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Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?

#21

Post by wasteduniverse »

armchairhacker wrote: post #20
sky2224 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one genuinely didn't make much sense to me. My (conspiracy) guess is that Nintendo hit him with a really fat lawsuit (given the blatantly stolen art) and they came to some agreement that he'd pull the game if he could go out with a bang. The dude was raking in $50,000/day. You don't just pull the plug on something doing that because of really mean and aggressive online comments, do you...?

He made enough to live the rest of his life in luxury. And it wasn’t just online, the attention bled into his personal life. > As news hit of how much money Nguyen was making, his face appeared in the Vietnamese papers and on TV, which was how his mom and dad first learned their son had made the game. The local paparazzi soon besieged his parents’ house, and he couldn’t go out unnoticed. While this might seem a small…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?

#22

Post by seba_dos1 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #2

Not so much addiction but worrying misuse. My heads-up on the whole smart-tech and human behaviour crisis happened very early. About 2014 we were at RJDJ pioneering reactive music and audio games. Two products, gave me serious worry. One was a zombie hunting game, possibly one of the first ever geo-location mobile games way before Pokemon etc. It used audio only and put the player into an immersive horror survival la…

> possibly one of the first ever geo-location mobile games

The first geo-location mobile game I used to play (Xyber Mech) was from 2004; it was inspired by BotFighters from 2001, and Ingress was released in 2012 making a global craze, so I don't think you could be "one of the first ever" in 2014 ;) Pokemon Go, while certainly the most popular, was really late to the party.

Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?

#23

Post by nonrandomstring »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #22
nonrandomstring wrote: post #2

Not so much addiction but worrying misuse. My heads-up on the whole smart-tech and human behaviour crisis happened very early. About 2014 we were at RJDJ pioneering reactive music and audio games. Two products, gave me serious worry. One was a zombie hunting game, possibly one of the first ever geo-location mobile games way before Pokemon etc. It used audio only and put the player into an immersive horror survival la…

> possibly one of the first ever geo-location mobile games The first geo-location mobile game I used to play (Xyber Mech) was from 2004; it was inspired by BotFighters from 2001, and Ingress was released in 2012 making a global craze, so I don't think you could be "one of the first ever" in 2014 ;) Pokemon Go, while certainly the most popular, was really late to the party.

As you get older it all starts to blend :) Would have actually been more like 2010 [0] as I remember the iPhone 4 was the next target [1] and my job was to get all the DSP running on it. But you're absolutely right, the idea of GPS games is way, way older. Some of the team then were into "geocashing" sort of games and that's what inspired the musical zombies thing. IIRC they didn't all use "smartphones" either because not all models had GPS then.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RjDj [1] https://www.iphonelife.com/content/evolution-iphone-every-mo...

Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?

#24

Post by nicoloren »

franze wrote: post #5

In 2004 my boss - I was a one man team technical business development at the Austria Press Agency - came to me and told me "our press release clients want to get better found in that Google". At that time I saw it as a nice, fun project. too my knowledge I was one of the first in my market on corporate state who took on this topic. which later came to be called search engine optimization. I was definitely one of the…

I France, SEO was already popular and we were already gaming the Google ranking algo. One of the big player in the game of SEO, abondance.com was registered in 1998 and we also have the popular website webrankinfo.com (registered in 2002).

> 20 years later we screwed up the internet. well at least the part of the internet that shows up in Google.

You're right... :(

Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?

#25

Post by throwaway18284 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #2

Not so much addiction but worrying misuse. My heads-up on the whole smart-tech and human behaviour crisis happened very early. About 2014 we were at RJDJ pioneering reactive music and audio games. Two products, gave me serious worry. One was a zombie hunting game, possibly one of the first ever geo-location mobile games way before Pokemon etc. It used audio only and put the player into an immersive horror survival la…

Ah man, I love the RJDJ apps! I keep an ancient iPod touch around just because it has some of them on it. :)

Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?

#26

Post by j0hnyl »

hitekker wrote: post #3

The developer of FlappyBird shared his thoughts on this problem: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/the-flight-of... > By early February, the weight of everything – the scrutiny, the relentless criticism and accusations – felt crushing. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, didn’t want to go outdoors. His parents, he says, “worried about my well-being.” His tweets became darker and more cryptic. “I can call…

I remember reading something about how there was a lot of heat on him, because he was essentially accused of stealing the game and that's the real reason why he took it down, not because he regretted creating something addictive... not sure if there's any truth to it, but then again why else would someone turn off a money printing machine at its peak?

Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?

#27

Post by gregopet »

I created a backend for a mobile game once. It was one of those typical mobile "get hooked" clones, with loot boxes, hard & soft currencies, the works. It was created to promote a sports club, one of the really big ones. I was mainly just programming other people's ideas (if I wanted to write a game it certainly wouldn't be something like that), but they needed help parameterizing loot chances and stuff like that, and I eagerly helped - I wrote mathematical formulas that fitted their descriptions & presented it to them and it was quite fun as opposed to the usual business software "data goes from A to B" boring crap.

At a certain point we had a tournament. The prize was surprisingly rich, the club gave something quite rare and unique. So people really played! We would watch on those fancy Grafana charts I programmed how people would play night and day. I wrote an SQL query that would track the habits of the top 3 players specifically and we would comment on the few breaks in their gaming spree: "food", "power nap", "ahah, toilet break!". For an entire week. They slept an hour here and an hour there, otherwise they played. I sure hope the poor bastard who won really got their memorabilia.

The game stopped soon after that, the club decided to ditch it (for whatever reason, my employer said it was club politics but who knows). I was a bit surprised at myself that I didn't feel any really strong emotions about it.. I mean sure, the worst of it was when they were going for a real prize, but anyhow I never had a true "Oh no what have I done" moment, even before I learned the app would be cancelled. Not an emotional one anyway, rationally I do realize that entire mechanics and the tournament you could win by staking all your free time is not great to say the least.

Re: Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?

#30

Post by vijitdhingra »

I built https://rockyai.me/ (chrome extension to chat with any webpage) for my personal use tbh but ended up putting it on the store for others to use as well. One of my friends sent it to his data who is retired and consumes a lot of news articles online. I see his dad using the extension a few times every few hours now to summarize things / get more background on stories.
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