Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

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This line of thinking is very odd to me. As mentioned downthread, there are plenty of wonderful things you get out of YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc: music, personal connections, education, exploration, art, etc etc etc. The dopamine-kick stuff isn't inherent to the product: the efficiency of delivery just means that that stuff is easier to get. My usage of all these services is extremely healthy, and none of the complaints people have about addictiveness resonate with me at all; but I've also never been into idle TV watching, or junk food, or celebrity gossip. Unhealthy usage is not inherent to the product.

Advances in food production means that the proportion of people starving and undernourished is lower than ever. It also means that, for the first time, excess food is a problem for more than just kings. It would be kind of crazy to complain that these advances in food production are per se a bad thing because they enabled obesity. They're just a tool that accelerate both good and bad uses.

It was already possible to feed the idle, addiction-prone part of your mind with channel-surfing and People magazine. The Internet has accelerated this possibility by making everything about access to content more efficient, but describing efficiency solely as "making access to bad stuff" more efficient makes no sense.

To me it seems similar to blaming an advance in fuel efficiency for making it cheaper for bank robbers to get to their targets. It's true, but also missing the point.

Like alcohol or gambling, it's probably inherent in the product for some people with genetic predispositions to certain types of addictive behavior. My hypothesis is that the level of "dopamine-kick" is at least partially a function of genes and probably partially a function of nurture. For example there are some people who cannot drink socially, encouraging them to have one drink "to relax with the rest of us" may cause them harm. To the extent that you are designing your application to consume more and more of the user's attention (note that the customer is the advertiser, the addicted user is the product), to make it more and more addictive, you may be ruining some people's lives.

> To the extent that you are designing your application to consume more and more of the user's attention (note that the customer is the advertiser, the addicted user is the product), to make it more and more addictive, you may be ruining some people's lives.

Our economy is intertwined enough that "your actions somewhere down the line may be making it easier for someone to make choices that ruin their lives" is probably true of literally every single person. If you work on a product making low-skill hiring more efficient, you're also lowering McDonald's costs and making it even harder for people with unhealthy relationships with food to resist, and thus "you may be ruining some people's lives".

It's so broad a claim that it's utterly meaningless.

If your direct goal is to consume more and more of your user's attention so that you can sell it to your customers and you don't place any limits on how much you will "harvest" you are on a path to destroy people's lives. Your points are also valid as to second and third order effects but I think you need to distinguish between the deleterious impact of primary goals and side effects. I would suggest the goal of developing an addictive app is similar to developing digital heroin: likely to be highly profitable but ethically and morally bankrupt. I think McNamee is offering a direct and specific ethical test for anyone developing applications.

The hole I see in this idea is that we could have all of the benefits of Youbute, without "YouTube". All of the benefits of these services can exist without the predatory privacy invasive behaviour.

The problem is that there's a ton of value created by the information the services collect. Delivering more value to advertisers allows more video creators to make their livings.

If you started your own site there's absolutely no way you could be profitable competing on both hosting costs and payout to creators.

Is there? How are we defining value here? Profit?

I broadly agree that creators hugely benefit from these platforms, but that really doesn't seem to be what they're optimizing on imho. And you basically admitted they're a monopoly with that final statement.

It costs money to host video. The volume of advertising you sell supports your costs, with a fraction going to the content creators. Using information you gather increases how much advertising you can sell. The more advertising you sell the more money everyone gets.

Having a low cost infrastructure for video streaming and good advertising deals is not a monopoly, it's an investment.

But you can still have advertising, just not targeted and use tactics from the gaming industry to get people hooked on content.

You must be Mr.Spock. Incase you missed it, being human is being flawed.

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