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Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

economist.com

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Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#181

Post by intended »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #180
intended wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait how? Internal testing showed these features were addictive. They had resources allocated to creating addictive experiences for tweens. The underlying behavioral science is well studied, down to the causal level. Dark patterns are designed to make it hard to exit and unsubscribe. The language is purposefully obtuse, the options buried behind menu choices. We have enough A/B testing data to know how effective fric…

Proving something is addictive is not proving a negative

Ok. So is that you are saying that the quoted section is setting up a situation where the firm has to prove a negative?

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#182

Post by Nasrudith »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #36
dd8601fn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's literally what it was. These technologies are addicting. Is it as bad or the same as heroin? No. However, they are designed to be addicting.

I mean, if I add a bell to a tic tac toe game it is being designed to be addictive. It is triggering positive associative conditioning. I see 'designed to be predicting' as a misleading rhetorical device used to excuse control over speech. The 'fire in a crowded theater' of its age.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#183

Post by MikeNotThePope »

beloch wrote: post #154

How much time you spend on something has become a metric of success in both gaming and social media. I occasionally play a perpetually-in-alpha AAA+ game (I won't name it to avoid the flames) that recently asked users to fill out a questionnaire. At no point did it ask how they could make my time spent in the game more fun or awesome. They did explicitly ask, "What can we do to make you spend more time in game?". The…

Ha, it’s like a service asking me which ads I’d rather see. No ads is never an option.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#184

Post by port11 »

prawn wrote: post #164
beloch wrote: post #154

How much time you spend on something has become a metric of success in both gaming and social media. I occasionally play a perpetually-in-alpha AAA+ game (I won't name it to avoid the flames) that recently asked users to fill out a questionnaire. At no point did it ask how they could make my time spent in the game more fun or awesome. They did explicitly ask, "What can we do to make you spend more time in game?". The…

I try to explain to my young teenage son what he misses by playing a near-perpetual game like Fortnite. In the years that he might spend in that, my equivalent time was put into dozens of games across various categories, and memorable levels, stories and moments. I miss those days where the measure of success was having someone play the game at all and enjoy it, not how long they might be locked into your product to…

The game he’s playing is different from what you expect, speaking as a former LoL addict. Fortnite is barely interesting when compared to most other games, but the skill progression and fast pace make it hard to put down.

I think that’s where League gets you as well. New champions. New items. Oops, just redid the skill tree. Oh hey, balance changes. All while you’re trying to go up in rank. It feels like work — and has in fact become a job for some —, but can be incredibly fun and addictive.

I’m glad I’m out of it, and instead get to play my good ol’ Steam collection.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#185

Post by port11 »

pembrook wrote: post #103
dd8601fn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time. No, it was not. It was actually nothing like that. No babies were left to die because their parents were out searching for tiktok clips. I saw no people whoring themselves on the street just to see a few tiktok clips. I heard no stories of children stealing from their own family to get a few scrolls of tiktok. There was no people killing…

Let’s not pretend like all drugs are equally addictive, or that some tech products aren’t even more so. You’re comparing TikTok to crack, but it’s much more like coming off E, where your life has no sense of pleasure or happiness for weeks/months (anhedonia, I think it’s called), and you’re left on edge for any source of contentment.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#186

Post by advisedwang »

oldmanhorton wrote: post #170
advisedwang wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the TikTok ban that lasted all of twelve seconds The TikTok ban successfully forced the sale of the US TikTok operations. I wouldn't be so dismissive of it.

A year and a half later? Does that really count?

Yes. It's a direct consequence. Such things just move slowly.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#187

Post by ceheaaf »

port11 wrote: post #184
prawn wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to explain to my young teenage son what he misses by playing a near-perpetual game like Fortnite. In the years that he might spend in that, my equivalent time was put into dozens of games across various categories, and memorable levels, stories and moments. I miss those days where the measure of success was having someone play the game at all and enjoy it, not how long they might be locked into your product to…

The game he’s playing is different from what you expect, speaking as a former LoL addict. Fortnite is barely interesting when compared to most other games, but the skill progression and fast pace make it hard to put down. I think that’s where League gets you as well. New champions. New items. Oops, just redid the skill tree. Oh hey, balance changes. All while you’re trying to go up in rank. It feels like work — and h…

I have ~13,000 hours in DotA (and several thousand in other strategy games, and an erstwhile career in game development).

I'm a noob, the depth of the game is still unfathomable to me.

Every time I sit down to play, the game feels richer, more nuanced. The minds I encounter striving for the same joy of mastery come alive and reveal themselves - you'd be amazed how much personality can come through mouse clicks.

I take better care of myself because if I'm in a bad mood or mindset, I won't be able to play good dota. It's a litmus test for my current mental and emotional state.

Oh, and it keeps my ego in check: If you're playing for yourself, you will lose. It's better to work together on a suboptimal plan than announce you're correct and sabotage the team. Humility complements skill.

I find most other games boring - I don't play for story, I play for depth and nuance of mechanics, for connoisseurship and mastery. Most video games are on-rails; may as well watch netflix for all it demands of you. Having a wide variety of colored candies does not make a diet.

You get out of games what you put in, in my opinion.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#188

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Alternative to archive.ph

No Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no DDoS^1, no geo-blocking, other nonsense^2

   echo '
   url https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-tech-from-making-users-behave-in-ways-they-dont-want-to
   user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Liskov"
   header accept: 
   output 1.htm
   '|curl -K/dev/stdin

   firefox ./1.htm
1. https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...

2. What's up with the LinkedIn reCAPTCHA sitekey in the page source

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#189

Post by pembrook »

port11 wrote: post #185
pembrook wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time. No, it was not. It was actually nothing like that. No babies were left to die because their parents were out searching for tiktok clips. I saw no people whoring themselves on the street just to see a few tiktok clips. I heard no stories of children stealing from their own family to get a few scrolls of tiktok. There was no people killing…

Let’s not pretend like all drugs are equally addictive, or that some tech products aren’t even more so. You’re comparing TikTok to crack, but it’s much more like coming off E, where your life has no sense of pleasure or happiness for weeks/months (anhedonia, I think it’s called), and you’re left on edge for any source of contentment.

So you believe clinically diagnosable Anhedonia and ecstasy withdrawal is...similar to what happens if a teenager isn't allowed to watch tiktok for a few days...hrmmm.

I'm just astonished how hard all of the supposedly rational engineering minds of hackernews are falling for this classic moral panic. The crowd of mindless pitchforks is cringe.

It must be a cognitive gymnastics that makes people here feel more important. How powerful it must feel to believe your email job can addict and destroy the world...via...javascript scroll effects on...mobile entertainment apps.

I mean, how else do you rationalize the fact that you're paid as much as a heart surgeon to implement react components and reply thumbs up to messages on slack? All this doomsday cosplaying must help square the cognitive dissonance.

Re: Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

#190

Post by Seattle3503 »

intended wrote: post #181
Seattle3503 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proving something is addictive is not proving a negative

Ok. So is that you are saying that the quoted section is setting up a situation where the firm has to prove a negative?

Yes

> The question is whether the company can show, before rolling a product out to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design.

"Not predatory" is a negative

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