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“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

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

#171

Post by [deleted] »

lordnacho wrote: post #99
luplex wrote: post #41

I did an internship with a very profitable Swedish mobile game before the pandemic, and it was really interesting to see the doublethink: everyone knew we were making a drug, but people avoided speaking of it in that way. It was always "our most engaged players readily spend on in-game items", and never "the most addicted users spend money so they can continue playing" It was a great workplace, but I don't think it w…

Plausible deniability is such a wonderful idea. There's a lot of things that fall on a spectrum, and this fact can be used to pretend that motivations are different to what they really are. For instance, where is the line between investing and gambling? A friend of mine was looking into setting up a spreadbetting firm once, so he went talking to insiders. It turns out 90% of people lose 90% of their money in 90 days,…

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by ketzo »

thecupisblue wrote: post #93
Kaze404 wrote: post #10

I still haven't fully grasped that we reached this point of perversiveness online. We have brilliant minds and a ridiculous amount of money working on making Alabama's soccer moms click more ads, and we have reached the point of making people addicted to websites to reach that goal. Obviously this is nothing new, and the cigarette industry has been profitting off addiction for decades, but I never expected the same t…

Fixing bullshit left by others, refactoring parts of the machine, copying other apps, working on pointless panels and ideas that will be killed in a hot minute or forgotten about, working on internal tools or mostly - fighting internal political battles to get a promotion/more money/authority/status. Most of the people are not there to innovate but to earn money and status for themselves by working at the big F***K

You sound like you're speaking from experience, so I wanna ask: How genuinely true do you think this is? I'm always curious, about the FAANGs in general but Facebook in particular.

Divorced from as much cynicism as possible, what % of level I-III software employees are just there for their resumes?

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

#173

Post by api »

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 definitely think personalized feeds are the worst in terms of "negative value creation." I don't think Qanon for example would be a popular movement without having ridden the YouTube recommendation algorithm and Facebook's personalized feeds before those companies were forced to ban it.

I think of it this way. Lets say I walk past someone on the street and say "hi." Now lets say I punch them in the face. What creates the most engagement?

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

#174

Post by FFRefresh »

djoldman wrote: post #165

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 pe…

I do think this is a worthy callout, that is often missing in discussions about social media and/or any sort of complex system.

The general narrative implies (but would never say) that humans lack agency and the ability to act in their own self-interest. And if only we could remove the social media site/system, would we see an enlightened, more perfect human.

Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly in favor of designing systems to bring out the best in humanity. But I think a lot of what we see on social media is a reflection of who we are as humans, and what we desire and want to see. And I don't see enough discussion at the individual level, and why we act the way we do.

If the discussion was at the individual level, we'd start to see our common humanity, and the conversation about social media would be less about moderating out the 'bad content' (which always just so happens to be the content that our outgroup likes), and more about the philosophical considerations with designing complex systems that help humanity thrive (and what it means to thrive).

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

#175

Post by ketzo »

deeeeplearning wrote: post #167
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"

I think that's kind of an overagressive interpretation. It's not ignorance of evil; there's a genuine feeling that good is being done, even if the parent commenter seems to acknowledge that good might not have, in fact, been done.

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

#176

Post by RandallBrown »

deeeeplearning wrote: post #167
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"

No it isn't...

I don't think any of the ideas in this article have any evil intent, even if they have evil results.

1. Relative timestamps are just a more useful way of telling people when something happened. It's how most humans communicate time to each other.

2. Infinite scrolling is just what happens when you're not constrained by physical pages. The only reason we used to see paged content was because it was technically easier. Facebook and Instagram even put up a big "You're all caught up" sign when you hit the end of where you were last.

3. Before Facebook had likes people would just add a comment like "+1" or "This." It didn't add anything to the conversation and just made things worse. Internet points are useful for filtering content and showing people more useful information.

Yes, all of these things have negative consequences but that doesn't mean they're inherently bad.

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

#177

Post by api »

There are two kinds of capitalism: value creation capitalism (also known as industrial capitalism) and value extraction capitalism. The latter includes quite a lot of financial capitalism, profit-driven warfare, and casinos and other addiction-driven products.

The former creates value while the latter extracts and concentrates it while overall creating net negative value. Addicting people to Skinner boxes is destroying hours of what otherwise might be productive, rejuvenating, or enriching time. It's macroeconomically indistinguishable from killing people.

One of the central problems of modern Western capitalism is that we fail to distinguish between the two. A businessperson is successful an a genius if they make money; nobody bothers to distinguish between those that make money by creating value and those that make money by merely extracting it and leaving a path of destruction in their wake.

Maybe we can figure out a way to re-channel the impulses of "cancel culture" in this direction, cancelling those that promote addictive net value destroying products and services. Since the algorithmic timeline and other personalized recommendation engines are by far the largest pushers of fascist and neo-racist ideology, the original goals of "cancel culture" might still be indirectly achieved.

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

#178

Post by ketzo »

djoldman wrote: post #165

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 pe…

> If people thought that engaging in social media was bad for them, they would stop.

This is the absolute cornerstone of your argument, and I gotta say, I think it is 100% incorrect.

This is, in fact, how we often define addiction: A behavior that a person repeatedly and compulsively engages in despite zero or negative side effects.

People will absolutely do things, and continue to do things, that they know for certain are bad for them.

I mean, seriously -- ask anyone in your life whether they think social media is actually good for them. I genuinely think every single person I know would respond to the effect of "I wish I used it less, but it's tough to quit."

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

#179

Post by frompdx »

theNJR wrote: post #83
koonsolo wrote: post #73

Could we introduce this kind of addiction in healthy things, like excising or healthy diet or anything like that? I've never seen it work in practice, so why are we not able to do that?

It’s very easy to get the dopamine loop going with sugar, nicotine, memes, rage-bait, and bikini photos. The brain loves it. Chicken breast, deadlifts and philosophy takes a lot of effort and the positive effects are delayed. The brain has to be trained to tolerate it. It will always prefer the latter.

Absolutely. For the last year I have been weightlifting regularly. This isn't my first foray into being serious about lifting either. Every day I lift I have to "make" myself do it. I can't really imagine something that would make it more reinforcing. It's hard every time even if I like the results.

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

#180

Post by djoldman »

ketzo wrote: post #178
djoldman wrote: post #165

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 pe…

> If people thought that engaging in social media was bad for them, they would stop. This is the absolute cornerstone of your argument, and I gotta say, I think it is 100% incorrect. This is, in fact, how we often define addiction: A behavior that a person repeatedly and compulsively engages in despite zero or negative side effects . People will absolutely do things, and continue to do things, that they know for cert…

I should have made "If people thought that engaging in social media was bad for them, they would stop" into question rather than a statement.

That said, my follow up questions stand: 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?

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