[readams]

The concept of addiction seems be quite diluted at this point. Does it really make sense to say that, because you're trying to make a product that people like, that this means you're addicting them (intentionally or otherwise) to your product?

Food should not taste good? Books should not be entertaining? Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted.

[skrtskrt]

Good things there are entire fields of medical experts working to understand the exact mechanisms and harm and we're not leaving it up to you.

Not to mention how often we keep catching these companies with explicit policies to make people never want to leave the app.

[Gormo]

> Good things there are entire fields of medical experts working to understand the exact mechanisms and harm and we're not leaving it up to you.

No, that doesn't work. Harm is a normative concept, not an empirical one, so there's no role for "expertise" to play in defining it. Medical experts can describe mechanisms of causality, and their associated effects, but deciding whether those effects constitute harm is something that actually is up to each individual to decide, since it is an inherently subjective evaluation.

> Not to mention how often we keep catching these companies with explicit policies to make people never want to leave the app.

Yes, and attesting one thing while doing another is certainly something they can be held accountable for -- perhaps even legally, in some cases. But this attempt at treating social media as equivalent to physically addictive chemicals is pure equivocation, and making claims like this actually undercuts the credibility of otherwise valid critiques of social media.

At the end of the day, this is a cultural issue, not a medical one, and needs to be solved via cultural norms, not via political intervention based on contrived pretenses.

[n4r9]

According to Wikipedia

> Addiction is ... a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behavior that produces an immediate psychological reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences

Immediate psychological reward = dopamine hits from likes and shares

Harm and other negative consequences = anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, FOMO, less connection with friends and family, etc...

Food is not as easy to make addictive because the psychological reward diminishes as you get full. The exception to this is people with an eating disorder, who use eating as a way to cope with or avoid difficult feelings.

[blackoil]

High sugar food is addictive as you don't feel full fast enough consuming empty calories.

[Spooky23]

These companies all hired psychologists to help design systems that maximize dopamine release and introduce loops that drive compulsive behavior.

Besides, they aren’t making great products and haven’t for some time. Is anyone happy with Facebook as a product? Does anyone who used Instagram before it became the a shittier TikTok / ultimate ad medium think it’s a better product today?

[supern0va]

>These companies all hired psychologists to help design systems that maximize dopamine release and introduce loops that drive compulsive behavior.

This seems like the important bit: these systems weren't designed just for enjoyment. They hired experts in habit formation.

I talked to a friend recently about this and she described it as feeling hollow. When she stayed up all night playing a game she really liked, she enjoyed herself and might have had regrets about giving up some sleep, but didn't necessarily regret the time spent. She found is nourishing in some way. Similarly to feeling compelled to keep reading a great book, or even eat an extra bit of something particularly great dessert.

But at the same time, she would describe staying up until 3-4am regularly scrolling TikTok and would just feel awful the next day. She didn't want to be up doing it, it wasn't actually really fun or enjoyable, but she just...did it anyway.

I'll also note that there are games that are designed for maximum addictiveness that probably also leave you feeling "hollow" in the way that TikTok does, too, so this isn't necessarily to say that games are universally different. But it's clear that there's a psychological mechanism that some companies use in their design that is intended to hijack, rather than just provide "fun" or entertainment.

I don't know what we do about that, or how/if it should be regulated in some way, but it's pretty clear that there is a real difference.

[fullshark]

There's people with unhealthy relationships with both food and video games and I'm comfortable saying they suffer from addiction.

[readams]

So then do you punish the chefs for making their food too appealing?

[overgard]

Well, think of it this way. You could make a meal out of healthy, fresh, whole foods cooked expertly. Or you could give someone a bag of Doritos. Nobody on "My 600lb Life" got there because they were eating great food. They were eating a lot of bad food that doesn't fire satiety signals in their head.

Addictive and Good are not exactly the same thing -- something can be objectively good and not addictive, and vice versa.

[scottious]

this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.

Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.

Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.

[_3u10]

Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes.

Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Surely such a society would devolve immediately into chaos.

What if the government wasn’t meant to be a strange parent that let you kill your kids but felt having a beer outside was too much freedom. It might just lead to being the happiest country on earth.

[Gormo]

> this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.

The slippery slope fallacy is purely a logical fallacy, meaning that it's fallacious to argue that any movement in one direction logically entails further movements in the same direction. Arguing that a slippery slope empirically exists -- i.e. that observable forces in the world are affecting things such that movement in one direction does manifestly make further movement in that direction more likely -- is absolutely not an instance of the slippery slope fallacy.

A concrete instance of the metaphor itself makes this clear: if you grease up an inclined plane, then an object dropped at the top of it will slide to the bottom. Similarly, if you put in place legal precedents and establish the enforcement apparatus for a novel state intervention then you are making further interventions in that direction more likely. This is especially true in a political climate where factional interest that actually are pushing for more extreme forms of intervention manifestly are operating. Political slippery slopes are a very observable phenomenon, and it is not a fallacy to point them out.

> Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.

It's true that the fact that it isn't your area of expertise doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.

Rather the thing that does mean that we can't study it and figure it out is that what constitute "harm" is a normative question, not an empirical one, and the extent to which there is widespread consensus on that question is a bounded one -- the more distant we get from evaluating physical, quantifiable impacts, and the more we progress into the intangible and subjective, the less agreement there is.

And where there is agreement in modern American society, it tends in the opposite direction of what you're implying here: apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm, at least not to a level sufficient to justify preemptive intervention.

[dlev_pika]

Diluted only if one doesn’t know the definition of addiction

[austinjp]

Food? Some products sold as food are most certainly addictive.

Video games? As just one example, Candy Crush is a vacuous waste of anyone's time and money, with plenty of tales of addiction.

Books? People used to think novels were addictive and bad news: https://archive.is/WDDCH

[Bjartr]

> Does it really make sense to say that, because you're trying to make a product that people like, that this means you're addicting them (intentionally or otherwise) to your product?

That's not what these companies did though. Their goal has been maximizing engagement and stickiness. Not enjoyment or usefulness. A company operating in good faith delivering a valuable product that serves the consumer should not be lumped in with Meta et al who have been shown on multiple occasions to be abusing psychological techniques to the benefit of their wallets and to the detriment of their users' mental health.

[andoando]

But the intent is to make as much as money as possible with zero care for the users well being.

I worked at Tinder for example and you would think that company in an ethical world would be thinking about how to make dating better, how to make people more matches spending less time on the app. Nope, we literally had projects called "Whale" and the focus was selling on absolutely useful and even harmful features that generated money

[alex1138]

I can't speak for others' definition of addiction but Facebook has been pretty bad about artificially inflating users' activities. Outright fake notifications, even spamming people's 2FA phone numbers

[miohtama]

I am addicted to Hacker News. Who can I sue?

[gensym]

Indeed. As a wise man once said:

"Who is to say what's right these days, what with all our modern ideas and products?"

[techblueberry]

So I think two things:

1. It's ok to want certain outcomes as a society. Like maybe this is a little conservative or whatever, but we can't just like stand by and be like, well everyone's dumb, no one's having sex, people are dying, healthcare costs are spiking, there goes our economy. Like I wish we would legalize smoking again, but I understand why we don't.

2. I think one could make an argument that over-optimization is immoral. This Paula Deen video really made me sort of understand the excess that leads to the obesity epidemic. She takes what used to be a desert, wraps it in like three other deserts, fries it and then that's now one desert with twice the calories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYbpWcw6MfA

But like, companies are trying to architect food to fit more fat and sugar in. Instagram doesn't go to people and ask them what they want, they study behavioral psychology to get people to use their products more. At some point, letting giant multinational corporations do whatever they want to hack people's brains is a kind of nihilism and absence of free choice that you're trying to avoid.

Monopolies are bad. Overoptimization is bad. It should be ok for us as a culture to reject micro-transactions. It's ok for us to have a shared morality. even if that means Epic games makes a little less money on Fortnight.

I think one measure should be. How much do people wish they did a thing less.

https://fortune.com/well/article/nearly-half-of-gen-zers-wis...

I used to watch like 6 hours of TV a day. Loved every minute of it. Same thing with video games. Same thing with my favorite restaurant, don't feel the same way about smoking or like the M&Ms I buy in the checkout aisle of the grocery store.