'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

And we all have a good excuse: there are great tools and best practices for publishing a development tool to other professionals. If you want to design something for a first week coder you have a lot more work to do, few examples to follow, and no obvious personal benefit.

Except the end result of that is that we sell computers to people which are useless for actual computing. All they give the average consumer is the opportunity to follow a path worn by someone like you or me.

We barely notice this, because we do have the ability to do real computation. We forget that it's something we are hoarding for ourselves.

It's gives a false sense of power, sets the responsibility in the wrong place, muddies the water and basically gives those actually doing the destruction a free pass.

The Internet is simply a source of information, its Google, Facebook and others who have completely lost any restraints in harvesting personal information, building surveillance infrastructure and creepily following people around without any sense of ethical constraints. And this forum itself is full of people desperate to work for such companies.

You would not necessarily expect any ethical dimension from a self absorbed profit driven corporate but at least the individuals working in it. It seems there is no moral compass and anything goes.

The problem is not technology but the people within it and a troubling 'disconnection' with relation to the concept of 'other people' and society at large.

TL;DR:

Hijack 1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices. Ask yourself: What’s not on the menu?, Why am I being given these options and not others? Do I know the menu provider’s goals? Is this menu empowering for my original need, or are the choices actually a distraction?

Hijack 2: Make apps behave like Slot Machines - give a variable reward. If you want to maximize addictiveness, link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.

Hijack 3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI). If I convince you that I’m a channel for important information, messages, friendships, or potential sexual opportunities — it will be hard for you to turn me off, unsubscribe, or remove your account — because there is a 1% chance you could be missing something important.

Hijack 4: Social Approval. When you get tagged by my friend, you think s/he made a conscious choice to tag you, when actually s/he just responds to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice. Thus Facebook controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience their social approval on the line.

Hijack 5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat). You follow me — it’s rude not to follow you back. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested c ontacts.

Hijack 6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay

Hijack 7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery. Messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously.

Hijack 8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons. When you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), so Facebook converts every reason you have for using it, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things. In an ideal world, apps would always give you a direct way to get what you want separately from what they want.

Hijack 9: Inconvenient Choices. Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder. NYTimes.com claims to give you “a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they force you to call a phone number that’s only open at certain times.

Hijack 10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies. People don’t intuitively forecast the true time cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click”), and escalating from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick.

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[1] http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-...

The article itself lists people directly who have worked on items and code meant to addict and make sites “sticky”.

If that’s not enough - go look at gamification.

Back when WoW launched I was impressed. They distilled the then amorphous knowledge of UI and game psych and upped the ante.

At that time friends and i imagined what maximally addictive games would be. How we would use more malicious techniques from behavioral science and habit formation to keep people in game for longed.

Then came TF and the hats/freemium model (Korea/SEA/China ).

And from there to now, the worst of those ideas have been applied and evolved.

Sites very definitely design themselves to trigger and keep people on site.

However, the "business" of the Wikimedia Foundation can be determined by its board of directors so long as it falls within the articles of incorporation and the IRS guidelines. It's not for us to decide.

So, when the Wikimedia Foundation decides to fund grants to help increase gender diversity in Wikipedia content, that's totally legitimate. It can decide what its business is.

From my perspective, Wikipedia is a global treasure and if they want to spend money to make sure it gets better, rather than just on servers and wiki tweaks, that's fine by me. No-one is forced to donate.