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“User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction”

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

#311

Post by bscphil »

notacoward wrote: post #112

Lots of good points here. I particularly like the "dark triad" bit, though I think a lot of nuance around different types of likes/upvotes/whatever is missing. It makes a difference whether those are shown to others and/or used to sort others' feeds. That last point is very close to montenegrohugo's about algorithmic feeds, with which I completely agree. Algorithmic feeds , especially those which show content from pe…

Size plays a huge and underappreciated role here. Hacker News is small enough that if you wanted to you could read the comments on everything that interested you from the first two or three pages every day. It might take you an hour or so, depending on how many interests you have. Probably not worth your time, but not debilitating either. Metafilter is sort of an experiment of taking this to its logical extreme: anyone on the site (IIRC) is allowed to post directly to the front page, but you're a member of the community and expected to post thoughtful stuff that's going to be worth the time of most site members.

Most social media platforms do the exact opposite, and intentionally at that. The whole point is that there's (practically) no end to how much you can consume, you can ruin your life on one site alone. Notably, HN and Metafilter don't have ads, but the incentives are clearly very different for almost any other social network.

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

#312

Post by matheusmoreira »

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,…

> The game mechanics were literally a rigged slot machine.

This is an accurate description. So many games where people have to pay for the chance to get something. It's even worse than actual gambling since the prize isn't even money. All people get is some numbers in a database.

Another oppressive feature found in most exploitative games is the timer. Through a timer, the progression of free players is rate-limited. There's almost always some kind of resource that's used up whenever players do anything and when they run out of it the timer reveals itself. The game refills the resource on a regular basis.

This creates habits in players. People start out playing normally and next thing they know they're setting alarms to wake them up at 3 AM to do game tasks because that's when the timer resets. This is done deliberately with the goal to increase the number of players who login every day through a mix of positive and negative reinforcement. The timed refills themselves act as a periodic reward which is simple enough. More insidious however is how usually the timers will not start counting down to the next reward until players play the game. Every second the timer is not running is wasted and delays the next reward.

Paying customers can reset this timer at will. They are therefore able to progress at an uncapped rate. This implies the game's true form is a spending competition: the whale who gives the most money to the company for the longest time will win.

Video game addiction is already a recognized medical diagnosis. I have no doubt this trash is at least partly responsible for that. The reputation of the games industry is only gonna go downhill from there.

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

#313

Post by thundergolfer »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #98
Mauricebranagh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this that much different to similar "concerns" about kids watching to much tv back in the 60's 70's etc.

You scoff, but would you honestly say those concerns were entirely unfounded? Habits we develop as children tend to persist through our lives. People who grew up very active tend to stay at least a little active, people who grew up eating healthy diets will tend to continue to eat well. The opposite also tends to be true. We have record levels of obesity in many developed nations now. There's a lot to blame for that,…

Neil Postman’s argument about the “now this” incoherence of television also applies doubly to today’s tech like TikTok and Reddit.

If TV was generally bad (as Postman argues) then video-based social media is awful, and worse than Postman ever predicted.

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

#314

Post by mparramon »

I can’t find it now, but DHH wrote somewhere about optimising for engagement vs action. The idea behind Basecamp is to be a service that helps you manage a project in a faster and easier way, not a service that makes you stay "engaged" while not pushing the project forward. Having more engagement means it’s doing the opposite of of what it's meant to.

This can easily apply for many other services. The purpose of an email client is to surface the important information (filtering and maybe inbox zero?) and let the user act on it (reply and write with the write context). The purpose of a dating website is to find a match and create a connection. The purpose of a social network, on the other hand, is much more debatable.

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

#315

Post by p1necone »

p1necone wrote: post #304
dleslie wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully, PC Gaming strangely hasn't been dominated by this phenomenon, despite EA's, Activision's, and Epic's best efforts. Fortnite is addiction-tuned F2P casinowear, and it's done gangbusters, but the industry hasn't managed to copy that formula with great success.

I really don't think Fortnite is as bad as you're making it out to be (certainly not even in the same league as most mobile microtransaction fests). The core of Fortnite is a pretty good (imo, although I prefer Apex Legends) battle royale fps, and the microtransactions are purely cosmetic items. In contrast a lot of the big mobile games are barely even games. They're just AI controlling your gambled for gacha charact…

Also bear in mind Fortnite was in no means special in offering cosmetic items for microtransactions. The game just got so big that it's a convenient punching bag.

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

#316

Post by jwalton »

I don’t understand how people can stand to use Facebook. It was fun a long time ago. Then, when I didn’t use it for a few weeks, I started getting “notifications” that, instead of saying “someone commented on your post” or “someone liked your post” they were “someone commented on someone else’s post”, or “someone posted something”, and I thought “These are not notifications, these have nothing to do with me.”

And that kind of turned me off, and I intentionally stayed away from Facebook for a bit, and now whenever I log in, there’s a ton of fake notifications clamouring for my attention, and my “feed” is 30-50% ads, and the content that isn’t ads is 30-50% memes. There’s very little actual content, and you have to work way too hard to find it.

In an attempt to further force me to “engage” Facebook has turned their platform into something I can’t stand to use.

I wonder if this is what social media looks like to anyone who “gets out” for a bit. Maybe we’re all like frogs in water that’s slowly getting hotter and hotter, not realizing that the water is boiling; Facebook keeps pushing more and more forced “engagement”, and no one who is in it realizes it’s turning into all ads and garbage.

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

#317

Post by boh »

jwalton wrote: post #316

I don’t understand how people can stand to use Facebook. It was fun a long time ago. Then, when I didn’t use it for a few weeks, I started getting “notifications” that, instead of saying “someone commented on your post” or “someone liked your post” they were “someone commented on someone else’s post”, or “someone posted something”, and I thought “These are not notifications, these have nothing to do with me.” And tha…

Haven't used it for seven years. Unless you're professionally dependent on social media, it's exclusively a net negative experience. Your attention is limited, your attention is your life experience, don't just give it to people just because they want it.

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

#318

Post by spoonjim »

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…

Companies involved in bad faith dealing often have this kind of NewSpeak.

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

#319

Post by flavius29663 »

bscphil wrote: post #309
flavius29663 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be honest, AOC doesn't seem very knowledgeable in general, IMO she's just a trump (a less successful one), but on the left.

Even granting that AOC isn't "very knowledgeable in general", that's hardly the most important of Trump's qualities. Surely there are more important standards to judge a leader by than their intelligence. Kim Jong-un might be a brilliant man for all I know, but I don't think anyone should be emulating him. So no, I don't think you can say she's "a Trump".

I meant not very smart, but narcissistic and populist. Trump is also quite a psychopath, but he held a lot of power, we won't know if AOC would be like that or not until she has that kind of power (like a billionaire or president) exhibit A for narcissism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9uTH0iprVQ

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

#320

Post by annadane »

notacoward wrote: post #116
mschuster91 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even Facebook and Twitter curate your newsfeed "for you" At least for Twitter, it allows you to turn that algorithm crap off and it respects that choice - iirc even across devices. Facebook, meanwhile, has entirely turned off that ability.

The functionality is still there, but they've made it harder and harder to access. It used to be an obvious choice. Then it was buried in options, then deeper in options, and now I can't even find it any more. However, if you add the magical "?sk=h_chr" to your Facebook bookmark you'll get a chronological feed (at least until you click on the icon to go back to the top so refresh instead). I'm sure they'll completely…

Is the culture at fb really toxic like that? Like surely they can't possibly claim 'we take feedback seriously! :D' and then ignore the hoardes of screaming masses who are being held hostage by a monopoly where the platform pretty much literally owns their social graph
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