[splitwheel]

There is science driving the design of products to make them addictive.

For teen girls - the apps are designed to scare them about being socially excluded. For teen boys - the apps are designed to fill their need to master skills.

The issue that the government has to deal with with app addictions is self harm attempts by girls (e.g. emergency room visits) and underperformance of boys in the real world (e.g. low college enrollment).

If you are trying to make an addictive app, this is a good reference to understand the science: https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Produc...

BJ Fogg is a good reference too: https://www.bjfogg.com

[EGreg]

There's a good article about how to fix it: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

(Disclaimer: it talks about my work)

[anthk]

>For teen girls - the apps are designed to scare them about being socially excluded.

Any female magazine ever.

[wussboy]

Agreed, but I do think the effects of the addiction are radically different between a social media app and a magazine.

[LorenPechtel]

I doubt there is any real difference, it's just a matter of quantity. The magazine comes out monthly or possibly weekly. The computer comes out all the time.

[antiviral]

Yes, and moreover, the important point in the article that some people seem to be forgetting is that Meta itself believed that certain design choices led to addictive products and worked to incorporate those designs despite harmful consequences to children and adults alike. It matter much less that anyone on the outside believes this or not.

Additionally, saying that children and adults should be wholly responsible for this is like saying the Chinese and not the British should be responsible for their opium addiction (see Opium War) and that homeless in San Francisco should be responsible for their Fentanyl addition. They can always just say no, right?

I worry that if nothing is done, this will only get worse, addiction will become the norm, of one sort or another, and you can just look at history of the Opium War to see where this leads.

[jocaal]

> Additionally, saying that children and adults should be wholly responsible for this is like saying the Chinese and not the British should be responsible for their opium addiction (see Opium War) and that homeless in San Francisco should be responsible for their Fentanyl addition. They can always just say no, right?

This is why I find it funny that FAANG people call themselves software engineers. In the real world, an engineer is wholly responsible for the projects they bring into the world. Imagine a bridge collapses and someone dies. Then in court the family is told that the person was responsable to research bridge designs before using it. These social media companies are just run by money hungry a-holes.

[jstarfish]

> This is why I find it funny that FAANG people call themselves software engineers. [...] Imagine a bridge collapses and someone dies. Then in court the family is told that the person was responsable to research bridge designs before using it.

They are software engineers though. Engineers build all of our weapons.

The bridge collapsing isn't accidental-- it was the intended outcome. It's a carefully-engineered trap.

[superkuh]

This is what happens when you start using the word "addiction" outside of contexts where it applies. You get these kinds of invalid and dangerous arguments comparing actually addictive substances that hijack incentive salience directly on the physiological level to a screen and speakers that most definitely do not.

[hotpotamus]

Gambling addiction triggers the same brain areas as drug and alcohol cravings

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/176745/gambling-addiction-tr...

As someone who has had issue with addiction (a real one by your definition as well as screen based one), it's plainly obvious that the brain mechanisms at play are the same.

[superkuh]

So does listening to enjoyable music or viewing an impressive art gallery. I assume you're talking about glutamergic activity in populations in the shell of the nucleus accumbens. (edit: after reading the paper, https://www.nature.com/articles/tp2016256 , I was correct).

And that's funny because in the incentive salience theory of addiction, which they cite at the start of their paper, the nucleus accumbens populations don't encode for wanting, those populations encode for liking. The actual voxels of the brain this study should have been watching would be the ventral pallidum and ventral tegmental area. Those are necessary and sufficient for wanting(craving). The nucleus accumbens is not.

You'd think the director of the National Problem Gambling Clinic who cites the incentive salience theory in his first paragraph would actually take the time to understand the neurological correlates of the theory he's citing (but then again, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."). This lack should make you question the other aspects of this study.

Like how a 19 person MRI studies might as well not be studies at all in the neuroscience sense. They're for getting more funding to do a study with actual statistical power to make inferences. And note that in the actual paper they don't call it addiction, it's gambling disorder.

[superkuh]

There is a for-profit pseudo-science, much like the anti-gay camps of the 1980s, which is spreading unsupported claims using words like "addiction" in contexts where the medical regulatory bodies and journal literature don't believe the concept applies. These people prey on the irrational behavior of parents scared for their children and try to convince them that things like addiction to a website on a screen is possible. They write popular press books, go on talk shows, etc, to keep the meme (and their funding sources) alive. But the DSM and ICD just don't support it. Neither do the recent literature; at least if you stay out of the pay for publish 3rd tier "journals" these scammers submit their "science" to. And yes, it even applies to media personalities associated with Stanford.

[erellsworth]

>> These people prey on the irrational behavior of parents scared for their children and try to convince them that things like addiction to a website on a screen is possible.

Saying that addiction to a website isn't possible is unfounded.

People get addicted to online gambling. That's just "a website on a screen." It's clearly possible and it clearly happens.

[dotandgtfo]

What are you stating? I genuinely don't get the point. Are you saying that screens/apps don't cause addiction?

[haltist]

He is saying people need to be more techno-optimistic and stop paying attention to all this fear mongering hack jobs about social media algorithms. These algorithms deliver billions of dollars of value on a daily basis. Money and GDP are more important than depressed teens. It's important to focus on what actually matters: market capitalization and profitability.

[liquidpele]

Poes law almost got me.

[hotpotamus]

I mean, stating it that plainly is what makes it a joke, but it is indeed an accurate description of the choices we have collectively made as near as I can tell.

[superkuh]

I thought I was clear. There is no such thing as "internet addiction" or any subset. There's actually not even "gambling addiction" anymore. It's been properly renamed to "gambling disorder". But I guess we're not talking facts here. Instead we're concentrating on how it feels to us. And various ambitious policians are realizing they can use that collective lay delusion to further their careers.

I am not pro-corporate as some are accusing me. I've never even had a facebook, twitter, or the like account in my life. I think these are terrible services and platforms. But it is even more dangerous to apply a label like "addiction" to them because then politicians think they can treat them like drugs... and we know how dangerous that response is.

[everforward]

> There's actually not even "gambling addiction" anymore. It's been properly renamed to "gambling disorder".

You're incorrectly making assumptions about that wording. They're all disorders now. E.g. a heroin addiction is officially "opioid use disorder" in the DSM. It's probably part of some initiative to be more inclusive or avoid the accusatory nature of the word addiction.

More than that, you're interpreting in the wrong direction. Gambling disorder and substance use disorders were both moved into the same chapter of the DSM-V ("Substance-related and addictive disorders"), reflecting ongoing evidence that gambling disorder triggers reward pathways in the brain the same way that drugs do.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40429-014-0027-6 if you want more info on the history of categorizing gambling and other addictive but non-substance-abuse disorders.

[superkuh]

I appreciate the correction and the reference. I am suprised that they decided to put gambling disorder with the substance abuse disorders under "Substance-related and addictive disorders". But the bulk of the paper is about how all the other behavior disorders besides gambling do not have sufficient evidence to include them with the addiction disorders. This continues to support my point, re: interaction with websites.

>reflecting ongoing evidence that gambling disorder triggers reward pathways in the brain the same way that drugs do.

Yes, people find things that are intermittently rewarding to have more incentive salience eventually. But gambling with random operant condition is not hijacking those neuronal populations responsible for reward prediction (like the dopaminergic neurons of the ventral tegmental area) and activating them in the absence of reward. It is merely reacting appropriately to actual reward as encoded by activation of the glutamergic populations of the shell of the nucleus accumbens (at least). That's a huge difference... though apparently not big enough to stem the political and social tides.

[dotandgtfo]

Ok, it's just such an absurd position I wanted to make sure. So essentially you're arguing about semantics?

[superkuh]

Nope. It's important to use the right word in this case for 2 reasons. First is the trivial semantic one you've perceived; addiction has a definition and things like physiological withdrawl symptoms don't exist for behavioral disorders. They aren't addictions.

The second, more important, is that even if we rename it properly to "internet disorder" there's still not significant evidence for making it a behavioral disorder. This is backed up by the lack of inclusion in the DSMV updates and ICD10 updates or 11 just released. People have certainly tried to have these things included: their income depended upon it. But the science rejected it.

You could also make the same correlations between autism spectrum disorder and the rise of popular (ie, non-usenet, irc, etc) social networks online. But it obviously wasn't caused by it. It was caused by a better identification of the phenotype and more accessible treatment. I think the claimed and unverifiable "increase in bad mental health/etc/etc in teens" is much of the same.

[jstarfish]

> This is backed up by the lack of inclusion in the DSMV updates and ICD10 updates or 11 just released. People have certainly tried to have these things included: their income depended upon it. But the science rejected it.

It's not in the Bible either. So clearly this isn't a real problem.

Why are we trusting acceptance by a community of gatekeeping charlatans as the final say on whether or not a problem exists? Meta hires psychologists to engineer these very exploitative patterns they deny the existence of. They can't put that in the DSM-V. People would take notice that they're a rehab clinic in the business of selling heroin.

[dxbydt]

> even more dangerous to apply a label like "addiction" to them

my dude, teens leaving school are crossing the street without even looking up, because they're scrolling insta. Ok so they are dumb teens. What about the crossing guard lady ? She is paid money by the school board to monitor the crossing lane so the cars don't hit the teens. Now, the crossing guard also doesn't look up, because she is scrolling insta too. How do you think all this ends ?

[superkuh]

The same argument was literally made against newspapers and how people were ignoring each other and their environment and causing accidents. It turned out just fine.

[verisimi]

My concern would be more that it is entraining a sort of consumerist outlook, where corporate values are instilled into a child, rather than addiction. That has always been the case of course, with education preparing the new generation for the workforce. But the use of technology disintermediates the parent from that process.

[4death4]

Doesn't BJ Fogg work at Stanford?