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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

Some of the design anti-patterns he's describing smell a lot like the broken window fallacy [1]. Sure, apps can get big on getting users addicted and "engaged", but there's no actual economic benefit being produced by such design - just tons of opportunity cost to users.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

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I'm not sure I follow why the fallacy applies. But for lots of smartphone apps there is an economic benefit. Making your app mildly addictive increases your weekly active users as well as the amount of time they spend in the app. These are two gold star metrics used by lots of VCs.

He is implying there is no economic benefit to the users, not for the app in general but for engaging with particular bits of offensive design. If a user actually sat down and consciously decided whether or not to take a particular action, they likely would have gone the other way. See autoplaying videos. You probably didn't want to watch that next video, but if Google/Netflix gets their way you'll do it anyway for any number of psychological reasons. But that next video was not something you wanted, potentially it's value to you is zero or negative because of opportunity cost. That won't stop you from watching it though, if they can manipulate you and distract you from making that decision consciously.

That's just the basic, innate value of increased activity time, too; not to mention other things like the more time people spend in the app the more likely they are to generate some other form of economic activity.

The broken window fallacy isn't concerned with the local economic benefit for the app developer but the total economic benefit of society. A user who is addicted to an app may be using that app far past the actual utility they are deriving from it -- the app developer is encouraging them to mismanage their opportunity costs and in aggregate creates negative productivity across the total body of all users. It might be good for the VCs, but is it good for society?

The ads intermittently injected into the user's stream benefits the company.

Cigarette sales benefitted cigarette companies. That doesn't mean they benefitted the economy because the costs of smoking were eventually passed on to health insurance and/or taxpayers. Money that could have been spent elsewhere.

Yes, sorry, I misinterpreted your previous comment to mean that there was no benefit to either party.

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