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an0malousyesterday at 2:30 PM1 replyview on HN

Every business wants you to be addicted to their products, whether it’s social media, cigarettes, video games, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, supplements, fashion, electronics. Even seemingly innocuous things like reading the news or exercising are often addictions, people are running away from their fears and insecurities. It’s a systemic problem in western society, removing infinite scroll is such a ridiculous idea in the face of a core societal problem like this.

My suggestion would be to look at something like the rat park studies. When mice lived in a nice communal space with other mice, they preferred regular ware over drug laced addictive water. I suspect people are similar, they’re not intrinsically prone to addiction, they’re just trying to treat psychological problems like fear, loneliness, insecurity. We need to attack this root of the problem, but there’s so much money in ensuring that people feel empty so they’ll buy shit to fulfill themselves that there’s no actual motivation from anyone with power to do anything. That’s why you get these dumb ideas for laws, they’re not enough to impact the businesses (who are the real constituents) but politicians can still say they’re doing something and something is better than nothing.


Replies

alastairryesterday at 4:24 PM

> Every business wants you to be addicted to their products

It simply isn't true a) that businesses are all as unscrupulous as digital media platforms and b) that most products even have potential to be addictive.

It's certainly true that most companies would like you to be a loyal repeat customer, but that falls a long way short of addiction.