[HN Gopher] A Mindful Mobile OS
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A Mindful Mobile OS
Author : parsecs
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-07-03 20:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thistooshallgrow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thistooshallgrow.com)
| solaceb wrote:
| I would support reterming persuasive design as _coercive_ design,
| because to me that's really what it is
|
| Or perhaps addictive design?
| sneak wrote:
| This really strikes at the core social/philosophical divide:
| should people be free to choose to destructively engage in
| addictive goods and services?
|
| Ultimately we're not free if we're not free to destroy
| ourselves if we so choose.
|
| It seems that most people want to burn huge amounts of their
| time consuming ad-laden social media, just as they did with ad-
| laden tv before it.
| [deleted]
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > "Apps that are using persuasive design could be required to
| list all the techniques they use"
|
| Tracking disclosures are easy to do because they're all fairly
| objective data points. Either you collect personal data, or you
| don't. Ask Facebook and im sure they'll tell you they don't use
| "persuasive design"
| sneak wrote:
| Also, if you care about such things, you can just uninstall the
| app, or, you know, pay attention while using it.
|
| These techniques are obvious. If you don't like companies
| nudging your behavior in a certain direction, just uninstall
| their apps and delete your accounts when you notice them doing
| it.
|
| Leaving your account active in Facebook, Instagram, and
| WhatsApp makes it more attractive for your friends to make and
| preserve their accounts there.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| These techniques gain use because for the vast majority of
| people, they're subtle and play into unconscious biases and
| subconscious parts of the brain's reward circuitry. You may
| be a more evolved and educated human who is aware of all
| their biases and conscientious of all the different dark and
| grey patterns apps can use, but the techniques are effective
| because most people aren't. Pretending otherwise is
| disingenuous.
| sneak wrote:
| I think it's a logical error to think of the "vast majority
| of people" to be entirely unaware of the nudges of the
| market.
|
| It's not like I'm some superman to notice this stuff.
| People know they shouldn't scroll IG all day or eat
| McDonald's for every meal. It might play into subconscious
| biases but ultimately people are consciously aware of their
| behaviors in the macro.
|
| What's disingenuous is to think that only smart/savvy
| people know that the app equivalent of junk food is bad.
| Personally, I grow really tired of this (seemingly
| pervasive) viewpoint that the everyman is clueless and
| helpless and will be totally fucked if we, the
| learned/savvy, do not intervene. (Apologies in advance if
| this is not your view - I am complaining about a wider
| problem more so than replying to your specific comment.)
|
| It's a seductive viewpoint, and one that seems to tickle
| the "but it's obvious" common sense. I don't think it's
| true, though, despite being very plausible.
|
| Casinos exist, with way more extensive and battle-tested
| addiction-response features than the Facebook app, and the
| vast majority of people in the cities in which they operate
| don't go broke pouring their life savings into the
| machines.
|
| Give the everyman some credit.
| Hnaomyiph wrote:
| Casinos also exist with way more extensive laws and
| regulations.
| dantondwa wrote:
| I agree with this. Moreover, people who do fall into
| addicted behaviors are often very aware of the risks and
| dangers involved with their choices. However, the present
| desire or satisfaction that the impulse provides them
| overrides such awareness. As an ex smoker, this is
| apparent to me. I knew it was bad, I knew the details of
| what I was doing to myself, but I couldn't help myself.
|
| It is not about stupidity or awareness. It is about
| finding satisfaction or motivation elsewhere. Educated
| people, rich people, poor people, ignorant people: all
| classes have their addictions.
| fsociety wrote:
| This still strikes me as a hardware device telling me what to do.
| I wish we would just consider (optionally) removing things
| instead of requiring the user to take more actions or read more
| disclosures.
| Syonyk wrote:
| It's a good set of suggestions, but it doesn't touch on the key
| problem with "mobile" interfaces - _notifications._ The core evil
| (dark design?) of most mobile interfaces to various networks,
| social or not, is that they can use notifications to get the user
| into their app. While there 's some ability to restrict
| notifications, there's still not huge support (at least that I
| know of... maybe it exists and I've missed it?) for levels of
| notification by default. You can go and turn some options off in
| an app, if it supports it, but in general, there are tiers of
| notifications.
|
| High priority is "The world is on fire." Be it your pager for
| work, or, more often in my case, "The hill I live on is on fire,
| _again_... ", these are the things a mobile device is useful for.
| I'd argue that phone calls serve this purpose currently, because
| the cell network has made calls suck for everything else with
| latency...
|
| Most of the person to person communications (outside group chats)
| tends to fall into the "Important, but not immediate" category.
| This is what I tend to use my phone for, so my notifications are
| around this.
|
| Then there's the clutter of other notifications ranging from "Oh,
| hey, you got more spam email!" to "Please come check into our app
| again, we miss your eyeballs on our ads!" These are fairly
| unimportant and probably shouldn't exist, in most cases. But most
| of them are low priority.
|
| I'd like to be able to set things up so that notifications are
| batched over some period of time, instead of being immediate
| (unless it's high priority - if my wife is sending me a picture
| of A or B at the store, I need to respond to that quickly
| enough). But for other stuff, I'd love to see batched
| notifications on an hourly, or perhaps even daily basis.
|
| I simulate this on my devices by largely running "pull" instead
| of "push" for almost everything - outside direction communication
| from people, which is what I use my phone for, I have
| notifications turned off. I check my email often enough mostly
| that I don't need notifications for my primary account (it's not
| for anything time sensitive so if I check once or twice a day
| this is fine), though it does lead to some priority inversions in
| that infrequently used accounts actually do send prompt
| notifications. I don't have a way to queue these for once a day
| or something and still get notifications, and I tend to fail to
| check them otherwise.
|
| If you allow your devices to go back to "pull mode" instead of
| "push mode," you remove a lot of the evils of most of the
| applications in terms of attention vampire effects.
|
| But a more flexible notification system would be really, really
| useful.
| bityard wrote:
| I can't speak to iOS because I've never used that platform but
| Android offers pretty fine grained control over notifications
| including the ability to modify the app's settings right from
| the notification itself. You can disable notifications for
| specific apps altogether.
| surround wrote:
| Previous discussion on the original article (447 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27456500
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