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Comment by hownottowrite | Hacker News Reader

Solving technology-induced addiction with more technology is like a doctor prescribing drugs to treat the side effects of other drugs.

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As long as they call it, "Methaphone" i'll take 500mg.

I think I'll need a 1000mg at least...

The article reads like an episode from Silicon Valley complete with TJ Miller clone boy.

"He signs his emails with emojis–a bear, a red heart, a sun–describes himself on the company’s website as an 'escaped circus bear' and favors collared shirts unbuttoned to the sternum, revealing a tan wilderness of chest hair."

Really... This is the guy who's going to save everyone from their smartphones?

No, that's a poor analogy. For example, I purchased a timer plug socket that turns off my router between the hours of midnight and 7am. That's using technology to solve the problem of technology addiction. If you apply technology in the right way, it can help you to use it less.

Putting a time lock on your liquor cabinet so it doesn't open between midnight and seven a.m. isn't solving the problem of alcoholism.

If an approach of the sort you describe does anything to solve the problem of the behavior pattern it is directed at, you probably shouldn't use “addiction” to describe the behavior pattern in the first place.

Sometimes the right way to solve a problem is to alleviate the symptoms.

Like dog cones. The solution to some skin issue is to not poke at it, and that's it. If you stop poking at it, it'll fix itself.

This is also a poor analogy. To an alcoholic, alcohol serves no (or very little) useful purpose. However, to a technology addict, technology serves both useful and useless purposes. My suggestion is to build technology in a way that maximises the usefulness to a user and minimises the uselessness. There are two dimensions to work with and you can make changes to your technology that moves you along them independently.

It’s a perfect analogy and thank you for reinforcing the point.

I was expecting this article to be about software that locks down your phone, or turns off notifications at certain times of the day and sends them to the graveyard. Notifications are the devil.

Alas, it's not possible for an app to block notifications on iOS. You can do more with Android, tho.

Maybe someone should design AI for notifications that I really need to see. Of course the problem is I don't need to see anything but Slack.

We've talked about this. It's part of the thinking around where the engagement sweet spot is: there IS some value that things like FB bring to your life, but beyond that, they're detrimental. Where is that point? Can you find it? Can you habituate people to it? Dunno.

I don't see Facebook as having any value. If people want to communicate with me they should do it directly.

Civilization is the accretion of more techniques to fix the problem of the other techniques.

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