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Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

"They don't only build apps; they build traps," Lanier said, saying Meta and YouTube pursued "addiction by design," making his arguments using props like a toy Ferrari and a mini slot machine.

These are opening remarks, Perhaps we should wait until they actually present evidence.

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Have you ever used YT shorts? No further evidence needed, your honor.

My YT Shorts experience: absent-mindedly watch a few, eventually think "damn, these things suck", tap the "show fewer shorts" link to reduce the chance of absent-mindedly clicking on them again soon. The format, with all its annoying little stylistic cliches, is just too irritating to be addictive. (modern Facebook is even more absurdly un-addictive).

The first time I walked into a casino I wanted to vomit. I hated everything about it. The lights, the smell, the sound, every sensory input rubbed me the wrong way. If hell exists, this is it.

And yet some people have the opposite response. They get hooked.

I suspect it’s the same here. The tactics that are wildly addictive dopamine pumps for their largest cohort actively repel you and me.

Pokemon Sleep and Pokemon TCG apps (ran by two different companies) are very annoying with this. I had to drop TCG because it was much worse than Sleep with all the menus. The only reason I keep up with sleep is because it allows me to gamify my sleep and it honestly has a pretty good UI with its calendar view of my sleep patterns.

I suppose all "gacha" games use this pattern. I find it interesting that gachapon machines are so ingrained in Japanese culture because it is basically culturally approved gambling.

Then again, the West had similar with sports trading cards, which are less popular now. Then again, again, NFTs kinda brought this back for a bit with the randomized drops.

Facebook has figured out that I really like videos of people removing rust from badly corroded metal. If they don't mess up and show me something else, then it takes some serious conscious effort to stop.

dont authors of books build traps by that same logic? or do books = good?

nobody likes that argument oddly

Yes I’m eagerly awaiting the internal emails acknowledging the priorities of revenue over user health too!

One of the emails released from discovery already was about how Facebook deliberately trying to cultivate FOMO in teens, specifically sending mass notifications during school hours to make people not on facebook feel like they're being left out.

This is wild. I would've thought everyone working in the company implicitly knew what they were doing without no-one needing to mention it but I can't imagine someone being so dumb as to suggesting something like sending notifications during school hours in writing. Could you link to this?

Take a look at this (facebook saying teens are top priority): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

Heavily redacted document talking about the mass notifications: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

Here's reporting on this and other documents: https://techoversight.org/2026/01/25/top-report-mdl-jan-25/

HN discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46902512

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