I just wish there was a better way to measure "positive impact" on people's lives. Often the amount of time spent is used as a proxy for this, because it is much easier to measure.
In order to truly accurately measure such a thing, you would need to know (or infer/predict) someone's personal goals, and their progress towards their goals. This raises concerns with privacy, but perhaps it is a level of trust that more people will be able to give technology at some point.
The phone must have a direct link to our brain and measure our dopamine and serotonin levels. Thats the only way. As long as our hormone data is anonymized then there's no problem.
> Never before in history have 50, mostly male, 20-35 year old designers, living in California, working at 3 tech companies, influenced how a billion people spend their time.
This is an incredibly specific statement that wouldn't be true if scaled back a bit. The result of this seems to be pure FUD. I have to say what an incredibly biased piece. The attention economy did not start with the internet. This a cultural issue not the fault of the companies in Sili Valley. Take responsibility for yourself people.
I actually am very far from addicted to my smartphone. I spend very little time trying to digest information on a 6" screen when I can wait till I get home and digest it on a 4K display and able to concentrate on my work.
For me the most annoying thing is that other people expect me to be glued to my smartphone like them. They expect that I can be reachable at any hour, any minute, and always checking my messages. People expect that they can change venues last minute and I'll be checking my messages. People expect that they can be late 45 minutes and that I'll be okay with it because I can check my messages.
No. That's not the life I want to live. When I leave the house, I have a plan and I execute it according to schedule, giving full attention to the world around me, not the world inside a stupid 6" screen.
> I have a plan and I execute it according to schedule
This makes no sense. The single best thing about a phone is removing friction from the last mile and last fifteen minutes of meeting friends. Checking in and fine tuning last minute details is great for friendships. If someone changes venues on you, consider that maybe it accommodated the needs of other members of the group. If someone is late, it's not a problem unless it is a pattern. If it's a pattern, then you know how to plan around it or avoid that friend
Sure, you're totally right. Except where you started your post with "This makes no sense." We all have different social requirements. For some people and in some situations it's awesome to be able to change things ad hoc, for other people and for other situations that just causes stress and discomfort.
As another replier said, everyone has different needs.
> Checking in and fine tuning last minute details is great for friendships.
I hate this culture of "checking in". If we agree to meet at place X and time T, is it so difficult to just ... actually be there? I remember the life in the pre-smartphone days when things were just that simple.
Also, when arranging to meet at a place, I am usually specific. Like, "meet me at the train station in front of the inside entrance to Starbucks at 8:20a". That completely eliminates the need for the stupid rounds of "where are you? can you hear me?" at the actual meeting time.
> If someone changes venues on you, consider that maybe it accommodated the needs of other members of the group.
What about my needs, which are to concentrate on what I'm doing for the day instead of being glued to my smartphone worrying if the time and place has changed? What if I planned a hike for the day and am without reception? What if I'm on the way, biking or driving, and don't want to look at my phone for safety reasons? What if I'm out of battery but still running according to schedule?
In general I consider it disrespectful to change venues last minute, unless someone physically present at the old venue, or a sign is posted is there to inform people who did not see the change of venue. If it's a group of friends meeting at a restaurant that closed, is dietary-wise unsuitable, or something like that, I'd rather just gather everyone at the pre-specified venue first, and then find an alternate venue together.
I've had friends call off a meeting because "I wasn't responding on the phone." Moron I'm driving or riding my bike of course I'm not responding. And you didn't call me so I couldn't tell you that, since you're afraid of talking to people over the phone.
My motorcycle is set up for hands free operation but phones still generally assume you have a screen active and shift into screen mode and then accept touches in my pocket which makes me pull over and fix the phone. Or simple shit like google not knowing how to "read hangouts" or "send hangout" but able to text. You can tell it's definitely an afterthought feature. I've spent some time getting that all configured but it's not ideal and doens't really survive new phones.
I agree and I think the fact that you're getting downvoted stems from the fact that HackerNews is probably not particularly full of social butterflies.
>Instead of people using technology to magnify their lives, they are confining their lives to their phone.
I just love it how people jump to conclusions about what is going on with other people, based on cursory observation.
I doubt your conclusions are very accurate. I suspect many of the people you see engaged with their phones are enriching their real lives, not just the life in the phone, but the life outside of the phone, by connecting with friends, arranging IRL meetings, and learning.
The guy in the video was doing this to a pathological degree... projecting his own unexamined intuitions as facts about other people.
>I just love it how people jump to conclusions about what is going on with other people, based on cursory observation.
If by "cursory" you mean "many years of close, and 24x7 observation, including of close relatives and friends", then what's not to love?
It's not like people saying that are some tourists to Earth that have just some short-term cursory relationship with the "other people".
At some point, there's enough observation to "jump to conclusions" about what is going on with other people.
The alternative is a kind of solipsism, as if we cannot say anything and make generalizations of what we see people do ever, and can only speak for ourselves.
As if everybody else is some unique snowflake that one needs to study meticulously to draw conclusions from their behavior.
Or as if somehow there's some inner difference that makes their outward behavior (e.g. glued to a screen all the time, even in the most intimate situations) unfit to draw conclusions from ("Yeah, this person has his eyes glued to some BS mobile app while just 10 meters in front of them there's fireworks and naked people running around and Kanye jamming with Bruce Springsteen, KISS, Aphex Twin and Keith Jarrett on stage, but you cannot say that they're oblivious to their surroundings -- in actuality said person totally enjoys and absorbs whats going on around them").
We should be able to call a spade a space, and masses of tourists with their phones out snapping pictures of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre as uncultivated idiots.
There's obviously a huge amount of people addicted to their phones, and many people on HN profit off of them so they refuse to admit it.
However this romantic idea that without phones people would be living vivid moments to the fullest also needs to die. Lets not romanticize the lived experience of a boring commute as a sensory roller-coaster just to score a few points against people glued to their phones.
People who make arbitrary distinctions in the book/e-reader/smartphone spectrum are just wrong. Many people use their phones productively during their commutes.
When I lived in Vancouver, I'm sure many people mistook me for a Candy Crusher or Facebook Scroller, but I was actually learning japanese.
>However this romantic idea that without phones people would be living vivid moments to the fullest also needs to die. Lets not romanticize the lived experience of a boring commute as a sensory roller-coaster just to score a few points against people glued to their phones.
No, but the problem is that people don't just do that on "boring commutes", but screen-staring increasingly encroaches other parts of life, from concerts to dates.
While at it, let's also lay to death the idea that all eras/decades/periods are the same, and everything a society does, from norms to arts, is either "the best it has ever been" or "the same as it always was", and anyone complaining is only romanticizing.
There are peaks and valleys, progress and regression, in lots of social norms and output, and its worth to point them out.
I mean, even when it was fashionable, they probably already suspected that the mule haircut was a bad idea...
Man I was in the Louve in 2001 and people were snapping tons of photos with their ~200x128 pixel phones instead of just looking at the painting. There were repros for sale reasonably right next to the real photo. Also that painting is impossible to see well due to the protection glass and there are so many better paintings just to the left or right of it, which I sadly couldn't get a good look at because everyone getting their 8 seconds in front of the Mona Lisa.
Totally unrelated but I feel the louve is a massive misuse of space in a lot of cases. The room right before the lisa on one side is a massive long gallery with around a hundred gigantic (8'x12' or bigger) religious passion paintings that no one really looks at with a few gems sprinkled throughout. The other side is a very high gallery with some great paintings 20'+ up in the air. It's like the louve has so many paintings they feel it just all has to be out on display without thought about how people will look at it (or at least that section is). I found the impressionist museum much better but this is 16 years ago.
The Louvre is one of those important institutions of mankind completely ruined by tourists. Unlike the Met or the Frick in New York, going in super early on a weekday doesn't even help. It's almost always packed.
> Instead of people using technology to magnify their lives, they are confining their lives to their phone.
No, you're just jumping to conclusions that fit your imagined narrative.
When I'm using my phone on the train, I'm going through my reading list or listening to podcasts. If I had a physical book in-hand, I bet you wouldn't jump to similar conclusions. Yet the activities are the same and the content is the same.
People who want to waste time will waste time. Back in the day people read garbage magazines to fill that same time that they now fill with maybe Candy Crush. Everything is different and yet everything is the same and that's what people fail to realize.
The difference now is accessibility. It's the 24/7 nature of it that I think is valid to critique. But the commuters who don't stare out the window now weren't staring out the window pre-smartphone era anyway. They were reading newspaper columns, gossip magazines, playing handheld games, etc. So I'm not sure your example is the best.
Back in my day, we happily stared out the window of our stagecoach at the countryside, and if we got bored, we made conversation or robbed a bank! It's interesting that the train, newspapers, magazines, handheld games, and phones are technology. They've all changed our lives in varying ways, to varying degrees. I love this stuff because it can make it easier to connect with other people. It can also be used in anti-social ways. Even now, we're on HN discussing this, and I'm doing it from my phone, as I'm sure some others are as well. We're no longer tied to occupying the same physical space to have a conversation, but a telephone also solves that. The telephone is synchronous, but written letters would solve that. Those aren't very fast, telegrams are quite a bit more involved, and computers used to sit on desks. Now I can walk through a park and read discussions like this, think about life, and still more or less carry on a conversation with other people from all over the world. It takes tons of infrastructure and countless technological innovations to make this even possible, but that's why I love technology.
Exactly. If you look at videos from the 60s of people on trams and buses, no one talked to each other back then either. There were always a handful of people with newspapers, magazines and books. By the 1980s, you'd see more people with Walkmans.
It's the same thing today, except we're wasting less paper, and we can have a bigger selection of music.
Yes there are additional bad things, like shopping apps/consumerism and free-to-play games that try to get that super addictable part of the market to give them tons of money for their shitty form of entertainment. But that's all in the choice of how you use things.
Exactly, there's a lot of social pressure, but at some point you have stand up for yourself. I refuse to use skype or any of these instant messaging bullshit apps as a matter of principle.
I agree with GP about not liking the ad-hoc instant messaging culture. Personally, however, I am all for using them for scheduled meetings where meeting in-person is inconvenient. I love technology, but not abusing technology at the cost of learning, relaxing, and getting work done.
Similarly, in general I don't take unscheduled phone calls. But I am all for scheduling calls and will make time, find good reception, and be ready to give my undivided attention when taking a scheduled call.
Yeah! I'm sticking with my horse drawn carriage! Down with these global warming inducing combustion engines vehicles! So much social pressure to use them. Why won't my work understand that it takes me 4hrs to commute by horse?! They are so totalitarian, requiring a car and all.
> I spend very little time trying to digest information on a 6" screen when I can wait till I get home and digest it on a 4K display and able to concentrate on my work.
This is so important. Not only are larger screens better for content creation, they are better for consumption as well. Virtually everything I do on my phone is done so only because of circumstance--I am not close to my home workstation, office workstation, or laptop. If I am anywhere near my workstation, I massively prefer it to a tiny-screened phone.
If anything, I am addicted to my workstation(s). But I've been addicted to them for nearly my whole life, so I'm not too concerned.
My phone is just something that makes a noble effort to fill that gap while I'm between home and work or otherwise away from the real computers in my life. But it can only do so much with that tiny display and limited input capability.
A routine refrain in my life is: "I'll do that when I'm at my real computer."
The closest I have been to a "real computer" in days is using Remote Desktop to connect to one from my iPhone 7+. FWIW, I seriously did some simple video editing using Premiere Pro that I happily admit would have taken me much less time and would have been much more enjoyable to do at the computer... but then I would have had to be at the computer :/. I don't want to be "at my real computer", and I definitely do not want to be traveling back and forth from where I am to my "real computer". I thereby make do with computers no larger than the 12" MacBook and am getting better at doing things on my iPhone 7+. Maybe one day I will never have to sit in front of a "real computer" ever again, and as far as I am concerned that will be amazing.
Anecdotally, I've actually been driving down the road (passenger side), middle of the woods on the way to the beach, putting out a small sysadmin fire while on vacation (from my Android phone).
I know, I know - supposed to be on vacation - but I was just sitting there. And I fixed the issue too.
To counter this anecdote - my iPhone 7 is my primary computing device. It's the computer that's with me the most, and it's the one that I use the most. Sometimes I'll have my real computer with me and yet I still prefer the handheld form factor and the swipe interactions of iOS (especially when I'm consuming, rather than creating).
It's mind blowing how many computing use cases my iPhone completely takes over for me.
There's some things that my phone will never be able to fully handle, like my full-fledged Lightroom photo management and editing workflow for example...but that's fine. Even some basic photo editing workflows are being handled by Instagram these days and the touch interactions are surprisingly efficient.
Have you tried Lightroom Mobile? It works pretty well for me. My editing is usually limited to cropping, white balance, exposure and colors, and I can do all of that on the phone.
He's absolutely right but how do you change the incentive from maximizing time spent to improving lives?
I find it unlikely that ads are the only problem, after all Netflix wants people to binge just as much as Spotify does and the customers have already paid.
Netflix's incentive structure is slightly different: they want their clients to enjoy the service, so that they will be inclined to subscribe to them in the future. Spotify, on the other hand, wants to maximize time spent using the service, which in turn maximizes exposure to advertisements and thus inflates their ad revenue.
For Spotify, binge use is the end goal, whereas for Netflix it is merely a consequence of producing an enjoyable service.
You're right though, it would be difficult to directly incentivize something as nebulous as 'improving lives' beyond providing services that do just that, since corporate incentives generally follow the money.
Well, grocery stores already do that. And it's hard to imagine what a 'healthier version' of an app, say Spotify, would look like. Unless you're suggesting they move to Netflix's business model, but that's a market niche that's already filled.
I confess that I can't see what gradient this ranking follows. It looks like the users get progressively more anonymous, except Reddit has the most anonymous users and it's in the middle; it also looks like the average use time per day goes down, except I have no idea whether that's the case.
BBS, Usenet and Email don't have ratings, likes or follower counts. I think the gradient follows less 'dopaminergic' services that don't offer rewards beyond the intrinsic content people send.
Ah, makes sense. But ratings and likes serve another purpose: determining which content is worth looking at. Snapchat aside, those services have the following they do because the content is tailored to the user: Facebook has their algorithms, r/all is filtered by 10M users, and so on.
But HN has an advantage in that it has a specific audience (the sort of people who know that Ycombinator is a thing). So the content is already probably relevant. Maybe that model has advantages we haven't fully explored yet.
I'm really happy this topic is getting some traction. Human well-being should be the non-negotiable constraint within the design process.
I understand the argument that people should be able to manage themselves but human nature is not that simple. People are never told that they are about to use a drug that has been proven to have addictive effects.
Receiving a like on facebook releases dopamine the same way smoking, drinking alcohol or gambling do. All fine in the right amount but dangerous when taken beyond a certain point. One of the problems for example is that people tend to use these substances more under stressful situation like studying for exams, dealing with a problem in your relationship, etc.
> I understand the argument that people should be able to manage themselves
I think that argument is made because people arent aware of the degree to which external factors can influence not only our behaviors, but our thoughts. Im sure the HN crowd is aware of things like framing and anchoring, but there are dozens of cognitive biases we are all susceptible to
First step is to gplv3 the entire stack as much as possible, and in the meantime while that seems impossible or improbable, the thing to do is to not use proprietary systems. LineageOS seems like the best comprimise for the time being.
Stallman was right. Either the program controls the user or the user controls the program.
This was covered in a comment already re: Netflix, but it can't be stressed enough: much of this is a consequence of free software services that need users to spend as much time as possible on the service in order to maximize ad revenue. If the software service required a subscription, then none of these issues are present. In fact, the provider company would have a fairly neutral position on usage, as long as costs are in line and the desired amount of profit is made.
It should give us pause when free software/services have a significant amount of design in common with the lottery and slot machines.
We have the example of services like cable tv where people pay for a service to be inundated with ads. So not necessarily the case. We have a pretty diseased relationship with the corporations which are suppose to serve us but instead prey upon us.
True. But in that case my point still stands: the cable company itself isn't particularly interested in usage as a profit center because it charges for a subscription. It's the networks that want more usage.
> It should give us pause when free software/services have a significant amount of design in common with the lottery and slot machines.
Paid software, too, and especially video games, and even more so if it supports paid DLC, can also employ similar tactics that exploit human psychology for profit.
Sure in the same way that many people have an exploitable "bug" for slot machines, opioids, calorie-dense foods, etc. It will take a long time if ever for evolution to catch up.
Cell phones were lurking in our subconscious long before they became real. Look at instances of magic books in old fantasy literature. For example in that wizard's house in CS Lewis's "Voyage of the Dawn Treader". And magic mirrors too.
Given that, it's like we hungered for them all along. They click into us like a lego brick.
Also, I see "employers" demanding that their "employees" be accessible via cellphone basically all reasonable waking hours. So it has us by the wallet now.
A newspaper prints articles most likely to consume your time (that's why you buy them). TV channels produce programs you're most likely to watch, and arrange them in such a way that your most likely to continue watching (damn HBO producing quality content so I'm more likely to watch it).
Don't pretend companies are forcing you to look at your phone all the time. Take responsibility for your own actions, and choose not to stare at your phone if you don't want to.
Should we praise the most boring magazine on the stand for not wanting to grab our attention? All hail Drying Paint Weekly, for they are the true guardians of my attention -- producing content so boring that's there's no chance of me getting suckered in!
You're right, other mediums employ whatever tactics they can to keep our attention. I think the key differences here are that we have our phones with us all of the time, and the phones have the ability to interrupt whatever we're doing. The point being highlighted in this video, whether you think it's a good thing or a bad thing, is that those two things are being exploited to make us addicted to looking at our phones.
I think everybody is in favour of interesting articles and engaging content - I think what this guy is against is the cheap tactics being used at the moment to make you check your phone regardless of the quality of the content you're checking.
I somewhat agree with this. Instead of shaming companies for trying to produce/show the most likely content users would enjoy, shame those who abuse the easy access to their users, e.g. this one: https://i.redd.it/bmkpt4orb3uy.jpg
I use a basic phone. Not charging it all the time is very convenient. But best of all, me and my friend don't know each other's numbers; and if we do, it gets invalid fast since we change SIM cards fast.
I think the best way is to get rich via trading Cryptocurrency and then be free from wage-slavery. Read physical books and eventually do something worthwhile like teaching in remote areas.
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65 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadIn order to truly accurately measure such a thing, you would need to know (or infer/predict) someone's personal goals, and their progress towards their goals. This raises concerns with privacy, but perhaps it is a level of trust that more people will be able to give technology at some point.
> Never before in history have 50, mostly male, 20-35 year old designers, living in California, working at 3 tech companies, influenced how a billion people spend their time.
This is an incredibly specific statement that wouldn't be true if scaled back a bit. The result of this seems to be pure FUD. I have to say what an incredibly biased piece. The attention economy did not start with the internet. This a cultural issue not the fault of the companies in Sili Valley. Take responsibility for yourself people.
For me the most annoying thing is that other people expect me to be glued to my smartphone like them. They expect that I can be reachable at any hour, any minute, and always checking my messages. People expect that they can change venues last minute and I'll be checking my messages. People expect that they can be late 45 minutes and that I'll be okay with it because I can check my messages.
No. That's not the life I want to live. When I leave the house, I have a plan and I execute it according to schedule, giving full attention to the world around me, not the world inside a stupid 6" screen.
This makes no sense. The single best thing about a phone is removing friction from the last mile and last fifteen minutes of meeting friends. Checking in and fine tuning last minute details is great for friendships. If someone changes venues on you, consider that maybe it accommodated the needs of other members of the group. If someone is late, it's not a problem unless it is a pattern. If it's a pattern, then you know how to plan around it or avoid that friend
> Checking in and fine tuning last minute details is great for friendships.
I hate this culture of "checking in". If we agree to meet at place X and time T, is it so difficult to just ... actually be there? I remember the life in the pre-smartphone days when things were just that simple.
Also, when arranging to meet at a place, I am usually specific. Like, "meet me at the train station in front of the inside entrance to Starbucks at 8:20a". That completely eliminates the need for the stupid rounds of "where are you? can you hear me?" at the actual meeting time.
> If someone changes venues on you, consider that maybe it accommodated the needs of other members of the group.
What about my needs, which are to concentrate on what I'm doing for the day instead of being glued to my smartphone worrying if the time and place has changed? What if I planned a hike for the day and am without reception? What if I'm on the way, biking or driving, and don't want to look at my phone for safety reasons? What if I'm out of battery but still running according to schedule?
In general I consider it disrespectful to change venues last minute, unless someone physically present at the old venue, or a sign is posted is there to inform people who did not see the change of venue. If it's a group of friends meeting at a restaurant that closed, is dietary-wise unsuitable, or something like that, I'd rather just gather everyone at the pre-specified venue first, and then find an alternate venue together.
My motorcycle is set up for hands free operation but phones still generally assume you have a screen active and shift into screen mode and then accept touches in my pocket which makes me pull over and fix the phone. Or simple shit like google not knowing how to "read hangouts" or "send hangout" but able to text. You can tell it's definitely an afterthought feature. I've spent some time getting that all configured but it's not ideal and doens't really survive new phones.
I would rather stare out of the window on the train in the morning than at facebook or twitter.
Instead of people using technology to magnify their lives, they are confining their lives to their phone.
I just love it how people jump to conclusions about what is going on with other people, based on cursory observation.
I doubt your conclusions are very accurate. I suspect many of the people you see engaged with their phones are enriching their real lives, not just the life in the phone, but the life outside of the phone, by connecting with friends, arranging IRL meetings, and learning.
The guy in the video was doing this to a pathological degree... projecting his own unexamined intuitions as facts about other people.
If by "cursory" you mean "many years of close, and 24x7 observation, including of close relatives and friends", then what's not to love?
It's not like people saying that are some tourists to Earth that have just some short-term cursory relationship with the "other people".
At some point, there's enough observation to "jump to conclusions" about what is going on with other people.
The alternative is a kind of solipsism, as if we cannot say anything and make generalizations of what we see people do ever, and can only speak for ourselves.
As if everybody else is some unique snowflake that one needs to study meticulously to draw conclusions from their behavior.
Or as if somehow there's some inner difference that makes their outward behavior (e.g. glued to a screen all the time, even in the most intimate situations) unfit to draw conclusions from ("Yeah, this person has his eyes glued to some BS mobile app while just 10 meters in front of them there's fireworks and naked people running around and Kanye jamming with Bruce Springsteen, KISS, Aphex Twin and Keith Jarrett on stage, but you cannot say that they're oblivious to their surroundings -- in actuality said person totally enjoys and absorbs whats going on around them").
We should be able to call a spade a space, and masses of tourists with their phones out snapping pictures of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre as uncultivated idiots.
However this romantic idea that without phones people would be living vivid moments to the fullest also needs to die. Lets not romanticize the lived experience of a boring commute as a sensory roller-coaster just to score a few points against people glued to their phones.
People who make arbitrary distinctions in the book/e-reader/smartphone spectrum are just wrong. Many people use their phones productively during their commutes.
When I lived in Vancouver, I'm sure many people mistook me for a Candy Crusher or Facebook Scroller, but I was actually learning japanese.
No, but the problem is that people don't just do that on "boring commutes", but screen-staring increasingly encroaches other parts of life, from concerts to dates.
While at it, let's also lay to death the idea that all eras/decades/periods are the same, and everything a society does, from norms to arts, is either "the best it has ever been" or "the same as it always was", and anyone complaining is only romanticizing.
There are peaks and valleys, progress and regression, in lots of social norms and output, and its worth to point them out.
I mean, even when it was fashionable, they probably already suspected that the mule haircut was a bad idea...
Totally unrelated but I feel the louve is a massive misuse of space in a lot of cases. The room right before the lisa on one side is a massive long gallery with around a hundred gigantic (8'x12' or bigger) religious passion paintings that no one really looks at with a few gems sprinkled throughout. The other side is a very high gallery with some great paintings 20'+ up in the air. It's like the louve has so many paintings they feel it just all has to be out on display without thought about how people will look at it (or at least that section is). I found the impressionist museum much better but this is 16 years ago.
At least it's better than Versailles...
No, you're just jumping to conclusions that fit your imagined narrative.
When I'm using my phone on the train, I'm going through my reading list or listening to podcasts. If I had a physical book in-hand, I bet you wouldn't jump to similar conclusions. Yet the activities are the same and the content is the same.
People who want to waste time will waste time. Back in the day people read garbage magazines to fill that same time that they now fill with maybe Candy Crush. Everything is different and yet everything is the same and that's what people fail to realize.
The difference now is accessibility. It's the 24/7 nature of it that I think is valid to critique. But the commuters who don't stare out the window now weren't staring out the window pre-smartphone era anyway. They were reading newspaper columns, gossip magazines, playing handheld games, etc. So I'm not sure your example is the best.
It's the same thing today, except we're wasting less paper, and we can have a bigger selection of music.
Yes there are additional bad things, like shopping apps/consumerism and free-to-play games that try to get that super addictable part of the market to give them tons of money for their shitty form of entertainment. But that's all in the choice of how you use things.
Similarly, in general I don't take unscheduled phone calls. But I am all for scheduling calls and will make time, find good reception, and be ready to give my undivided attention when taking a scheduled call.
This is so important. Not only are larger screens better for content creation, they are better for consumption as well. Virtually everything I do on my phone is done so only because of circumstance--I am not close to my home workstation, office workstation, or laptop. If I am anywhere near my workstation, I massively prefer it to a tiny-screened phone.
If anything, I am addicted to my workstation(s). But I've been addicted to them for nearly my whole life, so I'm not too concerned.
My phone is just something that makes a noble effort to fill that gap while I'm between home and work or otherwise away from the real computers in my life. But it can only do so much with that tiny display and limited input capability.
A routine refrain in my life is: "I'll do that when I'm at my real computer."
I know, I know - supposed to be on vacation - but I was just sitting there. And I fixed the issue too.
How is that not amazing already??
It's mind blowing how many computing use cases my iPhone completely takes over for me.
There's some things that my phone will never be able to fully handle, like my full-fledged Lightroom photo management and editing workflow for example...but that's fine. Even some basic photo editing workflows are being handled by Instagram these days and the touch interactions are surprisingly efficient.
I find it unlikely that ads are the only problem, after all Netflix wants people to binge just as much as Spotify does and the customers have already paid.
For Spotify, binge use is the end goal, whereas for Netflix it is merely a consequence of producing an enjoyable service.
You're right though, it would be difficult to directly incentivize something as nebulous as 'improving lives' beyond providing services that do just that, since corporate incentives generally follow the money.
Snapchat -> Facebook -> Reddit -> Hacker News -> BBS (Bulletin Board Systems)
But HN has an advantage in that it has a specific audience (the sort of people who know that Ycombinator is a thing). So the content is already probably relevant. Maybe that model has advantages we haven't fully explored yet.
I understand the argument that people should be able to manage themselves but human nature is not that simple. People are never told that they are about to use a drug that has been proven to have addictive effects.
Receiving a like on facebook releases dopamine the same way smoking, drinking alcohol or gambling do. All fine in the right amount but dangerous when taken beyond a certain point. One of the problems for example is that people tend to use these substances more under stressful situation like studying for exams, dealing with a problem in your relationship, etc.
I think that argument is made because people arent aware of the degree to which external factors can influence not only our behaviors, but our thoughts. Im sure the HN crowd is aware of things like framing and anchoring, but there are dozens of cognitive biases we are all susceptible to
Stallman was right. Either the program controls the user or the user controls the program.
The Battery Usage statistics on iOS are also helpful, if not as granular.
Once people have awareness of how they spend their time it becomes easier to make an informed decision.
It should give us pause when free software/services have a significant amount of design in common with the lottery and slot machines.
Paid software, too, and especially video games, and even more so if it supports paid DLC, can also employ similar tactics that exploit human psychology for profit.
Given that, it's like we hungered for them all along. They click into us like a lego brick.
Also, I see "employers" demanding that their "employees" be accessible via cellphone basically all reasonable waking hours. So it has us by the wallet now.
A newspaper prints articles most likely to consume your time (that's why you buy them). TV channels produce programs you're most likely to watch, and arrange them in such a way that your most likely to continue watching (damn HBO producing quality content so I'm more likely to watch it).
Don't pretend companies are forcing you to look at your phone all the time. Take responsibility for your own actions, and choose not to stare at your phone if you don't want to.
Should we praise the most boring magazine on the stand for not wanting to grab our attention? All hail Drying Paint Weekly, for they are the true guardians of my attention -- producing content so boring that's there's no chance of me getting suckered in!
I think everybody is in favour of interesting articles and engaging content - I think what this guy is against is the cheap tactics being used at the moment to make you check your phone regardless of the quality of the content you're checking.
I think the best way is to get rich via trading Cryptocurrency and then be free from wage-slavery. Read physical books and eventually do something worthwhile like teaching in remote areas.