Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Engineered Addictions

masonyarbrough.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 467 posts

Re: Engineered Addictions

#71

Post by gipp »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #46
danenania wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders. That may be true legally, but practically it's only true if they control the board. Otherwise they will simply be replaced by people who are willing to do what the board wants.

The difference between getting fired and getting convicted of a crime is pretty important, actually!

For the executive, sure. Not for the impact of the overall incentive structure on the trajectory of the business. Which is what this discussion is about.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#72

Post by mrweasel »

Devasta wrote: post #68

The best thing we could possibly do, besides throwing Musk and Zuckerberg in The Hague, is destroy targeted advertising as a business model. Everything, absolutely all of this is done so they can make fractions of a cent off of clicks. So long as they can, they will do everything possible to damage your brains into clicking more.

I'd go on further, we cannot have advertising as a business model, targeted or not. It worked previously, classic Google was a good example, but mixed with shareholders, it doesn't work, incentives screw up any attempt of providing a better product, because the product become the ad space.

Throwing Musk in there is strange. To my knowledge he doesn't really profit of ads, X probably have ad revenue, but that's not really his business model. Tesla stock however, that's a completely different addiction, mostly not relevant to consumers, but that stuff is immune to any type of common sense and traders can't seem to get enough of it.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#73

Post by throwawayoldie »

sorcerer-mar wrote: post #40
throwawayoldie wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a better idea: let's combat the notion that putting shareholder value ahead of the common good is moral.

Great! You've convinced nobody of anything. Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely critical to their continued existence and long-term viability. But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners. It cannot be "either/or" and it's not imm…

Yes, I've heard the party line too. The difference is, I realized it was horseshit.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#74

Post by NickC25 »

charliebwrites wrote: post #26
spenjuly wrote: post #6

Going to recommend "Addiction by Design" here. Superb book about the addiction design dynamics in the gambling industry and very reminiscent of what we see in the smartphone/internet universe today. Shout out to the forgotten HN user who recommended it originally, one of the best and most salient books I've read in years.

Also Nir Eyal’s Hooked, which used to be standard reading at tech startups in the “Growth Hacking” era

His followup book, Indistractable, is also quite good.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#75

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Engineered Addictions

#76

Post by kelseyfrog »

throwawayoldie wrote: post #33
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders. We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously destructive.

I have a better idea: let's combat the notion that putting shareholder value ahead of the common good is moral.

If I had to choose between common good and shareholder value all else being equal, I'd choose common good every time.

We should be suspicious of games that favor shareholder value over common good and repair them. Of course this is harder than it sounds, but letting the person with the most money in a Monopoly game also set the rules is absurd and and obviously wrong. Wrong even without having a consensus reality on what "common good" entails and this is important.

The "capital game" should serve us, rather than us serving it. A fatalistic lack of imagination is no longer an option. When we're more afraid of unintended consequences than accepting that we have a responsibility to the current consequences, our current consequences look rather intended.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#77

Post by citizenpaul »

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 Gomorrah fable is a warning not to let this happen or your society will destroy itself.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#78

Post by alephnerd »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #60
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 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…

> The company is the product.

If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public company, this becomes very apparent very quick.

Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your company, you will not succeed.

Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales Leadedship to drive customer outcomes, but the hyperfocus on short term deliverables AT THE EXPENSE of a long term product vision makes it difficult to push back.

Very few newly founded or public companies can do the latter - the most recent ones I can think of are maybe Datadog and Wiz (not public but they did drive a customer centric mentality internally).

Of course, a lot of this is also due to the extreme bloat that formed in the tech industry in the late 2010s to early 2020s. Teams grew unrealistically large with limited financial justification beyond cherry-picked growth metrics, and this meant a lot of companies lost the ability to innovate frugally or nimbly. Unrealistically high valuations also played a role because towards the end, founders could end up demanding IPO-sized multiples in private markets even without the underlying fundamentals (eg. Lacework's $9 BILLION valuation on what was at most $90 MILLION in revenue).

A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.

Re: Engineered Addictions

#79

Post by djoldman »

There are two things going on here.

The first and simpler question is what is a valuable software product? For products where the user expects to pay nothing, like almost all social media, the answer is: the product with the most user-hours. Therefore products that attract many user-hours attract much investment. There isn't some kind of insidious conspiracy to push specific types of products: investors don't care, they care about how many minutes of ads they can push down the pipe (legally).

The second question is: (again for products where the user expects to pay nothing) what products attract the most user-hours?

It seems folks dance around and rarely confront what I consider to be the main explanation here and where the primary cause is: humans choose and prefer to consume and interact with content that induces in them a set of emotions. They generally choose to experience stuff that gets them upset, looks cute, inspires longing, makes them feel lonely, etc.

If one categorizes the things that the consumer chooses as "problematic," where is the problem? The problem as stated is the consumer. One can't engineer a way out of that: folks have tried to provide alternative options and these mostly fail to attract heaps of users.

To put this in the language of TFA: the addiction isn't engineered into the consumer. The addiction was there from the beginning: a million products were tried out, products evolved to better align with preferences, and now the products are "addictive."

Re: Engineered Addictions

#80

Post by apples_oranges »

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…

Why „historically“?
Post reply on HN