To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it? Because the average person is unlikely to know its harmful effects. What about these applications? Which are profitable by tapping into our desires and impulsive tendencies.
Its time we discuss this.
my sister has an addicition to shopping for clothes, so that's going to need regulation, as well as my friend's action to watching tv, etc.
But putting Facebook and shopping for clothes on the same footing isn't. And the "Facebook causes depression" arguments are utterly unconvincing.
Do you believe there should be a minimum age to buy tobacco?
Do you believe tobacco companies should have to publish information stating that tobacco is addictive and dangerous on their products?
Taxes.
Many Mobile games do abuse psychological elements. Agree they shouldn't abuse and should be stopped.
Waste hundreds of hours? I thoroughly enjoy hundreds of hours of game play so I don't see anything wrong with that.
Tapping into our desires? What's wrong with tickling our fancy?
Tapping into our impulsive tendencies. I feel like this is abusing human psychology again.
I'm not a gambler but I have felt the excitement and joy of it. I also love video games. I see nothing wrong with either of these things. But there is a clear distinction between the rewards of playing and the manipulation a company takes to enrich their bottom line.
Google may have a chance of beating Apple at #1 but Facebook has quite a margin.
Essentially both Facebook and Google are ads businesses. Facebook seems to be optimizing for short term growth at the expense of their brand.
I know many people who joined Facebook around 2008 and absolutely were big fans of it. After 10 years none of them even use it, the novelty wore off.
PS - There's an easy way to bet on this, just buy some stock :)
EDIT - Well, technically, you want to short the stock.
The question is if you can hold out long enough and if the change you predict will happen fast enough.
That can get expensive quickly, so it's not quite the inverse of holding stock where the only downside is how far the stock can drop, not how far it can go up.
Facebook has shown a willingness to diversify its social properties via synergetic integration. See: whatsapp, instagram.
Facebook will likely continue to diversify its business. For example, it could easily repurpose its excess hardware to enter the cloud computing market and compete with AWS/GoogleCloud. I would be surprised if this is not on the roadmap.
Something will likely come along. My guess is that it will be spam-related, which will make the FB user-experience too difficult to use to get a quality experience. FB will try to appeal to government for protectionist legislation, but it won't happen fast enough.