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A Mindful Mobile OS

thistooshallgrow.com

61 pointspicture28 comments

> “Apps that are using persuasive design could be required to list all the techniques they use"

Tracking disclosures are easy to do because they're all fairly objective data points. Either you collect personal data, or you don't. Ask Facebook and im sure they'll tell you they don't use "persuasive design"

Also, if you care about such things, you can just uninstall the app, or, you know, pay attention while using it.

These techniques are obvious. If you don't like companies nudging your behavior in a certain direction, just uninstall their apps and delete your accounts when you notice them doing it.

Leaving your account active in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp makes it more attractive for your friends to make and preserve their accounts there.

These techniques gain use because for the vast majority of people, they're subtle and play into unconscious biases and subconscious parts of the brain's reward circuitry. You may be a more evolved and educated human who is aware of all their biases and conscientious of all the different dark and grey patterns apps can use, but the techniques are effective because most people aren't. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

The techniques are often effective at manipulating you even if you are ‘aware’, unless you are also so very well-aligned internally that the consciously aware part of you can and does counter-affect the subconsciously affected parts strongly and consistently enough. Intelligence and knowledge won't save you. Combining them with ‘enlightenment’ and/or strong detachment might, but that's a much taller order.

In the case of central/popular social/communication software, this is much, much worse, because it can be set up so that taking up the mindset for resistance directly conflicts with taking up a mindset that will be (or be read as) adequately engaged for relationship maintenance and continued connection; the persuasion can use your friends as an attack reflector, getting mixed up in the signal. And no amount of purely individual willpower will help you not get steamrolled by that so long as you remain dependent on the society around you.

(I want to find an analogy to use for the latter—I'm almost tempted to say it compares to historical examples of ideological spirals the same way nuclear explosives compare to conventional ones, but that feels not-quite-right. History pointers appreciated if anyone has 'em.)

I think it's a logical error to think the "vast majority of people" to be entirely unaware of the nudges of the market.

It's not like I'm some superman to notice this stuff. People know they shouldn't scroll IG all day or eat McDonald's for every meal. It might play into subconscious biases but ultimately people are consciously aware of their behaviors in the macro.

What's disingenuous is to think that only smart/savvy people know that the app equivalent of junk food is bad. Personally, I grow really tired of this (seemingly pervasive) viewpoint that the everyman is clueless and helpless and will be totally fucked if we, the learned/savvy, do not intervene. (Apologies in advance if this is not your view - I am complaining about a wider problem more so than replying to your specific comment.)

It's a seductive viewpoint, and one that seems to tickle the "but it's obvious" common sense. I don't think it's true, though, despite being very plausible.

Casinos exist, with way more extensive and battle-tested addiction-response features than the Facebook app, and the vast majority of people in the cities in which they operate don't go broke pouring their life savings into the machines.

Give the everyman some credit.

I agree with this. Moreover, people who do fall into addicted behaviors are often very aware of the risks and dangers involved with their choices. However, the present desire or satisfaction that the impulse provides them overrides such awareness. As an ex smoker, this is apparent to me. I knew it was bad, I knew the details of what I was doing to myself, but I couldn’t help myself.

It is not about stupidity or awareness. It is about finding satisfaction or motivation elsewhere. Educated people, rich people, poor people, ignorant people: all classes have their addictions.

I've had addictions before, myself. It's better to have the option.

Casinos also exist with way more extensive laws and regulations.

The regulation is mostly around making sure the games are fair and that children can't use them, not that people can't dump their life savings into them if they want to.

How did we come so far in a society where people assume no personal agency and responsibility- an entire population led by the nose on their whims and desires for social 'petting'. This trend is deeply saddening, and it seems like the more 'coddling' we build into the web, the more people retreat into these agony/dopamine factories called apps when they need stimulus, whether it be positive or negative. How many times have you seen people engaged in the heat of a flamewar or some pointless ideological argument only for them to repeatedly distract themselves and re-engage?

I look forward to the studies that may come in the next generation that examine the outcomes of these apps, app networks, and the mechanisms employed to elicit more user fellowship, and at what cost, both emotionally and physically but also socially. No clue where we go from here, but what's happening now isn't good, and it's hard to see how people actively engaged in it will ever realize the negative effect it is having on our future enough to put a stop to it or at least engage in a discussion around curtailing some of these patterns.

I would support reterming persuasive design as coercive design, because to me that’s really what it is

Or perhaps addictive design?

This really strikes at the core social/philosophical divide: should people be free to choose to destructively engage in addictive goods and services?

Ultimately we're not free if we're not free to destroy ourselves if we so choose.

It seems that most people want to burn huge amounts of their time consuming ad-laden social media, just as they did with ad-laden tv before it.

A much less dishonest (or maybe just less naive) way to frame it is to ask whether we're okay with someone exploit systemic weaknesses in human nature en masse for personal gain and to the long-term detriment of those exploited.

This watered down idealized absolute interpretation of 'freedom of choice' is just so goddamn naive, and ignores pretty much everything we know about systemic flaws in human behavior and decision making. We can do so much fucking better than that.

You nailed it.

Food industry is really bad too, they have been exploiting human weakness for longer, and they have mastered all these shady techniques in marketing and in their product composition. And the health damaging they cause is extensive

That's just it, though: giving people additional options and choices isn't exploiting them.

Detriment is in the eye of the beholder.

What are you talking about? Did you read any of what I wrote?

> whether we're okay with someone exploit systemic weaknesses in human nature en masse for personal gain and to the long-term detriment of those exploited.

Still doesn't seem like you've given it any thought...

If I go round giving people the 'choice' of free samples of heroin, with full knowledge that they're highly likely to become addicted and will no longer be able to choose not to parttake, and even with the intention that they do, and then I make bank, that's pure exploitation. And detriment there is definitely not subjective. Maybe there's a little more nuance to the equivalent in social media but it's not all that different, and negative effects on mental health are even more scary because they're not as blindingly obvious as the results of a physiological addiction.

Maybe you should try understand the limits of rationality in human decision making, especially with immediate vs. delayed rewards, then you might get some idea that choice is often more a function of the options in front of you than whatever might have the best outcome. Reality is just a little more nuanced than this oversimplified ECON101 libertarian ideal of absolute freedom of choice.

> If I go round giving people the 'choice' of free samples of heroin, with full knowledge that they're highly likely to become addicted and will no longer be able to choose not to parttake, and even with the intention that they do, and then I make bank, that's pure exploitation.

That's not how heroin or addiction or exploitation work.

Many people have received single doses of heroin or its analogs. The vast majority of them are not addicts.

I have multiple junkie friends who decided to stop buying and using opiates.

Ultimately the choice is the user's, and nobody's attitudes or beliefs can change that simple fact. It's actually a GOOD thing that the buck stops there, and not anywhere else.

It's not anyone else's place to decide for someone that their addiction is or is not detrimental to them. I am addicted to caffeine and while many (eg Mormons) might call that a bad thing, I vastly prefer my life addicted to caffeine over my life when I am not.

The world would be a much better place if free heroin were available in unlimited quantity on every streetcorner.

> Ultimately the choice is the user's

That's really not how choice seems to work in real life.

Anecdotes about recovered junkies are meaningless until you talk to those, which in my experience are the majority, who a) haven't recovered and b) repeatedly choose to try and c) fail to recover because humans just don't have the infinite willpower and rationality that this freedom of choice dogma always assumes. I mean people often don't even have enough information to make rational/good decisions in the first place. Until you stop looking at only success stories, and really have a look at the rest of the iceberg that is human failure, you're just chewing on ideological preconceptions.

> I am addicted to caffeine

Apples and oranges. Caffeine doesn't have much in the way of negatives, and if you experience one of the negatives then the positives most likely aren't strong enough to keep you coming back. So sure, Mormon judgements would then in the 'eye of beholder'.

Maybe talk about alcohol, there's some pretty objective negatives - not only for the person 'choosing' to do it but almost anyone around them - and I know plenty of alcoholics who wouldn't be alcoholics if they were capable of making that choice.

> The world would be a much better place if free heroin were available in unlimited quantity on every streetcorner.

Well now I really can't tell if I'm just feeding the trolls...

> should people be free to choose to destructively engage in addictive goods and services?

Should people be free to engineer addictive systems and services to extract more money from others?

The irresistable donation machine...

Previous discussion on the original article (447 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27456500

This still strikes me as a hardware device telling me what to do. I wish we would just consider (optionally) removing things instead of requiring the user to take more actions or read more disclosures.

See also these works by Joe Edelman years ago:

Design for Agency: http://nxhx.org/dfa/

Is anything worth maximizing for: https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-maximizin...

It's a good set of suggestions, but it doesn't touch on the key problem with "mobile" interfaces - notifications. The core evil (dark design?) of most mobile interfaces to various networks, social or not, is that they can use notifications to get the user into their app. While there's some ability to restrict notifications, there's still not huge support (at least that I know of... maybe it exists and I've missed it?) for levels of notification by default. You can go and turn some options off in an app, if it supports it, but in general, there are tiers of notifications.

High priority is "The world is on fire." Be it your pager for work, or, more often in my case, "The hill I live on is on fire, again...", these are the things a mobile device is useful for. I'd argue that phone calls serve this purpose currently, because the cell network has made calls suck for everything else with latency...

Most of the person to person communications (outside group chats) tends to fall into the "Important, but not immediate" category. This is what I tend to use my phone for, so my notifications are around this.

Then there's the clutter of other notifications ranging from "Oh, hey, you got more spam email!" to "Please come check into our app again, we miss your eyeballs on our ads!" These are fairly unimportant and probably shouldn't exist, in most cases. But most of them are low priority.

I'd like to be able to set things up so that notifications are batched over some period of time, instead of being immediate (unless it's high priority - if my wife is sending me a picture of A or B at the store, I need to respond to that quickly enough). But for other stuff, I'd love to see batched notifications on an hourly, or perhaps even daily basis.

I simulate this on my devices by largely running "pull" instead of "push" for almost everything - outside direction communication from people, which is what I use my phone for, I have notifications turned off. I check my email often enough mostly that I don't need notifications for my primary account (it's not for anything time sensitive so if I check once or twice a day this is fine), though it does lead to some priority inversions in that infrequently used accounts actually do send prompt notifications. I don't have a way to queue these for once a day or something and still get notifications, and I tend to fail to check them otherwise.

If you allow your devices to go back to "pull mode" instead of "push mode," you remove a lot of the evils of most of the applications in terms of attention vampire effects.

But a more flexible notification system would be really, really useful.

I can't speak to iOS because I've never used that platform but Android offers pretty fine grained control over notifications including the ability to modify the app's settings right from the notification itself. You can disable notifications for specific apps altogether.

is it really so hard to not use mobile apps constantly? I am missing something despite using smartphones for over a decade like most

I'm addicted to information. When I first got access to the Internet in the 90's stopped assisting to my university courses to read and try as much as I could from it. This might seem ridiculous but reading so much got me sick in bed for days. And my vision and general health have always been good. So I don't think the issue is related to apps, but to "information hunger", be it reading books, browsing the web, using apps, or whatever medium. How I combat my addiction? I just get as much as I can until I feel nauceous and move to something else, even watching the clouds pass by.

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