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Engineered Addictions

masonyarbrough.substack.com

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Re: Engineered Addictions

#311

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

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 think you are correct, the root problem is that the targeted advertisement model is far more profitable than any paid model, thus outcompeting every sustainable alternative.

I personally think the solution is simple, yet fairly draconian and therefore hard to implement due to the inevitable political backlash: ban all targeted advertising. You can still run ads on digital platforms, but the outcome of the heuristic used to pick an ad must be independent of user derived data, including session data, ip address, time of day, country, past viewing history and so on.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#312

Post by joshdavham »

> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns.

Realistically, this is the most likely solution to reducing addiction on online platforms in my opinion. I’m not sure how likely such regulations will be in the US, but it’s quite telling that the Chinese regulate their version of TikTok, while the US doesn’t regulate theirs.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#313

Post by heavyset_go »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #309

Late in the thread, but is this really addiction? How do you differentiate between addiction and people really liking something? In my opinion, unless people try to stop doing the thing but they can't will themselves to do that, it isn't an addiction. It is not OK to dilute terms used to describe serious problems. I am not saying tech addiction can't happen, I just haven't seen any evidence to that effect. Mere depen…

There are plenty of addictions where the incentive to stop never appears, and I wouldn't call those "not" addictions just because someone hasn't tried to stop or had a reason to.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#314

Post by navane »

trinsic2 wrote: post #278
ants_everywhere wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what common good is. Common good never requires that people share core values. Common good historically was what's good for the city/polis/country/band/family. Basically, you make some (ideally relatively small) sacrifice to your own interest for the sake of a larger group you share fate with. There are more formal/mathematical versions of it, for example in Bentham where the common good is essentially a w…

Here is the etymology of the word: common(adj.) c. 1300, "belonging to all, owned or used jointly, general, of a public nature or character," from Old French comun "common, general, free, open, public" (9c., Modern French commun), from Latin communis "in common, public, shared by all or many; general, not specific; familiar, not pretentious." This is from a reconstructed PIE compound ko-moin-i- "held in common," comp…

I don't think quoting the dictionary is helping here.

The problem with common good is that it's hard to agree upon what is good, and if you find a good, there's often a group that's outside this "common".

Re: Engineered Addictions

#315

Post by _Algernon_ »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #243
sailfast wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet probably less alone than when using polluted and terrible social media. I would pay, FWIW. I am actively looking for a decent community of humans online that isn’t run by selling data to AI farms or trying to get my eyeballs all the time. Unfortunately social media ate many of the places I previously used to call home.

[flagged]

But even paid business models get polluted with the usage driven metrics over time. Netflix is paid but now has advertisements. They have stated that their main competitor is sleep, which is obviously detrimental to the user. How do we prevent this from happening for such a paid social media?

Re: Engineered Addictions

#316

Post by iamacyborg »

bruce511 wrote: post #288
klik99 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> Amazon is the poster child for B2C success, but makes most of its money from AWS (which is B2B).

Amazon still makes the most revenue from ecom.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#317

Post by notarobot123 »

superkuh wrote: post #136

Nope. There's no addiction involved here. Engineers should know better than to mis-use terminology outside of it's context. > We don’t all have ADHD. We have an addiction. Growing up, I barely knew a world without social media, and neither did my friends. We were the guinea pigs for Silicon Valley's great dopamine experiment, and now we’re waking up with the side effects. Saying it's a "dopamine experiment" is just a…

Behavioral addiction is real and more similar to substance addiction than you might think (source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2607329/)

Re: Engineered Addictions

#318

Post by rwyinuse »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #292
kelseyfrog wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One small question: how did those places manage to change the economic system for the entire population?

Usually extremely violent revolt I don't think the appetite is there in most places

Many EU countries are pretty nice places to live, and didn't need a violent revolution to make it happen. All it took was democracy, a population willing to stand for its rights, and an elite which understood that building a welfare state is preferable outcome over having a violent Communist/Fascist revolution.

A capitalist system with right amount of social democracy to prevent worst concentration of wealth is the best model there is, at least for the well-being of its citizen and survival of its democracy.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#319

Post by bobnamob »

iamacyborg wrote: post #316
bruce511 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Amazon is the poster child for B2C success, but makes most of its money from AWS (which is B2B). Amazon still makes the most revenue from ecom.

But most of its profit from AWS

Re: Engineered Addictions

#320

Post by bgnn »

Ekaros wrote: post #142
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…

When you really think about it, this also applies to very many publicly traded companies. Tech especially, always searching to present next growth area. And then often shortly abandoning it or wasting massive resources on it... Really does make me cynical on investing...

We make fun of the state run businesses of old communist regimes, how wasteful they were, how mismanaged they were, how they produced stuff nobody wanted and so on. I'm increasingly getting a similar feeling for VC fueled tech. It's all smoke and mirrors of hype (was blockchain or web3.0 yesterday, AI and quantum today). There is so much wasted money, especially after quantitative easing and negative interest rates of the past decade.
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