[scottgg]

I enjoyed this. It feels obvious doesn’t it ? But - it’s so hard to see anything grassroots changing here for exactly the same reason the apps become attention-gamified - how can some small organically-grown thing compete with the money ?

[api]

The right question is: how can some small organically grown thing compete for attention?

If everyone is engaged with addiction machines nobody will use it.

Engineered addiction is mind control. It is abuse. Hacking the human brain is violence — a term that has been robbed of its impact through overuse for things that are not violence, but this is.

Engineering of addiction in any form should not be legal for the same reason that kidnapping someone and raping them or forcing them to do my labor is not legal.

Fix this problem — remove the mind control and violence — and a market niche opens up for honest business models. As it stands nobody can compete with these platforms because volition can’t compete with violence and honest commerce can’t compete with slavery through dopamine system hacking.

BTW if you work for these companies, quit. Ten to fifteen years ago ignorance was an excuse. I don’t think the original inventors of this nightmare knew quite what they were doing. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. If you are “optimizing engagement” in this context and in these ways you are a bad person.

[andrei_says_]

It’s interesting that the examples you provided - kidnapping and forced labor - are somewhat legal in the U.S. in the context of the treatment of people of color by law enforcement and incarceration industry.

Similarly, suppression of wages, taking away healthcare, food, employee protections (at-will employment), legally required vacation days and maternity leave, and any meaningful safety nets for employees, pushes the social contract for workers toward violent nonconsensual extraction.

Maximizing extraction inevitably requires violence and cruelty.

[zbentley]

Yes. Given that, how can we do what GP suggested and move the perception and legal treatment of these behaviors towards “ethically repugnant” rather than “conditionally (and, as you pointed out, very unequally) socially permitted”?

[ngriffiths]

I agree. I see this becoming a bigger and bigger problem unless someone steps in with significant regulation or major changes like the article says.

The other challenge is the regulation part is much easier when the product is, say, heroin. Algorithms are technically complex (hard for policymakers to grasp), flexible (can be tweaked to work around guidelines?), and operating in the digital world (harder to monitor/block).

Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?

[rudolftheone]

> Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?

Valid question - however I have a feeling that for shaping perception of such behaviors we need a stronger middle class - and my hope for it shrinks every day

[ambicapter]

By...not competing? As long as you're profitable (read: your expenses are lower than your incomes), what does competing to be "the best" (whatever that even means) provide you?

[ngriffiths]

I think in this context "competing" means having a meaningful market share, which would help reduce time the world spends on the alternative useless gamified/addictive apps

[klabb3]

And if it gets meaningful ”market share”, the business incentives are pulling in the direction of growth, which is the articles point.

[HWR_14]

In many segments, especially ones served digitally, only one or a few companies will survive. It's very much "grow or die".

[ambicapter]

That's a narrative that makes no sense. If a company is profitable, it doesn't "die". If customers like your product and their friends are on your platform, they have no reason to leave to another.

[aeve890]

Pardon my ignorance but is that expensive to run a social platform?

[DeathRay2K]

Running a social media platform can be very expensive, and it only gets more expensive every day.

Media takes a lot of storage and bandwidth, and you basically have unbounded costs if you want to meet user expectations for posting media.

[mistrial9]

similar discussions around liquor and tobacco in days past?

[zbentley]

Kind of. Those examples are often trotted out as discussion killers a la “regulating these vices didn’t work, so don’t bother trying to regulate $whatever (addictive dark patterns in this instance)”.

But that’s not exactly true, is it?

Calling out alcohol and tobacco ignores all the vices that were made durably illegal all over the world: prostitution, blood sport, slavery, forced marriage, and so on—and yes, institutionalized slavery was a vice, an economic one rather than a habitual one, but every bit as behaviorally seductive for slavers as speculative investing, MLM, or subprime asset flipping are for some people today.

Sure, not all of those things are illegal everywhere, and reasonable people may disagree as to whether illegality is appropriate for some of them (e.g. prostitution). But in total they do indicate that vice regulation can “stick” better than it did for alcohol and tobacco.

Hell, we used to put cocaine in soda! Whether or not you believe that the current prohibition/penalty practices around that drug are good, I assume most folks agree that it’s better now that we can’t get addicted to it via products available at the supermarket. Even as addiction-engineered as current-generation hyper-processed foods are, it was once much worse, and that was pretty successfully addressed via regulatory prohibition.

[nine_k]

In most places liquor, while legal, is seriously regulated, and alcoholism is considered a sickness worth treating. Alcohol's effects are visibly debilitating, from poor driving to the very ability to stand without falling or speak coherently.

Addictive games though don't show such easily detectable effects. So it's more like a discussion on gambling, casinos, etc, but the current forms of addiction-forming experiences are much more underhanded.