[bsder]

> Flavors aren't effective at hooking young people, nicotine is.

Wrong. Flavors are simply really effective at hooking everybody.

I watched this with a friend of mine who absolutely thought the same way as you. We got him a couple different flavored ones to try--all non-nicotine.

His reaction: "Alright, you win. You have to physically take the strawberry ones away as I will absolutely drain them all."

The flavors allow the industry to find the one that you personally find agreeable. Add nicotine on top of that and you have a device for personalized maximal addiction.

[User23]

Given that the entire modern tech business is addiction as a service, I don't think we have any room for moral grandstanding.

Remember when Internet addiction was a big concern?

[bsder]

> Given that the entire modern tech business is addiction as a service

That is grossly unfair to the many of us who have absolutely nothing to do with the latest Social-Garbage-As-A-Service fads.

Just because VCs will only fund Internet Junk Food does not mean that all software that exists does that.

[User23]

I commend you for your integrity. However the exceptions are a rounding error in terms of market cap, because today's tech industry is all about creating addicts and profiting from their addiction directly or selling access to them to a third party. Sometimes both. It's not a coincidence that we're one of only two industries that refers to customers as users.

[bsder]

While its probably hard to disagree about market cap, there are a lot of people writing software that backs your laptop/desktop, runs your bank, plans logistics delivery routes, runs medical equipment, etc.

There is a lot of software out there that isn't dedicated to triggering human dopamine receptors. You don't hear a lot about it as it's just part of the job.

And I didn't choose to have integrity--it's just that nobody ever offered me enough money to compromise it. :)