I've never been hooked on nicotine or similar, but toward the end of 2017 a game (Simcity Buildit) dug deeeeeeeeep into my soul and for the first time in my life I had to aggressively quit something like that cold turkey.
First I should say: It's a great game and really fun! (HA - I know I sound like a pusher...) I didn't spend any money on it. But man did I spend brain cycles and time on it. A few specific game dynamics really get their hooks into you - this concept of mini game-within-a-game "tournaments" which require your attention over a specific period of time (ahem weekends).
My "rock bottom" was two things: I was on a long drive from LA to SF and I had my girlfriend open up the app to complete a few time-sensitive tasks for me while I was driving. There I was explaining "ok now swipe this. Drag it there. Great. Now do the same on this other thing. Ok thanks love!".
The second was that a common strategy in the game where you start a second instance on a different device to mine certain resources (it was called a "feeder city"). So there I was on any given Friday night sitting on the couch with my iPhone AND iPad open, swiping away.
One day it struck me that there was no end to this cycle. There was no winning. There was just more building and more swiping and more hours to go down the drain, and I just realized I had to quit. So I hard-deleted the game from my phone and iPad right in the middle of a weekend mini-tournament and never looked back.
In the days following, I had very regular twitches and urges to go back. "Just one more"....I realized this was real addiction. Luckily it passed after a few days. But wow - what an eye-opener for me.
It's really well-made. My biggest knock on it is that it's a typical "milk as much money as possible out of the user" game, so you never know which mechanics are truly random or which ones are set up to hack your psychology. Some of the nags/alerts wear on you. I also wish it was a bit more optimized for aesthetics (no diagonal roads!).
But the UX is extremely good. The visuals are nice. The contests and general gameplay goals are engaging and fun. It's 4X-like, with that "one more turn" vibe and the need to balance multiple goals.
So you think “oh I just saw those!” And keep spinning the slot machine wheels of the marketplace. And then when they DO finally appear, that little dopamine hit is all the sweeter :)
I see this alleged all the time, but a part of me is convinced that it's a trick of the mind. But I don't know, and that's what's frustrating. Even if they don't pull the rug out from you, they could do so at any time and I'd never know it. Not great!
I recently blogged about that [1]. It's in spanish, but Google translate does an acceptable job with it.
[1] https://blog.jazzido.com/uncategorized/2021/02/12/mejore-su-...
HN is open discourse, focusing on respect. At least to me.
Hacker News aggressively moderates to remove the most abrasive types of shaming, but you can still shame out-groups here, provided you do it civilly. See any thread about managing developers: At least one person will go on a rant about how managers are empty suits who do nothing useful and just get in the way while extracting rents in the form of cushy compensation packages.
That kind of generalization is also out-group shaming, it just doesn't look like a bunch of misogynists complaining that there are too many women in tech demanding equity.
(I'm in no way saying that just because Twitter has shaming, and so does HN, that the two are equivalent. They aren't even close to equivalent, because these things are not binary. But I am trying to point out how toxicity can be hard to judge from within a community.)
She's the best paid person in her sub-orga. We're definitely lucky, but also the woman-vs-man topic isn't relevant at all here. We (as a company) are just looking at skill in all aspects, and she's good in most of them, as am I in a different subset.
She also has a twin-sister. She works in a different company, different federal state, and she earns a bit more than my wife - and she also doesn't care at all about the shenanigans happening, she's just doing what she likes and is good at. If you don't believe me I'll create an email alias you can mail me at and we'll get into touch.
Yes both of them have been humiliated, and this is what we should work against. But they have proven theirselves, and they have had support from co-workers, and instead of always putting blame on whatever, we should put focus on supporting good people, regardless of gender. This is so much lost.