[HN Gopher] Smartphones manipulate our emotions and trigger our ...
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Smartphones manipulate our emotions and trigger our reflexes
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 56 points
Date : 2025-10-26 19:00 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| hooverd wrote:
| what doesn't, at some point?
| HPsquared wrote:
| They do it very very frequently.
| hooverd wrote:
| Oh absolutely, The intent and magnitude of a lot of dark
| patterns do make them quite bad.
| quacked wrote:
| Bo Burnham put it succinctly, although he was talking about
| children on apps: "When they go to sleep at night, they have to
| choose between all of the information ever published in the
| history of the world, or the back of their eyelids."
|
| The smartphone is a perverted implementation of the goal that
| people use to fantasize about back in the early days of the
| computer revolution: a personal terminal to the world of audio,
| text, and video information stored in databases across all of
| humanity. It's of course worth talking about how they compel us
| to certain behaviors via push notifications, dark patterns, nasty
| design, etc. but also--obviously we'd be addicted to personal
| terminals that let us access all the publicly available digitized
| information in the history of the world.
| samrus wrote:
| I think the access to so much information itself isnt bad. Cuz
| access to all of wikipedia wouldnt do this. People would get
| bored because its still work to digest that information
|
| I think this access gave opportunities to bad actors whose
| incentives are misalligned with society's. Social media
| companies. They use this opportunity to serve us easily
| digestible garbage thats going to get us hooked.
|
| Its a not some grand and malicious conspiracy or anything.
| Greed is just a part of capitalism. Before, people loved
| getting others hooked on drugs because it made them so much
| money.
|
| People who like capitalism know this is a bug in the system
| that needs to be patched with regulations. We stopped putting
| cocaine in coca cola. We just need to stop putting brainrot
| garbage in our kids information feeds. We need to penalize
| companies for these greed driven addiction algorithms. Itll be
| hard, but its what needs to be done and we can do it if we have
| enough societal willpower
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I agree but it's too entwined with "freedom of speech" and
| section 230. Many here make too much money addicting children
| and don't want to turn off the fire hose of money.
| hooverd wrote:
| That just makes it So the big boys who are making all this
| money can continue to operate while small platforms can no
| longer afford to comply with the new regulatory
| environment.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I don't buy it. The internet existed before the carve out
| and was in fact less centralized and less shitty
| tayo42 wrote:
| Idk I've gotten high and just wasted whole nights going down
| Wikipedia rabbit holes. I think eventually turned to stronger
| time wasters though. The Wikipedia thing is real though.
| andy99 wrote:
| We didn't have internet when I was an early teen and I
| would read physical encyclopedias before bed.
|
| If academic study is on one end of a spectrum, lots of
| Wikipedia is maybe in the middle, pretty accessible and
| simple enough to keep clicking through links for someone
| interested, but still at least requiring active
| participation.
|
| Something like TikTok (which admittedly I've never used)
| along with AI conversations which I have, can basically
| take place without the brain ever even engaging other than
| the reward pathways.
|
| If academic books or literature are fruits and vegetables,
| Wikipedia is maybe a restaurant meal and social media (+ AI
| chat) dominos pizza or Pringle's or some other thing that's
| been processed into oblivion and just diffuses though your
| stomach lining directly onto your blood as you mindless
| binge on it.
| hooverd wrote:
| That's infinitely preferable to scrolling your short form
| video platform of choice. At least you get some fun facts
| to use in conversation out of it.
| ericmcer wrote:
| It isn't even a perverted implementation, we just overestimated
| ourselves.
|
| All our sci-fi futurism of the 70s/80s showed enlightened
| humans elevating themselves with technology. In real Star Trek
| the holo deck would be used for porn, the computer would be
| used to play shitty podcasts while they procrastinated work and
| the replicator would be churning out donuts and fried foods.
|
| It's philosophically a weird time, because we are more socially
| progressive than ever before, but we have a nonstop flow of
| evidence that people cannot self-govern. It feels paradoxical
| to demand freedom and protection from your own impulses at the
| same time.
| noduerme wrote:
| I don't know that anyone's really asking for protection from
| their own impulses. Freedom requires protection from _other
| people 's_ impulses. That's where this is all going. A few
| truly free people, everyone else in a cage.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Rather than framing it as "protection from my own
| impulses," I think it's more fair to frame it as
| "protection from teams of professional researchers and
| engineers and marketers whose entire life's work is fine
| tuning how to most effectively profit from my impulses"
| exe34 wrote:
| We want tools that aren't designed to trigger our impulses.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| >In real Star Trek the holo deck would be used for porn
|
| This is lampshaded in Lower Decks
| teekert wrote:
| With a smartphone you do not only give the internet to a kid,
| you are also giving the kid to the internet.
| the_snooze wrote:
| It's not even just children in safe situations like bedtime. I
| regularly see adults crossing the street typing on their phones
| while having headphones on.
| Simulacra wrote:
| "Short of powering off or walking away, what can we do to manage
| this dependency? We can access device settings and activate only
| those features we truly require, adjusting them now and again as
| our habits and lifestyles change."
|
| I think this is how some people feel about the dating apps. They
| promise love, affection, and future, but only manipulate our
| emotions.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| As someone who actively avoids political rage bait, was trained
| in rhetoric, was raised by public persuasion oriented public
| speakers.
|
| The idea that the most resonant rage bait that exists at any
| given moment is instantly, algorithmically, propagated to our
| public officials and the politically engaged is insane.
|
| All this while culture has now been trained to blindly celebrate
| bias, has been inculcated with a learned helplessness toward
| bias, have become poisoned against the idea that anyone has the
| goal of accuracy or objectivity and really does just wants
| accurate models of the world.
|
| We are lighting ourselves on fire.
| eep_social wrote:
| > We are lighting ourselves on fire.
|
| And the majority celebrate because they feel warm.
| lijok wrote:
| Notice under "Managing dependency", the focus is exclusively on
| technological solutions.
|
| There is no technological solution to this. We have the
| equivalent of unlimited crack in everyone's pocket 24/7 with no
| possible oversight over its use and no way to reel it back in.
| The genie has been out of the bottle for a while now.
|
| Just like gluttony, there is no solution, only management
| strategies and they're all very human.
|
| Sensible education about these things starting at K1. Social and
| outreach programs for addicts. Etc
| DavidPiper wrote:
| > Short of powering off or walking away ...
|
| We could all stop any time we want, but we don't. :(
| user2722 wrote:
| But solutions? Here's my take, will gladly take input (Android):
|
| Two profiles: profile 1 has no notifications, reading apps
| (ebooks) and shouldn't have a browser (mine does and shouldn't);
| profile 2 has all apps, inclusively all of profile 1 apps. Idea:
| have an "offline" phone. Good for battery. Whenever I need IoT or
| something else, I shrug and change profile.
|
| Use desktop apps/desktop browser: should work. Doesn't much. When
| I'm on laptop I tend to do terminal stuff, social apps feel like
| wasting time, do it fast and multitasking mode. Multitasking is
| not really what I want to train my attention span. Sometimes I
| turn on notifications but put system notifications in DnD so I
| can check what's notificated every half an hour or so.
|
| Use Waydroid to have social apps: should work, never worked.
|
| Special profiles on social apps: my current social apps have only
| institutional accounts being followed. Some decorum is kept, and
| with it, sanity. Exceptions: Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon,
| Linkedin, where I follow regular people. But I really should
| implement something similar for my LinkedIn account.
|
| Alternate sites/apps/mode of usage: use WhatsApp/Telegram to
| interact, say hi to some people online on Facebook Messenger,
| install Discourse; on group chats avoid links or include a short
| summary written by an human of why people should open your link
| and a quick "what's on the link" description.
|
| These are my takes to extract some humanness from my machine
| mobile phone.
| godelski wrote:
| I always feel conflicted when I see this problem phrased as
| "smartphones". I understand why but at the same time I wonder how
| much, if any, it detracts from solving the actual problems.
|
| The article discusses the usual surveillance capitalism and
| social media stuff[0] that we're probably all pretty familiar
| with here. But where I feel uneasy is the blaming on the device
| or technology itself. Smartphones, and even social media, could
| be amazing technologies. We use them poorly, but that's a
| different issue in of itself. It is their utility that is a big
| part of why they won't go away. But that also makes them ripe for
| abuse. Anything with value will be such a target. So even though
| I know "smartphones" is a shorthand for "surveillance capitalism
| and 'engagement based' social media", I do worry that it
| abstracts the problems too much, making it just seem like by
| getting rid of our smart phones we could fix everything.
|
| We've been using this tactic for years and tbh, I don't think it
| has had any meaningful success. Maybe it is time to try a
| different approach? I think the average person can handle a
| little nuance. And by breaking it down a little more we might be
| better at addressing the real issues. No one wants to give up the
| GPS in their pocket, but in 2025 do we really need that data to
| leave our device (except when explicitly sharing with someone
| like friends and family)? We don't need to throw the baby out
| with the bathwater.
|
| [0] To anyone who works on feed ranking systems and engagement:
|
| I'm genuinely curious, are you seeking to better measure
| engagement and look at ways to optimize _different kinds_ of
| engagement? From the outside it seems like only the lazy
| measurements are being used, and let 's be honest, arguing on the
| internet generates more comments and misinformation as well. Any
| bad comment that gets lots of responses falls down the ranking
| (top viewing), only to end up being replaced with similar
| comments which causes the process to repeat. Brandolini's law,
| right?
|
| But what are the issues? Is sentiment analysis just not good
| enough? Is a lack of desire? Momentum?
|
| I would seriously like to understand. Feel free to respond with
| an anonymous account. And please don't downvote responses, even
| if you disagree. Maybe we all can have an understanding that we
| can use votes to express our interest in the conversation
| (upvoting honest but disagreeable responses, downvoting quips and
| "mic drops") rather than our to express our agreement with a
| particular comment? We get to decide what votes mean, right?
|
| [1] Follow-up
|
| Can we at least tone down notifications? It is absolutely insane
| how complicated it is getting. I need to leave my bank
| notifications on to ensure I get notified of a fraudulent charge
| but that same notification system is being used to advertise to
| me savings bonds and referral bonuses. Same thing happens to
| emails. Let's be honest here, too many false alarms makes people
| ignore true alarms. Alarm fatigue is a real thing. If you don't
| believe me, watch what people do with a faulty smoke detector in
| an apartment. They just remove it!
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(page generated 2025-10-26 23:01 UTC)