I assume this is about dark patterns but can’t confirm as I’m faced with a cookie wall where I can select from “Manage” and “Accept All”.
I got a big "reject all" button just next to the "accept all" one, on mobile.
[flagged]
The point isn't us. You should know that. The point is the 99.8% that doesn't have our skills, and is forced into these dark patterns, by deception or psychological manipulation.
Cookie dialogs are the opposite, they are asking for consent up front.
Before they existed websites would just put stuff on your computer without asking. They’re literally a consumer protection.
Direct your outrage elsewhere.
They're better, but most of them use dark patterns to get you to accept all of them
I have no outrage, and for what it's worth, I upvoted you so your comment wasn't killed.
I think you're being condescending though, and missing the point.
Direct yours
Sure, making instagram as addictive as possible seems bad but I disagree with the framing a bit. Dark patterns get users to do things they don't want, that's why they get super annoyed at the design or the process or the outcome. Addictive apps are a different thing to me.
I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! The question is can you make a compelling case that spending time on it is harmful.
This reminds me of the TikTok ban that lasted all of twelve seconds.
I’ve been using the internet for longer than I care to admit, and I’ve never seen anything like it.
It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time.
While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed.
How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?
Agree. My first thought is most people in early days didn’t even want to start using PCs for work to begin with. The businesses generally had to mandate it. I imagine many people are facing this today with AI.
Well, you could look to the gambling market for inspiration and let people voluntarily sign up for a blacklist on that feature.
That would be a lot of extra work for the platforms, but I think the results would be interesting. It amounts to legislating that certain features have to be optional and configurable.
The Irony is that in order to read this entry I had to pass a cookie wall, which gave me only ‘Accept all’ and ‘Manage’. Then I couldn’t read it, because I had no subscription.
I'm no defender of engagement algorithms and social media (including upvote based algos and this site too)....but this is a ridiculous argument.
This constant push by the urban monoculture to turn everything into an "addiction" and turn everyone into a "victim" is a terrible set of ideas to put in peoples heads and is equally as toxic as anything they claim smartphone apps are trivially doing with UI design.
Apps are not physically addictive like cigarettes or alcohol and never have been.
And if you're going to argue social media preys on reward systems in the brain, this is also true about everything that humans do. Reward systems in the brain govern every single action we take, so everything we do can turned into a victimization by some addictive outside force.
Social media is not holding a gun to your head. People WANT to doomscroll social media instead of get out of bed and engage reality, because engaging the real world requires action, effort and social risk...doomscrolling is pure passive consumption.
If we're going to give people autonomy and freedom to choose how they spend their time, at some point we have to draw the line and hold people accountable for their own actions. Or we have to acknowledge we'd rather stay in a permanent state of adolescence and give full control of our lives to big brother.
Step by step I am slowly backing away from
any technology that I dont like, sometimes going to ridiculous lengths to bypass certain imposed aysmmetric requirements, up to and including abandonment.
Nothing in my house beeps.
My only online subscription is for web space.
At this point it has become fun, as I have stoped reacting, and am experimenting and planning ahead, while figureing out ways to increase my income, while reduceing my personal spend
> An internal memo found that 12-year-olds were three times as likely as 32-year-olds to stay on Facebook for the long term, despite the platform nominally requiring users to be at least 13; the memo concluded that Facebook “should consider investing more heavily in bringing in larger volumes of tweens”.
100 years from now the descendants of the engineers who work at Big Tech will be looked upon by their descendants with the same shame that people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco.
I don't think it will take 100 years, the world is already souring on big tech.
>people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco
Huh? Does anyone actually care any more? The kind of moralizing busybodies that spend their time shaming the tobacco industry are few and far between.
This is an outrageously dumb thing to say. BIg Tobacco knowingly sold a product that physically addicted (the only real form of addiction) its users and killed them.
Facebook is not that.
> Problem gambling (PG), also known as pathological gambling, gambling disorder, gambling addiction or ludomania, is repetitive gambling behavior despite harm and negative consequences. [0]
Addiction isn't just [chemical in blood stream] -> [addiction]. Addiction involves many steps, many of them in the brain, and many of those reactive to non-physical events.
Facebook ran experiments on on unknowing teenage girls to study how being shown negative content leads to negative mental health outcomes, which has lead to suicide.
> physically addicted (the only real form of addiction)
> Contrary to the earlier notion that addiction is predominantly a substance dependency, research now suggests that any source or experience capable of stimulating an individual has addictive potential. This has led to a paradigm shift in the psychiatric understanding of behavioural addictions.
dopamine, the little “hit” you get on social media sites or when you get a “ping”, has a massive role to play in behavioural addictions. and with behavioural addiction it basically causes the same stuff in the brain that cocaine etc does (very simplified explanation).
also, i’m a recovering drug addict. and i can tell you for sure from my lived experience that addiction is definitely not limited to physical stuff like drugs. xD
Gambling is conventionally considered addictive, but the user isn't ingesting chemicals. I don't think a physical/non-physical binary really stands up under scrutiny. I mean, aren't all addictions physical insofar as they stimulate the body to produce neurotransmitters?
Plus, smoking doesn't kill people; its pathological outcomes do. Similarly, looking at a phone screen might hurt a user's eyes, but it won't kill them; however, the decisions that user makes over time due to the effects of the subject matter they interact with might definitely put them at risk. And if aspects of that subject matter are deliberately amplified for their addictive properties, should platforms be regulated to control this?
>the only real form of addiction
gonna need a citation on that one, dawg
Depression is not death, but it is still a loss of life.
I assume this is about dark patterns but can’t confirm as I’m faced with a cookie wall where I can select from “Manage” and “Accept All”.
I got a big "reject all" button just next to the "accept all" one, on mobile.
[flagged]
The point isn't us. You should know that. The point is the 99.8% that doesn't have our skills, and is forced into these dark patterns, by deception or psychological manipulation.
Cookie dialogs are the opposite, they are asking for consent up front.
Before they existed websites would just put stuff on your computer without asking. They’re literally a consumer protection.
Direct your outrage elsewhere.
They're better, but most of them use dark patterns to get you to accept all of them
I have no outrage, and for what it's worth, I upvoted you so your comment wasn't killed.
I think you're being condescending though, and missing the point.
Direct yours
Sure, making instagram as addictive as possible seems bad but I disagree with the framing a bit. Dark patterns get users to do things they don't want, that's why they get super annoyed at the design or the process or the outcome. Addictive apps are a different thing to me.
I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! The question is can you make a compelling case that spending time on it is harmful.
This reminds me of the TikTok ban that lasted all of twelve seconds.
I’ve been using the internet for longer than I care to admit, and I’ve never seen anything like it.
It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time.
While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed.
How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?
Agree. My first thought is most people in early days didn’t even want to start using PCs for work to begin with. The businesses generally had to mandate it. I imagine many people are facing this today with AI.
Well, you could look to the gambling market for inspiration and let people voluntarily sign up for a blacklist on that feature.
That would be a lot of extra work for the platforms, but I think the results would be interesting. It amounts to legislating that certain features have to be optional and configurable.
https://archive.ph/3HkyR
The Irony is that in order to read this entry I had to pass a cookie wall, which gave me only ‘Accept all’ and ‘Manage’. Then I couldn’t read it, because I had no subscription.
I'm no defender of engagement algorithms and social media (including upvote based algos and this site too)....but this is a ridiculous argument.
This constant push by the urban monoculture to turn everything into an "addiction" and turn everyone into a "victim" is a terrible set of ideas to put in peoples heads and is equally as toxic as anything they claim smartphone apps are trivially doing with UI design.
Apps are not physically addictive like cigarettes or alcohol and never have been.
And if you're going to argue social media preys on reward systems in the brain, this is also true about everything that humans do. Reward systems in the brain govern every single action we take, so everything we do can turned into a victimization by some addictive outside force.
Social media is not holding a gun to your head. People WANT to doomscroll social media instead of get out of bed and engage reality, because engaging the real world requires action, effort and social risk...doomscrolling is pure passive consumption.
If we're going to give people autonomy and freedom to choose how they spend their time, at some point we have to draw the line and hold people accountable for their own actions. Or we have to acknowledge we'd rather stay in a permanent state of adolescence and give full control of our lives to big brother.
Step by step I am slowly backing away from any technology that I dont like, sometimes going to ridiculous lengths to bypass certain imposed aysmmetric requirements, up to and including abandonment. Nothing in my house beeps. My only online subscription is for web space. At this point it has become fun, as I have stoped reacting, and am experimenting and planning ahead, while figureing out ways to increase my income, while reduceing my personal spend
> An internal memo found that 12-year-olds were three times as likely as 32-year-olds to stay on Facebook for the long term, despite the platform nominally requiring users to be at least 13; the memo concluded that Facebook “should consider investing more heavily in bringing in larger volumes of tweens”.
100 years from now the descendants of the engineers who work at Big Tech will be looked upon by their descendants with the same shame that people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco.
I don't think it will take 100 years, the world is already souring on big tech.
>people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco
Huh? Does anyone actually care any more? The kind of moralizing busybodies that spend their time shaming the tobacco industry are few and far between.
This is an outrageously dumb thing to say. BIg Tobacco knowingly sold a product that physically addicted (the only real form of addiction) its users and killed them.
Facebook is not that.
> Problem gambling (PG), also known as pathological gambling, gambling disorder, gambling addiction or ludomania, is repetitive gambling behavior despite harm and negative consequences. [0]
Addiction isn't just [chemical in blood stream] -> [addiction]. Addiction involves many steps, many of them in the brain, and many of those reactive to non-physical events.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_gambling
Facebook ran experiments on on unknowing teenage girls to study how being shown negative content leads to negative mental health outcomes, which has lead to suicide.
> physically addicted (the only real form of addiction)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26318318221116042
snippet from the abstract
> Contrary to the earlier notion that addiction is predominantly a substance dependency, research now suggests that any source or experience capable of stimulating an individual has addictive potential. This has led to a paradigm shift in the psychiatric understanding of behavioural addictions.
dopamine, the little “hit” you get on social media sites or when you get a “ping”, has a massive role to play in behavioural addictions. and with behavioural addiction it basically causes the same stuff in the brain that cocaine etc does (very simplified explanation).
also, i’m a recovering drug addict. and i can tell you for sure from my lived experience that addiction is definitely not limited to physical stuff like drugs. xD
Gambling is conventionally considered addictive, but the user isn't ingesting chemicals. I don't think a physical/non-physical binary really stands up under scrutiny. I mean, aren't all addictions physical insofar as they stimulate the body to produce neurotransmitters?
Plus, smoking doesn't kill people; its pathological outcomes do. Similarly, looking at a phone screen might hurt a user's eyes, but it won't kill them; however, the decisions that user makes over time due to the effects of the subject matter they interact with might definitely put them at risk. And if aspects of that subject matter are deliberately amplified for their addictive properties, should platforms be regulated to control this?
>the only real form of addiction
gonna need a citation on that one, dawg
Depression is not death, but it is still a loss of life.
Wellll....
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/18/nx...