Engineered Addictions

Posted by echollama 6/28/2025

Engineered Addictions(masonyarbrough.substack.com)

720 points | 451 commentspage 5

asdf6969 6/28/2025|

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

dirtyhippiefree 6/29/2025||

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...

Narciss 6/28/2025||

My hope, and it may be a naïve hope, is that with the rise of AI will see more and more people be able to build the kind of digital experience that they envision, including social media experiences, because of the democratization of software engineering. That being said, what does it take to build a social media app using AI and also perhaps just as important to market it worldwide?

kurthr 6/28/2025||

It feels like this is the optimism of early internet where "information wants to be free".

We got a solid 5 maybe 10 years of that (up through 2k)?

cornholio 6/28/2025|||

If you can't build it with a bunch of junior coders, then AI won't help you.

Social media is all about network effects and first mover advantage, one network turned textbook fascist and it's still going strong.

blendergeek 6/28/2025|||

I "hope" that will happen as well. It is a naïve hope indeed. Almost all current AI systems and all future ones I foresee, are made by large corporations that are looking to turn a profit. Enabling, ordinary "people ... to build the kind of digital experience that they envision" does not maximise profit. Instead AI systems will work for their owners to maximize profits by extracting revenue from the users. Some of this revenu could come from advertising. AIs could build ads that are far more personalized and convincing than anything we can imagine now. AI agents will work first and foremost for their corporate owners and will only do the users bidding if it benefits the owners. There is absolutely no reason to believe that it will be different this time and that now corporations will happily hand out everything for free and users will be empowered. I don't doubt that open source and freedom respecting AI will exist and that some will be able to use it. The great thing about free markets is that those who want to will be able to opt out. But it will always be niche and small just like it is now.

DeathRay2K 6/28/2025||

Building the social media platform you want to see isn’t really the problem though. They are relatively easy to build, the hard part is making it valuable enough to attract users and earning enough to keep it running.

Using AI introduces additional costs without solving the core challenge there.

johanneskanybal 6/29/2025||

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.

ByteDrifter 6/29/2025||

The article mentioned that we can reconnect offline life and redesign the platform to encourage real human interaction instead of endless scrolling. Imagine a social app that encourages you to exit the screen and meet friends instead of constantly scrolling. It should feel good.

liendolucas 6/28/2025||

What I haven't found in the article is what would happen if people paid for a true social network, completely free of all the nasty things we already know. Is there any chance that a carefully crafted paid social network can actually succeed?

jay_kyburz 6/28/2025|

My plan is/was to structure the payments as a single annual payment that only one person in a group or family needs to pay. Then all the members of the group/family join free. That way you only need to convince one person in a group its worth the change.

liendolucas 6/29/2025||

I can't see why wouldn't it work. You definitely have some options. Group or family subscriptions is one. Then you can have extra charges for people for example that post above the average (it would make sense to extra charge those who abuse posting). If someone is unable to pay for some reason don't cancel the account(s) simply make those read-only. So even if they don't pay they are not excluded. Bear in mind that people pay for lots of subscriptions! Streaming services, newspapers, vpns, etc. So again if is setup as a profitable but not greedy profit business it should work. One of the key things is convincing people why using a non-manipulative social network is a way better choice than the "free" options. I'm not very good with business ideas but I do believe that there's absolutely room for a healthy social network out there.

darkhorse222 6/29/2025||

I honestly think there is some place here to be anti tech. Some things, the things closest to our humanity, like love and community, are not all that better with technology in my opinion. Sure, you can stay connected with a family member or friend who lives in another city, but that same positive is a negative via another perspective because it doesn't force you to make new connections with people around you.

And love is similar. It's nice that algorithms can help you match, but the psychology by which you arrive at a compatible partner matters a great deal. The swipe is inherently dehumanizing even if it does match you with a human.

Some things are supposed to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Tech should stop trying to eliminate that and instead augment it. That calls for an entirely different philosophy when choosing ideas to build. Instead of looking for uncomfortable or inefficient things and trying to "fix" that, consider your values. What do you care about, what is important for a good human life? Then use your skills to enable deeper integration into those values.

Easier is not always better.

I recently had this revelation when considering how difficult it is to find events that I'm interested in. I was shocked that this isn't a problem that we had solved in the 2000s. But Facebook events is full of bar specials like ladies night and doesn't seem to match to my taste and Eventbrite is overly monetized and tends to be formal events, my friend who's very into the electronic scene told me that the way that she found events was by following people on Instagram and then following the businesses that she went to and checking their pages for events. I thought that seemed very inefficient and then it occurred to me that maybe the goal here is not to get as many people as possible to go to your event. Maybe it's about getting the right people with the right values and right taste to go to your event. This is a classic case where making something easier would not necessarily serve to achieve the goal of that ease, which, in this case would be making it easier for me to find authentic events. *The very nature of them being trivially accessible would change what they are.*

IAmGraydon 6/28/2025||

What this all boils down to is the major weak point of capitalism: profit over all. It’s a darwinistic system, and survival depends upon the ability to abandon ethics in the name of money. Not that ethics doesn’t have some value - it does - but only as a money generator as some customers are motivated to spend on it or at least the idea of it. By and large, however, ethics becomes a weakness in this system.

So in my view, the solution has to abide by this law of the jungle, but also short circuit the psychological mechanisms that tech companies are using to harvest attention. Somehow, people will have to pay for their freedom, similar to how drug addicts can pay for rehabilitation once they see the damage the drug has done to their life. It’s still a business, but one that contributes to the greater good.

Most of the solutions in this article require some kind of government intervention, which I don't see happening any time soon. Eventually, maybe, but probably only after society has nearly (or completely) ripped itself apart due to social media, the negatives are laid bare, and people start pushing for change.

knuppar 6/29/2025||

> This isn't because founders are evil

Sounds like something an evil founder would say

larodi 6/29/2025|

Perhaps this all goes even deeper - it's screen addiction, not only social media addiction, though social media in 2025 is a very powerful and addictive drug (in all senses of it)

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