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TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

nytimes.com

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Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#201

Post by dylan604 »

wasmainiac wrote: post #173
stronglikedan wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this age of zero personal accountability. It's so easy to just not doomscroll, but I should be allowed if I want to.

did you see what happened when we tried to decriminalise hard drugs in Vancouver? Feel good for yourself that you have the discipline to have self control, other do not and need help. You are free to not use TikTok yourself, no one is stopping you. Also drug decriminalisation is very nuanced, I’m not 100% against it, I’m just pointing out just that open drug use spiked after.

> Also drug decriminalisation is very nuanced, I’m not 100% against it, I’m just pointing out just that open drug use spiked after.

Was that spike a true spike in new users, or existing users just coming out of the shadows?

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#202

Post by hbn »

llbbdd wrote: post #47

Idk how to feel about this specifically but I kind of hope they come for Duolingo next. They are up to some similar mind hacking shit to keep people from leaving. There's the downright abusive streak management tactics that have become a major part of their brand and PR, and the lesson plans seem designed to plateau to prevent you from actually getting proficient enough in a language to ever unsub. They reset your cl…

I think you're giving Duolingo too much credit.

Their lessons aren't bad because they want to stop you from being proficient in the language; they're just uninspired and unchallenging. Their gamification is nonsense and totally non-addictive. No one is addicted to Duolingo, otherwise they'd be doing hours of lessons every day.

People just don't want to break their streak - that's the reason they continue to use it. It's an obligatory thing you do once a day, it takes 2 minutes, and they get to show you an ad.

I've used it for a couple years learning Spanish, essentially because it introduces me to new words I'm otherwise not encountering in my regular Spanish usage, and that's all I need it for. Duolingo actually used to be better, and I was paying for it for a couple years. But they did a giant AI overhaul last year that made the content worse overnight. The stories are regularly nonsense because they're LLM-generated and seemingly not vetted properly. And they somehow even broke the TTS which hasn't been able to say certain consonant sounds for months now. But I digress.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#203

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

randysalami wrote: post #174
dmix wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.

I’ve noticed the same thing and this creates such a negative user experience. Every short is a reaction test and if I fail, I get slop. Makes the whole experience very jarring (for better or for worse).

For better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#204

Post by bondarchuk »

horsawlarway wrote: post #182
bondarchuk wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also very much an exercise in framing, though. Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company. But choosing to call this specific instance of it "addictive" has everyone up in arms.

To the framing issue - I can frame an alternate lens through which we balance enrichment against engagement. Media can enrich people - expose them to new ideas, new stories, different views and opinions. This expands worldview and generally trends in the same direction as education. Media can also be engaging - Use tools that make it compelling to continue viewing, even when other things might be preferable, on the l…

I fundamentally don't think governments should do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society and then ban it if it falls on the wrong side. Just on basic principles of personal freedom. That's why the "addiction" framing is so important, because it implies that citizens don't have agency, and so justifies the authoritarian intervention.

PS if we apply your analysis to video games they surely would have been banned too.

Edit: by the way I remember back in the day we searched for "addicting flash games" and it was seen as a positive ;p

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#205

Post by arethuza »

Ylpertnodi wrote: post #189
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #149

I do think it's addictive, but also the very idea of media in general is to keep you around. Television channels try to display content their viewers enjoy, but they can only target broadly. The web allows sites to have way more personal recommendations, but banning it is essentially banning sites because people enjoy it too much. I think short form content especially is basically brain rot, but I also don't know how…

Reddit once told me to take a break (i was on the sick for a foot injury). So I did. I now check in once a week, for one hour, max. Ahhh, creatures of habit, that we are.

On YouTube I seem to mostly get ads for gambling apps that emphasise the controls and safety measures they have.

I've never gambled let along used a gambling app.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#206

Post by ElevenLathe »

DaanDL wrote: post #143
eggy wrote: post #71

I'm skeptical about banning design patterns just because people might overuse them. Growing up, I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling. Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine, but short-form video needs government intervention? The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecti…

What an unworldly remark. So, we should also not ban hard-drugs then?

Yeah, prohibition is a terrible policy for everyone except the cops, jailers (including private, for-profit jailers), government spooks, smugglers, arms dealers, hitmen, chain and shackle manufacturers, etc. who make a living from it. I'm taxed to pay some of the world's most odious people to stop a small percentage of the supply of these drugs. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the supply makes it through and causes untold suffering for addicts, often thanks to other (or the same) taxpayer-funded bad guys and an onramp provided by the legal pharmaceutical industry. In the impoverished countries where the supply comes from, all this revenue funds hellish slave/feudal economies where a small violent elite terrorize, torture, and kill working people. Even in the developed world, addicts are weaponized by others for all kinds of violence (drug gangs, human trafficking rings, etc.) and net-negative property crime (stripping copper from abandoned houses, stealing catalytic converters, etc.).

In short, banning hard drugs is very very obviously a losing policy that serves only to enrich the world's worst people at the expense of everyone else.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#207

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

amarant wrote: post #179
wackget wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not acknowledging the fact that the companies producing these addictive apps are very much doing it intentionally. They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's how they make money . And they have billions of dollars to sink into making their products as irresistable as possible. The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems li…

I don't like this narrative. I'm a person, and HN is the only social media I use.I tolerate this one because I find the addictiveness off-putting, but unlike other social media HN doesn't engage in that much. I'm not some sort of prodigy or anything, just a random schmuck. If I can do it, anyone can. People just really like blaming others for their own vices instead of owning up to having a vice. HN is a vice too. On…

You haven't chosen anything. That's the point - the illusion of choice and agency.

If you can't stop cold at any time if/when you decide to, you don't have the agency to make a free choice.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#208

Post by krapp »

zbentley wrote: post #195
krapp wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the absolutism is that the line will be drawn not where society broadly agrees it should, but where governments find it most useful, and that line will always move in the direction of increasing censorship and propaganda. If Hacker News becomes enough of a threat to the regime it will be classified as "social media" and all of a sudden it will be illegal to moderate without a court order or some nonsense…

And that kind of absolutism isn't helpful either! "Government" isn't an external actor; most governments exist on the spectrum between "a big chunk of the public is OK with or supports what they're doing" and "directly influenced by public opinion" (democratic states). And yeah, they abuse power a lot! So do corporations, tribes, religions, etc.--governments are just the "big group with violence capability and power"…

>Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it!

And yet there's no Constitutional right to liquor, nor is access to liquor generally recognized as a fundamental human right. The civil unrest was due to the obvious result of banning liquor being the creation of mafia-run black markets. Same as the "war on drugs." Banning drugs only makes black markets and cartels more effective.

>As for cigarettes: what's different about my right to express myself in speech and my right to put what I want in my body?

Cigarettes aren't speech. Speech has value, even if it can do harm. Social media, being a means of effecting speech, has value even if it can do harm. Cigarettes have no value and can only do harm.

>We also heavily restricted speech then; take off the rose-tinted history glasses. Broadcast media restrictions were insane.

Sure. The argument for regulating broadcast tv and radio was the spectrum being a limited resource - but the web is not a limited resource. No matter how big Facebook or Twitter get, we're not going to run out of internets for new platforms.

>I just don't think the way to do that is to stake out deliberately absolutist positions--either because you think an absolutist outcome is good or out of a flawed believe that an extreme position will somehow help move the consensus position in the direction of the extreme.

I don't believe my position is necessarily absolutist - although it gets interpreted as such - I believe that social media platforms have the right and the moral duty to police themselves and deplatform dangerous and extremist content. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence nor does it oblige you a platform. I just don't believe that having governments step into that role is a good idea, and I think recent history in the US and UK back me up in that regard.

And yes, social media platforms may (and will) get things wrong, but they can't send men with guns to shoot me in the head.

But staking out extreme positions to the contrary is sometimes necessary when confronted with extreme positions. I consider the position that social media is more addictive and dangerous than heroin to be extremist, that algorithms need to be banned, that social media platforms need to be nationalized, all of that hyperbole is getting ridiculous to me, and it smacks of a moral panic. But almost no one seems willing to push against it or even question it.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#209

Post by saubeidl »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #200
wackget wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not acknowledging the fact that the companies producing these addictive apps are very much doing it intentionally. They are specifically making it as engaging as possible because that's how they make money . And they have billions of dollars to sink into making their products as irresistable as possible. The average person has zero chance against all-pervasive, ultra-manipulative, highly-engineered systems li…

That's not wrong, but it's a selective take. The entire economy operates like an addiction machine, using proven psychological techniques to modify individual and collective behaviours and beliefs. It's not just social media. It's gaming, ad tech, marketing, PR, religion, entertainment, the physical design of malls and stores... And many many more. The difference with social media is that the sharp end is automated a…

Yup. It's capitalism that's the core problem. Social media is just a particularly nasty outgrowth.
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