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Comment by npsimons | Hacker News Reader

> It's that they are catering to the worse impulses in all of us and encouraging us to become those people.

That is incredibly unsettling, and not just because it makes me uncomfortable. Dumbing down should never be a deliberate goal, especially of people.

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It’s not deliberate. It’s the tragedy of the commons. They are tapping into a shared resource (our well being) and everyone else is doing it.

If you listen to Frances Haugen's testimony, you see that it is very much deliberate.

There are probably thousands of psychology grads that went to school, hoping to help people, that are, instead, designing dark patterns.

But they are probably making a lot more money than they would, helping people.

Evil pays cash.

It's as deliberate as a cow eating grass. The cow deliberately eats the grass but because of the game theory involved (lack of information, lack of coordination, incentives etc.), the pasture disappears. The point of my comment (and the article's, I think) was that companies want the revenue, but don't deliberately want to harm us.

Companies aren't cows. They know. Big companies always have people studying the larger economic trends of the markets they are in and looking into the future--you know, people who are always ignored if they point out anything or advocate anything that would be counter to this quarter's profits.

There's no commons on a commercial website. This is deliberate.

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