[blackbear_]

There is no escaping the fact that feeding addictions is a great business model.

[teekert]

It's a real challenge for a society based around personal freedom. Same goes for addictive apps. I feel the conflict within me.

[kuerbel]

Regulating predatory business models is not in conflict with personal freedom

[tristramb]

Personal freedom includes not being manipulated by commercial interests.

[shrubby]

We have banned heroin so we should be able to ban anything else that's toxic. For us, close ones or even the generations to come.

Algorithm, food, intoxicants, anything that has manipulative potential.

[keybored]

Notice something curious. The correlation with discussions around regulating businesses, freedom, and social media attention.

There is a strong correlation between someone making money and someone arguing that people being able to make money is about freedom.

And here we are a few centuries into capitalism and people say that they are conflicted because personal freedom = making money off people. Effectively.

Yet there are many freedoms that are not profitable. We just have to sit down in a chair and think it through for ten minutes. Preferably without the corrupting influence of a scren.

[shrubby]

And the addictive algorithm is not far away from violence.

The power asymmetry behind and in the front of the six inch screen is immense.

[fuzzfactor]

I've mentioned this before but over 40 years ago the periodical R & D was originally known as Industrial Research, and the R & D 100 was the IR100, showcasing the most promising companies they picked out every year in their opinion.

It wasn't too much like an academic publication, there were plenty of those, but lots of times a breakthrough would be reported anyway, and everything was more commercially oriented by far.

You know how trade publications can be kind of uninteresting for non-insiders, IR could be so boring that college professors wouldn't even read it.

But you could tell when an author had recently left academia and joined industry though because their papers appeared more academic than very seasoned ones.

It's still a challenging transition to make, but I'll never forget how it was addressed one time in the back pages. Where you get the occasional cartoon comic like you would in consumer media.

There's two scientists in lab coats working at their benches, the boss comes on the intercom and they look at each other as he blasts from the overhead speaker:

"Hey you guys in Research, get off your butts and invent something that's habit forming".

[smt88]

What's your point? We regulated cigarettes and now they have a tiny fraction of their former customer base, saving millions of lives. These are solvable problems.

[XorNot]

Regulated but did not ban and the trick is to keep the availability far enough above the profitability of the criminal enterprise versus demand and your law enforcement potential.

Which technically isn't hard because criminal enterprise is pretty damn inefficient!

[tgv]

Perhaps the point is that we need to return to social-democratic(ally inspired) policies of yore. In the current political climate, greed is good.

[panick21_]

Cigarretes are an interesting example. Its way more about general society attitude, without doing a full baning. And that's likely what we need for other stuff.

We litearlly can't ban everything that is bad in the large. That would simply be to many things.

[fredley]

If you want to become a billionaire, the best way to do it is invent some new addiction.

[hahahahhaah]

No need. Profiting fron gambling will do it.