Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

https://economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-tech-from-making-users-behave-in-ways-they-dont-want-to

by andsoitis • 3 months ago

309 175 3 months ago

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 months ago

An internal memo found that 12-year-olds were three times as likely as 32-year-olds to stay on Facebook for the long term, despite the platform nominally requiring users to be at least 13; the memo concluded that Facebook “should consider investing more heavily in bringing in larger volumes of tweens”.

ViktorRay• 3 months ago

100 years from now the descendants of the engineers who work at Big Tech will be looked upon by their descendants with the same shame that people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 months ago

I don't think it will take 100 years, the world is already souring on big tech.

colechristensen• 3 months ago

people nowadays look at ancestors who were involved in tobacco

Huh? Does anyone actually care any more? The kind of moralizing busybodies that spend their time shaming the tobacco industry are few and far between.

selectively2• 3 months ago

This is an outrageously dumb thing to say. BIg Tobacco knowingly sold a product that physically addicted (the only real form of addiction) its users and killed them.

Facebook is not that.

wxw• 3 months ago

https://archive.ph/3HkyR

andy99• 3 months ago

I assume this is about dark patterns but can’t confirm as I’m faced with a cookie wall where I can select from “Manage” and “Accept All”.

Unai• 3 months ago

I got a big "reject all" button just next to the "accept all" one, on mobile.

gavinsyancey• 3 months ago

I wonder if you're in a region that requires that, while the original commenter isn't?

californical• 3 months ago

I just got a big

“We respect your privacy” banner, with a big green ok button and a “manage data collection” tiny print text that had consent for everything automatically approved

ngriffiths2• 3 months ago

Sure, making instagram as addictive as possible seems bad but I disagree with the framing a bit. Dark patterns get users to do things they don't want, that's why they get super annoyed at the design or the process or the outcome. Addictive apps are a different thing to me.

I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! The question is can you make a compelling case that spending time on it is harmful.

dd8601fn• 3 months ago

This reminds me of the TikTok ban that lasted all of twelve seconds.

I’ve been using the internet for longer than I care to admit, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time.

thinkingtoilet• 3 months ago

That's literally what it was. These technologies are addicting. Is it as bad or the same as heroin? No. However, they are designed to be addicting.

Terr_• 3 months ago

This reminds me of the TikTok ban that lasted all of twelve seconds.

That timeline has way more to do with the corrupt politicians than consumer behavior.

_______________

Both in the sense that the original semi-bipartisan law should've been ruled unconstitutional [0], and also in how the Republican party turned around and broke portions of that law for months until Trump could ensure the assets were handed to his major donor buddy--and fixing none of the original PRC influence issues. [1]

[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/banning-tiktok-i...

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/19/tiktok-deal-done-and-its...

pembrook7• 3 months ago

It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time.

No, it was not. It was actually nothing like that.

No babies were left to die because their parents were out searching for tiktok clips. I saw no people whoring themselves on the street just to see a few tiktok clips. I heard no stories of children stealing from their own family to get a few scrolls of tiktok. There was no people killing each other just to get a hit of tiktok.

Let's not trivialize something like drug addiction by comparing it to kids procrastinating by watching their TV phone app.

advisedwang2• 3 months ago

the TikTok ban that lasted all of twelve seconds

The TikTok ban successfully forced the sale of the US TikTok operations. I wouldn't be so dismissive of it.

wormy745• 3 months ago

Do you think Instagram/Facebook is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or a sheep with fangs?

By that I mean- is the product addiction, with a shroud of media, or is it media which just happens to be addictive.

micromacrofoot• 3 months ago

they know what they're doing, they've tried to bury the evidence but their own internal studies have shown addiction and harmful psychological effects in children

facebook in the past has done tests of emotional manipulation on their users without informing them

they're rotten from the head down

thewebguyd• 3 months ago

They are the wolf. The product is the user's attention, they are ad delivery networks disguised as "social media."

The entire revenue model is based on on engagement and clicks, the product is incentivized to maximize time spent on the service at any cost. Addiction is a core engineering requirement.

fsflover2• 3 months ago

is the product addiction, with a shroud of media, or is it media which just happens to be addictive.

It's the former, by design:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26846784

altmanaltman• 3 months ago

they are the Shepard, we are the sheep, ads/media are the wolves that also have a deal with the shepard.

throwaway274482• 3 months ago

I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do!

I can't say I know anyone who defends extended social media usage. Do you?

InsideOutSanta• 3 months ago

I absolutely did not want to go to these websites and did it anyway. I ended up blocking them in my hosts file to get me to stop.

thedougd• 3 months ago

It's wild. I reinstalled Facebook to sell some things on Marketplace. Thirty minutes later I'm doom scrolling through shit I wouldn't have sought out. I uninstall the app after I no longer have items to sell.

rconti• 3 months ago

What we've lost in social media just makes me so sad. I hate that reels/stories have become the "new" way of sharing things (over the past 10 years).

I took a trip to Yosemite last weekend and took the (rare) opportunity to post a reel. All of the comments and reactions are DMs. It feels so lonely and weird and isolating. Who asked for this?

I miss the days where you shared things, and people actually commented on them and interacted with each other as well as the poster. And where it wasn't ephemeral.

funimpoded• 3 months ago

I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! The question is can you make a compelling case that spending time on it is harmful.

I want to follow news and deals from a handful of vendors and local businesses I like a lot. The best way to do that is following them on instagram. It’s the only reason I signed up and installed the app. If it’d been one or two, I’d not have bothered, but it’s that way for lots of them.

I never want to see the “feed”. I would disable it if I could. I would make it default to my “following” view if I could. Instagram so very much wants me not to do that that they went out of their way to make it impossible to achieve that even with iOS’ built in shortcut-like system (you used to be able to).

As a result, sometimes I get distracted by one or two of the top items on the feed. That doesn’t mean I actually want to see them. That I open the app once every couple days doesn’t mean I like the app. I think it’s terrible.

People taking what folks do with a sharply constrained set of options as an expression of “why they want” or revealed preference or whatever is frustratingly wrong.

cortesoft3• 3 months ago

While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed.

How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

thaumasiotes• 3 months ago

Well, you could look to the gambling market for inspiration and let people voluntarily sign up for a blacklist on that feature.

That would be a lot of extra work for the platforms, but I think the results would be interesting. It amounts to legislating that certain features have to be optional and configurable.

conductr• 3 months ago

Agree. My first thought is most people in early days didn’t even want to start using PCs for work to begin with. The businesses generally had to mandate it. I imagine many people are facing this today with AI.

general1465• 3 months ago

Very simple - force companies into data interoperability. That will allow users to move to competition without any data loss. I.e. nobody actually cares that GitHub is constantly down because you can move your repos to a different git provider or to your own server.

Aurornis3• 3 months ago

I.e. nobody actually cares that GitHub is constantly down because you can move your repos to a different git provider or to your own server.

I honestly can't tell if this is serious or satire, so apologies if missed the joke.

Pushing a git repo to a new server is built into git itself.

Github project data is easy to export: https://docs.github.com/en/issues/planning-and-tracking-with...

There are import tools for many competing projects that will transfer it over in various ways.

akersten• 3 months ago

How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

For laws like this it always boils down to "I'll know it when I see it" which is such a shockingly poor way to write legislation that I'm flabbergasted it doesn't immediately fail any amount of rudimentary scrutiny. Not to mention the latitude it grants for selective enforcement. It's basically Washington asking (through the Economist) for a leash on platforms that host their critics that they can yank at any time the population gets too rowdy, with the convenient justification that the algorithm is too good and our attention spans are in danger or whatever.

intended6• 3 months ago

A large portion of the laws you live under, are exactly like this. Norms make up the major chunk of governance.

traderj0e2• 3 months ago

One way is intent. If a company's internal communications show that they're intentionally making it addictive, or worse they know it causes harm, you have the smoking gun. This of course doesn't catch all the abuse, but at least it makes it much harder to do this down an entire reporting chain. They have to get really good at winking.

One famous case was Apple suing Samsung over patents. Hard to prove until internal comms surfaced showing intent to copy the iPhone.

cortesoft3• 3 months ago

Companies are onto this, though, and do training with their staff about how to phrase things in emails to make it look better.

ryandrake• 3 months ago

How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

I don't know how you'd write it in a law either, but if you're in a meeting at your tech company, and the product owner or tech lead uses language like "We need to get users to do..." and "We need to incentivize..." and "It should be easy to do X and hard to do Y..." then do whatever is in your power to steer/stop. You're not really building a product users want, you're pushing a behavior-modification scheme onto users.

pbasista• 3 months ago

It should be easy to do X and hard to do Y
you're pushing a behavior-modification scheme onto users

In general I think that your comment is reasonable. I just would like to point out that such "behavior-modification" schemes are sometimes introduced for genuinely good and ethical reasons.

For instance, it is in my opinion desirable to make it more difficult for users to delete all their photos by e.g. having to confirm their decision in a dialog first. Because it prevents them from accidentally doing something they might not want to do and which is potentially impossible to revert.

cortesoft3• 3 months ago

I feel like they will just frame it differently: “Users aren’t getting the full value from product x, so let’s change the workflow to help enable them to get more value with no additional effort” or “Users are losing out on a ton of value by cancelling their subscriptions without realizing what they are losing out on, so let’s implement feature x to make them less likely to mistakenly cancel”

y0eswddl2• 3 months ago

dark patterns are pretty well documented and understood at this point. I don't think identifying them is all that hard.

Infinite scroll is one obvious one. As well as forcing algorithmic feeds of accounts we don't follow.

Seattle35035• 3 months ago

You create an agency and give it a mandate that requires it to balance concerns.

octoberfranklin2• 3 months ago

This answer can be applied to pretty much any social question.

If it were so easy, we'd do this all the time. We already do it a lot, and there are heaps of examples where it goes wrong.

nalekberov2• 3 months ago

The Irony is that in order to read this entry I had to pass a cookie wall, which gave me only ‘Accept all’ and ‘Manage’. Then I couldn’t read it, because I had no subscription.

y0eswddl2• 3 months ago

the author has no control over that

Aurornis3• 3 months ago

The publication did not force the author to publish their works on their site.

The author made a choice to publish there. They want the paywall, because that's how they get paid for this writing.

nalekberov2• 3 months ago

She had, apparently.

metalman• 3 months ago

Step by step I am slowly backing away from any technology that I dont like, sometimes going to ridiculous lengths to bypass certain imposed aysmmetric requirements, up to and including abandonment. Nothing in my house beeps. My only online subscription is for web space. At this point it has become fun, as I have stoped reacting, and am experimenting and planning ahead, while figureing out ways to increase my income, while reduceing my personal spend

pembrook7• 3 months ago

I'm no defender of engagement algorithms and social media (including upvote based algos and this site too)....but this is a ridiculous argument.

Social media is not making you behave in ways you don't want. On the contrary, it's giving you EXACTLY what you want. People want to doomscroll social media instead of engage reality, because the real world requires action, effort and social risk...doomscrolling is pure passive consumption.

If we're going to give people autonomy and freedom to choose how they spend their time, at some point we have to draw the line and hold people accountable for their own actions. Or we have to acknowledge we'd rather stay in a permanent state of adolescence and give full control of our lives to big brother.

This constant push by the urban monoculture to turn everything into an "addiction" and turn everyone into a "victim" is a terrible set of ideas to put in peoples heads and is equally as toxic as anything they claim smartphone apps are trivially doing with UI design.

Apps are not physically addictive like cigarettes or alcohol and never have been.

And if you're going to argue social media preys on reward systems in the brain, this is also true about everything that humans do. Reward systems in the brain govern every single action we take, so everything we do can turned into a victimization by some addictive outside force.

tardedmeme3• 3 months ago

What is addiction? Can you explain to us how you think about addiction?

pembrook7• 3 months ago

Everything is an addiction. Nothing is an addiction. Instead of jumping down a semantic rabbit hole, it might be more useful to look at specifics since obviously its a spectrum.

I can say with certainty that opioids are addictive. I can also say with certainty that doomscrolling is pretty far on the opposite end of that spectrum. I have yet to meet someone who would steal copper pipes off of an abandoned building or sell their body on the street for a few scrolls of tiktok.

But why do you get out of bed at all in the morning? What drives you to exist...are those reward systems in the brain addictive? Why are you sitting at your keyboard right now arguing with a random stranger on the internet?

Are you procrastinating something else you should be doing instead...and is that Hackernews' fault or yours?

grocery_stores• 3 months ago

I'll agree and add on: doesn't every for-profit enterprise want their products to be as addictive as possible (retrofitting that word in various ways to suit whatever their context)?

If I'm making bicycle wheels, I want all my customers thinking "these are the best bicycle wheels. I don't want them from any other supplier ever again and actually I want some that I don't even need just in case." I want them up at night thinking about how great my bicycle wheels are, looking at pictures of them on their phones.

I'm not sure how people are squaring the circle where companies are supposed to meet market demand by giving people what they want, but, uh, "not like that." If a product people want is really that bad for them, vote for the government to regulate it. We've read this story before.

intended6• 3 months ago

The article in question is linked, and it does a great job of putting the varied forces into a single frame of reference.

The market is the thing we create, and its effective functioning is what competition and regulation is meant to enable. It is through the functioning of the market that effective resource allocation occurs.

A market economy is meant to generate the best allocation of resources and the biggest benefits for consumers. For these promises to be fulfilled, consumers must be able to see and choose alternatives deliberately; compare them on undistorted dimensions; form preferences that reflect actual interests; and switch freely. Cognitive exploitation undermines all four of these. Infinite scroll captures attention. Dark patterns distort comparison. Dopaminergic loops manufacture compulsion. Addiction engineering blocks effective switching.
Securities regulation offers an instructive analogy. When a trader manipulates stock or derivatives prices, the law treats the crime as a structural harm to the broader market; the corrupted price no longer tells the truth. Cognitive exploitation should be seen in the same light, at a much larger scale. When platforms systematically manufacture the preferences of billions of users, consumer signals no longer point anywhere useful. That is a structural failure.

xg153• 3 months ago

...but but but Innovation!

DangitBobby• 3 months ago

Can we not do this type of mocking comment here please?

But but but <argument I am mocking>
Shhh! <People I don't agree with> will hear you!
It's almost as if <sarcastic oversimplification>.
Tell me you <don't understand topic> without telling me you <don't understand topic>.

xg153• 3 months ago

I'm sorry. Yeah, agreed that this was too much. I was angry because I have seen quite often pushback against regulation that tries to elevate "innovation" as a value in itself, that even trumps other considerations such as safety or whether the innovation in question actually improves things meaningfully. What Meta did felt to me like the ultimate outcome of that thinking.

JohnMakin• 3 months ago

There are still supposedly serious people who should know better than insist "dark patterns" are not real and a mechanism to attack tech companies. I don't know how anyone these days can honestly reach that conclusion. Some of these sites use similar strategies as the old tobacco companies used to, all of this stuff is known already to marketers.

jp57• 3 months ago

But are they actually serious people? I had corporate astroturf accounts arguing with me on my otherwise-ignored blog as early as 2004. All this time later, I just assume that every serious corporation employs PR firms using sock-puppet accounts to shill in favor of whatever dark shit they're doing, acting like it all just really great and good for us.

ddtaylor• 3 months ago

We've seen this on HN before as well. Companies targeting blogs and reddit with LLM generated content that "subtly" name drop products or services, fake praise, and even meaningless "support" requests on discussion boards.

securicat6• 3 months ago

It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products.

Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual users can (and should IMO) take. We should be helping our friends, family and neighbors find safe and health alternatives like Signal for comms. Build different networks that are actually social and not doomscrolling.

macintux• 3 months ago

They're still distorting our political and social worlds, whether we're participants or not.

dakiol3• 3 months ago

Same can be said about Claude, Codex, etc. These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). Only the usual suspects benefit from AI (executive layer, investors, etc)

Still amazes me how engineers on HN are in awe of AI and LLMs knowing that 90% of us will be affected (we won't be able to bring money to the table) once the higher ups start to normalize even more the usage of AI to reduce headcount. Not everything is about the technical details people, grow up

fragmede3• 3 months ago

It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma with all the other developers in the world, and some are vocally choosing to defect. The only rational strategy then is to also defect.

joe_mamba2• 3 months ago

These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees).

I'm a mid programmer at best, like compared to top guys in the industry, who built stuff like OpenClaw or those prodigy 16 year-old coders who became millionaires, and yet I don't fear the LLM assisted coding future. I'm at peace knowing that I will adapt to the LLM programming world using my knowledge in my favor, or adapt to a world where I will no longer be a SW engineer, but something else.

Also I find it ironic and poetic how some SW devs here want us to rise up and fight LLMs and the companies making them for disrupting this profession, when the SW dev profession was so well paid precisely because the SW products they wrote, disrupted other peoples' professions, moving the savings from labor costs into the pocket of employers, who used SW to optimize processes and repetitive labor and not have to hire as many people, yet they never saw an issue with other people losing their jobs. "Learn to code" eh?

Oh how the turntables.

securicat6• 3 months ago

As if Claude and Instagram are remotely similar products. But again, these products make it incredibly easy to cancel. If work requires that you use it, make the next job you get not require it or just use it on the job.

fsflover2• 3 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

idle_zealot• 3 months ago

You can and should do that, but it's not sufficient to individually avoid harm. You still have to live in a world where most people have their behavior manipulated, and that will impact you. Even from a purely selfish perspective you should support efforts to stop this sort of control broadly with legal action.

bdangubic• 3 months ago

exactly. I did all of OPs suggestions, decade ago (never had TT to begin with) and still live in a sick society surrounded by the influence of these platforms

securicat6• 3 months ago

Fair point, and nothing would make me happier than TikTok and Instagram being shut down, at least for minors.

sonicvroooom• 3 months ago

yeah but that's a way they want you to behave in order to set up a control group within the target group that continues to behave as expected. the questions to be answered are not which parts of that control group, and how, nudge which parts of the target group slightly off the predicted and/or confirmed results. they answered that way back when. the question is, how can we react to the unexpected results that we ourselves forced. they can't just go on doing the opposite of what's good for them and bad for the users or vice versa, they have 50 years of data on that, some of which, should be noted, was accidently burned or bombed with a bunch of incriminating evidence shortly before investigators arrived ... which should make even the last sus person understand, it wasn't on purpose

afavour2• 3 months ago

It's frustrating to see this response so often, as if it weren't blindingly obvious.

After years of near monopoly status these companies have a lock on many people's social lives. To give up Instagram is akin to giving up text messaging. "Just stop using it" isn't helpful advice to those people.

If Instagram disappeared tomorrow it would be different, because everyone would be in the same position. But preaching personal responsibility in an area subject to network effects doesn't work.

securicat6• 3 months ago

Give me a break. No one says “I can’t live without Instagram” literally. There are even studies that show that it makes their users depressed. From inside the company that _makes the product_.

Now, would it be inconvenient to stop, sure, but people need better self control. Put that cookie down!

toasty228• 3 months ago

It takes five minutes to just stop being depressed, it takes 5 minutes to just stop being addicted

What works for you, and me actually, doesn't work for most people, humans are complex things

securicat6• 3 months ago

That’s pretty insensitive to people suffering from mental illness. To compare sitting and doomscrolling on social media with something that’s chemically out of balance in a persons body is… a choice.

dinfinity• 3 months ago

It takes five minutes to just stop being depressed, it takes 5 minutes to just stop being addicted

Would you place all the responsibility of drug addiction on drug dealers?

Yes, their practices are predatory, but it is essential to remind the addicts that ultimately change comes from within themselves. They need to change something.

logickkk1• 3 months ago

"just delete your account" assumes the exit was designed to work. this is the company that called its own prime cancellation flow "the iliad."

throwaway274482• 3 months ago

Look it's either this or we adopt an economic strategy that isn't basically "assume the market magically knows what is best"—i.e., communism, as I understand Americans to know the term.

jmyeet• 3 months ago

This touches on many issues. It's kind of a confused narrative. Predatory practices against minors (in particular), sign up dark patterns, addictive behavior (eg infinite scroll). I don't think you should bundle all of these together like this.

For example, infinite scroll is a product of a news feed and a news feed is algorithmic. What this produces and what it reinforces in the user is one thing but not really related to some small grey text in an Amazon Prime sign up.

So let's break it down. Some of the issues are:

1. Intent to sign up.

2. Difficulty in cancelling a service. This is what I call the "gym model". Easy to sign up, hard to cancel. This can be handled. California, for example, requires companies to offer online cancellation. Most other states don't. This is so much an issue you'll regularly find advice from people to change their address to California so they get that option. There's no reason why every state or the federal government couldn't do that.

3. Selling of your data. Not really touched here but it's going to be a big issue going forward;

4. Addictive behavior to maximize time spent on platform; and

5. What should we allow or disallow for minors. This is going to be a big issue. We're only at the start of the Age Verification Era (like it or not). But IMHO no company should be talking about how to maximize time spent for 13 year olds. And no advertiser should be able to advertise to minors; and

6. Not really touched here but I'm going to add it anyway. IMHO we give tech companies a free pass for algorithms as some kind of mystical, neutral black box. But everything an "algorithm" does represents a decision humans made to get a certain behavior from what training data is used, what they're optimizing for (eg interactions or time spent) and what features they create.

Platforms now essentially get liability protection from publishing content even though they elevate or suppress content based on what it contains. IMHO this is no different than someone deciding what to publish and being liable for it.

tolerance• 3 months ago

Do you want your fascist/authoritarian government to arrive via buxom CyberTruck or svelte fixie bike?

smarm52• 3 months ago

The author is a "Master of Laws" (lawyer) writing about technology and psychology. Read with some skepticism.

Animats• 3 months ago

There are two separate issues: addictive technologies, and mandated technologies. Instagram and TikTok are examples of the first. Google Play Store and Microsoft 360 are examples of the second. The second is more of a concern than the first.

Google Chrome is trying hard to become a mandated technology, but hasn't quite succeeded yet.

andai2• 3 months ago

SOMEWHERE IN META’S servers sat a slide deck marked “Confidential”. Written in 2019, its conclusion was blunt: “Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to.”

Found this document:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-...

Headlines (quote):

Instagram is an inevitable and unavoidable component of teens lives. Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to.

Instagram has become the ID card of this generation. It is the go-to tool for both measuring and gathering social prestige.

Instagram sets the standards not only for how teens should look and act but also for how they should think and feel.

Teens feel themselves to be at the forefront of new social behaviours to which there is no consensus on how to behave or cope. They sorely lack empathetic voices to whom they can turn for support.

Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in a compulsive behaviour that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.

The pressure to ‘be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.

Anxiety around what to post and the potential cost involved in posting the wrong thing means teens are switching from proactive to passive engagement with the platform.

andai2• 3 months ago

Kinda sounds like the older generations have abandoned them, and now they settle for IG.

tedd4u• 3 months ago

The link you share is the link to TFA. I don't see the text you post here in that article. Is there another link that contains this text? Thank you.

sunandsurf• 3 months ago

IMO recommender algorithms and other dark patterns like infinite scroll should be turned off BY DEFAULT on these apps. That way those people who want a dose of brainrot still have the option to do so but most of them get a little help to turn away from screens (I never heard anybody say they want to spend more time on social media).

I've written more about this here: https://klemenvodopivec.substack.com/p/recommender-systems-n...

thebeardisred• 3 months ago

Dopamine neurons respond not to rewards received but to the uncertainty of whether a reward will arrive: the more unpredictable the outcome, the stronger the signal.

This leads me to think about the idea of procrastination as a mechanism of gambling by the sub-conscious. A subversive way of "raising the stakes on the game" in an attempt to "make things a little bit more interesting."

Seattle35035• 3 months ago

The burden of proof should fall on the platform, not the victim. The question is not whether a harmed user can show specific damage. The question is whether the company can show, before rolling a product out to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design.

That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features.

Could we have a regulatory agency that keeps an eye on dark patterns and deals with them as evidence emerges that something is harmful.

Pet_Ant• 3 months ago

That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features.

That’s not as rediculous as it seems. That’s sort of model that drug manufacturers follow. It would also mean that if internally they see troubling behaviour they know they have to stop.

Practically, it would be corporate cover up. And applied earnestly it would make these businesses unviable.

intended6• 3 months ago

Wait how?

Internal testing showed these features were addictive. They had resources allocated to creating addictive experiences for tweens.

The underlying behavioral science is well studied, down to the causal level.

Dark patterns are designed to make it hard to exit and unsubscribe. The language is purposefully obtuse, the options buried behind menu choices. We have enough A/B testing data to know how effective friction is at dissuading people from following a path.

How are we proving a negative here?

Seattle35035• 3 months ago

Proving something is addictive is not proving a negative

noosphr• 3 months ago

I'm so happy the economist is converting this important topic.

Now if only the dick heads running this complete rag could listen to the wonderful people who wrote that enlightened piece and let users unsubscribe: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rli0u9/how_t...

bloqs• 3 months ago

Jeez. I actually stopped short of reading the article because of this screenie

arduanika• 3 months ago

It's educating you about economics, exactly as advertised, what's the problem?

ruszki• 3 months ago

It seems much better now. At least in the EU. 4 years ago I had to do the same to change my address to a different country. Now I could do it with a simple form. It seems that I can cancel my subscription also without chat/call.

mactavish88• 3 months ago

Isn't one of the core problems here a lack of "healthier" alternatives?

(Not only in terms of tech, but also in terms of ways of living popularized by celebrities, thought leaders, etc.)

ajb• 3 months ago

What's ironic is that originally one of the advantages of automation was that it was more impartial than human-delivered services. The inventor of the automated telephone exchange, Strowger, designed it because he was concerned that the local telephone operators we directing his calls to a competitor. We had several decades during which machines had only very limited decision-making ability, and so it was their ability to manipulate or discriminate was minimal. That's gone. It went years ago, but it's taken a while for the public's intuition to catch up. People are starting to get angry, but are still somewhat baffled. Industry believes that they can continue to get away with it since they've done it for 10-20 years, but I think this underestimates how strong the backlash can get.

gnarlouse• 3 months ago

nauseating to think that Amazon was only charged $2.5B when they made somewhere around $25-44B off the Iliad cancellation thing.

mayhemducks• 3 months ago

Yes it is nauseating. And it's the norm. Whenever some company finds a way to make a boat-load of money by exploiting a weakness of human nature, the government will demand a portion of the proceeds. It's business as usual, in the USA at least. Even more nauseating is what they could do with that $2.5B...

beloch• 3 months ago

How much time you spend on something has become a metric of success in both gaming and social media.

I occasionally play a perpetually-in-alpha AAA+ game (I won't name it to avoid the flames) that recently asked users to fill out a questionnaire. At no point did it ask how they could make my time spent in the game more fun or awesome. They did explicitly ask, "What can we do to make you spend more time in game?". The focus was clearly on quantity, not quality. This made me realize that, perhaps, I should stop playing this game.

Social media and games use all sorts of dark patterns and engagement bait to keep you clicking, but no concern is given to giving back. There is a complete absence of awareness that the best forms of entertainment enrich and then end. If they were to provide an amazing but brief experience that changes regularly, people would come back again and again. They don't need to spend hours on it every single day to feel they're getting value and justify opening their wallets. Doom-scrolling and spending excessive time grinding in games will only make you feel stressed out and unfulfilled. Customers need to realize this and start voting with their wallets for experiences that end.

We need to turn things around and say, "The light that burns half as long burns twice as bright!"

NemoNobody• 3 months ago

This is a rather easy fix - we all just need to start leaving games open, save a game, leave it on, go to work, come back load the save and play, or just alt-f4. I watch a lot of Asian content that used to be practically impossible to watch legally. I actually intentionally used a site that would constantly be "visiting websites" in the background, thousands of sites would be visited in a short time - I don't really see ads on the Internet but when I did, they no longer made any sense - my actual internet activity was a small percentage of my the activity that was tracked. I have spent hundreds of hours in games I've literally never played.

Make their data junk.

prawn2• 3 months ago

I try to explain to my young teenage son what he misses by playing a near-perpetual game like Fortnite. In the years that he might spend in that, my equivalent time was put into dozens of games across various categories, and memorable levels, stories and moments.

I miss those days where the measure of success was having someone play the game at all and enjoy it, not how long they might be locked into your product to the detriment of anything else in life.

One tactic against Fortnite has been to say "Yes, you can play on the console this evening, but not Fortnite and instead choose from one of these games." That at least encouraged him to play through Horizon Zero Dawn, as an example.

port114• 3 months ago

The game he’s playing is different from what you expect, speaking as a former LoL addict. Fortnite is barely interesting when compared to most other games, but the skill progression and fast pace make it hard to put down.

I think that’s where League gets you as well. New champions. New items. Oops, just redid the skill tree. Oh hey, balance changes. All while you’re trying to go up in rank. It feels like work — and has in fact become a job for some —, but can be incredibly fun and addictive.

I’m glad I’m out of it, and instead get to play my good ol’ Steam collection.

nsagent• 3 months ago

I learned that lesson nearly two decades ago when I first started as a game dev straight out of school. I had much less free time and began appreciating shorter games with focused experiences that ended relatively quickly (6-8 hrs). This allowed me to experience more variety.

Unfortunately, games keep getting longer and longer with more and more filler. The problem is that many gamers complain loudly when games are short. There are comparatively few games that buck the trend. Now, I play very few games as a result.

m463• 3 months ago

Yes, I appreciate a long game.

But you're right comparatively few games give you "more game" vs "more filler"

For example, I liked factorio because I was always struggling with the "current paradigm" and trying to get to the "next paradigm". For example, coal powered furnaces vs electric furnaces. Or conveyor belts vs trains.

But some games just make themselves longer by just turning the knobs on grinding.

I guess this is like novels vs short stories. And we are seeing the same sorts of things where the story arc is stretched over a long series of books and content is fluffed up a bit.

MikeNotThePope• 3 months ago

Ha, it’s like a service asking me which ads I’d rather see. No ads is never an option.

djoldman• 3 months ago

From the corporate POV, the lesson remains: never ever ever conduct research that could lead to a conclusion that your product/service can harm in any way, unless you know how and intend to fix/change it.

The most important evidence was just internal research saying exactly what the plaintiffs wanted.

siliconc0w• 3 months ago

On one hand, this is insidious when targeting children.... On the other these kind of metrics are what pretty much every company tries to optimize.

We're going to get better and better at hacking the human brain - for good and evil and we're going to have to trade some free will and personal liberty to really keep the worst of it in check. The dark pattern bullshit is the easiest thing to regulate but I don't have a lot of hope for even that.

intended6• 3 months ago

Which is fine. As the article points out, we value markets because they find ways to allocate resources effectively. Insider trading is illegal because it breaks the market.

Firms can optimize as they like, but if the net result is that the market ceases to function, then those behaviors get penalized.

morpheos137• 3 months ago

Lets simplify things "stop big tech."

jojobas• 3 months ago

Should this go back all the way to inception of TVs? Cause nobody really wanted to watch endless commercials interspersed with talk shows and pulp series.

LanceH• 3 months ago

Everyone calling for government intervention when unsubscribing or taking a device away from a child would work is just hastening the end of free (libre) general purpose computing.

Insert credit card and two forms of id to log on...

intended6• 3 months ago

Thank god, and a million times yes.

There is no market if you have no mechanism for price discovery, no meaningful alternatives, users are addicted, confused, and simply unable to switch.

Things WERE better before we combined skinner boxes with ad tech, before we preyed on users and applied every trick in the book to entrap them.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 months ago

Alternative to archive.ph

No Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no DDoS^1, no geo-blocking, other nonsense^2

   echo '
   url https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-tech-from-making-users-behave-in-ways-they-dont-want-to
   user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Liskov"
   header accept: 
   output 1.htm
   '|curl -K/dev/stdin

   firefox ./1.htm

1. https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...

2. What's up with the LinkedIn reCAPTCHA sitekey in the page source

Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

Related Stories