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Comment by dschuetz | Hacker News Reader

It's clearly a contradiction. Companies like Google thrived on addictive behavior of users online. Now that Google basically is the Internet for consumers they want to crack down on online and tech addiction? Really?

What I've read in the article means to me that Google will toss away the responsibility to users by making them aware of their usage patterns. "We told them they need a break from consuming our apps, but they won't listen! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" Well, good luck with that, I guess? Consumers will buy anything, even that joke about "making consumer tech less consume-ry".

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It's only a contradiction if you think short term. Long term, it's clearly in Google's interest to engender sustainable consumption. People who are comfortable with the role their smartphones play in their lives are much more valuable consumers than addicts who are apprehensive over it. They are also much less likely to seek radical action which may damage Google in hard to predict ways.

It has not, historically, been in the nature of companies to think or act in the long term. People inside companies have incentives to bring short term profits, while long term profits benefits only the company as a whole, not any individual internal actor who may be positioned to make them happen. Therefore, they don’t happen, and large organizations basically always act only in the short term.

This isn’t true. There are many companies that make long term decisions at the expense of short term value. The reason it doesn’t feel that way is because those are the kinds of moves and companies that tend to fly under the radar, while short term blockbuster moves get trotted out as examples more often because the consequences, good or bad, tend to be more of a spectacle.

I don't think this is quite true. Companies which are privately owned, or run by their founders tend to have long term interests. People get tied up in the idea of their 'legacy', or move beyond the ideals of mere profit and want to affect change in the world and build a world more to their liking.

It's things like that which motivated Henry Ford to pay his workers are more fair wage than his competitors.

Google's founders still control either the majority or a large plurality of the voting stock, so they can have the company align with long-term profit motives, and sustainable existence.

Yeah, that's common knowledge but like most such knowledge it may contain a nugget of truth (yes, there are certain structures that reward shorttermism), it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny as a general framework. In studying practically all companies that has become successful at scale and sustained both success and scale over a period of time, you can find plenty of evidence of long term thinking.

Google in particular has shown itself to be perfectly capable of setting and following a long term strategy.

In the case of both Google and Facebook, the founders still have more than 50% of the voting rights (not ownership) and I don't believe that they are necessarily motivated by making another billion. I think they are interested in the long term success of their company.

It's called balance. They made it an official notion and released a few things. It's a tangible effort. I give them a bit (a bit) of trust regarding the wisdom needed to make a good "business".

I don't subscribe to the responsibility shift. Unless they make their notification and metrics bogus, hard to notice etc it's a good measure. And yes, let's make user "responsible" or IMO.. in control. The system informs me, I decide. You see this as a trick to get away with murder, personally I don't.

Also, unless they decide to retire from business I don't see how Google can improve the life of their users.

Well, in my opinion, the users actually are always in control. Don't buy shady and addictive stuff. Or throw away, sell whatever you've got. But, let's face it, that's not a productive solution Google would suggest, right? Making good and lasting tech is really expensive, there is no denying that. But I'd rather have that, instead of shady and addictive consumer products. The tech industry always fails to deliver neutral products. Every Internet enabled gadget has some shady twist and the respective companies don't give a damn if something fails to live up to expectations of consumer neutrality.

I kinda disagree. Your phone is a pocket computer that transfered the desktop usages, you didn't have that much time in your computer before so life took care of time constraints. "Ubiquitous computing" means neverending internet .. and this scales the problematic usages to the point people realize they've been somehow hijacked by their devices, something they didn't sense before. More and more articles talk about that, and now brands are trying to give users hints about unforeseen effects.

I disagree. Youtube might thrive on user's addiction. But not Google Search. I know plenty of people who the first step to answer a question is to check out Google Search, but I don't know anyone who's addicted to searching for the sake of searching. Compare that with people who check twitters, facebook or instagram the second they get a bit bored.

So what exactly is the solution you want? Do you want google to block the service after a threshold period of time.

Google is just optimizing, instead of trying to attract the most eyeballs, they are trying to attract the most eyeballs without you realizing that you are being attracted.

Internet companies, but Google especially, thrive on high numbers of short interactions that end in an ad click. Someone spending an hour in Gmail and then clicking an advert is less profitable to Google than someone spending 15 minutes in Gmail and then clicking an advert on 4 separate occasions. The ideal for Google is for people to spend less time on their site, but to keep coming back more often.

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