Comment by qop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qop | Hacker News Reader

I was an alcoholic for over a decade before I found my recovery.

But I couldn't turn around and tell a distilleryman that he has to brew his liquor a certain way.

Maybe the world would be a better place without booze. I would've had an easier childhood, maybe. I don't think addiction is necessarily the fault of production.

There are certain exceptions and scenarios, like cigarette marketing to minors, marketing in lower income neighborhoods on purpose, stuff like that.

Regulation is and always will be a very slippery slope. Even a small step down the slope can eventually compose into cataclysmic effects. It also makes it easier for regulatory bodies to make their case fallaciously once the first steps are taken. "You trust us with your credit card number, why not give us your location info now?"

I'm rambling, but the video game industry could be irrevocably injured by trying to regulate addictive content. Maybe that's not a bad thing, but we should aim for fairness when possible, I think.

Maybe awareness for individuals that are already more vulnerable to addictive behaviors? Like a surgeon general warning or something.

Alcohol poisons the body, so there are natural limits to how much one can drink. How much one can game is limited by how well one's meeting their own needs, eg. food, water, sleep, connection, etc.

Point being alcohol probably can't be designed to be more addictive, while games can.

As a recovering information addict & software developer who has studied dark designs, I can confirm people are intentionally making things with the intention of creating addicted customers. Information and gaming of various types is also freely available at most libraries, not to mention on all smartphones.

Information & games are way more ubiquitously available than alcohol. They're not comparable & recovery for behavior addictions that don't contribute to social skills the way substance addictions often do can be a bit more complex. Substance addicts usually learn to navigate society well; behavioral addicts typically don't. Social connection is really important for recovery & requires skills the addict may need to develop. I know I had to do LOADS of work on connecting, as well as developing my emotional intelligence, since I started addictively avoiding my emotions around age 9.

People designing things to be addictive are absolutely liable to some degree.

So I've heard of dark patterns before, but wouldn't it be a logistic nightmare to try and describe, and therefore regulate, design patterns that dont actively injure users? I'm using injure to mean induction of the addictive behaviors. Design is something I'd consider very subtle, and with lots of moving parts.

Here's an example. What if Google decided that when you pull down for notifications on android, items originating from DoubleClick should be prioritized to the top, regardless of user settings? A lot of people who have apps that generate advert-ifications wouldn't immediately notice the difference but the effect would begin to work in their brains as that consumption impulse is triggered more and more often.

Or what if they decided that same thing for the lock screen notifications? Eventually you're fending off consumption impulses everytime you touch your phone.

These are patterns I trust independent users, like bloggers and columnists, enthusiasts, those sorts, to keep me informed about. I remember hearing about the search engine nuking years ago when it actually was committed. That sort of media is in my eyes, a decent way to inform people that they need to mentally condition themselves to subvert the patterns.

But many never become aware of these things, and of course those are the people usually more vulnerable to the effects of psychological conditioning in the first place.

I'd love to hear some moonshots about how to safely and fairly try and regulate something like design.

Pulling down for notifications is a form of addictive behavior in itself, much like pulling the arm on a slot machine. You might get nothing, you often get something boring, you rarely get something great. Perversely, they can taper off how often it pays off which makes it more addictive (deep instincts tell us to keep trying when we know the odds are bad), which is a pattern that's easily observed in a lot of games.

Sorting ads to the top is, as far as I know, not a mechanism for increasing addiction so much as a way to try to monetize it. It's more likely to run into anti-trust regulations than public health concerns in my opinion.

But as to regulation, it's likely to run behind the technology but it's not hard to document dark patterns and write laws against them, just like bait-and-switch and various con jobs that were well known before the Internet age.

My moonshot: end capitalism & figure out how to give everyone what they need in a sustainable fashion.

Disincentivize exploitation. Capitalism never got my consent.

I'm working on this by developing an understanding of human needs, learning to reduce the financial cost of my life, and learning how to ask for what I need.

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