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Ask HN: How do you end an industry?

6 points by ponderatul ↗ HN
Or better yet, how do you build another to displace it?

I'm looking specifically at the ones that prey on human "bugs" - casino, betting, but especially porn.

Maybe not even end an industry, but place some ethical limits, such as when someone starts harming himself you don't let him ruin his/her life, or when other people are exploited (i.e. human trafficking).

Has anyone had similar curiosities?

10 comments

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ej_san
Interesting question

We know how to disrupt an industry (paper maps->google map, cd music -> spotify, etc) but to "end" a business means to reroute a human need/weakness toward something better (healthier, creative, etc)

In my country, the Slow Food Movement by Carlo Petrini successfully "ended" the Fast Food industry in the 80', by promoting the culture of good food.

As we're living times of technological solutions, I'd invest my time building an artificial mentor, a conscious entity that learns ethics from us and helps us to make good use of our life.

ej

ponderatul
I guess that's what I'm going for... disruption, but with a positive effect to society.
SHOwnsYou
This is a very disturbing question. Why do you want control over other people, especially with regard to casinos, betting, and porn? All of those are consensual indulgences.

What is an ethical limit and who decides where the line is drawn?

ponderatul
Those are great questions. For one, I think companies in these industries have so much data on individual usage, that they could potentially draw some ethical limit.

For example in the case of casinos and gambling, when one enters the addiction phase and takes unnecessary risks we could be nudged, at least, towards no ruining his life.

partisan
How would that work, exactly? I imagine you could extend the concept to anything that humans do in excess, which is just about everything. And then you would be monitoring every aspect of their lives for that point in time when they overindulge. In the meantime, you would have all of their actions mapped in your database, enough to determine their likes and dislikes, their wants and desires to the point where you can do so before they know what they want. And then you can stop it before it happens. With a nudge.
partisan
Build things that help people do what they want to do. Don't build stuff to stop people from doing what they want. Unless they want to stop doing those things, in which case build things to help them stop doing those things.

If you are building stuff to stop people from doing what they want and they didn't ask you to, well then you are treading on questions ground. Unless you want to, in which case, well, build it, because you want to.

notjtrig4
Porn will always be displaced by technology that takes out the middle man. Right now premium snapchat stories are huge.
paulcole
> I'm looking specifically at the ones that prey on human "bugs" - casino, betting, but especially porn.

These have existed since the beginning of humans. Would be easier to just end people instead.

muzani
The habit loop: cue (trigger) > routine > reward.

You can't easily change the cue and reward, but you can change the routine.

Cues can be really tricky. Something like pornography is rarely triggered by horniness. It's often things like fatigue, stress, being alone in a room, seeing someone in a certain type of clothing.

Reward can also be very tricky. For pornography, it's often an orgasm. For gambling, it's winning money. It's not easy to replace these rewards with say, a game.

What you can do is change the routine easily. For example, someone triggered to look at porn might instead look for his wife. Someone triggered to gamble could trade stocks or cryptocurrency instead.

There's also always been a "boredom" black hole that has been displaced by newspaper, TV, IRC, Netflix, forums, Facebook, Reddit and so on. These things run on the same cue/routine and are easy to displace.