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Engineered Addictions

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Re: Engineered Addictions

#281

Post by j7ake »

Nasrudith wrote: post #263
j7ake wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also survivorship bias. Given that a start up has explosive growth, it way more likely that they are amoral. The ones who play the game with integrity and morals never have the type of growth that makes headlines. But I’m sure they exist.

That really doesn't follow. Explosive growth guarantees amorality? What sin is inherit to success? Has envy become so embedded in our thinking that success alone is proof of guilt? Or is it just Original Sin style bullshit where everone is automatically guilty?

Didn’t say guaranteed, I said more likely.

To succeed, you have to execute many things well and avoid bad luck. Add to this an extra constraint that one also needs integrity or morals and it will drastically reduce your success rate.

My statement will be true as long as having integrity or morals could hinder growth in some way.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#282

Post by jjani »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #234

I think the problem is more fundamental than this: When your monetization model is tied to usage, then of course you will try to maximize usage, rather than user benefit. It can't be any other way if your reward function is tied to product usage. Contrast with a car: Their monetization model does not depend on how much I drive it - as long as I find it useful enough to buy. Or a gym, where it actually runs in reverse…

As long as the founders aren't looking to make billions, it's very possible to run a healthy social media platform, as evidenced by Front Porch Forum [1]. 20 employees, human moderators (gasp)! There's also Metafilter which is paid [2].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/10/front-p...

[2] https://www.metafilter.com/

Re: Engineered Addictions

#283

Post by stego-tech »

klik99 wrote: post #20

> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these co…

Reductionism is fine when a supermajority of available data paints the same picture, and that's what's happening here.

* Founders aren't trying to solve a problem, they're trying to grab table scraps from VCs and the already-wealthy to try and save their own skins. As a result, it's all about exit strategy, growth, and moat instead of business fundamentals and customer experience.

* VCs and their wealthy backers aren't looking for good business, they're looking for good profit. It's why they'll gladly invest into slop or outright grifts, and why they demand anything they invest into have an exit strategy (i.e., IPO) planned so they can cash out before the company collapses.

* Talent who wants to build a long-term career with a company - and accordingly focus on fixing its flaws, improving the customer experience, and saving expenditures - can't, because companies no longer fundamentally exist to provide long-term solutions and products, only short-term growth YoY. This ultimately ends up harming output and innovation, because why bother giving it your all when such efforts are counter to the "explosive growth" narrative and likely to get you PIPed?

* Retail investors and Business News are left feeding a monster that runs on Fairy Tales and ignorance, promoting big gains and huge losses rather than actual investing advice or corporate accountability.

It's all just a disgusting grift, is what I'm reducing it to, and I can't really fault Founders either since they're just trying to strike gold in an emptying mine shaft before it's closed off or collapses in. They're playing the game they think will net them safety and success...even though they may have better odds on some casino games instead.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#284

Post by darkhorse222 »

I honestly think there is some place here to be anti tech. Some things, the things closest to our humanity, like love and community, are not all that better with technology in my opinion. Sure, you can stay connected with a family member or friend who lives in another city, but that same positive is a negative via another perspective because it doesn't force you to make new connections with people around you.

And love is similar. It's nice that algorithms can help you match, but the psychology by which you arrive at a compatible partner matters a great deal. The swipe is inherently dehumanizing even if it does match you with a human.

Some things are supposed to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Tech should stop trying to eliminate that and instead augment it. That calls for an entirely different philosophy when choosing ideas to build. Instead of looking for uncomfortable or inefficient things and trying to "fix" that, consider your values. What do you care about, what is important for a good human life? Then use your skills to enable deeper integration into those values.

Easier is not always better.

I recently had this revelation when considering how difficult it is to find events that I'm interested in. I was shocked that this isn't a problem that we had solved in the 2000s. But Facebook events is full of bar specials like ladies night and doesn't seem to match to my taste and Eventbrite is overly monetized and tends to be formal events, my friend who's very into the electronic scene told me that the way that she found events was by following people on Instagram and then following the businesses that she went to and checking their pages for events. I thought that seemed very inefficient and then it occurred to me that maybe the goal here is not to get as many people as possible to go to your event. Maybe it's about getting the right people with the right values and right taste to go to your event. This is a classic case where making something easier would not necessarily serve to achieve the goal of that ease, which, in this case would be making it easier for me to find authentic events. *The very nature of them being trivially accessible would change what they are.*

Re: Engineered Addictions

#285

Post by DaveZale »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #252
DaveZale wrote: post #196

Are we overthinking this? Old school specialty sites are still around, with topics, categories, and discussions around the whole site emphasis. As someone who likes to grow a little food in a semi-rural area, I enjoy permies.com - every day, a volunteer posts a new question or reposts a relevant topic, depending on the season or recent interest or whatever. But they're not trying to make a billion dollars. Or even a…

This may be a misinterpretation tangent, but I play tennis and do a bit of inline skating, and I find one of the benefits is it provides a grounding to the real, physical world; time away from the constant feed of new shit on the internet. I also get in-person human interaction, which is an additional grounding effect. I've made plenty of friends as a result of both activities, and these friends cover a wide spectrum…

Good you are already there!

Midunderstanding tangent, I don't think so. Arnold says to get off the phone, get out into the real world. Totally aligned with what you are saying.

I signed up for the gym, got my partner to do the same, sought out and found some good volunteer work where I was needed. Too much screen time is not good, but old school newsletters that are relevant work just fine. They always have. Be the change you want to see, all that mumbo jumbo can actually work. Sure community can be the catalyst.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#286

Post by gyinshen »

smikhanov wrote: post #156
dehrmann wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi just passed 50k users: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=members They claim to be profitable, but the TAM for services people are used to thinking of as "free" is small.

Sorry to mumble, I'll add one more thing. Back in 2013, I was running a productivity startup, and we tried courting Evernote into acquiring us (unsuccessfully, though damn we were a good match). I remember those times vividly: Evernote raises a sizeable fraction of a billion in funding in several rounds, employs like 400 people, their CEO goes to places like Le Web or whatever and expatiates from stage about building…

Maybe they needed the staff to build the software back then and now they could be leaner cos the product is already built. Maintaining is much easier than building.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#287

Post by abdullahkhalids »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #234

I think the problem is more fundamental than this: When your monetization model is tied to usage, then of course you will try to maximize usage, rather than user benefit. It can't be any other way if your reward function is tied to product usage. Contrast with a car: Their monetization model does not depend on how much I drive it - as long as I find it useful enough to buy. Or a gym, where it actually runs in reverse…

> I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it?

In 2022, mastodon.social was provisioned at a cost of 0.6EUR/year/user for 191k users [1]. This price is payable even by many people in poor countries. People would pay for something like this same as they pay for other stuff, assuming it was well designed and gave users power to do stuff.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385

Re: Engineered Addictions

#288

Post by bruce511 »

klik99 wrote: post #126
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product. When we have that mindset, we absolutely don't care about the thing that we call "our product." It's just food for the actual product, where we want to fatten it up, and sell it to the biggest slaughterhouse. That starts almost immediately. You can't even get an A round, without an "exit plan." I feel that the very existence of an exit plan, dooms the user. N…

"The company is the product." -> When I'm feeling more optimistic I see this is how VC sees their portfolio and how you sell it to them, but not what the company is in reality. Like playwrights who write under authoritarian regimes selling it to the censor as promoting the regime while it actually satirizes and undermines them. But even if it's possible to walk that line, the data just doesn't back it up as common. S…

It helps to formally understand who is who. Every company has staff, customers, suppliers and product.

If you go the VC route then the VC is the customer. Since any good business is focused on customer satisfaction, a VC funded business is focused on VC satisfaction.

VCs want an exit. Which necessarily means switching funding model. The only switch that has worked so far is advertising. Advertising requires attention.

Of course a business can succeed with say SaaS subscriptions instead of advertising. This works well for B2B, but less so for B2C. Amazon is the poster child for B2C success, but makes most of its money from AWS (which is B2B).

The pattern is now well understood, and well demonstrated. If your business is B2C then figure out the funding model. If you can't do that, if you can't do it without VC money, then your path is predestined.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#289

Post by whatever1 »

klik99 wrote: post #20

> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.” Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these co…

The investors don’t care about the morals of the company; they just want a higher valuation so they can flip it for a profit.

Either with a guy promising Mars while siegheiling or jeopardizing teens’ health or ruining the Earth. All that matters is the valuation.

And why not? Investors never get into trouble for the mess their investments cause. Worst-case scenario, they lose their investment.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#290

Post by aucisson_masque »

So what’s wrong with open source social network ? They don’t have the issue mentioned, because they don’t have investor there is no need to optimize kpi and when it’s optimized the infrastructure cost can be minimized a lot.

See mastodon for instance.

Yet it doesn’t catch up in popularity, seems like people do prefer the traditional Facebook, twitter and instagram.

You can only show a donkey where water is but you can’t force it to drink.

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