Engineered Addictions

As an outsider I don’t believe it. Morals? I don’t even see a nugget or trace of some elevated goal in all of these stories.

Shareholders or not, the companies have to make money. Now us users have been gaslit for years about us just being too stingy to “pay for the product”, therefore we “become the product”. But all of these gamification/social media platforms were made to be free. Obviously there had to be a path to monetization. Morals or not. And they all end up in the same place.

Duolingo was co-founded by the inventor of Captcha. One of the ideas was to use people as translators, similar to the Mechanical Turk idea of letting people do some chore and using the product. Anyway, they also monetized eventually. Now what has Duolingo actually done for langauge learning? According to many people now, nothing. Look on YouTube. People post about their streaks. I.e. the gamification. The last video I saw was barely about how Duolingo helped at all. They had the typical “of course you can’t use only Duolingo” and then they listed all the other approaches and techniques. Well, did Duolingo serve any role? They said repetition. Well the repetition is for very artificial and out of context words and phrases. That Duolingo learners are like fish out of water in a context where they have to apply their knowledge is a meme at this point.

Another fun, very SC thing[1] about DuoLingo is/was the volunteer community. Yes of course a volunteer community to boost the for-profit platform. That’s how you get Klingon.

The AI-fication, aggressive ads, and pay-to-streak (you can artificially pause a streak for a whole month apparently) has made people worry and complain. And not because they are making a good language learning app worse to use, even. It seems to be mostly that people are hooked to the streak and are now even more annoyed by the hoop they have to go through (the app itself) to maintain it.

So what did Duolingo (DL) achieve? It made people fret and worry about their streak. That’s it. I had a friend who was so glad that he was getting close to a one-year streak on DL. Why? Because then he could quit. I wrote like one or two sentences that I recalled in his target language. He didn’t understand it.

[1] See StackExchange. I remember Jeff Atwood’s very humble blog piece about how he made his millions. It was of course all him but he had a good upbringing and access to good schools of course. No mention of the employees, but that’s just normal capitalist things so that’s fine. But also no mention that he made a platform based on volunteer work. Hmm. Self-made man? In SC culture he is. Because getting users/fools to work for you for free is the ultimate disruption.

Until then, why can't it just be called a habit? addiction very strongly implies inability to quit. Have you seen the 90's congressional testimony of tobacco CEO's all swearing on oath that Nicotine isn't addictive? That's how strong of a case you have to make for an addiction to be established. If you dilute the term and use it anonymously with "habit" then actual addictions can be dismissed or crooked people that facilitate addictions can avoid consequences.

At the very least, there needs to be a pattern of inability to quit the habit. Positive reinforcement signals are not in themselves indicators of addiction (case in point: LSD/Acid -- it isn't considered addictive, neither is good tasting food on its own).

But one for the rare case of ours taking off

There is the “shareholder lawsuit” but that really is about enforcing a company’s stated goals to its shareholders, which can and often are things other than “try to make the stock price go up as much as possible”.

As an immigrant to the US, I found dessert in US contains much more sugar than where I was. And when I make/recommend less sugary food, friends don't like it even though some of them admitted that's healthier.

so similar to diabetes, I would expect Ozempic for algorithm feed addiction will be available one day to solve this, or at least sounds like so (although I'm not fully convinced).

It may sounds dystopia, but addiction is a builtin feature of late stage capitalism, and it's already too late to turn around.