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Engineered Addictions

masonyarbrough.substack.com

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Re: Engineered Addictions

#181

Post by klabb3 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #163

> Every attempt to “fix” social media eventually becomes part of the problem because the economic structure creates inevitable corruption of the original mission. Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users". Anything else will present high values targets for corruption and is doomed to fail. You're not going to get investors in such a thing, because th…

> Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users".

Right, which is impractical, and after direct democracy comes representational democracy. Eventually you get things like libraries or public parks, public goods managed by government employees. The main difference this time is the need for more transnational cooperation. Other than that, it should be relatively easy and cheap.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#182

Post by fragmede »

smikhanov wrote: post #150
dehrmann wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi just passed 50k users: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=members They claim to be profitable, but the TAM for services people are used to thinking of as "free" is small.

Kagi is cool (as a company), really. The whole idea of running your company while thinking about TAM and whatever is totally from a VC playbook. If you don’t take VC funding, you stop caring about TAM. Instead, you care about whether having the profit you have makes you — yes, you, personally — comfortable about your life. This is a much, much healthier line of thinking than trying to capture every bloody dollar in t…

trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach is the VC part. Looking and making sure that there's a market for the widget your factory produces is just due diligence.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#183

Post by klabb3 »

ngriffiths wrote: post #21
ambicapter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By...not competing? As long as you're profitable (read: your expenses are lower than your incomes), what does competing to be "the best" (whatever that even means) provide you?

I think in this context "competing" means having a meaningful market share, which would help reduce time the world spends on the alternative useless gamified/addictive apps

And if it gets meaningful ”market share”, the business incentives are pulling in the direction of growth, which is the articles point.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#184

Post by kmeisthax »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #27
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…

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.

[dead]

Re: Engineered Addictions

#185

Post by carlosjobim »

j7ake wrote: post #168
carlosjobim wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're never going to be able to change the economic system for the entire population where you live. Better to vote with your feet and move to a country where all economic activity is arranged for "the common good". There are many, many such countries. You're not the first with that idea. That of course won't mean that you will have the privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as "the common good". It's u…

Please name a few such places

Any communist country of your preference.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#186

Post by carlosjobim »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #173
carlosjobim wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're never going to be able to change the economic system for the entire population where you live. Better to vote with your feet and move to a country where all economic activity is arranged for "the common good". There are many, many such countries. You're not the first with that idea. That of course won't mean that you will have the privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as "the common good". It's u…

One small question: how did those places manage to change the economic system for the entire population?

Most famously they did it by a "great leap".

Re: Engineered Addictions

#187

Post by fragmede »

dimal wrote: post #151
Aurornis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mo…

People pay for software all the time. Hell I pay $30/month for a fucking email client (Superhuman). But no one has tried it for a social network. I think the problem is that people think a social network is worthless unless you hit Twitter scale, but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work. People are now saying that Discord is being enshittified, right on schedule. Maybe there's an oppo…

Ning, Substack, OnlyFans, Nostr, mirror.xyz, Farcaster are paid social networks, among others. It's been tried, with varying degrees of success based on user base.

But people are cheap as fuck. Even here we post links to archive.is to get around paywalls (which rubs me the wrong way). Every time YouTube Premium come up the comments are full of people saying they won't pay up.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#188

Post by mschuster91 »

alephnerd wrote: post #78
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product. When we have that mindset, we absolutely don't care about the thing that we call "our product." It's just food for the actual product, where we want to fatten it up, and sell it to the biggest slaughterhouse. That starts almost immediately. You can't even get an A round, without an "exit plan." I feel that the very existence of an exit plan, dooms the user. N…

> The company is the product. If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public company, this becomes very apparent very quick. Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your company, you will not succeed. Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales Leadedship to drive cu…

> A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.

The problem is, any amount of rightsizing has the potential to tank the entire economy. Too big to fail, just that it isn't banks this time but a bunch of companies who went all in on "AI".

Re: Engineered Addictions

#189

Post by Avicebron »

api wrote: post #174
alephnerd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The company is the product. If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public company, this becomes very apparent very quick. Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your company, you will not succeed. Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales Leadedship to drive cu…

Isn’t all this company is the product stuff an obvious side effect of wealth inequality? There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much. It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money en…

I would be willing to bet addiction in general (gambling, drug, dopamine, etc) is probably a symptom/side effect of wealth inequality. Desperation -> "relatively cheap method of short term emotional/sensory boost" -> Further Desperation not mitigated by outside forces -> repeat

Re: Engineered Addictions

#190

Post by kelseyfrog »

carlosjobim wrote: post #186
kelseyfrog wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One small question: how did those places manage to change the economic system for the entire population?

Most famously they did it by a "great leap".

Can you explain how that model isn't generalizable while avoiding describing the consequences? I want to know why it can't work not how it fails.
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