Say what?
Granted that my comment was short, and may assume some background knowledge not obvious to everyone, here's a longer discussion of the issues in a broader context: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_we_havent_met_an...
You should add HN to your blocklist not enforce it on others.
For better or worse, I have no authority to enforce anything here; what I'm doing is making suggestions. That said, forums whose content consists only or primarily of junk or links thereto, I simply refrain from visiting. The percentage of quality content on HN, on the other hand, is generally high, which is why I read this forum, and why I think it worthwhile to make suggestions aimed at improving it or at least trying to stop it deteriorating.
You just placed 2048 next to alcohol, cannabis and other drugs. Congratulations.
Precisely. If X exploits security vulnerabilities in your motivation system so that consuming X causes you to desire more X at a cost to everything else in your life, what difference does it make whether the medium is chemistry or graphics? It's the result that counts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU Have you seen this TED talk about porn addiction and how it has similar effects like some sort of hard drug addiction on the brain. Everything uses the same pipeline.
1. Making harmful products is a bad idea.
2. If you chose to make a harmful product as a programming exercise, publishing it is a bad idea.
3. If you find someone else has published a harmful product, posting a link to a forum is a bad idea.
4. If you find someone else has posted a link to a harmful product, upvoting it is a bad idea.
Life is complicated. There is no simple formula that will tell you the right thing to do in the general case. And sometimes even when we know which is which, we end up doing the wrong thing because the right thing would be harder.
But when we know which is which, and the right thing is easy? Then, at least, we should be able to stop doing the wrong thing.