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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

Forget "kids", I'm an adult and I'd love to have versions of all modern social media with the 'growth hacking' features axed.

Remember the days before forever scrolling on Reddit? When Facebook timelines were chronological? When bullshit clickbait links didn't show up as "recommended" after you meticulously pruned bullshit clickbait groups from your feed? When Youtube didn't just autoplay down into the deep dark depths of crazytown? How about social media that's actually social instead of just being the same national outrage "conversation" being replayed in a slightly different setting?

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Alternatively: delete your accounts, and stop using these services first, instead of maintaining them hoping a better thing comes along you can switch to.

Indeed. It's akin to complaining that there's too much poison in cigarettes because of course it'd be inhumane to suggest people stop smoking.

I deleted Facebook a few years ago. Great decision. I don't miss it at all. But of course - I can't remember anyone's birthday anymore.

> growth hacking

More like mind hacking. It's like these apps want to hook into the reward center of people's brains. Get them addicted to stupid bullshit so they spend hours scrolling through that stuff so they look at more and more advertising. Funny how advertising is always at the root of all this evil. Maybe we should get rid of it.

Only thing worse is video game design which does this explicitly and unashamedly. They wire the dopamine button to the player's credit card.

> Remember the days before forever scrolling on Reddit?

Yea it was awful. Pagination is an optimization for faster page load speeds that has nothing to do with user engagement. Sure some people can get caught in the doom scrolling, but for normal users, having to navigate between pages is an awful experience compared to just scrolling to the bottom to get the next "page"

I use old reddit redirect and without reddit enhancement suite that adds infinite scrolling, it's awful to use

Infinite-scrolling is awful for 2 reasons:

1. What you’re currently looking at is not directly addressable (instead it’s “open this URL, within this time-window, and scroll exactly X-many pixels in exactly S-seconds to get to the exact same content as me”).

2. It makes it impossible to get to the real page footer, which often contains essential links like Contact Us, the About/Impressum page, and other important stuff.

For #1 it's the same because the content on each page is dependent on reddit's algorithm, which may change by the time you load up the next page (maybe reddit has some caching that prevents this), so if you link page 3 to someone, they will see something different depending on when they open the link

For #2 that's useful for novice users but as a reddit user for who knows how many years I don't care about the footer

The truly awful implementation is the paging of comments on this website.

It's a good thing that its awful to use with pagination. Frequently I would find myself using RES and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, the only thing stopping me from continuing scrolling was suddenly noticing that these posts had 12 upvotes and I was 600 posts off the front page at this point. Friction like pagination gives you pause. Sure, its annoying, but subconsciously that annoyance leads you to make a finite ending of saying "I'll stop after I get through this page," instead of time flying by scrolling and scrolling.

Looking at your last line I think it would be helpful to assess your addiction in brass tacks. Imagine if you said, "I only use cocaine intraveinously, insufflation is awful." Sometime its helpful to add some breaks to unhelpful habits than trying to min max them all the time. I still have a lot of problems with this myself and I am doing my best to introduce more friction to my internet usage, since you can't just flush it down the drain and walk away like a pack of cigarettes in this day and age when internet means work.

Should it be up to social media companies to integrate controls for people who lack self-control into their products? Should alcohol companies include a BAC meter on each bottle to determine if you can drink from it? Should casinos allow you to only withdraw a certain amount when you enter and no more?

I don't believe it's the place of these companies to implement these kind of controls. Governments will create regulations that force these companies to implement controls, but I don't believe that addresses the root cause.

The root cause is, why can't you control your social media/gambling/alcohol use? It's a wide ranging cause from genetics to mental health problems to other external causes. I believe those should be the first level of addressing from the government, but it's easier to just regulate

Its not so much that they should build controls, but the other side of the argument, that they shouldn't spend so much effort hiring psychologists as consultants to figure out how to make their website/app/service the most dominating thing in at least a portion of their user's daily life (most companies call these sorts of users "whales" since they produce so much meat for the company).

At least for YouTube you can disable auto play.

...and yet it still manages to turn itself back on whenever you sign in again, when you cast to a new device...and you can't tell me the company that knows everything about me can't remember my preference for not wanting auto play. Other services seem to remember it just fine, I set it once on Netflix and have never needed to set it ever again.

Actually, my issue with YouTube isn't really the autoplay per se, it's how the recommended videos (including autoplayed videos) go very aggressively into rabbit holes.

I'll listen to an anime music playlist and my entire recommended video / front page becomes full of anime stuff. An in-law joins Youtube to watch bible study videos and now they're an avowed freedom fighter against the globalist satanist cabal running the world. That sort of thing.

This is a feature and I love it. I don't want to subscribe to football channels, for example, but if I'm in the mood I watch a couple of them and then it shows me related videos for a few more hours and then it switches when I decide to search for cooking videos, of which I don't want to subscribe to either. Works great.

They could easily let you accomplish this by just giving you an option to actively seek out this content by giving you a "What else is like this?" button that takes you to a 'related videos' page.

The problem when it just puts it all in a single recommendation feed is that that feed more-or-less presents itself as "here's what the world is talking about" rather than "here's a bunch of stuff that conforms to the biases and ideological filters of the stuff you've been watching lately." It creates a solipsistic worldview if you're not aware of what's going on.

There needs to be a plugin to wipe cookies on every YouTube page load. The recommended videos list for a given video on your first visit? Excellent. Every subsequent page load where they give recommendations pertaining to a video from 30 minutes ago? Absolute garbage.

Curiously, I don't have that experience at all. I'll play Backyardigans videos to watch with the baby ~4 times per week and nothing of the sort ever shows up in my recommended feed. I can't understand the reports of sub-par recommendation experience on YouTube. Maybe my behavior is somewhat different -- I tap "watch this later" a lot (and rarely do).

You can reject the recommended videos and purely exist either checking subscribed channels or using the search function for every video. I've found that their recommendations are usually pretty good but I use youtube on different devices for different "moods" so I've got my background lets-plays on one device - people talking about maps on another device - and my youtube-only music needs on a third device - this helps keep my stuff pretty siloed.

I wish you could disable the free trial offers.

Sorta, kinda. Except it tends to turn itself back on at random. Except there IIRC are two auto-plays on YouTube: one for normal videos, one for playlists - and YouTube's search has a nasty habit of returning results that happen to be smack in the middle of some random playlist.

And speaking of YouTube, the other annoyance is the extremely idiotic anti-feature of pausing the playback and displaying "Are you still watching?" popup after you go a couple of minutes without moving your mouse or tapping on the screen. No YouTube, I'm not watching, I'm only listening on my wireless headset. But you already know that. What you don't know is that I'm in the middle of some household cleaning and my hands are covered with caustic chemicals, so I frikkin do not appreciate having to press a stupid button you introduced to get more "engagement".

To be fair, you can disable autoplay by using youtube-dl[0], and it's (effectively) physically incapable of turning itself back on. Also fixes "Are you still watching?" and other engagement 'features'^Wdefects.

0: http://youtube-dl.org/

Agreed, funny that it takes "for Kids" for instagram to finally (pretend) to care about involving external stakeholders on the implications of their at-any-cost growth mechanics

These services are so fucking needy. It's like they were designed by broken people. How about some respectful technology that knows its place, and can say "hey, you've accomplished the task you wanted to do here, so go do something else."

What you describe is antithetical to capitalism as it is currently implemented

Subscription services (at very low cost) could achieve this.

In 2019, Instagram only made around $11.98 per user annually.

Imagine if you could pay $12 a year and never see an ad, never be manipulated by an algorithm, never have to worry about any of that. All engineering would be focused on retaining you as a user, not as a market segment for advertisers. The incentive wouldn't be to addict you with an infinite scroll but to provide enough value for you to maintain the annual cost. Possibly even minimizing the attention it demands because the greatest profits is in justifying the subscription while encouraging the least amount of resource use.

Unfortunately, growth-hacking meant VC subsidized growth with free services and there was no way that subscriptions could compete.

The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost, user-centric subscription-based apps in a world where free (but not really) is taken for granted.

$12 a year is misleading. Paying users are much more valuable ad targets than free users once you start segmenting them.

So now you need to charge significantly more than $12 to make up for that. The higher price makes the paid users even more valuable to advertisers. Eventually the service slips in a few ads because it’s just too much money to leave on the table.

Cable TV started as an ad free subscription service. I’m not saying it can’t work, but historically most subscription services don’t stay ad free forever.

most subscription services don’t stay ad free forever.

This is true, for two reasons: Declining profit as markets mature and the need for investors to see greater returns YOY. Eventually, all companies turn to more intense methods of profit extraction.

This isn't specific to digital services of course, we're seeing the effects of this broadly across the economy.

One way to put off the inevitable (for potentially quite some time) would be to bootstrap instead of taking investment. Easier said than done, of course, but maybe not impossible since the hardest part may be breaking open the market in the first place and it might be a lot easier to build an alternative app in a mature space than it was to create Instagram in 2010.

This is extremely important, and something I think many people don't realize. Charging a fee might make it possible for a company to be profitable without needing ad revenue, but it likely won't change the underlying economics such that also showing ads won't be even more profitable. The only ways around this that I can see are 1) a company steadfastly choosing to forgo the ad revenue, 2) a company maintaining a customer base that is willing to pay the subscription fee and has a principled opposition to ads such that introducing ads wouldn't be viable, or 3) somehow reorganizing the economy such that the negative externalities of advertising are greatly reduced.

> somehow reorganizing the economy such that the negative externalities of advertising are greatly reduced.

What “negative externalities” are you referring to?

Some simple and direct ones to start with: bandwidth and CPU usage, blatant malware, annoyance.

Strictly speaking, I don't think those are "externalities" though

This reminds me of the NYT banner ad prompting subscribers to allow ads on articles. $35/month and ads? Yeah, no.

I came here to say I am ready to pay for that service!

There's always Glass. $5 / month, no ads, no VC funding, no manipulative algorithm.

Last quarter, they made $10.12 per user[1, slide 4], however that's not evenly distributed. They made $53.01 per user in US and Canada. But even that isn't evenly distributed. The users who are likely to pay for the subscription are also the most valuable to advertisers because they have disposable income. Some Instagram users see ads for luxury cars, real estate, and vacations, while other users see ads for dollar stores and dropshipped junk. FB earns much more in their auction from that first set of users, but those will be the first users willing to pay to opt out of ads.

Dynamic pricing would probably offend both audiences - "what do you mean the algorithm thinks I'm worthless?" "what do you mean that I'm worth thousands of dollars to you?"

[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...

That's for Facebook broadly, which is a beast of a corporation that encompasses dozens of services and properties. I'm talking about instagram specifically.

those will be the first users willing to pay to opt out of ads.

The service would have to be built from the ground-up to not have a free option, it would have to be equalized across all users. Again, this is where the difficulty lies in an economy that already offers so much for free.

IF someone could pull it off, they would benefit from the gym membership effect of people keeping the subscription while barely using the service (and it's resources).

There would also be considerable savings on the engineering and sales side if you cut all adtech out of the equation and provide a simple time-series feed.

I felt this way when Hulu gave me the option to opt out of ads for $4 a month extra…

“Wait that’s all my eyes are worth?!”

It’ll be less than $4/mo: part of that $4 will have to pay for building-out the ad-free experience.

Lets be honest here, they'd just charge you the money as an added bonus on top of productizing you as a user

> The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost, user-centric subscription-based apps in a world where free (but not really) is taken for granted.

Well, yes, it does come down to this, and I'd say the answer is very clearly that this cannot be done, at least not at any scale remotely close to the scale of the big free social media networks.

Before being acquired, WhatsApp served a half a billion users on a $1 per year subscription model (first year was free, and they were competing against comparatively high charges for sms), and apparently only a few dozen engineers. Signal manages a similar feat on a handful of (large) donations. It's possible to have a profitable business while charging users a small fee, but once a public company achieves network effects and a captured user base, there is a pressure to milk it for all it is worth.

In a normal market there would be competition and an equilibrium would be reached, but where network effects dominate, it takes something like Signal to make a dent in this regard. That said, there's no reason that a non-profit version of instagram couldn't eventually compete or dominate by charging users a pittance.

Moving to a subscription fee model is dangerous for a service that's reached saturation point. They can no longer project infinite growth in value extracted from eyeballs going into the future, and are stuck with whatever they choose to charge (along with some limited increases in fees. Building a better service cannot be fully leveraged into higher fees, since there's only so much YoY increase in costs users will stomach.)

On the other hand, subscription models are fine for new entrants, even with VC hyper-growth expectations - there are still billions of users to capture even if per-user revenue is fixed! Then the game becomes delivering as much value to these customers as possible to attract more paying users.

Perhaps this is another malincentive that comes about from monopolies.

They can no longer project infinite growth

This is true, but only applies to the "tech unicorn" VC-funded model. There are other ways to build businesses and if the model we're used to always ends up with such terrible social results, maybe it's time we strongly considered them.

Everyone knows these things are bad. Everyone knows they are causing harm to society. Everyone knows these services are actively doing this stuff despite knowing the risks. And yet we allow them to operate. I am with you on this. The current system has no real incentives to stop this. They are essentially developing a drug and we praise them for it.

Then maybe we should implement capitalism differently. Hopefully by making the "surveillance" part of it illegal even if it kills these companies.

The only popular social app that claims to do this is Hinge.

Hinge has all sorts of dark patterns to keep you swiping on the app as long as possible. Recently they added some feature called Standouts that removes the "best" matches from your ability to match, so you have to wait until those matches drop from the exclusive-only bin. The idea behind limiting max likes is nice (10), but they also have some ranking algorithm that only starts showing your preferred matches near the end of your match limit, extremely subtle but I noticed it started making me feel like I was anxious about preserving my bin of likes. It's all a money game to these Match companies and pretty obvious why people are burning out on all the ghosting / terrible interactions etc.

You can still pay for unlimited likes, right? I would see the limit more as incentive to pay than to limit engagement for the user's sake.

There were two days last week where I got on TikTok around bedtime as a distraction from actually going to bed. After a while a clip came up on my FYP with someone saying "hey, maybe you wanna be done scrolling and go to bed", and I was like, "yeah, that's a very good idea, thanks".

It was the second time that I realized the clip was from TikTok. Honestly, I appreciate it.

right - cos tiktok is totally looking after you more than any of the other services /s

I mean, I don't get the sarcasm. Have you had another app steer you away from engagement for the sake of your mental/behavioral health in this way?

I certainly haven't. Other than maybe Nintendo suggesting go outside breaks or something.

Many Gacha games do it either through limits of stamina or just directly saying go do something else.

A few other regular games do it too.

Netflix asking me if I'm still alive after three hours does nothing to prevent mindless consumption on the whole

TikTok ran out of clips to recommend to you lol

Maybe figure out why it is you don't want to go to bed. It's usually because you don't like doing the thing you do after waking up.

> How about some respectful technology that knows its place, and can say "hey, you've accomplished the task you wanted to do here, so go do something else."

From bitter experience: people don't like being told they're done for the day. It wears you down having to explain it.

Add in the profit motive and it's easy to see why people cave to adding infiniscrolling

Nintendo does this in some of its games, like Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D. Navi says, 'You've been playing for a while, maybe take a break?' I found it more annoying than anything, and I don't think it ever caused me to stop playing.

I forgot they made a product just got kids, right when their teenager harm report was released.

Now that most of them are the hyper growth stage, you’d think they could figure out which growth hacky things they could turn off and still retain users.

I personally use Telegram as my main social network. No algorithms, no "recommended", just channels and chats you want. It is not secure, sure, but I don't need it to be secure. A lot of Russian buisness and science-related media is only found there. That said I am Russian and AFAIK most English content there is far-right propaganda so it might not be useful to you.

you’re asking for them to remove the part that prints them money. the only reason they’re going this route is the whistle blower leaking and hopes to appease regulators before regulation.

None of that really describes Instagram today, though. The problem with IG today is literally everyone is trying to sell something. 100% of Instagram today is marketing and there is no longer any reason to use it.

Unfortunately, there is: it's the few acquaintances you like that insist to post news about themselves as stories on Instagram.

God, I hate stories. This is probably the most antisocial "growth hack" these companies invented. A simple way to boost and exploit FOMO to ensure most users will be checking with your app at least once every single day.

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