Dozens of U.S. states, including California, New York, Arizona and Indiana are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people’s mental health and contributing the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to the platforms.
I’m the last person who would leap to Meta’s defense, but I gotta ask: how, exactly, does one draw the line between a service being addictive and one that’s just well designed and pleasant to use?
I wouldn’t want this lawsuit to discourage quality web design.
Well designed service and addictive are completely different concept.
Addiction is not about how likely you are to use something and if you like doing so. That’s naïve.
Okay, I have no problem admitting I’m naïve on the subject. If I guessed wrong, though, what is addiction about? It’s hard for me to imagine getting addicted to something you aren’t likely to use and don’t like.
Sure, I can see people changing their mind about something once they’re already addicted, but that’s not the same thing.
You can decide to use something because you like it and have a positive value for you, and then end up abusing that same things because of addiction.
Facebook and other social media actively engineer their service to exploit our natural brain functioning in order to became addictive. On top of that, they also give well designed services which can be useful and fun to use. People decide to use those services because of that and ends up becoming addicted and using them for a lot more time. This has nothing to do with good design.
It’s like with smoking: people can find it a legitimate pleasure because of the taste, the social meanings and the gesture, but you ends up being addicted because of the nicotine, not because it’s a pleasure per-se.
Thank you! I was starting to wonder if I simply expressed myself poorly, but you explained what I was trying to ask about. Now I get it!
This is an oversimplification, but do you think drugs don’t feel fucking fantastic? Like, how would they hook you if there wasn’t something about them on the first dose? Facebook does it by dopamine hits and confirmation bias, but the pathways are not far off.
Did you mean to reply to me? You’re kind of asking what I’m asking. I wouldn’t imagine there’s a “first dose” if the website is shitty and annoying to use. Instead of dopamine, wouldn’t there be bad memories and unpleasant associations?
Sorry, had a long day and parsed your comment as the opposite of what you meant.
quality web design sure, but Meta/Facebook is also well known for using dark patterns to promote stickiness and engagement. They’ve built Facebook to be addictive and keep people on it.
What does that have to do with Meta?
I don’t have an account on any of their stuff, but even I recognize that this is a nice burn.
The more I’ve delved into free and open source, the more I’ve seen what isnt normal: stuff that isnt designed out of the box to be eye-candy. Seeing the complete opposite side of the spectrum, its clearer that Facebook isnt just eye candy, good animations, timely pop-ups, and perfectly targeted ads. It’s everything and more. The addictive tactics have created an emergent highly addictive quality. And dont even get me started on Instagram.
Interesting (and disturbing) contrast. I haven’t done any programming, so I appreciate the perspective!
There are plenty of information and even research onto the deliberately addictive design of Facebook.
Link: https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/trapped-the-secret-ways-social-media-is-built-to-be-addictive-and-what-you-can-do-to-fight-back
There are more and better articles out there that I have read but this is one that I can find right now.
I can’t give you a clear answer, maybe bots? Something is “missing” here on Lemmy, as somedays I spent as much as 8 hours on Reddit, whereas I spent 30 min at most per day here on Lemmy. It feels like Lemmy is mostly informative for me and not so much entertainment. But good riddance, I have so much more time to read books now!
Any good recent reads?