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“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

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Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

#161

Post by wott »

toto444 wrote: post #97
montenegrohugo wrote: post #8

I'd add that algorithmic feeds are another part of the triad (quartet?), and probably the worst offender. Personalized addictive content is on the rise (tiktok, YouTube, even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" ), and these ml-determined feeds drive engagement to the highest possible levels, leading to an incredible waste of time, a distorted world view (mostly the posts with the highest engagement wi…

I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically and that makes an insane difference to the quality of the conversation. You go from the most outrageous at the top to the most discussed at the top. All content gets a chance to be read. Even if it the first user find it uninteresting. On reddit, if what you post gets a downvote very quickly, you're basicall…

> I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically

Chronologically by last update, otherwise you could always read /r/yoursub/new, but that's only chronologically by last original post. By last original post doesn't help much. For slow-moving subs, it doesn't change anything much; for fast-moving subs, it's okay-ish if you care about posts more than comments, but you still lack curation (however imperfect).

Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

#162

Post by pixelbro »

tesseract wrote: post #146
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer “you'll need to buy about 50 more loot boxes, on average, to get that item” as wording. Bonus if there's a question mark next to it that explains probability (specifically, why the gambler's fallacy is wrong – though not necessarily mentioning the fallacy).

"Most players will get the item after buying 26 more boxes"

While we're all patting ourselves on the back for understanding probability, the correct calculation is actually log.98(.5) = 34.3 = number of attempts required for a 50% chance of getting a 2% item.

Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

#163

Post by bordercases »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #149
Consultant32452 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dr. Robert Epstein has done some research on this and has testified before Congress about it. Here's one article. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-google-search-bia...

[flagged]

"Objective absolute indifferent thing, has bias towards patchy intersubjective historically situated thing" sounds a lot less catchy when you unpack it.

Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

#164

Post by noahtallen »

s_dev wrote: post #7

Anything that provides a 'hit' stands a chance of being addictive. Including cheeseburgers and fun video games. >Most alarming is the “internet points”. On Reddit, this is called Karma. On Twitter, it’s likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score displays the community’s overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can vote! T…

I think you are missing the point. Yes, cheeseburgers can be addictive. Consider if $burger_chain provided an unlimited burger, which you could eat forever. This would certainly be very problematic, but at least you have the biological function of “too full to eat” which gets you to stop. But you can imagine how bad this could be for many people even with that function.

Social media is even worse. It’s an unlimited hit for hours and hours and hours with hardly any short-term consequence which causes you to break out of the loop.

The other point you are missing is that the incentives are all wrong. The incentive for posts on social media is engagement, which means polarizing content, which means radicalization.

At least with a fun video game, you might have fun playing it and learning new skills and stories! But I can admit that I often spend too much time captured in the game loop a because it’s unlimited — that’s problematic.

It’s still fair to point out that the incentives for $burger_chain are all wrong too — hence why fast food is so full of sugar and other ingredients which are bad for you, but taste good in the moment to many. It’s to drive addiction, which drives recurring sales. I think that’s messed up to.

Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

#165

Post by djoldman »

Discussion of the addictive qualities of social media often strikes me as bizarre.

Where is examination of the person doing the scrolling? Isn't the flaw there?

(The following applies to adults):

Ostensibly, the person should be allowed to spend their time as they like if they're engaging in legal activity. If people thought that engaging in social media was bad for them, they would stop. Are we really saying that people cannot stop using social media? Are we saying that people don't think it's bad for them?

If people can't stop doing an activity that is definitely hurting them, don't they need professional help? Do all these social media users need professional help?

What amount of time on social media is sufficient for it to have a negative effect? Is it anything besides zero?

To be meta: if hackernews is social media and social media is bad, are we all hurting ourselves?

Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

#166

Post by throwaway3699 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #149
Consultant32452 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dr. Robert Epstein has done some research on this and has testified before Congress about it. Here's one article. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-google-search-bia...

[flagged]

Not reality, but definitely the media we consume. It's no wonder those Search results skew left when most news articles do too.

Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

#167

Post by deeeeplearning »

tppiotrowski wrote: post #69

This is what I think The Social Dilemma missed. I worked at one of these companies and did not see anybody evil looking to enslave users in front of their screen. Instead we built new features and celebrated when time spent in our app went up or a new feature was used because we assumed the user must be getting value. After some time we switched metrics from time spent in app or daily active users to Net Promoter Sco…

>I did not see any evidence of malicious intent towards our users but a genuine belief we were enabling them to be more productive.

The Banality of Evil, this is just a version of "We were just following orders"

Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

#168

Post by starpilot »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #151
toto444 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have moved from using reddit to frequenting a traditional forum where the content is ordered chronologically and that makes an insane difference to the quality of the conversation. You go from the most outrageous at the top to the most discussed at the top. All content gets a chance to be read. Even if it the first user find it uninteresting. On reddit, if what you post gets a downvote very quickly, you're basicall…

Yes, Reddit basically encourages flashy comments. But the rub with traditional message boards is, that they don't scale well. Some subreddits have many, many thousands of active regular participants. It's hard for a single subforum to operate at that scale.

Isn't this the same as the algo-driven placement of HN stories and comments?

Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

#169

Post by blub »

ramphastidae wrote: post #82
skohan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have sometimes mused about how we have worried about "sky net" since the 90's, but we've already let AI have power to control our lives to some extent. For instance, there are cases you can point to where some normal person on Twitter with a couple dozen followers posted the wrong thing, it blew up into an international story, and they eventually got fired from their real-world job for it. Who made the decision tha…

> Who made the decision that this person's views should be widely scrutinized? This is a serious stretch. The algo didn’t force that person to sign up and post their every ignorant thought on a public forum. People can just put down their phones but they love the attention. Individuals are just as guilty for giving power over themselves to social media.

It's not the ignorant thoughts which are considered wrongthink nowadays, but reasonable opinions that don't toe the line on controversial topics.

Re: “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

#170

Post by dleslie »

mysterydip wrote: post #152
dleslie wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left casual games because of this; every partner and publisher we worked with was heavily pressuring us to optimize for whales. They wanted the long tale for marketing, and the whales for revenue; and once hooked, the core interaction loop was to be as addictive as possible. When I left it was Candy Crush that was the top of the field; and we were in awe. They were _always_ rewarding players, and were pushing micro…

The frustrating part is there are lots of people making games to tell stories and explore worlds, but they fall into the void almost inmediately after launch due to the slot machine games taking the lion's share of the attention and money.

Thankfully, PC Gaming strangely hasn't been dominated by this phenomenon, despite EA's, Activision's, and Epic's best efforts. Fortnite is addiction-tuned F2P casinowear, and it's done gangbusters, but the industry hasn't managed to copy that formula with great success.
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