7 ms·

Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

309 points by andsoitis 6mo ago

2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
> An internal memo found that 12-year-olds were three times as likely as 32-year-olds to stay on Facebook for the long term, despite the platform nominally requiring users to be at least 13; the memo concluded that Facebook “should consider investing more heavily in bringing in larger volumes of tweens”.
- ViktorRay 6mo ago
  100 years from now the descendants of the engineers who work at Big Tech will be looked upon by their descendants with the same shame that people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
    I don't think it will take 100 years, the world is already souring on big tech.
  - colechristensen 6mo ago
    >people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco Huh? Does anyone actually care any more? The kind of moralizing busybodies that spend their time shaming the tobacco industry are few and far between.
    - adi_kurian 6mo ago
      As someone who had a brief stint consulting for Big Tobacco, I can assure you that people care a lot. RJ Reynolds does not have their pick of the most elite graduates. Most of them would be ashamed to tell their friends and family, no matter the salary.
    - AngryData 6mo ago
      Yeah I don't know why people are downvoting. Not for one second would I or anybody I know care about someone in the family having been a tobacco farmer any more than they would care about someone growing alfalfa.
  - selectively 6mo ago
    This is an outrageously dumb thing to say. BIg Tobacco knowingly sold a product that physically addicted (the only real form of addiction) its users and killed them. Facebook is not that.
    - vrganj 6mo ago
      Wellll.... https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/18/nx-s1-5436951/jama-screens-teens-addiction-suicide-abcd https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/18/nx...
    - treyd 6mo ago
      Facebook ran experiments on on unknowing teenage girls to study how being shown negative content leads to negative mental health outcomes, which has lead to suicide.
    - b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
      >the only real form of addiction gonna need a citation on that one, dawg
    - dijksterhuis 6mo ago
      > physically addicted (the only real form of addiction) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26318318221116042 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26318318221116042 snippet from the abstract > Contrary to the earlier notion that addiction is predominantly a substance dependency, research now suggests that any source or experience capable of stimulating an individual has addictive potential. This has led to a paradigm shift in the psychiatric understanding of behavioural addictions. dopamine, the little “hit” you get on social media sites or when you get a “ping”, has a massive role to play in behavioural addictions. and with behavioural addiction it basically causes the same stuff in the brain that cocaine etc does (very simplified explanation). also, i’m a recovering drug addict. and i can tell you for sure from my lived experience that addiction is definitely not limited to physical stuff like drugs. xD
    - ambicapter 6mo ago
      Depression is not death, but it is still a loss of life.
wxw 6mo ago
https://archive.ph/3HkyR https://archive.ph/3HkyR
andy99 6mo ago
I assume this is about dark patterns but can’t confirm as I’m faced with a cookie wall where I can select from “Manage” and “Accept All”.
- dangus 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - birdsongs 6mo ago
    The point isn't us. You should know that. The point is the 99.8% that doesn't have our skills, and is forced into these dark patterns, by deception or psychological manipulation.
    - dangus 6mo ago
      Cookie dialogs are the opposite, they are asking for consent up front. Before they existed websites would just put stuff on your computer without asking. They’re literally a consumer protection. Direct your outrage elsewhere.
      - EGreg 6mo ago
        Direct yours
        deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
      - birdsongs 6mo ago
        I have no outrage, and for what it's worth, I upvoted you so your comment wasn't killed. I think you're being condescending though, and missing the point.
        dangus 6mo ago
        The point came across to me as a pretty unproductive comment on the design of the website hosting the article rather than its contents, which is why I responded the way I did. Just like people who will complain about a news site with ads or some other unrelated design feature of the site they don’t like. Again, if you’re on here you presumably know how to block ads, or cookie dialogs.
ngriffiths 6mo ago
Sure, making instagram as addictive as possible seems bad but I disagree with the framing a bit. Dark patterns get users to do things they don't want, that's why they get super annoyed at the design or the process or the outcome. Addictive apps are a different thing to me. I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! The question is can you make a compelling case that spending time on it is harmful.
- dd8601fn 6mo ago
  This reminds me of the TikTok ban that lasted all of twelve seconds. I’ve been using the internet for longer than I care to admit, and I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time.
  - thinkingtoilet 6mo ago
    That's literally what it was. These technologies are addicting. Is it as bad or the same as heroin? No. However, they are designed to be addicting.
    - cmoski 6mo ago
      Not as good as heroin either.
    - shimman 6mo ago
      Well seeing how we are all granted with one single life, maybe we should be more upset at things that take away our valuable time and replace it with things that make us angry? Who's to say that these things aren't worse than heroin? Lots of people would argue otherwise, I'm becoming one of them myself. Heroin only impacts one individual, social media impacts every connected person on the planet. Mass misery is still misery.
      - bheadmaster 6mo ago
        We should, but we also shouldn't decide what other people consider proper use of their time
cortesoft 6mo ago
While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed. How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?
- thaumasiotes 6mo ago
  Well, you could look to the gambling market for inspiration and let people voluntarily sign up for a blacklist on that feature. That would be a lot of extra work for the platforms, but I think the results would be interesting. It amounts to legislating that certain features have to be optional and configurable.
- conductr 6mo ago
  Agree. My first thought is most people in early days didn’t even want to start using PCs for work to begin with. The businesses generally had to mandate it. I imagine many people are facing this today with AI.
- general1465 6mo ago
  Very simple - force companies into data interoperability. That will allow users to move to competition without any data loss. I.e. nobody actually cares that GitHub is constantly down because you can move your repos to a different git provider or to your own server.
  - Aurornis 6mo ago
    > I.e. nobody actually cares that GitHub is constantly down because you can move your repos to a different git provider or to your own server. I honestly can't tell if this is serious or satire, so apologies if missed the joke. Pushing a git repo to a new server is built into git itself. Github project data is easy to export: https://docs.github.com/en/issues/planning-and-tracking-with-projects/managing-your-project/exporting-your-projects-data https://docs.github.com/en/issues/planning-and-tracking-with... There are import tools for many competing projects that will transfer it over in various ways.
nalekberov 6mo ago
The Irony is that in order to read this entry I had to pass a cookie wall, which gave me only ‘Accept all’ and ‘Manage’. Then I couldn’t read it, because I had no subscription.
- y0eswddl 6mo ago
  the author has no control over that
  - Aurornis 6mo ago
    The publication did not force the author to publish their works on their site. The author made a choice to publish there. They want the paywall, because that's how they get paid for this writing.
  - nalekberov 6mo ago
    She had, apparently.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
metalman 6mo ago
Step by step I am slowly backing away from any technology that I dont like, sometimes going to ridiculous lengths to bypass certain imposed aysmmetric requirements, up to and including abandonment. Nothing in my house beeps. My only online subscription is for web space. At this point it has become fun, as I have stoped reacting, and am experimenting and planning ahead, while figureing out ways to increase my income, while reduceing my personal spend
pembrook 6mo ago
I'm no defender of engagement algorithms and social media (including upvote based algos and this site too)....but this is a ridiculous argument. Social media is not making you behave in ways you don't want. On the contrary, it's giving you EXACTLY what you want. People want to doomscroll social media instead of engage reality, because the real world requires action, effort and social risk...doomscrolling is pure passive consumption. If we're going to give people autonomy and freedom to choose how they spend their time, at some point we have to draw the line and hold people accountable for their own actions. Or we have to acknowledge we'd rather stay in a permanent state of adolescence and give full control of our lives to big brother. This constant push by the urban monoculture to turn everything into an "addiction" and turn everyone into a "victim" is a terrible set of ideas to put in peoples heads and is equally as toxic as anything they claim smartphone apps are trivially doing with UI design. Apps are not physically addictive like cigarettes or alcohol and never have been. And if you're going to argue social media preys on reward systems in the brain, this is also true about everything that humans do. Reward systems in the brain govern every single action we take, so everything we do can turned into a victimization by some addictive outside force.
- tardedmeme 6mo ago
  What is addiction? Can you explain to us how you think about addiction?
  - pembrook 6mo ago
    Everything is an addiction. Nothing is an addiction. Instead of jumping down a semantic rabbit hole, it might be more useful to look at specifics since obviously its a spectrum. I can say with certainty that opioids are addictive. I can also say with certainty that doomscrolling is pretty far on the opposite end of that spectrum. I have yet to meet someone who would steal copper pipes off of an abandoned building or sell their body on the street for a few scrolls of tiktok. But why do you get out of bed at all in the morning? What drives you to exist...are those reward systems in the brain addictive? Why are you sitting at your keyboard right now arguing with a random stranger on the internet? Are you procrastinating something else you should be doing instead...and is that Hackernews' fault or yours?
xg15 6mo ago
...but but but Innovation!
- DangitBobby 6mo ago
  Can we not do this type of mocking comment here please? > But but but <argument I am mocking> > Shhh! <People I don't agree with> will hear you! > It's almost as if <sarcastic oversimplification>. > Tell me you <don't understand topic> without telling me you <don't understand topic>.
  - xg15 6mo ago
    I'm sorry. Yeah, agreed that this was too much. I was angry because I have seen quite often pushback against regulation that tries to elevate "innovation" as a value in itself, that even trumps other considerations such as safety or whether the innovation in question actually improves things meaningfully. What Meta did felt to me like the ultimate outcome of that thinking.
JohnMakin 6mo ago
There are still supposedly serious people who should know better than insist "dark patterns" are not real and a mechanism to attack tech companies. I don't know how anyone these days can honestly reach that conclusion. Some of these sites use similar strategies as the old tobacco companies used to, all of this stuff is known already to marketers.
- jp57 6mo ago
  But are they actually serious people? I had corporate astroturf accounts arguing with me on my otherwise-ignored blog as early as 2004. All this time later, I just assume that every serious corporation employs PR firms using sock-puppet accounts to shill in favor of whatever dark shit they're doing, acting like it all just really great and good for us.
  - ddtaylor 6mo ago
    We've seen this on HN before as well. Companies targeting blogs and reddit with LLM generated content that "subtly" name drop products or services, fake praise, and even meaningless "support" requests on discussion boards.
securicat 6mo ago
It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products. Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual users can (and should IMO) take. We should be helping our friends, family and neighbors find safe and health alternatives like Signal for comms. Build different networks that are actually social and not doomscrolling.
- macintux 6mo ago
  They're still distorting our political and social worlds, whether we're participants or not.
- dakiol 6mo ago
  Same can be said about Claude, Codex, etc. These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). Only the usual suspects benefit from AI (executive layer, investors, etc) Still amazes me how engineers on HN are in awe of AI and LLMs knowing that 90% of us will be affected (we won't be able to bring money to the table) once the higher ups start to normalize even more the usage of AI to reduce headcount. Not everything is about the technical details people, grow up
  - fragmede 6mo ago
    It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma with all the other developers in the world, and some are vocally choosing to defect. The only rational strategy then is to also defect.
    - dakiol 6mo ago
      Right. It seems then that all these "elite" engineers on HN aren't as smart as we thought (and yeah, I include myself in that bag). It's deeply sad to see how our most beloved work (those side projects we pour ourselves into purely for the joy of it) will, at the end, be the very reason most of us lose our jobs (not all of us, but the majority). Openai/antrhopic/etc and others simply took all of that and turned it to their advantage. It's capitalism, sure, but it's heartbreaking... I wouldnt mind be out of job for another reason, but not for that one pls
throwaway27448 6mo ago
Look it's either this or we adopt an economic strategy that isn't basically "assume the market magically knows what is best"—i.e., communism, as I understand Americans to know the term.
jmyeet 6mo ago
This touches on many issues. It's kind of a confused narrative. Predatory practices against minors (in particular), sign up dark patterns, addictive behavior (eg infinite scroll). I don't think you should bundle all of these together like this. For example, infinite scroll is a product of a news feed and a news feed is algorithmic. What this produces and what it reinforces in the user is one thing but not really related to some small grey text in an Amazon Prime sign up. So let's break it down. Some of the issues are: 1. Intent to sign up. 2. Difficulty in cancelling a service. This is what I call the "gym model". Easy to sign up, hard to cancel. This can be handled. California, for example, requires companies to offer online cancellation. Most other states don't. This is so much an issue you'll regularly find advice from people to change their address to California so they get that option. There's no reason why every state or the federal government couldn't do that. 3. Selling of your data. Not really touched here but it's going to be a big issue going forward; 4. Addictive behavior to maximize time spent on platform; and 5. What should we allow or disallow for minors. This is going to be a big issue. We're only at the start of the Age Verification Era (like it or not). But IMHO no company should be talking about how to maximize time spent for 13 year olds. And no advertiser should be able to advertise to minors; and 6. Not really touched here but I'm going to add it anyway. IMHO we give tech companies a free pass for algorithms as some kind of mystical, neutral black box. But everything an "algorithm" does represents a decision humans made to get a certain behavior from what training data is used, what they're optimizing for (eg interactions or time spent) and what features they create. Platforms now essentially get liability protection from publishing content even though they elevate or suppress content based on what it contains. IMHO this is no different than someone deciding what to publish and being liable for it.
tolerance 6mo ago
Do you want your fascist/authoritarian government to arrive via buxom CyberTruck or svelte fixie bike?
smarm52 6mo ago
The author is a "Master of Laws" (lawyer) writing about technology and psychology. Read with some skepticism.
Animats 6mo ago
There are two separate issues: addictive technologies, and mandated technologies. Instagram and TikTok are examples of the first. Google Play Store and Microsoft 360 are examples of the second. The second is more of a concern than the first. Google Chrome is trying hard to become a mandated technology, but hasn't quite succeeded yet.
andai 6mo ago
> SOMEWHERE IN META’S servers sat a slide deck marked “Confidential”. Written in 2019, its conclusion was blunt: “Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to.” Found this document: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-tech-from-making-users-behave-in-ways-they-dont-want-to https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-... Headlines (quote): Instagram is an inevitable and unavoidable component of teens lives. Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to. Instagram has become the ID card of this generation. It is the go-to tool for both measuring and gathering social prestige. Instagram sets the standards not only for how teens should look and act but also for how they should think and feel. Teens feel themselves to be at the forefront of new social behaviours to which there is no consensus on how to behave or cope. They sorely lack empathetic voices to whom they can turn for support. Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in a compulsive behaviour that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist. The pressure to ‘be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off. Anxiety around what to post and the potential cost involved in posting the wrong thing means teens are switching from proactive to passive engagement with the platform.
- andai 6mo ago
  Kinda sounds like the older generations have abandoned them, and now they settle for IG.
- tedd4u 6mo ago
  The link you share is the link to TFA. I don't see the text you post here in that article. Is there another link that contains this text? Thank you.
sunandsurf 6mo ago
IMO recommender algorithms and other dark patterns like infinite scroll should be turned off BY DEFAULT on these apps. That way those people who want a dose of brainrot still have the option to do so but most of them get a little help to turn away from screens (I never heard anybody say they want to spend more time on social media). I've written more about this here: https://klemenvodopivec.substack.com/p/recommender-systems-need-the-tobacco https://klemenvodopivec.substack.com/p/recommender-systems-n...
thebeardisred 6mo ago
> Dopamine neurons respond not to rewards received but to the uncertainty of whether a reward will arrive: the more unpredictable the outcome, the stronger the signal. This leads me to think about the idea of procrastination as a mechanism of gambling by the sub-conscious. A subversive way of "raising the stakes on the game" in an attempt to "make things a little bit more interesting."
Seattle3503 6mo ago
> The burden of proof should fall on the platform, not the victim. The question is not whether a harmed user can show specific damage. The question is whether the company can show, before rolling a product out to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design. That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features. Could we have a regulatory agency that keeps an eye on dark patterns and deals with them as evidence emerges that something is harmful.
- Pet_Ant 6mo ago
  > That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features. That’s not as rediculous as it seems. That’s sort of model that drug manufacturers follow. It would also mean that if internally they see troubling behaviour they know they have to stop. Practically, it would be corporate cover up. And applied earnestly it would make these businesses unviable.
- intended 6mo ago
  Wait how? Internal testing showed these features were addictive. They had resources allocated to creating addictive experiences for tweens. The underlying behavioral science is well studied, down to the causal level. Dark patterns are designed to make it hard to exit and unsubscribe. The language is purposefully obtuse, the options buried behind menu choices. We have enough A/B testing data to know how effective friction is at dissuading people from following a path. How are we proving a negative here?
  - Seattle3503 6mo ago
    Proving something is addictive is not proving a negative
    - intended 6mo ago
      Ok. So is that you are saying that the quoted section is setting up a situation where the firm has to prove a negative?
noosphr 6mo ago
I'm so happy the economist is converting this important topic. Now if only the dick heads running this complete rag could listen to the wonderful people who wrote that enlightened piece and let users unsubscribe: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rli0u9/how_to_unsubscribe_from_the_economist_in_just/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rli0u9/how_t...
- bloqs 6mo ago
  Jeez. I actually stopped short of reading the article because of this screenie
- arduanika 6mo ago
  It's educating you about economics, exactly as advertised, what's the problem?
- ruszki 6mo ago
  It seems much better now. At least in the EU. 4 years ago I had to do the same to change my address to a different country. Now I could do it with a simple form. It seems that I can cancel my subscription also without chat/call.
mactavish88 6mo ago
Isn't one of the core problems here a lack of "healthier" alternatives? (Not only in terms of tech, but also in terms of ways of living popularized by celebrities, thought leaders, etc.)
ajb 6mo ago
What's ironic is that originally one of the advantages of automation was that it was more impartial than human-delivered services. The inventor of the automated telephone exchange, Strowger, designed it because he was concerned that the local telephone operators we directing his calls to a competitor. We had several decades during which machines had only very limited decision-making ability, and so it was their ability to manipulate or discriminate was minimal. That's gone. It went years ago, but it's taken a while for the public's intuition to catch up. People are starting to get angry, but are still somewhat baffled. Industry believes that they can continue to get away with it since they've done it for 10-20 years, but I think this underestimates how strong the backlash can get.
gnarlouse 6mo ago
nauseating to think that Amazon was only charged $2.5B when they made somewhere around $25-44B off the Iliad cancellation thing.
- mayhemducks 6mo ago
  Yes it is nauseating. And it's the norm. Whenever some company finds a way to make a boat-load of money by exploiting a weakness of human nature, the government will demand a portion of the proceeds. It's business as usual, in the USA at least. Even more nauseating is what they could do with that $2.5B...
beloch 6mo ago
How much time you spend on something has become a metric of success in both gaming and social media. I occasionally play a perpetually-in-alpha AAA+ game (I won't name it to avoid the flames) that recently asked users to fill out a questionnaire. At no point did it ask how they could make my time spent in the game more fun or awesome. They did explicitly ask, "What can we do to make you spend more time in game?". The focus was clearly on quantity, not quality. This made me realize that, perhaps, I should stop playing this game. Social media and games use all sorts of dark patterns and engagement bait to keep you clicking, but no concern is given to giving back. There is a complete absence of awareness that the best forms of entertainment enrich and then end. If they were to provide an amazing but brief experience that changes regularly, people would come back again and again. They don't need to spend hours on it every single day to feel they're getting value and justify opening their wallets. Doom-scrolling and spending excessive time grinding in games will only make you feel stressed out and unfulfilled. Customers need to realize this and start voting with their wallets for experiences that end. We need to turn things around and say, "The light that burns half as long burns twice as bright!"
- MikeNotThePope 6mo ago
  Ha, it’s like a service asking me which ads I’d rather see. No ads is never an option.
- NemoNobody 6mo ago
  This is a rather easy fix - we all just need to start leaving games open, save a game, leave it on, go to work, come back load the save and play, or just alt-f4. I watch a lot of Asian content that used to be practically impossible to watch legally. I actually intentionally used a site that would constantly be "visiting websites" in the background, thousands of sites would be visited in a short time - I don't really see ads on the Internet but when I did, they no longer made any sense - my actual internet activity was a small percentage of my the activity that was tracked. I have spent hundreds of hours in games I've literally never played. Make their data junk.
- prawn 6mo ago
  I try to explain to my young teenage son what he misses by playing a near-perpetual game like Fortnite. In the years that he might spend in that, my equivalent time was put into dozens of games across various categories, and memorable levels, stories and moments. I miss those days where the measure of success was having someone play the game at all and enjoy it, not how long they might be locked into your product to the detriment of anything else in life. One tactic against Fortnite has been to say "Yes, you can play on the console this evening, but not Fortnite and instead choose from one of these games." That at least encouraged him to play through Horizon Zero Dawn, as an example.
djoldman 6mo ago
From the corporate POV, the lesson remains: never ever ever conduct research that could lead to a conclusion that your product/service can harm in any way, unless you know how and intend to fix/change it. The most important evidence was just internal research saying exactly what the plaintiffs wanted.
siliconc0w 6mo ago
On one hand, this is insidious when targeting children.... On the other these kind of metrics are what pretty much every company tries to optimize. We're going to get better and better at hacking the human brain - for good and evil and we're going to have to trade some free will and personal liberty to really keep the worst of it in check. The dark pattern bullshit is the easiest thing to regulate but I don't have a lot of hope for even that.
- intended 6mo ago
  Which is fine. As the article points out, we value markets because they find ways to allocate resources effectively. Insider trading is illegal because it breaks the market. Firms can optimize as they like, but if the net result is that the market ceases to function, then those behaviors get penalized.
morpheos137 6mo ago
Lets simplify things "stop big tech."
jojobas 6mo ago
Should this go back all the way to inception of TVs? Cause nobody really wanted to watch endless commercials interspersed with talk shows and pulp series.
LanceH 6mo ago
Everyone calling for government intervention when unsubscribing or taking a device away from a child would work is just hastening the end of free (libre) general purpose computing. Insert credit card and two forms of id to log on...
intended 6mo ago
Thank god, and a million times yes. There is no market if you have no mechanism for price discovery, no meaningful alternatives, users are addicted, confused, and simply unable to switch. Things WERE better before we combined skinner boxes with ad tech, before we preyed on users and applied every trick in the book to entrap them.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
Alternative to archive.ph No Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no DDoS^1, no geo-blocking, other nonsense^2 echo ' url https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-tech-from-making-users-behave-in-ways-they-dont-want-to user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Liskov" header accept: output 1.htm '|curl -K/dev/stdin firefox ./1.htm 1. https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/ https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-... 2. What's up with the LinkedIn reCAPTCHA sitekey in the page source

309 points by andsoitis 6mo ago

> An internal memo found that 12-year-olds were three times as likely as 32-year-olds to stay on Facebook for the long term, despite the platform nominally requiring users to be at least 13; the memo concluded that Facebook “should consider investing more heavily in bringing in larger volumes of tweens”.

ViktorRay 6mo ago
100 years from now the descendants of the engineers who work at Big Tech will be looked upon by their descendants with the same shame that people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
  I don't think it will take 100 years, the world is already souring on big tech.
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  >people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco Huh? Does anyone actually care any more? The kind of moralizing busybodies that spend their time shaming the tobacco industry are few and far between.
  - adi_kurian 6mo ago
    As someone who had a brief stint consulting for Big Tobacco, I can assure you that people care a lot. RJ Reynolds does not have their pick of the most elite graduates. Most of them would be ashamed to tell their friends and family, no matter the salary.
  - AngryData 6mo ago
    Yeah I don't know why people are downvoting. Not for one second would I or anybody I know care about someone in the family having been a tobacco farmer any more than they would care about someone growing alfalfa.
- selectively 6mo ago
  This is an outrageously dumb thing to say. BIg Tobacco knowingly sold a product that physically addicted (the only real form of addiction) its users and killed them. Facebook is not that.
  - vrganj 6mo ago
    Wellll.... https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/18/nx-s1-5436951/jama-screens-teens-addiction-suicide-abcd https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/18/nx...
  - treyd 6mo ago
    Facebook ran experiments on on unknowing teenage girls to study how being shown negative content leads to negative mental health outcomes, which has lead to suicide.
  - b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
    >the only real form of addiction gonna need a citation on that one, dawg
  - dijksterhuis 6mo ago
    > physically addicted (the only real form of addiction) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26318318221116042 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26318318221116042 snippet from the abstract > Contrary to the earlier notion that addiction is predominantly a substance dependency, research now suggests that any source or experience capable of stimulating an individual has addictive potential. This has led to a paradigm shift in the psychiatric understanding of behavioural addictions. dopamine, the little “hit” you get on social media sites or when you get a “ping”, has a massive role to play in behavioural addictions. and with behavioural addiction it basically causes the same stuff in the brain that cocaine etc does (very simplified explanation). also, i’m a recovering drug addict. and i can tell you for sure from my lived experience that addiction is definitely not limited to physical stuff like drugs. xD
  - ambicapter 6mo ago
    Depression is not death, but it is still a loss of life.

wxw 6mo ago

https://archive.ph/3HkyR https://archive.ph/3HkyR

andy99 6mo ago

I assume this is about dark patterns but can’t confirm as I’m faced with a cookie wall where I can select from “Manage” and “Accept All”.

dangus 6mo ago
[flagged]
- birdsongs 6mo ago
  The point isn't us. You should know that. The point is the 99.8% that doesn't have our skills, and is forced into these dark patterns, by deception or psychological manipulation.
  - dangus 6mo ago
    Cookie dialogs are the opposite, they are asking for consent up front. Before they existed websites would just put stuff on your computer without asking. They’re literally a consumer protection. Direct your outrage elsewhere.
    - EGreg 6mo ago
      Direct yours
      - deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
    - birdsongs 6mo ago
      I have no outrage, and for what it's worth, I upvoted you so your comment wasn't killed. I think you're being condescending though, and missing the point.
      - dangus 6mo ago
        The point came across to me as a pretty unproductive comment on the design of the website hosting the article rather than its contents, which is why I responded the way I did. Just like people who will complain about a news site with ads or some other unrelated design feature of the site they don’t like. Again, if you’re on here you presumably know how to block ads, or cookie dialogs.

ngriffiths 6mo ago

Sure, making instagram as addictive as possible seems bad but I disagree with the framing a bit. Dark patterns get users to do things they don't want, that's why they get super annoyed at the design or the process or the outcome. Addictive apps are a different thing to me. I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! The question is can you make a compelling case that spending time on it is harmful.

dd8601fn 6mo ago
This reminds me of the TikTok ban that lasted all of twelve seconds. I’ve been using the internet for longer than I care to admit, and I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time.
- thinkingtoilet 6mo ago
  That's literally what it was. These technologies are addicting. Is it as bad or the same as heroin? No. However, they are designed to be addicting.
  - cmoski 6mo ago
    Not as good as heroin either.
  - shimman 6mo ago
    Well seeing how we are all granted with one single life, maybe we should be more upset at things that take away our valuable time and replace it with things that make us angry? Who's to say that these things aren't worse than heroin? Lots of people would argue otherwise, I'm becoming one of them myself. Heroin only impacts one individual, social media impacts every connected person on the planet. Mass misery is still misery.
    - bheadmaster 6mo ago
      We should, but we also shouldn't decide what other people consider proper use of their time

cortesoft 6mo ago

While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed. How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

thaumasiotes 6mo ago
Well, you could look to the gambling market for inspiration and let people voluntarily sign up for a blacklist on that feature. That would be a lot of extra work for the platforms, but I think the results would be interesting. It amounts to legislating that certain features have to be optional and configurable.
conductr 6mo ago
Agree. My first thought is most people in early days didn’t even want to start using PCs for work to begin with. The businesses generally had to mandate it. I imagine many people are facing this today with AI.
general1465 6mo ago
Very simple - force companies into data interoperability. That will allow users to move to competition without any data loss. I.e. nobody actually cares that GitHub is constantly down because you can move your repos to a different git provider or to your own server.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  > I.e. nobody actually cares that GitHub is constantly down because you can move your repos to a different git provider or to your own server. I honestly can't tell if this is serious or satire, so apologies if missed the joke. Pushing a git repo to a new server is built into git itself. Github project data is easy to export: https://docs.github.com/en/issues/planning-and-tracking-with-projects/managing-your-project/exporting-your-projects-data https://docs.github.com/en/issues/planning-and-tracking-with... There are import tools for many competing projects that will transfer it over in various ways.

nalekberov 6mo ago

The Irony is that in order to read this entry I had to pass a cookie wall, which gave me only ‘Accept all’ and ‘Manage’. Then I couldn’t read it, because I had no subscription.

y0eswddl 6mo ago
the author has no control over that
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  The publication did not force the author to publish their works on their site. The author made a choice to publish there. They want the paywall, because that's how they get paid for this writing.
- nalekberov 6mo ago
  She had, apparently.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

metalman 6mo ago

Step by step I am slowly backing away from any technology that I dont like, sometimes going to ridiculous lengths to bypass certain imposed aysmmetric requirements, up to and including abandonment. Nothing in my house beeps. My only online subscription is for web space. At this point it has become fun, as I have stoped reacting, and am experimenting and planning ahead, while figureing out ways to increase my income, while reduceing my personal spend

pembrook 6mo ago

I'm no defender of engagement algorithms and social media (including upvote based algos and this site too)....but this is a ridiculous argument. Social media is not making you behave in ways you don't want. On the contrary, it's giving you EXACTLY what you want. People want to doomscroll social media instead of engage reality, because the real world requires action, effort and social risk...doomscrolling is pure passive consumption. If we're going to give people autonomy and freedom to choose how they spend their time, at some point we have to draw the line and hold people accountable for their own actions. Or we have to acknowledge we'd rather stay in a permanent state of adolescence and give full control of our lives to big brother. This constant push by the urban monoculture to turn everything into an "addiction" and turn everyone into a "victim" is a terrible set of ideas to put in peoples heads and is equally as toxic as anything they claim smartphone apps are trivially doing with UI design. Apps are not physically addictive like cigarettes or alcohol and never have been. And if you're going to argue social media preys on reward systems in the brain, this is also true about everything that humans do. Reward systems in the brain govern every single action we take, so everything we do can turned into a victimization by some addictive outside force.

tardedmeme 6mo ago
What is addiction? Can you explain to us how you think about addiction?
- pembrook 6mo ago
  Everything is an addiction. Nothing is an addiction. Instead of jumping down a semantic rabbit hole, it might be more useful to look at specifics since obviously its a spectrum. I can say with certainty that opioids are addictive. I can also say with certainty that doomscrolling is pretty far on the opposite end of that spectrum. I have yet to meet someone who would steal copper pipes off of an abandoned building or sell their body on the street for a few scrolls of tiktok. But why do you get out of bed at all in the morning? What drives you to exist...are those reward systems in the brain addictive? Why are you sitting at your keyboard right now arguing with a random stranger on the internet? Are you procrastinating something else you should be doing instead...and is that Hackernews' fault or yours?

xg15 6mo ago

...but but but Innovation!

DangitBobby 6mo ago
Can we not do this type of mocking comment here please? > But but but <argument I am mocking> > Shhh! <People I don't agree with> will hear you! > It's almost as if <sarcastic oversimplification>. > Tell me you <don't understand topic> without telling me you <don't understand topic>.
- xg15 6mo ago
  I'm sorry. Yeah, agreed that this was too much. I was angry because I have seen quite often pushback against regulation that tries to elevate "innovation" as a value in itself, that even trumps other considerations such as safety or whether the innovation in question actually improves things meaningfully. What Meta did felt to me like the ultimate outcome of that thinking.

JohnMakin 6mo ago

There are still supposedly serious people who should know better than insist "dark patterns" are not real and a mechanism to attack tech companies. I don't know how anyone these days can honestly reach that conclusion. Some of these sites use similar strategies as the old tobacco companies used to, all of this stuff is known already to marketers.

jp57 6mo ago
But are they actually serious people? I had corporate astroturf accounts arguing with me on my otherwise-ignored blog as early as 2004. All this time later, I just assume that every serious corporation employs PR firms using sock-puppet accounts to shill in favor of whatever dark shit they're doing, acting like it all just really great and good for us.
- ddtaylor 6mo ago
  We've seen this on HN before as well. Companies targeting blogs and reddit with LLM generated content that "subtly" name drop products or services, fake praise, and even meaningless "support" requests on discussion boards.

securicat 6mo ago

It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products. Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual users can (and should IMO) take. We should be helping our friends, family and neighbors find safe and health alternatives like Signal for comms. Build different networks that are actually social and not doomscrolling.

macintux 6mo ago
They're still distorting our political and social worlds, whether we're participants or not.
dakiol 6mo ago
Same can be said about Claude, Codex, etc. These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). Only the usual suspects benefit from AI (executive layer, investors, etc) Still amazes me how engineers on HN are in awe of AI and LLMs knowing that 90% of us will be affected (we won't be able to bring money to the table) once the higher ups start to normalize even more the usage of AI to reduce headcount. Not everything is about the technical details people, grow up
- fragmede 6mo ago
  It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma with all the other developers in the world, and some are vocally choosing to defect. The only rational strategy then is to also defect.
  - dakiol 6mo ago
    Right. It seems then that all these "elite" engineers on HN aren't as smart as we thought (and yeah, I include myself in that bag). It's deeply sad to see how our most beloved work (those side projects we pour ourselves into purely for the joy of it) will, at the end, be the very reason most of us lose our jobs (not all of us, but the majority). Openai/antrhopic/etc and others simply took all of that and turned it to their advantage. It's capitalism, sure, but it's heartbreaking... I wouldnt mind be out of job for another reason, but not for that one pls

throwaway27448 6mo ago

Look it's either this or we adopt an economic strategy that isn't basically "assume the market magically knows what is best"—i.e., communism, as I understand Americans to know the term.

jmyeet 6mo ago

This touches on many issues. It's kind of a confused narrative. Predatory practices against minors (in particular), sign up dark patterns, addictive behavior (eg infinite scroll). I don't think you should bundle all of these together like this. For example, infinite scroll is a product of a news feed and a news feed is algorithmic. What this produces and what it reinforces in the user is one thing but not really related to some small grey text in an Amazon Prime sign up. So let's break it down. Some of the issues are: 1. Intent to sign up. 2. Difficulty in cancelling a service. This is what I call the "gym model". Easy to sign up, hard to cancel. This can be handled. California, for example, requires companies to offer online cancellation. Most other states don't. This is so much an issue you'll regularly find advice from people to change their address to California so they get that option. There's no reason why every state or the federal government couldn't do that. 3. Selling of your data. Not really touched here but it's going to be a big issue going forward; 4. Addictive behavior to maximize time spent on platform; and 5. What should we allow or disallow for minors. This is going to be a big issue. We're only at the start of the Age Verification Era (like it or not). But IMHO no company should be talking about how to maximize time spent for 13 year olds. And no advertiser should be able to advertise to minors; and 6. Not really touched here but I'm going to add it anyway. IMHO we give tech companies a free pass for algorithms as some kind of mystical, neutral black box. But everything an "algorithm" does represents a decision humans made to get a certain behavior from what training data is used, what they're optimizing for (eg interactions or time spent) and what features they create. Platforms now essentially get liability protection from publishing content even though they elevate or suppress content based on what it contains. IMHO this is no different than someone deciding what to publish and being liable for it.

tolerance 6mo ago

Do you want your fascist/authoritarian government to arrive via buxom CyberTruck or svelte fixie bike?

smarm52 6mo ago

The author is a "Master of Laws" (lawyer) writing about technology and psychology. Read with some skepticism.

Animats 6mo ago

There are two separate issues: addictive technologies, and mandated technologies. Instagram and TikTok are examples of the first. Google Play Store and Microsoft 360 are examples of the second. The second is more of a concern than the first. Google Chrome is trying hard to become a mandated technology, but hasn't quite succeeded yet.

andai 6mo ago

> SOMEWHERE IN META’S servers sat a slide deck marked “Confidential”. Written in 2019, its conclusion was blunt: “Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to.” Found this document: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-tech-from-making-users-behave-in-ways-they-dont-want-to https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-... Headlines (quote): Instagram is an inevitable and unavoidable component of teens lives. Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to. Instagram has become the ID card of this generation. It is the go-to tool for both measuring and gathering social prestige. Instagram sets the standards not only for how teens should look and act but also for how they should think and feel. Teens feel themselves to be at the forefront of new social behaviours to which there is no consensus on how to behave or cope. They sorely lack empathetic voices to whom they can turn for support. Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in a compulsive behaviour that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist. The pressure to ‘be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off. Anxiety around what to post and the potential cost involved in posting the wrong thing means teens are switching from proactive to passive engagement with the platform.

andai 6mo ago
Kinda sounds like the older generations have abandoned them, and now they settle for IG.
tedd4u 6mo ago
The link you share is the link to TFA. I don't see the text you post here in that article. Is there another link that contains this text? Thank you.

sunandsurf 6mo ago

IMO recommender algorithms and other dark patterns like infinite scroll should be turned off BY DEFAULT on these apps. That way those people who want a dose of brainrot still have the option to do so but most of them get a little help to turn away from screens (I never heard anybody say they want to spend more time on social media). I've written more about this here: https://klemenvodopivec.substack.com/p/recommender-systems-need-the-tobacco https://klemenvodopivec.substack.com/p/recommender-systems-n...

thebeardisred 6mo ago

> Dopamine neurons respond not to rewards received but to the uncertainty of whether a reward will arrive: the more unpredictable the outcome, the stronger the signal. This leads me to think about the idea of procrastination as a mechanism of gambling by the sub-conscious. A subversive way of "raising the stakes on the game" in an attempt to "make things a little bit more interesting."

Seattle3503 6mo ago

> The burden of proof should fall on the platform, not the victim. The question is not whether a harmed user can show specific damage. The question is whether the company can show, before rolling a product out to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design. That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features. Could we have a regulatory agency that keeps an eye on dark patterns and deals with them as evidence emerges that something is harmful.

Pet_Ant 6mo ago
> That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features. That’s not as rediculous as it seems. That’s sort of model that drug manufacturers follow. It would also mean that if internally they see troubling behaviour they know they have to stop. Practically, it would be corporate cover up. And applied earnestly it would make these businesses unviable.
intended 6mo ago
Wait how? Internal testing showed these features were addictive. They had resources allocated to creating addictive experiences for tweens. The underlying behavioral science is well studied, down to the causal level. Dark patterns are designed to make it hard to exit and unsubscribe. The language is purposefully obtuse, the options buried behind menu choices. We have enough A/B testing data to know how effective friction is at dissuading people from following a path. How are we proving a negative here?
- Seattle3503 6mo ago
  Proving something is addictive is not proving a negative
  - intended 6mo ago
    Ok. So is that you are saying that the quoted section is setting up a situation where the firm has to prove a negative?

noosphr 6mo ago

I'm so happy the economist is converting this important topic. Now if only the dick heads running this complete rag could listen to the wonderful people who wrote that enlightened piece and let users unsubscribe: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rli0u9/how_to_unsubscribe_from_the_economist_in_just/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rli0u9/how_t...

bloqs 6mo ago
Jeez. I actually stopped short of reading the article because of this screenie
arduanika 6mo ago
It's educating you about economics, exactly as advertised, what's the problem?
ruszki 6mo ago
It seems much better now. At least in the EU. 4 years ago I had to do the same to change my address to a different country. Now I could do it with a simple form. It seems that I can cancel my subscription also without chat/call.

mactavish88 6mo ago

Isn't one of the core problems here a lack of "healthier" alternatives? (Not only in terms of tech, but also in terms of ways of living popularized by celebrities, thought leaders, etc.)

ajb 6mo ago

What's ironic is that originally one of the advantages of automation was that it was more impartial than human-delivered services. The inventor of the automated telephone exchange, Strowger, designed it because he was concerned that the local telephone operators we directing his calls to a competitor. We had several decades during which machines had only very limited decision-making ability, and so it was their ability to manipulate or discriminate was minimal. That's gone. It went years ago, but it's taken a while for the public's intuition to catch up. People are starting to get angry, but are still somewhat baffled. Industry believes that they can continue to get away with it since they've done it for 10-20 years, but I think this underestimates how strong the backlash can get.

gnarlouse 6mo ago

nauseating to think that Amazon was only charged $2.5B when they made somewhere around $25-44B off the Iliad cancellation thing.

mayhemducks 6mo ago
Yes it is nauseating. And it's the norm. Whenever some company finds a way to make a boat-load of money by exploiting a weakness of human nature, the government will demand a portion of the proceeds. It's business as usual, in the USA at least. Even more nauseating is what they could do with that $2.5B...

beloch 6mo ago

How much time you spend on something has become a metric of success in both gaming and social media. I occasionally play a perpetually-in-alpha AAA+ game (I won't name it to avoid the flames) that recently asked users to fill out a questionnaire. At no point did it ask how they could make my time spent in the game more fun or awesome. They did explicitly ask, "What can we do to make you spend more time in game?". The focus was clearly on quantity, not quality. This made me realize that, perhaps, I should stop playing this game. Social media and games use all sorts of dark patterns and engagement bait to keep you clicking, but no concern is given to giving back. There is a complete absence of awareness that the best forms of entertainment enrich and then end. If they were to provide an amazing but brief experience that changes regularly, people would come back again and again. They don't need to spend hours on it every single day to feel they're getting value and justify opening their wallets. Doom-scrolling and spending excessive time grinding in games will only make you feel stressed out and unfulfilled. Customers need to realize this and start voting with their wallets for experiences that end. We need to turn things around and say, "The light that burns half as long burns twice as bright!"

MikeNotThePope 6mo ago
Ha, it’s like a service asking me which ads I’d rather see. No ads is never an option.
NemoNobody 6mo ago
This is a rather easy fix - we all just need to start leaving games open, save a game, leave it on, go to work, come back load the save and play, or just alt-f4. I watch a lot of Asian content that used to be practically impossible to watch legally. I actually intentionally used a site that would constantly be "visiting websites" in the background, thousands of sites would be visited in a short time - I don't really see ads on the Internet but when I did, they no longer made any sense - my actual internet activity was a small percentage of my the activity that was tracked. I have spent hundreds of hours in games I've literally never played. Make their data junk.
prawn 6mo ago
I try to explain to my young teenage son what he misses by playing a near-perpetual game like Fortnite. In the years that he might spend in that, my equivalent time was put into dozens of games across various categories, and memorable levels, stories and moments. I miss those days where the measure of success was having someone play the game at all and enjoy it, not how long they might be locked into your product to the detriment of anything else in life. One tactic against Fortnite has been to say "Yes, you can play on the console this evening, but not Fortnite and instead choose from one of these games." That at least encouraged him to play through Horizon Zero Dawn, as an example.

djoldman 6mo ago

From the corporate POV, the lesson remains: never ever ever conduct research that could lead to a conclusion that your product/service can harm in any way, unless you know how and intend to fix/change it. The most important evidence was just internal research saying exactly what the plaintiffs wanted.

siliconc0w 6mo ago

On one hand, this is insidious when targeting children.... On the other these kind of metrics are what pretty much every company tries to optimize. We're going to get better and better at hacking the human brain - for good and evil and we're going to have to trade some free will and personal liberty to really keep the worst of it in check. The dark pattern bullshit is the easiest thing to regulate but I don't have a lot of hope for even that.

intended 6mo ago
Which is fine. As the article points out, we value markets because they find ways to allocate resources effectively. Insider trading is illegal because it breaks the market. Firms can optimize as they like, but if the net result is that the market ceases to function, then those behaviors get penalized.

morpheos137 6mo ago

Lets simplify things "stop big tech."

jojobas 6mo ago

Should this go back all the way to inception of TVs? Cause nobody really wanted to watch endless commercials interspersed with talk shows and pulp series.

LanceH 6mo ago

Everyone calling for government intervention when unsubscribing or taking a device away from a child would work is just hastening the end of free (libre) general purpose computing. Insert credit card and two forms of id to log on...

intended 6mo ago

Thank god, and a million times yes. There is no market if you have no mechanism for price discovery, no meaningful alternatives, users are addicted, confused, and simply unable to switch. Things WERE better before we combined skinner boxes with ad tech, before we preyed on users and applied every trick in the book to entrap them.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

Alternative to archive.ph No Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no DDoS^1, no geo-blocking, other nonsense^2 echo ' url https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-tech-from-making-users-behave-in-ways-they-dont-want-to user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Liskov" header accept: output 1.htm '|curl -K/dev/stdin firefox ./1.htm 1. https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/ https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-... 2. What's up with the LinkedIn reCAPTCHA sitekey in the page source