[cokeandsympathy]

The point though is that companies act to maximize 'user engagement', a goal which may be at odds with what users actually want to get out of a product or service. Whatever they can do to get just 5% more views or clicks or time on sight is 5% more ad revenue for their investors. Nevermind if that 5% comes from time I'd rather been spending elsewhere and will end up regretting. They incorporate design choices that cause this, whether by autoplaying the next video, implementing a continuous feed, all while controlling exactly how much content they need to show before you finally get sick of it. They are stealing the surplus the promised you.

And suppose you are of psychological steel. Should those who aren't still be exploited? There are entire industries and schools of design whose goal it is to extract as much money as possible from users, take slot machine design for example. (I'd definitely recommend looking up the work of Natasha Schull). Do you consider that practice immoral? Nir's existence is a testament to the fact that product designers use similar techniques

[spaceribs]

We didn't solve alcoholism by outlawing alcohol, we are only really recovering from that product by creating a culture of respect and social norms, which means we need to critically think about how we're spending our time and the signs of any manipulation as a part of becoming an adult.

[ben_w]

Alcohol is outlawed in many contexts, though they vary from place to place. In some (all?) countries, likewise tobacco. These are combined with large scale government advertising campaigns that start in school, which only differ from propaganda in that I think they are true (but then, if they were fake and I’d fallen for it, how would I know? Lots of people in my original country fear the drug Ecstasy, but that government lied - and continues to lie - about the dangers, and the poster-girl of the anti-Ecstasy talks at school died of a water overdose that only happened because of previous, different, bad anti-drugs advice).

Also, there are many ways to fool people that still work even if the victim knows about them, and the pain of being told one has been fooled means every technique the victim knows can (and often will) be rattled off as a fully generic counter-argument to whoever tells them that they have been fooled.

[spaceribs]

I just want to be clear that society at large has instituted regulations like "You need to be 21 to drink" and "You cannot drink in a public park", but there are no regulations on how much you are allowed to drink, that's where personal responsibility to social norms comes into play.

So you're saying it's ok for the government to manipulate you, but not a company, because their goal isn't a vague idea of societal good, it's to make more money? I find it much easier to understand why a company does X, rather than why the age for drinking is set at 21. I take that understanding with me every time I sign up for any kind of service.

If anything should come out of any of this, it's that personal/private information should be fully controlled by individuals in the same way health information is handled. It shouldn't be so easy to generate huge databases of people and claim ownership over them, and it definitely shouldn't be so easy to use those social ties to create an addiction.

[ben_w]

> there are no regulations on how much you are allowed to drink

Counterexample: drink-driving blood alcohol limit.

> So you're saying it's ok for the government to manipulate you, but not a company, because their goal isn't a vague idea of societal good, it's to make more money?

In the right area, sort of (manipulation generally bad but a few things can override the badness) but I would say that governments are (in theory) democratically accountable, whereas business are legally and financially accountable. Yes, people do vote for dumb laws, but in principle that can be undone by another vote, businesses only get in trouble with their shareholders if the government doesn’t limit their behaviour.

While I agree with the point that it would be better if it wasn’t “so easy to generate huge databases of people and claim ownership over them, and it definitely shouldn't be so easy to use those social ties to create an addiction“, I don’t have any long term solutions. At some point the collective footprint of someone’s public statements on the internet is such a database, albeit in the informal sense of the word and spread over dozens of unconnected businesses, and demonstrating that the information has been used to cause addiction is more difficult than demonstrating tax avoidance.