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Comment by jiveturkey | Hacker News Reader

Been going on long before Silicon Valley was even a thing. Sugar industry for example.

> What might actually work

This section is idealistic. I guess the author was too damaged by his own experience to actually study the wave of twitter replacements. I would love to see an analysis of those. "Different Funding Methods" is clearly required but perhaps not sufficient.

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Alcohol, nicotine / cigarettes, sugar packed junk food. The digital realm of addiction is a new face of the same pattern.

Cheap hits to increase pleasure centers in the brain that overall have a detrimental cost to humanity with entire industries to deal with the health consequences.

This is the mining of wealth from health reducing the overall productivity of humanity for the sake of near term profits. Optimizing short term gains for long term progress.

True. Regulatory prohibition has sometimes succeeded at addressing these problems, though. More info on that in my adjacent comment, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407009

Indeed. The first thing I think of when I read "engineered addictions" is fast food like McDonalds and Subway. People work very hard to make sure the taste and smell is addictive but that the food is not satiating.

For sure… but digital distribution and deep understanding of the mental processes behind addiction make it even more accessible for new products / games today.

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