Posted by andsoitis 5 days ago
I occasionally play a perpetually-in-alpha AAA+ game (I won't name it to avoid the flames) that recently asked users to fill out a questionnaire. At no point did it ask how they could make my time spent in the game more fun or awesome. They did explicitly ask, "What can we do to make you spend more time in game?". The focus was clearly on quantity, not quality. This made me realize that, perhaps, I should stop playing this game.
Social media and games use all sorts of dark patterns and engagement bait to keep you clicking, but no concern is given to giving back. There is a complete absence of awareness that the best forms of entertainment enrich and then end. If they were to provide an amazing but brief experience that changes regularly, people would come back again and again. They don't need to spend hours on it every single day to feel they're getting value and justify opening their wallets. Doom-scrolling and spending excessive time grinding in games will only make you feel stressed out and unfulfilled. Customers need to realize this and start voting with their wallets for experiences that end.
We need to turn things around and say, "The light that burns half as long burns twice as bright!"
Make their data junk.
Unfortunately, games keep getting longer and longer with more and more filler. The problem is that many gamers complain loudly when games are short. There are comparatively few games that buck the trend. Now, I play very few games as a result.
But you're right comparatively few games give you "more game" vs "more filler"
For example, I liked factorio because I was always struggling with the "current paradigm" and trying to get to the "next paradigm". For example, coal powered furnaces vs electric furnaces. Or conveyor belts vs trains.
But some games just make themselves longer by just turning the knobs on grinding.
I guess this is like novels vs short stories. And we are seeing the same sorts of things where the story arc is stretched over a long series of books and content is fluffed up a bit.
I miss those days where the measure of success was having someone play the game at all and enjoy it, not how long they might be locked into your product to the detriment of anything else in life.
One tactic against Fortnite has been to say "Yes, you can play on the console this evening, but not Fortnite and instead choose from one of these games." That at least encouraged him to play through Horizon Zero Dawn, as an example.
I think that’s where League gets you as well. New champions. New items. Oops, just redid the skill tree. Oh hey, balance changes. All while you’re trying to go up in rank. It feels like work — and has in fact become a job for some —, but can be incredibly fun and addictive.
I’m glad I’m out of it, and instead get to play my good ol’ Steam collection.
I'm a noob, the depth of the game is still unfathomable to me.
Every time I sit down to play, the game feels richer, more nuanced. The minds I encounter striving for the same joy of mastery come alive and reveal themselves - you'd be amazed how much personality can come through mouse clicks.
I take better care of myself because if I'm in a bad mood or mindset, I won't be able to play good dota. It's a litmus test for my current mental and emotional state.
Oh, and it keeps my ego in check: If you're playing for yourself, you will lose. It's better to work together on a suboptimal plan than announce you're correct and sabotage the team. Humility complements skill.
I find most other games boring - I don't play for story, I play for depth and nuance of mechanics, for connoisseurship and mastery. Most video games are on-rails; may as well watch netflix for all it demands of you. Having a wide variety of colored candies does not make a diet.
You get out of games what you put in, in my opinion.
Fair, although what you get out of League is a lot of stress and abusive teammates. Of course you also get tons of fun and challenging matches that make it worth it. But…
I have about 8k hours on Factorio, and about half that in Terraria. Another 5k in Civilization V. Now: are they more enjoyable and enriching than a MOBA? Do they have better mechanics and provide more happy memories? Yes on all counts.
Of course we all enjoy different things :) And hey, in DotA you have a really cool sniper!
I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! The question is can you make a compelling case that spending time on it is harmful.
I’ve been using the internet for longer than I care to admit, and I’ve never seen anything like it.
It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time.
That timeline has way more to do with the corrupt politicians than consumer behavior.
_______________
Both in the sense that the original semi-bipartisan law should've been ruled unconstitutional [0], and also in how the Republican party turned around and broke portions of that law for months until Trump could ensure the assets were handed to his major donor buddy--and fixing none of the original PRC influence issues. [1]
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/banning-tiktok-i...
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/19/tiktok-deal-done-and-its...
So looks like politicians never had any problem with the addictiveness of social media, they only have a problem when it's used by foreign adversaries and not by domestic companies...
Are you even remotely surprised by that? Honestly.
Mass misery is still misery.
I have to disagree with this. Having talked to heroin addicts in the past, I was told that the heroin addiction destroyed their relationship with their families and their friends, causing heart-break in the process (particularly for mothers). They use everyone around them so that they could get their next fix: borrowing, constant cajoling and stealing results in alienating them from everyone in their social circle – other than fellow junkies.
When cut off from family and friends, junkies resort to begging, stealing, street prostitution, shop-lifting and other petty crimes, all of which have a negative effect on their community. Some junkies end up committing violent crimes which has a more destructive effect on society. They often end up in debt to their dealers and commit other crimes at their behest.
All these things are much worse when the junkie is a parent or has others depending on them for a safe and secure family life.
Also, in my country (Ireland), heroin junkies also place a huge burden on the health service. Their chaotic lives result in multiple health issues and they take up a significant portion of hospital beds.
How do you make sure that whoever makes that choice makes it in a way you yourself will agree with?
People's lives are ruined by gambling all the time, for instance. It is dumb to pretend like the pleasure a few people get out of it is worth someone betting away his family's welfare. It is ok to just decide "this needs to be regulated." Not everything is some intractible philosophical mystery that no consensus will ever coalesce around. Not every single thing every single person wants needs to be taken seriously.
If you're going to get philosophical, go all the way. Why have society at all because it's just people imposing their will on others? Or do you at least agree that there exists a line?
It’s not at all obvious that “adults can’t have TikTok” is anywhere near the correct side of that line.
The TikTok ban successfully forced the sale of the US TikTok operations. I wouldn't be so dismissive of it.
No, it was not. It was actually nothing like that.
No babies were left to die because their parents were out searching for tiktok clips. I saw no people whoring themselves on the street just to see a few tiktok clips. I heard no stories of children stealing from their own family to get a few scrolls of tiktok. There was no people killing each other just to get a hit of tiktok.
Let's not trivialize something like drug addiction by comparing it to kids procrastinating by watching their TV phone app.
The median child of a social media user (so basically, the median child) is vastly more well off than the median child of a heroin/crack cocaine user and its not even close.
The fact you're suggesting some level of equivalency is wild imo.
Glad I could draw attention to the irrational logic of the current "social media is evil" moral panic.
I'm just astonished how hard all of the supposedly rational engineering minds of hackernews are falling for this classic moral panic. The crowd of mindless pitchforks is cringe.
It must be a cognitive gymnastics that makes people here feel more important. How powerful it must feel to believe your email job can addict and destroy the world...via...javascript scroll effects on...mobile entertainment apps.
I mean, how else do you rationalize the fact that you're paid as much as a heart surgeon to implement react components and reply thumbs up to messages on slack? All this doomsday cosplaying must help square the cognitive dissonance.
Instagram was supposedly the same, with Meta internally knowing that. They said it themselves, the teenagers couldn’t stop using Instagram even if they wanted to. I mean, isn’t that addiction?
I don’t need to feel important. I’m an addict trying to stay away from my triggers. It’s not Instagram, but I also know how that one feels, because I had an account for years. Of course I’m not saying it’s exactly like a drug — any drug —, but that to dismiss the very real, very negative design of these tools is also folly. They hijack the same brain chemistry, to similar results, and a different scale of recovery.
No, developers aren’t special. Nobody in tech is. But Instagram themselves, in their own document, are basically admitting to behaving like a very capable dealer of a neural drug.
I want to follow news and deals from a handful of vendors and local businesses I like a lot. The best way to do that is following them on instagram. It’s the only reason I signed up and installed the app. If it’d been one or two, I’d not have bothered, but it’s that way for lots of them.
I never want to see the “feed”. I would disable it if I could. I would make it default to my “following” view if I could. Instagram so very much wants me not to do that that they went out of their way to make it impossible to achieve that even with iOS’ built in shortcut-like system (you used to be able to).
As a result, sometimes I get distracted by one or two of the top items on the feed. That doesn’t mean I actually want to see them. That I open the app once every couple days doesn’t mean I like the app. I think it’s terrible.
People taking what folks do with a sharply constrained set of options as an expression of “why they want” or revealed preference or whatever is frustratingly wrong.
I can't say I know anyone who defends extended social media usage. Do you?
I sort of claimed that everyone enjoys it when they use these apps, maybe it's better to say they are likely getting something out of it in that moment. This could be kind of a bad deal - people make bad deals, and repeat old ones all the time. Other times they delete the app once they realize it.
I took a trip to Yosemite last weekend and took the (rare) opportunity to post a reel. All of the comments and reactions are DMs. It feels so lonely and weird and isolating. Who asked for this?
I miss the days where you shared things, and people actually commented on them and interacted with each other as well as the poster. And where it wasn't ephemeral.
By that I mean- is the product addiction, with a shroud of media, or is it media which just happens to be addictive.
The entire revenue model is based on on engagement and clicks, the product is incentivized to maximize time spent on the service at any cost. Addiction is a core engineering requirement.
facebook in the past has done tests of emotional manipulation on their users without informing them
they're rotten from the head down
It's the former, by design:
Now if only the dick heads running this complete rag could listen to the wonderful people who wrote that enlightened piece and let users unsubscribe: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rli0u9/how_t...
I've written more about this here: https://klemenvodopivec.substack.com/p/recommender-systems-n...
The most important evidence was just internal research saying exactly what the plaintiffs wanted.
Google Chrome is trying hard to become a mandated technology, but hasn't quite succeeded yet.
The author made a choice to publish there. They want the paywall, because that's how they get paid for this writing.
Huh? Does anyone actually care any more? The kind of moralizing busybodies that spend their time shaming the tobacco industry are few and far between.
RJ Reynolds does not have their pick of the most elite graduates. Most of them would be ashamed to tell their friends and family, no matter the salary.
Facebook is not that.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26318318221116042
snippet from the abstract
> Contrary to the earlier notion that addiction is predominantly a substance dependency, research now suggests that any source or experience capable of stimulating an individual has addictive potential. This has led to a paradigm shift in the psychiatric understanding of behavioural addictions.
dopamine, the little “hit” you get on social media sites or when you get a “ping”, has a massive role to play in behavioural addictions. and with behavioural addiction it basically causes the same stuff in the brain that cocaine etc does (very simplified explanation).
also, i’m a recovering drug addict. and i can tell you for sure from my lived experience that addiction is definitely not limited to physical stuff like drugs. xD
Addiction isn't just [chemical in blood stream] -> [addiction]. Addiction involves many steps, many of them in the brain, and many of those reactive to non-physical events.
gonna need a citation on that one, dawg
Plus, smoking doesn't kill people; its pathological outcomes do. Similarly, looking at a phone screen might hurt a user's eyes, but it won't kill them; however, the decisions that user makes over time due to the effects of the subject matter they interact with might definitely put them at risk. And if aspects of that subject matter are deliberately amplified for their addictive properties, should platforms be regulated to control this?