[HN Gopher] Addictions Are Being Engineered
___________________________________________________________________
Addictions Are Being Engineered
Author : echollama
Score : 299 points
Date : 2025-06-28 14:45 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (masonyarbrough.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (masonyarbrough.substack.com)
| scottgg wrote:
| 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 ?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| similar discussions around liquor and tobacco in days past?
| zbentley wrote:
| Kind of. Those examples are often trotted out as discussion
| killers _a la_ "regulating these vices didn't work, so don't
| bother trying to regulate $whatever (addictive dark patterns
| in this instance)".
|
| But that's not exactly true, is it?
|
| Calling out alcohol and tobacco ignores all the vices that
| _were_ made durably illegal all over the world: prostitution,
| blood sport, slavery, forced marriage, and so on--and yes,
| institutionalized slavery _was_ a vice, an economic one
| rather than a habitual one, but every bit as behaviorally
| seductive for slavers as speculative investing, MLM, or
| subprime asset flipping are for some people today.
|
| Sure, not all of those things are illegal everywhere, and
| reasonable people may disagree as to whether illegality is
| appropriate for some of them (e.g. prostitution). But in
| total they do indicate that vice regulation can "stick"
| better than it did for alcohol and tobacco.
|
| Hell, we used to put cocaine in soda! Whether or not you
| believe that the current prohibition/penalty practices around
| that drug are good, I assume most folks agree that it's
| better now that we can't get addicted to it via products
| available at the supermarket. Even as addiction-engineered as
| current-generation hyper-processed foods are, it was once
| much worse, and that was pretty successfully addressed via
| regulatory prohibition.
| nine_k wrote:
| In most places liquor, while legal, is seriously regulated,
| and alcoholism is considered a sickness worth treating.
| Alcohol's effects are visibly debilitating, from poor driving
| to the very ability to stand without falling or speak
| coherently.
|
| Addictive games though don't show such easily detectable
| effects. So it's more like a discussion on gambling, casinos,
| etc, but the current forms of addiction-forming experiences
| are much more underhanded.
| api wrote:
| The right question is: how can some small organically grown
| thing compete for attention?
|
| If everyone is engaged with addiction machines nobody will use
| it.
|
| Engineered addiction is mind control. It is abuse. Hacking the
| human brain is violence -- a term that has been robbed of its
| impact through overuse for things that are not violence, but
| this is.
|
| Engineering of addiction in any form should not be legal for
| the same reason that kidnapping someone and raping them or
| forcing them to do my labor is not legal.
|
| Fix this problem -- remove the mind control and violence -- and
| a market niche opens up for honest business models. As it
| stands nobody can compete with these platforms because volition
| can't compete with violence and honest commerce can't compete
| with slavery through dopamine system hacking.
|
| BTW if you work for these companies, quit. Ten to fifteen years
| ago ignorance was an excuse. I don't think the original
| inventors of this nightmare knew quite what they were doing.
| Ignorance is no longer an excuse. If you are "optimizing
| engagement" in this context and in these ways you are a bad
| person.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| It's interesting that the examples you provided - kidnapping
| and forced labor - are somewhat legal in the U.S. in the
| context of the treatment of people of color by law
| enforcement and incarceration industry.
|
| Similarly, suppression of wages, taking away healthcare,
| food, employee protections (at-will employment), legally
| required vacation days and maternity leave, and any
| meaningful safety nets for employees, pushes the social
| contract for workers toward violent nonconsensual extraction.
|
| Maximizing extraction inevitably requires violence and
| cruelty.
| zbentley wrote:
| Yes. Given that, how can we do what GP suggested and move
| the perception and legal treatment of these behaviors
| towards "ethically repugnant" rather than "conditionally
| (and, as you pointed out, very unequally) socially
| permitted"?
| ambicapter wrote:
| By...not competing? As long as you're profitable (read: your
| expenses are lower than your incomes), what does competing to
| be "the best" (whatever that even means) provide you?
| ngriffiths wrote:
| I think in this context "competing" means having a meaningful
| market share, which would help reduce time the world spends
| on the alternative useless gamified/addictive apps
| klabb3 wrote:
| And if it gets meaningful "market share", the business
| incentives are pulling in the direction of growth, which is
| the articles point.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| In many segments, especially ones served digitally, only one
| or a few companies will survive. It's very much "grow or
| die".
| aeve890 wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance but is that expensive to run a social
| platform?
| DeathRay2K wrote:
| Running a social media platform can be very expensive,
| and it only gets more expensive every day.
|
| Media takes a lot of storage and bandwidth, and you
| basically have unbounded costs if you want to meet user
| expectations for posting media.
| ambicapter wrote:
| That's a narrative that makes no sense. If a company is
| profitable, it doesn't "die". If customers like your
| product and their friends are on your platform, they have
| no reason to leave to another.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| I agree. I see this becoming a bigger and bigger problem unless
| someone steps in with significant regulation or major changes
| like the article says.
|
| The other challenge is the regulation part is much easier when
| the product is, say, heroin. Algorithms are technically complex
| (hard for policymakers to grasp), flexible (can be tweaked to
| work around guidelines?), and operating in the digital world
| (harder to monitor/block).
|
| Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In
| the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial
| to be on your phone nonstop?
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| 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.
| spenjuly wrote:
| 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.
| charliebwrites wrote:
| Also Nir Eyal's Hooked, which used to be standard reading at
| tech startups in the "Growth Hacking" era
| NickC25 wrote:
| His followup book, Indistractable, is also quite good.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| 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.
| MobileVet wrote:
| For sure... but digital distribution and deep understanding of
| the mental processes behind addiction make it even more
| accessible for new products / games today.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Indeed. The first thing I think of when I read "engineered
| addictions" is fast food like McDonalds and Subway. People work
| very hard to make sure the taste and smell is addictive but
| that the food is not satiating.
| almost_usual wrote:
| Alcohol, nicotine / cigarettes, sugar packed junk food. The
| digital realm of addiction is a new face of the same pattern.
|
| Cheap hits to increase pleasure centers in the brain that
| overall have a detrimental cost to humanity with entire
| industries to deal with the health consequences.
|
| This is the mining of wealth from health reducing the overall
| productivity of humanity for the sake of near term profits.
| Optimizing short term gains for long term progress.
| zbentley wrote:
| True. Regulatory prohibition has sometimes succeeded at
| addressing these problems, though. More info on that in my
| adjacent comment, here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407009
| MobileVet wrote:
| 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.
| asim wrote:
| 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..
| nine_k wrote:
| > _healthier relationship with our tools_
|
| The point is that these are not tools, they provide a direct
| kick, which is a goal in itself. Whisky is not a tool.
| echollama wrote:
| agreed its like saying that jerking off makes you healthier
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Wait, it doesn't? /s
| Narciss wrote:
| My hope, and it may be a naive 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?
| kurthr wrote:
| It feels like this is the optimism of early internet where
| "information wants to be free".
|
| We got a solid 5 maybe 10 years of that (up through 2k)?
| cornholio wrote:
| If you can't build it with a bunch of junior coders, then AI
| won't help you.
|
| Social media is all about network effects and first mover
| advantage, one network turned textbook fascist and it's still
| going strong.
| blendergeek wrote:
| I "hope" that will happen as well. It is a naive hope indeed.
| Almost all current AI systems and all future ones I foresee,
| are made by large corporations that are looking to turn a
| profit. Enabling, ordinary "people ... to build the kind of
| digital experience that they envision" does not maximise
| profit. Instead AI systems will work for their owners to
| maximize profits by extracting revenue from the users. Some of
| this revenu could come from advertising. AIs could build ads
| that are far more personalized and convincing than anything we
| can imagine now. AI agents will work first and foremost for
| their corporate owners and will only do the users bidding if it
| benefits the owners. There is absolutely no reason to believe
| that it will be different this time and that now corporations
| will happily hand out everything for free and users will be
| empowered. I don't doubt that open source and freedom
| respecting AI will exist and that some will be able to use it.
| The great thing about free markets is that those who want to
| will be able to opt out. But it will always be niche and small
| just like it is now.
| DeathRay2K wrote:
| Building the social media platform you want to see isn't really
| the problem though. They are relatively easy to build, the hard
| part is making it valuable enough to attract users and earning
| enough to keep it running.
|
| Using AI introduces additional costs without solving the core
| challenge there.
| klik99 wrote:
| > 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
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad
| latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to
| shareholders.
|
| We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive
| focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or
| ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously
| destructive.
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| I have a better idea: let's combat the notion that putting
| shareholder value ahead of the common good is moral.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Great! You've convinced nobody of anything.
|
| Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the
| fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely
| critical to their continued existence and long-term
| viability.
|
| But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce
| positive externalities and they need to produce those
| externalities for more than just their owners.
|
| It cannot be "either/or" and it's not immoral to pursue
| profits.
| egypturnash wrote:
| You can explicitly build the business to say "delivering
| shareholder value is not our highest goal, we must
| remember that we live in a society and upon a planet".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
| monkaiju wrote:
| Their purpose is absolutely not "to produce positive
| externalities" (whatever that even means). What makes you
| say that? You can, and people do, run a business doing
| all sorts of heinous things
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| You should read a history book about why corporations
| were invented and allowed to exist.
| moefh wrote:
| There's an old saying: The purpose of a system is what it
| does[1]. You can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by
| its _intended_ purpose if what it ends up doing goes
| against it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system
| _is_wha...
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| And businesses _as a whole_ produce positive
| externalities, as intended, which is why we continue to
| allow them to exist.
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| Only when accounting is done without calculating
| ecological cost, including human quality of life.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| > we continue to allow them to exist
|
| Who is "we"? I can't do anything about it. No more than
| peasants "allow" the king to exist..
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Sure you can. You can vote to get rid of corporations,
| and you'll get outvoted. Ergo: we.
|
| You don't understand how kings work if you think it's
| equivalent to your situation in a western democracy.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| Voting obviously doesn't work. Troll
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Formatting issue?
|
| "Voting obviously doesn't work." - Troll
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| Yes, I've heard the party line too. The difference is, I
| realized it was horseshit.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| If I had to choose between common good and shareholder
| value all else being equal, I'd choose common good every
| time.
|
| We should be suspicious of games that favor shareholder
| value over common good and repair them. Of course this is
| harder than it sounds, but letting the person with the most
| money in a Monopoly game also set the rules is absurd and
| and obviously wrong. Wrong even _without_ having a
| consensus reality on what "common good" entails and this
| is important.
|
| The "capital game" should serve us, rather than us serving
| it. A fatalistic lack of imagination is no longer an
| option. When we're more afraid of unintended consequences
| than accepting that we have a responsibility to the current
| consequences, our current consequences look rather
| intended.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I hear you but disagree. Who decides what the common good
| is? You end up with companies moralizing, forcing
| employees to adhere to those common goods in both their
| work and personal lives. Forcing people to get the
| vaccine was for the common good. DEI was common good and
| that in turn led to Trump being elected. The pendulum
| swings.
|
| At least with share holder value, you know where you
| stand. The common good is a constantly changing thing
| determined by the moral authority in charge at a moment
| in time.
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have
| the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them
| & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.
| aianus wrote:
| One of humans' needs is for status which is by definition
| zero sum. Same with mating.
|
| If anything those two are probably the most important
| needs so it's not possible to build such a system.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| If one of human needs is status and status is zero-sum,
| then why does it matter what economic system is in place
| at all? We could equally rely on feats of strength, or
| games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care.
|
| Besides why can't one of human needs also be an economic
| system that doesn't have the failure mode of poverty?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You're never going to be able to change the economic
| system for the entire population where you live. Better
| to vote with your feet and move to a country where all
| economic activity is arranged for "the common good".
| There are many, many such countries. You're not the first
| with that idea.
|
| That of course won't mean that you will have the
| privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as
| "the common good". It's unfortunately not like the Arch
| Linux terminal where you are omnipotent.
|
| I say that sincerely, as somebody who had to do just
| that. It's easier for Mohammad to go to the mountain.
|
| Edit: To say: I voted with my feet and moved to a place
| which better aligns with my values. From a "common good"
| society to a "freedom" society.
| j7ake wrote:
| Please name a few such places
| neom wrote:
| Off the top of my head, Costa Rica, Bhutan, Canada,
| Norway/Sweden?
|
| A good read: https://www.project-
| syndicate.org/commentary/costa-rica-enli...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Any communist country of your preference.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| One small question: how did those places manage to change
| the economic system for the entire population?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Most famously they did it by a "great leap".
| jbs789 wrote:
| It's a question of time horizon.
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| ...go on.
| klik99 wrote:
| I wish it were that simple, I think capitalism works best
| when personal self-interested incentives are aligned with
| what creates common good - IE policy is like game design
| where you design the rules in a way that provides an
| overall good outcome. In this lens, there is a huge problem
| with PE right now (the rules incentivize buying out
| industries and gutting them), and something wrong with VC
| (the rules incentivize enshittification) so the rules need
| to be adjusted to align with the broader outcomes we want.
| badpun wrote:
| Would you put your money into a business which put common
| good above your return on investment?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Then don't make a company with shares. This is like
| complaining in a tennis court that it's better to play
| football. Anybody who makes his business a company with
| shares will be beholden to shareholders, even if he's the
| only shareholder. There are plenty of venues for any
| activity, which isn't structured in this way.
|
| 1. Nobody forces you to use a smart phone. 2. Nobody forces
| you to have social media or use it. 3. Nobody forces you to
| watch Netflix.
|
| We all choose what we do in life.
| pstuart wrote:
| The only way to make that happen is to have that common
| good be priced into the shareholder value, i.e., removing
| externalities that allow the privatization of profit and
| the public subsidies of the remediation of the damage done.
|
| Easy peasy, no?
| slt2021 wrote:
| There is no latitude. They have only one requirement: growth
| growth growth.
|
| If you hit the growth targets, they will pat you in the back
| and will demand Hyperscale growth growth growth and will
| throw money at you to supercharge it.
|
| If you refuse to chase the growth, they will simply kick you
| off the company via Board or fund your competitor that will
| chase the growth at all means
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Your board firing you is not a "legal obligation".
| slt2021 wrote:
| The funding is raised to chase growth, otherwise no VC
| will ever give money.
|
| If you get the money and then try to U-turn and refuse to
| chase growth, the board will start asking questions
|
| The legal obligation is that CEO does whatever board
| tells him to, otherwise board can fire ceo
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| This still does not produce any legal obligation.
| sssilver wrote:
| Ok but you've lost your mission, your tools to accomplish
| that mission, and effectively your company.
| watwut wrote:
| Yeah, but you not getting what you want, you not having
| own little imperium is not the same as "you having legal
| obligation".
|
| This amounts to an argument that if doing something
| immoral gives you money and power, you can not possibly
| say no and no one can blame you. That somehow more money
| and power is good enough excuse.
| DenisM wrote:
| So you don't get sued, but you lose control or even your
| stake or even the whole business. Remember how Uber
| founder got kicked out? He had a strong hand.
|
| Chilling effect is there one way or another, and even
| when that does not work adverse selection does.
|
| You have to have a very strong market position to resist
| the investor pressure. Kinda like Google had twenty years
| ago.
|
| Or you can have a diverse set of investors who can't or
| won't be swayed by activist investors. But that usually
| means being public at which point your employees are
| incentivized by RSUs.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| I'm not arguing there isn't an incentive problem. I'm
| arguing that it doesn't have any basis _in statute._ The
| distinction is important because it points to a different
| solution and different moral culpability for the system
| 's outcomes.
| danenania wrote:
| > To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely
| broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to
| shareholders.
|
| That may be true legally, but practically it's only true if
| they control the board. Otherwise they will simply be
| replaced by people who are willing to do what the board
| wants.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| The difference between getting fired and getting convicted
| of a crime is pretty important, actually!
| danenania wrote:
| The annoying tone is unnecessary. Yes, legally speaking
| operators can go against the board and get replaced,
| which they certainly should do if they feel they're being
| asked to do something unethical. But it's not going to
| change how the company is run.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| On that level, on the quasi-feudal economy that is taking
| over the world, it's not clear which of those is more
| impactful.
| gipp wrote:
| For the executive, sure. Not for the impact of the
| overall incentive structure on the trajectory of the
| business. Which is what this discussion is about.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| The discussion literally said "legal obligation."
|
| That's what I was responding to.
| lovich wrote:
| The root comment this thread is in reply to had the
| implication that people are only acting this way because
| of an inaccurate idea of how strict the legal obligations
| are, and the other comments are about how that's
| obviously not the only force producing the current
| outcome
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Yeah, obviously that's not "the only force producing this
| outcome." Nobody claimed it was.
|
| But it's important for founders to understand they _are
| not_ legally obligated to do any specific thing for their
| shareholders. It is _their responsibility_ to act
| morally. Yes, there are other incentives and forces at
| play. "Legal obligation" is not the cop-out excuse that
| executives claim it is.
| duped wrote:
| The idea that executives have a duty to maximize shareholder
| value is a trope from business ethics class, not law.
|
| I say this because you used the phrase "fiduciary duty" which
| does not exist in this context.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Correct, because GP said "legal obligation," which I agree:
| there isn't one.
| klik99 wrote:
| Genuine question because I think I might be wrong on this
| one, or maybe misunderstanding what you're saying -
| aren't there cases of shareholders suing CEOs for not
| acting in shareholders interest and winning? If there was
| no legal obligation to act on behalf of shareholders how
| could they win those cases?
|
| My understanding is those kind of cases aren't common
| because a) they are hard to prove, b) the people being
| sued if they actually have the money to make it worth
| suing them also have the money to fight it, and c) it's a
| really bad look for an investor to be suing a previous
| member of their portfolio and would a strong adverse
| affect on their deal flow
|
| Unless you're saying there is no explicit legal
| obligation / fiduciary duty in law, but it does emerge
| from civil court cases, which is how I understand it, but
| short paragraphs are not a good place for the amount of
| nuance so I just said "legal obligation" as a shorthand
| for something real but very complex.
| duped wrote:
| I think Matt Levine coined this phrase: "everything is
| securities fraud."
|
| Activist investors will sue for anything alleging that
| executives broke securities law by doing anything that
| harmed their portfolio. It doesn't mean they win the
| cases, or that anyone is guilty.
|
| There's also something worth noting that even if there
| isn't a legal obligation for executives to act on their
| shareholders interests, they have a really strong
| incentive when their compensation is mostly stock grants
| and the shareholders can fire them.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| As far as I know, no there has not been a CEO
| successfully sued in the US for failing to maximize
| shareholder value.
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| > from business ethics class, not law
|
| Well, there was one case in the law over 100 years ago in
| the USA. A company had decided to sell itself for cash and
| go out of business. The Court ruled, that in that
| situation, it should sell to the highest bidder. This is
| long before Milton Friedman began advocating that
| corporations had a duty to their common shareholders that
| provided the only valid yardstick for evaluating corporate
| activities. Friedman was an economist, and a controversial
| one, not a lawyer, and how he got the lawyers behind him is
| itself a long strange story.
|
| The idea that common shareholders own the corporation was
| not really obvious to anyone from the start. Common
| shareholders get from the corporation only what is their
| privilege according to the corporate bylaws and charter.
| There are now, and have been in the past, many different
| kinds of and classes of common shareholders. For example,
| some big corporations today have many common shareholders
| who do not have any voting rights. The thing that sets
| common shareholders apart from the other stakeholders who
| also hold pieces of paper from the corporation granting
| them various interests in the corporation, is that the
| common shareholders get to divide up whatever is left over
| if and when the corporation is liquidated and everyone else
| is given what they are owed first. They are more heirs than
| owners. It is more realistic to hold that the corporation,
| as an artificial person, is not and cannot be owned by
| other persons, and owns itself.
| lovich wrote:
| > To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely
| broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to
| shareholders.
|
| Legally maybe. The market and shareholders will punish you if
| you deviate from the current standard behavior.
|
| We've all seen companies do layoffs just because "Wall
| Street" was concerned about the economy and then instantly
| see the stock price spike up.
|
| These negative consequences are all results of bog standard
| prisoner dilemma issues that need government regulation to
| make sure everyone picks the good square, but the tech
| industry and this boards community as well is allergic to the
| idea that regulations can improve the situation for everyone
| potatolicious wrote:
| Yeah, I think it honestly lets founders off the hook too
| much.
|
| In 95% of cases, the founder isn't smashing moral barriers
| because the VCs and shareholders are _making_ them, or
| lording the threat of legal action or any some such.
|
| In 95% of cases, the founder is smashing through moral
| barriers because their interests are aligned with the VCs:
| because they think what they are doing will lead to
| stupendous mega-wealth for them personally.
|
| Like sure, I think the idea that corporate execs must be
| beholden to maximizing share price is a) corrosive to our
| society and b) not as true as often portrayed, but I don't
| think that's even a real factor here.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| 100% agreed, well put
| j7ake wrote:
| It's also survivorship bias. Given that a start up has
| explosive growth, it way more likely that they are amoral.
|
| The ones who play the game with integrity and morals never
| have the type of growth that makes headlines. But I'm sure
| they exist.
| klik99 wrote:
| Maybe in theory, but in practice there is a strong power
| mismatch that causes investors to have a strong influence.
| Sand Hill learned it's lesson from Facebook/Zuckerberg and
| now always have a seat on the board. Only outliers like
| zuck/bezos/similar have the weight to push back against
| investors. Heck, even Dorsey couldn't for whatever reason.
|
| And even if what you said is true, you can look at the
| results of years of this system, the difference between
| companies with outside investment vs without makes a strong
| case against what you're saying.
|
| It's like saying educating people about their rights wrt
| police helps, but in practice police don't derive their power
| from actual laws and it comes at considerable personal
| expense to push it to courts, in the same way Delaware is
| very strongly biased towards shareholder rights.
| chubot wrote:
| It's incredibly simple, but it's also true
|
| _Show me the incentive, and I 'll show you the outcome_ -
| Charlie Munger
|
| It's the same with politics and money.
|
| We don't get the leaders we want, because it costs money to buy
| people's attention. We get the people who have some way to pay
| for attention
|
| (in recent years, one of those ways is increasingly corruption
| - e.g. senator of NJ, mayor of NY, etc.)
|
| An article today talks about Cuomo following the "local TV
| buys" playbook, which WAS a fairly reliable way to win
| elections:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...
|
| That didn't work this time, but the mechanism is simple and
| clear
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > "local TV buys" playbook
|
| Who watches local TV anymore? Probably not many people under
| 60.
| chubot wrote:
| The linked article is questioning why the Democratic
| powers-that-be thought that
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product.
|
| When we have that mindset, we absolutely don't care about the
| thing that we _call_ "our product." It's just food for the
| _actual_ product, where we want to fatten it up, and sell it to
| the biggest slaughterhouse.
|
| That starts almost immediately. You can't even get an A round,
| without an "exit plan."
|
| I feel that _the very existence_ of an exit plan, dooms the
| user. No one cares about them. It 's all about fattening the
| company, and making it look good. When we do that, we'll feed
| it nothing but junk food, in an effort to make it as fat as
| possible, as quickly as possible, with absolutely no thought as
| to long-term viability.
|
| I would _love_ to see the tech industry return to concentrating
| on _truly_ delivering good to the end-user. It 's still
| possible to make a decent living, but maybe not at the insane
| rates we see.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > The company is the product.
|
| If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public
| company, this becomes very apparent very quick.
|
| Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you
| cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to
| be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your
| company, you will not succeed.
|
| Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales
| Leadedship to drive customer outcomes, but the hyperfocus on
| short term deliverables AT THE EXPENSE of a long term product
| vision makes it difficult to push back.
|
| Very few newly founded or public companies can do the latter
| - the most recent ones I can think of are maybe Datadog and
| Wiz (not public but they did drive a customer centric
| mentality internally).
|
| Of course, a lot of this is also due to the extreme bloat
| that formed in the tech industry in the late 2010s to early
| 2020s. Teams grew unrealistically large with limited
| financial justification beyond cherry-picked growth metrics,
| and this meant a lot of companies lost the ability to
| innovate frugally or nimbly. Unrealistically high valuations
| also played a role because towards the end, founders could
| end up demanding IPO-sized multiples in private markets even
| without the underlying fundamentals (eg. Lacework's $9
| BILLION valuation on what was at most $90 MILLION in
| revenue).
|
| A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-
| competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of
| rightsizing will help the industry.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis...about your
| company, you will not succeed.
|
| Halfway true. There's a famous quote:
|
| > In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in
| the long run, it is a weighing machine.
|
| At some point, strong fundamentals will catch up with you.
| api wrote:
| Isn't all this company is the product stuff an obvious side
| effect of wealth inequality?
|
| There is way way more money up top looking for investments
| than there is in the hands of customers, so it's far more
| profitable to chase that money and make the stock the
| product than it is to care about the actual product much.
|
| It's a special case of the more general big dumb money
| problem that happens whenever too much money ends up in too
| few hands, whether those hands are a government or a few
| private rich citizens. You end up with this giant pinata of
| big dumb money and everyone whacking it.
|
| In the old USSR instead of the stock is the product it was
| the appearance in the eyes of other bureaucrats is the
| product, but it's kind of the same phenomenon. The customer
| isn't the customer.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-
| competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of
| rightsizing will help the industry.
|
| The problem is, any amount of rightsizing has the potential
| to tank the entire economy. Too big to fail, just that it
| isn't banks this time but a bunch of companies who went all
| in on "AI".
| whateveracct wrote:
| > I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product.
|
| As Action Jack Barker said, Pied Piper's product is its
| stock.
| klik99 wrote:
| "The company is the product." -> When I'm feeling more
| optimistic I see this is how VC sees their portfolio and how
| you sell it to them, but not what the company is in reality.
| Like playwrights who write under authoritarian regimes
| selling it to the censor as promoting the regime while it
| actually satirizes and undermines them. But even if it's
| possible to walk that line, the data just doesn't back it up
| as common.
|
| Side note, on "exit plan" - the most ridiculous thing about
| raising money is you need an exit strategy but you cannot
| explicitly say you have an exit strategy, you have to imply
| it while the whole time pretending it's not a focus for you.
| It's a very weird dynamic.
| Ekaros wrote:
| When you really think about it, this also applies to very
| many publicly traded companies. Tech especially, always
| searching to present next growth area. And then often shortly
| abandoning it or wasting massive resources on it...
|
| Really does make me cynical on investing...
| akudha wrote:
| While "maximizing shareholder value" is a huge problem, aren't
| there other problems too? Founders wanting to get rich as
| quickly and as easily as possible, customers/users refusing to
| pay even for most important services (for example, how many
| people are willing to pay 5 bucks a month for something as
| important to modern life as email? But they're happy to pay 5$
| for a crappy Starbucks coffee), lawmakers too old or too
| corrupt to understand the negative effects of the
| products/markets they're supposed to regulate, general public
| more interested in convenience and cheap entertainment than
| subjects like privacy, parents simply hooking their kids up
| with iPads so they don't have to deal with tantrums (one of my
| colleagues told me he was raised by TV/internet, not by
| humans)... and on and on.
|
| I suppose we're living in an age of unchecked capitalism. But
| there are other issues too
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I think its bigger. Morality and social contract have eroded
| and continue to erode.
|
| Look at Mozila for the most insidious example. Take a privacy
| focused product. Rope in a bunch of suckers. Then literally
| delete the privacy focus from your mission statment and start
| the "slaughter"
|
| Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so
| few people with them means and morality exist anymore. The
| Sodom and Gomorrah fable is a warning not to let this happen or
| your society will destroy itself.
| bigthymer wrote:
| > Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that
| so few people with them means and morality exist anymore.
|
| I don't think this is a good example. Back then, the internet
| was a new thing only a small cohort of people cared about.
| Something small could just stay small because none of the big
| players with money cared. Nowadays, if someone wanted to
| start something like Craigslist, they would be outrun by
| someone else going the VC route before the small company
| could get big enough on its own. I think it boils down to the
| difference between slower growth, boot-strapped companies vs.
| VC-backed.
| apples_oranges wrote:
| Why ,,historically"?
| klik99 wrote:
| For the last 5-10 years I've noticed a lot of people here are
| more willing to question VC as the sole or even ideal way to
| start a company, and since a major chunk of YC is to train
| how to raise money and connect people via demo day or mentors
| to VC, I think that marks how the HN community has departed
| from the YC community. Obviously there's a lot of overlap,
| and HN clearly has it's roots in YC by it's literal founder,
| but I think it's wrong to say HN community is the same as YC
| community, which I say "historically"
| andoando wrote:
| Its not just shareholders, stock based equity also has all the
| employees pushing profit.
|
| Engineering addiction is also probably more often than not
| intentional. When all the business metrics/KPIs are stuff like
| "engagement time", "$ spent", even AB testing of random
| features leads to manufacturing addiction
| vonnik wrote:
| I wrote a couple pieces about how to take back control of your
| brain:
|
| https://open.substack.com/pub/vonnik/p/how-to-take-your-brai...
|
| Yes, the addictions are engineered in the service of
| shareholder value. There are many ways to fight it!
|
| Fwiw, this dynamic goes way beyond VC and tech.
|
| Douglas Courtwright writes about this in Age of Addiction:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/The-Age-of-Addiction-audiobook/dp/B07...
| wonderwonder wrote:
| "Shareholder value" is what turned "we're a family here" into a
| joke and cliche. It turns people into lines on a spreadsheet
| and strips leadership of their ability to care or treat people
| as humans. It's represents the very darkest side of capitalism.
| Im very much a capitalist but it doesn't mean I have to ignore
| the realities of it, both good and bad. I'll take it over all
| alternatives though as it actually works and improves the lot
| of society as a whole
| welder wrote:
| I'm not raising money to prevent this for my new social
| network.
|
| https://wonderful.dev/download
| moffkalast wrote:
| Of course VC loan sharking is a major part of the problem. But
| it's also tiring reading blog after blog of people who say they
| want to do the right things and do them right or whatever the
| trendy thing is that month, all as a thinly veiled pretence to
| get as much funding from whoever wants to give it to them and
| try to make themselves the next Zuckerberg or Bezos.
|
| If people actually believed in something they'd make it open
| source or a non-profit, not a convenient vehicle for personal
| enrichment. Imagine if Wikipedia was a for-profit startup, it
| would've eventually ended up as an unusable cesspool of
| advertising.
| baxtr wrote:
| Yes, and there is a huge problem connected to that:
|
| If you don't play this game you'll lose. Look at Europe for
| example, they haven't played the VC game properly and thus have
| no really significant tech player compared to the US / China.
|
| So what options are left? Play the game or be ruled by those
| that play it.
|
| I'd rather play even if moral erosion is required.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| I think the VC thing is indicative of the entire thing; the
| goal is profit and everything is subordinated to that. This is
| how the system works and how it is designed to work. When
| profit and some external thing like social responsibility are
| at odds, profit is going to win out every time. The mercenary
| mentality rules the scene.
|
| In Magickal Faerieland, we have regulations to align those 2
| things by incentivizing the "goodguy" path and/or
| disincentivizing the "cackling villain" path but we live in
| reality where money rules and regulatory capture is a thing. So
| a Facebook or other megacorp can get away with using
| neuroscience and psychology to engineer a virtual slot machine
| with a terrible payout and ExxonMobile et al can get away with
| being an architect of environmental degradation and the
| accompanying humanitarian disasters.
| mouse_ wrote:
| 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?
| jfengel wrote:
| He's not. Anything he has in mind is socially unacceptable and
| he knows it.
|
| We'd all love to rebuild economics from the ground up. But as
| soon as you try you realize that everyone has a different idea
| and they can't agree on anything.
| DeathRay2K wrote:
| The author doesn't suggest it, but the implicit solution is
| public funding for social goods.
|
| That could be through a robust grant process, providing funding
| for social media that is not supported other ways.
|
| Alternately, it could be through a UBI, giving people basic
| cash flow that could be allocated to paid social media
| platforms rather than everyone relying on ad-supported social
| media.
| fullshark wrote:
| Government regulation / laws
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| And whats more, there is only one law you need to change. You
| simply need to remove common carrier exemptions from hosts so
| that if false or misleading information is delivered to a
| user from a platform, that platform can be sued for damages.
|
| Its the rule that newspapers and TV need to live by, social
| media should play by the same rules.
|
| The platforms then simply need to protect themselves my
| making sure they accurately identify users posting on their
| networks, so they can pass the cost of any lost lawsuit onto
| the original poster.
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| quaintdev wrote:
| > 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social
| networks if we want to bring people together.
|
| Agreed. Social networks not only didn't bring us together,
| they've actually done the opposite and made us more tribal.
| Excellent book on the topic is _Superbloom: How Technologies of
| Connection Tear us Apart_ by Nicholas Carr.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| I love that idea, I just wish I knew how to precipitate it in
| my local community beyond just trying.
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| My theory is that local community _is_ "just trying".
| b0a04gl wrote:
| 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
| closetkantian wrote:
| 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.
| cushpush wrote:
| Fascinating, bet the battery life is great. Probably no games
| on your phone but texting works like normal I'm guessing?
| closetkantian wrote:
| Battery life isn't as good as I expected, but I do leave the
| backlight on quite a bit. I'm not a big phone gamer, but some
| people do enjoy playing original (black and white) game boy
| games on them.
|
| Texting works very well. I'm typing this on the phone right
| now. It's one of the smoothest eink devices I've ever
| encountered.
| braaileb wrote:
| Can you use Android Auto with it? Props for the change
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| Camera and video calls feels like two major drawbacks. Also
| I've heard there are NFC problems.
| cushpush wrote:
| Do you think a nonprofit model could work?
| waveforms wrote:
| yes, go ahead and have ads but any income over server fees can
| be shared with open source projects.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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.
| fullshark wrote:
| The proposed solution is hinted at in this piece but dare not
| spoken: government regulation.
| kixiQu wrote:
| FTFA:
|
| > 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.
| ruined wrote:
| an article on the problems of social media with no mention of the
| federated platforms? seems like a huge omission
| waveforms wrote:
| it is. There are many websites and applications that I use,
| like wikipedia and linux / kde that could help if they picked
| an application like Mastodon and promoted it on their site. I
| only use social media about once a month so I am far from
| expert but an ad supported open source facebook clone that
| stayed non profit by sending its profits to other open source
| sites would be ideal.
| johncole wrote:
| 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.
| andoando wrote:
| Ive been very interested in a worker owned company, or at least
| representative democracy/republic style of ownership.
|
| Now just need a successful startup to push the idea
| Kudos wrote:
| Literally Mastodon.
| alwa wrote:
| For that matter--the apps that communities are using that
| _aren't_ so aggressively exploiting addictive patterns--like
| the one you and I are using now--could it be that they're at
| some level the norm, they're just kind of boring beyond the
| small group of people who find them useful?
|
| Methamphetamine is flashy and destructive, and its supply chain
| and sales force are the sort of thing romanticized in _Breaking
| Bad_ --but billions drink tea (and nobody really glamorizes
| it).
|
| To my mind, the norms of a specific subreddit or Local Co-Op
| Facebook Group or neighborhood gossip board tend to fall closer
| to the "tea" pattern than the "viral growth" paradigm. And
| those, and boring email, and transactional interfaces to
| companies that primarily do real-world stuff--those tend to
| take up the bulk of the time of the people in my life. But
| maybe I'm just old fashioned :)
| Devasta wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I'd go on further, we cannot have advertising as a business
| model, targeted or not. It worked previously, classic Google
| was a good example, but mixed with shareholders, it doesn't
| work, incentives screw up any attempt of providing a better
| product, because the product become the ad space.
|
| Throwing Musk in there is strange. To my knowledge he doesn't
| really profit of ads, X probably have ad revenue, but that's
| not really his business model. Tesla stock however, that's a
| completely different addiction, mostly not relevant to
| consumers, but that stuff is immune to any type of common sense
| and traders can't seem to get enough of it.
| djoldman wrote:
| 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."
| liendolucas wrote:
| 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?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| My plan is/was to structure the payments as a single annual
| payment that only one person in a group or family needs to pay.
| Then all the members of the group/family join free. That way
| you only need to convince one person in a group its worth the
| change.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| ec109685 wrote:
| To add to this, BeReal flamed out because it was a gimmick that
| was quickly copied and then forgotten by all the other
| platforms.
|
| Agree that blaming VCs for why TikTok has an algorithmic feed
| and hundreds of millions of users is simplistic. A non-
| algorithmic TikTok would have no users.
|
| And without a personalized algorithms, the feed ranking would
| just be showing content from popular accounts, which is a worse
| experience.
| alwa wrote:
| 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
| smikhanov wrote:
| 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.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Because social networks are boring without users.
| smikhanov wrote:
| How in the world is it easier to attract people to some new
| VC-funded nonsense?
| Jensson wrote:
| VC-funded means you have money for marketing.
| smikhanov wrote:
| But for a paid social network you can do marketing too.
| All you need is for CLV to be higher than CAC.
| jrib wrote:
| what if we mention AI somewhere???
| quonn wrote:
| How do you get everyone to join - which is the important part?
| smikhanov wrote:
| How in the world is it easier to attract people to some new
| VC-funded nonsense?
| pathsjs wrote:
| For one thing you can use VC money to pay for ads
| smikhanov wrote:
| But for a paid social network you can do that too. All
| you need is for CLV to be higher than CAC.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| If you want to launch a big viral marketing campaign, you
| also need someone who's willing to trade your predictions
| of future revenue for cash today, and VCs are by
| definition the people interested in making that trade.
| For something that depends on network effects, slowly
| trickling out one new ad every time you get 10 new
| signups isn't going to work.
| Kudos wrote:
| There are several mature open source social network stacks. The
| barrier isn't technology.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn't work?
|
| Commenters all across the internet will say they'd pay good
| money for a site that does something specific that sounds like
| a good idea.
|
| Then when the site is built, you will discover that they will
| not, in fact, pay any money for it at all. You will continue to
| add the features they request and the goalposts will continue
| to move.
|
| Social networks are even more difficult to bootstrap because
| they're not worth paying for if you can't find people to
| socialize with. Nobody wants to sign up for an empty social
| network.
|
| Even the free social networks have a hard time getting started.
| There were dozens of Twitter competitors created after Twitter
| was acquired, but most of them languished. The few that have
| survived have their own problems that are driving many of their
| own fans away.
| smikhanov wrote:
| You description is probably spot on, but boy I'd love to have
| a version of Instagram where I could just pay $5/month and
| get a time-sorted stream of photos of my friends' babies,
| Pina coladas with a beach background, and sweaty mirror
| selfies in a gym without any stupid ads in the middle.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Kagi just passed 50k users:
| https://kagi.com/stats?stat=members
|
| They claim to be profitable, but the TAM for services people
| are used to thinking of as "free" is small.
| smikhanov wrote:
| Kagi is cool (as a company), really.
|
| The whole idea of running your company while thinking about
| TAM and whatever is totally from a VC playbook. If you
| don't take VC funding, you stop caring about TAM. Instead,
| you care about whether having the profit you have makes you
| -- yes, you, personally -- comfortable about your life.
| This is a much, much healthier line of thinking than trying
| to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach.
| fragmede wrote:
| trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you
| can reach is the VC part. Looking and making sure that
| there's a market for the widget your factory produces is
| just due diligence.
| smikhanov wrote:
| Sorry to mumble, I'll add one more thing. Back in 2013, I
| was running a productivity startup, and we tried courting
| Evernote into acquiring us (unsuccessfully, though damn we
| were a good match). I remember those times vividly:
| Evernote raises a sizeable fraction of a billion in funding
| in several rounds, employs like 400 people, their CEO goes
| to places like Le Web or whatever and expatiates from stage
| about building a "100 year company".
|
| Fast forward to 2022: Evernote itself is acquired by a
| random app studio, and the whole service is now run by
| something like a dozen people. The CEO of what used to be a
| "100 year company" moved on.
|
| I thought about this a lot. They never needed those 400
| employees, even in 2013, it was absolutely possible to run
| the same service with a tiny team, it's just that the
| people at the company's top would be completely different
| people with completely different aptitude towards building
| their businesses. It's only if you really, really want to
| be on stage at Le Web, then you go to investors over and
| over again and convince them and yourself that a note-
| taking app needs 400 employees, and you're building a
| company as a product, not a product as a product.
|
| Looks like the author of the original article here also
| didn't actually want to build a social network business but
| rather wants to be in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. Well,
| good luck to them.
| dimal wrote:
| People pay for software all the time. Hell I pay $30/month
| for a fucking email client (Superhuman). But no one has tried
| it for a social network. I think the problem is that people
| think a social network is worthless unless you hit Twitter
| scale, but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks
| at $2/pop could work. People are now saying that Discord is
| being enshittified, right on schedule. Maybe there's an
| opportunity to poach some communities.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > People pay for software all the time.
|
| Well obviously some people would pay. The hurdle that a
| company needs to clear is getting enough people to pay to
| support both an engineering staff and the infrastructure
| costs.
|
| Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web
| site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone
| to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription
| required to make that work is prohbitively high.
|
| > but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at
| $2/pop could work
|
| Even large, free, well-funded social networks are failing
| to get significant traction or running into echo chamber
| problems (Bluesky).
|
| I've been hearing for years that a paid social network
| would work, but if the unpaid social network competitors
| can't get any traction, what makes you think adding a
| $2/month signup hurdle would improve the situation?
|
| If you want to see a real-world example of people squirming
| out of their claims that they'd pay for ad-free services,
| take a look at any HN thread discussing YouTube premium or
| their ad-block evasion efforts. The price for ad-free
| YouTube is reasonable for as much as people watch it, yet
| when cornered the same audiences who claimed they'd pay for
| an ad-free version suddenly come up with a multitude of new
| excuses for why they're refusing to pay. My personal
| favorite claim (which invariably surfaces in every thread)
| is when people say they would happily pay for YouTube
| premium if they weren't so aggressive about adblockers.
| smikhanov wrote:
| Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web
| site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and
| someone to run the business. The number of $2/month
| subscription required to make that work is prohbitively
| high.
|
| Is this really so? Let's try doing the math: you're
| describing a distributed team of maybe 10 people, likely
| less. Let's assume you need $600K/year to run this
| business (is this the right number? not sure, feel free
| to correct me). At $2/month, that requires 25000 paying
| users.
|
| Difficult, but not impossible. At $5/month (the $3
| difference wouldn't trigger any price sensitivity,
| talking from real experience) that's 10000 users. If your
| service actually provides value, you can crank it even
| higher. Again, difficult, but totally within the realm of
| possible. if the unpaid social network
| competitors can't get any traction, what makes you think
| adding a $2/month signup hurdle would improve the
| situation?
|
| Because the "traction" needed to make free and paid
| social network work is vastly different. You need insane
| scale (millions or tens of millions of users) to make
| free social network viable, hell, my stomach hurts from
| only thinking about it. A paid social network business,
| run with certain austerity, can be profitable with one
| thousand paid users.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There are comparatively no moderation expenses and public
| relations' liability from random uploads with an email
| client.
| fragmede wrote:
| Ning, Substack, OnlyFans, Nostr, mirror.xyz, Farcaster are
| paid social networks, among others. It's been tried, with
| varying degrees of success based on user base.
|
| But people are cheap as fuck. Even here we post links to
| archive.is to get around paywalls (which rubs me the wrong
| way). Every time YouTube Premium come up the comments are
| full of people saying they won't pay up.
| skybrian wrote:
| If you're not trying to make a business out of it, you don't
| even need that much money. You could set up a Mastodon server
| and invite your friends. It might not get a lot of attention,
| but it will work.
| scoofy wrote:
| 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
| Vektorceraptor wrote:
| 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.
| divbzero wrote:
| 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
| superkuh wrote:
| 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.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| 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.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > 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.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled
| by anything more centralized than "all the users".
|
| Right, which is impractical, and after direct democracy comes
| representational democracy. Eventually you get things like
| libraries or public parks, public goods managed by government
| employees. The main difference this time is the need for more
| transnational cooperation. Other than that, it should be
| relatively easy and cheap.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| 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
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