It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products. Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual user…
Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
51–60 of 198 posts
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#52There are still supposedly serious people who should know better than insist "dark patterns" are not real and a mechanism to attack tech companies. I don't know how anyone these days can honestly reach that conclusion. Some of these sites use similar strategies as the old tobacco companies used to, all of this stuff is known already to marketers.
But are they actually serious people? I had corporate astroturf accounts arguing with me on my otherwise-ignored blog as early as 2004. All this time later, I just assume that every serious corporation employs PR firms using sock-puppet accounts to shill in favor of whatever dark shit they're doing, acting like it all just really great and good for us.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#53It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products. Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual user…
[deleted]
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#54Sure, making instagram as addictive as possible seems bad but I disagree with the framing a bit. Dark patterns get users to do things they don't want, that's why they get super annoyed at the design or the process or the outcome. Addictive apps are a different thing to me. I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! Th…
Do you think Instagram/Facebook is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or a sheep with fangs? By that I mean- is the product addiction, with a shroud of media, or is it media which just happens to be addictive.
> is the product addiction, with a shroud of media, or is it media which just happens to be addictive.
It's the former, by design:
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#55It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products. Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual user…
You can and should do that, but it's not sufficient to individually avoid harm. You still have to live in a world where most people have their behavior manipulated, and that will impact you. Even from a purely selfish perspective you should support efforts to stop this sort of control broadly with legal action.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is addiction? Can you explain to us how you think about addiction?
Everything is an addiction. Nothing is an addiction. Instead of jumping down a semantic rabbit hole, it might be more useful to look at specifics since obviously its a spectrum. I can say with certainty that opioids are addictive. I can also say with certainty that doomscrolling is pretty far on the opposite end of that spectrum. I have yet to meet someone who would steal copper pipes off of an abandoned building or…
So, buried within this extended mostly-non-answer, it seems your definition of an addiction is something that drives someone to steal copper pipes.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point isn't us. You should know that. The point is the 99.8% that doesn't have our skills, and is forced into these dark patterns, by deception or psychological manipulation.
Cookie dialogs are the opposite, they are asking for consent up front. Before they existed websites would just put stuff on your computer without asking. They’re literally a consumer protection. Direct your outrage elsewhere.
The site doesn't put cookies on my browser, my browser lets the site set/get cookies. If I let it.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#58It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products. Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual user…
Same can be said about Claude, Codex, etc. These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). Only the usual suspects benefit from AI (executive layer, investors, etc) Still amazes me how engineers on HN are in awe of AI and LLMs knowing that 90% of us will be affected (we won't be able to bring money to the table) once the higher ups start…
It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma with all the other developers in the world, and some are vocally choosing to defect. The only rational strategy then is to also defect.
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#59Sure, making instagram as addictive as possible seems bad but I disagree with the framing a bit. Dark patterns get users to do things they don't want, that's why they get super annoyed at the design or the process or the outcome. Addictive apps are a different thing to me. I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! Th…
This reminds me of the TikTok ban that lasted all of twelve seconds. I’ve been using the internet for longer than I care to admit, and I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time.
[dead]
Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to
#60While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed. How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?
One way is intent. If a company's internal communications show that they're intentionally making it addictive, or worse they know it causes harm, you have the smoking gun. This of course doesn't catch all the abuse, but at least it makes it much harder to do this down an entire reporting chain. They have to get really good at winking.
One famous case was Apple suing Samsung over patents. Hard to prove until internal comms surfaced showing intent to copy the iPhone.