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Comment by anothergoogler | Hacker News Reader

Porn addiction is a thing but I haven't heard of smut producers being successfully sued for enabling it.

There might be a difference that's worth noting. There are game designs that are clearly engineered to create either outright addiction, or at the very least, cravings. Porn, at least superficially, doesn't seem to attempt to engineer addiction in a similar way, maybe because they don't need to?

While the end result might be the same, there seems to be a much clearer intent to create addiction in some parts of the game industry, especially where gaming and gambling meet.

Cigarettes, at least around WWI when they originally gained wide popularity, weren't engineered to create addiction. It was just a built-in property of tobacco, enhanced by the instant gratification of pre-rolled cigarettes. Would you make the same argument there?

I'm not sure that distinction is as clear as you're describing it. Pretty much anything that creates positive feedback has the potential to create addictive behaviors, and (most) porn certainly isn't going for a realistic depiction of a healthy sex life. The design of porn sites, like most content websites, are oriented around continued usage. Trying to get people to use your product more doesn't seem technically distinguishable to me from "engineering to create addiction", and it's not clear to me what you think makes the two examples you describe distinct from each other.

That's a controversial opinion. Neither porn addiction nor sexual addiction is in the DSM-V, so it's not "officially" recognised as a real thing, and many researchers and experts believe it is not. There's not even any real agreement on what "porn addiction" would be (or if it's the same thing as sexual addiction). What little research has been done is inconclusive at best, showing that people do react to porn (well, duh), but that when, eg, brain imaging is does, the reaction doesn't really look like the reaction to drugs.

It's not surprising lawsuits about porn addiction aren't going ahead when it's so easy to get an expert witness to (truthfully) testify that the psychiatric profession doesn't recognise porn addiction as a real thing.

There's certainly people consuming porn who'd like to consume less, and who believe their consumption is harming their lives. That doesn't mean addiction is the correct model for what's going on, and to date, there appears to be little-to-no evidence showing that it is.

Sorry if I was unclear, I meant "a thing" in the same sense as parent, in that people seek treatment for it.

Article that talks about some of the theory behind mental disorders:

https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/07/creation-illness-gaming...

Excerpt:

> Carlat: How did you decide on five criteria as being your minimum threshold for depression?

> Spitzer: It was just consensus. We would ask clinicians and researchers, “How many symptoms do you think patients ought to have before you would give them a diagnosis of depression?” And we came up with the arbitrary number of five.

> Carlat: But why did you choose five and not four? Or why didn’t you choose six?

> Spitzer: Because four just seemed like not enough. And six seemed like too much.

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