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“User engagement” is code for “addiction”

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Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#191

Post by roughly »

carapace wrote: post #188
roughly wrote: post #81

I feel like there's basically two business models in the world - you can be a baker, in which you try to create a product that customers will want on its merits, and work to make the best possible customer experience, or you can be a crack dealer. I think a lot of people think they're bakers, but you gotta realize, the moment you start sprinkling crack in the cookies, you're not selling cookies anymore.

There's a family-run bakery near my house that specializes in cheesecakes. They make the best cheesecakes I've ever tasted. They only make a certain number (~200, say, I dunno really) per day, they always sell out, then they close for the day. Every year they take a two-month vacation. That's it. That's the whole business. Anthony Mangieri was downtown for a few years here in SF before he went back East. https://www.…

That’s the truth - and it’s a good life, too. Easy to sleep at night, at least.

Ed: man, I had that pizza too - it was hyped to the roof and I didn’t want to admit it, but damned if that wasn’t the best pizza in the city...

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#192

Post by mro_name »

roughly wrote: post #182
tdaltonc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baker Crack-dealer is a spectrum. But wherever you are on the spectrum, you always draw the line one step to the right.

It's not, though - that's the point. You're either a baker or you're a crack dealer - you don't get to be a baker that just sells a little crack, that's not how it works.

I think that shall have potential to become a proverb.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#194

Post by mdpopescu »

ketzo wrote: post #134
mdpopescu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I still don't understand how people use the word. Am I addicted to water? I have nasty physiological reactions if I stop using it. What about sleep? Is that a bad habit I should get rid of?

A reasonable definition that I have applied in the past is "an activity that has negative consequences, but which one feels compelled to participate in anyway." Withdrawal isn't actually required for someone to be addicted to something; they just have to want to keep doing it, even though it's obviously bad for them. This definition still has flaws; am I "addicted" to eating unhealthy food? Etc.

Not a bad definition, the problem being that most negative consequences from drug abuse are due to the fact that they are illegal, and thus 1) way more expensive than they could be and 2) of bad quality.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#195

Post by wruza »

HNfriend234 wrote: post #26

Social media is a perfect example of where this is used. I know countless people that are literally addicted to it. They want to see every new update continuously and the social media apps are designed to do this through notifications. I saw this clear as day when I was at jury duty. We were waiting for the court to get back into session. There was a girl sitting next to me on the bench and I noticed about every 5 mi…

It’s not exactly the cigarette, it is a smoking right behind a fence where all bitches and bullies do hang out. Just walk further and smoke in nicer places like HN (coughs and spits on js)

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#196

Post by samatman »

munificent wrote: post #140
roughly wrote: post #81

I feel like there's basically two business models in the world - you can be a baker, in which you try to create a product that customers will want on its merits, and work to make the best possible customer experience, or you can be a crack dealer. I think a lot of people think they're bakers, but you gotta realize, the moment you start sprinkling crack in the cookies, you're not selling cookies anymore.

I like analogies, but I really don't think this one illuminates anything. The US bread industry has been slowly jacking up the amount of sugar in their products for decades. That's because almost all large-scale food producers also want their product to be as addictive as crack. Maybe there are "bakers" who are more honest than that, but as a category I don't think there are enough to base a useful analogy on.

You could just work with the analogy, if you wanted.

"Food science" is all about engineering food to be addictive. Which, sure, it's what 'consumers want', but it isn't what people need.

The line between sprinkling MSG on corn chips fried in cheap seed oils, and sprinkling crack on cookies, is a fine one.

When I hear "baker" I picture a millennia-old activity carried out on a human scale. I don't picture an enormous factory churning out least-common-denominator starches, jacked up with sugar, seed oils, and dough conditioners.

Sure, they don't bake most of the bread. But that is clearly what OP was referring to, and you don't have to refuse to get their point.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#197

Post by samatman »

Nasrudith wrote: post #59
CivBase wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why invest in "providing value to users" when psychological manipulation is so much cheaper?

Because people tend to drop you and forget about it when you only provide clickbait and doomscroll fodder when they realize that you have nothing of value to provide.

Y'know that would be a great point if the opposite wasn't steadily happening since 2007 at the very latest.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#198

Post by teddyh »

carapace wrote: post #188
roughly wrote: post #81

I feel like there's basically two business models in the world - you can be a baker, in which you try to create a product that customers will want on its merits, and work to make the best possible customer experience, or you can be a crack dealer. I think a lot of people think they're bakers, but you gotta realize, the moment you start sprinkling crack in the cookies, you're not selling cookies anymore.

There's a family-run bakery near my house that specializes in cheesecakes. They make the best cheesecakes I've ever tasted. They only make a certain number (~200, say, I dunno really) per day, they always sell out, then they close for the day. Every year they take a two-month vacation. That's it. That's the whole business. Anthony Mangieri was downtown for a few years here in SF before he went back East. https://www.…

> sell out, then they close for the day. Every year they take a two-month vacation.

What is stopping their landlord from raising the rent, since they obviously have money to spare?

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#199

Post by imtringued »

pixelbro wrote: post #171
gary_bernhardt wrote: post #132

Here's an anecdote about what happens when you design a product in the opposite way. I own https://www.executeprogram.com , which has interactive in-browser courses on various software development technologies. Currently they all cover languages, more or less: TypeScript, SQL, various JS topics, regexes. (Disclosure: it costs money after you finish your 16th lesson.) Almost all (maybe literally all) of our competitor…

Uh, it's interesting that you see the design of your product as a counterexample, because to me it looks exactly like what mobile games have been doing as a mechanism for maximizing engagement. You want to stop them from playing through too much of the game's content and burning themselves out on it. So you lock them out with a timer, forcing them to come back later. Then you reward them for coming back every day. Th…

>Looks to me like you've accidentally stumbled onto one of the very tactics games use to turn people into addicts.

You're confusing something. It's the exact opposite.

"Games accidentally stumbled onto one of the very tactics you use to turn people into addicts."

Industries take advantage of human behavior, they don't invent them.

Re: “User engagement” is code for “addiction”

#200

Post by samatman »

andrewla wrote: post #47

This kind of semantic game has to stop. If you water down the meaning of "addiction" enough then you can say that anything is "addictive" and with that, you can carry over all the connotations of the word. Then people start saying "I'm addicted to coffee" and "I'm addicted to bread" and before you know it people saying "I'm addicted to heroin" are met with "well, why don't you just stop, like I did with coffee for a…

This is profoundly ignorant, or to quote you, just stupid.

Turns out, most people who use heroin don't get addicted to it. Most people who smoke tobacco, don't get addicted to it.

Easily 90% of people prescribed a course of opiates, don't get addicted to it. I've been handed a scrip for vicodin three times, never finished a bottle in less than a year's time.

Coffee dependence is the most common chemical dependence in the Western world, and stopping will outright ruin your entire week. Is withdrawal from a hefty heroin habit even less fun? It is, but so what? I eat eggs every day, what happens if I stop? Nothing, that is not at all true of coffee.

Oh, and bread? Compulsive overeating has a similar etiology to other addictions, it leads to morbid obesity and the various dire consequences that come with it, it ruins lives. Do you think someone rounding 150 kilos on their way to 200 feels like they're in control of what's happening to them? They would stop if they could.

Addiction to gambling is also both real and tragic. And now we're getting into the home stretch: so is addiction to social media.

Remember how most heroin users don't get addicted? That's real by the way, look it up. Most users of social media don't develop an addiction, just like most players of pay-to-play games don't blow their whole paycheck on them or sneak off to play at work until they get fired, but: some do.

Ever quit smoking? It's not that bad, really. Maybe a headache, some brain fog, only problem is that you're constantly thinking about getting some nicotine for, like, weeks.

Which is why it's just about the hardest drug to quit, heroin addicts have a higher success rate than cigarette smokers (again: look it up). Addiction along the dopamine pathway is insidious. Opiates hook users through a simple mechanism, if they stop, their pain receptors go into overdrive.

Dopaminergic stimulus, which includes chemicals but also endogenous pathways, produce repetitive compulsions: they hijack the part of the brain which wants you to do that thing again.

Social media isn't nicotine. Even cocaine isn't nicotine, it's uniquely pernicious. But it absolutely creeps up into some people's lives, to the point where their social lives and work lives suffer for it, where they feel out of control, break promises to themselves to use it less, and quit with the intention of walking away which they then break.

tl;dr you don't know what you're talking about.

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