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Comment by krrishd | Hacker News Reader

Given that a significant chunk of design/product nowadays is centered around 'engagement', the inevitability of this can't be understated.

Imagine if our medication, food, etc were designed around engagement. We already have a term for that, and it's addiction.

I don't understand why we guard our physical intake from 'addiction', but don't show anywhere as much concern re: our cognitive intake despite our mind not mattering any less than our body.

I know the practical solution here is being a more conscientious user, but I feel like there's ethical culpability on our profession.

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This. And I wonder how PG's philosophy about addictions factors into his advice to YC companies. On the one hand, you have to make products engaging in order for your startup to survive. On the other hand, if the only companies that thrive are the "stickiest", then our lives will be filled with products and services that have been specifically designed to make them psychologically addictive.

Sometimes people get sick of being addicted too - people getting sick of facebook delete or deactivate their accounts altogether.

I agree with your point but also want to point out that a very large percentage of the food industry is very focused on increasing 'engagement'. Most process foods/snacks push our addiction button to get us coming back and eating more.

Fair, and (while I'm not wholly educated on the subject) there still is a lot more regulation and consumer attention to those things now.

Of course, that may not have been the case a few decades ago, but I think there's a lot to be learned from there.

There's more than enough responsibility to go around. If we want industries to create things that counteract the problem, they'll need new processes to replace the old ones with.

I believe the first step is the development of new design theories.

I'd think it's more about economic theories. If all economic incentives point to making a product more addictive, of course products will be designed that way.

It's simple to show addiction is an unsustainable configuration for pretty much any system across all economic levels.

How does that fit the GP's observation that more and more design is focused on "engagement" - which, from the techniques involved, is really not much different than designing for addictiveness?

Also - without knowing the theories - only because a configuration is unsustainable doesn't mean that such a configuration won't appear.

There have been many "self-corrections" of unsustainable configurations in history which I am glad to not have witnessed personally...

Not all engagement is created equal. Engagement for engagement's sake promotes addiction because addiction is a coping mechanism to other problems. Without explicitly targeting those problems at a societal level (which includes organizations), they'll remain unchecked and allowed to grow. More specifically, based on my research & recovery experiences, addiction's a learning disorder resulting from things that can be overcome (in part) through emotionally supportive social connections, paying attention to one's needs (which requires being able to pay attention to oneself, courage to face one's own issues, knowing what one's basic humans needs are, learning how to meet those needs alone, and how to meet them with the help of other people), and developing skills for emotional regulation. Any design theory seeking to minimize its contribution to addiction will need to promote human connection (which is based on the quality of interactions and not simply having the ability to interact), respect attention, promote mindfulness, and responsibly use human emotions as inputs.

As for unsustainable configurations, they're inevitable. With the advent of global connectivity & new research, humanity is now primed to take more responsibility for its unsustainable configs & devise strategies for intentional corrections, as opposed to passively waiting for inevitable self-corrections.

Through solving addiction (or any other unsustainable config), the law of unintended consequences will be invoked at some point and a new unsustainability will emerge because no system is perfect. All we can do is accept this fact and do our best to address things as they come.

Could you do so? It's non-obvious to me.

If we incompletely define addiction as a cycle of compulsions with negative consequences, it's already an unsustainable process at the individual level. We can predict (and statistics confirm this) lifespans of addicts to be lower than those of comparable non-addicts.

If a business intentionally develops a userbase of addicts, they are choosing customers who will live shorter lives than others. They'll need to get more people addicted over time in order to maintain the biz or grow it. As their impact on customers rises, so does their visibility. At some point, the public will become aware of the effects and push back, making it harder to cultivate new addicts. The company will likely have to start covertly converting addicts to keep up the game, adopting addiction patterns at an organizational level. Governments will have to step in before their tax bases are affected.

Is that clearer?

> If a business intentionally develops a userbase of addicts, they are choosing customers who will live shorter lives than others.

That assumes that all addictions are deadly and that the company would mind.

A company is not interested in a customer's life span but the span of time they are their customer. if someone dies with 30 after having been a "loyal" customer for 20 years, that's better for them than if they die with 90 but are a customer for 5 years.

> They'll need to get more people addicted over time in order to maintain the biz or grow it. As their impact on customers rises, so does their visibility.

Not really if the incentive is strong enough that everyone does it. As seems to be the case with the internet.

> At some point, the public will become aware of the effects and push back, making it harder to cultivate new addicts.

That's an assumption. Like the previous point, that won't happen if it's considered "normal".

> The company will likely have to start covertly converting addicts to keep up the game, adopting addiction patterns at an organizational level.

Yes. So what?

> Governments will have to step in before their tax bases are affected.

I don't see any evidence of that happening.

Anyway, what are the sources for that theory?

That reminds me of an amazing book "Thinking in Systems: A Primer." It is probably on my list of must-read books for software developers and other roles around them.

I haven't read it, but systems theory is at the core of how I've been thinking lately. I'll check it out.

> I believe the first step is the development of new design theories.

I tend to agree, at least in the abstract. But what would this look like, and how would it successfully supplant the old design theories?

I think bringing neuroscience and mindfulness into the mix is the way to go.

How it'll supplant is simple: tack it on to human-centric design, get companies applying HCD already to adopt it, and they can show the addiction-addicted companies how to make money in a more sustainable way.

Sell it to the capitalists by showing people can live longer if their well-being is higher.

I don't see this taking off for companies whose bottom line is directly tied into advertising (Facebook, Google etc).

Apple could lead here and build some tools directly into the OS that let people easily set some custom boundaries around addictive use.

That's fine. Others will develop it and the big ones will adopt it. Or not and they'll continue to be platforms for addicting others.

Once one person succeeds in figuring out a service for marketing in a way people will welcome into their home (as opposed to begrudgingly being forced to allow them), others will follow.

Ads suck, so I'm betting people can get behind a platform explicitly designed for experimenting with ad tech to find things that don't.

Yeah, at the end of the day this is very unlikely to change unless people start to think about the ethical implications of what they are doing and whether or not they are really bringing any value to people.

How do you design things NOT around "engagement"?

I see one alternative: design things around "value."

On the other hand, as users are already trained to choose products based on "engagement," it would be important to have a certain level of "engagement" with these products no matter how "valuable" they are. Otherwise, users just won't notice the product and its "value."

I think engagement is better off being a byproduct of value/utility, as opposed to the first-order driver of product decisions (even if that runs contrary to the $$$ in the short-term)

I guess what I was saying is, a product that has no engagement soon ceases to be a product

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