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Large portions of the tech sector thrive off the attention economy. If your goal as a product is to have someone spend hours a day everyday engaged with your p

Large portions of the tech sector thrive off the attention economy. If your goal as a product is to have someone spend hours a day everyday engaged with your product, and you focus on a data driven approach to maximize the time spent on the app, then you’ll create something not dissimilar to addiction.

embedding-shape 8mo ago
Supposedly the people working for these companies are "the brightest of the bright" but if they didn't even notice that this was what they were contributing to, what kind of intelligence is even that? Not everyone working there could possibly be so socially inept that they didn't realize what they helped building right? Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals? I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place, even before it started making the news.
- LiquidSky 8mo ago
  > I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place Money.
- post-it 8mo ago
  Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine. They're completing an 8-point ticket to integrate a new scroll-tracking library, or a 5-point ticket to send an extra parameter to the logging system. When there's thousands of people working on a product, nobody feels like they're doing anything impactful.
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    > Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine. Are people really not aware of what the company's overall mission, product and impact is? I'm finding that hard to believe. If you accept employment at Facebook, regardless of what department you're in, you know exactly what kind of company you're contributing your time, energy and effort into.
    - elevatortrim 8mo ago
      The problem is, between producing cigarettes, weapons, disposable fashion, sugary food and drink, disposable vapes, extremely wasteful cars, addicting game mechanics, many of the financial "product"s, ad optimisation, ..., not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy.
      - blibble 8mo ago
        > not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy let's be honest everyone working as a software engineer at facebook is perfectly capable of finding employment elsewhere working there is a deliberate decision to prioritise comp over the stability of the world
        elevatortrim 8mo ago
        agreed about this group in particular.
      - embedding-shape 8mo ago
        > not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy We're talking about software engineers here, not "cleaner taking up any job you can". Literally one of the most well paid jobs considering the amount of effort you put into it. People slave away on fields picking berries for less, with more impact on their life expectancy, if there is any career you can almost jump between jobs in just a few weeks, software engineering is one of them.
    - StilesCrisis 8mo ago
      I joined Google Analytics in 2018 and had no idea that Analytics really meant "Tracking and Remarketing" until about 3 weeks into the role. At that point, what're you going to do, quit? I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do, but it took two years to get out cleanly.
      - embedding-shape 8mo ago
  - codyb 8mo ago
    I think it's a fair point to say that many people do not feel as if they're the ones responsible even if they're direct contributors.
- doron 8mo ago
  in the words of Upton Sinclair "“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” This affects the brightest of the bright and the less talented alike.
- ecshafer 8mo ago
  Its basically impossible for them to not notice. I know someone who is a software engineer for lockheed. He told me that back in the 90s he wrote a bunch of software for a missile. He wasn't told that is what he was working on, it was all classified, and part of that is you only know what you need to know. But from the specifications and how the math worked, it was very clear to him that it was a surface to air missile. After the fact, it was confirmed that is what he was working on. Google and Meta are surely more open than a classified missile project. So it would really be beyond the pale for someone to not realize that what they are working on is an additive platform, sure I am willing to bet they didn't say "Addictive" and instead cleaned it up in tidy corporate product management lingo, "highly engaged users" or something like that. But its just impossible.
  - shermantanktop 8mo ago
    It’s simpler than that. Engagement increases are the perpetual goal. The vector is constant. Relative motion is all that matters. Nobody would talk about whether the product is now “addictive” because that suggests crossing a finish line to completion, and we can’t ever be done.
- Spooky23 8mo ago
  People are motivated by money, and the aspects of the job that aren’t toxic.
- komali2 8mo ago
  > Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals? Surely it's this, right? I just had what I would consider an intelligent conversation with someone wherein we eventually settled on a core ideological difference between us is that I thought all humans have equal value (infinite and immeasurable), while he believed a human's value is only as much as said human can generate money within capitalism (basically, if their salary or net worth is low, they must not be very valuable people, and we shouldn't do things for them like give them healthcare). I think it's a bit of a dangerous fallacy to assume that intelligence naturally leads people to arriving at your own personal ideology. There were plenty of highly intelligent Nazis or Imperial Japanese. They either didn't care about the regimes they supported or leveraged their intelligence to rationalize it (requiring fallacy to do so of course - or perhaps not, if they really did just want their subgroup to dominate all others and believed it was possible to do so). For me it's not smarts alone to define my value system. It can't be purely rationality, since the premise of deciding good and bad is subjective and dependent on what you value. You can argue these things rationally and use logic to determine outcomes, but at the end of the day there's a messy human brain deciding good/bad, important/not important, relevant/not relevant.
- jimnotgym 8mo ago
  It is interesting that Software Engineering as it's practitioners like to call it, is unregulated. If you want to be an accountant, lawyer, surveyor et cetera, one has to learn about ethics, and violating ones professional institute's code of ethics may result in you being unable to practice in future.
  - Forgeties79 8mo ago
    I am amazed that I’ve never considered this before
    - nickcw 8mo ago
      Have been surveying Computer Science courses at university with my son recently. All the ones we looked at had a compulsory ethics module which shows the direction things are headed at least.
      - embedding-shape 8mo ago
        I wonder how many programmers working today are coming through universities though? I'm self-taught, most of my programmers friends are as well, same with most of my colleagues back when I worked. I can remember maybe the name of 3-4 people in total, out of maybe ~30 or so, who went to university for computer science before they started working.
      - ang_cire 8mo ago
        In my experience CompSci ethics modules are about hacking or mishandling user data or code theft... i.e. things that companies don't want their employees doing. I've yet to see an ethics module that covers ethics from the perspective of ethics over profit.
        jimnotgym 8mo ago
        Whereas an accountant is taught that they should resign rather than get involved in unethical practices, like profit manipulation for example. I interview people with ethics questions. I discussed them frequently when training. I refused the pressure to be unethical when I was pushed, even when I knew I would be fired (which I was). I was able to discuss it with old mentors, who made time to meet with me, even when I hadn't worked at their company for years. Lastly I disclosed why I was fired at interview for a new job (without the confidential details), and was hired partly on the strength of it by a person who had been through much the same. And I didn't learn it at University, I learnt it on my professional qualification, that was around 3 years long and was postgraduate level, although had non-degree based entry routes for technicians. It also required a wide range of supervised experience.
- elevatortrim 8mo ago
  Intelligent does not mean moral. Typically, intelligent people get so much joy out of being able to do something (such as addicting the masses), they do not stop to think whether that's a good idea. Especially when that's the very thing that's fuelling their extremely lavish lifestyle.
  - codyb 8mo ago
    A lot of folk justify it to themselves. I've heard "well, you have to change things from the inside" before. And a lot of people have been there for a while, it wasn't always... quite as bad even if a lot of the warning signs were absolutely there. I was actually just thinking to myself this morning that I literally have no idea what these feeds look like at this point, but more and more people seem to be looking at me with envy when I say I don't have any lol. I'm kind of curious and might ask my friends if I can see what they're looking at day to day if they'll show me.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago
  At the end of the day these brainiac innovators still just chase money and tail.
- DHolzer 8mo ago
  250k per year would make me reconfigure my internal right/wrong classifier real fast...
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    Really, that little? Don't feel even slightly embarrassed about your morals being so cheap? You'd hurt your neighbors and acquaintances for 20K a month? Given you probably don't earn that today, say you got paid that now instead of whatever you earn, what would you spend that money on in reality?
    - baq 8mo ago
      if you're literally anywhere in the west other than bay area or NYC this is good to amazing money
      - embedding-shape 8mo ago
        Sure, but what about all the other aspects of your life, those contributing more to your happiness? Corrupted people have money as their top goal in life, everyone else is trying to live a good life once they have enough, but there seemingly is no "enough" for quite a large part of the population, and in some places of the world this obsession seems worse than in others.
        baq 8mo ago
        Hate the game, not the players. Somebody is supposed to be regulating this stuff. If you're in a poor city or country having a shot at such compensation would be life changing for the whole family, not just you and game-theoretically someone else will take that job anyway, for similar reasons, too.
        embedding-shape 8mo ago
        > Hate the game, not the players. No, I'm sorry, but fuck that. I've been one of the players, and it's definitively possible to not play the game, especially when you see what's going on around you, and still live a perfectly fine life that is above the living standards of most others in your country, if you're working as a software engineer. And I'm saying this as someone who never came close to FAANG salaries yet was lucky enough to paid enough to live better than I thought I'd ever do, but initially had really shit living situation and have had to steal at one point to feed myself. I've had chances that could mean I'd live a life of luxury earlier than what it ended up being, but I couldn't live with myself if I did those things, when I had anything resembling of a choice. There is almost always a choice, and "hate the game not the player" is such a bullshit excuse for people to just participate because everyone else is. It's spineless and the answer of a chicken who doesn't want to consider the consequences of their actions. Hate the players and the game.
- rbtbisrespected 8mo ago
  [dead]
- ang_cire 8mo ago
  Many people get used to the paycheck before they really discover the extent of their predatory practices. A lot of people will choose their own comfort and stability over morality.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
  Hey emsh! So what I had written was quite long and I have been writing it since your comment was 6 minutes ago. https://writeforfun.mataroa.blog/blog/the-brightest-of-the-bright/ https://writeforfun.mataroa.blog/blog/the-brightest-of-the-b... Essentially a thought dump. Hope you can read it and we can discuss it. Have a nice day!
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    While I appreciate the mention and the flattery, I'm just a person, my thought are not special and I'm starting to feel like you might be better off not focusing on what specifically I am saying :) Again, I do appreciate it, can't deny it feels nice initially, but don't treat me like I'm special, I'm not, I'm just sharing stray thoughts sent out the ether like everyone else.
    - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
      haha, Sorry but I didn't intend to flatter you (atleast this time although your work in oaoh is commendable) but I literally just wrote it as a (blog?) because I was already writing a comment and I didn't want a massive wall of text & also you can see from my other project that I wanted to write more as blog posts rather than HN comments when they get too big. I wrote the 6 minute mark to think of how long it took me to write the comment which was around ~50 minutes ish. And I mentioned you many times in the comment-ish because I had written something first and then wrote something on top of it & thus many initial mentions. Anyways I have now removed the mentions and honestly a lot of this is just transparency efforts. I literally just write whatever I am thinking :)
- jerf 8mo ago
  We have separate words for intelligence and wisdom for a reason. Intelligence is not particularly correlated to ethics or morality. Probably sounds obvious when I say it directly, but it is clearly something that you have banging around in the back of your mind. Bring it forward out of the morass of unexamined beliefs so you can see that it is clearly wrong, and update the rest of your beliefs that are implicitly based on the idea that intelligence somehow leads to some particular morality as appropriate.
- anonymars 8mo ago
  I believe the quote is, "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
- foobar_______ 8mo ago
  Fatten up that wallet with 500K a year and tech stock RSUs and people pretty quickly forget about their morals. Seriously, they tell themselves the same story: "ah this is just temporary. I can make big money for a couple years then get out." But 2 years turns to 5, then they buy a house in the Bay area and now they're stuck. Same thing for Seattle.
- intended 8mo ago
  Oh they absolutely know. I've had some tragi-comic interactions with trust and safety folk in tech. You aren't going to be very popular in the firm telling people their stuff is bad for users. Its easiest to think of tech firms as a tale of 2 different dichotomies. Internally, the firm is split between the people who are told to do best for their users and the people who are told to do best for the next quarterly earnings call. So you may have a bright and shiny idea, but its not really going to increase time on site. And if you don't increase ToS, then that other social platform which is nibbling at your lunch, will starve you into an early grave. The other strange juxtaposition is between tech firms trying to suggest actually better policy, while also sitting on data that they dont want to share because they are afraid it will get used against them. Which it absolutely will, because when people understand how the sausage is made, they are absolutely aghast. This leaves regulators mostly in the dark, and then they are forced to act. At which point lobbying comes into play once again. You wouldn't be alone in thinking this whole story sounds similar to Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
- stronglikedan 8mo ago
  Most people just want a steady paycheck, so it's not hard to find a bunch of very smart people that just want a paycheck. As for morals go, this topic is way too subjective to say whether it's wrong. People can make great cases for and against aspects of it. It'll be interesting to see what the jury says. It'll definitely be a precedent setting case.
gadders 8mo ago
Reminds me of a Judge Dredd story from the 80s. A confectionary company invented a type of bubble gum (called "Umpty Candy") that became addictive not because it had any drugs in it, but because they kept optimising the taste until it became too delicious to refuse.
- testing22321 8mo ago
  Potato chip brands spend enormous sums of money on flavour engineering for that very goal.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mentalgear 8mo ago
    fun fact: the people working for those companies, even though the attribute they are optimizing for is "addictability", they call it "snackability". Probably b/c of motivation and ... legal.
    - incahoots 8mo ago
      additional fun fact: Philip Morris (yes that one) controlled the majority of these companies and brands during the 80s & 90s.
- maurits 8mo ago
  "the bliss curve" [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
- incahoots 8mo ago
  I was thinking Robocop had the relevance factor these days, though I do enjoy the aesthetics of Dredd.
parpfish 8mo ago
So many problems on the internet stem from products trying to be “free” and funding themselves with ads. I’m starting to think that we need to push for more of the internet going behind paywalls, which is weird because I’ve always been somebody who claimed to hate walled gardens and supported “information should be free”.
- pixl97 8mo ago
  Bullshit Asymmetry. The ease of creation of digital data has lead to the creation of an infinite sea of bullshit. Ads/attention economy are just the newest layer of this asymmetry. Curated datasets are a solution to the problem, as this was how old media worked. The problem is then how will it be paid for.
- mrweasel 8mo ago
  Many of the products, while they do provide value, aren't providing services that are attractive enough in their own right, to generate multi-billion dollar companies. Facebook is pretty much a niche product, Instagram provides maybe a little entertainment, but with out the addiction part, it's not really worth as much as Meta shareholders would like. Same with search, or AI, clearly there's value, but it's hard to become a $1T company, while still be ethical. We need the world to be okay with much much small, less valuable tech companies.
- anthonypasq 8mo ago
  this is because people do not know how to accurately value their time and attention
myrmidon 8mo ago
In a perfect world, when you realise that your company creates and fuels addiction in children, that company should be concerned about having resulting profits seized (fully!) and responsible decisionmakers criminally prosecuted. I would argue that we fail completely at doing this (historically, too, see e.g. leaded gas). This incentivizes companies toward net-negative behavior until it is fully regulated despite knowing better, because it is clear that it won't be really punished anyway and remain a net-positive for them. It is a difficult problem though.
- elevatortrim 8mo ago
  I am all for it, I do not think Mark Zuckerberg deserves any of the billions of dollars he has and he has contributed nothing to society in return for that. On the contrary, everyone knows his contribution has been a net negative but our systems do not accurately reward positive contribution, or disincentivise the negative.
  - macintux 8mo ago
    It has been frequently demonstrated that capitalism is terrible at pricing in externalities. In the U.S. it used to be industrial waste in the environment; now it's climate change and addiction and culture wars.
  - NickC25 8mo ago
    Upvoting you because all the Zuck worshipers and meta stockholders downvoted you for speaking the truth. The guy is worth a quarter trillion dollars and doesn't seem intent on calling it a day, and insists on destroying society's youth so he can make more money. Intelligent or not, that's a mental disease. Imagine having that sort of money where if 99% was taken away, you'd still have over 2 billion dollars to your name....and you refuse to just walk away and focus on things like your family, making the world a better place, or just enjoying your life. Tom took the money for MySpace and actually seems to enjoy time with his family, traveling, doing photography, etc. For all his (many) faults, Gates took a look at the polio virus and said "I'm bigger than you" and pretty much spent until it was wiped out. Doesn't counteract the bad or the Epstein stuff at all, but wiping out polio has helped people. Mark's done jack shit to genuinely help people besides his shareholders and his immediate family. One might argue that his whole bunker thing is an indicator that he's realized he's done tremendous damage to society, but instead of fixing it, he's insulating himself for when the proverbial bomb goes off.
quotemstr 8mo ago
"[T]hrive off the attention economy"? What a sinister way to describe building products that people want to use to connect to people whose words and images they enjoy. Nobody is pushing drugs here. There's no fraud or deception. The whole situation is Alice not liking the medium Bob and Charlie use to communicate and what they say to each other over it. Alice needs to mind her own business. She doesn't get to use the power of the state to separate Bob and Charlie just because she's indignant. When you define "addiction" as anything people who at a level you consider excessive, the word expands to cover every domain of life and so becomes worse than useless.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- Forgeties79 8mo ago
  How is it sinister to describe what it is? The industry literally uses that term. Their entire goal is to maximize the amount of time you are on the screen by grabbing your attention with every single lesson they have learned from decades and billions of dollars of research, almost universally in service of throwing ads up in front of you. More time = more ads = more revenue. It is not a fair fight and to act like this is anything less than a corporate-run legal addiction machine is way too generous to these companies given what we know now. Sometimes I feel like people only consider something addictive if it involves slot machine mechanics or an actual narcotic. But we know now it’s much broader than that. Your argument held water in 2010. Not in 2026. We know better now.
- elevatortrim 8mo ago
  You could describe drugs the same way, no? building products to connect people to substances they enjoy? There would be no fraud and deception too. This is not about Alice liking or disliking it. This is about allowing Mark to engineer a system where statistically too many Bob's and Charlie's can't refuse (for the same reasons gambling is more common in poor communities), making the society worse off at a result.
- incahoots 8mo ago
  I’d argue that just because there’s no clear indication of fraud or deception immediately apparent doesn’t discount the reality that much of society has become dependent on their phones. It’s pretty clear it’s designed that way—otherwise, its effectiveness wouldn’t be nearly as troubling as it is. Advertising absolutely has overlap as of that of propaganda, and engagement remains the central focus of the millions of apps that populate stores and devices (along with the constant stream of ads that accompany them). Working in transitional housing brings a unique perspective that’s often unshared with the vast majority of everyday people. When you do this for a time, you start to recognize patterns and the overlap in environments around you. In the case of addiction, it certainly applies to a whole swath of life that most never notice.
incahoots 8mo ago
I mean engagement is the game. The overlap of other mediums like TV, movies, music, gambling clearly have the same focus, though they could only wish to have the same death grip that social media has been tuned to achieve.
socalgal2 8mo ago
The single thing I find most addicting in my life for the last 5-6 years is HN. I feel like all the same criticisms can be applied here. HN chooses their algo and how quickly upvotes degrade and how much they are worth for keeping something on the front page. It works to keep me checking multi times a day. As an example, they could instead pick to only update the front page once every 24 hours and my addition would disappear because I'd know "no updates until tomorrow". As it is, I get that random reward addiction of "maybe there's something interest now". I guess HN is an evil company engineering addiction.
- AstroBen 8mo ago
  You can get an RSS feed here: https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ Seems that might solve your problem You can do a "best" top submissions with a minimum of upvotes which ends up not being that many per day.. and you still stay up to date

embedding-shape 8mo ago

Supposedly the people working for these companies are "the brightest of the bright" but if they didn't even notice that this was what they were contributing to, what kind of intelligence is even that? Not everyone working there could possibly be so socially inept that they didn't realize what they helped building right? Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals? I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place, even before it started making the news.

LiquidSky 8mo ago
> I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place Money.
post-it 8mo ago
Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine. They're completing an 8-point ticket to integrate a new scroll-tracking library, or a 5-point ticket to send an extra parameter to the logging system. When there's thousands of people working on a product, nobody feels like they're doing anything impactful.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  > Because nobody is clocking in and willfully contributing to the addiction machine. Are people really not aware of what the company's overall mission, product and impact is? I'm finding that hard to believe. If you accept employment at Facebook, regardless of what department you're in, you know exactly what kind of company you're contributing your time, energy and effort into.
  - elevatortrim 8mo ago
    The problem is, between producing cigarettes, weapons, disposable fashion, sugary food and drink, disposable vapes, extremely wasteful cars, addicting game mechanics, many of the financial "product"s, ad optimisation, ..., not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy.
    - blibble 8mo ago
      > not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy let's be honest everyone working as a software engineer at facebook is perfectly capable of finding employment elsewhere working there is a deliberate decision to prioritise comp over the stability of the world
      - elevatortrim 8mo ago
        agreed about this group in particular.
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      > not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy We're talking about software engineers here, not "cleaner taking up any job you can". Literally one of the most well paid jobs considering the amount of effort you put into it. People slave away on fields picking berries for less, with more impact on their life expectancy, if there is any career you can almost jump between jobs in just a few weeks, software engineering is one of them.
  - StilesCrisis 8mo ago
    I joined Google Analytics in 2018 and had no idea that Analytics really meant "Tracking and Remarketing" until about 3 weeks into the role. At that point, what're you going to do, quit? I knew it wasn't what I wanted to do, but it took two years to get out cleanly.
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
- codyb 8mo ago
  I think it's a fair point to say that many people do not feel as if they're the ones responsible even if they're direct contributors.
doron 8mo ago
in the words of Upton Sinclair "“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” This affects the brightest of the bright and the less talented alike.
ecshafer 8mo ago
Its basically impossible for them to not notice. I know someone who is a software engineer for lockheed. He told me that back in the 90s he wrote a bunch of software for a missile. He wasn't told that is what he was working on, it was all classified, and part of that is you only know what you need to know. But from the specifications and how the math worked, it was very clear to him that it was a surface to air missile. After the fact, it was confirmed that is what he was working on. Google and Meta are surely more open than a classified missile project. So it would really be beyond the pale for someone to not realize that what they are working on is an additive platform, sure I am willing to bet they didn't say "Addictive" and instead cleaned it up in tidy corporate product management lingo, "highly engaged users" or something like that. But its just impossible.
- shermantanktop 8mo ago
  It’s simpler than that. Engagement increases are the perpetual goal. The vector is constant. Relative motion is all that matters. Nobody would talk about whether the product is now “addictive” because that suggests crossing a finish line to completion, and we can’t ever be done.
Spooky23 8mo ago
People are motivated by money, and the aspects of the job that aren’t toxic.
komali2 8mo ago
> Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals? Surely it's this, right? I just had what I would consider an intelligent conversation with someone wherein we eventually settled on a core ideological difference between us is that I thought all humans have equal value (infinite and immeasurable), while he believed a human's value is only as much as said human can generate money within capitalism (basically, if their salary or net worth is low, they must not be very valuable people, and we shouldn't do things for them like give them healthcare). I think it's a bit of a dangerous fallacy to assume that intelligence naturally leads people to arriving at your own personal ideology. There were plenty of highly intelligent Nazis or Imperial Japanese. They either didn't care about the regimes they supported or leveraged their intelligence to rationalize it (requiring fallacy to do so of course - or perhaps not, if they really did just want their subgroup to dominate all others and believed it was possible to do so). For me it's not smarts alone to define my value system. It can't be purely rationality, since the premise of deciding good and bad is subjective and dependent on what you value. You can argue these things rationally and use logic to determine outcomes, but at the end of the day there's a messy human brain deciding good/bad, important/not important, relevant/not relevant.
jimnotgym 8mo ago
It is interesting that Software Engineering as it's practitioners like to call it, is unregulated. If you want to be an accountant, lawyer, surveyor et cetera, one has to learn about ethics, and violating ones professional institute's code of ethics may result in you being unable to practice in future.
- Forgeties79 8mo ago
  I am amazed that I’ve never considered this before
  - nickcw 8mo ago
    Have been surveying Computer Science courses at university with my son recently. All the ones we looked at had a compulsory ethics module which shows the direction things are headed at least.
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      I wonder how many programmers working today are coming through universities though? I'm self-taught, most of my programmers friends are as well, same with most of my colleagues back when I worked. I can remember maybe the name of 3-4 people in total, out of maybe ~30 or so, who went to university for computer science before they started working.
    - ang_cire 8mo ago
      In my experience CompSci ethics modules are about hacking or mishandling user data or code theft... i.e. things that companies don't want their employees doing. I've yet to see an ethics module that covers ethics from the perspective of ethics over profit.
      - jimnotgym 8mo ago
        Whereas an accountant is taught that they should resign rather than get involved in unethical practices, like profit manipulation for example. I interview people with ethics questions. I discussed them frequently when training. I refused the pressure to be unethical when I was pushed, even when I knew I would be fired (which I was). I was able to discuss it with old mentors, who made time to meet with me, even when I hadn't worked at their company for years. Lastly I disclosed why I was fired at interview for a new job (without the confidential details), and was hired partly on the strength of it by a person who had been through much the same. And I didn't learn it at University, I learnt it on my professional qualification, that was around 3 years long and was postgraduate level, although had non-degree based entry routes for technicians. It also required a wide range of supervised experience.
elevatortrim 8mo ago
Intelligent does not mean moral. Typically, intelligent people get so much joy out of being able to do something (such as addicting the masses), they do not stop to think whether that's a good idea. Especially when that's the very thing that's fuelling their extremely lavish lifestyle.
- codyb 8mo ago
  A lot of folk justify it to themselves. I've heard "well, you have to change things from the inside" before. And a lot of people have been there for a while, it wasn't always... quite as bad even if a lot of the warning signs were absolutely there. I was actually just thinking to myself this morning that I literally have no idea what these feeds look like at this point, but more and more people seem to be looking at me with envy when I say I don't have any lol. I'm kind of curious and might ask my friends if I can see what they're looking at day to day if they'll show me.
2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo ago
At the end of the day these brainiac innovators still just chase money and tail.
DHolzer 8mo ago
250k per year would make me reconfigure my internal right/wrong classifier real fast...
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  Really, that little? Don't feel even slightly embarrassed about your morals being so cheap? You'd hurt your neighbors and acquaintances for 20K a month? Given you probably don't earn that today, say you got paid that now instead of whatever you earn, what would you spend that money on in reality?
  - baq 8mo ago
    if you're literally anywhere in the west other than bay area or NYC this is good to amazing money
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      Sure, but what about all the other aspects of your life, those contributing more to your happiness? Corrupted people have money as their top goal in life, everyone else is trying to live a good life once they have enough, but there seemingly is no "enough" for quite a large part of the population, and in some places of the world this obsession seems worse than in others.
      - baq 8mo ago
        Hate the game, not the players. Somebody is supposed to be regulating this stuff. If you're in a poor city or country having a shot at such compensation would be life changing for the whole family, not just you and game-theoretically someone else will take that job anyway, for similar reasons, too.
        embedding-shape 8mo ago
        > Hate the game, not the players. No, I'm sorry, but fuck that. I've been one of the players, and it's definitively possible to not play the game, especially when you see what's going on around you, and still live a perfectly fine life that is above the living standards of most others in your country, if you're working as a software engineer. And I'm saying this as someone who never came close to FAANG salaries yet was lucky enough to paid enough to live better than I thought I'd ever do, but initially had really shit living situation and have had to steal at one point to feed myself. I've had chances that could mean I'd live a life of luxury earlier than what it ended up being, but I couldn't live with myself if I did those things, when I had anything resembling of a choice. There is almost always a choice, and "hate the game not the player" is such a bullshit excuse for people to just participate because everyone else is. It's spineless and the answer of a chicken who doesn't want to consider the consequences of their actions. Hate the players and the game.
rbtbisrespected 8mo ago
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ang_cire 8mo ago
Many people get used to the paycheck before they really discover the extent of their predatory practices. A lot of people will choose their own comfort and stability over morality.
Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
Hey emsh! So what I had written was quite long and I have been writing it since your comment was 6 minutes ago. https://writeforfun.mataroa.blog/blog/the-brightest-of-the-bright/ https://writeforfun.mataroa.blog/blog/the-brightest-of-the-b... Essentially a thought dump. Hope you can read it and we can discuss it. Have a nice day!
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  While I appreciate the mention and the flattery, I'm just a person, my thought are not special and I'm starting to feel like you might be better off not focusing on what specifically I am saying :) Again, I do appreciate it, can't deny it feels nice initially, but don't treat me like I'm special, I'm not, I'm just sharing stray thoughts sent out the ether like everyone else.
  - Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
    haha, Sorry but I didn't intend to flatter you (atleast this time although your work in oaoh is commendable) but I literally just wrote it as a (blog?) because I was already writing a comment and I didn't want a massive wall of text & also you can see from my other project that I wanted to write more as blog posts rather than HN comments when they get too big. I wrote the 6 minute mark to think of how long it took me to write the comment which was around ~50 minutes ish. And I mentioned you many times in the comment-ish because I had written something first and then wrote something on top of it & thus many initial mentions. Anyways I have now removed the mentions and honestly a lot of this is just transparency efforts. I literally just write whatever I am thinking :)
jerf 8mo ago
We have separate words for intelligence and wisdom for a reason. Intelligence is not particularly correlated to ethics or morality. Probably sounds obvious when I say it directly, but it is clearly something that you have banging around in the back of your mind. Bring it forward out of the morass of unexamined beliefs so you can see that it is clearly wrong, and update the rest of your beliefs that are implicitly based on the idea that intelligence somehow leads to some particular morality as appropriate.
anonymars 8mo ago
I believe the quote is, "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
foobar_______ 8mo ago
Fatten up that wallet with 500K a year and tech stock RSUs and people pretty quickly forget about their morals. Seriously, they tell themselves the same story: "ah this is just temporary. I can make big money for a couple years then get out." But 2 years turns to 5, then they buy a house in the Bay area and now they're stuck. Same thing for Seattle.
intended 8mo ago
Oh they absolutely know. I've had some tragi-comic interactions with trust and safety folk in tech. You aren't going to be very popular in the firm telling people their stuff is bad for users. Its easiest to think of tech firms as a tale of 2 different dichotomies. Internally, the firm is split between the people who are told to do best for their users and the people who are told to do best for the next quarterly earnings call. So you may have a bright and shiny idea, but its not really going to increase time on site. And if you don't increase ToS, then that other social platform which is nibbling at your lunch, will starve you into an early grave. The other strange juxtaposition is between tech firms trying to suggest actually better policy, while also sitting on data that they dont want to share because they are afraid it will get used against them. Which it absolutely will, because when people understand how the sausage is made, they are absolutely aghast. This leaves regulators mostly in the dark, and then they are forced to act. At which point lobbying comes into play once again. You wouldn't be alone in thinking this whole story sounds similar to Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
stronglikedan 8mo ago
Most people just want a steady paycheck, so it's not hard to find a bunch of very smart people that just want a paycheck. As for morals go, this topic is way too subjective to say whether it's wrong. People can make great cases for and against aspects of it. It'll be interesting to see what the jury says. It'll definitely be a precedent setting case.

gadders 8mo ago

Reminds me of a Judge Dredd story from the 80s. A confectionary company invented a type of bubble gum (called "Umpty Candy") that became addictive not because it had any drugs in it, but because they kept optimising the taste until it became too delicious to refuse.

testing22321 8mo ago
Potato chip brands spend enormous sums of money on flavour engineering for that very goal.
- deleted 8mo ago
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- mentalgear 8mo ago
  fun fact: the people working for those companies, even though the attribute they are optimizing for is "addictability", they call it "snackability". Probably b/c of motivation and ... legal.
  - incahoots 8mo ago
    additional fun fact: Philip Morris (yes that one) controlled the majority of these companies and brands during the 80s & 90s.
maurits 8mo ago
"the bliss curve" [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
incahoots 8mo ago
I was thinking Robocop had the relevance factor these days, though I do enjoy the aesthetics of Dredd.

parpfish 8mo ago

So many problems on the internet stem from products trying to be “free” and funding themselves with ads. I’m starting to think that we need to push for more of the internet going behind paywalls, which is weird because I’ve always been somebody who claimed to hate walled gardens and supported “information should be free”.

pixl97 8mo ago
Bullshit Asymmetry. The ease of creation of digital data has lead to the creation of an infinite sea of bullshit. Ads/attention economy are just the newest layer of this asymmetry. Curated datasets are a solution to the problem, as this was how old media worked. The problem is then how will it be paid for.
mrweasel 8mo ago
Many of the products, while they do provide value, aren't providing services that are attractive enough in their own right, to generate multi-billion dollar companies. Facebook is pretty much a niche product, Instagram provides maybe a little entertainment, but with out the addiction part, it's not really worth as much as Meta shareholders would like. Same with search, or AI, clearly there's value, but it's hard to become a $1T company, while still be ethical. We need the world to be okay with much much small, less valuable tech companies.
anthonypasq 8mo ago
this is because people do not know how to accurately value their time and attention

myrmidon 8mo ago

In a perfect world, when you realise that your company creates and fuels addiction in children, that company should be concerned about having resulting profits seized (fully!) and responsible decisionmakers criminally prosecuted. I would argue that we fail completely at doing this (historically, too, see e.g. leaded gas). This incentivizes companies toward net-negative behavior until it is fully regulated despite knowing better, because it is clear that it won't be really punished anyway and remain a net-positive for them. It is a difficult problem though.

elevatortrim 8mo ago
I am all for it, I do not think Mark Zuckerberg deserves any of the billions of dollars he has and he has contributed nothing to society in return for that. On the contrary, everyone knows his contribution has been a net negative but our systems do not accurately reward positive contribution, or disincentivise the negative.
- macintux 8mo ago
  It has been frequently demonstrated that capitalism is terrible at pricing in externalities. In the U.S. it used to be industrial waste in the environment; now it's climate change and addiction and culture wars.
- NickC25 8mo ago
  Upvoting you because all the Zuck worshipers and meta stockholders downvoted you for speaking the truth. The guy is worth a quarter trillion dollars and doesn't seem intent on calling it a day, and insists on destroying society's youth so he can make more money. Intelligent or not, that's a mental disease. Imagine having that sort of money where if 99% was taken away, you'd still have over 2 billion dollars to your name....and you refuse to just walk away and focus on things like your family, making the world a better place, or just enjoying your life. Tom took the money for MySpace and actually seems to enjoy time with his family, traveling, doing photography, etc. For all his (many) faults, Gates took a look at the polio virus and said "I'm bigger than you" and pretty much spent until it was wiped out. Doesn't counteract the bad or the Epstein stuff at all, but wiping out polio has helped people. Mark's done jack shit to genuinely help people besides his shareholders and his immediate family. One might argue that his whole bunker thing is an indicator that he's realized he's done tremendous damage to society, but instead of fixing it, he's insulating himself for when the proverbial bomb goes off.

quotemstr 8mo ago

"[T]hrive off the attention economy"? What a sinister way to describe building products that people want to use to connect to people whose words and images they enjoy. Nobody is pushing drugs here. There's no fraud or deception. The whole situation is Alice not liking the medium Bob and Charlie use to communicate and what they say to each other over it. Alice needs to mind her own business. She doesn't get to use the power of the state to separate Bob and Charlie just because she's indignant. When you define "addiction" as anything people who at a level you consider excessive, the word expands to cover every domain of life and so becomes worse than useless.

deleted 8mo ago
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Forgeties79 8mo ago
How is it sinister to describe what it is? The industry literally uses that term. Their entire goal is to maximize the amount of time you are on the screen by grabbing your attention with every single lesson they have learned from decades and billions of dollars of research, almost universally in service of throwing ads up in front of you. More time = more ads = more revenue. It is not a fair fight and to act like this is anything less than a corporate-run legal addiction machine is way too generous to these companies given what we know now. Sometimes I feel like people only consider something addictive if it involves slot machine mechanics or an actual narcotic. But we know now it’s much broader than that. Your argument held water in 2010. Not in 2026. We know better now.
elevatortrim 8mo ago
You could describe drugs the same way, no? building products to connect people to substances they enjoy? There would be no fraud and deception too. This is not about Alice liking or disliking it. This is about allowing Mark to engineer a system where statistically too many Bob's and Charlie's can't refuse (for the same reasons gambling is more common in poor communities), making the society worse off at a result.
incahoots 8mo ago
I’d argue that just because there’s no clear indication of fraud or deception immediately apparent doesn’t discount the reality that much of society has become dependent on their phones. It’s pretty clear it’s designed that way—otherwise, its effectiveness wouldn’t be nearly as troubling as it is. Advertising absolutely has overlap as of that of propaganda, and engagement remains the central focus of the millions of apps that populate stores and devices (along with the constant stream of ads that accompany them). Working in transitional housing brings a unique perspective that’s often unshared with the vast majority of everyday people. When you do this for a time, you start to recognize patterns and the overlap in environments around you. In the case of addiction, it certainly applies to a whole swath of life that most never notice.

incahoots 8mo ago

I mean engagement is the game. The overlap of other mediums like TV, movies, music, gambling clearly have the same focus, though they could only wish to have the same death grip that social media has been tuned to achieve.

socalgal2 8mo ago

The single thing I find most addicting in my life for the last 5-6 years is HN. I feel like all the same criticisms can be applied here. HN chooses their algo and how quickly upvotes degrade and how much they are worth for keeping something on the front page. It works to keep me checking multi times a day. As an example, they could instead pick to only update the front page once every 24 hours and my addition would disappear because I'd know "no updates until tomorrow". As it is, I get that random reward addiction of "maybe there's something interest now". I guess HN is an evil company engineering addiction.

AstroBen 8mo ago
You can get an RSS feed here: https://hnrss.github.io/ https://hnrss.github.io/ Seems that might solve your problem You can do a "best" top submissions with a minimum of upvotes which ends up not being that many per day.. and you still stay up to date