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Engineered Addictions

masonyarbrough.substack.com

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Re: Engineered Addictions

#431

Post by _Algernon_ »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #429
_Algernon_ wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Netflix introduced an additional billing model to cater to those folks who would prefer ads to a subscription fee, but has not removed the no-ads model for a higher fee. I'm happy to pay for my ad-free Netflix, and I respect that others might want to choose differently. This is not a dark pattern, it's a light/good/gold (?) pattern.

I disagree. Introducing ads just to then effectively increasing the price of the no-ads plan is scummy, rent-seeking behavior.

Ironically the Black Mirror episode from Netflix called Common People is the best dystopic extrapolation of this kind of behavior that I have seen.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#432

Post by account42 »

Jensson wrote: post #400
bgnn wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

The difference is that VC fueled startups is a very small part of the economy while communist regimes are the entire economy. Imagine if every company was as wasteful as VC fueled startups and life would be hell, imagine going to the new smart grocery store where prices changes by the minute and now you have surge pricing since many wanted to buy toilet paper this minute...

They may be a small part of the economy as measured in imaginary numbers being shifted around but still have a significant negative effect on our lives that cannot be easily escaped. This is even more true when you also count publicly traded companies which have similar incentives to sell out their "customers" in order to benefit the real customers and are often just the final form of VC funded startups.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#433

Post by account42 »

MangoToupe wrote: post #402
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…

> I would love to see the tech industry return to concentrating on truly delivering good to the end-user. I How do you force an industry to ignore profit incentive? Seems a little pollyannish to hope for.

You force them to pay for the negative externalities they cause so that their profit incentives are not as misaligned with what is good for the rest of the world. This includes making companies pay for pollution but also for much more abstract damages like the reduced consumer choice from monopolies.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#434

Post by account42 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #191
crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.

Over human history the best system we have come up with and implemented to ensure this has been capitalism. Nothing else has come close

Not really - in practice on paper capitalistic countries need tons of socialist policies in order to prevent the system from eating the people it depends on.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#435

Post by wonderwonder »

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #413
wonderwonder wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friend you are comparing civilizations that support hundreds of millions of people to small tribes of pygmies that total maybe 30k people and survive on hunting and gathering. Additionally they only exist in little groups of 50 to a few hundred individuals. How do you see billions of people surviving as hunter gatherers? Or do you forsee the need to cull 95% of humanity? This is not a realistic comparison friend and…

Friend, go run the simulations at scale and get back to me before you keep peddling the religious belief that capitalism is the only way to feed billions. You have no idea how to scale up collaboration due to separation from indigenous cultures that were praxised for tens of thousands of years & cultivated food forests across America without price tags.

I am sure you know this due to your extensive research and simulations but the average life span of the tribes you mentioned is in the low 20s... Some of your examples are even less than that.

Only 40% of the Aka and Mbuti actually survive to age 15 or greater

I look forward to you explaining how this is actually a good thing. Because currently it looks like your argument is that the 9 billion people on earth should adopt the life style of tiny groups of hunter gatherers that for the most part don't make it out of childhood and those that do generally die in their early 20s or younger.

For reference, the average lifespan in the United States is 77, so more than 3x, approaching 4x. Per your prior arguments, this is a genocide...

Re: Engineered Addictions

#436

Post by account42 »

cornfieldlabs wrote: post #232
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Europe is moving g toward digital independence even more. They've still got Instagram and WhatsApp and everything, but I can see them moving more aggressively toward Facebooks core business model (ie, programmatic adverising) and essentially creating a European internet bubble. Would be nice for Europeans to be able to have their own social media sites which operate less aggressively on your attention span -…

We are building a social network with chronological feed. I am thinking how to make it sustainable without raising VC funding but not doing aggressive ad targeting. Obviously people are not going to pay for a social network. So maybe just very generic sponsered links?

Maybe the model should be more like public roads - for-profit companies are involved in building parts of them but they don't control the whole system.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#437

Post by account42 »

fn-mote wrote: post #399
absolute_unit22 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> said that 4 of the 35 or so kids at the camp left because they couldn’t be away from their devices. Wow that’s scary. Such powerful addiction at such a young age

Parents let them.

Individual parents don't have that much of a choice unless they want to turn their kids into social pariahs.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#438

Post by account42 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #228
tadzikpk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, maybe social networks are a utility, like electricity or ISPs

You effectively need or greatly benefit from gas, water, electricity and an ISP. What do you really get out of social media? I mean other than most of you getting crippling anxieties about things that aren’t even real, of course. Sure sure, I know, everyone wants it because they need to share photos of the kiddos with grandma out of country. No one needs it because they enjoy the shallow bullshit and dopamine and sna…

Social media is a pretty wide term and includes networks where you mostly talk to your friends and relatives to networks where you mostly consume content from strangers.

The former has a clear benefit (especially where it challenges legacy industries with exploitative pricing like mobile phone networks) and even the latter can benefit you by exposing you to new ideas and information.

That social media is incentivized to push meaningless but addictive fluff over genuine communication due to monetary incentives is the point of TFA. This is a reason for making social media a public utility, not against it.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#439

Post by account42 »

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…

It might surprise you that we do in fact live in a society.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#440

Post by bluecheese452 »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #415
trinsic2 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So "Common Good" is directly related to "Common Law" which showed up in 509-27 BC Rome during the Republic period and it was a way to have a common understanding between the "Common People" when Rome's political state was trying to use political law against non-Romans. The common people needed a way to protect themselves from the rising emperors and their decrees. So I understand that you think its about families, bu…

Again that is not what common good is and it does not originate in the Roman Republic. I'm honestly not sure it's worth responding here or what you're trying to say about Rome. It sounds like you may be confusing the Roman Republic with the Roman Empire, which started much later in 31 BCE. For one thing the Roman Republic did not have an emporer. For another it wasn't expanding militarily or ruling non-Romans. And yo…

Rome most certainly was expanding militarily and ruling non romans far before it became an empire. The punic wars for example were more than a century before it became an empire.
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