I occasionally play a perpetually-in-alpha AAA+ game (I won't name it to avoid the flames) that recently asked users to fill out a questionnaire. At no point did it ask how they could make my time spent in the game more fun or awesome. They did explicitly ask, "What can we do to make you spend more time in game?". The focus was clearly on quantity, not quality. This made me realize that, perhaps, I should stop playing this game.

Social media and games use all sorts of dark patterns and engagement bait to keep you clicking, but no concern is given to giving back. There is a complete absence of awareness that the best forms of entertainment enrich and then end. If they were to provide an amazing but brief experience that changes regularly, people would come back again and again. They don't need to spend hours on it every single day to feel they're getting value and justify opening their wallets. Doom-scrolling and spending excessive time grinding in games will only make you feel stressed out and unfulfilled. Customers need to realize this and start voting with their wallets for experiences that end.

We need to turn things around and say, "The light that burns half as long burns twice as bright!"

Now if only the dick heads running this complete rag could listen to the wonderful people who wrote that enlightened piece and let users unsubscribe: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rli0u9/how_t...

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.

I've written more about this here: https://klemenvodopivec.substack.com/p/recommender-systems-n...

The most important evidence was just internal research saying exactly what the plaintiffs wanted.

Google Chrome is trying hard to become a mandated technology, but hasn't quite succeeded yet.

Insert credit card and two forms of id to log on...

Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual users can (and should IMO) take. We should be helping our friends, family and neighbors find safe and health alternatives like Signal for comms. Build different networks that are actually social and not doomscrolling.

How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features.

Could we have a regulatory agency that keeps an eye on dark patterns and deals with them as evidence emerges that something is harmful.

We're going to get better and better at hacking the human brain - for good and evil and we're going to have to trade some free will and personal liberty to really keep the worst of it in check. The dark pattern bullshit is the easiest thing to regulate but I don't have a lot of hope for even that.

Found this document:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-...

Headlines (quote):

Instagram is an inevitable and unavoidable component of teens lives. Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to.

Instagram has become the ID card of this generation. It is the go-to tool for both measuring and gathering social prestige.

Instagram sets the standards not only for how teens should look and act but also for how they should think and feel.

Teens feel themselves to be at the forefront of new social behaviours to which there is no consensus on how to behave or cope. They sorely lack empathetic voices to whom they can turn for support.

Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in a compulsive behaviour that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.

The pressure to ‘be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.

Anxiety around what to post and the potential cost involved in posting the wrong thing means teens are switching from proactive to passive engagement with the platform.

This leads me to think about the idea of procrastination as a mechanism of gambling by the sub-conscious. A subversive way of "raising the stakes on the game" in an attempt to "make things a little bit more interesting."

(Not only in terms of tech, but also in terms of ways of living popularized by celebrities, thought leaders, etc.)

There is no market if you have no mechanism for price discovery, no meaningful alternatives, users are addicted, confused, and simply unable to switch.

Things WERE better before we combined skinner boxes with ad tech, before we preyed on users and applied every trick in the book to entrap them.

For example, infinite scroll is a product of a news feed and a news feed is algorithmic. What this produces and what it reinforces in the user is one thing but not really related to some small grey text in an Amazon Prime sign up.

So let's break it down. Some of the issues are:

1. Intent to sign up.

2. Difficulty in cancelling a service. This is what I call the "gym model". Easy to sign up, hard to cancel. This can be handled. California, for example, requires companies to offer online cancellation. Most other states don't. This is so much an issue you'll regularly find advice from people to change their address to California so they get that option. There's no reason why every state or the federal government couldn't do that.

3. Selling of your data. Not really touched here but it's going to be a big issue going forward;

4. Addictive behavior to maximize time spent on platform; and

5. What should we allow or disallow for minors. This is going to be a big issue. We're only at the start of the Age Verification Era (like it or not). But IMHO no company should be talking about how to maximize time spent for 13 year olds. And no advertiser should be able to advertise to minors; and

6. Not really touched here but I'm going to add it anyway. IMHO we give tech companies a free pass for algorithms as some kind of mystical, neutral black box. But everything an "algorithm" does represents a decision humans made to get a certain behavior from what training data is used, what they're optimizing for (eg interactions or time spent) and what features they create.

Platforms now essentially get liability protection from publishing content even though they elevate or suppress content based on what it contains. IMHO this is no different than someone deciding what to publish and being liable for it.

Social media is not making you behave in ways you don't want. On the contrary, it's giving you EXACTLY what you want. People want to doomscroll social media instead of engage reality, because 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.

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.