I was telling people last year (before the tide shifted against FB) that there will one day (decades away) be Big Tobacco style litigation by governments against Facebook for intentionally making their service addictive when they knew the harmful effects (e.g., depression). I did not expect the sentiment to change so dramatically but I guess people are looking to blame anyone for the election.
Man I agree with you 100%.
I have been trying to get this message across whenever these topics come up in discussions with people.
We are risking the minds of people.
Take this example. So many mobile games which essentially leverage the thrill of gambling to make their games addictive. Of course, this only increases micropayment revenues. How many people get hooked and waste hundreds of hours? How many kids!?
To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it? Because the average person is unlikely to know its harmful effects. What about these applications? Which are profitable by tapping into our desires and impulsive tendencies.
okay, then let's regulate donuts, let's regulate hacker news because I just can't stop myself from checking it everyday. let's regulate cereals and candy, etc. Oh and coffee too. oh and toothpaste as well, i can't help but brush my teeth two or even 3 times a day!
my sister has an addicition to shopping for clothes, so that's going to need regulation, as well as my friend's action to watching tv, etc.
Of course, the laws and regulations that have cropped up sometimes are in response to the addictiveness of particular vices. That's why we don't regulate shopping for example. It is kind of disingenuous to put "shopping for clothes" and nicotine addiction on the same footing.
I agree with much of what you said. I'm not sure where I'd place Facebook in this case. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd make ruddct's argument for regulation based on the addictiveness of facebook more than I'd make the old anti-trust, money in politics and unchecked influence arguments.
Cigarette addicts can lead useful, productive lives before cancer or emphysema takes them out. Gamers on the other hand twitch away the best years of their natural lives, in some self-chosen dark sweatshop. Cigarettes then arguably the more benign of the two.
I feel like your conflating 2 arguments here. And I agree with 1 but whole heartedly disagree with the other.
Many Mobile games do abuse psychological elements. Agree they shouldn't abuse and should be stopped.
Waste hundreds of hours? I thoroughly enjoy hundreds of hours of game play so I don't see anything wrong with that.
Tapping into our desires? What's wrong with tickling our fancy?
Tapping into our impulsive tendencies. I feel like this is abusing human psychology again.
I'm not a gambler but I have felt the excitement and joy of it. I also love video games. I see nothing wrong with either of these things. But there is a clear distinction between the rewards of playing and the manipulation a company takes to enrich their bottom line.
Facebook will remain an "ads" company for as long as it's profitable. Marketing dollars will always need go somewhere, so I'm not convinced the advertising market will just wither and die in the face of adblockers. As long as Facebook commands an army of eyeballs, its advertising business will be profitable.
Facebook has shown a willingness to diversify its social properties via synergetic integration. See: whatsapp, instagram.
Facebook will likely continue to diversify its business. For example, it could easily repurpose its excess hardware to enter the cloud computing market and compete with AWS/GoogleCloud. I would be surprised if this is not on the roadmap.
Yes. As we've seen, the only way to stop such things, is for the next disruptive company to come along and fuck their shit up.
Something will likely come along. My guess is that it will be spam-related, which will make the FB user-experience too difficult to use to get a quality experience. FB will try to appeal to government for protectionist legislation, but it won't happen fast enough.
The question is if you can hold out long enough and if the change you predict will happen fast enough.
That can get expensive quickly, so it's not quite the inverse of holding stock where the only downside is how far the stock can drop, not how far it can go up.
Except it's not physically addictive. It's at most psychologically addictive and the withdrawal is not terribly painful. Just stop using it. Distract yourself with a good novel for a couple of days and it's done.
That was not my experience. I had a goal of reading 52 books last year, one for each week of the year. I reached 40 but never felt the need to post any cover photos on FB. Your relationship with it changes quite fast once you start finding other things to do rather than hang out on Facebook
