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Comment by missingcolours | Hacker News Reader

This kind of sounds to me like "you can stop smoking by not buying anymore cigarettes". True, but glosses over the addictive aspects which led to cigarettes being regulated as they are. And this isn't an accidental property of these apps, they're intentionally engineered features to drive "engagement"/addiction.

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The difference is that actually addictive things, rather than just rewarding stimuli, produce increases in incentive salience regardless of actual reward outcome. In cigarettes this is mediated through nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on cells with inputs to dopaminergic systems that predict reward.

There's a vast distance between directly effecting the substrate of thinking chemically and reactions to rewarding stimuli coming in normally.

And what would that difference be when you are just describing different methods for affecting dopaminergic reward pathways?

If you scan the brain with an fMRI, the reward pathway lights up and suggest over time you will have reinforced that pleasurable activity and have created a strong affinity towards repeated activations, further strengthening those pathways.

Have there been any studies to show withdrawals from inhibiting consuming pleasurable visual media?

I mean if you were watching a series on Netflix that really resonates with you and you make a strong connection with the characters and feel as if you are a part of the scenes taking place (game of thrones etc), with characters faces activating your fusiform gyrus and dramatic scenes activating your amygdala making you emotional etc, how is autoplay facilitating the pleasurable dopamine response from imagining/anticipating/looking forward to how great the next episode will be, not as compelling of an issue as consuming exogenous substances that activate similar dopamine release?

Are you implying here that watching TV is not addictive? If this is the case, what do you think about videogames and why?

That's fair, but personally I am much more comfortable with the government regulating things which actually have chemicals which cause people to be addicted to them (cigarettes, hard drugs, etc.) than services which people can get addicted to. The fact that their is actually a chemical in cigarettes is the critical difference, to me. Maybe psychologically there isn't much difference, but that's where I draw the line personally.

I realize, I'm not the typical customer (I think autoplaying the next episode was the last feature Netflix introduced that didn't annoy me and made me think about canceling), but for me the only thing that matters when watching TV in the evening is if it's the penultimate episode (because those tend to end with cliffhangers and I'll want to watch the final one as well) and how tired I am/how late it is.

All autoplay does for me is saving me the click on next which I'd click 100% of those times when I don't close Netflix right at the end of the old or start of the next episode.

I can't even understand how it would make people watch more (unless they barely watch and just didn't realize a new one started)

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