I took it a step further and just use my home phone now. Not necessarily to escape any sort of addiction or privacy issues of feature phones (though the latter does cross my mind occasionally), but because when you retire a smartphone, the majority of your traffic is no longer data, but calls and SMS.
I have also reached this sad conclusion about myself, and also others around me: my wife, my parents, brother, friends, and now I'm also starting to notice how my kids are slowly becoming addicted.
Having quit smoking and TV, I sure hope I can quite my smartphone too, and get my family also to kick the habit.
What saddens me is that the time my kids spend passively consuming electronics and software, is the time that I spent at the same age, learning how to actively create electronics and software.
Humans have an amazing capacity for addiction. It may be easy to say no to micropayment games, but "products that engender addiction" is a very broad and fuzzy category.
This is very true. A sad reality of market competition is that it incentivizes creating things that take advantage of human instincts and low level responses, which are frequently misaligned with human-intelligent want. It's a pretty tricky thing to address, obviously, but it's worth keeping in mind when deciding how to spend your own time.
Be careful – that's your moral stance, not necessarily the only moral stance. "Developers" don't "need" to agree with your stance, that's just what you'd like.
Would you rather someone gets addicted to Candy Crush or to alcohol?
I would not be surprised to hear about relationships being destroyed, people being crippled emotionally, living in shame and depression, etc. over a gaming addiction and the consequences, just as we know classically comes from alcohol addiction. So no, it's not a meaningful choice, I wouldn't wish either on someone.
IIRC I saw a Reddit post about someone's S.O. lying about hundreds or thousands of dollars of in-app gaming purchases, lying about quitting, etc.. I couldn't find it, but here's one about a person recognizing their own problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/StopGaming/comments/3oj8zg/spent_ab...
> I would not be surprised to hear about relationships being destroyed, people being crippled emotionally, living in shame and depression, etc. over a gaming addiction and the consequences, just as we know classically comes from alcohol addiction. So no, it's not a meaningful choice, I wouldn't wish either on someone.
There are very real and very severe physical effects of alcohol addiction, so the two are in no way comparable.
A Candy Crush addiction is most equivalent to a gambling addiction.
> There are very real and very severe physical effects of alcohol addiction, so the two are in no way comparable.
I didn't name any physical effects. I did compare emotional and interpersonal effects of Candy Crush/gambling to those of alcoholism, so unless you disagree with those specific comparisons, gaming addiction is by definition comparable, in at least a few ways.
I get your point, but I reject the GP's and your implication that gaming addiction is almost benign because it has no physical effects, or that we have to choose between two evils here, or that malicious marketers of alcohol (maybe tobacco would be a better one here) and deliberate designers of addictive games aren't both morally culpable for hurting people.
(And on the physical effects, I wonder if gaming can alter brain chemistry enough that there actually could be physical effects... I don't know enough about it. Here's something from the article along those lines: "According to Eyal, checking in delivers a hit of dopamine to the brain, along with the craving for another hit.")
> "Developers" don't "need" to agree with your stance
Which in turn is your moral stance.
> Would you rather someone gets addicted to Candy Crush or to alcohol?
I'd rather have those "receptors" occupied by things that make people deeply happy while they do them, and then not make them cringe when they think back to them. That is, I'm assuming there is a certain lust for life and growth which can get hijacked and misdirected by addictions. Sure, what is an addiction may not so much depend on the activity as why and how it's done, and of course I can't draw the line for others; but on the other hand, let's not pretend there is no such line, or that there is no problem worthy of discussion.
Agreed that it's my moral stance (I have lots more) but doctors for example take a moral stance as part of their profession, why shouldn't developers also do this? When software is creeping into all areas of endeavour, refusing to think about the moral consequences of one's actions is dangerous negligence. Shouldn't we have a crowdsourced Hippocratic oath for developers?
Of course a one liner on HN is not perfectly formulated but I think the sentiment is right.
I would rather people not get addicted at all. Alcohol I have nothing to do with, but the people who made Candy Crush are my colleagues and I feel they should have considered their actions.
This is really tricky when major products succeed because of their addictive capacity. So long as we measure engagement, getting users addicted is the holy grail.
I love this statement, it's so true. We self-determine what the internet consists of. If we're unhappy with our addiction, we'll invent a better drug.
I see more of the rifts being a surfacing or metastasization of things that were smashed down and normalized before: Families that clamped down conversation to head-of-household preferences, people curating their public image at events, sexist and bigoted beliefs aired in limited forms and formats. A lot of genies coming out of bottles all at once.
A negative of empathy is that it's often encouraged through an environment of abuse. If it's going down, does that mean that we're becoming callous robots, or that people are increasingly liberated in their everyday lives?
It's not an extremely complicated problem.
The solution is use a phone to talk to people (if you must).
That's what a phone is supposed to do.
You probably do not need all the other stuff.
It's all a matter of choice.
I try to have at least one day a week in which I stay unhooked. I will use the phone just to call family while somewhere in nature doing nothing. It clears my mind and helps me get over procrastination.
The first 5 minutes are the worst. Then you realize how bad it must be if 5 minutes feel like an eternity.
I've done a few experiments with myself where I went entirely without checking my phone and favorite websites for a week at a time. I found myself much more tired (either willpower depletion or not being stimulated as much), and my productivity didn't really increase.
After 4 years of iPhone and 3 years of Android, I got a Blackberry Classic in December 2014. A year later, I couldn't be happier; it's the first smartphone I've ever owned about which I've said that.
It's good for phone calls and e-mail. It begrudgingly plays host to a few native apps for Blackberry OS, but not a whole lot. If I really want to use something like Facebook, I use the mobile browser version, but it's enough work to not mindlessly reach for it. So, the device is good for objective work things and not that much else. Its excellent physical keyboard also makes typing less frustrating and cognitively stultifying, since I can do 40-50 WPM on the thing with nearly 100% accuracy.
But getting away from all the apps and the notification overload has made my life considerably less anxious, if not ideally so. I'm still very OCD about being on top of my e-mail, but that's primarily due to the 24/7 always-on nature of my business rather than being glued to the handset per se. Every once in a while, I miss the convenience of some Android or iOS app or another, but for the most part it's a nonissue, and the upside of the liberation definitely outweighs the inconvenience.
No, oddly enough; it's as snappy and responsive as ever. And I like the Blackberry OS UX very much, although it's clearly all deprecated now. The newest Blackberry product is the Priv, an Android-based phone.
I think this is why I've been so hesitant to switch back to an Android or iPhone now that I have a Windows Phone (Lumia 635).
The UI is well designed and super slick, the browser is crap but works enough to check most things, the selection of apps is crap but the main ones I need are on there, albeit are inferior versions (Kindle, FB, Amazon, Meetup, Podcasts), the alarms will make noise even if the phone is on vibrate (iOS and Android seem incapable of that), and I really love the Live Tiles and it's awesome for texting.
Also I got the phone for $30 so I'm nowhere near as paranoid of bad things happening to it like when I paid $450 for my Nexus 5. And yet it seems sturdier.
It's also waaaaay better and has lasted longer as a mid-range phone than the mid-range Android phone I bought a few years ago. That thing was super slow and buggy and a terrible battery life after six months, and just kept getting worse. My Lumia phone still acts just as smooth as it did on Day 1 and the battery still lasts over a day per charge.
But I don't waste time trying out a bunch of apps, and I don't get endless notifications, so I'm not constantly distracted by my phone.
I did much the same and had a pretty horrible experience with Blackberry after owning multiple Iphones. I guess i realized that there are just so many basic IOS apps that actually had value to my life that weren't available on BB. These weren't the time-hole apps either that the article talks about (Snapchat, Facebook, IG, etc). I don't use social media at all (unless HN is considered social, which I guess it is) - but having things like reliable GPS, a reliable camera, apps for my line of work, Siri, etc, was just too good to pass up for me.
I have essentially had my smartphone setup like that since I got the first one. It really isn't worth having all these notification disturbing my life.
It really feels like most of us who were early adopters, and therefore the people who other people used to look weird at because of it, learnt how to best use the devices as an addition to our life rather than its foundation due to sheer social pressure to not be considered "the weird guys".
And now the tables have turned, to put it mildly, and a lot of people are growing up with the tech and not enough people around them to point out all the experiences they're missing out on because they're servicing a notification manager.
I often feel that it may have been that we were already addicted to the internet, and thus were a little more inoculated to the newer version.
Conversely, a lot of people who didn't really like computers ten years ago are now hopelessly addicted to their phones. So maybe its just more practice, and we can look forward to more people doing this as times goes on.
If successful phone-based VR takes off though, we're all screwed ;)
> Even when I’m with my friends, I’ll go online to make a point…. I’m more at home.” An Ivy league–bound high school student worries that college is going to require “a fair amount of on-the-spot talking.”
Geez. Had a young lady at a concert last night not said something like this to her friend I don't know that I would have believed it.
Even I've noticed how often I use technology, most of it not on social networks, per se, but YouTube/HN are pretty dang close.
Sometimes I yearn to be able to sit and just read a paper book, but it's hard to ignore the allure of the Internet. Even if the majority of it doesn't enrich my life.
I waste more time than I should with the excuse that I'm keeping abreast of current events...
I'll share this with you...if you read a good book, a really good one--you pick the subject--you'll benefit from the raw truth that someone really bright spent a long time organizing their thoughts and presenting the knowledge they're sharing...
I cannot always say the same about what I stumble upon on the internet...
Buying a kindle and setting boundaries and goals (1-2 books per week, save interesting long form articles to kindle, no computer an hour before bed, no addictive games/apps on my phone or computer) really set my mind back on track after years of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Since making this change in late December I've read a dozen books, countless interesting long form articles, and significantly cut down my time on gaming and social media. It's also resulted in fascinating personal discoveries and helped improved my performance at work and music.
Most importantly it doesn't feel like work. I love discussing various findings from what I read with friends. And when you read an edifying book, it stays with you for a long time and helps form a foundation to keep building upon.
I keep an ebook on my phone, so in little gaps I can read a book instead of ending up on social media. This doesn't lend itself to many books, but I end up reading around one a week this way.
I also keep Reddit and Facebook blocked on my computer, and don't have the apps on my phone. It keeps me from habitually typing in the URL or tapping the app and derailing myself from anything productive I was doing.
A problem I have is finding good long form content. Usually I find things through HN and Reddit, but that lends itself to mindless browsing. How do you usually find long form content?
The most conventional way to find long-form content (i.e. novels) is probably to use a digital library. I can recommend https://openlibrary.org/ which is just an unbelievably awesome project that makes over 1 million books available free-to-download in a searchable catalog (most are public domain).
Depending on where you live, it's quite likely that your city's physical libraries also have an online presence. This gives you access to more recent popular releases, but at the cost that most of them have some archaic system wherein they simulate a limited number of "copies" that can be in circulation at any time and they mostly come in some format that requires a special device to read (e.g. a kindle, or perhaps a kindle phone app).
There's also Amazon.com, but with the same limitation as above. You're not going to find .pdf or .txt book formats in large stores or region-based libraries.
The author also mentioned fanfiction communities as a place where people tend to be especially friendly/supportive on the internet. From my experience, there are actually some really great self-published works out there (fan-based and wholly original) by hobbyist writers. And this avenue is unique in that it's especially easy to discuss the book with the author and with other readers online. You can probably find something of interest at http://nanowrimo.org/forums (National Novel Writing Month forums) or, if you identify with some fandom, you can consult http://fanfiction.net, though I've heard mixed things about the quality of the latter. Ironically for you, I find most of my long-form literature via some specific reddit book-sharing threads. It's actually the primary reason I even have a reddit account.
>argued that phones and texting disrupt the ability to separate from one’s parents, and raise other obstacles to adulthood
What 'separation'? What 'obstacles'? Do the parents have phones? Vague and unfalsifiable.
Just to put this into context plenty of people are addicted to such diverse things bread, cheese, breast milk, or thinking about physics. These are considered OK things. So any problem is to do with the addict or what the people around him think and not with the substance, medium or ritual.
The reason we're bothered its because of the "somebody think of the children"-effect. Also because people hold their phones up in front of them when they're talking or walking instead of attending to polite but boring conversation or to traffic or muggers or tripping hazards. This is a problem with the medium which will eventually be solved by further technological developments.
I liked the smoking reference. Years ago a friend explained that part of the allure of cigs was to have something to do with your hands so you can look busy and avoid awkwardness. I remember thinking a few years ago that smart phones are the new smoking.
Only they are more antisocial. When people smoke they talk.
I think this was worse a few years ago than it is now. At least in Silicon Valley. I'm seeing fewer teens glued to phones than five years ago. They all have them, but don't seem compelled to look at them constantly. Maybe this is just something that happens right after smartphones are introduced, and once people get used to them, they're not overused.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadThe codec used in wireline telephony is an order of magnitude better, so it starts to make a lot more sense; http://www50.zippyshare.com/v/sJG1ch4b/file.html
As for SMS, it's nothing Google Voice or any number of different services doesn't cover.
Having quit smoking and TV, I sure hope I can quite my smartphone too, and get my family also to kick the habit.
Would you rather someone gets addicted to Candy Crush or to alcohol?
IIRC I saw a Reddit post about someone's S.O. lying about hundreds or thousands of dollars of in-app gaming purchases, lying about quitting, etc.. I couldn't find it, but here's one about a person recognizing their own problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/StopGaming/comments/3oj8zg/spent_ab...
There are very real and very severe physical effects of alcohol addiction, so the two are in no way comparable.
A Candy Crush addiction is most equivalent to a gambling addiction.
I didn't name any physical effects. I did compare emotional and interpersonal effects of Candy Crush/gambling to those of alcoholism, so unless you disagree with those specific comparisons, gaming addiction is by definition comparable, in at least a few ways.
I get your point, but I reject the GP's and your implication that gaming addiction is almost benign because it has no physical effects, or that we have to choose between two evils here, or that malicious marketers of alcohol (maybe tobacco would be a better one here) and deliberate designers of addictive games aren't both morally culpable for hurting people.
(And on the physical effects, I wonder if gaming can alter brain chemistry enough that there actually could be physical effects... I don't know enough about it. Here's something from the article along those lines: "According to Eyal, checking in delivers a hit of dopamine to the brain, along with the craving for another hit.")
Yeah, that's why I compared it to a gambling addiction. Because gambling addictions are well known for the mildness.
Or a third option: I spend time helping build a society where the consumption of neither ends in addiction.
Which in turn is your moral stance.
> Would you rather someone gets addicted to Candy Crush or to alcohol?
I'd rather have those "receptors" occupied by things that make people deeply happy while they do them, and then not make them cringe when they think back to them. That is, I'm assuming there is a certain lust for life and growth which can get hijacked and misdirected by addictions. Sure, what is an addiction may not so much depend on the activity as why and how it's done, and of course I can't draw the line for others; but on the other hand, let's not pretend there is no such line, or that there is no problem worthy of discussion.
Of course a one liner on HN is not perfectly formulated but I think the sentiment is right.
I would rather people not get addicted at all. Alcohol I have nothing to do with, but the people who made Candy Crush are my colleagues and I feel they should have considered their actions.
I see more of the rifts being a surfacing or metastasization of things that were smashed down and normalized before: Families that clamped down conversation to head-of-household preferences, people curating their public image at events, sexist and bigoted beliefs aired in limited forms and formats. A lot of genies coming out of bottles all at once.
A negative of empathy is that it's often encouraged through an environment of abuse. If it's going down, does that mean that we're becoming callous robots, or that people are increasingly liberated in their everyday lives?
The first 5 minutes are the worst. Then you realize how bad it must be if 5 minutes feel like an eternity.
It's good for phone calls and e-mail. It begrudgingly plays host to a few native apps for Blackberry OS, but not a whole lot. If I really want to use something like Facebook, I use the mobile browser version, but it's enough work to not mindlessly reach for it. So, the device is good for objective work things and not that much else. Its excellent physical keyboard also makes typing less frustrating and cognitively stultifying, since I can do 40-50 WPM on the thing with nearly 100% accuracy.
But getting away from all the apps and the notification overload has made my life considerably less anxious, if not ideally so. I'm still very OCD about being on top of my e-mail, but that's primarily due to the 24/7 always-on nature of my business rather than being glued to the handset per se. Every once in a while, I miss the convenience of some Android or iOS app or another, but for the most part it's a nonissue, and the upside of the liberation definitely outweighs the inconvenience.
The UI is well designed and super slick, the browser is crap but works enough to check most things, the selection of apps is crap but the main ones I need are on there, albeit are inferior versions (Kindle, FB, Amazon, Meetup, Podcasts), the alarms will make noise even if the phone is on vibrate (iOS and Android seem incapable of that), and I really love the Live Tiles and it's awesome for texting.
Also I got the phone for $30 so I'm nowhere near as paranoid of bad things happening to it like when I paid $450 for my Nexus 5. And yet it seems sturdier.
It's also waaaaay better and has lasted longer as a mid-range phone than the mid-range Android phone I bought a few years ago. That thing was super slow and buggy and a terrible battery life after six months, and just kept getting worse. My Lumia phone still acts just as smooth as it did on Day 1 and the battery still lasts over a day per charge.
But I don't waste time trying out a bunch of apps, and I don't get endless notifications, so I'm not constantly distracted by my phone.
And now the tables have turned, to put it mildly, and a lot of people are growing up with the tech and not enough people around them to point out all the experiences they're missing out on because they're servicing a notification manager.
Conversely, a lot of people who didn't really like computers ten years ago are now hopelessly addicted to their phones. So maybe its just more practice, and we can look forward to more people doing this as times goes on.
If successful phone-based VR takes off though, we're all screwed ;)
Geez. Had a young lady at a concert last night not said something like this to her friend I don't know that I would have believed it.
Even I've noticed how often I use technology, most of it not on social networks, per se, but YouTube/HN are pretty dang close.
Sometimes I yearn to be able to sit and just read a paper book, but it's hard to ignore the allure of the Internet. Even if the majority of it doesn't enrich my life.
I waste more time than I should with the excuse that I'm keeping abreast of current events...
I'll share this with you...if you read a good book, a really good one--you pick the subject--you'll benefit from the raw truth that someone really bright spent a long time organizing their thoughts and presenting the knowledge they're sharing...
I cannot always say the same about what I stumble upon on the internet...
Most importantly it doesn't feel like work. I love discussing various findings from what I read with friends. And when you read an edifying book, it stays with you for a long time and helps form a foundation to keep building upon.
I keep an ebook on my phone, so in little gaps I can read a book instead of ending up on social media. This doesn't lend itself to many books, but I end up reading around one a week this way.
I also keep Reddit and Facebook blocked on my computer, and don't have the apps on my phone. It keeps me from habitually typing in the URL or tapping the app and derailing myself from anything productive I was doing.
A problem I have is finding good long form content. Usually I find things through HN and Reddit, but that lends itself to mindless browsing. How do you usually find long form content?
Depending on where you live, it's quite likely that your city's physical libraries also have an online presence. This gives you access to more recent popular releases, but at the cost that most of them have some archaic system wherein they simulate a limited number of "copies" that can be in circulation at any time and they mostly come in some format that requires a special device to read (e.g. a kindle, or perhaps a kindle phone app).
There's also Amazon.com, but with the same limitation as above. You're not going to find .pdf or .txt book formats in large stores or region-based libraries.
The author also mentioned fanfiction communities as a place where people tend to be especially friendly/supportive on the internet. From my experience, there are actually some really great self-published works out there (fan-based and wholly original) by hobbyist writers. And this avenue is unique in that it's especially easy to discuss the book with the author and with other readers online. You can probably find something of interest at http://nanowrimo.org/forums (National Novel Writing Month forums) or, if you identify with some fandom, you can consult http://fanfiction.net, though I've heard mixed things about the quality of the latter. Ironically for you, I find most of my long-form literature via some specific reddit book-sharing threads. It's actually the primary reason I even have a reddit account.
What 'separation'? What 'obstacles'? Do the parents have phones? Vague and unfalsifiable.
Just to put this into context plenty of people are addicted to such diverse things bread, cheese, breast milk, or thinking about physics. These are considered OK things. So any problem is to do with the addict or what the people around him think and not with the substance, medium or ritual.
The reason we're bothered its because of the "somebody think of the children"-effect. Also because people hold their phones up in front of them when they're talking or walking instead of attending to polite but boring conversation or to traffic or muggers or tripping hazards. This is a problem with the medium which will eventually be solved by further technological developments.
"It’s not the indelible record that Snapchat’s teenage users fear. It’s the sin of premeditated curating — looking like you’re trying too hard."
Only they are more antisocial. When people smoke they talk.