Hacker News Reader

Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

Corporations want to sell as much as possible to make as much money as possible.

Whenever the frequency, quantity or intensity of use drives up earnings, you are bound to get the same result: More "addictive" designs are better for earnings than less "addictive" designs. The difference (if any) between addictive because fun and addictive by design is irrelevant for this outcome.

What I will grant you is that the link can be more direct with ad funding. If a newspaper publisher knows that some very loyal subscribers only ever read 5 articles every morning, making that particular group read 30 articles would not drive up earnings.

But I think on average across all readers the link between reading more and higher earnings would still exist and hence the incentive to make the product more "addictive".

View on HN

The "problem" (for corporations) is that the process of signing up for a subscription is itself a major obstacle in user flow and can serve as a point where users "wake up" and realize what they are doing.

Sure, you can design your pages after the sign up to be addictive, but that wouldn't actually help you to get more subscribers - so there is not a lot of economic rationale to do so (unless you have other mechanisms to "monetize" already signed up users, such as lootboxes or in-app purchases)

In contrast, if you can use advertising to monetize non-subscribed users, you can sidestep that entire obstacle altogether. That's why there is a lot of economic incentive to design the free part of services to be addictive, as long as there is advertising.

I don't get it. Why do you think that it doesn't make sense for subscription based services to be as addictive as possible so that users don't churn?

Second, I don't believe that forms of "addiction" that have existed for centuries can be beaten by small changes to business models. See my other comment for more detail on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023484

Also, what would you do about the fact that ad funded services for lower earners are effectively subsidised by higher earners? If you ban the subsidised services, you are causing a massive regressive change to the availability of information and entertainment.

It's the exact opposite of "democratization".

> If a newspaper publisher knows that some very loyal subscribers only ever read 5 articles every morning, making that particular group read 30 articles would not drive up earnings.

I think it's hard to say if that's true. A consumer might be willing to pay more for a service they use a lot rather than a little.

What I do know is that I can see plainly that advertising-driven services are among the worse offenders for creating addictive products and other revenue models generally provide healthier incentives to direct development.

The EU's general approach here is probably better than banning advertising since it diagnoses a clear problem, but leaves it open for regulators and companies to address it.

>What I do know is that I can see plainly that advertising-driven services are among the worse offenders for creating addictive products and other revenue models generally provide healthier incentives to direct development.

I can see plainly that this is not the case and I have given you a number of examples. But I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one.

>The EU's general approach here is probably better than banning advertising since it diagnoses a clear problem

I also prefer this to a ban because a ban would be incredibly destructive and regressive while this regulation will be merely ineffective.

> I also prefer this to a ban because a ban would be incredibly destructive and regressive while this regulation will be merely ineffective.

So what would be your solution to the addiction problem then?

This sort of "addiction" has caused moral panics for centuries starting with reading addiction in the 18th century. During my own lifetime we had this sort of hysteria about comic books, video games, TV and now social media.

I don't deny that it can cause problems. I remember a time as a kid when I was reading so much all day every day that I actually got depressed and lonely when I was forced to interact with the real world. I wanted to live in the story I was reading.

I also used to procrastinate a lot here on Hacker News. There's even a setting you can enable called "noprocrast" to stop your addiction if you want.

My wife told me she had trouble staying awake at school for years because she was reading novels into the early morning.

Some people believe that what we are currently seeing is something new that wouldn't exist without ad funded media companies deliberately causing it. My experience tells me that this is not true.

But to answer your question. I have no solution. If anything, the solutions may exist on an individual level - lifestyle, social connections, etc. Banning this or that medium or various kinds of advertising tricks will have no effect whatsoever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com