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> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”

Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook. It’s Stanford Prison Experiment stuff.

I hate being reductionist, and I am posting this on a historically YC forum so of course there’s nuance, but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering. It sucks we’re seeing less grants and less security net to encourage risks under current administration, because it leaves investment as the quickest path to starting or scaling a company. Donate to open source, IMO

I think the problem is more fundamental than this: When your monetization model is tied to usage, then of course you will try to maximize usage, rather than user benefit. It can't be any other way if your reward function is tied to product usage.

Contrast with a car: Their monetization model does not depend on how much I drive it - as long as I find it useful enough to buy. Or a gym, where it actually runs in reverse - the gym makes more money when I use the product less, just so long as I don't leave.

Microsoft office or Mario Kart do not need me to be addicted - they just need me to buy the software. Even Photoshop with a subscription model doesn't pursue addiction strategies - why would they? Just make it useful enough for me to keep paying for it, and that's plenty good. Maybe it's actually closer to the gym in that sense.

Which products are the ones that require addiction?? The ones that are free to use but cost money to provide.

IOW - In many ways this is our fault for expecting social media and many other services to be provided to us for free, relying on ads to pay for it.

I suppose you could try to make a social media platform without dark patterns and charge a monthly fee for it, but how many people would pay for it? My guess is close enough to zero to ensure failure. But I tell you what - I'd probably pay for it myself. And I'd be very lonely.

Edit: Replaced all-caps with italics.

This reminds me of my borderline exhausting quest to build a wiki for golf that isn’t extractive like most golf sites.

Trying to bootstrap it without any funding is a lot, but necessary, and I have to run it on a shoestring. The frustrating part is that with all networks the flywheel is everything. Once you get the product on people’s phones, the value is easy to see, but to get the app in their phones, you need a bunch of money to create value to get people there.

This is why the VC funding is so pernicious and why projects like mastodon, lemmy, and pixelfed are so difficult to get off the ground. The point is almost always the network itself more than the product.

I’ll keep trying to just do it slow and steady, even if it takes me a decade. I honestly don't care if I fail because I know the people out there that care about golf course architecture just want a place to talk about the courses they love.

https://golfcourse.wiki

The proposed solution is hinted at in this piece but dare not spoken: government regulation.

I was talking with a friend who is a camp counselor for a small summer camp the other day and they said that 4 of the 35 or so kids at the camp left because they couldn’t be away from their devices.

This power intermittent reinforcement in the on-ramp of addiction is scary powerful.

Do we have any ways to innoculate ourselves and the future generations against it?

The author poses changing the game which is support. I guess the trendy “dopamine fast” is a tool against this or weekly screen free time. Maybe more education on intermittent reinforcement or a D.A.R.E-like program for apps (a this one is a little tongue-in-cheek, but not really).

I'll tell you what's been working for me: an e-ink phone. It's a Bigme Hibreak Pro. The interface is a bit clunky but it gets the job done. Social media is just not fun on this phone. It's still very usable if I need it, however. I'm also knocking out books at a rate that I haven't in years.

Thought experiment: what if these apps were owned by non-profits? Would they still be addictive?

I don’t think the VC money does much but accelerate the end state, the apps would become addictive if they were held privately their entire lifespan.

The problem is not the apps, the problem is the users. Which means the problem is human nature.

Make a photography site for people to share photographs and it will inevitably turn into a site for people to share selfies of them pretending to live a life that they do not actually live and can not actually afford, but which you will inevitably compare yourself against.

Make a site for people to share opinions and it will inevitably be dominated by one particular group of users that will shame anyone with any opinion at all that diverges from the tiny area of acceptable opinion.

The problem is not the tools that the users have. The problem is not the engineers. The problem is that people are being giving exactly what they want. The problem is right there in the mirror.

There are no solutions.

> We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t.

I deleted an app every month until my phone was so boring I threw it in a drawer and canceled my cell phone subscription. It confuses and annoys everyone around me, but my attention span, happiness, and productivity have skyrocketed so I really do not care what the addicts think. It works for me.

I truly encourage everyone to consider how humans survived before smartphones. All of that still works fine today. 5 years cell-phone free.

> We need a fundamental re-evaluation of what our phones should be for, whether these platforms can ever return to their original purpose of actually bringing us together instead of keeping us scrolling

Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together. Let people meet each other in real life. Let the relationships flourish organically. No amount of tech will ever build the trust that face to face interactions can build. When people are in presence of each other they are just not exchanging ideas. There is so much of non verbal exchange through body language, tone of voice, facial expressions. I think all this helps in building trust. Social media on other hand just does the opposite unless the user is very conscious of the effects of social media.

Best social media platform already exists. Personal Blog (maybe) for public posts and Email + phone + IRL for friends.

Personal blog can be on blogger if needed. The nature of any blog is non algorithmic.

This is all true, but it's definitely not the full story. I'm addicted to HN despite it not being engineered for engagement. (though _technically_ it has taken investor money hahaha)

> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns.

Realistically, this is the most likely solution to reducing addiction on online platforms in my opinion. I’m not sure how likely such regulations will be in the US, but it’s quite telling that the Chinese regulate their version of TikTok, while the US doesn’t regulate theirs.

I remember when ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ came out by Nir Eyal. It came out the same year as ‘Addiction by Design’ and was rapidly adopted in the SV and HN circles. I heard somewhere he felt bad about the impact of Hooked… but I don’t have a source.

Eyal wrote another book 5 years later trying to help people control their attention & not falling victim to the playbook he outlined in Hooked.

There is still a deeper problem, which the article didn't tackle. We don't need social media in general. Some forums and platforms for geeks and freaks are enough. We don't need perfectly orchestrated or fairly designed apps to simulate genuine connection, which works best without any digital help what so ever.

So let's imagine that the best way is to return to offline interactions and connections - which take time, trust, respect and value of each other.

The internet is better when used by the nerds, not the general public.

Good people of HN, could anyone tell me why buying an MVP of a social network for $10K from a Belarusian contractor on Upwork (it couldn’t cost much more, it’s like five SQL tables and a web CRUD) and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work?

Why does the author need to moan about how morally destructive it was to raise VC? Just run your social network from your bedroom, while asking ChatGPT how to rewrite the landing page in React.

The best thing we could possibly do, besides throwing Musk and Zuckerberg in The Hague, is destroy targeted advertising as a business model. Everything, absolutely all of this is done so they can make fractions of a cent off of clicks. So long as they can, they will do everything possible to damage your brains into clicking more.

> This isn't because founders are evil

Sounds like something an evil founder would say

What this all boils down to is the major weak point of capitalism: profit over all. It’s a darwinistic system, and survival depends upon the ability to abandon ethics in the name of money. Not that ethics doesn’t have some value - it does - but only as a money generator as some customers are motivated to spend on it or at least the idea of it. By and large, however, ethics becomes a weakness in this system.

So in my view, the solution has to abide by this law of the jungle, but also short circuit the psychological mechanisms that tech companies are using to harvest attention. Somehow, people will have to pay for their freedom, similar to how drug addicts can pay for rehabilitation once they see the damage the drug has done to their life. It’s still a business, but one that contributes to the greater good.

Most of the solutions in this article require some kind of government intervention, which I don't see happening any time soon. Eventually, maybe, but probably only after society has nearly (or completely) ripped itself apart due to social media, the negatives are laid bare, and people start pushing for change.

This hits the nail for my sentiments about the matter. Good that someone who was actually in the business confirm it.

addiction drives revenue but isn't the only model .monetize outcomes: charge writing tools per export, focus apps per session, design tools per final asset .soak in usage decay : session lengths shrink unless reengaged .let users set caps, pick 'read-only' or 'close-friends' modes .in social apps, rank by saves/comments, not scroll time .monetize filters, advanced DM settings, creator tools .intentional use stays high, manipulation drops .i want to build something like this someday lets see

Honestly it always comes back to, we need a healthier relationship with our tools. The phone, social media, etc. It's all a tool. And yes it can be highly addictive but so are drugs, alcohol, TV, etc. all easily accessible and how we deal with it comes down to ourselves. It's what environment you put yourself in, and if that environment is one that includes a lot of screens then there's a sliding scale as to how corrupted you'll become by it. If you're at places where theres alcohol and cigarettes I mean it's highly likely you're going to smoke and drink. The only things that really beat all of this is a way of life that recognises that it can or is poisonous and many things must be avoided e.g get off social media. It was built to be addictive, that's not going to change.

As someone who's a lifelong Muslim and even more dedicated to that in my late 30s and now at 40 I'll say we were put on this earth for a purpose. As engineers we need to understand our own design. We need to understand that all the things we constructed for ourselves isn't all for our benefit but actually a lot of it is harmful, whether it be the digital life or processed food. This is a more holistic way to live. The author obviously wanted to get people offline. I think the issue is when the algorithm of silicon valley is making money then anything inherently social becomes about addiction and gamification. There are alternative routes forward but probably by first getting offline or reassessing ones relationship with the world..

It a seems pretty simple mistake from almost the first step:

> To get funding, you need users. To get more funding, you need exponential growth. Growth becomes the primary metric

No, you don't. This exponential user scaling theory of investment is a sickness that has taken over silicon valley and is half the reason for much of the harm we are seeing. Serve a small number users really well, build all the infra to autoscale and let the organic growth happen more slowly. Get to a bigger critical mass and you'll eventually be able to take money on your own terms. If you can't do that, you haven't waited long enough, tried hard enough, or maybe your idea just isn't what you thought it was.

It’s not just social media. Externalized financialization ruins everything. Private equity firms quickly gut everything they buy from plumbers to health clinics (and you still have no choice but to buy their services because they “consolidate” the competition). It’s capitalism gone mad: financial incentives disconnected from any other considerations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.ht...

so this is basically like “we couldnt raise money and this is how i rationalize it”?

Western capitalists have engineered addictions for 100s of years from forcing China to accept opium to introducing the taste of coffee to children to create demand for coffee in Japan in the future it's nothing new. Now they are doing the same with technology.

No matter how you slice and regulate it, the problem will always be there as long as its capitalism, which makes businesses exploit anything they operate upon.

yep, good luck figuring out how to make a social media site that is engaging enough for people to keep coming back, able to pay its hosting bills, and just generally sustainable, without falling into the dark patterns.

> Pure Intentions: Founders, like myself, genuinely want to connect people, share authentic moments, and build community. The early versions feel magical because they follow this original mission.

No. This idea that SC (or similar business cultures) want to change the world for the better is a cliche. At a certain point, after all the history of these companies, you don’t get a pure-intentions pass any more.

And in particular: I don’t believe that Zuckerberg’s motivations were ever good.

> Different Funding Methods: What if social platforms were funded like utilities or public goods instead of venture-backed and advertisement driven growth machines? Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics. Wikipedia thrives as a donation-funded cooperative. These models exist - they just don’t scale at venture-required rates.

This is good. You need to rethink the whole model. Even if that means that you don’t get to growth-hack people.

This is far better than the usual model:

1. Admit there’s a problem

2. It’s systemic

3. The fake solution: some feel-good manifesto about making X but “for humans”. But nothing about the incentives have been changed. The fundamental axiom is still there: we are entitled to make money off social media just like before, but we have a lot of words and paragraphs about doing so goodly.

The same thing happened with an attempt at making neoliberalism palpatable. “Stakeholder Capitalism”. The idea is that we just continue with neoliberalism but have a manifesto about how all stakeholders are taken into account. But nothing about the system or the power centers are changed. So you still get a corporations and their boards of directors having as much power as before.

> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms.

I’m not sure. This seems like a half-measure. Regulating something which is inherently harmful (according to the simile) just causes more bloat.

If I’m addicted to nicotine I’m already hooked. No advertisement doesn’t help me. I already know what I want. You’re gonna make the packaging less sexy? Make me go into the Sin Section of the shop to get my fix? I’m gonna do that anyway.

What you need is an effective and mandatory opt-out option. Let me ban myself from buying these products. And provide me with alternatives (grocery shops already sell both tobacco and nicotine gum).

Give me an option to opt-out. Don’t just make a whole regulatory beast which can prey on me but one hundred checkboxes are marked and it’s very ethical and so on.

> Alternative Metrics: Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals?

This would have been naive and just a loophole if the premise was to let companies keep doing their thing. They would just rebrand with fake metrics. Oh you have sent X messages this month, that means you are connecting and according to some research people who IM more are happier blah blah blah.

But this could have some merit given the previous utilities/public goods point.

I was addicted to reading newgroups using Larry Wall's trn program.

In trn, it is very easy to get a new screenful of text to appear, but it is hard to go back to what you were reading 3 screenfuls ago (unless you are still in the same message you were in 3 screenfuls ago, in which case, to get back, you could scroll up 3 times) which discourages reflection, which leaves fewer reasons not to constantly seek out the next dopamine hit (namely, the next passage of text that teaches you something).

My point is that neither trn nor the newsgroups were in any way VC-funded. There also weren't any non-VC-funded startups or companies involved: when I started browsing them in 1991, the software that ran the newsgroups was entirely designed, implemented and operated by volunteers. Yes, these volunteers mostly worked for tech companies, universities or governmental research labs (because in those days, most people with internet connectivity got it through their workplace and most normal workplaces did not have internet connectivity) but their involvement in the newsgroups did not figure into their employer's evaluation of their work performance.

My point is that VCs are not the whole of the problem. Not even the profit motive is the whole of the problem. The problem can show up in a program distributed under an open-source license for hobbyist or communitarian reasons.

Going to recommend "Addiction by Design" here. Superb book about the addiction design dynamics in the gambling industry and very reminiscent of what we see in the smartphone/internet universe today. Shout out to the forgotten HN user who recommended it originally, one of the best and most salient books I've read in years.

Maybe the solution is that these services shouldn't be free, and you should pay for your usages. Then a non-profit could run an Instagram / tiktok clone and there would be no incentive to make the app more addicting, addiction would be even self-regulated to an extent by the fact that watching 10 hours of video might cost $5

> Every attempt to “fix” social media eventually becomes part of the problem because the economic structure creates inevitable corruption of the original mission.

Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users". Anything else will present high values targets for corruption and is doomed to fail. You're not going to get investors in such a thing, because the lack of chokepoints means you can't really monetize it. But I do think that the existing players will eventually behave badly enough that such a thing will emerge--one volunteer effort at a time.

They sold us a dream of what the internet could be and I don't think we're letting that go--we just have to dispatch with them first.

Late in the thread, but is this really addiction?

How do you differentiate between addiction and people really liking something? In my opinion, unless people try to stop doing the thing but they can't will themselves to do that, it isn't an addiction.

It is not OK to dilute terms used to describe serious problems. I am not saying tech addiction can't happen, I just haven't seen any evidence to that effect. Mere dependency or development of a habit isn't addiction. addiction is those things plus inability to quit the habit despite strong and persistent effort.

Perhaps a good litmus test might be a person's ability to go on a week-long vacation without their phones, internet or whatever the supposed addiction might be.

There are addictions like Porn or eating-disorders that can be exasperated by tech, but they're not "technology usage" addictions, they're "addictions that can be enabled by technology".

an article on the problems of social media with no mention of the federated platforms? seems like a huge omission

Bogey man staff psychologists aren't to blame for these woes, and they certainly aren't some unstoppable force with reins to all things you do.

The Internet was "addicting" long before there was ever a concept of social networks the way that there is today. I used to sit on my computer from sun down to sun up way back in the mid 90s, and I knew hundreds of other people that did the same thing.

I've been "addicted" to social networks that predate modern capital schemes, such as message boards, IRC, AIM, ICQ, MMORPGs, and so on.

Are we overthinking this?

Old school specialty sites are still around, with topics, categories, and discussions around the whole site emphasis.

As someone who likes to grow a little food in a semi-rural area, I enjoy permies.com - every day, a volunteer posts a new question or reposts a relevant topic, depending on the season or recent interest or whatever.

But they're not trying to make a billion dollars. Or even a million dollars.

That's why I like it. To raise funds, they sell books, playing cards, instructional videos. With non-invasive "tiny ads" which they self-parody.

Small is beautiful. The current internet is ruled by evil reptiles seeking to rip off your time, your data, your privacy, your friends... "Don't be evil" is dead and gone.

Turn back the clock 30 years. I did. And I'm happy.

I enjoyed this. It feels obvious doesn’t it ? But - it’s so hard to see anything grassroots changing here for exactly the same reason the apps become attention-gamified - how can some small organically-grown thing compete with the money ?

It’s very obvious in 2025, have deleted all my social accounts, (maybe still a bit of reddit). Kids are definitly not allowed even close to it.

100% correct it’s about the business model/funding. Just make it in your basement and don’t take vc capital and let it take a decade and you’ll be the only used social network.

There are two things going on here.

The first and simpler question is what is a valuable software product? For products where the user expects to pay nothing, like almost all social media, the answer is: the product with the most user-hours. Therefore products that attract many user-hours attract much investment. There isn't some kind of insidious conspiracy to push specific types of products: investors don't care, they care about how many minutes of ads they can push down the pipe (legally).

The second question is: (again for products where the user expects to pay nothing) what products attract the most user-hours?

It seems folks dance around and rarely confront what I consider to be the main explanation here and where the primary cause is: humans choose and prefer to consume and interact with content that induces in them a set of emotions. They generally choose to experience stuff that gets them upset, looks cute, inspires longing, makes them feel lonely, etc.

If one categorizes the things that the consumer chooses as "problematic," where is the problem? The problem as stated is the consumer. One can't engineer a way out of that: folks have tried to provide alternative options and these mostly fail to attract heaps of users.

To put this in the language of TFA: the addiction isn't engineered into the consumer. The addiction was there from the beginning: a million products were tried out, products evolved to better align with preferences, and now the products are "addictive."

I like the post but I feel like it’s missing the reason why VC funding is necessary. A lot of small scale apps and old school forums can be run pretty cheap. What is stopping social media from growing slow and following a more traditional business model? For example, people regularly start things like nail salons with just personal funds and bank loans but they are so much more expensive to run than something like this website

Monetization is the problem, not funding. Better monetization methods haven’t arisen because it’s impossible to compete with free. On the other hand I think it’s clear that the status quo is not creating unrealized value, but is actually causing tremendous harm and are a net negative. People who argue otherwise either have holy arguments about the infallibility of the market or a direct financial interest in the continuation of the ad sponsored status quo. The solution would be new laws that attack the profitability of today’s primary monetization method, not the actual act of social media itself.

Doing so would clear the undergrowth for the true innovators to take over and we’ll know who they are when people pay for their products, as functioning markets have always intended.

My hope, and it may be a naïve hope, is that with the rise of AI will see more and more people be able to build the kind of digital experience that they envision, including social media experiences, because of the democratization of software engineering. That being said, what does it take to build a social media app using AI and also perhaps just as important to market it worldwide?

The article mentioned that we can reconnect offline life and redesign the platform to encourage real human interaction instead of endless scrolling. Imagine a social app that encourages you to exit the screen and meet friends instead of constantly scrolling. It should feel good.

Been going on long before Silicon Valley was even a thing. Sugar industry for example.

> What might actually work

This section is idealistic. I guess the author was too damaged by his own experience to actually study the wave of twitter replacements. I would love to see an analysis of those. "Different Funding Methods" is clearly required but perhaps not sufficient.

Nope. There's no addiction involved here. Engineers should know better than to mis-use terminology outside of it's context.

> We don’t all have ADHD. We have an addiction. Growing up, I barely knew a world without social media, and neither did my friends. We were the guinea pigs for Silicon Valley's great dopamine experiment, and now we’re waking up with the side effects.

Saying it's a "dopamine experiment" is just as bad an incorrect as calling your monitor "the cpu" or saying "I'm so adhd" to describe a common behavior.

Using the concept of addiction and completely unrelated neurochemistry in this context drags in all the terribly dangerous ideas of drug addiction. Drugs are entirely different things that truly do subvert incentive salience at the neurochemical level. While screens and speakers most certainly do not. And even if they did it's be "glutamergic experiment" not "dopamine". These ideas imply that in normal situations and stimuli humans do not have volition and so need state force to protect them from their own choices. This premise is far more damaging to society than screens and sounds could ever be.

What I haven't found in the article is what would happen if people paid for a true social network, completely free of all the nasty things we already know. Is there any chance that a carefully crafted paid social network can actually succeed?

algorithm feed addiction is unsolvable, at least without some new drug.

As an immigrant to the US, I found dessert in US contains much more sugar than where I was. And when I make/recommend less sugary food, friends don't like it even though some of them admitted that's healthier.

so similar to diabetes, I would expect Ozempic for algorithm feed addiction will be available one day to solve this, or at least sounds like so (although I'm not fully convinced).

It may sounds dystopia, but addiction is a builtin feature of late stage capitalism, and it's already too late to turn around.

This article thinks it's talking about problems with social media, but it's actually talking about problems with venture capitalism and economic inequality.

Perhaps this all goes even deeper - it's screen addiction, not only social media addiction, though social media in 2025 is a very powerful and addictive drug (in all senses of it)

I honestly think there is some place here to be anti tech. Some things, the things closest to our humanity, like love and community, are not all that better with technology in my opinion. Sure, you can stay connected with a family member or friend who lives in another city, but that same positive is a negative via another perspective because it doesn't force you to make new connections with people around you.

And love is similar. It's nice that algorithms can help you match, but the psychology by which you arrive at a compatible partner matters a great deal. The swipe is inherently dehumanizing even if it does match you with a human.

Some things are supposed to be uncomfortable. Discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing. Tech should stop trying to eliminate that and instead augment it. That calls for an entirely different philosophy when choosing ideas to build. Instead of looking for uncomfortable or inefficient things and trying to "fix" that, consider your values. What do you care about, what is important for a good human life? Then use your skills to enable deeper integration into those values.

Easier is not always better.

I recently had this revelation when considering how difficult it is to find events that I'm interested in. I was shocked that this isn't a problem that we had solved in the 2000s. But Facebook events is full of bar specials like ladies night and doesn't seem to match to my taste and Eventbrite is overly monetized and tends to be formal events, my friend who's very into the electronic scene told me that the way that she found events was by following people on Instagram and then following the businesses that she went to and checking their pages for events. I thought that seemed very inefficient and then it occurred to me that maybe the goal here is not to get as many people as possible to go to your event. Maybe it's about getting the right people with the right values and right taste to go to your event. This is a classic case where making something easier would not necessarily serve to achieve the goal of that ease, which, in this case would be making it easier for me to find authentic events. *The very nature of them being trivially accessible would change what they are.*

Right on.

The problem is capital. Of course many people are allergic to Marx, but the dude hit the nail on the head with his critique.

The problem is not individuals, it's a system of ownership over assets. And 99% of people will use their ownership to generate profits through hiring labor. Why? Because it's easier to have other people work for you, instead of you doing the work.

This becomes extended in the digital age beyond the original form of employees generating profit from the difference between their pay and the monetary value of their work (the original Marxist definition of profit), but also to end-users generating raw material as information for the further generation of profits through the selling of information services or plain data.

Tech has workers AND users in the formula for the generation of capital.

And if we, plebs, know this, you know the industry has already crafted their bourgeois science of this info extraction mechanism.

This monetary influence has already spread over the creation of hardware as well as software. This will follow in all of the tech-realms. They will influence the organizations that create the hardware and software specs. They will influence the law to ignore these ills. They are the creators of mass-use hardware and software.

The average end-user will live in a tech prison and the state is gonna become way more invasive. Democracy is on the line like it never has been before. They WILL use your instincts against you and they will use your data against you.

Just like capitalization has taken over every aspect of modern commodity/service production, and therefore modern life, so will data-capitalization.

There was never enshittification, it was just capital.

I think, with no supporting data whatsoever, that this is a classic case of stated vs revealed preferences.

We all think we want a place to find community, learning, connection, etc, but given the choice will choose stimulus.

So, if given the choice of 10 social networks, on a scale of extremely stimulating to extremely connecting, we’ll end up choosing the stimulating one.

In which case, it seems tricky to find a business model fixes this more fundamental problem

Do you think a nonprofit model could work?

The moment you take VC money, you are obligated to attempt to achieve VC scale.

It’s nothing to do with social media, and everything to do with the wrong KPIs.

The article Farmvillains in SF Weekly fifteen years ago said Zynga had a staff psychologist to guarantee that each iteration would be more addictive.

https://www.sfweekly.com/archives/farmvillains/article_eb8e2...

So what’s wrong with open source social network ? They don’t have the issue mentioned, because they don’t have investor there is no need to optimize kpi and when it’s optimized the infrastructure cost can be minimized a lot.

See mastodon for instance.

Yet it doesn’t catch up in popularity, seems like people do prefer the traditional Facebook, twitter and instagram.

You can only show a donkey where water is but you can’t force it to drink.

Last paragraph seems to speak without speaking.

> We built these platforms. We can build better ones. But only if we're willing to abandon the economic models that made the current ones inevitable. Until we change those incentives, every attempt to fix social media will become part of the problem it’s trying to solve. We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t.

> The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely.

In direct language, what exactly is the author suggesting we do here?

I read and enjoyed the post, but also found it a bit directionless. Yes, I think a lot of people agree that addictive social media is a problem. What's the solution?

> The deeper issue is that we’ve outsourced our human connection to systems designed for profit. Real connection happens in the margins that can’t be monetized. The conversations that don’t generate data, the relationships that don’t scale, and the moments that can’t be optimized for engagement.

This sounds profound, but this is a problem that predates social media. People went to shows and music festivals to see art and connect with others - these are systems also designed for profit (and delivering art as their second thing.)

The problem is, as the author definitely knows, that running systems that enable connections costs money. The suggestion the author makes: "improve third spaces where people connect directly, authentically, without intermediation by systems designed to extract value from their attention", except someone has to pay for those third spaces, and people won't always want to visit them because we like dopamine, so we might go to the bar, or back on social media, or to video games or tv shows instead. A slow pace - boredom - breeds creativity and connection, but it's also boring, and it's hard to get people to stay with it (I might be projecting.)

> The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely.

On a different note, this closing feels very, very ChatGPT, and whether it is or isn't, the fact that AI tone is permeating our writing makes me really sad.

OP mentions how Facebook introduced engagement algorithms to Instagram and how Twitter followed suit, but doesn’t mention that Facebook was also the first to popularize engagement algorithms in 2011 via their News Feed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Facebook)#History

It's not about addiction. It's about providing value.

>The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”

It's more like limiting themselves to just sharing a single photo per day is limiting to how much value they can provide users and advertisers.

>Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X aren't neutral tools. They're carefully crafted slot machines engineered to get you hooked. Pull to refresh. Tap to like. Scroll forever. Random rewards. Notifications timed to spike your cortisol. The same behavioral loops that addict gamblers now hook children and adults alike.

This is quite a stretch. Users finding immense value is not the same as addiction.

>Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics.

Even if YouTube forced people to have premium they would still optimize for engagement. Loading up the home page and getting terrible recommendations is a terrible experience. Finding the best content for user provides the most value.

>Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals?

Feel free to use those metrics if you want, but most people will continue to use the apps that provide them the most value.

With technological products in particular—where an idiosyncratic nerd with an old computer under the desk can run a vibrant forum, a couple of plucky young “cofounders” can conjure a company from nothing, and HN (at least at one point [0]) can sway the entire tech culture from a single process on a single server—isn’t it an option to… not grow?

I guess the LLM era makes credible products more capital-intensive than they used to be, but even so, the vendors are pricing their stuff aggressively, and even when they try to squeeze the prices later, half these foundation models that are better-than-last-year’s-SOTA are open-source!

If you want to play with lots of money and seek out lots of money, there’s lots of money swirling around seeking to involve you in that game. But if you just want to make something nice and human-scale and small, what better time than now?

The path to billions of bucks may require mercenary bucks-extracting behavior, but that’s not the same as a growth imperative being an inevitable force of nature.

I can’t help but feel like the Small Web folks are on to something.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522

One positive that I have seen lately among older teens, is they are starting to realize how much of a waste of time staring into a screen all day is. At some point, you realize that life is short and watching short clips for hours on end is robbing you of that.