This is all true, but it's definitely not the full story. I'm addicted to HN despite it not being engineered for engagement. (though _technically_ it has taken investor money hahaha)

> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns.

Realistically, this is the most likely solution to reducing addiction on online platforms in my opinion. I’m not sure how likely such regulations will be in the US, but it’s quite telling that the Chinese regulate their version of TikTok, while the US doesn’t regulate theirs.

It’s very obvious in 2025, have deleted all my social accounts, (maybe still a bit of reddit). Kids are definitly not allowed even close to it.

100% correct it’s about the business model/funding. Just make it in your basement and don’t take vc capital and let it take a decade and you’ll be the only used social network.

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."

an article on the problems of social media with no mention of the federated platforms? seems like a huge omission

There is still a deeper problem, which the article didn't tackle. We don't need social media in general. Some forums and platforms for geeks and freaks are enough. We don't need perfectly orchestrated or fairly designed apps to simulate genuine connection, which works best without any digital help what so ever.

So let's imagine that the best way is to return to offline interactions and connections - which take time, trust, respect and value of each other.

The internet is better when used by the nerds, not the general public.

I remember when ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ came out by Nir Eyal. It came out the same year as ‘Addiction by Design’ and was rapidly adopted in the SV and HN circles. I heard somewhere he felt bad about the impact of Hooked… but I don’t have a source.

Eyal wrote another book 5 years later trying to help people control their attention & not falling victim to the playbook he outlined in Hooked.

I like the post but I feel like it’s missing the reason why VC funding is necessary. A lot of small scale apps and old school forums can be run pretty cheap. What is stopping social media from growing slow and following a more traditional business model? For example, people regularly start things like nail salons with just personal funds and bank loans but they are so much more expensive to run than something like this website

The article Farmvillains in SF Weekly fifteen years ago said Zynga had a staff psychologist to guarantee that each iteration would be more addictive.

https://www.sfweekly.com/archives/farmvillains/article_eb8e2...