[somenameforme]

If you reject the necessity of a monetary payout then near to all modern tech becomes gambling. Maximizing "engagement" has always been little more than a euphemism for addiction after all. And social media "engagement" is certainly destroying far more lives than gambling, not only in raw numbers but also as a percent of its users.

So many people claim to be unhappy or at least dissatisfied with social media, yet continue to spend hours per day on it, chasing those highly exploitative little dopamine rushes that drive addiction to it. And of course it regularly gets much darker than just wasting vast amounts of time. Even in a casino the overwhelming majority of people will at least tell you they're having fun. And in video games the overwhelming majority of people will not only be having fun with what they're playing, but also spending next to nothing on it.

[srcreigh]

Maybe that’s why china bans Facebook, limits TikTok usage to 1h per day, and video games to 1 hour per day on weekends and public holidays only.

What addictive software system isn’t banned in china? maybe software development..

[eternityforest]

I really do think software development can be at least somewhat similar to video game addiction. So many personal projects are just useless obsessions. I'm not sure why people don't treat them more like video games and only spend the amount of time you would be comfortable spending in counter strike.

I guess pursuit of simplicity, and supposed educational benefits (which are real, but these personal projects are different enough from commercial software, and often don't really push the boundaries of anyone's skill or involve any new technologies likely to be used outside of a hobby) make it seems worth the 10+ hours a day people can spend?

[levesque]

To be fair, the people quoted in the book don't seem to be having that much fun. But yes, most of modern tech seems to be exploiting the same mechanism, generating addiction.