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Engineered Addictions

masonyarbrough.substack.com

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Re: Engineered Addictions

#331

Post by [deleted] »

citizenpaul wrote: post #77
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…

I think its bigger. Morality and social contract have eroded and continue to erode. Look at Mozila for the most insidious example. Take a privacy focused product. Rope in a bunch of suckers. Then literally delete the privacy focus from your mission statment and start the "slaughter" Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore. The Sodom and Gomor…

[deleted]

Re: Engineered Addictions

#332

Post by intended »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #49
chubot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly simple, but it's also true Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome - Charlie Munger It's the same with politics and money. We don't get the leaders we want, because it costs money to buy people's attention. We get the people who have some way to pay for attention (in recent years, one of those ways is increasingly corruption - e.g. senator of NJ, mayor of NY, etc.) An article today talks…

> "local TV buys" playbook Who watches local TV anymore? Probably not many people under 60.

A lot of people. Especially older people who go out and vote.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#333

Post by liendolucas »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #132
liendolucas wrote: post #83

What I haven't found in the article is what would happen if people paid for a true social network, completely free of all the nasty things we already know. Is there any chance that a carefully crafted paid social network can actually succeed?

My plan is/was to structure the payments as a single annual payment that only one person in a group or family needs to pay. Then all the members of the group/family join free. That way you only need to convince one person in a group its worth the change.

I can't see why wouldn't it work. You definitely have some options. Group or family subscriptions is one. Then you can have extra charges for people for example that post above the average (it would make sense to extra charge those who abuse posting). If someone is unable to pay for some reason don't cancel the account(s) simply make those read-only. So even if they don't pay they are not excluded. Bear in mind that people pay for lots of subscriptions! Streaming services, newspapers, vpns, etc. So again if is setup as a profitable but not greedy profit business it should work. One of the key things is convincing people why using a non-manipulative social network is a way better choice than the "free" options. I'm not very good with business ideas but I do believe that there's absolutely room for a healthy social network out there.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#334

Post by newswasboring »

nradov wrote: post #240
dehrmann wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis...about your company, you will not succeed. Halfway true. There's a famous quote: > In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine. At some point, strong fundamentals will catch up with you.

In the short run if you can get acquired then the long run fundamentals don't matter. They just become noise in some larger company's financial statements.

This is such a boring dytopia. Everything is just a grift at this point.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#335

Post by rudolftheone »

ngriffiths wrote: post #18
scottgg wrote: post #2

I enjoyed this. It feels obvious doesn’t it ? But - it’s so hard to see anything grassroots changing here for exactly the same reason the apps become attention-gamified - how can some small organically-grown thing compete with the money ?

I agree. I see this becoming a bigger and bigger problem unless someone steps in with significant regulation or major changes like the article says. The other challenge is the regulation part is much easier when the product is, say, heroin. Algorithms are technically complex (hard for policymakers to grasp), flexible (can be tweaked to work around guidelines?), and operating in the digital world (harder to monitor/bl…

> Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?

Valid question - however I have a feeling that for shaping perception of such behaviors we need a stronger middle class - and my hope for it shrinks every day

Re: Engineered Addictions

#336

Post by rudolftheone »

fullshark wrote: post #52

The proposed solution is hinted at in this piece but dare not spoken: government regulation.

So the master plan is to let governments (known for tech illiteracy and 20-year procurement cycles) regulate hyper-evolving social media platforms? Why teach people to think critically or resist engineered dopamine traps when we can have a bunch of career bureaucrats draft laws while using Wordpad or Internet Explorer to Google “AI” xD

Re: Engineered Addictions

#337

Post by [deleted] »

closetkantian wrote: post #35

I'll tell you what's been working for me: an e-ink phone. It's a Bigme Hibreak Pro. The interface is a bit clunky but it gets the job done. Social media is just not fun on this phone. It's still very usable if I need it, however. I'm also knocking out books at a rate that I haven't in years.

[deleted]

Re: Engineered Addictions

#338

Post by lrvick »

trollbridge wrote: post #242
lrvick wrote: post #237

> We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t. I deleted an app every month until my phone was so boring I threw it in a drawer and canceled my cell phone subscription. It confuses and annoys everyone around me, but my attention span, happiness, and productivity have skyrocketed so I really do not care what the addict…

No cell phone at all, or do you carry a feature phone?

No cell phone at all as I do not wish to have my location sold, rely on proprietary tech, or to be reachable at all times. I also use cash exclusively IRL so my digital footprint away from home is virtually zero.

I am happiest being intentional and present in whatever I am doing. I am reachable from my desktop by email, matrix, or VoIP SMS, when I am at my desk and have been able to run a profitable security research and consulting business this way.

I do have a very small laptop I carry when I am going to be away from my desk more than one business day, but the overwhelming majority of the time I have no electronics of any kind on my person when I leave home.

Typically I carry a mechanical watch, a micro-wallet, and sometimes a notebook, or mechanical puzzle.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#339

Post by JimDabell »

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…

You are what you earn.

If you construct your business model so that revenue is derived from attention, then your business will become a machine for consuming attention.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#340

Post by _Algernon_ »

dehrmann wrote: post #145
Aurornis wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work? Commenters all across the internet will say they’d pay good money for a site that does something specific that sounds like a good idea. Then when the site is built, you will discover that they will not, in fact, pay any money for it at all. You will continue to add the features they request and the goalposts will continue to move. Social networks are even mo…

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.

Kagi doesn't have network effects stacked against them. If your friends don't use Kagi, you still benefit from it. The same is not true for social media.
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