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“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

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

#261

Post by tppiotrowski »

AlexandrB wrote: post #227
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…

This really puzzles me. Productivity can roughly be defined as (output / time). How can increasing "time" possibly increase productivity? Of course the catch with advertising-funded products and services is that "time" is what gets you paid.

Good point. We built paid products. Advertising was not a major driver of revenue. People wanting to buy/renew the product was.

Maybe a good analogy here is building a calculator. People buy your calculator and use it (the assumption is because it saves them time). Initially your calculator only does basic arithmetic and you add square root, exponential function, etc. Now people buy and use your calculator for even more. They spend more “time” with the calculator but still save even more “time” not having to use pen and paper, so it’s a productivity gain. Soon a movie on Netflix comes out called “The Calculators” which blames the fact that people are no longer able to do basic arithmetic in their head on a calculated decision by your company to profit from people while making them dumber. It paints your company as making people dependent on your calculators and robbing them of their cognitive abilities.

This was never your intent when creating the calculator. Now it’s something you will have to address, but the narrative here is one of unintended consequences not a deliberate plan.

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

#262

Post by anticristi »

tomjen3 wrote: post #253
tomc1985 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the content that inevitably ends up in kids autoplay video feeds? Weird doesn't even begin to describe it. Some of it would give HBO pause.

Almost every Disney movie have the childrens parents being killed, the Swedish childrens author Astrid Lindgren (very popular in Europe, I don’t know about the US) wrote a story called The Brothers Lionheart where the young brother is dying from an incurable respiratory disease and (spoilers) his brother dies saving him from a house fire. The he dies from the respiratory disease. My point is that children are being t…

I recently got a book with the full collection of the Grimm brothers' fairytales. I don't get how those authors got marketed as kids story writers. Some of the stories make it feel like reading Terminator for bedtime is harmless.

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

#263

Post by soledades »

djoldman wrote: post #212
soledades wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling people to be different is simply not a viable mechanism for making the world a better place. You can inquire after however many chickens and eggs you like about why the world is the way it is, but I think most people are more interested in what can be done to improve things.

>Telling people to be different is simply not a viable mechanism for making the world a better place. Perhaps. However this reminds me of the credit cards that are offered on college campuses. They're signed up for like hotcakes sometimes. Later in life people learn that perhaps it isn't such a good idea. Can't people be given information showing the potential effects of decisions that then helps them better make cho…

What you call a root flaw (in your previous comment) I see as being neither root nor a flaw, but that is not interesting to me.

If you take a plant out of the ground, and toss it into the sea, the plant dies. The 'root flaw' is that the plant is a vulnerable living being. The more relevant fact is that the plant is better off in the ground.

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

#264

Post by QuixoticQuibit »

reducesuffering wrote: post #244
ketzo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From Amazon, and according to my extensive experience with the other FANG in Blind, I would very seriously say 90% are there simply for resume and money.

I don’t feel like Blind is a good source. Selection bias at play. Especially with disgruntled employees or the ones who only care about optimizing earnings.

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

#265

Post by tppiotrowski »

AngrySkillzz wrote: post #189
RandallBrown wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tech…

The medium is the message. We've been talking about this for decades - the structure of the thing you are interacting with determines how you interact with it. Substantive debate is difficult in 140 characters, so substantive debate does not often happen on Twitter. Infinite scroll and auto-play video eliminates the "decision points" where people would otherwise reconsider if they want to continue, so people spend mo…

My understanding is that Hacker News currently paginates comments but they’re working hard to put them all on one page.

Maybe the intent is so you can use find in page to search all the comments at once or maybe something else but they will also inevitably lead you to read more comments and spend even more time on here.

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

#266

Post by deeeeplearning »

RandallBrown wrote: post #176
deeeeplearning wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 tech…

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

The Nazis made essentially this same argument at Nuremberg. Didn't work out too well for them.

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

#267

Post by souprock »

hawktheslayer wrote: post #27

For me the pandemic has actually allowed me to spend more time outdoors and with my children and as a result less time online. We have been taking walks daily and started gardening. I've cut down social media time to almost nothing on all major platforms (HN is my last "addiction"). The author claims the pandemic forced us inside and on social media--do people find this true for them?

It's been horrible for me.

The pandemic means classes are virtual/online. That means kids need computers with internet connections and modern web browsers. That means games, stupid videos, games, chat, games, and more games.

I'm really at a loss here.

I've gone to demanding a cold-turkey moratorium on the junk, with computer use only when supervised. This solution sucks up too much parental time and doesn't allow enough computer time for the homework.

If the classes didn't require web video, I could get an old VT510 terminal (no graphics) or an e-ink display, and then the gaming would be limited to a few things like online chess. The addiction problem wouldn't be so severe.

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

#268

Post by m463 »

red-montaigne wrote: post #52
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…

Great example of how language is a tool for thinking, but it's also a tool for not thinking. If you want to ignore or obfuscate something, you can seal it off with euphemisms and misrepresentations, kind of like putting an interface in front of an implementation. And as you pointed out, you can use this tactic to deceive not only others but also yourself.

"we're supported by advertising" (pervasive surveillance and tracking)

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

#269

Post by superkuh »

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?

That's the problem. It's not an addiction. And by saying "kind of addiction" or tip-toeing around it we confuse the issue. Addiction is a real thing with a real definition. Providing a service people like is not addiction. Social media is not addictive. Heroin is addictive.

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

#270

Post by hogFeast »

drchopchop wrote: post #50
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…

Yep, I spent many years at a large, public US mobile game company and it was the same. We had a considerable number of players who had total spend in the 5-figure range, and a few into the 6's. And that's on one single game. The constant rationalization around the office was basically something like: "They're paying for fun, it would otherwise be drinks/movies/real gambling/etc, we're just a different medium". This,…

Addiction by Design by Dow Schull is an interesting book on this.
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