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

41–50 of 443 posts

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#41

Post by realitycheckxxx »

First world problems. This post was really disgusting.

"Oh, no, I have to look at pictures of bars...Manipulation!", "Oh, no, they are offering me to tag myself on a picture - systemic oppression and manipulation!" "Nooo... Fuck, now have to say 'You're welcome' "

Fuck this author. A spoiled, rich cunt complaining that someone will auto-play a video after a countdown on his newest iPhone.

... In the meantime, slaves in Africa are digging material from the ground for $1 or less per day, so that he can get his iPhone. Slaves in Asia making his clothing or assembling his devices. Domestic, desperate part-time slaves delivering his food (Postmates) or driving him (Uber/Lyft).

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#42

Post by danr4 »

lars wrote: post #30

Wow, I'm glad this was posted. I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s. Modern app design isn't about creating things that are good for the user, but about creating want in the user. This is a problem. For example, there are several studies showing that using Facebook in general makes people less happy. User happiness just happen…

Couldn't agree more with the looking back part.

It's a line of thought I frequently have when trying to think critically about many accepted practices in todays society.

It usually comes in the form of asking myself "Is this practice the kind society is going to laugh about in a 100 years?" or me imagining someone saying "Haha I can't believe this is what they did in 2016! Man were they dumb".

Most prominent non-tech example in these times for me is the meat industry.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#43

Post by jonstokes »

First thought: I gotta get off all of these apps. I always knew they were messing with me, and now I know how!

Second thought: Our UX designer needs to read this ASAP... it's basically a "best practices" guide for making a social app that shows "traction".

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#44

Post by tlb »

How can one separate the inherent addictiveness of social approval (which we evolved to cope with) from the added addictiveness due to slot-machine rewards?

(Discrete measures of approval, like a count of Likes, add their own variance in addition to the inherent variability of how much people liked something. That discretization is a property of the digital system, and adds the variance of a binomial distribution.)

So when you say something IRL, you can gauge a lot of fine gradations of approval in the way people react. But online, where you get a small count of upvotes, the quantization adds variance and makes it more addictive.

The added variance is most significant at small sample sizes. People whose submissions get hundreds of votes might find the process less addictive than people whose submissions get a handful of votes.

Would HN be less addictive if the upvote process was more analog, somehow? Say, by adding up the duration people held down the mouse button for?

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#45

Post by reasonattlm »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #35
lars wrote: post #30

Wow, I'm glad this was posted. I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s. Modern app design isn't about creating things that are good for the user, but about creating want in the user. This is a problem. For example, there are several studies showing that using Facebook in general makes people less happy. User happiness just happen…

I think the more apt metaphor is lead in Roman pipes. They knew lead exposure made you crazy but they still used it in their pipes, on their plates - and it drove them mad. After the planet has warmed beyond a point of no return, after antibiotic resistant bacteria make routine surgery a life-or-death decision, after we have squandered away our resources and used what little we had left to wage futile wars, we will f…

The lead hypothesis for Roman decline is disputed.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2014/04/lead-pipes-pollute...

The demise of antibiotics is much overwrought. It won't happen, since researchers have basically solved the problem of cost-effectively finding an unlimited supply of new ones.

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26701

In general people like seeing doom everywhere. To the extent this motivates some of them to do something about it, this is probably good. But it is very irritating when the doomsayers don't adjust their doomsaying based upon current scientific work.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#46

Post by y0ast »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #35
lars wrote: post #30

Wow, I'm glad this was posted. I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s. Modern app design isn't about creating things that are good for the user, but about creating want in the user. This is a problem. For example, there are several studies showing that using Facebook in general makes people less happy. User happiness just happen…

I think the more apt metaphor is lead in Roman pipes. They knew lead exposure made you crazy but they still used it in their pipes, on their plates - and it drove them mad. After the planet has warmed beyond a point of no return, after antibiotic resistant bacteria make routine surgery a life-or-death decision, after we have squandered away our resources and used what little we had left to wage futile wars, we will f…

Actually, the Roman pipe store is a bit of an urban legend.

According to this PNAS [0] paper: "Lead pollution of “tap water” in Roman times is clearly measurable, but unlikely to have been truly harmful."

[0] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594.full

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#47

Post by AngrySkillzz »

bognition wrote: post #15
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.

He is implying there is no economic benefit to the users, not for the app in general but for engaging with particular bits of offensive design. If a user actually sat down and consciously decided whether or not to take a particular action, they likely would have gone the other way. See autoplaying videos. You probably didn't want to watch that next video, but if Google/Netflix gets their way you'll do it anyway for any number of psychological reasons. But that next video was not something you wanted, potentially it's value to you is zero or negative because of opportunity cost. That won't stop you from watching it though, if they can manipulate you and distract you from making that decision consciously.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#48

Post by knowaveragejoe »

bognition wrote: post #15
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.

That's just the basic, innate value of increased activity time, too; not to mention other things like the more time people spend in the app the more likely they are to generate some other form of economic activity.

Re: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds

#50

Post by whatsreal »

jonstokes wrote: post #43

First thought: I gotta get off all of these apps. I always knew they were messing with me, and now I know how! Second thought: Our UX designer needs to read this ASAP... it's basically a "best practices" guide for making a social app that shows "traction".

I had the same first thought, but I think it needs to be tempered somewhat. Some apps you can turn off notifications on. For example, Gmail on my phone I have turned off notifications for my work account, but not my personal account. I've also filtered what comes into my "Primary" inbox heavily so I only see emails that have some legitimate urgency on the phone. Everything else disappears into tabs and labels that I check when I want to.

If Gmail didn't make that set of options available to me I would delete it off my phone. I have yet to receive such an important email that it would have had horrendous results to not know or reply immediately. I keep the limited set of emails I do see simply because I enjoy the convenience and politeness of being able to reply to my parents, wife, and friends from my phone.

Post reply on HN