I agree that many of these problems exist on HN and other non-monetized sites. They’ve existed since Usenet. What separates sites like Instagram and Facebook from sites like HN is the conscious maximization of these emotions due to the incentives inherent in their business model. They elicit fear and anxiety on a far greater scale and to a far greater degree.
HN political discussions, bad as they can be, are tame and rational compared to Twitter or Facebook, because the design of HN does not go out of its way to reward inflammatory rhetoric. And why would it? That would only hurt HN, whose business model is simply to make tech people have a positive opinion of Y Combinator in the hope that we will apply if we one day found a startup. Facebook and Twitter’s business model, by contrast, is to maximize the number of users and the amount of time that each user spends on the site. This is accomplished via an algorithmic feed that decides which content to display to keep the user addicted. Unfortunately, the most inflammatory and emotionally damaging content is what does the best job of this, so that is what they show. HN doesn’t intentionally do this because it has no incentive to do so.
Similarly, HN-driven envy is real, but it is not causing an epidemic of anxiety among young people like Instagram envy is. Again, the vast difference in degree is due to the business model. HN doesn’t have an incentive to addict millions of people and turn their anxiety up to 11. This is exactly the awful incentive that is created by the advertising-focused business model of the major social media companies.
Instead of their sites unwittingly having some negative effects on some people, like HN does, the social media giant explicitly design their sites to have these effects, to the greatest possible degree, on as many people as possible. They are an adversary and we are the target. It is not the responsibility of the target to be a little better educated or a little more disciplined. The adversary needs to be brought to heel. Not all business models are legal—and I would contend that the advertising-based attention economy should not be legal.
As for Robinhood, let’s be honest about what it provides to its users. Robinhood’s value proposition is not “investment options”. Day trading is not investment—it has a negative expected value, and there is abundant research showing that over a long enough time horizon, every day trader loses. Day traders have done somewhat well over the last eight months in beneficial market conditions (soaring valuations are the best environment fo day traders [1]) that will not last forever. Day trading is not investment, it is gambling (an activity which also has a negative expected value). Robinhood provides no-fee gambling, with the full knowledge that this is addictive, has a negative expected value, and will ruin many people’s lives (it’s very easy to find examples on Reddit or any other day-trading forum).
Robinhood makes its money by selling order flow, and not everything that’s been said about that business model is true, but what is true is that the more order flow they have available to sell, the more money they make. In other words, the greater the number of trades that are made on Robinhood, the more money Robinhood makes. This is why trades are free. Unfortunately for users, traders’ expected return is inversely related to the number of trades they make [2]. In other words, Robinhood makes money by designing a user experience that encourages you to lose money. They make money by making it easy, fun, and addictive for as many people as possible to engage in an activity that predictably destroys the user’s wealth.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2469/faj.v59.n6.2578?...
[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10293523.2012.11...