Hacker News Reader

Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

It’s designed to be addictive. It’s like saying nobody is forced to use drugs, alcohol or tobacco. There’s a reason those are very difficult to quit.

View on HN

The weird thing is that labeling tobacco as addictive did actually seem to produce a decline in use. Labeling social media apps as addictive has, from what I’ve seen, given a lot of people an excuse to keep using it. The narrative has shifted toward “It’s not my fault I use it so much, it’s the company’s fault for making it addictive!”.

Something about moving the locus of control to a 3rd party opens the door for people to forgive themselves for using it so much.

Obligatory “not everyone”, of course, but I can’t believe how many conversations about social media use will immediately shift all blame to the company and downplay any individual choices.

I think part of this is the genuine benefit of social media, it's used for education, connection, political organization... not quite the same as a cigarette. You can pick any emotional or moral response you're having from it and cite some aspect of its multifaceted nature to bolster your position.

HN ist also addictive for many people. So lets also ban it, ok?

There's no endless stream of short videos. That's the hook of these apps. A slow, bare, text only website is probably low on the dopamine trigger scale. Worst case scenario you're now addicted to post graduate conversations.

Text can be addictive though, silly and arbitrary distinction.

Hmm I'm no neurologist but I would place solid money on the fact that it really doesn't activate the same neurological circuits. Saying this because I had issues there and reading really change my brain patterns tangibly.

Plenty of articles documenting how TikTok is designed to be addictive. Show me equivalents for HN.

Even that is not entirely relevant. I think the criteria here are likely actual addiction combined with harm from that addiction combined with scale of that harm. So even if we showed that HN was addictive, the harm and scale are so low that banning it shouldn't even be a conversation. Under the same framework, we have TikTok, which combines an algorithm designed for addiction, actual or imminent harm from a foreign power, and probably the most massive scale possible. So it seems within the realm of possibility that banning TikTok should be a discussion.

You're looking at this in a binary way but there's a spectrum of addictiveness. Some things are a little bit addictive, some things are more addictive, and some things are intentionally designed to be addictive.

Sure, there's some individual out there who spends 8 hours a day on HN and is completely addicted to it. But there are a much larger porportion of users on other platforms that are at that high level of addiction, because those platforms are designed to be addictive.

Scrolling apps don't want you to leave. Ever. In contrast, HN stops you from commenting if you keep doing it too fast.

Quick-access video and audio is particularly psycologically impactful.

We ban chemicals that are designed to be addictive to humans. The exception are substances that are addictive but also have high medical utility. Those are carefully controlled (sometimes less carefully of course — see OxyContin).

It doesn’t seem impossible to make similar value judgments about social media apps, but clearly it’s even harder than with chemicals.

HN ranks fairly low on the "designed to be addictive" scale, and fairly high on the utility scale. With TikTok, it's obvious that it's off the charts on the former while the latter is a very complicated value judgment.

HN is not intentionally engineered to be as addictive as possible now, is it?

Yes! That sound good to me actually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com