounts, and for regular people to follow them. I've always thought it would be a good idea for governments to run their own mastodon servers for this, but something else with accounts (not publicly) tied to real identities could be interesting.
• johncole 1y ago
  Thought experiment: what if these apps were owned by non-profits? Would they still be addictive? I don’t think the VC money does much but accelerate the end state, the apps would become addictive if they were held privately their entire lifespan.
  • andoando 1y ago
    Ive been very interested in a worker owned company, or at least representative democracy/republic style of ownership. Now just need a successful startup to push the idea
  • Kudos 1y ago
    Literally Mastodon.
  • alwa 1y ago
    For that matter—the apps that communities are using that aren’t so aggressively exploiting addictive patterns—like the one you and I are using now—could it be that they’re at some level the norm, they’re just kind of boring beyond the small group of people who find them useful? Methamphetamine is flashy and destructive, and its supply chain and sales force are the sort of thing romanticized in Breaking Bad—but billions drink tea (and nobody really glamorizes it). To my mind, the norms of a specific subreddit or Local Co-Op Facebook Group or neighborhood gossip board tend to fall closer to the “tea” pattern than the “viral growth” paradigm. And those, and boring email, and transactional interfaces to companies that primarily do real-world stuff—those tend to take up the bulk of the time of the people in my life. But maybe I’m just old fashioned :)
    • Nasrudith 1y ago
      You should look at the history of tea closer, namely the Opium Wars and how the desire to not deflate their economy via consumption lead to it. Technically also a demonstration of the harm of bad economic practices likd precious metal standards and mercantalism as well.
• Devasta 1y ago
  The best thing we could possibly do, besides throwing Musk and Zuckerberg in The Hague, is destroy targeted advertising as a business model. Everything, absolutely all of this is done so they can make fractions of a cent off of clicks. So long as they can, they will do everything possible to damage your brains into clicking more.
  • mrweasel 1y ago
    I'd go on further, we cannot have advertising as a business model, targeted or not. It worked previously, classic Google was a good example, but mixed with shareholders, it doesn't work, incentives screw up any attempt of providing a better product, because the product become the ad space. Throwing Musk in there is strange. To my knowledge he doesn't really profit of ads, X probably have ad revenue, but that's not really his business model. Tesla stock however, that's a completely different addiction, mostly not relevant to consumers, but that stuff is immune to any type of common sense and traders can't seem to get enough of it.
• djoldman 1y ago
  There are two things going on here. The first and simpler question is what is a valuable software product? For products where the user expects to pay nothing, like almost all social media, the answer is: the product with the most user-hours. Therefore products that attract many user-hours attract much investment. There isn't some kind of insidious conspiracy to push specific types of products: investors don't care, they care about how many minutes of ads they can push down the pipe (legally). The second question is: (again for products where the user expects to pay nothing) what products attract the most user-hours? It seems folks dance around and rarely confront what I consider to be the main explanation here and where the primary cause is: humans choose and prefer to consume and interact with content that induces in them a set of emotions. They generally choose to experience stuff that gets them upset, looks cute, inspires longing, makes them feel lonely, etc. If one categorizes the things that the consumer chooses as "problematic," where is the problem? The problem as stated is the consumer. One can't engineer a way out of that: folks have tried to provide alternative options and these mostly fail to attract heaps of users. To put this in the language of TFA: the addiction isn't engineered into the consumer. The addiction was there from the beginning: a million products were tried out, products evolved to better align with preferences, and now the products are "addictive."
• liendolucas 1y ago
  What I haven't found in the article is what would happen if people paid for a true social network, completely free of all the nasty things we already know. Is there any chance that a carefully crafted paid social network can actually succeed?
  • jay_kyburz 1y ago
    My plan is/was to structure the payments as a single annual payment that only one person in a group or family needs to pay. Then all the members of the group/family join free. That way you only need to convince one person in a group its worth the change.
    • liendolucas 1y ago
      I can't see why wouldn't it work. You definitely have some options. Group or family subscriptions is one. Then you can have extra charges for people for example that post above the average (it would make sense to extra charge those who abuse posting). If someone is unable to pay for some reason don't cancel the account(s) simply make those read-only. So even if they don't pay they are not excluded. Bear in mind that people pay for lots of subscriptions! Streaming services, newspapers, vpns, etc. So again if is setup as a profitable but not greedy profit business it should work. One of the key things is convincing people why using a non-manipulative social network is a way better choice than the "free" options. I'm not very good with business ideas but I do believe that there's absolutely room for a healthy social network out there.
• charcircuit 1y ago
  It's not about addiction. It's about providing value. >The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” It's more like limiting themselves to just sharing a single photo per day is limiting to how much value they can provide users and advertisers. >Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X aren't neutral tools. They're carefully crafted slot machines engineered to get you hooked. Pull to refresh. Tap to like. Scroll forever. Random rewards. Notifications timed to spike your cortisol. The same behavioral loops that addict gamblers now hook children and adults alike. This is quite a stretch. Users finding immense value is not the same as addiction. >Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics. Even if YouTube forced people to have premium they would still optimize for engagement. Loading up the home page and getting terrible recommendations is a terrible experience. Finding the best content for user provides the most value. >Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals? Feel free to use those metrics if you want, but most people will continue to use the apps that provide them the most value.
  • ec109685 1y ago
    To add to this, BeReal flamed out because it was a gimmick that was quickly copied and then forgotten by all the other platforms. Agree that blaming VCs for why TikTok has an algorithmic feed and hundreds of millions of users is simplistic. A non-algorithmic TikTok would have no users. And without a personalized algorithms, the feed ranking would just be showing content from popular accounts, which is a worse experience.
• alwa 1y ago
  With technological products in particular—where an idiosyncratic nerd with an old computer under the desk can run a vibrant forum, a couple of plucky young “cofounders” can conjure a company from nothing, and HN (at least at one point [0]) can sway the entire tech culture from a single process on a single server—isn’t it an option to… not grow? I guess the LLM era makes credible products more capital-intensive than they used to be, but even so, the vendors are pricing their stuff aggressively, and even when they try to squeeze the prices later, half these foundation models that are better-than-last-year’s-SOTA are open-source! If you want to play with lots of money and seek out lots of money, there’s lots of money swirling around seeking to involve you in that game. But if you just want to make something nice and human-scale and small, what better time than now? The path to billions of bucks may require mercenary bucks-extracting behavior, but that’s not the same as a growth imperative being an inevitable force of nature. I can’t help but feel like the Small Web folks are on to something. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522
• deleted 1y ago
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• smikhanov 1y ago
  Good people of HN, could anyone tell me why buying an MVP of a social network for $10K from a Belarusian contractor on Upwork (it couldn’t cost much more, it’s like five SQL tables and a web CRUD) and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work? Why does the author need to moan about how morally destructive it was to raise VC? Just run your social network from your bedroom, while asking ChatGPT how to rewrite the landing page in React.
  • ec109685 1y ago
    Because social networks are boring without users.
    • smikhanov 1y ago
      How in the world is it easier to attract people to some new VC-funded nonsense?
      • Jensson 1y ago
        VC-funded means you have money for marketing.
        • smikhanov 1y ago
          But for a paid social network you can do marketing too. All you need is for CLV to be higher than CAC.
          • satvikpendem 1y ago
            Where will you get the initial money to do said marketing, if you have no (paying) users yet?
          • esperent 1y ago
            Only if people pay. Which they won't when there's nobody else on there. How do you get your first 100k users? You might say, well, start with 1000 users. But 1000, or 10,000 isn't enough to make a social network interesting. Maybe you could get around this by making it about a specific niche to start with. But that probably won't work, and if it does, you'll end up stuck in that niche. On the other hand, I don't think this idea is as impossible as people say it is. It's just highly unlikely to be successful, and far more complicated than simply paying someone on Upwork to make it for you.
• scoofy 1y ago
  This reminds me of my borderline exhausting quest to build a wiki for golf that isn’t extractive like most golf sites. Trying to bootstrap it without any funding is a lot, but necessary, and I have to run it on a shoestring. The frustrating part is that with all networks the flywheel is everything. Once you get the product on people’s phones, the value is easy to see, but to get the app in their phones, you need a bunch of money to create value to get people there. This is why the VC funding is so pernicious and why projects like mastodon, lemmy, and pixelfed are so difficult to get off the ground. The point is almost always the network itself more than the product. I’ll keep trying to just do it slow and steady, even if it takes me a decade. I honestly don't care if I fail because I know the people out there that care about golf course architecture just want a place to talk about the courses they love. https://golfcourse.wiki https://golfcourse.wiki
  • moomoo11 1y ago
    That's cool. Good luck
    • scoofy 1y ago
      Thanks! Aside from the occasional 503 error (again, I'm trying to get as much as possible out of the cheapest plan), it works pretty well.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Vektorceraptor 1y ago
  There is still a deeper problem, which the article didn't tackle. We don't need social media in general. Some forums and platforms for geeks and freaks are enough. We don't need perfectly orchestrated or fairly designed apps to simulate genuine connection, which works best without any digital help what so ever. So let's imagine that the best way is to return to offline interactions and connections - which take time, trust, respect and value of each other. The internet is better when used by the nerds, not the general public.
• notShabu 1y ago
  Games around who does the grunt work requiring maintenance of a status hierarchy or a constant inflow of interns do affect quality and time to delivery though. The current problems are oversupply of who does the creative work as well as no longer requiring interns. There is both less of a need for new inflow and a problem with existing overproduction.
• divbzero 1y ago
  OP mentions how Facebook introduced engagement algorithms to Instagram and how Twitter followed suit, but doesn’t mention that Facebook was also the first to popularize engagement algorithms in 2011 via their News Feed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Facebook)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Facebook)#History
• superkuh 1y ago
  Nope. There's no addiction involved here. Engineers should know better than to mis-use terminology outside of it's context. > We don’t all have ADHD. We have an addiction. Growing up, I barely knew a world without social media, and neither did my friends. We were the guinea pigs for Silicon Valley's great dopamine experiment, and now we’re waking up with the side effects. Saying it's a "dopamine experiment" is just as bad an incorrect as calling your monitor "the cpu" or saying "I'm so adhd" to describe a common behavior. Using the concept of addiction and completely unrelated neurochemistry in this context drags in all the terribly dangerous ideas of drug addiction. Drugs are entirely different things that truly do subvert incentive salience at the neurochemical level. While screens and speakers most certainly do not. And even if they did it's be "glutamergic experiment" not "dopamine". These ideas imply that in normal situations and stimuli humans do not have volition and so need state force to protect them from their own choices. This premise is far more damaging to society than screens and sounds could ever be.
  • notarobot123 1y ago
    Behavioral addiction is real and more similar to substance addiction than you might think (source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2607329/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2607329/)
    • superkuh 1y ago
      And they're much more different than you might think. Lets be clear. Drug addiction is mediated either directly through effecting incentive salience via dopaminergic agonism, or, indirectly through glutamergic agonism as reward eventually training incentive salience. There's no need to actually enjoy the drugs, they just directly effect the reward prediction system and alter wanting and so behavior. Very clear causation. Very clearly outside of human volition. Now you have screens and sounds. Very clearly not effecting incentive salience directly. Very clearly not effecting glutamergic agonism (in the shell of the nucleus accumbens) directly. The only mechanism of action would be through the person actually finding the experience enjoyable repeatedly and learning to anticipate this real enjoyment. Just normal human experience. No more 'addictive' and damaging to ones life than the random interval operant conditioning of recreational fishing, and probably much less expensive. Very abstract causation with a very weak effect. Very clearly not ouside of human volition. And, btw, gambling disorder was grandfathered in (there are no non-substance addictions in the DSM or ICD as your article highlights at the start). Repeated calls for, and instantiations of, working groups in the DSM and ICD have covered these 'media addictions' and found the medical support wanting over and over the last 20 years. Much like uncategorizable gambling disorder would be rejected if considered these days with modern medical standards and understandings. Most of the support for these concepts come from commercial groups that profit off "treatments". It's very similar to the "gay conversion camps" model in terms of political advocacy without scientific support. But the memes for "dopamine screens" and the like have raged like wildfire among the uninformed which gives such evil for-profit groups a seeming gleen of legitimacy they definitely do not have. If it was not clear from me addresing the points of the linked paper above, I did read the Philosophical Transactions B paper (a very low tier journal for any biology subject). In this review paper they collect a random assortment of other studies to try to say gambling disorder people's brains are similar to drug addicted people. If you've read it (then I don't know why you linked it) but you'd know they come away with no solid conclusions beyond one: gambling disorder people often have drug problems too. This does not support your argument in this context. I recommend you check out some of the lay review articles coming out of Kent Berridge's lab: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/publications/ https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/berridge-lab/publications/
• rufus_foreman 1y ago
  The problem is not the apps, the problem is the users. Which means the problem is human nature. Make a photography site for people to share photographs and it will inevitably turn into a site for people to share selfies of them pretending to live a life that they do not actually live and can not actually afford, but which you will inevitably compare yourself against. Make a site for people to share opinions and it will inevitably be dominated by one particular group of users that will shame anyone with any opinion at all that diverges from the tiny area of acceptable opinion. The problem is not the tools that the users have. The problem is not the engineers. The problem is that people are being giving exactly what they want. The problem is right there in the mirror. There are no solutions.
  • news_hacker 1y ago
    Absolutely not. People are not asking for dark patterns to engineer their behavior to maximize retention. This is like locking a kid in a room full of candy, and then blaming them for gorging themselves.
• __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  > Every attempt to “fix” social media eventually becomes part of the problem because the economic structure creates inevitable corruption of the original mission. Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users". Anything else will present high values targets for corruption and is doomed to fail. You're not going to get investors in such a thing, because the lack of chokepoints means you can't really monetize it. But I do think that the existing players will eventually behave badly enough that such a thing will emerge--one volunteer effort at a time. They sold us a dream of what the internet could be and I don't think we're letting that go--we just have to dispatch with them first.
  • klabb3 1y ago
    > Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users". Right, which is impractical, and after direct democracy comes representational democracy. Eventually you get things like libraries or public parks, public goods managed by government employees. The main difference this time is the need for more transnational cooperation. Other than that, it should be relatively easy and cheap.
    • __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      This is about determining which content a user wants to see and showing it to them without having influence over that selection be susceptible to influence by third parties. I'll concede that there aren't heterarchical solutions to all of our problems, but it does not follow that there isn't a heterarchical solution to this one.
• asdf6969 1y ago
  I like the post but I feel like it’s missing the reason why VC funding is necessary. A lot of small scale apps and old school forums can be run pretty cheap. What is stopping social media from growing slow and following a more traditional business model? For example, people regularly start things like nail salons with just personal funds and bank loans but they are so much more expensive to run than something like this website
• knuppar 1y ago
  > This isn't because founders are evil Sounds like something an evil founder would say
• DaveZale 1y ago
  Are we overthinking this? Old school specialty sites are still around, with topics, categories, and discussions around the whole site emphasis. As someone who likes to grow a little food in a semi-rural area, I enjoy permies.com - every day, a volunteer posts a new question or reposts a relevant topic, depending on the season or recent interest or whatever. But they're not trying to make a billion dollars. Or even a million dollars. That's why I like it. To raise funds, they sell books, playing cards, instructional videos. With non-invasive "tiny ads" which they self-parody. Small is beautiful. The current internet is ruled by evil reptiles seeking to rip off your time, your data, your privacy, your friends... "Don't be evil" is dead and gone. Turn back the clock 30 years. I did. And I'm happy.
  • teaearlgraycold 1y ago
    I use tildes.net quite a bit. It’s not for everyone but it’s great to have for those that like it.
    • sotix 1y ago
      Ooh that looks like a great site! Would you consider sending me an invite? My email is in my profile.
    • DaveZale 1y ago
      looks good. old school discussion sites were just fine. The larger corporations are big scams, ripping off your personal details, your relationships, your photo library, and who knows what else, and up to 99% of users have no clue. Nothing to be gained, everything to lose. Even facebook emojis can be entered into the record in a court of law during a divorce proceeding. A fleeting moment of trying to make someone feel better, or more likely, to get a thumbs up, becomes a permanent electronic record completely removed from fleeting circumstances. That nonsense is potentially very dangerous
  • bohemian1 1y ago
    totally "i want to help people connect!!! but i gave up when i noticed i wasnt gonna get easy money" then you dont wanna help people..
• _1tem 1y ago
  It’s not just social media. Externalized financialization ruins everything. Private equity firms quickly gut everything they buy from plumbers to health clinics (and you still have no choice but to buy their services because they “consolidate” the competition). It’s capitalism gone mad: financial incentives disconnected from any other considerations. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.ht...
• dostick 1y ago
  No matter how you slice and regulate it, the problem will always be there as long as its capitalism, which makes businesses exploit anything they operate upon.
• bravesoul2 1y ago
  Best social media platform already exists. Personal Blog (maybe) for public posts and Email + phone + IRL for friends. Personal blog can be on blogger if needed. The nature of any blog is non algorithmic.
• Nifty3929 1y ago
  I think the problem is more fundamental than this: When your monetization model is tied to usage, then of course you will try to maximize usage, rather than user benefit. It can't be any other way if your reward function is tied to product usage. Contrast with a car: Their monetization model does not depend on how much I drive it - as long as I find it useful enough to buy. Or a gym, where it actually runs in reverse - the gym makes more money when I use the product less, just so long as I don't leave. Microsoft office or Mario Kart do not need me to be addicted - they just need me to buy the software. Even Photoshop with a subscription model doesn't pursue addiction strategies - why would they? Just make it useful enough for me to keep paying for it, and that's plenty good. Maybe it's actually closer to the gym in that sense. Which products are the ones that require addiction?? The ones that are free to use but cost money to provide. IOW - In many ways this is our fault for expecting social media and many other services to be provided to us for free, relying on ads to pay for it. I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it? My guess is close enough to zero to ensure failure. But I tell you what - I'd probably pay for it myself. And I'd be very lonely. Edit: Replaced all-caps with italics.
  • sailfast 1y ago
    And yet probably less alone than when using polluted and terrible social media. I would pay, FWIW. I am actively looking for a decent community of humans online that isn’t run by selling data to AI farms or trying to get my eyeballs all the time. Unfortunately social media ate many of the places I previously used to call home.
    • Nifty3929 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • _Algernon_ 1y ago
        But even paid business models get polluted with the usage driven metrics over time. Netflix is paid but now has advertisements. They have stated that their main competitor is sleep, which is obviously detrimental to the user. How do we prevent this from happening for such a paid social media?
• lrvick 1y ago
  > We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t. I deleted an app every month until my phone was so boring I threw it in a drawer and canceled my cell phone subscription. It confuses and annoys everyone around me, but my attention span, happiness, and productivity have skyrocketed so I really do not care what the addicts think. It works for me. I truly encourage everyone to consider how humans survived before smartphones. All of that still works fine today. 5 years cell-phone free.
  • trollbridge 1y ago
    No cell phone at all, or do you carry a feature phone?
    • lrvick 1y ago
      No cell phone at all as I do not wish to have my location sold, rely on proprietary tech, or to be reachable at all times. I also use cash exclusively IRL so my digital footprint away from home is virtually zero. I am happiest being intentional and present in whatever I am doing. I am reachable from my desktop by email, matrix, or VoIP SMS, when I am at my desk and have been able to run a profitable security research and consulting business this way. I do have a very small laptop I carry when I am going to be away from my desk more than one business day, but the overwhelming majority of the time I have no electronics of any kind on my person when I leave home. Typically I carry a mechanical watch, a micro-wallet, and sometimes a notebook, or mechanical puzzle.
      • sotix 1y ago
        Which mechanical watch?
        • lrvick 1y ago
          My go-tos are the CIGA Eye Of Horus and the Bradley Element, both using a Leatherman Tread for a band with TreadLinks adapters so I always have some basic tools with me which get used a surprising amount.
• zmmmmm 1y ago
  It a seems pretty simple mistake from almost the first step: > To get funding, you need users. To get more funding, you need exponential growth. Growth becomes the primary metric No, you don't. This exponential user scaling theory of investment is a sickness that has taken over silicon valley and is half the reason for much of the harm we are seeing. Serve a small number users really well, build all the infra to autoscale and let the organic growth happen more slowly. Get to a bigger critical mass and you'll eventually be able to take money on your own terms. If you can't do that, you haven't waited long enough, tried hard enough, or maybe your idea just isn't what you thought it was.
• osigurdson 1y ago
  One positive that I have seen lately among older teens, is they are starting to realize how much of a waste of time staring into a screen all day is. At some point, you realize that life is short and watching short clips for hours on end is robbing you of that.
• Atlas667 1y ago
  Right on. The problem is capital. Of course many people are allergic to Marx, but the dude hit the nail on the head with his critique. The problem is not individuals, it's a system of ownership over assets. And 99% of people will use their ownership to generate profits through hiring labor. Why? Because it's easier to have other people work for you, instead of you doing the work. This becomes extended in the digital age beyond the original form of employees generating profit from the difference between their pay and the monetary value of their work (the original Marxist definition of profit), but also to end-users generating raw material as information for the further generation of profits through the selling of information services or plain data. Tech has workers AND users in the formula for the generation of capital. And if we, plebs, know this, you know the industry has already crafted their bourgeois science of this info extraction mechanism. This monetary influence has already spread over the creation of hardware as well as software. This will follow in all of the tech-realms. They will influence the organizations that create the hardware and software specs. They will influence the law to ignore these ills. They are the creators of mass-use hardware and software. The average end-user will live in a tech prison and the state is gonna become way more invasive. Democracy is on the line like it never has been before. They WILL use your instincts against you and they will use your data against you. Just like capitalization has taken over every aspect of modern commodity/service production, and therefore modern life, so will data-capitalization. There was never enshittification, it was just capital.
• keeganpoppen 1y ago
  so this is basically like “we couldnt raise money and this is how i rationalize it”?
• ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
  Bogey man staff psychologists aren't to blame for these woes, and they certainly aren't some unstoppable force with reins to all things you do. The Internet was "addicting" long before there was ever a concept of social networks the way that there is today. I used to sit on my computer from sun down to sun up way back in the mid 90s, and I knew hundreds of other people that did the same thing. I've been "addicted" to social networks that predate modern capital schemes, such as message boards, IRC, AIM, ICQ, MMORPGs, and so on.
• hollerith 1y ago
  I was addicted to reading newgroups using Larry Wall's trn program. In trn, it is very easy to get a new screenful of text to appear, but it is hard to go back to what you were reading 3 screenfuls ago (unless you are still in the same message you were in 3 screenfuls ago, in which case, to get back, you could scroll up 3 times) which discourages reflection, which leaves fewer reasons not to constantly seek out the next dopamine hit (namely, the next passage of text that teaches you something). My point is that neither trn nor the newsgroups were in any way VC-funded. There also weren't any non-VC-funded startups or companies involved: when I started browsing them in 1991, the software that ran the newsgroups was entirely designed, implemented and operated by volunteers. Yes, these volunteers mostly worked for tech companies, universities or governmental research labs (because in those days, most people with internet connectivity got it through their workplace and most normal workplaces did not have internet connectivity) but their involvement in the newsgroups did not figure into their employer's evaluation of their work performance. My point is that VCs are not the whole of the problem. Not even the profit motive is the whole of the problem. The problem can show up in a program distributed under an open-source license for hobbyist or communitarian reasons.
• czhu12 1y ago
  I think, with no supporting data whatsoever, that this is a classic case of stated vs revealed preferences. We all think we want a place to find community, learning, connection, etc, but given the choice will choose stimulus. So, if given the choice of 10 social networks, on a scale of extremely stimulating to extremely connecting, we’ll end up choosing the stimulating one. In which case, it seems tricky to find a business model fixes this more fundamental problem
• dirtyhippiefree 1y ago
  The article Farmvillains in SF Weekly fifteen years ago said Zynga had a staff psychologist to guarantee that each iteration would be more addictive. https://www.sfweekly.com/archives/farmvillains/article_eb8e249b-bcbf-54ee-a7b7-4976da1cb026.html https://www.sfweekly.com/archives/farmvillains/article_eb8e2...
• xbmcuser 1y ago
  Western capitalists have engineered addictions for 100s of years from forcing China to accept opium to introducing the taste of coffee to children to create demand for coffee in Japan in the future it's nothing new. Now they are doing the same with technology.
• darkhorse222 1y ago
  I honestly think there is some place here to be anti tech. Some things, the things closest to our humanity, like love and community, are not all that better with technology in my opinion. Sure, you can stay connected with a family member or friend who lives in another city, but that same positive is a negative via another perspective because it doesn't force you to make new connections with people around you. And love is similar. It's nice that algorithms can help you match, but the psychology by which you arrive at a compatible partner matters a great deal. The swipe is inherently dehumanizing even if it does match you with a human. Some things are supposed to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Tech should stop trying to eliminate that and instead augment it. That calls for an entirely different philosophy when choosing ideas to build. Instead of looking for uncomfortable or inefficient things and trying to "fix" that, consider your values. What do you care about, what is important for a good human life? Then use your skills to enable deeper integration into those values. Easier is not always better. I recently had this revelation when considering how difficult it is to find events that I'm interested in. I was shocked that this isn't a problem that we had solved in the 2000s. But Facebook events is full of bar specials like ladies night and doesn't seem to match to my taste and Eventbrite is overly monetized and tends to be formal events, my friend who's very into the electronic scene told me that the way that she found events was by following people on Instagram and then following the businesses that she went to and checking their pages for events. I thought that seemed very inefficient and then it occurred to me that maybe the goal here is not to get as many people as possible to go to your event. Maybe it's about getting the right people with the right values and right taste to go to your event. This is a classic case where making something easier would not necessarily serve to achieve the goal of that ease, which, in this case would be making it easier for me to find authentic events. *The very nature of them being trivially accessible would change what they are.*
• aucisson_masque 1y ago
  So what’s wrong with open source social network ? They don’t have the issue mentioned, because they don’t have investor there is no need to optimize kpi and when it’s optimized the infrastructure cost can be minimized a lot. See mastodon for instance. Yet it doesn’t catch up in popularity, seems like people do prefer the traditional Facebook, twitter and instagram. You can only show a donkey where water is but you can’t force it to drink.
  • GreenWatermelon 1y ago
    Well, for one thing, they aren't backed by billion-dollat corporations hell-bent on shoving them down the throat of every man, woman, child, infant, and pet they can reach.
• ByteDrifter 1y ago
  The article mentioned that we can reconnect offline life and redesign the platform to encourage real human interaction instead of endless scrolling. Imagine a social app that encourages you to exit the screen and meet friends instead of constantly scrolling. It should feel good.
• BrenBarn 1y ago
  This article thinks it's talking about problems with social media, but it's actually talking about problems with venture capitalism and economic inequality.
• larodi 1y ago
  Perhaps this all goes even deeper - it's screen addiction, not only social media addiction, though social media in 2025 is a very powerful and addictive drug (in all senses of it)
• notepad0x90 1y ago
  Late in the thread, but is this really addiction? How do you differentiate between addiction and people really liking something? In my opinion, unless people try to stop doing the thing but they can't will themselves to do that, it isn't an addiction. It is not OK to dilute terms used to describe serious problems. I am not saying tech addiction can't happen, I just haven't seen any evidence to that effect. Mere dependency or development of a habit isn't addiction. addiction is those things plus inability to quit the habit despite strong and persistent effort. Perhaps a good litmus test might be a person's ability to go on a week-long vacation without their phones, internet or whatever the supposed addiction might be. There are addictions like Porn or eating-disorders that can be exasperated by tech, but they're not "technology usage" addictions, they're "addictions that can be enabled by technology".
  • heavyset_go 1y ago
    There are plenty of addictions where the incentive to stop never appears, and I wouldn't call those "not" addictions just because someone hasn't tried to stop or had a reason to.
    • notepad0x90 1y ago
      Scientifically speaking, I would expect that pattern of habit to be studied, and for individuals to be unable to quit, and for actual electro-chemical rewiring of the brain (as nicotine,caffeine and harder drugs do) to be established. Until then, why can't it just be called a habit? addiction very strongly implies inability to quit. Have you seen the 90's congressional testimony of tobacco CEO's all swearing on oath that Nicotine isn't addictive? That's how strong of a case you have to make for an addiction to be established. If you dilute the term and use it anonymously with "habit" then actual addictions can be dismissed or crooked people that facilitate addictions can avoid consequences. At the very least, there needs to be a pattern of inability to quit the habit. Positive reinforcement signals are not in themselves indicators of addiction (case in point: LSD/Acid -- it isn't considered addictive, neither is good tasting food on its own).
      • 1y ago
• joshdavham 1y ago
  > Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. Realistically, this is the most likely solution to reducing addiction on online platforms in my opinion. I’m not sure how likely such regulations will be in the US, but it’s quite telling that the Chinese regulate their version of TikTok, while the US doesn’t regulate theirs.
• asimpletune 1y ago
  Monetization is the problem, not funding. Better monetization methods haven’t arisen because it’s impossible to compete with free. On the other hand I think it’s clear that the status quo is not creating unrealized value, but is actually causing tremendous harm and are a net negative. People who argue otherwise either have holy arguments about the infallibility of the market or a direct financial interest in the continuation of the ad sponsored status quo. The solution would be new laws that attack the profitability of today’s primary monetization method, not the actual act of social media itself. Doing so would clear the undergrowth for the true innovators to take over and we’ll know who they are when people pay for their products, as functioning markets have always intended.
• keybored 1y ago
  > Pure Intentions: Founders, like myself, genuinely want to connect people, share authentic moments, and build community. The early versions feel magical because they follow this original mission. No. This idea that SC (or similar business cultures) want to change the world for the better is a cliche. At a certain point, after all the history of these companies, you don’t get a pure-intentions pass any more. And in particular: I don’t believe that Zuckerberg’s motivations were ever good. > Different Funding Methods: What if social platforms were funded like utilities or public goods instead of venture-backed and advertisement driven growth machines? Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics. Wikipedia thrives as a donation-funded cooperative. These models exist - they just don’t scale at venture-required rates. This is good. You need to rethink the whole model. Even if that means that you don’t get to growth-hack people. This is far better than the usual model: 1. Admit there’s a problem 2. It’s systemic 3. The fake solution: some feel-good manifesto about making X but “for humans”. But nothing about the incentives have been changed. The fundamental axiom is still there: we are entitled to make money off social media just like before, but we have a lot of words and paragraphs about doing so goodly. The same thing happened with an attempt at making neoliberalism palpatable. “Stakeholder Capitalism”. The idea is that we just continue with neoliberalism but have a manifesto about how all stakeholders are taken into account. But nothing about the system or the power centers are changed. So you still get a corporations and their boards of directors having as much power as before. > Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms. I’m not sure. This seems like a half-measure. Regulating something which is inherently harmful (according to the simile) just causes more bloat. If I’m addicted to nicotine I’m already hooked. No advertisement doesn’t help me. I already know what I want. You’re gonna make the packaging less sexy? Make me go into the Sin Section of the shop to get my fix? I’m gonna do that anyway. What you need is an effective and mandatory opt-out option. Let me ban myself from buying these products. And provide me with alternatives (grocery shops already sell both tobacco and nicotine gum). Give me an option to opt-out. Don’t just make a whole regulatory beast which can prey on me but one hundred checkboxes are marked and it’s very ethical and so on. > Alternative Metrics: Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals? This would have been naive and just a loophole if the premise was to let companies keep doing their thing. They would just rebrand with fake metrics. Oh you have sent X messages this month, that means you are connecting and according to some research people who IM more are happier blah blah blah. But this could have some merit given the previous utilities/public goods point.
• jimmydoe 1y ago
  algorithm feed addiction is unsolvable, at least without some new drug. As an immigrant to the US, I found dessert in US contains much more sugar than where I was. And when I make/recommend less sugary food, friends don't like it even though some of them admitted that's healthier. so similar to diabetes, I would expect Ozempic for algorithm feed addiction will be available one day to solve this, or at least sounds like so (although I'm not fully convinced). It may sounds dystopia, but addiction is a builtin feature of late stage capitalism, and it's already too late to turn around.
• thenobsta 1y ago
  I was talking with a friend who is a camp counselor for a small summer camp the other day and they said that 4 of the 35 or so kids at the camp left because they couldn’t be away from their devices. This power intermittent reinforcement in the on-ramp of addiction is scary powerful. Do we have any ways to innoculate ourselves and the future generations against it? The author poses changing the game which is support. I guess the trendy “dopamine fast” is a tool against this or weekly screen free time. Maybe more education on intermittent reinforcement or a D.A.R.E-like program for apps (a this one is a little tongue-in-cheek, but not really).
  • absolute_unit22 1y ago
    > said that 4 of the 35 or so kids at the camp left because they couldn’t be away from their devices. Wow that’s scary. Such powerful addiction at such a young age
    • fn-mote 1y ago
      Parents let them.
      • account42 1y ago
        Individual parents don't have that much of a choice unless they want to turn their kids into social pariahs.
        • yesfitz 1y ago
          Can you provide any sources on that? I've only been able to find articles that counter it[1][2][3][4], and nothing more rigorous than a Pew survey. It feels right, and I recall feeling similarly about certain items/events as a teen, but teens aren't known for having the most measured interpretations of reality. 1: https://medium.com/@helmisantosa/teens-without-smartphones-how-is-their-social-life-81214ba3047d https://medium.com/@helmisantosa/teens-without-smartphones-h... 2: https://screenstrong.substack.com/p/can-you-raise-a-teen-today-without https://screenstrong.substack.com/p/can-you-raise-a-teen-tod... 3: https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/parenting/article/teenage-sons-friends-without-smartphones-experiment-vpcnbj58d?region=global https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/parenting/article/teenag... 4: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/smartphones-flip-phones-screen-time-teens-social-media/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/smartphones-flip-phones-screen-...
• rationalfaith 1y ago
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• aiono 1y ago
  This hits the nail for my sentiments about the matter. Good that someone who was actually in the business confirm it.
• varelse 1y ago
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• djsavvy 1y ago
  This is all true, but it's definitely not the full story. I'm addicted to HN despite it not being engineered for engagement. (though _technically_ it has taken investor money hahaha)
• maxverse 1y ago
  I read and enjoyed the post, but also found it a bit directionless. Yes, I think a lot of people agree that addictive social media is a problem. What's the solution? > The deeper issue is that we’ve outsourced our human connection to systems designed for profit. Real connection happens in the margins that can’t be monetized. The conversations that don’t generate data, the relationships that don’t scale, and the moments that can’t be optimized for engagement. This sounds profound, but this is a problem that predates social media. People went to shows and music festivals to see art and connect with others - these are systems also designed for profit (and delivering art as their second thing.) The problem is, as the author definitely knows, that running systems that enable connections costs money. The suggestion the author makes: "improve third spaces where people connect directly, authentically, without intermediation by systems designed to extract value from their attention", except someone has to pay for those third spaces, and people won't always want to visit them because we like dopamine, so we might go to the bar, or back on social media, or to video games or tv shows instead. A slow pace - boredom - breeds creativity and connection, but it's also boring, and it's hard to get people to stay with it (I might be projecting.) > The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely. On a different note, this closing feels very, very ChatGPT, and whether it is or isn't, the fact that AI tone is permeating our writing makes me really sad.
  • rsync 1y ago
    "The problem is, as the author definitely knows, that running systems that enable connections costs money." It's not that much of a problem because it doesn't cost that much money. A full rack and 1gb at he.net costs something like $350/mo. I think it's $500 if you get the entire 10gb. Very fast servers are available for, basically, shipping charges on ebay. The cost that seems prohibitive is all of the flashing lights and fancy imagery and reactive design, etc. Further, the frameworks and scaffolding that enable all of the tracking and ads ... are themselves expensive and this complexity becomes self-reinforcing. A final unnecessary set of costs is the neurotic compulsion for 5-9s reliability and perfect, instantaneous responsiveness from every geography. What does it cost to run lobste.rs ? Metafilter ? HN ? I think any reasonably resourced individual could do it as a hobby in their spare time - especially if you strip away the CDNs and the load balancers and the expensive frameworks, etc.
• Slava_Propanei 1y ago
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• johanneskanybal 1y ago
  It’s very obvious in 2025, have deleted all my social accounts, (maybe still a bit of reddit). Kids are definitly not allowed even close to it. 100% correct it’s about the business model/funding. Just make it in your basement and don’t take vc capital and let it take a decade and you’ll be the only used social network.
• chipsrafferty 1y ago
  Maybe the solution is that these services shouldn't be free, and you should pay for your usages. Then a non-profit could run an Instagram / tiktok clone and there would be no incentive to make the app more addicting, addiction would be even self-regulated to an extent by the fact that watching 10 hours of video might cost $5