Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaner | Hacker News Reader

What is it, exactly?

There should be some laws about using addictive patterns imo. I'm sure that's fine and profitable and coca cola would continue to like putting cocaine into their drinks to make their customers want it all the more, but we have laws preventing that behavior in the meatspace and therefore we can have laws preventing this sort of evil behavior with technology companies too. Tie it into website accessibility laws that are already codified in law and can be used to sue certain companies today.

While this is extremely murky and maybe impossible to pin down from a legal standpoint, I do like the thought. It's not just Facebook and it's not just social media. It's any software (online games?) that clearly goes out of its way to induce addictive behavior as their business model.

How could legislators draft such a law in a way that wouldn't be voided for vagueness?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagueness_doctrine?wprov=sfla1

Probably with the help of psychologists who can offer more concrete definitions of addictive behavior and dark patterns than you or I.

Since psychology is mostly unscientific bunk, hopefully the courts would put a stop to that type of legislative overreach.

Yikes

The gaming industry would like to have a word...

In a sense, companies are right now incentived to develop the most effective 'digital crack', because anything that hijacks the reward pathway of the brain more effectively leads to more profit. It'll be quite interesting to see how the public discourse around this will progress, since digital entertainment isn't as easy to publicly mark as 'bad' as drugs were.

On the other hand, China is sending quite clear signals that it's theoretically possible to legislate against e.g. video games -- though only after you've already established an intrusive 'social credit' system, which I hope we won't see in the west any time soon.

Digital crack is a perfect way to describe this. I'm sure someone clever enough can write some great legislation for this. The issue is that so many industries are beholden to relying on digital crack. You might get one senator who wants this, then 99 others who are getting flooded with calls from every major employer in their district telling them to vote no. I wish we had stronger government that wasn't so susceptible to having anything good for the public exploited to make a few people very wealthy. Then again we've never had this sort of public first government in the history of our nation, its sort of always been like this out of design whenever I learn more about our history.

> The gaming industry would like to have a word

And I would like to have a word with them. They've been given free reign to turn our kids into absolute digital junkies (this is coming from a self-diagnosed sometimes-addict who realizes these kids are on another level), deliberately dangling carrots that reward 24/7 engagement in the activity.

> digital entertainment isn't as easy to publicly mark as 'bad' as drugs were

Definitely true. We need a way to differentiate between Super Mario Brothers and Mega Crack Force Gacha Legends Online.

I agree completely. I've had the chance to slowly grow up with video games and witness their evolution, and still it's really hard to withdraw myself from the allure of 'just one more round of Apex Legends' and the like. And why should I try so hard, they are great games, after all!

It's decades of development in 'addictiveness tuning' unleashed upon the brain as a stationary target... I really feel sorry for the kids that never knew anything else.

Completely true, I think the mobile sector is the worst offender. That said, people can perfectly spend insane amounts of time on titles that doesn't employ these mechanisms. But the industry got far worse in more recent years.

I disagree - I think that it should be completely legal to sell cocaine drinks as long as you inform the customers that the drinks have cocaine in them and I think that is should be legal to use even the most psychologically manipulative marketing techniques imaginable. I would rather that it be the responsibility of consumers to avoid getting addicted than to use government power to ban things. Similarly, for example I think that it should be legal to sell skateboards even though people sometimes injure themselves while riding them.

> There should be some laws about using addictive patterns

Of course there should be.

But then you would also need to ban casinos, sports gambling, gaming, porn, cigarettes, alcohol and the myriad of other things that are addictive in nature.

Well we do have laws regulating and/or taxing most of those addictive things already. Except for social media and gaming really, although gaming is under hot water currently due to loot box gambling mechanics.

Notably, all of those things are in fact, banned for people under the age of 18 or 21.

Personalized advertising.

What would be the definition of this?

I listen to a podcast on football. Are they allowed to run ads that are about sports betting and NFL tickets? That is personalized to the group. Is Facebook allowed to run ads for sports betting to all people who are fans of a professional team on their site?

Is Facebook not allowed to run me ads for local restaurants any more?

This could be done. The ads on a football podcast could be based on who their broader audience is, not based on a specific user.

> Is Facebook not allowed to run me ads for local restaurants any more?

Nope.

the difference between a cohort that listens to a football podcast and lives in a metro doesn’t seem obvious to me.

I’m guessing that people use targeted advertising and personalized advertising interchangeably. The advertising industry knows full well what it means, and I’m sure the legislator should have no problem finding experts in that area to make a legally rigorous definition.

I personally find the personalized advertising great. A lot of the time I am shown things that are actually useful/valuable to me.

I think a lot of the value really depends on the individual. If you're engaging in productive activities like hobbies, you get valuable targeted ads. If you're engaging in activities that are low value like signaling to others in myriad ways, you probably get adds for things like disposable fashion.

Personalized ads are basically a mirror. They feed what the person already wants to engage in. If you want less of the bad types of advertising, then you need to start at the root which is getting people to stop being interested in activities and behaviors that are lower value.

> I personally find the personalized advertising great. A lot of the time I am shown things that are actually useful/valuable to me.

There are plenty of ways to deliver this value without secretly fingerprinting every user and delivering targeted ads at every corner. A search where you profile yourself, for instance; similar to how you provide search filters on Amazon.

All ads are fundamentally ugly in the sense that their effect is the opposite of a great work of art or entertainment. Ads are fundamentally just some pathetic person's selfish attempt to control what other people to think and feel in order to increase their own power through financial profit. In a sane world they would all be banned. Ads exist in their current deranged and disgusting form because contemporary humans have been selectively bred through social engineering to be submissive, cowardly, selfish, and stupid. Personalized/targeted advertising is not something that needs to be discussed.

Ads have been around for more than 2000 years now - would need a massive shift in mores to get rid of them (they survive in a lot of very different societies).

Yes! Excellent suggestion. This is at the root of so many data-related problems.

Ads.

I knew something was seriously wrong the moment I saw a legitimate business (EBay) selling eye-ball space (ads) on their property that was supposedly profitable through legitimate business (hosting a marketplace, taking a cut, etc).

Ads create a negative and detrimental feedback loop by incentivizing dark patterns and other negative gamification in order to squeeze out previously non-existant eyeball time from your product. E.g. the optimal path for say EBay is to have a user come on, find what they want, browse a bit through interesting things and recommendations, buy what they want/need, then log off. Instead, ads have incentivized spam listings which do two things: More eyeball time and thus ad-impressions/clicks. And they've cause the creation of non-optimal experiences by allowing non-optimal players to exist through pure randomness. I.e. In an ideal market, it should be "winner takes all" for any unique genre or field or product space, one which should be exploring. Instead, the spam listings make it so a non-negligible amount of useless and bottom of the barrel products/sellers/companies to exist and thrive.

For FB, ads have commoditized eyeball time even more directly than the indirect example I gave above with EBay. A potential product path with FB should be people using it as a platform to interact with people they know, organize events, and to have a shared space to communicate and discuss ideas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com