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Comment by bigDinosaur | Hacker News Reader

If you mean 'should network TV be allowed to use behavioural psychology to manipulate people into being couch potatoes' then the answer is yes, that should be regulated against.

Anyway, the way you talk about shorts reminds me of drug addicts who talk about how they can control their consumption. Some can. Many cannot but delude themselves. The way I see people interact with shorts/TikTok/reels is very much not restrained. They're optimised for addictive scrolling in the same way a slot machine is - the fact that some people can use a slot machine without becoming addicted is besides the point.

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Using behavioral psychology in commercial speech should be illegal?

Good luck with that one. Somebody probably used 18th Century behavioral psychology to try to sell George Washington a horse!

You dropped the second half of my sentence which pointed to a specific harm. You consequently argued against something which I didn't say. You are not arguing in good faith and this 'conversation' has clearly run its course as you are not capable of engaging the actual points someone is making.

Someone saying that someone shouldn't be able to promote specific harm x is not saying that the idea of 'promotion' of anything in general is necessarily bad, exactly in the same way that we restrict certain harmful things from being sold without being against the idea of selling things in general.

OK, sorry, so using behavioral psychology to encourage an audience to stay on the couch watching TV for prolonged periods should be illegal?

This is the Netflix business model, right now.

Netflix makes the same profit whether you watch 30 minutes or 30 hours a month.

Tiktok gets paid for every extra second you spend there.

Netflix certainly doesn’t think about their subscriber audience that way.

The difference is that the media is 30 seconds not 2 hours so the feedback loop is shorter and the content pool is far far far deeper because it is user submitted so the content recommendation algorithms become so effective , and the experience so compelling, that it becomes addictive. And as a wise man once said “a difference in scale is a difference in kind”

I’m actually strongly sympathetic to this argument, but I’d love to see some actual clinical research that suggests algorithmic short form video has mental and physiological effects that (say) video games do not.

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