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Engineered Addictions

masonyarbrough.substack.com

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Re: Engineered Addictions

#111

Post by ec109685 »

charcircuit wrote: post #86

It's not about addiction. It's about providing value. >The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” It's more like limiting themselves to just sharing a single photo per day is limiting to how much value they can provide users and advertisers. >Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X aren't neutral tools. They're carefully crafted slot machines engineered to get you hooked. Pull to refresh. Tap to like.…

To add to this, BeReal flamed out because it was a gimmick that was quickly copied and then forgotten by all the other platforms.

Agree that blaming VCs for why TikTok has an algorithmic feed and hundreds of millions of users is simplistic. A non-algorithmic TikTok would have no users.

And without a personalized algorithms, the feed ranking would just be showing content from popular accounts, which is a worse experience.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#112

Post by Kudos »

johncole wrote: post #64

Thought experiment: what if these apps were owned by non-profits? Would they still be addictive? I don’t think the VC money does much but accelerate the end state, the apps would become addictive if they were held privately their entire lifespan.

Literally Mastodon.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#113

Post by klik99 »

throwawayoldie wrote: post #33
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders. We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously destructive.

I have a better idea: let's combat the notion that putting shareholder value ahead of the common good is moral.

I wish it were that simple, I think capitalism works best when personal self-interested incentives are aligned with what creates common good - IE policy is like game design where you design the rules in a way that provides an overall good outcome. In this lens, there is a huge problem with PE right now (the rules incentivize buying out industries and gutting them), and something wrong with VC (the rules incentivize enshittification) so the rules need to be adjusted to align with the broader outcomes we want.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#114

Post by alwa »

johncole wrote: post #64

Thought experiment: what if these apps were owned by non-profits? Would they still be addictive? I don’t think the VC money does much but accelerate the end state, the apps would become addictive if they were held privately their entire lifespan.

For that matter—the apps that communities are using that aren’t so aggressively exploiting addictive patterns—like the one you and I are using now—could it be that they’re at some level the norm, they’re just kind of boring beyond the small group of people who find them useful?

Methamphetamine is flashy and destructive, and its supply chain and sales force are the sort of thing romanticized in Breaking Bad—but billions drink tea (and nobody really glamorizes it).

To my mind, the norms of a specific subreddit or Local Co-Op Facebook Group or neighborhood gossip board tend to fall closer to the “tea” pattern than the “viral growth” paradigm. And those, and boring email, and transactional interfaces to companies that primarily do real-world stuff—those tend to take up the bulk of the time of the people in my life. But maybe I’m just old fashioned :)

Re: Engineered Addictions

#115

Post by smikhanov »

ec109685 wrote: post #106
smikhanov wrote: post #102

Good people of HN, could anyone tell me why buying an MVP of a social network for $10K from a Belarusian contractor on Upwork (it couldn’t cost much more, it’s like five SQL tables and a web CRUD) and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work? Why does the author need to moan about how morally destructive it was to raise VC? Just run your social network from your bedroom, while asking ChatGPT how to rewrit…

Because social networks are boring without users.

How in the world is it easier to attract people to some new VC-funded nonsense?

Re: Engineered Addictions

#116

Post by smikhanov »

quonn wrote: post #108
smikhanov wrote: post #102

Good people of HN, could anyone tell me why buying an MVP of a social network for $10K from a Belarusian contractor on Upwork (it couldn’t cost much more, it’s like five SQL tables and a web CRUD) and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work? Why does the author need to moan about how morally destructive it was to raise VC? Just run your social network from your bedroom, while asking ChatGPT how to rewrit…

How do you get everyone to join - which is the important part?

How in the world is it easier to attract people to some new VC-funded nonsense?

Re: Engineered Addictions

#117

Post by Aurornis »

smikhanov wrote: post #102

Good people of HN, could anyone tell me why buying an MVP of a social network for $10K from a Belarusian contractor on Upwork (it couldn’t cost much more, it’s like five SQL tables and a web CRUD) and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work? Why does the author need to moan about how morally destructive it was to raise VC? Just run your social network from your bedroom, while asking ChatGPT how to rewrit…

> and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work?

Commenters all across the internet will say they’d pay good money for a site that does something specific that sounds like a good idea.

Then when the site is built, you will discover that they will not, in fact, pay any money for it at all. You will continue to add the features they request and the goalposts will continue to move.

Social networks are even more difficult to bootstrap because they’re not worth paying for if you can’t find people to socialize with. Nobody wants to sign up for an empty social network.

Even the free social networks have a hard time getting started. There were dozens of Twitter competitors created after Twitter was acquired, but most of them languished. The few that have survived have their own problems that are driving many of their own fans away.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#118

Post by klik99 »

apples_oranges wrote: post #80
klik99 wrote: post #20

> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these co…

Why „historically“?

For the last 5-10 years I've noticed a lot of people here are more willing to question VC as the sole or even ideal way to start a company, and since a major chunk of YC is to train how to raise money and connect people via demo day or mentors to VC, I think that marks how the HN community has departed from the YC community. Obviously there's a lot of overlap, and HN clearly has it's roots in YC by it's literal founder, but I think it's wrong to say HN community is the same as YC community, which I say "historically"
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