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these products are intentionally designed to be addictive by some of the greatest minds of our generation. If you were intentionally designing society this woul

these products are intentionally designed to be addictive by some of the greatest minds of our generation. If you were intentionally designing society this would be the opposite of what you'd do. Our children are effectively enslaved through basic trinkets and manipulation to serve as eye-balls for ad impressions to fuel equity value in silicon valley. It's fucked and it was intentionally designed to be this fucked. The abstract of what you state makes sense, but the layers of manipulation on top of it are what the problem is.

card_zero 9mo ago
OK: how?
- Quarrelsome 9mo ago
  don't act coy. We did it. Hooked - How to build habit forming products - Nir Eyal. We did it intentionally.
  - card_zero 9mo ago
    While I read through snippets from that book, I'd like to know what substantive point to look for in it. There's a chapter about ethics apparently.
    - Quarrelsome 9mo ago
      Consider the Lean Startup methodology. The darker patterns are where you break down the big picture rationale for the company. You extract metrics that contribute to the company's success (i.e. engagement) and you build a machine that rewards changes to the underlying system that improves those metrics. If done successfully, you create an unwitting sociopathy, a process that demands the product be as addictive as possible and a culture that is in thrall to the machine that rewards its employees by increasing those metrics. You're no longer thinking about purpose or wondering about what you're doing to your users. You simply realise that if you send this notification at this time, with this colour button, in this place, with this tagline then the machine likes it. Multiple people might contribute a tiny piece of a horrifying and manipulative whole and never quite realise the true horror of the monster they've helped build.
      - card_zero 9mo ago
        That horror being..? I understand that this is a ruthless quest for engagement by any means, good or bad. For instance ...? I don't mean to make you do all the work here: I can see a couple of pages from the introduction which mention "variability" and "investment": > What distinguishes the Hook Model from a plain vanilla feedback loop is the Hook’s ability to create a craving. Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire. The unsurprising response of your fridge light turning on when you open the door doesn’t drive you to keep opening it again and again. However, add some variability to the mix—suppose a different treat magically appears in your fridge every time you open it—and voila, intrigue is created. So that's "variability". I'm not hugely impressed. "Investment", meanwhile, is when you set preferences or connect to friends, so you feel like you lose out if you stop attending. I can see that these might be foolish ideas. But I can also see that foolish ideas are part of "engaging" with anything - something traditionally wholesome such as a piano, for instance. Imagine I'm a Victorian lady, and I've bought a piano and I invite my friends over for a regular evening of singing art songs, so that's "investment": also we buy new song sheets every time, so there's "variety". I'm totally hooked on this harmless positive thing, am I? Or do I in fact just like it and have free will?
        Quarrelsome 9mo ago
        Are you being intentionally obstinate? I can't help but feel like you're sealioning. An increasing number of young people get their news from social media and what is "engaging" isn't necessarily what's true. This leads to greater political polarisation, nuance is lost, tribalism increases, people treat conversations as things to be won as opposed to opportunities to share information. People spend their entire time doomscrolling because everything is "engaging" so it caters to their paranoia and attempts to keep them glued to their phone, ramping up their anxiety and paranoia because it makes them more money. People stay up late scrolling a feed that hooks them, sleep less, perform less well at work, may lose their job and all the ramifications that go along with that. Parents spend more time on their phones than with their children, a generation of babies and toddlers are having to compete for attention with these apps and in many cases fail because they're designed so well. What's worse is the babies get thrust an ipad and then are brought up by arbitrary strangers who may not have their best interests at heart and are exposed to considerable amounts of advertising at far too young an age. I could go on but I feel like you're just going to give another one liner where you pretend that actually there's nothing wrong with this or smth.
Simboo 9mo ago
I agree.
nobodywillobsrv 9mo ago
It's worth stating that addictive tech is addictive partly because it doesn't work very well. So they build useful things and then make them pretty bad and less useful. If they were useful your interest or need would complete and you would move on. Fundamentally I think it is important to say this. Addiction confounds some things in the space of designed systems
- Quarrelsome 9mo ago
  Spot on. Like how Facebook used to be quite useful to stay in touch with friends, or how dating websites used to be kinda decent to find like-MINDED people but have now all been enshittified in order to keep people on them.
  - thijson 9mo ago
    I used to not mind my kids watching Youtube on the home TV, but lately when I walk by they are doom scrolling one short after the other. I tell them not to watch shorts, but a day later I walk by and they are back to doom scrolling. I'm finally forced to remove Youtube from the TV. On the phone, Instagram is the same way, I see my teenager doom scrolling it quite often. They claim it helps them relax.
- 1718627440 9mo ago
  It depends on what you define their use to be. If the point is to gain data from as much people as possible, they do work pretty well.

card_zero 9mo ago

OK: how?

Quarrelsome 9mo ago
don't act coy. We did it. Hooked - How to build habit forming products - Nir Eyal. We did it intentionally.
- card_zero 9mo ago
  While I read through snippets from that book, I'd like to know what substantive point to look for in it. There's a chapter about ethics apparently.
  - Quarrelsome 9mo ago
    Consider the Lean Startup methodology. The darker patterns are where you break down the big picture rationale for the company. You extract metrics that contribute to the company's success (i.e. engagement) and you build a machine that rewards changes to the underlying system that improves those metrics. If done successfully, you create an unwitting sociopathy, a process that demands the product be as addictive as possible and a culture that is in thrall to the machine that rewards its employees by increasing those metrics. You're no longer thinking about purpose or wondering about what you're doing to your users. You simply realise that if you send this notification at this time, with this colour button, in this place, with this tagline then the machine likes it. Multiple people might contribute a tiny piece of a horrifying and manipulative whole and never quite realise the true horror of the monster they've helped build.
    - card_zero 9mo ago
      That horror being..? I understand that this is a ruthless quest for engagement by any means, good or bad. For instance ...? I don't mean to make you do all the work here: I can see a couple of pages from the introduction which mention "variability" and "investment": > What distinguishes the Hook Model from a plain vanilla feedback loop is the Hook’s ability to create a craving. Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire. The unsurprising response of your fridge light turning on when you open the door doesn’t drive you to keep opening it again and again. However, add some variability to the mix—suppose a different treat magically appears in your fridge every time you open it—and voila, intrigue is created. So that's "variability". I'm not hugely impressed. "Investment", meanwhile, is when you set preferences or connect to friends, so you feel like you lose out if you stop attending. I can see that these might be foolish ideas. But I can also see that foolish ideas are part of "engaging" with anything - something traditionally wholesome such as a piano, for instance. Imagine I'm a Victorian lady, and I've bought a piano and I invite my friends over for a regular evening of singing art songs, so that's "investment": also we buy new song sheets every time, so there's "variety". I'm totally hooked on this harmless positive thing, am I? Or do I in fact just like it and have free will?
      - Quarrelsome 9mo ago
        Are you being intentionally obstinate? I can't help but feel like you're sealioning. An increasing number of young people get their news from social media and what is "engaging" isn't necessarily what's true. This leads to greater political polarisation, nuance is lost, tribalism increases, people treat conversations as things to be won as opposed to opportunities to share information. People spend their entire time doomscrolling because everything is "engaging" so it caters to their paranoia and attempts to keep them glued to their phone, ramping up their anxiety and paranoia because it makes them more money. People stay up late scrolling a feed that hooks them, sleep less, perform less well at work, may lose their job and all the ramifications that go along with that. Parents spend more time on their phones than with their children, a generation of babies and toddlers are having to compete for attention with these apps and in many cases fail because they're designed so well. What's worse is the babies get thrust an ipad and then are brought up by arbitrary strangers who may not have their best interests at heart and are exposed to considerable amounts of advertising at far too young an age. I could go on but I feel like you're just going to give another one liner where you pretend that actually there's nothing wrong with this or smth.

Simboo 9mo ago

I agree.

nobodywillobsrv 9mo ago

It's worth stating that addictive tech is addictive partly because it doesn't work very well. So they build useful things and then make them pretty bad and less useful. If they were useful your interest or need would complete and you would move on. Fundamentally I think it is important to say this. Addiction confounds some things in the space of designed systems

Quarrelsome 9mo ago
Spot on. Like how Facebook used to be quite useful to stay in touch with friends, or how dating websites used to be kinda decent to find like-MINDED people but have now all been enshittified in order to keep people on them.
- thijson 9mo ago
  I used to not mind my kids watching Youtube on the home TV, but lately when I walk by they are doom scrolling one short after the other. I tell them not to watch shorts, but a day later I walk by and they are back to doom scrolling. I'm finally forced to remove Youtube from the TV. On the phone, Instagram is the same way, I see my teenager doom scrolling it quite often. They claim it helps them relax.
1718627440 9mo ago
It depends on what you define their use to be. If the point is to gain data from as much people as possible, they do work pretty well.