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Comment by olefoo | Hacker News Reader

Is it the phone people are addicted to, or the media available through it?

Especially Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Twitter. All of which seem designed to cultivate obsessive compulsive behavior in their users with social proof, intermittent rewards and a builtin hedonic treadmill.

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Isn’t that a difference without a distinction?

If the headline were about television addiction would you question if it’s the TV set or the shows?

Watching TV stations was the only purpose of TV set, while social network apps are just one of many purposes of mobile phones. Many people do not use such apps, but still use mobile phones.

Social networks are only one of the problematic class of apps. Games, texting, news and some other app categories were also called out in the article.

So I guess I agree - the problem isn’t the hardware but then nobody really ever thought it was. I think that’s why my tv analogy works.

We didn't have these issues back in the early 2000s. Cause of price and the average person didn't use a computer as often as they do now. That's because there was barely anything to soon them then.

I myself spent a lot of time on the computer back then, mostly playing computer games. And I remember how everyone talked about how addictive and bad computer games were.

I remember skipping college classes to play World of Warcraft. Then my graphics card crapped out. So I skipped classes reading psychology books I got from the library. Turns out, my problems were depression and social anxiety, not video games.

I'm lucky that I didn't have issues like that. For me, it was just entertainment, nothing too detrimental. But maybe if I had a computer in my pocket, it would have been different.

Absolutely. 99% of bullshit like "game addiction" is just a symptom of depression or similar, not some distinct phenomenon with a novel cause.

They can build upon one another. So because someone is depressed, they become addicted to something that makes them forget they're depressed.

For whatever reason I never got into games. I learned to program and found that to be fun and rewarding. Started in the mid 1980s. Back then, there were games for home computers and home gaming systems, but they were pretty lame. Arcades were still a big thing then for gaming. Kids would spend a lot of money in arcades, one quarter at a time. I never saw the appeal.

Hi there, millennial here. I spend hours and hours on live journal, flash game sites, and various web comics in the mid-2000s. I think I spent basically the same number of hours per day on the internet I do now. Just now some of it is work instead of teenage entertainment/dithering, and a lot of it is on a phone.

given that most phones are designed in such a way that running anything other than curated apps on it is fairly difficult the distinction is quite blurry.

The phones and the operating software they run are built to discourage anything that isn't media consumption or passive app use.

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