“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction” | Hacker News Reader

“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

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737 pointswilsocr88336 comments

I did an internship with a very profitable Swedish mobile game before the pandemic, and it was really interesting to see the doublethink: everyone knew we were making a drug, but people avoided speaking of it in that way. It was always "our most engaged players readily spend on in-game items", and never "the most addicted users spend money so they can continue playing"

It was a great workplace, but I don't think it was adding much value to the world.

Yep, I spent many years at a large, public US mobile game company and it was the same. We had a considerable number of players who had total spend in the 5-figure range, and a few into the 6's. And that's on one single game.

The constant rationalization around the office was basically something like: "They're paying for fun, it would otherwise be drinks/movies/real gambling/etc, we're just a different medium". This, of course, completely ignored the boatload of psychological exploitation tricks that we used to keep people playing (and paying). The game mechanics were literally a rigged slot machine. The meta-game was designed to constantly tantalize you with something just out of reach. The monetization was high-pressure, time-sensitive, and used false discounts to increase value ("Get this $20.00 pack for $1.99! Only for the next 60 minutes!")

It got very draining after a while, and I'm much happier now that I've left the industry.

It may be an artifact of the division between body and mind, common in Western cultures. Any problem related to the psyche is treated differently (ie taken less seriously) from problems related to the body. I wonder how many millenia this ostensibly subtle difference in conception will keep on giving us pain and mental anguish. Its so deeprooted, I wonder what it will take to pull it out.

This division is on the verge of self destruction under the own weight of its inconsistencies.

There are plenty of people hooked on this stuff in the east. Addiction doesn't care about your philosophy. Some people are just more mentally available to addiction in all it's myriad forms.

I was refering to the tendency to not treat psychological issues as serious as physical ones. Obviously addiction knows no boundaries.

I left casual games because of this; every partner and publisher we worked with was heavily pressuring us to optimize for whales. They wanted the long tale for marketing, and the whales for revenue; and once hooked, the core interaction loop was to be as addictive as possible.

When I left it was Candy Crush that was the top of the field; and we were in awe. They were _always_ rewarding players, and were pushing microtransactions everywhere. It was flashy like a slot machine, and provided a constant stream of "rewards" for continued engagement.

It was a disgusting industry then; it probably still is now. I went into game dev to tell stories and explore worlds, not to sell dope.

The frustrating part is there are lots of people making games to tell stories and explore worlds, but they fall into the void almost inmediately after launch due to the slot machine games taking the lion's share of the attention and money.

Thankfully, PC Gaming strangely hasn't been dominated by this phenomenon, despite EA's, Activision's, and Epic's best efforts. Fortnite is addiction-tuned F2P casinowear, and it's done gangbusters, but the industry hasn't managed to copy that formula with great success.

At least fornite cosmetics have limited gameplay impact (although not zero impact).

It is quite possible to be a relatively competitive player without spending a single cent (and without needing excessive grinding to do so, or at least, no more grinding than a paying player).

This is a lot better than most mobile games (pay more or wait # hours to continue), or games with lootboxes whose results give serious competitive advantage. (There are far too many of the latter to even list.)

But I do dislike any game that depends on any form of microtransaction model. I've no real issue with meaningful DLC for single player games (i.e. the equivlent of the old expansion packs), but otherwise a game should either be a one time cost, or a simple subscription. Not some unholy hybrid of the two as has become all too common.

Ah, but it's a social experience. The primary capital isn't one's competitive standing, it's the uniqueness of your gear.

Fortnite's store UI is designed around limited time access panic sales.

This can be easily managed without microttansaction. Simply award in game point that allows a player to buy cosmetics. Do not create any way for players to trade money for in game points.

No profit vs Big profit

Indeed. In fact, we've even spotted kids using "default" as a slur - which is exactly what you design for if you're building a microtransaction slurry game.

My daughter recently encountered this in Roblox. Her friends gave her a hard time for her default skin. The peer pressure to spend money is real.

> although not zero impact

For reference https://twitter.com/jmantheguy/status/970497516566347776?s=2...

Epic picked literally the most vulnerable target audience. That's what made Fortnite a hit.

The reward loop works much better when it can be in your pocket and be accessed during moments of boredom/idleness. The lack of friction before getting pulled in is at least as much of a causative factor as the three issues the article highlights. Every little bit of friction diminishes its effectiveness.

One thing that's ironic with a lot of mainstream AAA gaming though, is that even though they aren't copying the revenue model the game design conventions still tend to focus on length of engagement and playtime. I'm sure there's a reason compelling it but I'm not sure what.

I’ve read that the reason is to extend playtime for as long as possible to limit resale market.

Maybe with the advent of digital purchase (and the death of selling your used copy) we’ll see a return to designing games for fun.

Fortnite is a mobile game; it's why Epic is having a fight with Apple.

Pretty much all people I ever heard about or new who has issue with gaming were addicted to something like lol, wow or pubg.

The people who play whole night and that are irritable and underperforming during day, who made gaming their whole life, are not playing causual games. They are playing console and pc games.

Those folks are paying their time into the game sure - but casual games in IAPs can drain bank accounts surprisingly fast from folks that'd normally consider themselves above microtransactions. There is a lot of very sneaky psychological tricks that go into trying to get folks to spend an insane amount of money - I'd compare that to something like CS:GO which is trying to get everyone to spend a little bit of money but is less oriented to harness big spenders outside of the marketplace which isn't all that promoted in game.

Well i mean csgo stuff holds value and can be sold off so its not really comparable to normal mtx.

I really don't think Fortnite is as bad as you're making it out to be (certainly not even in the same league as most mobile microtransaction fests). The core of Fortnite is a pretty good (imo, although I prefer Apex Legends) battle royale fps, and the microtransactions are purely cosmetic items.

In contrast a lot of the big mobile games are barely even games. They're just AI controlling your gambled for gacha characters, which are very not cosmetic only. And the games that aren't AI controlled are still just basic turn based battle mechanics with very little strategy (and what is there is vastly less important than just getting better characters, probably by gambling).

I suspect the market of "people who play mobile games" and the market of "people who play PC games" are not even the same kinds of people, and if you tried to release the same stuff that makes money on mobile on PC, you wouldn't actually attract many new players. Likewise if the mobile market ceased to exist overnight, I doubt the players would be that attracted to many PC/console games. They're getting different things out of them.

Of course this is all just speculation, I don't really know.

Also bear in mind Fortnite was in no means special in offering cosmetic items for microtransactions. The game just got so big that it's a convenient punching bag.

The Fortnite store is special; it's an industry-leading example in exploiting social anxiety through time-limited unique cosmetics.

What's important about Fortnite isn't the core game, it's the social experience and the role that the cosmetics and store play in that.

> not to sell dope.

Is there no Breaking Bad effect because it's all legal?

I was in early and rode the wave from selling real games for $4.99, then $2.99, then $0.99, and finally... free. At which point the “real” part of making games was out the window and it was all user acquisition, LTVs, retention, and ugh.

Couldn’t have been more happy to get out of casual and F2P games four years ago. I honestly thought I might be done making games after that experience.

Thankfully, between doing the indie thing for a few years and starting a new studio last year, it became clear it was the medium and not the craft that was the problem.

> Thankfully, between doing the indie thing for a few years and starting a new studio last year, it became clear it was the medium and not the craft that was the problem.

Do you mean to say it's specifically a mobile issue?

I would say it's a free to play issue. A lot of these games exist on multiple platforms, basically wherever microtransactions are supported. Gems of War, for example, exists on mobile, on PC (Windows store, Steam), on Playstation, Switch and Xbox...

100% mobile. I have no issues with F2P games that aren't predatory (like LoL or Rocket League). I've spent hundreds on these games for silly cosmetics that don't affect gameplay.

I was watching a livestreamer that currently organizes their schedule almost entirely around F2P mobile games. I find it hard to tell such a person on an individual level that they are being exploited, because that sounds like moral posturing to me. But from the perspective of the company I could imagine how the effects of time limited sales and events could drive their KPIs on a macro level. How many of those people contributing to the 5 and 10 percent upticks were "exploited" in the truest sense of the word, as in they could not help themselves even if they wanted to? I have to wonder how many of these people would rather stop but are addicted or otherwise not conscious, versus those on the spectrum that see the games as a legitimate outlet for entertainment (and can stop themselves from spending too much).

I don't play them though, since I know I'd spend too much money and time on objects intangible.

The thing that strikes me the most about F2P is how societally acceptible it is. The people for whom the notion of "casinos" doesn't fit their interests can now have their own preferentially targeted equivalent of a casino in their pockets at all times, branded with things like television show franchises that ground them in a sense of familiarity.

Addiction by Design by Dow Schull is an interesting book on this.

> The game mechanics were literally a rigged slot machine.

This is an accurate description. So many games where people have to pay for the chance to get something. It's even worse than actual gambling since the prize isn't even money. All people get is some numbers in a database.

Another oppressive feature found in most exploitative games is the timer. Through a timer, the progression of free players is rate-limited. There's almost always some kind of resource that's used up whenever players do anything and when they run out of it the timer reveals itself. The game refills the resource on a regular basis.

This creates habits in players. People start out playing normally and next thing they know they're setting alarms to wake them up at 3 AM to do game tasks because that's when the timer resets. This is done deliberately with the goal to increase the number of players who login every day through a mix of positive and negative reinforcement. The timed refills themselves act as a periodic reward which is simple enough. More insidious however is how usually the timers will not start counting down to the next reward until players play the game. Every second the timer is not running is wasted and delays the next reward.

Paying customers can reset this timer at will. They are therefore able to progress at an uncapped rate. This implies the game's true form is a spending competition: the whale who gives the most money to the company for the longest time will win.

Video game addiction is already a recognized medical diagnosis. I have no doubt this trash is at least partly responsible for that. The reputation of the games industry is only gonna go downhill from there.

F2P-with-purchases games should (a) require disclaimers, (b) be illegal and stiffly penalized for allowing minors to play, & (c) have their algorithms open to a gaming regulator (in the same way Las Vegas does).

I play a lot of Apex Legends and recently I found out that when you go purchase a loot box it explicitly tells you the chance of each item's rarity. My initial thought was that it's a step in the right direction (of banning loot boxes entirely), but it also made me wonder how anyone can be sure those numbers are actually true in their backend.

In some countries, games are legally required to do state rarity of items in lootboxes, so it may just be so that they are compliant with all countries. I forget which countries, but I think they're in central europe

It is also pretty useless. Normal people can't parse probabilities - otherwise nobody would play in the lottery. If you have a list of 20 items with non-uniform chances, can you tell how long you need to play before it's likely you'll get an item you want? You and me can, by doing little math in head; most people can't (and it's another question whether one has the willpower to do such math and follow it through while tired, unwindng in front of a casual game).

What would be more useful if they listed the expected number of loot boxes you need to buy to get an item. "2% chance" reads differently than "you'll need to buy about 50 loot boxes, on average, to get that item".

I'd prefer “you'll need to buy about 50 more loot boxes, on average, to get that item” as wording. Bonus if there's a question mark next to it that explains probability (specifically, why the gambler's fallacy is wrong – though not necessarily mentioning the fallacy).

Good catch, I agree yours is better.

"Most <evil grin> players will get the item after buying 26 more boxes"

While we're all patting ourselves on the back for understanding probability, the correct calculation is actually log.98(.5) = 34.3 = number of attempts required for a 50% chance of getting a 2% item.

Wouldn't it be easier to just ban gambling apps including ones disguised as games from app stores?

You could probably get virtually everyone by simply defining it as a game with in app purchases that provide probabilistic or in game performance improvements.

If they can sell levels but not swords nothing of value will be lost.

> Normal people can't parse probabilities - otherwise nobody would play in the lottery.

Yes, they would. The lottery is about giving up something of little value ($1 or $2) for some entertainment and the chance at a truly life-changing situation. I doubt anyone is unaware there's almost no chance they win, and that they're losing on every dollar they spend. Interestingly, the lottery is occasionally +EV to play.

I otherwise agree, people are bad at gambling, probabilities, and understanding the long term. I play poker, and poker players are constantly furious that their 80% favorite hand doesn't win 100% of the time. 80% feels like a lock.

Some people don't care. They want to gamble, and they have no regard for what they lose in the process. I think many humans are just wired this way, or perhaps it's cultural.

I agree, playing the lottery is a little like buying insurance for something. Everyone knows that insurance is a losing proposition, but no one buys it to save 500$ on that fender bender, people buy it so that they can get through a catastrophic event like 500,000$ in medical bills.

I would hazard a guess that people who buy lottery tickets are much less likely to buy insurance than those who don't. I think some similar psychological mechanisms may be at play, but not in the way you are suggesting where they overestimate small probabilities across the board. I suspect it has more to do with discounting odds that are against them.

But I wouldn't bet on it.

Well because evolutionarily, gambling must pay off sometimes, and the people who are averse to gambling might become rarer if it pays off in a big way.

Ten thousand years ago doing something risky might result in you going from being a male with no prospects to having a harem with 50 wives. It makes sense that when your ancestors could have made a risky gambled (say raiding the village next door), they’d go for it, much like someone will put everything on 21 Black because the payoff could be so big.

But who gives a damn about the EEA?

That is not how evolution works. It can just be that the trait was not much in a way. Our that trait is innefective maladaption.

Evolution is not a god. And it does not build perfect organisms.

Or maybe it's just a trait that ended up there, like countless others.

A RNG machine that's slightly directed towards optimal variation still spews out a bunch of rubbish

A bit part of the lottery is that everyone knows that it's unlikely, but most people are capable of comprehending just how unlikely it is. Most people would probably say it's like "one-in-a-million", when it's really hundreds of times worse than that. People are just bad at understanding really big numbers. Everyone still feels like, "I know it won't, but it could happen to me," when even if you bought a lottery ticket every single week for your entire adult life, it would take you over a thousand lifetimes for you to finally have a 1% chance to win the lottery.

I think people at least initially have better grasps on things like 50-50 chances or 10% chances, even if other gambling fallacies kick in the more you play them.

1 in 140 million for EuroMillions

1 in 293 million for Powerball

Just because someone wins doesn't mean it will be you

> I play poker, and poker players are constantly furious that their 80% favorite hand doesn't win 100% of the time. 80% feels like a lock.

I always liked an interview by one of the designers of the game XCOM which relies heavily on showing players probabilities. Apparently behind the scenes on lower difficulties, even though they might show you 85% chance of success, they tweak it under the hood to be closer to 95% because that is where the player's emotional weighting is. They want the players to have fun and that is certainly one way to go about it.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/266891/Jake_Solomon_expl...

> The lottery is about giving up something of little value ($1 or $2) for some entertainment and the chance at a truly life-changing situation

Wish that were true. Organizers usually take 90% of the money. Just a tiny percentage is paid out.

Like Voltaire said: "Lotteries are a tax on stupidity"

I agree, and I don't see how it contradicts what I said at all.

Except that wasn't Voltaire it was the economist Sir William Petty. In fact Voltaire made his fortune on the lottery. He found a exploit in the rules of the particular implementation of the lottery allowing him to guarantee a win and high pay out.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/05/how-voiltair...

I've never had an urge to buy lottery tickets or gamble for money. Mathematically, I know the odds of me winning are highly unlikely so my non-urge turns further into complete disinterest, I can pass by lottery shops and rolls of scratch lottery cards in shops and not even notice them.

I've only been in one lottery and I was forced to enter against my wishes - that was the draft/conscription which, unfortunately, I did win - along with many others.

If I've an interest in lotteries/gambling then it's to question why I'm so disinterested in the subject compared to others. I've not been able to answer that adequately.

> Yes, they would. The lottery is about giving up something of little value ($1 or $2) for some entertainment and the chance at a truly life-changing situation.

It is expected that that one or two dollars is more likely to result in a life changing situation if saved and properly invested - this is difficult in the modern world since a lot of large institutions are out to short-change the little guys but it still remains true.

I can easily see the value proposition of regular casino gambling - you're slowly losing money for the experience - but for the lottery your money is being transformed into a ticket that is, essentially, worthless.

I am strongly morally opposed to the lottery as a form of government income supplement since spending on lotteries tends to be weighted toward lower income and is extracting revenue from those less able to bear it. Lotteries are an extremely regressive tax.

That all said I think the EV of a lottery ticket is probably quite a bit higher than Starbucks and those sell gangbusters. A lot of our society is oriented toward exploiting addiction.

I don't think you realistically can trust these as there will never be serious audits, and they exploit all kinds of psychological weaknesses. They really just need to be illegal. Sell content piecemeal, sure. But not loot boxes.

I agree completely. I would've spent ridiculous amounts of money on that game at this point if it weren't for loot boxes, but alas it wasn't meant to be.

I don't have any more information than you do, but my gut feeling is "80% of companies won't bother to lie on the numbers, 20% will lie, and will occasionally provoke a scandal when they get caught in the rare audit or get the whistle blown on them by a spiteful employee".

They should also disclose a spending ceiling. How much do you need to / can you spend to gain access to all the content. Do I need to spend $60, $600, $6000, $60,000 or is there no limit?

Most of them don't have limits as you don't buy a DLC to unlock content. Games are almost infinite and money helps you advance.

Mobile gaming is disgusting. And the few good developers that make good "traditional" games don't make enough money to keep developing.

Interestingly enough, the Pokemon Picross game on the 3DS had a fixed spend limit of $50, after which you could just top up your in game currency for free.

So either you did f2p, or you paid $50 and got a full game, or some linear combination of both.

I liked that game and paid $50 for it.

Hello fellow person who liked that game! I didn't know there were more of us.

I never did spend any money on it though.

> F2P-with-purchases

this misses the core issue. a game like path of exile is completely playable for free - and they release new content quarterly and yearly (again, for free). a game like Raid Shadow Legends is not - you very rapidly hit a paywall and it would take years of free play to acquire power equivalent to spending $100.

the exploitative nature is pay to win, where youre simply playing a different game unless you spend money.

There's nothing wrong with an honest pay-to-win game. The dangerous part is the randomness.

While I agree with your sentiment, I have to wonder if it would be possible to make a non-random pay-to-win game be compelling both from a financial and gameplay standpoint.

Say you can buy max-level weapons/characters/whatever for a defined price. The meta rapidly breaks down to "this is the highest yield of power per dollar" and "the optimal build costs exactly USD 1143.76."

It's not compelling for new players to say "I know that I'm going to eventually spend eleven hundred bucks if I love this game." You can't dangle the chance of getting a super-powered item on that first 99 cent lootbox to get someone on the IAP treadmill. I'd expect the game design itself would have to feature hard breakpoints to trigger a purchase/hundred hour grind moment.

And then, how do you convince the whales to pony up 5 and 6 figures once they possess an optimal build? Fashion and equivalent power churn only goes so far.

Eh I don't really think "think of the children" is the right narrative here. These games, while especially bad for children, aren't much better for adults. Absolutely require 18+ to play and require them be labeled as gambling but I don't think that's enough.

If we're counting on adults "knowing better" which makes it okay to play these games while the industry profits on precisely those adults that don't then there's a problem.

In fact, we never marketed to children. Adults are much more profitable, because they can actually pay up.

I don't have a problem with "F2P-with-purchases" as long as the "purchases" aren't random lootboxes and aren't gating progression or buying power.

For example, I always felt that League of Legends had a good F2P-with-purchases model. There are a lot of characters you can play as, but you have to either unlock them by playing or pay a couple dollars to unlock one. But the more expensive characters aren't necessarily more powerful, they're typically just newer, and it doesn't take much play to unlock a character.

Once a character is unlocked, there are skins you can purchases with money, but they're purely cosmetic.

Great example of how language is a tool for thinking, but it's also a tool for not thinking. If you want to ignore or obfuscate something, you can seal it off with euphemisms and misrepresentations, kind of like putting an interface in front of an implementation. And as you pointed out, you can use this tactic to deceive not only others but also yourself.

Let's say language is a tool to convey information regardless of truth or precision.

You can disguise negative information giving it the appearance of a usual positive one (the fake discount).

It's more a property of information than of language, or rather a property of our information processor, so lazy it doesn't check every single piece 3 times but instead rely on habit and context

I'm thinking more of a writer sitting down and struggling to choose the correct word to identify a thought. I wouldn't say they're "conveying information." At that point they don't have information. I would say rather that they're attempting to refine the raw material of the flow of their thought-consciousness by using language. You can use words to assist that refinement. (I'm doing it now, for example.) But you can also use words to divert your thought stream away from potentially uncomfortable ideas, or someone else can do that to you.

Casual game design uses many of the same nouns as casino operators.

“Compelling”

Definitely. It reminds me of Orwell's Newspeak in 1984- although the novel itself shows that having a "clean" vocabulary doesn't completely prevent "unclean" thought deemed by the authorities, having a censored set of language can "nudge" people to certain propaganda.

"we're supported by advertising" (pervasive surveillance and tracking)

The surveillance and tracking complement advertising, but aren't necessarily part of it. I'd call it brainwashing instead.

Plausible deniability is such a wonderful idea.

There's a lot of things that fall on a spectrum, and this fact can be used to pretend that motivations are different to what they really are.

For instance, where is the line between investing and gambling? A friend of mine was looking into setting up a spreadbetting firm once, so he went talking to insiders. It turns out 90% of people lose 90% of their money in 90 days, and that's what several firms told him. But of course they don't lead with this fact, they say they're offering training videos the teach you how to invest in the market, just like proper investors. And it's not even a lie, a lot of the content makes perfect sense and would be found in any "proper" investment house. The real deal is of course that they offer a buzz from massive leverage, and everything about the UI is to make you blow yourself up.

The same story applies for social media. A place to keep in touch with your old friends is a great thing, but realistically, how often are you going to write to your classmates on a classmates-only forum? And how is classmatesforum going to make any money doing that? So we get the ML-powered feed of news/funnies/cutesies reactions that seems to be the modern social web.

> "It turns out 90% of people lose 90% of their money in 90 days, and that's what several firms told him. But of course they don't lead with this fact"

They do in the UK; the first one I googled is https://pepperstone.com/en-gb/trading/spread-betting/ and it has a banner accross the top of the page (like a cookie banner, above the header) saying "Spread bets and CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 79.8% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading spread bets and CFDs with this provider.". This is typical here on sites and adverts for sites.

This has been going on for more than a decade. I recommend to read at least the opening chapter: https://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-...

Yep, I've pasted that link in the past. It's now a proper classic.

From my experience, knowing people who works at King this is definitely a thing. The doublethink due to having a pretty great workplace is stark.

Gaming today is not that different than gambling. I started playing some games on iOS recently, I got addicted too and spent way too much money I should have.

Meanwhile ads displayed in the app offer me “real money” and “millions each month” playing cards or by “putting my finance at risk” or playing similar addictive games.

(Yes, I paid for the game but there are ads for extra scores)

Except that with gambling, you get a rush and a chance of profit. In games, it's only a sad and short-lived rush.

...which is why i like video games and not gambling :)

>I don't think it was adding much value to the world

I believe this statement can be applied to the vast majority of jobs, or capitalistic endeavors in general. Not to defend them in any sort of way, as I abhor these practices, but I think we should acknowledge that reality (and perhaps work our way out of it, somehow)

This all seems a bit silly. Go work for an *unprofitable* mobile game company (or start your own!) to see how quickly your model breaks down.

The idea that you can engineer yourself an addictive game is a silly concept.

That games en masse are evolving for maximal "addictiveness" is unquestionable, but has entirely different implications.

The fact that some people fail to accomplish a thing doesn't mean others can't. Of course you can engineer addictive games. We know quite a lot about addiction. What do you think casinos are, exactly?

Tell me this -- do casinos fail?

If you look only at examples of successful things and say "it is addictive" but don't look at the same principles as applied to failed examples of the same thing, then you're being intellectually lazy.

In order to establish some facet as "addictive" it needs to work both ways, otherwise you're just using "addictive" as a synonym for "successful" -- Edison's light bulb was "addictive" and people were "addicted" to Pullman cars. But you get to carry all the negative connotations of "addictive"; you're trying to let the informal do all the work while positing nonsensical equivalences.

Do bars fail?

Yes, and so do casinos. That is the point

The original point was: "The idea that you can engineer yourself an addictive game is a silly concept."

The rebuttal was: "this is literally what casinos do"

The rebuttal to that was: "well, some casinos fail"

Which isn't really a point. Some casinos fail, that doesn't show that they don't optimize for addiction. It just indicates that optimizing for addiction is necessary but not sufficient for a casino to maintain solvency.

I think we have fundamentally different of andrewla's original point, and that is OK.

I read it as pointing out that success isn't guaranteed with an addictive game model.

I did not read it as saying that some games don't or cant optimize for addictiveness.

So you call someone intellectually lazy... and immediately turn around and make an implication that if casinos have failed to be successful then that somehow speaks to the addition qualities of gambling? Something something nonsensical equivalences.

I once read "The best game developers are like weed dealers: they sell you something they love. The worst game developers are like heroin dealers: they would never, ever touch the stuff, or let their own children get within a mile of it."

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

- Upton Sinclair

Not really applicable. In this case, everyone understands it but they don’t talk about it due to legal reasons

Yesterday I saw on Cardi B's stories she did a paid post promotion for a game that is literally a slot machine..

It's designed with childlike graphics and her followers are very young. It's marked as teen in google store.

God even the first review shows how blatant this is:

"I'm really not big on games but this game is the truth. I cant stop playing it. I go to sleep to it. Wake to it. My day is filled with ways of finding new ways to get coins and spins (mainly spins, lol)"

I'm all for legal, regulated online gambling. This not even disguised style of game should be called what it is. Some type of Pachinko in that you don't get money back but some other token. But even worse since you probably can't walk around the corner to exchange easily for real world value.

Call it gambling, verified 18+, and regulate it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.moonactive...

Why does this type of ad work? Do people want to be addicted to something so badly? Don't they have something better to do?

Escape.

People just don't have "free", quiet time to think or to reflect about things anymore, stolen by various things, social media mostly. You'll operate in automatic, always-consuming mode, rigged by algorithm, and that doesn't help you thinking critically when this kind of ads comes up.

and companies exploit these things and make tons of money, sad.

I worked for a VP in mobile games who described the central loop as “giving the players a job and having them pay us [the makers of the game] for it”. I respected his candor on what we are doing, but this was past the point when I had realized it wasn’t something I was proud to have spent time on.

It can be even seen in design of offices. I once joined a meetup at what turned out to be a sports gambling software company (William Hill I think), and there was no mention or suggestion of gambling at any place in their offices - it was about "celebration of sports" and other bullshit.

Even before mobile gaming and in-game purchases was a thing. I remember there was a very wealthy player on Asheron's Call Frostfell who paid players to feed his XP chain, bought all of the rarest items such as nexus armour etc etc. There was a huge botting scene that sort of ruined the game but forced me to learn C++ and made me a bit of money as a teenager selling accounts.

Companies involved in bad faith dealing often have this kind of NewSpeak.

I'd add that algorithmic feeds are another part of the triad (quartet?), and probably the worst offender. Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time, a distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement will be those that call for outrage, which leads to radicalization [1]), and just in general a society where our information consumption is determined by black boxes with opaque goals that do not optimize for the common good.

I attribute a significant part of the political rift and radicalization that has occurred in the western world in the past few years to specifically this feature, the algorithmically determined, engagement maximizing, feed.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00550-7

I think this is how AI takes over humanity.

Humans are so short-sighted, we don't even need a superintelligence to outsmart us. We happily stand by and collect profits while letting the AI do whatever it wants. Really, we need regulation that makes companies care about side-effects of their AI technology.

I have sometimes mused about how we have worried about "sky net" since the 90's, but we've already let AI have power to control our lives to some extent.

For instance, there are cases you can point to where some normal person on Twitter with a couple dozen followers posted the wrong thing, it blew up into an international story, and they eventually got fired from their real-world job for it. Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? In a lot of cases it was the algorithm: for whatever reason that tweet drew engagement, so a massive spotlight was put on this mostly-private individual.

In a real way that's an example of an AI system deciding to take away someone's livelihood.

> Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized?

This is a serious stretch. The algo didn’t force that person to sign up and post their every ignorant thought on a public forum. People can just put down their phones but they love the attention. Individuals are just as guilty for giving power over themselves to social media.

I'm not "blaming the AI" for this person's behavior. My point is that there was a non-human component in this decision process which led to this person losing their livelihood.

To make an old-world analogue, in 1980 for someone to be held to account for an objectionable view, it probably would have involved some journalist making the decision to write a story about the comments which someone made. That human component in deciding what is newsworthy has been replaced by a machine in some cases.

Another example would be dating apps. Now we have algorithms which make decisions about which parts of the dating pool an individual will have access to. In a real sense, non-human intelligence is playing some role in who gets to pass on their genes to the next generation, and with whom.

I'm not saying that our lives are ruled by machines, but they're not completely not governed by machines either.

If anything, the next generation of people will learn to avoid online polarized engagement using their own identities. They will create these curated and sterile personas under their real name while using a nom de plume for actual content.

I'm kind of surprised that aliases have not widely taken off already. But I suppose the consequences are not very severe yet.

>I'm kind of surprised that aliases have not widely taken off already.

The funny thing is that these aliases already existed, but we've largely eschewed them for our "real" identities. Prior to probably Facebook I think every interaction I had with other people online was behind a screen name detached from my real world identity.

Aliases used to be the default before the social media revolution, though. If anything the trend has been decidedly in the other direction - using one's real name was seen as irresponsible just 15 years ago, whereas now it seems the average internet user is not even aware pseudonymity is an option.

It's not the ignorant thoughts which are considered wrongthink nowadays, but reasonable opinions that don't toe the line on controversial topics.

Wait until people figure out how much power the AIs already have over election outcomes.

What?

The AI determines which political articles and posts you see. The AI determines if you get reminded to register/vote. At the extremes the AI has a very strong impact on whether you believe Obama is a secret Muslim or Trump is a Russian asset.

Which means people best able to play people to increase the "this post is good" score of the AI will sway the election results. It's not enough to control them, but I'd imagine you can tip a close election by 10% or so.

Dr. Robert Epstein has done some research on this and has testified before Congress about it. Here's one article. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-google-search-bia...

Most people in democracies are entrenched into two blocks (even in European multiparty systems), and AI/ML/statistical methods/mathematical optimization allows interested groups to target the people inbetween the blocks. And based on their personality profile you can goad them to one side or the other with targeted advertising.

(I’m not making any claims about where or how or how much these things are happening.)

I'm French and this comment really doesn't reflect our political landscape.

It reminds me of Spirited Away and how everyone fed No Face for a little gold in return, but in the end they all got eaten.

The other component is that algorithmic feeds encourage echo chambers. People engage with outrage most when they are on the “same side” of it.

But what of trolling then, a sort of counter reaction to the echo chamber where large outliers enter the room and disturb the equilibrium?

For my part I think it's asynchronous written debates that are the source of these problems, so even earlier than facebook.

On a large massive forums, people write for themselves, not the others, and barely read the discussion. Oral debates or written rendering of them, had the advantage to be slow, less variate, and adaptative to a single argumentative line.

Nowadays when you discuss an issue online, everyone starts new train of thought to escape adaptation, and care little about an audience they d need to seduce or convince.

I suppose I just did the same anyway, you can reply but I wont read :)

Trolling pushes people further into their echo chambers. It isn't intended to encourage a wider world view, it's intended to hurt. It just convinces people that they're already on the right side.

I think this is partially correct. People write for themselves, but they also write for an audience. The latter is a problem because they can essentially ignore whatever they are responding to as long as triggers n upvote. This disincentivizes honest and productive dialog in favor of nitpicking, gotchas, or simple ridicule.

The former is like a bunch of drunk grandpas mumbling to themselves in a room, the latter is like a self interested orator playing to a crowd. Asynchronous written debate can be the one of the best forms of communication. Think about Jefferson’s letters or other famous correspondence. The incentives are just wrong on boards with ranking and voting

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicalization I'm honestly surprised to see the world "radicalization" used as a net negative thing, rather than positive/negative/neutral depending on context.

E.g. Gandhi would have been called "radical" without implying any violent tendency.

Since 9/11 it's been common to use "radicalization" to refer to crossing the line between regular Islam and Radical Islam.

And (to a lesser extent) the equivalent process for other domestic terrorist groups.

People will still understand what you mean if you use "radicalization" to refer to positive things, but they'll wonder if you're making a very dry joke.

I think this emerges as a collective version of the "my views are always normal" fallacy.

* Anyone who drives slower than me is an idiot and anyone who drives faster than me is reckless.

* Anyone who's worse than me at me at Overwatch is a noob, anyone who's better than me has no life.

* Anyone who's views are less extreme than me is a sheep, anyone who's views are more extreme than me is a radical.

It takes a lot of effort to realize that I'm on the "radical" spectrum for a lot of my political views (I'm hella progressive) and that that isn't a bad thing, but neither are other people's, in my view less aggressive, ideas for tackling problems.

It certainly feels tricky because "radical" can apply to ideas about goals and also to ideas about ways of achieving goals ("tackling problems").

It's hard to suss out people's goals. They might not understand their goals themselves, and "goal" may be an abstract and unknowable thing. But I think it's necessary to find some goals to be a bad thing in order to figure out your own politics.

I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically and that makes an insane difference to the quality of the conversation.

You go from the most outrageous at the top to the most discussed at the top. All content gets a chance to be read. Even if it the first user find it uninteresting. On reddit, if what you post gets a downvote very quickly, you're basically done.

Yes, Reddit basically encourages flashy comments.

But the rub with traditional message boards is, that they don't scale well. Some subreddits have many, many thousands of active regular participants. It's hard for a single subforum to operate at that scale.

Isn't this the same as the algo-driven placement of HN stories and comments?

To a certain extent, yes, though my understanding is that HN's comment ranking algorithm is substantially different from Reddit's.

Also, HN is more of a news feed than a forum, so it makes sense to favor newer posts over knowledge-base type threads.

Makes me sort of want an HN forum though. Maybe limited to self posts and with a more chronological feed.

> I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically

Chronologically by last update, otherwise you could always read /r/yoursub/new, but that's only chronologically by last original post. By last original post doesn't help much. For slow-moving subs, it doesn't change anything much; for fast-moving subs, it's okay-ish if you care about posts more than comments, but you still lack curation (however imperfect).

It's such a shame that most hobby-related content has moved to Reddit. Because of the way the algorithms work there are no long-running threads and recent content is heavily favoured.

This is terrible for hobby boards because it means that content from long-timers gets drowned out by newbies asking the same questions over and over. In my experience hobby subreddits are completely dominated by inexperienced newbies giving one another the same cargo-cult advice. That, and straight up image posts with literally 0 value (for example the front page of /r/simracing at any given moment is usually about 30-50% pictures of just a steering wheel / rig from someone saying "got my new wheel/rig today").

The old days of forums were great for hobbyists because the long-running threads would stretch into the dozens or hundreds of pages of comments. Newbies could be directed to the longer threads or deep-linked directly to older comments. The format surfaced all posts, but did not favour recency - old threads could be revived (necro'd) or kept up top indefinitely. It wasn't perfect but it was a system that favoured long-timers over newbies.

Reddit has "1 account for everything", Markdown editing, collapsible threaded conversation, and limited or no on profile pictures and signatures (much like HN). All of this amounts to a more seamless user flow that lets you quickly skim large amounts of conversation quickly.

People switching to Reddit has less to do with "it's Reddit" and more to do with the UX of Reddit being better for what people tend to want to do on a forum. Discourse is OK and comes close in some places (has great Markdown editing for example), but "1 account for everything" alone is somewhat of a killer feature.

It's a shame that Stackexchange didn't get OpenID to catch on anywhere other than Stackexchange. Could have been a big help in driving more attention to independent (and maybe even federated) platforms.

Some of my hobby forums have seen a resurgence in the past few years now that Reddit has consumed all of the low-effort posters.

I think it's mostly a problem of not having sub-subreddits.

Any reasonable forum with - checks simracing - 168k members would have a dozen subforums for different reasons soas not to drown out the general forum. One might even be "post your rig" or "newbie questions".

> even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you"

At least for Twitter, it allows you to turn that algorithm crap off and it respects that choice - iirc even across devices.

Facebook, meanwhile, has entirely turned off that ability.

The functionality is still there, but they've made it harder and harder to access. It used to be an obvious choice. Then it was buried in options, then deeper in options, and now I can't even find it any more. However, if you add the magical "?sk=h_chr" to your Facebook bookmark you'll get a chronological feed (at least until you click on the icon to go back to the top so refresh instead).

I'm sure they'll completely break it some day. They broke it briefly once already. Since I was working at Facebook at the time I filed a task on it. The response was the rudest I ever got in 3.5 years at the company. If it works, as long as it works, it's basically by accident (or because some front-end developer is resisting management's constant pressure to deprecate it).

It is still working. But no, uncurated chronological feed is just too dense for me.

Is the culture at fb really toxic like that? Like surely they can't possibly claim 'we take feedback seriously! :D' and then ignore the hoardes of screaming masses who are being held hostage by a monopoly where the platform pretty much literally owns their social graph

I’m pretty sure Twitter switches you back to the algo feed after a certain amount of time (or at least they used to).

I agree. In fact, I wrote about that fact on my blog. https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicali...

I definitely think personalized feeds are the worst in terms of "negative value creation." I don't think Qanon for example would be a popular movement without having ridden the YouTube recommendation algorithm and Facebook's personalized feeds before those companies were forced to ban it.

I think of it this way. Lets say I walk past someone on the street and say "hi." Now lets say I punch them in the face. What creates the most engagement?

I liked Facebook much more when I could scroll back far enough and my perfectionist mind would see where I previously left off and I'd feel "caught up". You can still do it, but the content changes a bit every time. Twitter seems a lot worse; you'll never be able to "go back" and find that thing you just saw a minute ago before you closed the app, and it's just infinite.

> Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time

I like watching YouTube, I learn a lot from it. My wife likes watching tiktok, it is an exchange of culture. How exactly is this a waste of time? What would be a better use of my time? Making money for someone else? Watching TV? If I (and many others) enjoy it, why does it matter?

> distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement will be those that call for outrage, which leads to radicalization

This is propaganda. Do you think the perspective imposed on the public by an elite group of individuals, hand-fed information by government press conferences doesn't lead to a distorted world view?

Tiktok's algorithm is on a completely other level.

I’ve used TikTok, and the way its algorithm made me feel is unparalleled. It’s truly something else. I’m not sure how it does it, but it’s one of the only apps where one truly feels they have a live being behind the screen watching and tweaking the recommendations. It’s fluid, responds almost immediately, and feels like it knows everything about how I consume the content. Tiktok must employ some smart statisticians.

Smart statisticians or the next best thing - the kitchen sink black box method

what method is that?

I still haven't fully grasped that we reached this point of perversiveness online. We have brilliant minds and a ridiculous amount of money working on making Alabama's soccer moms click more ads, and we have reached the point of making people addicted to websites to reach that goal.

Obviously this is nothing new, and the cigarette industry has been profitting off addiction for decades, but I never expected the same thing (except the very immediate threat of lung cancer) to happen to tools that could have been optimized for so much good instead.

And the worst part is that some of it is just so incompetent. I've been trying to break away from Facebook for a while, and recently (the past year or so) I started realizing that my Facebook feed always shows me the exact same posts in the exact same order for days, to the point where I know exactly what post will be first when I open the website. Where is all the Facebook money going? What are these people working on? What are they doing?

Fixing bullshit left by others, refactoring parts of the machine, copying other apps, working on pointless panels and ideas that will be killed in a hot minute or forgotten about, working on internal tools or mostly - fighting internal political battles to get a promotion/more money/authority/status. Most of the people are not there to innovate but to earn money and status for themselves by working at the big F***K

You sound like you're speaking from experience, so I wanna ask: How genuinely true do you think this is? I'm always curious, about the FAANGs in general but Facebook in particular.

Divorced from as much cynicism as possible, what % of level I-III software employees are just there for their resumes?

From Amazon, and according to my extensive experience with the other FANG in Blind, I would very seriously say 90% are there simply for resume and money.

I don’t feel like Blind is a good source. Selection bias at play. Especially with disgruntled employees or the ones who only care about optimizing earnings.

In software? I'd say about 50-60 in S1 and going down to like 30-40 in S3, but a high percentage none the less.

Outside of software, you will probably get to 70+%.

It's not just a facebook problem, its a problem of a lot of large orgs with large salaries and "prestige" associated. People get in just to use it as a "platform" to launch their career, they bring their status and political games with them, read books such as "How to win fake political friends and push your influence to others" and then implement them. They lack real visions, ideas or venues of productivity, so they delegate and communicate and call meetings and push ideas and agendas that only serve to give them the "upper hand" when its promotion time.

Just check out Facebooks internal network, where you gotta play nice and play politics or you will be look down on as "not having community spirit".

Every idea is vulnerable to the monster understatedly known as "business rules." If you want to change how these companies operate, how they treat users, or, really, how the company makes money in a user-driven economy, you have to be able to affect "business rules."

> Every idea is vulnerable to the monster understatedly known as "business rules."

Cool take

I always thought it was pretty obvious when YouTube rolled out screen time reminders.

It had nothing to do with anything but minimizing liability in case the general public ever catches on to what they are doing to kids mental health.

What’s hilarious is they probably have some “data retention policy” and will get away with it.

I guess it’s why SV engineers want to care about social issues so much. When you’re up in your $300k+ a year ivory tower built on something you know is dirty, you are exactly the type of person to be angry and project frustration.

I saw on Reddit a screenshot of AOC dogging on old people in Congress for not understanding digital. She listed a bunch of modern day issues and this wasn’t one of them. If even she doesn’t know, we really are screwed.

How is this that much different to similar "concerns" about kids watching to much tv back in the 60's 70's etc.

You make a great and difficult point. I’ll try to answer as best I can at least how I see it.

Big TV’s goal is to broadcast as engaging as possible material to a general audience. This is broad and therefore not very addictive / effective.

Big Tech’s goal is to broadcast as engaging as possible material to an individual. This is specific and therefore very addictive / effective.

Regardless that the goal is the same, one is a heavier hitter, and we should have regulations to protect people against the bigger punches.

Here is a rough ranking of information sources by amount of "user engagement".

Books < TV < Video Games <= Social Media

The rankings are potentially different per individual and each information source effects people in different ways. This is my mental model of different user engagement sources. The hard part is where to draw the line and the inevitable fact that pandora is already out of the box.

> Big TV’s goal is to broadcast as engaging as possible material to a general audience. This is broad and therefore not very addictive.

That may have been true once, but since then TV distilled down the patterns for maximizing addiction across the biggest segment of the population - that's why most TV is so mind-dumbing that you can almost feel your brain being sucked out of your skull when watching.

But I agree that Internet media are much more focused and much heavier hitters.

With youtube you're one "recommended" video away from both morally dubious content targeting kids, and qanon conspiracy content.

I think that's more a problem for the grandparents and parents

Sure, but you still can't police the content your kids watch there passively, while conversely with Netflix or cable you can set it and forget it.

If parents are relying on "setting it and forgetting it", that's not policing at all. Youtube Kids was supposed to be a solution like this where the site would offer filtered videos for children, but it quickly resulted in the so-called Elsagate scandal where children were targeted with videos depicting things like violence, drug use, and sexual activity

It's definitely a problem for both. Lots of kids are getting radicalized too, along with the Fox News generation.

While not related to TV (but possibly radio), My political radicalism probably peaked in 4th grade due to my surroundings. Young minds can be very easily influenced before they fully develop critical thinking.

Is that actually your experience on YouTube or is this just something people say to encourage deplatforming? I don't think I've seen anything at the level of flat earth or Q on my related videos since like 2017... I've even attempted to seek out some of these videos just to see the claims and it was difficult to maneuver past Youtubes search redirections.

Want a non-conspiracy example? Search "obama is gone" on youtube then on DuckDuckGo. Even a stupid crab rave meme is buried, presumably for the purposes of preventing Obama related conspiracy theories from emerging.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=obama+is+gone https://duckduckgo.com/?q=obama+is+gone+site%3Ayoutube.com

I'd still never park my kid on Youtube but things aren't like they were pre-adpocalypse.

Just yesterday I got recommendations for Sky News, some preacher, and conspiracy clips. All it took was to watch a couple of music videos with several million views. This is what the algorithm is shoveling to people.

One evening of video surfing and you'll practically trip over them. I have no idea how it is one could never notice this stuff. I clear cookies and have no account.

Interesting. I do look at related videos so it's not about noticing anything... We clearly have different experiences.

The difference I see is that I have an account with subscriptions and years of activity data. I guess the algorithm knows I don't click on that stuff so they stopped trying to show it to me. I'm very surprised to learn they are giving users these recommendations by default.

It is mine. I don't watch much political content on YouTube, and I constantly get Steven Crowder and PragerU videos on my recommended feed. Needless to say I don't subscribe to their ideas (to put it lightly).

The type of content is certainly different, since anyone can upload videos to YouTube. The TV that kids were watching “too much” of was super bland, mainstream stuff, for better or worse. There certainly weren’t organizations bulk generating thousands of hours worth of creepy and bizarre videos featuring kids’ favorite characters, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

You scoff, but would you honestly say those concerns were entirely unfounded?

Habits we develop as children tend to persist through our lives. People who grew up very active tend to stay at least a little active, people who grew up eating healthy diets will tend to continue to eat well. The opposite also tends to be true.

We have record levels of obesity in many developed nations now. There's a lot to blame for that, but surely our sedentary lifestyles is a factor. That includes watching too much TV.

>In 2017, an average U.S. consumer spent 238 minutes (3h 58min) daily watching TV.

...more or less a humanitarian catastrophe

Neil Postman’s argument about the “now this” incoherence of television also applies doubly to today’s tech like TikTok and Reddit.

If TV was generally bad (as Postman argues) then video-based social media is awful, and worse than Postman ever predicted.

We know that both of those things can have negative effects when taken to the extreme. Anything people find addicting can be harmful.

For instance, television screen time is correlated with increased obesity.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4555288/

Have you seen the content that inevitably ends up in kids autoplay video feeds? Weird doesn't even begin to describe it. Some of it would give HBO pause.

Almost every Disney movie have the childrens parents being killed, the Swedish childrens author Astrid Lindgren (very popular in Europe, I don’t know about the US) wrote a story called The Brothers Lionheart where the young brother is dying from an incurable respiratory disease and (spoilers) his brother dies saving him from a house fire. The he dies from the respiratory disease.

My point is that children are being told stories that we wouldn’t consider for children all the time. And that isn’t even considering fairytales.

I recently got a book with the full collection of the Grimm brothers' fairytales. I don't get how those authors got marketed as kids story writers. Some of the stories make it feel like reading Terminator for bedtime is harmless.

You're missing my point. There are people sneaking downright weird shit into kids' feeds on Youtube.

https://www.theverge.com/culture/2017/11/21/16685874/kids-yo...

The difference between brothers Grimm or old Disney films and this is coherence, and possibly motive. At the very least they are trying to tell a story of some kind. But this stuff is closer to porn (except its surreal? instead of titillating), and the motive is unknown.

It's totally different and a new thing compared to the 60s/70s/80s kids argument.

Well, what happened to those kids? The kids grew up and now spend the majority of their time working in advertising, supplying games, creating endless streams of new media, etc.

how has it NOT been harmful?

I'm more inclined to believe my parents did the right thing by limiting TV time and commenting that most of it was rubbish. And I presume like many parents in Silicon Valley, I'm going to fight tooth and nail to keep advertising and most of this stuff from my kids.

The funny thing is, if you're not brought up around it, if you learn some math and statistics, and then you suddenly go somewhere exposure is considered normal, you almost have a physical or psychological revulsion to it.

Ads become frustrating and unacceptable intrusions. casino floors are sad, boring, pathetic and dystopian. mobile games look like drugs foistered upon an underclass, etc.

At least with big TV at the time, programming was so limited (at least in my country), you had maybe 2 to 3 hours per week of anything that would fit a genre worth watching. But even with that restriction, I know a large number of people who deem that the TV should be on even if there's "nothing to watch". I just can't write that sort of behaviour off as not being dysfunctional, it's just that we've culturally got a general acceptance of very specific types of dysfunction...

And what about rates of obesity? I'm not saying TV is solely to blame, but are we going to pretend that screen time and such programming (on demand or otherwise) is a blameless part of our culture?

Well said. Whenever I have to turn on the TV (which actually requires plugging in the cable box, because I simply don't use it, and also because it's crappily designed and causes buzzing in my speakers when plugged in), I'm always shocked by how blatantly ideological the advertising is.

Upthread there's a comment on how someone's kid is being made fun of for not purchasing custom skins to use in Fortnight, and I almost commented something about how to me, there's always something been something weirdly uncomfortable about people who choose to spend money on arbitrarily customizing something. I'm glad I didn't, because thinking about it, I am the weird one. Most people are quite happy to "waste" time and money in this way. I'm not one of the kids (or adults) who grew up like this their whole life.

Lest this comment come across as me saying I'm the one sane person in a crazy world, I should add that I'm certainly affected by this when it comes to the Internet. Although I haven't seen more than an ad or two in years (thanks ad blockers), I'm still affected by the addiction-promotion used by websites to keep you there so you (theoretically) see those ads. I caught myself spending hours a day scrolling through Twitter. I'm trying to kick the habit, but it is a habit. Maybe I'm just in a better position to recognize it because I see the damage too much TV did to others.

to be honest, AOC doesn't seem very knowledgeable in general, IMO she's just a trump (a less successful one), but on the left.

Trump was a beast for the ages.

AOC is closer to a regular ol' populist. Note how she and Cruz were the first to join the ranks of angry people online in lambasting Robinhood before they could explain themselves in the GME debacle.

Even granting that AOC isn't "very knowledgeable in general", that's hardly the most important of Trump's qualities. Surely there are more important standards to judge a leader by than their intelligence. Kim Jong-un might be a brilliant man for all I know, but I don't think anyone should be emulating him. So no, I don't think you can say she's "a Trump".

I meant not very smart, but narcissistic and populist. Trump is also quite a psychopath, but he held a lot of power, we won't know if AOC would be like that or not until she has that kind of power (like a billionaire or president) exhibit A for narcissism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9uTH0iprVQ

That's an exhibit in narcissism? I was genuinely curious what you would produce. Let me tell you, that ain't it.

Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive. Including cheeseburgers and fun video games.

>Most alarming is the “internet points”. On Reddit, this is called Karma. On Twitter, it’s likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score displays the community’s overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can vote! The reality is very different. Reddit, for example, has always obfuscated the true Karma score (“to prevent vote brigading”), and the position of a piece of content within the feed can be purposely decided by the Reddit home office, not by the community. This is incredibly, deeply sinister.

Why is it 'deeply sinister' -- he just seems to assert it, reddit home office isn't putting other content there that isn't sponsored -- astro turfing exists and explains a lot of that but I don't think it's the reddit admins. The voting mechanism is pretty good at determining interesting content from uniteresting content.

This whole article reads like a conspiracy theorist rant like some luddite against tech. There are negative behviors associated with modern technology but this article just asserts that without really elaborating exactly why. It just blankly gestures "you know -- bad tech, feedback loops, doom srolling" all the keywords!

Reddit also has purchased up/downvotes (through click-farms/bots), opaque moderation, and the real-time public display of these promote mobs and groupthink even if it were actually organic. I don't think for a second their algorithms do a good enough job of mitigating these clickfarms.

There is an arms race between reddit admins and spammers in general -- who will ruin any platform with eyeballs on it.

This article does not address that all -- vote fuzzification apparently only serves "brigading" -- thast not what it's for. It's for spammers so they can't judge the effectivness of their bots.

The author misses the wood from the trees. I'm not seeing valid criticisms either which means he didnt' even Google to see what others said of reddit, e.g. poor moderation tools for large subs.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04206.pdf

> Even though the environment of r/unpopularopinion encourages users to freely express their opinion, the dominant population of this community is young white males, and only the opinions representing them are supported by general users and brought up to the front page. Consequently, the minority opinions are neglected and it results in another spiral of silence phenomenon in the community

I don’t know if young white males needs to be said or if that’s just speculation. What matters more is the outcome which is actually just more groupthink.

I mean, they took a sample of the sub, and that is what they found (see their notes on data collection process done via Reddit Chat)

Regardless, I agree with you, the groupthink is the issue here - I do think it is telling though, that it is a groupthink (allegedly) skewed by the white male perspective. Which I think is also an issue, lack of representation in such echo chambers. But you’re right - two separate issues that happened to be intertwined here. Anti-racist echo chambers are still echo chambers.

Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, pointed out the hazards of "Peer to peer electronic media" in the 1960s with uncanny accuracy. Calling someone a luddite when your own views are as anachronistic as they are is ridiculous.

And stop flattering yourself by calling social media 'tech'. Every industry uses technology, calling it 'tech' doesn't distinguish it in any way. Social media is a medium for a exchange like a book, or a campfire. Different media have different effects on how information is conveyed and how the world is understood by the users of said medium.

Social media has been overwhelmingly influential to the way people communicate and understand one another and denying any questioning of it's effects outright is telling. Your tribalism is showing. Marshall McLuhan warned you about this, you should have listened.

This comment is as equally polarizing as GP, just in the opposite direction. You can have social media be tech, have some net effect on society (whether that's good or bad is literally being debated right now) and be addictive.

As with anything in life, there is nuance. Social media isn't a great satan and it isn't god's gift, it's somewhere in between.

Well yes, case in point, social media has a tribalizing effect on people. I don't disagree that comments on the internet tend to be polarizing. I wouldn't have commented at all if it wasn't to disagree with somebody, that's normal in these parts.

I wonder what happens when most of the population is relying on such a medium for their understanding of the world beyond what they can see and touch? I don't think me setting a good example here on HN is going to have much effect against the basic human impulses that social media selects for.

> stop flattering yourself

What does this even mean? Why would it be flattering himself?

The implication is that the poster works on social media.

> I don't think it's the reddit admins

It's actually the mods. A select small number of people are mods on the top 50 or so subreddits by size. They can control what gets posted, what gets upvoted and what gets silently censored. It's also an (unpaid) full time job, it's naive to think they're not monetising their power in any way.

>It's actually the mods.

Mod means nothing -- I'm a reddit mod. Admin is paid employee of reddit with completely different access level. A planted story by a mod is still within the grounds of "astroturfing" accusing reddit admins is another order of magnitude of corruption higher. Like I said I don't think reddit admins are doing it but the author does seem to imply it.

Mod doesn't mean nothing. A lot of the powerusers also moderate major subs and can spike opposing content and users who would interfere with their clout-chasing, and appeal to sympathetic admins to enforce "harassment" provisions if their manipulations were being critically discussed in places on Reddit that are beyond their reach.

I mean, is there any defensible reasons for why we often see the top powerusers on these subs also act as mods? I'm sure that they aren't behaving as "normal" mods.

You can buy and sell subreddits. Just as you can buy and sell mod powers in popular subreddits.

> This whole article reads like a conspiracy theorist rant like some luddite against tech.

Your whole comment is a rant. At least the article you're complaining about had some points to make.

Much of what the author mentions has its roots in behavioural addiction research. In particular, there are many parallels with the gambling industry, and how it profits from maximising user engagement and potential for addiction.

> Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive.

Also holds for the edit-compile-test cycle, I suppose.

In intelligence circles, you evaluate an adversary in terms of capabilities as a rule, then figure out the impact of those capabilities when employed against you.

I find it interesting that so many people in the world have a knee jerk reaction specifically against doing this. Especially when it comes to tactics around manipulation. The fact is, everyone is vulnerable to it. You don't spend all your time worrying about it mind, but it behooves one to evaluate and maintain a sense of perspective. No, Reddit probably isn't always actively engaging in some direct form of manipulation.

Oh wait, yes they are, they advertise, and they moderate. Both of those are active measures to shape discourse, the difference in whether this is positive or negative tends to come into play based on who the shaping of discourae benefits, and who it maligns, and where you are in respect to that divide. They aren't a hands off neutral platform.

The more interesting article, in my mind, would have been one less focused on particular tech, and moreso the role of manipulation in the modern world.

Tech and "tech companies" are a huge red herring in these discussions. These are business models and business decisions. The algorithms aren't doing this on their own - there are humans there, making decisions to mess with people's heads and make money through tricking other people to part with their money.

It's the same problem as we had 100+ years ago - and really even the same problems real (not stereotypical) Luddites rose against: business decisions. But talking about this is boring, we've been having this discussion for generations. Focusing on "tech" generates more clicks.

Cheese burgers and video games aren't free dude.

Bad enough they are handing out free drugs. On top of that look at the behavior it produces. Algo amplification of all the content that generates polarization, misinfo, mob justice etc is not possible without a corral of people addicted to and conditioned by the Like/Click/Upvote/View/Follower count.

When their behavior is unproductive. They point at their Like counter as validation. Thats how Trump end ups thinking he is doing something productive.

I think you are missing the point. Yes, cheeseburgers can be addictive. Consider if $burger_chain provided an unlimited burger, which you could eat forever. This would certainly be very problematic, but at least you have the biological function of “too full to eat” which gets you to stop. But you can imagine how bad this could be for many people even with that function.

Social media is even worse. It’s an unlimited hit for hours and hours and hours with hardly any short-term consequence which causes you to break out of the loop.

The other point you are missing is that the incentives are all wrong. The incentive for posts on social media is engagement, which means polarizing content, which means radicalization.

At least with a fun video game, you might have fun playing it and learning new skills and stories! But I can admit that I often spend too much time captured in the game loop a because it’s unlimited — that’s problematic.

It’s still fair to point out that the incentives for $burger_chain are all wrong too — hence why fast food is so full of sugar and other ingredients which are bad for you, but taste good in the moment to many. It’s to drive addiction, which drives recurring sales. I think that’s messed up to.

He could be referring to pinned posts.

I think it's valid to say the point system contributes to the formation of the echo chamber.

I'm increasingly finding that I have to actively struggle to take ownership of my time and attention. Without an active, conscious, effort to reclaim your mental resources you WILL be caught up in the never-ending cycle of dopamine-dependency to novel information or visual stimulation. Your attention is a valuable resource and many companies have spent billions on figuring out how to farm it.

Some of my more effective methods have included: strict site-blocking via OpenDNS, apps to implement time based blocking of information-novelty sites (Twitter, HN, reddit, instagram, CNN), almost complete disabling of notifications, with the exception of text messages and async work chat during business hours.

All of these methods, I can undo, but it prevents or at least slows down the automatic, reflexive app/site opening when my reptile brain craves a dopamine hit.

I experience the same. I've noticed that if I start my day with a dose of Twitter, I tend to be much more absentminded and less focused on tasks that need to get done.

This is what I think The Social Dilemma missed. I worked at one of these companies and did not see anybody evil looking to enslave users in front of their screen. Instead we built new features and celebrated when time spent in our app went up or a new feature was used because we assumed the user must be getting value. After some time we switched metrics from time spent in app or daily active users to Net Promoter Score but at the end of the day if analytics didn’t show that a feature was used it was dropped and if it was being used we’d double down on making it “better” (used even more).

I did not see any evidence of malicious intent towards our users but a genuine belief we were enabling them to be more productive.

They don't necessarily need to look evil. "Evil" doesn't sell and probably won't make you work for them. They have to look like a sane environment in which you can't pinpoint anything (philosophically, morally or ethically) wrong.

It's just a matter of language (how they communicate what the company is trying to do), with slogans like "making the world a better place by doing X". But if you think that at the end of the day, all they care about and all the trouble is just for the mighty Dollar, with a little change in perspective you can elucidate:

"time spent in our app": time lost in our app.

"user must be getting value": while getting even more value out of an unaware user.

"feature ... making it “better” (used even more)": more addictive? costing less for the company? costing more for the user?

"to be more productive": productive as in "making money faster but for someone else, while being paid the same".

>I did not see any evidence of malicious intent towards our users but a genuine belief we were enabling them to be more productive.

The Banality of Evil, this is just a version of "We were just following orders"

I think that's kind of an overagressive interpretation. It's not ignorance of evil; there's a genuine feeling that good is being done, even if the parent commenter seems to acknowledge that good might not have, in fact, been done.

No it isn't...

I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.

1. Relative timestamps are just a more useful way of telling people when something happened. It's how most humans communicate time to each other.

2. Infinite scrolling is just what happens when you're not constrained by physical pages. The only reason we used to see paged content was because it was technically easier. Facebook and Instagram even put up a big "You're all caught up" sign when you hit the end of where you were last.

3. Before Facebook had likes people would just add a comment like "+1" or "This." It didn't add anything to the conversation and just made things worse. Internet points are useful for filtering content and showing people more useful information.

Yes, all of these things have negative consequences but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad.

The medium is the message. We've been talking about this for decades - the structure of the thing you are interacting with determines how you interact with it. Substantive debate is difficult in 140 characters, so substantive debate does not often happen on Twitter. Infinite scroll and auto-play video eliminates the "decision points" where people would otherwise reconsider if they want to continue, so people spend more time on those sites than they would otherwise. Maybe the attributes of these mediums aren't "inherently bad," but they absolutely do influence the way that they are used and it is up to us to make the judgement of whether that has good or bad outcomes. And a lot of us think the results of infinite scroll is a bad outcome.

Also, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You judge a system by its outcome, not by the intentions of the people who built it.

"The purpose of a system is what it does."

My understanding is that Hacker News currently paginates comments but they’re working hard to put them all on one page.

Maybe the intent is so you can use find in page to search all the comments at once or maybe something else but they will also inevitably lead you to read more comments and spend even more time on here.

> Substantive debate is difficult in 140 characters, so substantive debate does not often happen on Twitter.

When it comes to politics, Twitter is the absolute worst. When you have only 140 characters, there's no room for nuance or actual discussion, so arguments get boiled down to short 1-sentence zingers that are often nothing more than really bad straw men.

> I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.

Evil is committed in actions - not intent. That's part of the whole banality of evil.

>I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.

The Nazis made essentially this same argument at Nuremberg. Didn't work out too well for them.

In so far as ice cream makers are all evil for trying to make their ice cream taste better when they know deep down it's not good for people's health.

Rivalrous goods are an inapt analogy.

This really puzzles me. Productivity can roughly be defined as (output / time). How can increasing "time" possibly increase productivity? Of course the catch with advertising-funded products and services is that "time" is what gets you paid.

Good point. We built paid products. Advertising was not a major driver of revenue. People wanting to buy/renew the product was.

Maybe a good analogy here is building a calculator. People buy your calculator and use it (the assumption is because it saves them time). Initially your calculator only does basic arithmetic and you add square root, exponential function, etc. Now people buy and use your calculator for even more. They spend more “time” with the calculator but still save even more “time” not having to use pen and paper, so it’s a productivity gain. Soon a movie on Netflix comes out called “The Calculators” which blames the fact that people are no longer able to do basic arithmetic in their head on a calculated decision by your company to profit from people while making them dumber. It paints your company as making people dependent on your calculators and robbing them of their cognitive abilities.

This was never your intent when creating the calculator. Now it’s something you will have to address, but the narrative here is one of unintended consequences not a deliberate plan.

Can't remember who this quote came from but it went something like this: "The only two things that call their clients 'users' is drugs and software."

I try to avoid the term in docs and discussion, but find that - where I can't refer to stakeholder names directly - I fall back to "the people that use the software", which.. might be more efficiently named 'users'.

I mean, the play on words in the gp is cute, and gives one the big Hmmm, but the accepted term is 'user' and some hills aren't worth dying on

It actually depends a lot on circumstance and half the work of software engineering is figuring out your different use cases. Every aspect of a system can have a different beneficiary.

Data analysts are interested in different things than end consumers, who are interested in different things than admins or sponsors...

If you can't split a generic abstraction of 'users' down further, you're either umplementing a very generic tool, or you're simply not standing up a system where the idea of access control is important.

The rub is how nefariously sneaky that access control abstraction can be employed as a fundamental tool.

Often something made in the name of user engagement makes me less addicted instead

Say we have something that shows all expanded comments immediately: keeps me on that site

Then they do an "engaging" redesign where only 10% of the comments actually show and requires lots of clicking to expand them, and lots of unrelated animated images show below: makes me want to close that tab and do something else

What you seem to be saying here is, "Imagine a thing that doesn't work. It doesn't work."

That's... not an argument?

Do you have an actual example website/app that does this “less addictive” thing?

Reddit's redesign. 'Less addictive' for me. I'm sure there must be some target audience for whom this is more addictive, but I'm not the one, I just want to read the comments of the thread I choose myself in peace.

The page is so heavy now it makes it a chore to browse.

Same here, also with Reddit refusing to show posts to me and trying to force me to install its App instead when browsing on mobile. I simply don't use it on mobile anymore.

As well as not going there on mobile any more (or hitting back PDQ if I do end up following a link that goes there), I use it a lot less on desktop. If you are not logged in some things (just browsing comments) become a lot less convenient, for instance. So unless there is a link that sounds really compelling (I sometimes get sent links by friends - though usually I just bounce through reddit and on to the actual information which is probably one link away) I simply don't go. I certainly don't go to subreddits unprompted to look for content any more (which I used to).

Yeah, old reddit still exists as some are fond of saying in these discussions. But other perfectly good information sources exist for what I want too (often better than reddit ever was - HN for instance).

Youtube is heading the same way: I'm visiting it less and less. The more adverts they pile in, the less of their adverts I actually witness because I'm not there to see them at all.

I should thank reddit, youtube, and their ilk, really, for saving me the time that I used to waste on their sites and can now enjoy wasting on other things instead!

I'm just glad that reddit still offers their old design through old.reddit.com, and that RES can force the old design.

Honestly if reddit ever takes away the old design and a browser extension can't recreate it, my days at reddit would be over. The new design is awful.

Yes all the social medias are addiction merchants. The people know full well that they sacrifice their data, but they do not care about that or ads. The people use them for gratification about likes and as a platform to be "heard" or voice their opinions.

Society is punishing drug users and vendors, which might be the right thing to do or not, I am not a decision maker. But the addiction should be measured in dopamine emissions and withdrawal symptoms. Does not matter if the product is a recreational drug or a virtual saas. Do not let the addiction merchant hide behind marketing terms like social media. The corporations use social to tick a compliance box and mislead the customers. To make it sound harmless or less dangerous. Similar to vegan, bio labeled food. Social media is targeting the most vulnerable and young. Sounds drastic? I do not think so

> Similar to vegan, bio labeled food.

What's with organic vegan food? It wrongly looks harmless? It targets most vulnerable and young?

Vegan and organic are criteria/characteristics, not things meant to be addictive. It's not similar. Sure, they can be highlighted for marketing purposes, but what characteristic seen as positive can't?

Lots of good points here. I particularly like the "dark triad" bit, though I think a lot of nuance around different types of likes/upvotes/whatever is missing. It makes a difference whether those are shown to others and/or used to sort others' feeds. That last point is very close to montenegrohugo's about algorithmic feeds, with which I completely agree. Algorithmic feeds, especially those which show content from people/groups I don't even follow, definitely deserve a place in the Dark Tetrad.

To illustrate these points, consider HN itself. Yes, HN uses an algorithm to determine story prominence. Yes, it has upvotes. Yes, it uses relative timestamps. OTOH, the upvotes are not shown to others and it doesn't have infinite scroll. I also wouldn't consider it a "feed" like Twitter or Facebook. On the third hand, even the features HN does have arguably contribute to echo chambers and audience pandering. I think this well illustrates that it's not easy to determine good vs. bad social media, and it would be hard to argue here that all social media are bad. ;)

Great points. I suppose, in the end, that social media are like any mind-altering substance. But, it seems to me that we're not fully aware of just how "mind-altering" they really are. There are certain things that are so addictive and damaging that we ban them, because they make people unable to function. That's the conversation, I guess: Where's that line?

Size plays a huge and underappreciated role here. Hacker News is small enough that if you wanted to you could read the comments on everything that interested you from the first two or three pages every day. It might take you an hour or so, depending on how many interests you have. Probably not worth your time, but not debilitating either. Metafilter is sort of an experiment of taking this to its logical extreme: anyone on the site (IIRC) is allowed to post directly to the front page, but you're a member of the community and expected to post thoughtful stuff that's going to be worth the time of most site members.

Most social media platforms do the exact opposite, and intentionally at that. The whole point is that there's (practically) no end to how much you can consume, you can ruin your life on one site alone. Notably, HN and Metafilter don't have ads, but the incentives are clearly very different for almost any other social network.

I'm blessed to be an older programmer who started my career back when we were selling products to people who had to make a business case for the purchase of our software systems. We were helping businesses achieve more. Most of the businesses my previous employers were helping were public utilities, communication companies, and manufacturers. You could feel good about your work and that you were contributing to a better world.

Today I'm blessed to work for an electric utility. Whenever I'm having a bad day I remind myself that I'm helping to provide the foundation of modern civilization. It's much better for your soul than knowing that in the end you're just working for a drug dealer and contributing to the destruction of people's lives. I'm glad I'm close to retirement and don't have to do that kind of work just so I can put food on the table.

> It might be, for all we know, that the primary reason someone posts on social media is anger. If a proper study was done, I bet it would show exactly that.

This is a low quality assertion.

> “How could they have just scrolled and scrolled all day? Didn’t they know what it was doing to them?” Social media is the new cigarettes. Everyone does it, it’s addictive, it’s harmful, and you should quit.

Scrolling is not different that sitting in front of your TV or consuming other types of information. I think social media is bad, but that's just my opinion, this article sounds like an unsubstantiated opinion, too.

There are weaknesses in the article, but the central claims ring true.

It is good, in moderation, to be detail-oriented and skeptical. But don't let these qualities run amok and prevent you from considering the overall claims.

This guy is a consultant giving a talk to a mobile game company and has slides titled "Use of Coercive Monetization". It's pretty much an evil TED talk on dark patterns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zex3b2mDnUw&t=17m16s

I agree with all of this. I also think Medium is a social media site (as is HN), guilty of the same things the author calls out.

Well yes, there are addictive aspects to HN. But aren't they more like side-effects?

The upvoting of submissions is needed to 'crowdsource' an interesting front page.

You might do without the karma reputation system, but that will have negative impact on the quality of discussion. After you passed the first treshold (downvote privilege at karma 500) there seems to be no value to the system (no further privileges). But (forgot the game theory name) the 'punishment' of a downvote + karma decrease is probably a great help against shitposting.

Is there a right way to set things up, and maintain high community standards and comment quality?

Edit: Was it Loss aversion?

Yes, and "influencer" is code for psychological manipulator.

It's not much of a code though is it? I mean, it's as subtle as "executioner".

I don't know, people, especially kids on YouTube, seem to be proud of the label these days.

Influencing people has always been a goal of many (see Dale Carnegie). It means being powerful. Influencing people to do a good thing is amazing. Being paid for any influence presumably feels also pretty good.

They might just be proud to be earning from something they don't find to be too much like work

It is no coincidence that PR is a continuation of propaganda for another field.

It’s always meant, “I’m paid to post ads”. Whether that’s psychological manipulation is up to you.

(Yes, ads are designed to get you to interact with them, but on their own, I wouldn’t go as far as saying, “psychological manipulation”. I’ll admit the industry has tended in that direction, however. Your view may differ)

It's not just showing ads. It's endorsement, and in many ways similar to fake reviews. And often the fact that ads are shown is concealed in semi-clever ways.

I personally call it "selling yourself out on the Internet".

The rise of small-time influencers, the "nanoinfluencers", is particularly worrying trend. There are degrees to how antisocial advertising is, but nanoinfluencing is near the top, along with MLMs - people literally get paid to cheat their family and friends out of their hard-earned cash. It does damage to the fundamental relationships in the society, and to the minds of everyone involved.

If you think I'm overdramatizing, consider if it's a healthy state of things, when asking a family member for advice or having a casual conversation, when you have to wonder whether they're being honest, or just shilling you some crap. That's a fundamental assault on basic interpersonal trust.

Discussion of the addictive qualities of social media often strikes me as bizarre.

Where is examination of the person doing the scrolling? Isn't the flaw there?

(The following applies to adults):

Ostensibly, the person should be allowed to spend their time as they like if they're engaging in legal activity. If people thought that engaging in social media was bad for them, they would stop. Are we really saying that people cannot stop using social media? Are we saying that people don't think it's bad for them?

If people can't stop doing an activity that is definitely hurting them, don't they need professional help? Do all these social media users need professional help?

What amount of time on social media is sufficient for it to have a negative effect? Is it anything besides zero?

To be meta: if hackernews is social media and social media is bad, are we all hurting ourselves?

I do think this is a worthy callout, that is often missing in discussions about social media and/or any sort of complex system.

The general narrative implies (but would never say) that humans lack agency and the ability to act in their own self-interest. And if only we could remove the social media site/system, would we see an enlightened, more perfect human.

Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly in favor of designing systems to bring out the best in humanity. But I think a lot of what we see on social media is a reflection of who we are as humans, and what we desire and want to see. And I don't see enough discussion at the individual level, and why we act the way we do.

If the discussion was at the individual level, we'd start to see our common humanity, and the conversation about social media would be less about moderating out the 'bad content' (which always just so happens to be the content that our outgroup likes), and more about the philosophical considerations with designing complex systems that help humanity thrive (and what it means to thrive).

>I think a lot of what we see on social media is a reflection of who we are as humans, and what we desire and want to see.

Agreed.

I'm curious why there aren't deep discussions about WHY people want to __insert convenient social media action__. Isn't the flaw that we have a fear of missing out, want to appear to have high status, want to belong to a group whose identity is tied into being against another group, etc.?

I just see most of these discussions giving the above a pass as if that's just who we are and we bear no responsibility in engaging in such activity.

Telling people to be different is simply not a viable mechanism for making the world a better place.

You can inquire after however many chickens and eggs you like about why the world is the way it is, but I think most people are more interested in what can be done to improve things.

>Telling people to be different is simply not a viable mechanism for making the world a better place.

Perhaps. However this reminds me of the credit cards that are offered on college campuses. They're signed up for like hotcakes sometimes. Later in life people learn that perhaps it isn't such a good idea. Can't people be given information showing the potential effects of decisions that then helps them better make choices?

>You can inquire after however many chickens and eggs you like about why the world is the way it is, but I think most people are more interested in what can be done to improve things.

My point exactly. Let's stop talking about social media, which takes advantage of a root flaw. Let's talk about the root flaw.

What you call a root flaw (in your previous comment) I see as being neither root nor a flaw, but that is not interesting to me.

If you take a plant out of the ground, and toss it into the sea, the plant dies. The 'root flaw' is that the plant is a vulnerable living being. The more relevant fact is that the plant is better off in the ground.

> If people thought that engaging in social media was bad for them, they would stop.

This is the absolute cornerstone of your argument, and I gotta say, I think it is 100% incorrect.

This is, in fact, how we often define addiction: A behavior that a person repeatedly and compulsively engages in despite zero or negative side effects.

People will absolutely do things, and continue to do things, that they know for certain are bad for them.

I mean, seriously -- ask anyone in your life whether they think social media is actually good for them. I genuinely think every single person I know would respond to the effect of "I wish I used it less, but it's tough to quit."

I should have made "If people thought that engaging in social media was bad for them, they would stop" into question rather than a statement.

That said, my follow up questions stand: If people can't stop doing an activity that is definitely hurting them, don't they need professional help? Do all these social media users need professional help?

Interesting, I got too focused on that point. I think you're absolutely right, or at least have the potential to be; I have certainly known people in my life who have had deeply problematic relationships with social media, to the point where professional help was either used or (IMO) would have been a good idea. I mean, I've personally had days where I wished that someone would just yell "get off fucking reddit!" at me.

I don't think it's "all users," and even for lots of users who are harmed, it's not necessarily "all the time." But it's definitely something that could be helped by a professional.

I guess the alternative is regulation of some kind: we recognize that these sites have the potential for meaningful harm to a large number of people, and someone (the government?) steps in to do something about it.

I predict Social Media Rehab is going to be a huge and lucrative business in about 5-10 years. Invest now.

...

I initially wrote that as a joke and intended to just hit Reply and move on with my life, but reflecting for more than a minute, there may be something to this. We have drug rehab programs which work to varying degrees. I wonder what research is being done on how to rehabilitate victims of social media, and if any specific techniques are known yet. Social Media has been known as a societal ill for some time, so surely someone is investigating this!

In a world where every party was rational, your points would make total and complete sense.

The reality, however is that social media companies with their curated feeds, dopamine buttons, echo chambers, and sheer size can push products to the market that cause detriment to the overall cultural environment. The average Joe does not understand that his Twitter feed is _designed_ to keep him hooked. I bet you, if he knew, he'd have quit long ago.

Your argument essentially posits that opioid addicts be held responsible for their addictions rather than our legal system clamping down on big pharma.

>The reality, however is that social media companies with their curated feeds, dopamine buttons, echo chambers, and sheer size can push products to the market that cause detriment to the overall cultural environment.

Given the nature of the internet, any entity can bring a product to the market that could be negative for users. What's the solution beyond the current legal framework?

>Your argument essentially posits that opioid addicts be held responsible for their addictions rather than our legal system clamping down on big pharma.

There's a wide gulf between consuming and engaging with intangible media content and abusing biologically powerful physical substances. Someone becoming addicted to a controlled substance like opioids is different from social media in a profound way. I think society recognizes this given that opioids are largely controlled substances.

The opening sentence:

> There is something about social media that human beings are not psychologically prepared for.

I would state it: Engineers and business people have distilled what creates craving and then satisfies it by creating more craving.

No different than distilling the sugar, heroin, or cocaine from otherwise healthy, innocuous plants. We regulate some of that distillation. Even what we don't regulate, as a society, we generally look down on people that addict others. Why we reward programmers as we did the Sacklers doesn't make sense to me. I would think we would consider employees and investors of antisocial media companies villainous pariahs.

I recently joined tiktok and their algorithm really freaked me out. It took maybe twenty minutes for it zone into some incredibly specific interests of mine. I enjoy the app, but I've never felt so pushed into the content I want to see so quickly. I'm quite A bit older than their average user but the mental impact on a child seems immense.

The author knew that adding a strong and clickbaity title is code for "addiction" still used it and published it in various places for getting the engagement. The companies and their managers are driven by same sort of metrics as the author.

I also tell some of my cousins to get less of their news from Facebook and, in general, use Facebook less.

On Facebook.

I don’t understand how people can stand to use Facebook. It was fun a long time ago. Then, when I didn’t use it for a few weeks, I started getting “notifications” that, instead of saying “someone commented on your post” or “someone liked your post” they were “someone commented on someone else’s post”, or “someone posted something”, and I thought “These are not notifications, these have nothing to do with me.”

And that kind of turned me off, and I intentionally stayed away from Facebook for a bit, and now whenever I log in, there’s a ton of fake notifications clamouring for my attention, and my “feed” is 30-50% ads, and the content that isn’t ads is 30-50% memes. There’s very little actual content, and you have to work way too hard to find it.

In an attempt to further force me to “engage” Facebook has turned their platform into something I can’t stand to use.

I wonder if this is what social media looks like to anyone who “gets out” for a bit. Maybe we’re all like frogs in water that’s slowly getting hotter and hotter, not realizing that the water is boiling; Facebook keeps pushing more and more forced “engagement”, and no one who is in it realizes it’s turning into all ads and garbage.

Haven't used it for seven years. Unless you're professionally dependent on social media, it's exclusively a net negative experience. Your attention is limited, your attention is your life experience, don't just give it to people just because they want it.

To add insult to injury as far as comparing us to the frog in question: the frog likely left. Older experiments show a mix of the frog leaving or staying (unless lobotomized), though contemporary experimentation appears to confirm the frog will leave of it's own accord.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

Could we introduce this kind of addiction in healthy things, like excising or healthy diet or anything like that?

I've never seen it work in practice, so why are we not able to do that?

I'm not an expert in cognitive behavioral therapy, but I believe much of what it advocates is along what you're describing. Reframing behavior you would otherwise avoid or be anxious about as something enjoyable, you might even say addictive. Developing habits that you derive more holistic/health pleasure from.

A good habit of exercise and diet is self-reinforcing.

What is the difference between self-reinforcing and habit-forming? I see three differences.

1. Who is in control? A runner is in relatively more control, because the act of running does not require a gamified online experience.

2. What are the ethical ramifications? These are subjective. To be clear, subjective certainly does not mean unimportant. It means people may disagree. In my view, people largely disagree on the "margins" of ethics -- meaning there is a wide swath of common ground.

3. There are some physiological differences; I'm not an expert. It seems that both the runner's high [1] and social media involve dopamine, but they appear to use different mechanisms. ("Runner's high" seems to involve endorphins as a precursor.)

[1] https://archives.drugabuse.gov/blog/post/chasing-runners-hig...

It’s very easy to get the dopamine loop going with sugar, nicotine, memes, rage-bait, and bikini photos. The brain loves it.

Chicken breast, deadlifts and philosophy takes a lot of effort and the positive effects are delayed. The brain has to be trained to tolerate it. It will always prefer the latter.

Absolutely. For the last year I have been weightlifting regularly. This isn't my first foray into being serious about lifting either. Every day I lift I have to "make" myself do it. I can't really imagine something that would make it more reinforcing. It's hard every time even if I like the results.

All addictions are kind of a bad thing... A moderate use of social media is fine. The problem comes with the abuse (product of the addiction). The same abuse can come from "healthy" things which might derive in other problems like image, behavioral and diet disorders.

Exercise addiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_addiction

Anecdotal but the gamification of exercise with respect to some of the newer products out there (Peloton, Zwift, Apple Fitness+) seems to be a step in this direction. I've been using Zwift for the past couple of months and have ridden my bike more than I have probably in the previous year combined. Most of it I don't really care/bother with, but when it keeps track of your records and you beat one during an exercise, it does give you a little of that dopamine rush.

That's the problem. It's not an addiction. And by saying "kind of addiction" or tip-toeing around it we confuse the issue. Addiction is a real thing with a real definition. Providing a service people like is not addiction. Social media is not addictive. Heroin is addictive.

I recently saw an FB "data engineer" talking about "experiment review sessions", where the - presumably engagement related - results of interface changes are discussed (he also expressed hope that all companies work that way).

It's very rational. The user needs a good user interface, the best that can be built. What is the best? The one the user likes to use, day in day out. Is that a problem? Obviously not for the platform.

When FB CEO announced that he want's to make users happy, he acknowledged his real intents: mass, aggregate control of behavior. I cannot deny that it carries a purely instrumental view of humans - but that's again only rational in the context of business.

> What is the best? The one the user likes to use, day in day out.

No.

The road is most used when there's a traffic jam.

My smartphone is a now a net negative for me. I need a token apps, maps, uber but everything else really is wasting my time. Sure I've tried a bunch of things but the addictive apps keep coming back.

You mark my words; this is how we will be taken advantage of: “Emotional Health” classes will be required in high schools. Where many things will be taught. And, somewhere around week 3 of the second semester will be an “avoiding addiction” module. A certain large group of citizens, with a mysteriously large advertisement budget, will vehemently oppose teaching children such “politically correct nonsense”. Thus, the program will be underfunded, and the curriculum poorly developed; like DARE, sex ed, biological evolution… Somehow, the same group of people are going to push for personal liability when it comes to managing your own addictions. The precedent set by the lawyers and courts, the litigation of which we won’t get to see, is that addiction management is a part of the core curriculum in high school and any accredited education facility. Therefore, “The Average Joe on the bus“ has already been equipped with the tools necessary to make educated decisions about what services they choose to participate in regardless of that service’s addiction-enabling behaviors and reinforced by a opaquely worded EULA’s. All of this being enabled by our cultural virtue of it “individual responsibility”. Oh, and something-something Free Markets... something-something Regulations...

Really some of these techniques are just scaling what is standard at arcades and bringing it online. Anyone who has ever been to an arcade knows how many tokens/quarters you can go through to keep playing and playing.

The danger with mobile gaming is that you never really get to leave the arcade and you don’t have to intrinsically budget the way you used to at arcades. At the arcade you usually have a fixed number of tokens to spend and you always have the allure of other games pulling you away.

There are two kinds of capitalism: value creation capitalism (also known as industrial capitalism) and value extraction capitalism. The latter includes quite a lot of financial capitalism, profit-driven warfare, and casinos and other addiction-driven products.

The former creates value while the latter extracts and concentrates it while overall creating net negative value. Addicting people to Skinner boxes is destroying hours of what otherwise might be productive, rejuvenating, or enriching time. It's macroeconomically indistinguishable from killing people.

One of the central problems of modern Western capitalism is that we fail to distinguish between the two. A businessperson is successful an a genius if they make money; nobody bothers to distinguish between those that make money by creating value and those that make money by merely extracting it and leaving a path of destruction in their wake.

Maybe we can figure out a way to re-channel the impulses of "cancel culture" in this direction, cancelling those that promote addictive net value destroying products and services. Since the algorithmic timeline and other personalized recommendation engines are by far the largest pushers of fascist and neo-racist ideology, the original goals of "cancel culture" might still be indirectly achieved.

Well, I think capitalism can be summed up as "optimize for one metric: capital".

In a capitalist world, if you want to change what companies are doing, make it more expensive to do so (alternatively, less lucrative). So I guess tax and fine companies, like GDPR does.

I wish there was a simple way to add more metrics like pollution, social impact, health impact, etc. But those are rather hard to measure, usually not immediately available, and can be hidden in some way or another. It might be doable, though, as we were more or less able to do so with capital (track monetary exchanges, etc); which is a completely artificial metric.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about actual economy theories.

Cancel culture is not something that is very effective against rich people, because you can’t fire somebody who don’t have a job.

Unfortunately, our economic system guarantees outcomes like this in pursuit of perpetual and ever increasing growth and profit. We either need to add regulations (short term fixes) or change our economic system (long term fixes). We can't continue to do nothing if we want to maintain a civil democratic society. Misinformation and propaganda are too powerful to leave unchecked.

Where is the line between engineering for addiction and engineering for a quality user experience?

Everything we are told about building modern services is about optimisation. You have metrics, you experiment, you tweak things, you see what helps and what doesn't. This is as true for business models as it is for interface design.

Some of this is good - it is positive to improve your UI to reduce friction and make it more usable by your customers. Some of it is fine - choosing a landing page design that gets more people to sign up. Some of it is bad - things you do that mean people don't close the app as readily.

All these changes are the result of the same process, that is built into how modern businesses operate. How do you draw the line between optimising for good UI and optimising for addiction? If you're writing legislation, do you outlaw specific practices? If you're trying to operate companies ethically, do you just avoid certain metrics?

I, for one, want HN to have an option to hide my karma point next to my username. It's a distraction. It's okay for them to use that number for moderating purposes, etc. but I don't need to see it for every time.

I work in a small company that helps news sites with engagement. Our aim is for our clients to be a place where the community can find as much info as possible for their daily life. Trying to offer readers all the info in the most easily digestible way.

Everytime we get a new customer we have to discuss to explain to them that the real value is in providing the info people need as fast and simple as possible. Unfortunately we have to fight against some major forces, such as google ranking sites with longer content just because of that and not metrics related to value.

So many truism and dogma it's really hard to take this person seriously, why so many upvotes for something that is just conjecture at best:

> it harms our brains in a way that we don’t yet fully understand

He even mentions "we don't yet fully understand" so why keep building on this narrative just to try to prove a point? That should have been the last sentence of this post but I guess that would have made for a pretty mediocre post one that doesn't tap into FUD of the reader.

For me the pandemic has actually allowed me to spend more time outdoors and with my children and as a result less time online. We have been taking walks daily and started gardening. I've cut down social media time to almost nothing on all major platforms (HN is my last "addiction"). The author claims the pandemic forced us inside and on social media--do people find this true for them?

Really depends on where do people live. For example my surroundings are not the best to walk around in (very close to busy main roads), and the city as a whole have shopping malls as the main point of interests before the pandemic. Parks are closed, and walking infrastructure are available but not what I'd call enjoyable (the risk crossing a main road without stop lights just for a morning walk doesn't sit well with me). I'm definitely more locked into my devices compared to before the pandemic.

I go on more walks. But I also meet way fewer people and spend more days and evenings alone at home. Social media fills some of that time if you don't actively avoid it.

It definitely is true for me. I haven't left my house for anything but doctor's appointments in 11 months. The most exercise I get is when I walk to my condominium's garbage disposal room.

Owing to the HN audience there might be a bias against this being true, but I expect there was a boost in general population. I don't think I spend more time on social media than I did before, and not by conscious choice.

What's interesting to me is, earlier in the pandemic I would hear more lofty plans for organizing online games and having more video calls between friends and family. It's amazing how quickly the motivation for this dissipated. Maybe because it's plainly cumbersome and awkward and just doesn't feel the same, and everyone I know still works.

For my part I think I've retreated from video/audio correspondence considerably. I still write to strangers online, which is social media, but feel like this experience has made me retreat into my shell. No substitution for seeing people in person.

>The author claims the pandemic forced us inside and on social media--do people find this true for them?

I used to play in a few city-wide social sports leagues, before covid, which were all canceled most of last year and aren't back yet due to the winter weather. I filled my time by hiking and trying out some new hobbies.

So while not quite the same as being force inside and/or forced on social media, I can see where the pandemic upended various gatherings/hobbies and social media is an easy alternative for many people. Social media is free, easy to access, convenient, can be a giant time-sink, etc. along with all sorts of negative consequences.

It's been horrible for me.

The pandemic means classes are virtual/online. That means kids need computers with internet connections and modern web browsers. That means games, stupid videos, games, chat, games, and more games.

I'm really at a loss here.

I've gone to demanding a cold-turkey moratorium on the junk, with computer use only when supervised. This solution sucks up too much parental time and doesn't allow enough computer time for the homework.

If the classes didn't require web video, I could get an old VT510 terminal (no graphics) or an e-ink display, and then the gaming would be limited to a few things like online chess. The addiction problem wouldn't be so severe.

I was working in a mobile gamedev in 2013 before the whole thing about Facebook and stuff and after talking to one of the game designers I thought to myself "Drugs. We're making drugs and invent techniques to milk users for their money". I could never feel proud of what I'm doing after that and left shortly after to work for a telecom.

Apps aren't drugs. I used to suck dick for coke. Now that's an addiction. You ever suck some dick for an in-game item?

dunno, about that. But I have heard hot chat and sending pics are both common tools.

Heh, I chuckled. I've got a dark sense of humour though. Because it's not really a joke.

A man was recently arrested in my city for a scheme where he was trading sexual images from underage boys for gift cards for popular video games.

This is a modified quote from the movie Half Baked. Not literal.

>> Relative timestamps (“3 hours ago” instead of “6:56 PM”). This creates IMMEDIACY.

TIL... I've always thought this was SO annoying on Twitter, because I want to see the exact time (I'd even be ok if I could hover and see the actual timestamp), and thought they were just 'dumbing it down'.

But it makes a lot more sense with that clue.

Ugh

Social media is one of those games where the only way not to lose is not to play at all.

Future of humanity stuff aside, isn’t the doublespeak for addition actually “retention”? “Engagement” is a classification for a set of actions that drives addition, not measures it.

Retention can be that users/players actually like it and want to come back without the need for tricks

> Fake internet points (clickable, often animated icons with incrementing numbers. Likes, reactions, upvotes, retweets, etc.). This creates ADDICTION.

Sounds like the HN karma system ;-)

>“How could they have just scrolled and scrolled all day?"

It would help if your article used more than just the middle 25% of my screen, thus requiring scrolling to read.

so many misconceptions on this text. this author knows very little about mental health and is just repeating this narrative these recent documentaries have been spreading - which was created, by the way, by those same fellas who created those systems and feel guilty now. Also, as an UX designer, he's pretty much getting money to apply the same stuff to his own projects, most probably.

Read 'The BITE Model Of Authoritarian Control: Undue Influence, Thought Reform, Brainwashing, Mind Control, Trafficking And The Law' by Steven Alan Hassan

'Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China' by Robert Jay Lifton

(both readily available as PDF online)

This type of ad hoc pathologization of behaviour is itself very suspect, and isn't helping anyone. Not everything that's bad is violence or an addiction, there are plenty of different types and nouances of evil in the world.

I can’t find it now, but DHH wrote somewhere about optimising for engagement vs action. The idea behind Basecamp is to be a service that helps you manage a project in a faster and easier way, not a service that makes you stay "engaged" while not pushing the project forward. Having more engagement means it’s doing the opposite of of what it's meant to.

This can easily apply for many other services. The purpose of an email client is to surface the important information (filtering and maybe inbox zero?) and let the user act on it (reply and write with the write context). The purpose of a dating website is to find a match and create a connection. The purpose of a social network, on the other hand, is much more debatable.

HOLY COW BATMAN! It is almost like these social media companies don't have the bests interests of their users at the core of their mission!

this shit makes me angry af

it's no wonder we have seen a decline in cognitive ability, as seen by various world events (election of the 45th president of the USA, "Brexit", climate denial, rise of neo-nazis, vaccination denial, Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, ...). we are just endlessly scrolling and spamming each other with our running commentary bullshit that masquerades as a modicum of insight.

what happened to making the world a better place? the tech industry is no better than the tobacco or fast food industry.

aka The Drug Dealers Business Model

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