Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused?

69 pointsswaptr35 comments

Have you (or your company) created a product, such as a toy or software, that led to unintended user consequences? How do you feel about its impact, and have you taken steps, like focus groups or educational initiatives, to address the issue?

View on HN

The developer of FlappyBird shared his thoughts on this problem: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/the-flight-of...

> By early February, the weight of everything – the scrutiny, the relentless criticism and accusations – felt crushing. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, didn’t want to go outdoors. His parents, he says, “worried about my well-being.” His tweets became darker and more cryptic. “I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ is a success of mine,” read one. “But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.” He realized there was one thing to do: Pull the game. After tweeting that he was taking it down, 10 million people downloaded it in 22 hours. Then he hit a button, and Flappy Bird disappeared. When I ask him why he did it, he answers with the same conviction that led him to create the game. “I’m master of my own fate,” he says. “Independent thinker.”

Interesting. It reminds me of Leif's reflections on his journey, but with an even darker tone.: https://www.omegle.com

This one genuinely didn't make much sense to me. My (conspiracy) guess is that Nintendo hit him with a really fat lawsuit (given the blatantly stolen art) and they came to some agreement that he'd pull the game if he could go out with a bang.

The dude was raking in $50,000/day. You don't just pull the plug on something doing that because of really mean and aggressive online comments, do you...?

He was from Vietnam. Suing someone there for copyright infringement is like suing a chinese company for stealing an IP. It is not easy and it is not likely to go anywhere.

Also, he probably got enough money to retire. If it did get $50k a day, he probably got more than a million before he pulled it. In 2014 Vietnam, that amount is probably more than most can make their whole life.

Heck, even in the US now, most people probably still can't make more than a milllion...

He made enough to live the rest of his life in luxury. And it wasn’t just online, the attention bled into his personal life.

> As news hit of how much money Nguyen was making, his face appeared in the Vietnamese papers and on TV, which was how his mom and dad first learned their son had made the game. The local paparazzi soon besieged his parents’ house, and he couldn’t go out unnoticed. While this might seem a small price to pay for such fame and fortune, for Nguyen the attention felt suffocating. “It is something I never want,” he tweeted. “Please give me peace.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/the-flight-of...

Moreover, you can’t understate the psychological impact. For comparison, the success of Kony 2012 caused Jason Russel (its creator) to have a mental breakdown and run in the streets naked. And all Dong Nguyen did was post a few cryptic tweets, then decide that after he made far beyond enough money for anything he could have realistically dreamed of just a few weeks ago, he was ok with making less money from then on (he still made ad revenue from existing downloads) in exchange for less attention. It's actually impressive how well he kept his sanity during the ordeal.

I remember reading something about how there was a lot of heat on him, because he was essentially accused of stealing the game and that's the real reason why he took it down, not because he regretted creating something addictive... not sure if there's any truth to it, but then again why else would someone turn off a money printing machine at its peak?

In 2004 my boss - I was a one man team technical business development at the Austria Press Agency - came to me and told me "our press release clients want to get better found in that Google".

At that time I saw it as a nice, fun project.

too my knowledge I was one of the first in my market on corporate state who took on this topic. which later came to be called search engine optimization.

I was definitely one of the first who gave corporate lectures, workshop, whitepapers, books about it.

20 years later we screwed up the internet. well at least the part of the internet that shows up in Google.

I France, SEO was already popular and we were already gaming the Google ranking algo. One of the big player in the game of SEO, abondance.com was registered in 1998 and we also have the popular website webrankinfo.com (registered in 2002).

> 20 years later we screwed up the internet. well at least the part of the internet that shows up in Google.

You're right... :(

> 20 years later we screwed up the internet.

But, you all got rich... right?

well kinda, I work as a Yoga Teacher now.

Yes, I created a leaderboard for programmers and recently found some people using it as motivation to sleep less, spending 18 hour energy drink fueled days coding for up to a month at a time. [0]

> How do you feel about its impact

Even though it's not healthy, I let it happen to a point. I reach out by email about the health impacts. Some people say, "I plan to stop at the end of the month".

> have you taken steps, like focus groups or educational initiatives, to address the issue?

I set limits to how long they can be on the leaderboard, and I reach out personally to those who overdo it.

My next project is wonderful.dev [1], where I promise to never email any dev users (we don't even store your email) and have a focus on usability even if it means slower growth. This is in contrast to most apps these days trying to hook users with addictive patterns, always competing for your attention.

[0] https://wakatime.com/leaders

[1] https://wonderful.dev

That's amazing! It's a really healthy approach, and even though it could easily be automated, it's impressive that you take the time to personally connect with them. By the way, I love your new venture and have already signed up. Wishing you all the best!

I used Wakatime, had to uninstall after I had the opposite problem, I realized I didn't really care about how much time I spent coding, and it had somewhat constant notifications if I recall correctly.

Back in high school, we had a pascal programming class. The teacher had a rule, no video games on the computers unless you write them yourself. I think he was being tongue in cheek, but I wrote a few simple arcade games, and he was true to his word. But students started playing my games instead of working on the assignments. So he said no games until you turn in your assignment for the day.

Not a very dramatic example, but it made me so proud that I decided then and there on the career path I'm still on today.

That's such a fun story! I'm really impressed. Do you happen to still have any of those games around by any chance?

No! I'm super bummed. I had them burned to CD, but then a hot texas summer destroyed the CD. Although, like the cartoons I enjoyed as a child, my games are probably better off being remembered than actually re-read as an experienced software engineer. ;-)

We had something similar back in 95. We had to write a LOGO program first if we wanted to play Dangerous Dave, Paratrooper, or Prince of Persia.

Not so much addiction but worrying misuse. My heads-up on the whole smart-tech and human behaviour crisis happened very early. About 2014 we were at RJDJ pioneering reactive music and audio games. Two products, gave me serious worry. One was a zombie hunting game, possibly one of the first ever geo-location mobile games way before Pokemon etc. It used audio only and put the player into an immersive horror survival landscape. Invisible zombies out there in the world would converge on you to do battle. The accelerometer controlled virtual weapons with swishing and flesh impact sound effect, and also the music got super intense. People would be flailing wildly in the street, frightening passers by and sometimes letting go and smashing their phone (same problem Wii controllers had). Another one was a reactive music game for in car use that created generative drum and bass according to how you drive. That basically ended up with people taking stupid risks to get the music fired up.

Both of those were an early wake-up call for me that the shit we were playing with where digital meets reality and human behaviour, was way more than just "entertainment".

> possibly one of the first ever geo-location mobile games

The first geo-location mobile game I used to play (Xyber Mech) was from 2004; it was inspired by BotFighters from 2001, and Ingress was released in 2012 making a global craze, so I don't think you could be "one of the first ever" in 2014 ;) Pokemon Go, while certainly the most popular, was really late to the party.

As you get older it all starts to blend :) Would have actually been more like 2010 [0] as I remember the iPhone 4 was the next target [1] and my job was to get all the DSP running on it. But you're absolutely right, the idea of GPS games is way, way older. Some of the team then were into "geocashing" sort of games and that's what inspired the musical zombies thing. IIRC they didn't all use "smartphones" either because not all models had GPS then.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RjDj [1] https://www.iphonelife.com/content/evolution-iphone-every-mo...

Ah man, I love the RJDJ apps! I keep an ancient iPod touch around just because it has some of them on it. :)

Around 2014 my company (a service provider for big enterprise, mostly telecom) was tasked with building dashboards for their operation center[1]. Think Nasa control centers, dark room with a bunch of people looking at monitors and a big array of TVs in the front.

They really liked the dashboards so we were tasked to build some more visualizations for them, one of which was a google-maps visualization of all the antennas with active alarms/errors and the field technicians they had in the country who went to fix those antennas. They had all the GPS info in their database from the technicians company-issued phone, but couldn't see it.

The people in the operation center said the biggest problem they had was technicians pretending or taking a long time to go to the antennas. The technicians apparently often stopped for 1-2 hour breaks at coffee shops[2]. They wanted to be able to track them live so they could see if they were actually working.

After a few months that map visualization got so popular that the COO of the org came directly to us (we had no interaction with him beforehand). He tasked us to build some dashboards to be used exclusively by him. He claimed that the biggest issue he had was people from lower layers hiding information from him and we, being a 3rd party, were trustworthy to give the right info.

This was very early in my career and I was surprised by how much cloak and dagger all the layers of the org treated each other. That telco was a massive company, sometimes I wonder if they still use the dashboards we built.

We used to joke that we probably got a lot of people fired. In retrospect that was the whole goal to begin with, but we didn't realize before we delivered those projects.

[1]: They had an array of 3 by 2 1080p 42'' TVs (6 total) in which they would put our dashboards on. The TVs were arranged as a single external monitor on their operations center. Being a single web application we had a lot of performance problems trying to render one browser tab in a 6k display in 2014.

[2]: Another big issue was a technician would claim that the weather was bad and they couldn't climb the antenna for safety reasons. So we added weather information to that map visualization.

Halfbrick studios made Tank Tactis, a game prototype that they had to ban from their own office. GDC talk from 2013[0] covers it, which is summarized here[1], and also publicized by a 15 minute People Make Games video[2].

[0]: https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-01-tank-tactics-the-prototy...

[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-01-tank-tactics-the-prototy...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOYbR-Q_4Hs

I created a backend for a mobile game once. It was one of those typical mobile "get hooked" clones, with loot boxes, hard & soft currencies, the works. It was created to promote a sports club, one of the really big ones. I was mainly just programming other people's ideas (if I wanted to write a game it certainly wouldn't be something like that), but they needed help parameterizing loot chances and stuff like that, and I eagerly helped - I wrote mathematical formulas that fitted their descriptions & presented it to them and it was quite fun as opposed to the usual business software "data goes from A to B" boring crap.

At a certain point we had a tournament. The prize was surprisingly rich, the club gave something quite rare and unique. So people really played! We would watch on those fancy Grafana charts I programmed how people would play night and day. I wrote an SQL query that would track the habits of the top 3 players specifically and we would comment on the few breaks in their gaming spree: "food", "power nap", "ahah, toilet break!". For an entire week. They slept an hour here and an hour there, otherwise they played. I sure hope the poor bastard who won really got their memorabilia.

The game stopped soon after that, the club decided to ditch it (for whatever reason, my employer said it was club politics but who knows). I was a bit surprised at myself that I didn't feel any really strong emotions about it.. I mean sure, the worst of it was when they were going for a real prize, but anyhow I never had a true "Oh no what have I done" moment, even before I learned the app would be cancelled. Not an emotional one anyway, rationally I do realize that entire mechanics and the tournament you could win by staking all your free time is not great to say the least.

While not addictive, I’ve made tools at work that people become dependent on. They were quick and dirty solutions to make things a bit easier than the manual process people typically did. If the tool broke for some reason, they’ll throw up their hands and think they can’t do the work anymore, instead of doing what they had done before it existed. They also won’t tell me it isn’t working, so I have no idea.

I really have no idea how to solve this. With one of the bigger ones, I handed it off to someone still in the trenches recently. He’s closer to the work, so it makes sense that he can see when it’s broken and be empowered to fix it himself. At the same time, he learns some new skills and reaches out to me when he has questions.

I built https://rockyai.me/ (chrome extension to chat with any webpage) for my personal use tbh but ended up putting it on the store for others to use as well. One of my friends sent it to his data who is retired and consumes a lot of news articles online. I see his dad using the extension a few times every few hours now to summarize things / get more background on stories.

so do you look at the users data?

I'd love to hear pgraham give his current thoughts on this aspect of HN, 15 years after this: https://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

Seafood Paella...

Yes.

Sinister just "yes". Is this a drug cartel? Checks bio. Oh no much worse!

Your creation led to younger me becoming a much better person. I learned when I was being a know it all vs Insightful or Funny. Probably the single greatest learning environment ever created. Yeah, probably would have gotten more work done without it existing, but I wouldn’t have social skills or know as much correct facts about everything. Thank you.

Would you do it again?

Yes netwrck AI chat platform.

Had to takedown some stuff

Looks like a fun platform. What happened?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com