What do you mean by this? Until very recently, TVs and radios never had the ability to report feedback on what people were consuming or whether people were watching ads. There were some surveys like Nielsen ratings that involved a small sample of people installing special hardware. TVs and radios have never served personalized results to individuals, even if there were “algorithms” involved — the targeting was toward the entire population at once, not to each an every person viewing. For most of TV & radio history, the “algorithms” were people and not computers, people manually sifting through data for weeks just to see if a show was popular.
It’s pretty odd to suggest that TV & radio was historically similar to what’s going on with today’s social media. Serving personalized results and gathering instant personalized viewing habits (“engagement”) is what’s fundamentally different than TV & radio, the feedback cycle fundamentally changed from a slow group feedback to a fast individual feedback, and that’s precisely why social media is more engaging and more dangerous.
With your video game idea, what's the difference between this and other software? Some social media seems like the game that never ends.
No we don't - because chess is a super-minority niche interest. The danger of social media is that it's social mass media - designed to be as addictive as possible to as many people as possible in as many different ways as possible using as many different techniques as possible.
And that's before getting into the dangers of targeted micro-niche ads used for political ends and/or individual belief and behaviour modification.
Without regulation it's an absolutely toxic medium.
I also don't see how people can separate "optimizing addictiveness" (e.g. making your junk food too yummy or whatever) versus simply trying to make a better product that gives your customers what they want. The main criteria for who gets described in this way seems to be the corporate structure of the seller.
Check out this gizmodo article:
https://gizmodo.com/chess-was-once-deemed-a-menace-to-societ...
People are weird.
No liking things. The Protestant work ethic demands no fun. Only anger and work. Play is of SATAN.
Then the addiction rating should get higher if there is more endless endgame content, more multiplayer content, boxes to purchase, etc.
You get the idea, if the industry is so determined to find the bliss point of a game/food item then the governments need to evolve with that challenge.