Engineered App Addiction

Addiction can be to anything. Its all dopaminergic pathways. Maybe half the idiots arent smoking anymore, instead they are taking selfies. What you are really asking is whether many companies have built themselves into perverse incentive structures with use of dark patterns on their consumers. Absolutely.

Are referring to Addiction by Design? This article reminded me of that bookhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-de...

It's not that simple. Capturing people's attention is now a well studied science. The addiction is engineered. The people who are addicted(or "engaged") to their media streams whether social or main stream need the same sort of help any addict needs to kick the habit.Since the addiction thus far hasn't caused lung cancer, driving accidents, violent behavior etc we can all continue to1. make money of it and2. tell the addicts to figure it out for themselves

It just reinforces for me that addiction is a human problem not a problem with technologyI know dang basically works tirelessly to not change the format in order to not induce those addictive patternsbut yet here we all are

so they can still make their apps addictive accidentally?

Please don't design addictive products. Addictions are only good for the supplier.

Wow. What you wrote sounds like a classic description of serious addiction. Something like an alcohol, drug, sex, or porn addict might go through. That shows the true power this type of product/service can wield over a person. These products are definitely designed to suck our time and souls. They are/were never made for the benefit of humanity, or whatever bullshit Zuckerberg and the other tech CEOs claim. They are designed to make us like the mindless slobs from Wall-E or the f

Considering that the darker edges of "app engagement" are trying to replicate gambling addiction, I hesitate to call users dumb when they don't act in their best self interest.

It's like a gambling addiction. All the apps have been designed and tweaked with user engagement metrics to ensure they are as addictive as possible and if the app fails it will be forgotten as users engage more with another more addictive app. Essentially they are dopamine dispensers. Scroll, dopamine, scroll, dopamine. A bit like a slot machine don't you think?

Not sure but anyway, 20 years ago it might have been accidentally addicting just because it was new, shiny and interesting. Today it's addicting because some people are employed full-time by large companies to make their products more addicting, and that's part of their OKRs and more ("Engagement" being one such metric that many companies try to increase religiously)