Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 443 posts

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#11

Post by imgabe »

The bit about choices reminds about the soda cup debacle from when Bloomberg proposed limiting the size of soda containers that some venues could sell.

Everyone griped about how it limited their "freedom of choice", but nobody asked about why those particular sizes were the choices available in the first place. 7-11 and others decided that they could add a $0.05 more soda and charge $0.25 more and make more money. People would buy it because look, you get 50% more for only a quarter!

Meanwhile the choice of buying less was never presented as an option.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#13

Post by have_faith »

emodendroket wrote: post #7
have_faith wrote: post #3

Technology doesn't hijack our minds, people do. It's an age old practice of blaming the tools. The logical next step might be to ask well then how do we fix people? (aka, society). Maximum freedom in society means maximum freedom to be manipulated by others. Perhaps ironically, the closer we get to solving world hunger and eradicating diseases and so on the closer we become to overpopulation and overcrowding our litt…

Did you read the article? The whole point is that there is a design intended to encourage "people" to act in ways they didn't really intend.

I read the article. The first line of my reply was in response to the title, the rest was in response to the rest of the article.

Did you read my post?

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#14

Post by Jtsummers »

imgabe wrote: post #11

The bit about choices reminds about the soda cup debacle from when Bloomberg proposed limiting the size of soda containers that some venues could sell. Everyone griped about how it limited their "freedom of choice", but nobody asked about why those particular sizes were the choices available in the first place. 7-11 and others decided that they could add a $0.05 more soda and charge $0.25 more and make more money. Pe…

And nevermind that most places have free refills on drinks anyways. So the total quantity of soda you consume isn't restricted unless it's take-away.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#15

Post by bognition »

AlexandrB wrote: post #8

Some of the design anti-patterns he's describing smell a lot like the broken window fallacy [1]. Sure, apps can get big on getting users addicted and "engaged", but there's no actual economic benefit being produced by such design - just tons of opportunity cost to users. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

I'm not sure I follow why the fallacy applies. But for lots of smartphone apps there is an economic benefit. Making your app mildly addictive increases your weekly active users as well as the amount of time they spend in the app. These are two gold star metrics used by lots of VCs.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#16

Post by nerdponx »

wslh wrote: post #2

I was really interested in the article until I read: "I spent the last three years as Google’s Design Ethicist...". In the article he is focusing at the application level but the issue is at the form factor level. One simple example: if you give to a child a Simon game app based on the original Simon game [1] he/she will probably end up switching to YouTube and watching stupid videos but if you give him/her the "limi…

Limited how?

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#17

Post by danr4 »

I enjoyed the article.

The most important takeaway for me was " now companies have a responsibility to reduce these effects by converting intermittent variable rewards into less addictive, more predictable ones with better design"

I think most of the techniques listed actually cause pain for users, the same way addictions do. I think a lot of people are aware at some level that they are giving up to temptation and it makes them feel worse about themselves.

On the contrary, when an app makes a prediction and nails it, I tend to appreciate it much more, and feel it helped me rather than lured me. My only gripe with predictability is it usually entails giving up a big portion of my privacy.

In my idealist mind somewhere in the future, personal privacy will be a default state of mind for service providers. Total self privacy combined with life analytics (Lifelytics?) which empower streamlining ones routine is a dream I hope I witness come true.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#19

Post by zeroxfe »

AlexandrB wrote: post #8

Some of the design anti-patterns he's describing smell a lot like the broken window fallacy [1]. Sure, apps can get big on getting users addicted and "engaged", but there's no actual economic benefit being produced by such design - just tons of opportunity cost to users. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

The ads intermittently injected into the user's stream benefits the company.
Post reply on HN