More like mind hacking. It's like these apps want to hook into the reward center of people's brains. Get them addicted to stupid bullshit so they spend hours scrolling through that stuff so they look at more and more advertising. Funny how advertising is always at the root of all this evil. Maybe we should get rid of it.

Only thing worse is video game design which does this explicitly and unashamedly. They wire the dopamine button to the player's credit card.

Yea it was awful. Pagination is an optimization for faster page load speeds that has nothing to do with user engagement. Sure some people can get caught in the doom scrolling, but for normal users, having to navigate between pages is an awful experience compared to just scrolling to the bottom to get the next "page"

I use old reddit redirect and without reddit enhancement suite that adds infinite scrolling, it's awful to use

Looking at your last line I think it would be helpful to assess your addiction in brass tacks. Imagine if you said, "I only use cocaine intraveinously, insufflation is awful." Sometime its helpful to add some breaks to unhelpful habits than trying to min max them all the time. I still have a lot of problems with this myself and I am doing my best to introduce more friction to my internet usage, since you can't just flush it down the drain and walk away like a pack of cigarettes in this day and age when internet means work.

I don't believe it's the place of these companies to implement these kind of controls. Governments will create regulations that force these companies to implement controls, but I don't believe that addresses the root cause.

The root cause is, why can't you control your social media/gambling/alcohol use? It's a wide ranging cause from genetics to mental health problems to other external causes. I believe those should be the first level of addressing from the government, but it's easier to just regulate

1. What you’re currently looking at is not directly addressable (instead it’s “open this URL, within this time-window, and scroll exactly X-many pixels in exactly S-seconds to get to the exact same content as me”).

2. It makes it impossible to get to the real page footer, which often contains essential links like Contact Us, the About/Impressum page, and other important stuff.

For #2 that's useful for novice users but as a reddit user for who knows how many years I don't care about the footer

I'll listen to an anime music playlist and my entire recommended video / front page becomes full of anime stuff. An in-law joins Youtube to watch bible study videos and now they're an avowed freedom fighter against the globalist satanist cabal running the world. That sort of thing.

The problem when it just puts it all in a single recommendation feed is that that feed more-or-less presents itself as "here's what the world is talking about" rather than "here's a bunch of stuff that conforms to the biases and ideological filters of the stuff you've been watching lately." It creates a solipsistic worldview if you're not aware of what's going on.

And speaking of YouTube, the other annoyance is the extremely idiotic anti-feature of pausing the playback and displaying "Are you still watching?" popup after you go a couple of minutes without moving your mouse or tapping on the screen. No YouTube, I'm not watching, I'm only listening on my wireless headset. But you already know that. What you don't know is that I'm in the middle of some household cleaning and my hands are covered with caustic chemicals, so I frikkin do not appreciate having to press a stupid button you introduced to get more "engagement".

0: http://youtube-dl.org/

It was the second time that I realized the clip was from TikTok. Honestly, I appreciate it.

I certainly haven't. Other than maybe Nintendo suggesting go outside breaks or something.

A few other regular games do it too.

From bitter experience: people don't like being told they're done for the day. It wears you down having to explain it.

Add in the profit motive and it's easy to see why people cave to adding infiniscrolling

In 2019, Instagram only made around $11.98 per user annually.

Imagine if you could pay $12 a year and never see an ad, never be manipulated by an algorithm, never have to worry about any of that. All engineering would be focused on retaining you as a user, not as a market segment for advertisers. The incentive wouldn't be to addict you with an infinite scroll but to provide enough value for you to maintain the annual cost. Possibly even minimizing the attention it demands because the greatest profits is in justifying the subscription while encouraging the least amount of resource use.

Unfortunately, growth-hacking meant VC subsidized growth with free services and there was no way that subscriptions could compete.

The question is if anyone could ever sell low cost, user-centric subscription-based apps in a world where free (but not really) is taken for granted.

Dynamic pricing would probably offend both audiences - "what do you mean the algorithm thinks I'm worthless?" "what do you mean that I'm worth thousands of dollars to you?"

[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...

those will be the first users willing to pay to opt out of ads.

The service would have to be built from the ground-up to not have a free option, it would have to be equalized across all users. Again, this is where the difficulty lies in an economy that already offers so much for free.

IF someone could pull it off, they would benefit from the gym membership effect of people keeping the subscription while barely using the service (and it's resources).

There would also be considerable savings on the engineering and sales side if you cut all adtech out of the equation and provide a simple time-series feed.

“Wait that’s all my eyes are worth?!”

So now you need to charge significantly more than $12 to make up for that. The higher price makes the paid users even more valuable to advertisers. Eventually the service slips in a few ads because it’s just too much money to leave on the table.

Cable TV started as an ad free subscription service. I’m not saying it can’t work, but historically most subscription services don’t stay ad free forever.

What “negative externalities” are you referring to?

This is true, for two reasons: Declining profit as markets mature and the need for investors to see greater returns YOY. Eventually, all companies turn to more intense methods of profit extraction.

This isn't specific to digital services of course, we're seeing the effects of this broadly across the economy.

One way to put off the inevitable (for potentially quite some time) would be to bootstrap instead of taking investment. Easier said than done, of course, but maybe not impossible since the hardest part may be breaking open the market in the first place and it might be a lot easier to build an alternative app in a mature space than it was to create Instagram in 2010.

In a normal market there would be competition and an equilibrium would be reached, but where network effects dominate, it takes something like Signal to make a dent in this regard. That said, there's no reason that a non-profit version of instagram couldn't eventually compete or dominate by charging users a pittance.

On the other hand, subscription models are fine for new entrants, even with VC hyper-growth expectations - there are still billions of users to capture even if per-user revenue is fixed! Then the game becomes delivering as much value to these customers as possible to attract more paying users.

Perhaps this is another malincentive that comes about from monopolies.

This is true, but only applies to the "tech unicorn" VC-funded model. There are other ways to build businesses and if the model we're used to always ends up with such terrible social results, maybe it's time we strongly considered them.

Well, yes, it does come down to this, and I'd say the answer is very clearly that this cannot be done, at least not at any scale remotely close to the scale of the big free social media networks.

God, I hate stories. This is probably the most antisocial "growth hack" these companies invented. A simple way to boost and exploit FOMO to ensure most users will be checking with your app at least once every single day.