Fundamentally, I think having a source of "free dopamine" on tap is not going to do any good. If I can get distracted from my real world tasks anytime, anywhere, the immediate incentives to work on real things disappear. Effectively, one can get stuck in a local minimum.
I don't know how to solve it, but personally I've chosen to block as many feeds/algorithms as I can, so I have to make a conscious decision to search for something (making it just as hard as making the conscious decision that I'm likely putting off). The only feeds I have right now are the FT and Hacker News. Everything else is just a blank home screen with a search bar.
But if things interest you, does that not also provide dopamine? If the interesting things are easily available, are they "free" and addictive and bad? If they're good because they're interesting, is TikTok not interesting to those who like it? If you had a pinball machine and it distracted you, would that be bad, or a hobby? Is TikTok more compelling than pinball because of the algorithm? Is the algorithm not merely providing things that will likely interest you? Is interest bad now?
these products are intentionally designed to be addictive by some of the greatest minds of our generation. If you were intentionally designing society this would be the opposite of what you'd do.
Our children are effectively enslaved through basic trinkets and manipulation to serve as eye-balls for ad impressions to fuel equity value in silicon valley. It's fucked and it was intentionally designed to be this fucked.
The abstract of what you state makes sense, but the layers of manipulation on top of it are what the problem is.
It's worth stating that addictive tech is addictive partly because it doesn't work very well.
So they build useful things and then make them pretty bad and less useful. If they were useful your interest or need would complete and you would move on.
Fundamentally I think it is important to say this. Addiction confounds some things in the space of designed systems
Spot on. Like how Facebook used to be quite useful to stay in touch with friends, or how dating websites used to be kinda decent to find like-MINDED people but have now all been enshittified in order to keep people on them.
I used to not mind my kids watching Youtube on the home TV, but lately when I walk by they are doom scrolling one short after the other. I tell them not to watch shorts, but a day later I walk by and they are back to doom scrolling. I'm finally forced to remove Youtube from the TV. On the phone, Instagram is the same way, I see my teenager doom scrolling it quite often. They claim it helps them relax.
Consider the Lean Startup methodology. The darker patterns are where you break down the big picture rationale for the company. You extract metrics that contribute to the company's success (i.e. engagement) and you build a machine that rewards changes to the underlying system that improves those metrics.
If done successfully, you create an unwitting sociopathy, a process that demands the product be as addictive as possible and a culture that is in thrall to the machine that rewards its employees by increasing those metrics. You're no longer thinking about purpose or wondering about what you're doing to your users. You simply realise that if you send this notification at this time, with this colour button, in this place, with this tagline then the machine likes it. Multiple people might contribute a tiny piece of a horrifying and manipulative whole and never quite realise the true horror of the monster they've helped build.
That horror being..? I understand that this is a ruthless quest for engagement by any means, good or bad. For instance ...?
I don't mean to make you do all the work here: I can see a couple of pages from the introduction which mention "variability" and "investment":
> What distinguishes the Hook Model from a plain vanilla feedback loop is the Hook’s ability to create a craving. Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire. The unsurprising response of your fridge light turning on when you open the door doesn’t drive you to keep opening it again and again. However, add some variability to the mix—suppose a different treat magically appears in your fridge every time you open it—and voila, intrigue is created.
So that's "variability". I'm not hugely impressed. "Investment", meanwhile, is when you set preferences or connect to friends, so you feel like you lose out if you stop attending. I can see that these might be foolish ideas. But I can also see that foolish ideas are part of "engaging" with anything - something traditionally wholesome such as a piano, for instance. Imagine I'm a Victorian lady, and I've bought a piano and I invite my friends over for a regular evening of singing art songs, so that's "investment": also we buy new song sheets every time, so there's "variety". I'm totally hooked on this harmless positive thing, am I? Or do I in fact just like it and have free will?
Are you being intentionally obstinate? I can't help but feel like you're sealioning.
An increasing number of young people get their news from social media and what is "engaging" isn't necessarily what's true. This leads to greater political polarisation, nuance is lost, tribalism increases, people treat conversations as things to be won as opposed to opportunities to share information. People spend their entire time doomscrolling because everything is "engaging" so it caters to their paranoia and attempts to keep them glued to their phone, ramping up their anxiety and paranoia because it makes them more money. People stay up late scrolling a feed that hooks them, sleep less, perform less well at work, may lose their job and all the ramifications that go along with that. Parents spend more time on their phones than with their children, a generation of babies and toddlers are having to compete for attention with these apps and in many cases fail because they're designed so well. What's worse is the babies get thrust an ipad and then are brought up by arbitrary strangers who may not have their best interests at heart and are exposed to considerable amounts of advertising at far too young an age.
I could go on but I feel like you're just going to give another one liner where you pretend that actually there's nothing wrong with this or smth.
Eh, sorry, edited some stuff in now. I'm not a sealion, honest, we just have different points of view where what is obvious to you (to the point of irrelevance?) is unsubstantiated and crucial from my perspective.
I'm going to acknowledge "anxiety and paranoia" as something that it's particularly unethical to pander to. But I feel like that deserves a name in its own right, separate from addiction. I'm having a tip-of-the-tongue moment about it.
- I guess that's (automated) fearmongering and hoaxing.
I see your angle but I worry the "free will" premise sleep walks us into manipulation. People are vulnerable to the The Psychology of Persuasion (Robert B Cialdini).
My perspective might be a bit nannying but I think we're arguing the nation-building vs individualism axis and the free-will vs regulation axis.
For example, smoking has some benefits, its a cheap stimulent, helps you focus, good for people with undiagnosed ADHD. However its highly addictive and causes terrible long term health issues, so where do we fall on the line of its regulation? Should we allow everyone to persue their "free will" and advertising to be unregulated? Tobacco companies have a perverse incentive to downplay and suppress the health costs, fabricate positive research and lobby governments. Last time we allowed that everyone smoked, that might be good for free will, but is that good for society, for nation building?
I'd make a similar argument for our addictive online services, I think they should probably be age gated and increasingly regulated. While they're beneficial for the US economy they're detrimental to the nation-building of all nations exposed to them.
I would ask you to consider how the internet would look if online advertising was banned. While its an unrealistic aim, I think that view is extremely informative to the idea of _actual_ free will. If you remember how the old internet looked, its clear how the profit motive has distorted the internet beyond recognition.
To throw up a more middle ground example based on a video I saw a couple of days ago: there's a popular "health food influencer" on tiktok who gives contradictory advice based on products he's promoting and their ingredients list. In January sugar is a terrible ingredient but in March its entirely fine. He's shilling via product placement and there's no regulation of his platform. If people lack critical thinking they just blindly buy these products and learn nothing about health. You might state they're exercising their free will, but is that genuinely true? Maybe he only obtained his traffic because he had no qualms about how manipulative his content was. Did he get his early numbers via botting and then ending up towards the top of the list? Perhaps he threw $20k at another popular influencer to spam mentions and that's how he got his early traffic. An entirely unregulated system permits this. If the money wasn't there the only people talking about health foods would be people genuinely interested who gave reliable advice. The profit motive creates this distortion because its profitable to be misleading and sensationalist. There is a nuanced conversation to be had around people being able to make money on the platform and dedicate a career to it and banning advertising doesn't allow that. Somewhere there's a middle ground, I'm not sure where that is but I don't think we're anywhere near it today.
If you want a genuinely dark example then look up subliminals [0]. Its a niche community of grifter adults and tragically sad children, where the children seem to be labouring under a bizarre misconception peddled by the grifters that by repeatedly watching a specially prepared video they can become taller or have a prettier nose.
Hey, that's a lot of assuming the conclusion. I meant that the piano-player has free will in the sense that she's not addicted. I don't want to argue for the right to use addictive drugs, I'm trying to establish whether TikTok is one.
and the "health food influencer" and subliminals? They're similar setups. Online advertising creates a perverse incentive and this was formerly constrained by the gatekeeping of traditional print media, but the internet does away with that constraint by making publishing a free-for-all.
We're already in a future where "news entertainment" has replaced news and journalism is inherently unprofitable because it lacks the same attention grabbing properties of not caring for the truth. The new chapter in this is that "news entertainment" doesn't need on the ground journalism, and advertising rates pay better in the developing world. This means that all the facebook grandmas and grandads as well as the children are getting hooked on foreign-based indignance mills that are not regulated in the slightest. These foreign-based "news entertainment" shows only care for impressions, so simply re-enforce the desired ignorance of their audiences and tend towards pushing bigoted world views, in some cases even encouraging racism towards the very countries that are actually producing the content! In the very worst case scenarios foreign state actors use these channels in order to push their propaganda and stir up unrest in rival nation states.
It is free will, but in the big picture, its harmful to society.
Right, yeah. "Misleading", like you say. That health food guy's a shyster (like the snake oil salesmen of yore), and algorithms can sometimes send a feed into a shyster-like mode. So now we come down to terminology: addiction is the wrong word, deception is the right one. This isn't purely semantic, it's a different kind of hold over people. More cognitive.
Sidetrack: I had the idea recently that unscrupulous advertising might be a tragedy of the commons for the clients en masse, and harmful for the economy in general. Based on the intuition that lying can't be doing any good.
I used that word mostly because of the name of that book "Hooked".
> like the snake oil salesmen of yore
the problem is that you could run that guy out of town in the past and his damage was localised. Nowadays he can be the biggest player in town.
> Sidetrack: I had the idea recently that unscrupulous advertising might be a tragedy of the commons for the clients en masse, and harmful for the economy in general. Based on the intuition that lying can't be doing any good.
I'd go further and state that all advertising is bad, but I might be a touch too radical. Also it might be too late, given how strong "native advertising" and product placement now is. The content and the adverts have merged. LLMs might offer some brief respite as I think it will be hard to reliably advertise inside that content.
Defining advert is hard. Store signage saying "we sell things here" seems essential information. Standing in the street and yelling about bananas and peppers? What if I step that up and yell that I have red hot peppers for sale? People have to know what's available, and I have to be free to sincerely talk it up. Then it can get intrusive and insincere, but you can only police that at the extremes of intrusion and dishonesty.
There's no need for insane abstraction, we're talking about motivation for negative effects. Silicon valley hooks our children into unproductive activity where they are often fed misinformation because they want to advertise to them. Entertainment News only wins because it brings in more money for adverts. Nobody cares about a sign in a street or someone yelling in the street.
The answer to this (if it exists) is to withdraw the motivations for spreading misinformation or find another means of tempering their impact.
Idk what the solution is, I just find it odd we make our society obviously worse in order for someone to sell some diet pills or smth.
No, interest is not bad. I would say that excessive time dedicated to certain interests is bad, because it might lead to neglecting other interests that have real-world consequences. There are only 24 hours in a day, after all.
Which consequences are considered significant/desirable varies depending on the person.
I am using "bad" to refer to my personal judgments of this task ("was this time well spent?") and survival/growth needs in life. Inherently, there is nothing "bad" about scrolling: many things can be overconsumed to the point of causing consequences that are bad. However, the fact that TikTok et al. algorithms (and drugs, etc.) are designed to occupy your time and attention, makes me (by extension) consider them bad, because they likely lead me to bad consequences.
If I had a pinball machine in my room and it distracted me occasionally, I would probably write it off as a bit of relaxation/fun. If I scrolled a few TikTok videos, I might say the same. But if I spent multiple hours doing each while forgetting my fundamental needs (food, water, sunlight...) repeatedly, I may well say they are bad.
It's obviously unreasonable to classify everything that doesn't advance a certain goal (money? career? education?) as "bad", so the optimum must be somewhere in the middle.
(Rambling train of thought warning)
To resolve this, I have a few heuristics. They are definitely not logically watertight, but it's what works for me.
A key tradeoff is between "how fun is this?" and "what's the opportunity cost/consequence?"
Personally, I would like to live with purpose. The algorithms that drive TikTok etc. too easily lend themselves to purposeless consumption, which can also be true for many other activities (gaming!). I feel better saying/planning "I will do 1 hour of X", then doing that wholeheartedly - but I would never consciously choose to do an hour of scrolling.
Another bias of mine is that real-world things > virtual/digital/game/simulated etc...
I feel like the inherent limitations and permanent consequences of physical things make me more careful about what I'm doing and what might result. If I break a part while tinkering/messing around in the workshop, I can't just load a quicksave - it gives me an opportunity to reconsider. Given that HN is a software-heavy place, I suspect many will not feel this way - this is OK, who am I to judge?
Long term compounding benefits > short term temporary pleasures. If I devoted my scrolling time (before I blocked everything) to playing pinball, or table tennis, or Minecraft, I would probably get very good at it. Similarly, if I tinkered with a pet project or filtered some photos, there would be some result to show for it - I would be improving my skill at something. As far as I can tell, the way I was scrolling TikTok-like feeds was not bringing any long-term results that I could look back at. Famously, no one remembers most of the short videos they scroll through. It only seems to deplete my
Granted, the previous paragraph depends on what one wants - perhaps influencers analysing successful video formats would improve their ability by scrolling. I'm imagining grouping outcomes into "good", "neutral" and "bad" for me: better at programming = good, top 1% Minecraft player = neutral, 100 hours spent on Reels = bad. (Reality is more nuanced, this is just a heuristic)
Speaking of too much time pursuing interests, it's time for me to close HN and get back to my problem sets. It is definitely interesting to think about this, but considering it for too long is bad in the sense that I will feel better having finished those questions.
There’s physical dependence and there’s psychological dependence. Most drugs can cause both, but hallucinogens in particular are usually thought to cause only psychological dependence. Whether that makes them less dangerous is debatable, but the fact is, they can still cause addiction if used carelessly.
Now to your main point... dopamine hits aren’t inherently good or bad. They can, however, also make things addictive, and drug abuse is indeed a good parallel here.
You can plot all activities on a spectrum of dopamine 'cheapness'. On one side of the spectrum is slot machines, various drugs, and doomscrolling. These generally involve little effort, and involve 'variable ratio reinforcement' which is where you get rewards at unpredictable intervals in such a way that you get addicted. Generally, after a long session of one of these activities, you feel like crap.
On the other side of the spectrum is more wholesome long-horizon activities like a challenging side project, career progression, or fitness goals. There's certainly an element of variable ratio reinforcement in all of these, but because the rewards are so much more tangible, and you get to exercise more of your agency, these activities generally feel quite meaningful on reflection.
Playing pinball is somewhere in the middle, probably on the cheaper side of the spectrum. Introspective people can generally reflect on a session and decide whether it was a good use of their time or not.
I really think that 'how do you feel after a long session of this' is a good measuring stick. Very few people will tell you that they feel good after a long session of social media scrolling or short-form content.
Another good measuring stick is 'do you want to want to be doing this?'. I want to want to go to the gym and gain 10kg of muscle. I do not want to want to spend hours on tiktok every day.
If we look at the effects, no, I don’t think so. I see how pinball could be optimized for addictiveness, but I don’t see a lot of people devoting all their free time to it.
Now, it is more nuanced than that. Is addiction bad for us? And at what point do we say we’re addicted to something? For me personally, when I can’t stop doing something (say, watching YouTube instead of working on a project), I won’t be happy long-term. It would be more gratifying short-term, sure, but I’d say it’s still not good.
One question is, even if I unwisely stay up all night doing something (reading comics, say), how do we decide whether to blame the thing for tricking me, or whether it's my own responsibility? Another question is, do we even know our own minds and truly know when we're being unwise? I note that many binges that I would have beaten myself up over at the time were in retrospect great, and the worthy things I assumed I should have been doing instead were actually pointless. So this suggests to me that having an authority dictate to, e.g., comic publishers "you are tempting the public into unwise habits, desist" would be a bad thing because the authority doesn't actually know what's unwise much better than we do.
We can look at intent: comic publishers want to make them interesting and capture your attention for some time, but do they make them addictive? And we can also look at the scale – if a product is reliably addictive across a wide audience, it might be bad for society, not just for individuals. If both criteria are met, it’s probably reasonable to blame the “dealer” of the thing in question.
But I agree that we should be able to decide for ourselves what is good for us – delegating it to authority isn’t a great solution, it should always be our own responsibility. We should, however, be especially cautious when making decisions about things that are known to be addictive for others.
Christ, this is like a textbook definition of sealioning. You've hijacked multiple threads here persistently asking for more and more evidence of their claims. If you don't agree with an argument, provide your own counter evidence. Stop harassing people and do your own work, or stop reading the threads with people you don't think have valid opinions or have no evidence.
At this point, I'd almost think you were a bot yourself, as your oblivious to the social standards of online forums and/or manipulating them intentionally.
> If I can get distracted from my real world tasks anytime, anywhere, the immediate incentives to work on real things disappear. Effectively, one can get stuck in a local minimum.
> I don't know how to solve it, ...
> but personally I've chosen to block as many feeds/algorithms as I can, ...
I think you solved it :) (at least, for yourself)
There are many things "out there" that are addictive and distracting and thus unhealthy, but we all have to find some way to overcome
Thanks for your positive response. It's true, we all need to help each other in finding community and human connection again amidst the waterfall of "content".
It's taken a few years to get to this point, but seeing the effects and regrets from over consumption of feeds made me take action.
I just bought a flip phone and a cool pocket sized camera. I've gotten down to leaving my phone at home a fair amount, and leave my phone on a speaker that's not near anything I sit on when at home.
It's awesome, come on back out to reality. I frequently go out at this point, come back home and go to see if I have any messages and realize my phone was on me the whole time and I had no idea (I also silence pretty much everything...).
I'm super pumped to have an actual camera to play with that's pocket sized too since I did miss the camera. But now I'll have something tremendously superior and can leave that aging device filled with way too many 2FA codes I don't want to inadvertently lose at home.
What kinda phone do you have? I was nostalgic for getting an old nokia, but when I actually did, using it was surprisingly painful. I guess that's kind of the point?
I still need a proper mp3 player (been using an old android) and a camera though.
...and a Kindle, and a fax machine ;)
As a side note, the "old" style Nokias now seem to be running on some kind of emulation... The Nokia startup sound lagged and stuttered and made me die a little inside.
Yea, when I'm on the move I rarely use more than texting and the camera. So I got a Nokia flip phone, and I'll see how it is. Worst comes to worst it'll be 90 bucks lost and I'll move back to something a bit more full featured. But really I chose for size, and to be able to text and make calls. It's possible I'll end up sticking with my mini for a while.
I also got a really nice pocket camera which I'm much more excited about. It's called a Ricoh, so the camera and the phone should fit in my pockets without any real trouble or bulge. Plus keys, and wallet, and I feel like I'm set.
You don't need to leave behind the conveniences of a smartphone to have a phone that is smart but without the dopamine traps. There are solutions out there like TechLockdown which allow you to make a dumbphone out of your smartphone using MDMs, while still keeping critical things like messenger apps, a predefined list of websites, navigation apps, etc.
Yea, I know, but smart phones are getting bigger and bigger. I'd rather a much nicer camera, and a small dumb phone which texts and calls. As opposed to a smart phone with a much worse camera, that also texts and calls and does maps.
I can just ask people if I need directions. I'm already don't use location services on maps, and usually look things up before I leave anyways.
Just leaving the phone at home is really the nicest thing, and I'll probably continue doing that a fair amount as well.
This is what drugs and alcohol can become if not used in moderation.
Once we have the AI holodeck (the full-sensory interactive, possibly multiplayer one), can you only imagine?
TikTok is only the punch card phase of this. TikTok may as well be black and white television. Just imagine what we might have in twenty years.
Maybe this is why we haven't found alien life. If their biologies have attention mechanisms like ours, maybe they automate highs and turn inward instead of outward. (I do like that better than AGI gray goo taking over galaxies.)
> a device you're now forced to use in daily life (bank/2fa/messaging apps).
Restaurants with only QR code menus.
"Let me scan your LinkedIn app."
Verify your government ID on our app.
"Zelle me."
"Scan this code to pay."
My favorite: "Scan this code for parking or you will be towed. Also, if you leave without paying, we'll tow you next time you enter any of our properties in any state because we scanned your license plate." There's no other way to pay.
Apartment / condo door keys and entry systems.
My battery is always at 10%. I don't know how y'all do it.
This is also one of the many reasons why I think it's criminal that two private businesses are allowed to own this modern life necessity so completely.
I've done that before (like many others), and occasionally still do. My current experience is that Wikipedia is decidedly finite (as far as content that is interesting enough for me to stick to, despite it being 3am). The slower pace and the conscious decision to choose what link I'll open next also regularly poke my "decision-making engine" to decide when to stop - no algorithmic feed of infinite scroll.
Story time! A couple years ago, I found myself with pretty severe ADHD and no way to get treatment for it. (There may have been a global healthcare cataclysm involved...)
I wanted to make some progress on a personal project, but I had a history of abandoning things, without external accountability. I had a guy for that the previous year, which worked great, but our interests diverged, so I had to find a way to do it on my own.
I realized that I couldn't force it. I had to find a way to make it work without having sufficient dopamine. Without relying on willpower at all.
So I stumbled into environmental design from first principles. I simply designed around all the failure modes.
1. I noticed that if I skipped a day of working on my project, the chance of completely losing momentum would rise enormously. So I decided I have to work every day, but to make it sustainable it only needs to be an hour.
2. I noticed that if I put work off until later in the day, the chance of skipping a day would rise enormously. So I decided that I had to start working as soon as I woke up. (But only for an hour. I could keep going but I didn't have to.)
3. And finally I noticed that, if I started playing with my phone or surfing the internet, the day was basically over. So I made a rule that I had to keep them both off for the first hour of the day. (And I turned them off the night before for good measure. That way I am waking up into the correct state by default.)
And what do you know. I didn't miss a day for 3 months. Even my dopamine starved brain was able to persist on this project every day without fail for several months straight, because I simply made these small changes to my environment!
The project suddenly became the most fun and interesting thing I could be doing. I actually looked forward to working on it the next day, when I went to sleep at night!
I don't know how to solve it, but personally I've chosen to block as many feeds/algorithms as I can, so I have to make a conscious decision to search for something (making it just as hard as making the conscious decision that I'm likely putting off). The only feeds I have right now are the FT and Hacker News. Everything else is just a blank home screen with a search bar.