> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”
Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook. It’s Stanford Prison Experiment stuff.
I hate being reductionist, and I am posting this on a historically YC forum so of course there’s nuance, but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering. It sucks we’re seeing less grants and less security net to encourage risks under current administration, because it leaves investment as the quickest path to starting or scaling a company. Donate to open source, IMO
ChrisMarshallNY · 3h ago
I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product.
When we have that mindset, we absolutely don't care about the thing that we call "our product." It's just food for the actual product, where we want to fatten it up, and sell it to the biggest slaughterhouse.
That starts almost immediately. You can't even get an A round, without an "exit plan."
I feel that the very existence of an exit plan, dooms the user. No one cares about them. It's all about fattening the company, and making it look good. When we do that, we'll feed it nothing but junk food, in an effort to make it as fat as possible, as quickly as possible, with absolutely no thought as to long-term viability.
I would love to see the tech industry return to concentrating on truly delivering good to the end-user. It's still possible to make a decent living, but maybe not at the insane rates we see.
klik99 · 1h ago
"The company is the product." -> When I'm feeling more optimistic I see this is how VC sees their portfolio and how you sell it to them, but not what the company is in reality. Like playwrights who write under authoritarian regimes selling it to the censor as promoting the regime while it actually satirizes and undermines them. But even if it's possible to walk that line, the data just doesn't back it up as common.
Side note, on "exit plan" - the most ridiculous thing about raising money is you need an exit strategy but you cannot explicitly say you have an exit strategy, you have to imply it while the whole time pretending it's not a focus for you. It's a very weird dynamic.
whateveracct · 2h ago
> I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product.
As Action Jack Barker said, Pied Piper's product is its stock.
Ekaros · 1h ago
When you really think about it, this also applies to very many publicly traded companies. Tech especially, always searching to present next growth area. And then often shortly abandoning it or wasting massive resources on it...
Really does make me cynical on investing...
alephnerd · 3h ago
> The company is the product.
If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public company, this becomes very apparent very quick.
Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your company, you will not succeed.
Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales Leadedship to drive customer outcomes, but the hyperfocus on short term deliverables AT THE EXPENSE of a long term product vision makes it difficult to push back.
Very few newly founded or public companies can do the latter - the most recent ones I can think of are maybe Datadog and Wiz (not public but they did drive a customer centric mentality internally).
Of course, a lot of this is also due to the extreme bloat that formed in the tech industry in the late 2010s to early 2020s. Teams grew unrealistically large with limited financial justification beyond cherry-picked growth metrics, and this meant a lot of companies lost the ability to innovate frugally or nimbly. Unrealistically high valuations also played a role because towards the end, founders could end up demanding IPO-sized multiples in private markets even without the underlying fundamentals (eg. Lacework's $9 BILLION valuation on what was at most $90 MILLION in revenue).
A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.
dehrmann · 1h ago
> if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis...about your company, you will not succeed.
Halfway true. There's a famous quote:
> In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.
At some point, strong fundamentals will catch up with you.
api · 10m ago
Isn’t all this company is the product stuff an obvious side effect of wealth inequality?
There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much.
It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money ends up in too few hands, whether those hands are a government or a few private rich citizens. You end up with this giant piñata of big dumb money and everyone whacking it.
In the old USSR instead of the stock is the product it was the appearance in the eyes of other bureaucrats is the product, but it’s kind of the same phenomenon. The customer isn’t the customer.
b00ty4breakfast · 3m ago
I think the VC thing is indicative of the entire thing; the goal is profit and everything is subordinated to that. This is how the system works and how it is designed to work. When profit and some external thing like social responsibility are at odds, profit is going to win out every time. The mercenary mentality rules the scene.
In Magickal Faerieland, we have regulations to align those 2 things by incentivizing the "goodguy" path and/or disincentivizing the "cackling villain" path but we live in reality where money rules and regulatory capture is a thing. So a Facebook or other megacorp can get away with using neuroscience and psychology to engineer a virtual slot machine with a terrible payout and ExxonMobile et al can get away with being an architect of environmental degradation and the accompanying humanitarian disasters.
sorcerer-mar · 3h ago
To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously destructive.
throwawayoldie · 3h ago
I have a better idea: let's combat the notion that putting shareholder value ahead of the common good is moral.
kelseyfrog · 3h ago
If I had to choose between common good and shareholder value all else being equal, I'd choose common good every time.
We should be suspicious of games that favor shareholder value over common good and repair them. Of course this is harder than it sounds, but letting the person with the most money in a Monopoly game also set the rules is absurd and and obviously wrong. Wrong even without having a consensus reality on what "common good" entails and this is important.
The "capital game" should serve us, rather than us serving it. A fatalistic lack of imagination is no longer an option. When we're more afraid of unintended consequences than accepting that we have a responsibility to the current consequences, our current consequences look rather intended.
carlosjobim · 44m ago
You're never going to be able to change the economic system for the entire population where you live. Better to vote with your feet and move to a country where all economic activity is arranged for "the common good". There are many, many such countries. You're not the first with that idea.
That of course won't mean that you will have the privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as "the common good". It's unfortunately not like the Arch Linux terminal where you are omnipotent.
I say that sincerely, as somebody who had to do just that. It's easier for Mohammad to go to the mountain.
kelseyfrog · 11m ago
One small question: how did those places manage to change the economic system for the entire population?
j7ake · 21m ago
Please name a few such places
neom · 8m ago
Off the top of my head, Costa Rica, Bhutan, Canada, Norway/Sweden?
I hear you but disagree. Who decides what the common good is? You end up with companies moralizing, forcing employees to adhere to those common goods in both their work and personal lives. Forcing people to get the vaccine was for the common good. DEI was common good and that in turn led to Trump being elected. The pendulum swings.
At least with share holder value, you know where you stand. The common good is a constantly changing thing determined by the moral authority in charge at a moment in time.
crawfordcomeaux · 56m ago
Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.
aianus · 45m ago
One of humans' needs is for status which is by definition zero sum. Same with mating.
If anything those two are probably the most important needs so it's not possible to build such a system.
kelseyfrog · 12m ago
If one of human needs is status and status is zero-sum, then why does it matter what economic system is in place at all? We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care.
Besides why can't one of human needs also be an economic system that doesn't have the failure mode of poverty?
pstuart · 7m ago
The only way to make that happen is to have that common good be priced into the shareholder value, i.e., removing externalities that allow the privatization of profit and the public subsidies of the remediation of the damage done.
Easy peasy, no?
sorcerer-mar · 3h ago
Great! You've convinced nobody of anything.
Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely critical to their continued existence and long-term viability.
But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
It cannot be "either/or" and it's not immoral to pursue profits.
egypturnash · 3h ago
You can explicitly build the business to say "delivering shareholder value is not our highest goal, we must remember that we live in a society and upon a planet".
Their purpose is absolutely not "to produce positive externalities" (whatever that even means). What makes you say that? You can, and people do, run a business doing all sorts of heinous things
sorcerer-mar · 2h ago
You should read a history book about why corporations were invented and allowed to exist.
moefh · 1h ago
There's an old saying: The purpose of a system is what it does[1]. You can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it.
And businesses as a whole produce positive externalities, as intended, which is why we continue to allow them to exist.
asdf6969 · 34m ago
> we continue to allow them to exist
Who is “we”? I can’t do anything about it. No more than peasants “allow” the king to exist..
sorcerer-mar · 21m ago
Sure you can. You can vote to get rid of corporations, and you'll get outvoted. Ergo: we.
You don't understand how kings work if you think it's equivalent to your situation in a western democracy.
asdf6969 · 5m ago
Voting obviously doesn’t work. Troll
sorcerer-mar · 1m ago
Formatting issue?
"Voting obviously doesn't work." - Troll
crawfordcomeaux · 55m ago
Only when accounting is done without calculating ecological cost, including human quality of life.
throwawayoldie · 3h ago
Yes, I've heard the party line too. The difference is, I realized it was horseshit.
carlosjobim · 53m ago
Then don't make a company with shares. This is like complaining in a tennis court that it's better to play football. Anybody who makes his business a company with shares will be beholden to shareholders, even if he's the only shareholder. There are plenty of venues for any activity, which isn't structured in this way.
1. Nobody forces you to use a smart phone.
2. Nobody forces you to have social media or use it.
3. Nobody forces you to watch Netflix.
We all choose what we do in life.
jbs789 · 2h ago
It’s a question of time horizon.
throwawayoldie · 2h ago
...go on.
badpun · 1h ago
Would you put your money into a business which put common good above your return on investment?
klik99 · 2h ago
I wish it were that simple, I think capitalism works best when personal self-interested incentives are aligned with what creates common good - IE policy is like game design where you design the rules in a way that provides an overall good outcome. In this lens, there is a huge problem with PE right now (the rules incentivize buying out industries and gutting them), and something wrong with VC (the rules incentivize enshittification) so the rules need to be adjusted to align with the broader outcomes we want.
duped · 2h ago
The idea that executives have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a trope from business ethics class, not law.
I say this because you used the phrase "fiduciary duty" which does not exist in this context.
lucas_membrane · 1h ago
> from business ethics class, not law
Well, there was one case in the law over 100 years ago in the USA. A company had decided to sell itself for cash and go out of business. The Court ruled, that in that situation, it should sell to the highest bidder. This is long before Milton Friedman began advocating that corporations had a duty to their common shareholders that provided the only valid yardstick for evaluating corporate activities. Friedman was an economist, and a controversial one, not a lawyer, and how he got the lawyers behind him is itself a long strange story.
The idea that common shareholders own the corporation was not really obvious to anyone from the start. Common shareholders get from the corporation only what is their privilege according to the corporate bylaws and charter. There are now, and have been in the past, many different kinds of and classes of common shareholders. For example, some big corporations today have many common shareholders who do not have any voting rights. The thing that sets common shareholders apart from the other stakeholders who also hold pieces of paper from the corporation granting them various interests in the corporation, is that the common shareholders get to divide up whatever is left over if and when the corporation is liquidated and everyone else is given what they are owed first. They are more heirs than owners. It is more realistic to hold that the corporation, as an artificial person, is not and cannot be owned by other persons, and owns itself.
sorcerer-mar · 2h ago
Correct, because GP said “legal obligation," which I agree: there isn't one.
klik99 · 2h ago
Genuine question because I think I might be wrong on this one, or maybe misunderstanding what you're saying - aren't there cases of shareholders suing CEOs for not acting in shareholders interest and winning? If there was no legal obligation to act on behalf of shareholders how could they win those cases?
My understanding is those kind of cases aren't common because a) they are hard to prove, b) the people being sued if they actually have the money to make it worth suing them also have the money to fight it, and c) it's a really bad look for an investor to be suing a previous member of their portfolio and would a strong adverse affect on their deal flow
Unless you're saying there is no explicit legal obligation / fiduciary duty in law, but it does emerge from civil court cases, which is how I understand it, but short paragraphs are not a good place for the amount of nuance so I just said "legal obligation" as a shorthand for something real but very complex.
duped · 1h ago
I think Matt Levine coined this phrase: "everything is securities fraud."
Activist investors will sue for anything alleging that executives broke securities law by doing anything that harmed their portfolio. It doesn't mean they win the cases, or that anyone is guilty.
There's also something worth noting that even if there isn't a legal obligation for executives to act on their shareholders interests, they have a really strong incentive when their compensation is mostly stock grants and the shareholders can fire them.
sorcerer-mar · 1h ago
As far as I know, no there has not been a CEO successfully sued in the US for failing to maximize shareholder value.
slt2021 · 3h ago
There is no latitude. They have only one requirement: growth growth growth.
If you hit the growth targets, they will pat you in the back and will demand Hyperscale growth growth growth and will throw money at you to supercharge it.
If you refuse to chase the growth, they will simply kick you off the company via Board or fund your competitor that will chase the growth at all means
sorcerer-mar · 3h ago
Your board firing you is not a "legal obligation".
DenisM · 3h ago
So you don’t get sued, but you lose control or even your stake or even the whole business. Remember how Uber founder got kicked out? He had a strong hand.
Chilling effect is there one way or another, and even when that does not work adverse selection does.
You have to have a very strong market position to resist the investor pressure. Kinda like Google had twenty years ago.
Or you can have a diverse set of investors who can’t or won’t be swayed by activist investors. But that usually means being public at which point your employees are incentivized by RSUs.
sorcerer-mar · 1h ago
I'm not arguing there isn't an incentive problem. I'm arguing that it doesn't have any basis in statute. The distinction is important because it points to a different solution and different moral culpability for the system's outcomes.
slt2021 · 3h ago
The funding is raised to chase growth, otherwise no VC will ever give money.
If you get the money and then try to U-turn and refuse to chase growth, the board will start asking questions
The legal obligation is that CEO does whatever board tells him to, otherwise board can fire ceo
sorcerer-mar · 3h ago
This still does not produce any legal obligation.
sssilver · 3h ago
Ok but you’ve lost your mission, your tools to accomplish that mission, and effectively your company.
watwut · 1h ago
Yeah, but you not getting what you want, you not having own little imperium is not the same as "you having legal obligation".
This amounts to an argument that if doing something immoral gives you money and power, you can not possibly say no and no one can blame you. That somehow more money and power is good enough excuse.
potatolicious · 2h ago
Yeah, I think it honestly lets founders off the hook too much.
In 95% of cases, the founder isn't smashing moral barriers because the VCs and shareholders are making them, or lording the threat of legal action or any some such.
In 95% of cases, the founder is smashing through moral barriers because their interests are aligned with the VCs: because they think what they are doing will lead to stupendous mega-wealth for them personally.
Like sure, I think the idea that corporate execs must be beholden to maximizing share price is a) corrosive to our society and b) not as true as often portrayed, but I don't think that's even a real factor here.
j7ake · 17m ago
It’s also survivorship bias. Given that a start up has explosive growth, it way more likely that they are amoral.
The ones who play the game with integrity and morals never have the type of growth that makes headlines. But I’m sure they exist.
sorcerer-mar · 2h ago
100% agreed, well put
klik99 · 2h ago
Maybe in theory, but in practice there is a strong power mismatch that causes investors to have a strong influence. Sand Hill learned it's lesson from Facebook/Zuckerberg and now always have a seat on the board. Only outliers like zuck/bezos/similar have the weight to push back against investors. Heck, even Dorsey couldn't for whatever reason.
And even if what you said is true, you can look at the results of years of this system, the difference between companies with outside investment vs without makes a strong case against what you're saying.
It's like saying educating people about their rights wrt police helps, but in practice police don't derive their power from actual laws and it comes at considerable personal expense to push it to courts, in the same way Delaware is very strongly biased towards shareholder rights.
lovich · 2h ago
> To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
Legally maybe. The market and shareholders will punish you if you deviate from the current standard behavior.
We’ve all seen companies do layoffs just because “Wall Street” was concerned about the economy and then instantly see the stock price spike up.
These negative consequences are all results of bog standard prisoner dilemma issues that need government regulation to make sure everyone picks the good square, but the tech industry and this boards community as well is allergic to the idea that regulations can improve the situation for everyone
danenania · 3h ago
> To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
That may be true legally, but practically it's only true if they control the board. Otherwise they will simply be replaced by people who are willing to do what the board wants.
sorcerer-mar · 3h ago
The difference between getting fired and getting convicted of a crime is pretty important, actually!
gipp · 3h ago
For the executive, sure. Not for the impact of the overall incentive structure on the trajectory of the business. Which is what this discussion is about.
sorcerer-mar · 2h ago
The discussion literally said "legal obligation."
That's what I was responding to.
lovich · 2h ago
The root comment this thread is in reply to had the implication that people are only acting this way because of an inaccurate idea of how strict the legal obligations are, and the other comments are about how that’s obviously not the only force producing the current outcome
sorcerer-mar · 2h ago
Yeah, obviously that's not "the only force producing this outcome." Nobody claimed it was.
But it's important for founders to understand they are not legally obligated to do any specific thing for their shareholders. It is their responsibility to act morally. Yes, there are other incentives and forces at play. "Legal obligation" is not the cop-out excuse that executives claim it is.
marcosdumay · 3h ago
On that level, on the quasi-feudal economy that is taking over the world, it's not clear which of those is more impactful.
danenania · 3h ago
The annoying tone is unnecessary. Yes, legally speaking operators can go against the board and get replaced, which they certainly should do if they feel they're being asked to do something unethical. But it's not going to change how the company is run.
baxtr · 17m ago
Yes, and there is a huge problem connected to that:
If you don’t play this game you’ll lose. Look at Europe for example, they haven’t played the VC game properly and thus have no really significant tech player compared to the US / China.
So what options are left? Play the game or be ruled by those that play it.
I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.
citizenpaul · 3h ago
I think its bigger. Morality and social contract have eroded and continue to erode.
Look at Mozila for the most insidious example. Take a privacy focused product. Rope in a bunch of suckers. Then literally delete the privacy focus from your mission statment and start the "slaughter"
Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore. The Sodom and Gomorrah fable is a warning not to let this happen or your society will destroy itself.
bigthymer · 25m ago
> Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore.
I don't think this is a good example. Back then, the internet was a new thing only a small cohort of people cared about. Something small could just stay small because none of the big players with money cared. Nowadays, if someone wanted to start something like Craigslist, they would be outrun by someone else going the VC route before the small company could get big enough on its own. I think it boils down to the difference between slower growth, boot-strapped companies vs. VC-backed.
vonnik · 2h ago
I wrote a couple pieces about how to take back control of your brain:
Its not just shareholders, stock based equity also has all the employees pushing profit.
Engineering addiction is also probably more often than not intentional. When all the business metrics/KPIs are stuff like "engagement time", "$ spent", even AB testing of random features leads to manufacturing addiction
akudha · 3h ago
While “maximizing shareholder value” is a huge problem, aren’t there other problems too? Founders wanting to get rich as quickly and as easily as possible, customers/users refusing to pay even for most important services (for example, how many people are willing to pay 5 bucks a month for something as important to modern life as email? But they’re happy to pay 5$ for a crappy Starbucks coffee), lawmakers too old or too corrupt to understand the negative effects of the products/markets they’re supposed to regulate, general public more interested in convenience and cheap entertainment than subjects like privacy, parents simply hooking their kids up with iPads so they don’t have to deal with tantrums (one of my colleagues told me he was raised by TV/internet, not by humans)… and on and on.
I suppose we’re living in an age of unchecked capitalism. But there are other issues too
moffkalast · 1h ago
Of course VC loan sharking is a major part of the problem. But it's also tiring reading blog after blog of people who say they want to do the right things and do them right or whatever the trendy thing is that month, all as a thinly veiled pretence to get as much funding from whoever wants to give it to them and try to make themselves the next Zuckerberg or Bezos.
If people actually believed in something they'd make it open source or a non-profit, not a convenient vehicle for personal enrichment. Imagine if Wikipedia was a for-profit startup, it would've eventually ended up as an unusable cesspool of advertising.
apples_oranges · 3h ago
Why „historically“?
klik99 · 2h ago
For the last 5-10 years I've noticed a lot of people here are more willing to question VC as the sole or even ideal way to start a company, and since a major chunk of YC is to train how to raise money and connect people via demo day or mentors to VC, I think that marks how the HN community has departed from the YC community. Obviously there's a lot of overlap, and HN clearly has it's roots in YC by it's literal founder, but I think it's wrong to say HN community is the same as YC community, which I say "historically"
wonderwonder · 1h ago
“Shareholder value” is what turned “we’re a family here” into a joke and cliche. It turns people into lines on a spreadsheet and strips leadership of their ability to care or treat people as humans. It’s represents the very darkest side of capitalism. Im very much a capitalist but it doesn’t mean I have to ignore the realities of it, both good and bad. I’ll take it over all alternatives though as it actually works and improves the lot of society as a whole
scoofy · 2h ago
This reminds me of my borderline exhausting quest to build a wiki for golf that isn’t extractive like most golf sites.
Trying to bootstrap it without any funding is a lot, but necessary, and I have to run it on a shoestring. The frustrating part is that with all networks the flywheel is everything. Once you get the product on people’s phones, the value is easy to see, but to get the app in their phones, you need a bunch of money to create value to get people there.
This is why the VC funding is so pernicious and why projects like mastodon, lemmy, and pixelfed are so difficult to get off the ground. The point is almost always the network itself more than the product.
I’ll keep trying to just do it slow and steady, even if it takes me a decade. I honestly don't care if I fail because I know the people out there that care about golf course architecture just want a place to talk about the courses they love.
Going to recommend "Addiction by Design" here. Superb book about the addiction design dynamics in the gambling industry and very reminiscent of what we see in the smartphone/internet universe today. Shout out to the forgotten HN user who recommended it originally, one of the best and most salient books I've read in years.
charliebwrites · 3h ago
Also Nir Eyal’s Hooked, which used to be standard reading at tech startups in the “Growth Hacking” era
NickC25 · 3h ago
His followup book, Indistractable, is also quite good.
smikhanov · 2h ago
Good people of HN, could anyone tell me why buying an MVP of a social network for $10K from a Belarusian contractor on Upwork (it couldn’t cost much more, it’s like five SQL tables and a web CRUD) and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work?
Why does the author need to moan about how morally destructive it was to raise VC? Just run your social network from your bedroom, while asking ChatGPT how to rewrite the landing page in React.
Aurornis · 2h ago
> and then charging users $2/month to use it wouldn’t work?
Commenters all across the internet will say they’d pay good money for a site that does something specific that sounds like a good idea.
Then when the site is built, you will discover that they will not, in fact, pay any money for it at all. You will continue to add the features they request and the goalposts will continue to move.
Social networks are even more difficult to bootstrap because they’re not worth paying for if you can’t find people to socialize with. Nobody wants to sign up for an empty social network.
Even the free social networks have a hard time getting started. There were dozens of Twitter competitors created after Twitter was acquired, but most of them languished. The few that have survived have their own problems that are driving many of their own fans away.
They claim to be profitable, but the TAM for services people are used to thinking of as "free" is small.
smikhanov · 58m ago
Sorry to mumble, I'll add one more thing. Back in 2013, I was running a productivity startup, and we tried courting Evernote into acquiring us (unsuccessfully, though damn we were a good match). I remember those times vividly: Evernote raises a sizeable fraction of a billion in funding in several rounds, employs like 400 people, their CEO goes to places like Le Web or whatever and expatiates from stage about building a "100 year company".
Fast forward to 2022: Evernote itself is acquired by a random app studio, and the whole service is now run by something like a dozen people. The CEO of what used to be a "100 year company" moved on.
I thought about this a lot. They never needed those 400 employees, even in 2013, it was absolutely possible to run the same service with a tiny team, it's just that the people at the company's top would be completely different people with completely different aptitude towards building their businesses. It's only if you really, really want to be on stage at Le Web, then you go to investors over and over again and convince them and yourself that a note-taking app needs 400 employees, and you're building a company as a product, not a product as a product.
Looks like the author of the original article here also didn't actually want to build a social network business but rather wants to be in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. Well, good luck to them.
smikhanov · 1h ago
Kagi is cool (as a company), really.
The whole idea of running your company while thinking about TAM and whatever is totally from a VC playbook. If you don’t take VC funding, you stop caring about TAM. Instead, you care about whether having the profit you have makes you — yes, you, personally — comfortable about your life. This is a much, much healthier line of thinking than trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach.
smikhanov · 1h ago
You description is probably spot on, but boy I’d love to have a version of Instagram where I could just pay $5/month and get a time-sorted stream of photos of my friends’ babies, Piña coladas with a beach background, and sweaty mirror selfies in a gym without any stupid ads in the middle.
dimal · 1h ago
People pay for software all the time. Hell I pay $30/month for a fucking email client (Superhuman). But no one has tried it for a social network. I think the problem is that people think a social network is worthless unless you hit Twitter scale, but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work. People are now saying that Discord is being enshittified, right on schedule. Maybe there's an opportunity to poach some communities.
Aurornis · 1h ago
> People pay for software all the time.
Well obviously some people would pay. The hurdle that a company needs to clear is getting enough people to pay to support both an engineering staff and the infrastructure costs.
Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work is prohbitively high.
> but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work
Even large, free, well-funded social networks are failing to get significant traction or running into echo chamber problems (Bluesky).
I've been hearing for years that a paid social network would work, but if the unpaid social network competitors can't get any traction, what makes you think adding a $2/month signup hurdle would improve the situation?
If you want to see a real-world example of people squirming out of their claims that they'd pay for ad-free services, take a look at any HN thread discussing YouTube premium or their ad-block evasion efforts. The price for ad-free YouTube is reasonable for as much as people watch it, yet when cornered the same audiences who claimed they'd pay for an ad-free version suddenly come up with a multitude of new excuses for why they're refusing to pay. My personal favorite claim (which invariably surfaces in every thread) is when people say they would happily pay for YouTube premium if they weren't so aggressive about adblockers.
smikhanov · 46m ago
Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work is prohbitively high.
Is this really so? Let's try doing the math: you're describing a distributed team of maybe 10 people, likely less. Let's assume you need $600K/year to run this business (is this the right number? not sure, feel free to correct me). At $2/month, that requires 25000 paying users.
Difficult, but not impossible. At $5/month (the $3 difference wouldn't trigger any price sensitivity, talking from real experience) that's 10000 users. If your service actually provides value, you can crank it even higher. Again, difficult, but totally within the realm of possible.
if the unpaid social network competitors can't get any traction, what makes you think adding a $2/month signup hurdle would improve the situation?
Because the "traction" needed to make free and paid social network work is vastly different. You need insane scale (millions or tens of millions of users) to make free social network viable, hell, my stomach hurts from only thinking about it. A paid social network business, run with certain austerity, can be profitable with one thousand paid users.
ec109685 · 2h ago
Because social networks are boring without users.
smikhanov · 2h ago
How in the world is it easier to attract people to some new VC-funded nonsense?
Jensson · 1h ago
VC-funded means you have money for marketing.
smikhanov · 1h ago
But for a paid social network you can do marketing too. All you need is for CLV to be higher than CAC.
jrib · 1h ago
what if we mention AI somewhere???
skybrian · 28m ago
If you’re not trying to make a business out of it, you don’t even need that much money. You could set up a Mastodon server and invite your friends. It might not get a lot of attention, but it will work.
Kudos · 2h ago
There are several mature open source social network stacks. The barrier isn't technology.
quonn · 2h ago
How do you get everyone to join - which is the important part?
smikhanov · 2h ago
How in the world is it easier to attract people to some new VC-funded nonsense?
pathsjs · 2h ago
For one thing you can use VC money to pay for ads
smikhanov · 1h ago
But for a paid social network you can do that too. All you need is for CLV to be higher than CAC.
SpicyLemonZest · 1h ago
If you want to launch a big viral marketing campaign, you also need someone who's willing to trade your predictions of future revenue for cash today, and VCs are by definition the people interested in making that trade. For something that depends on network effects, slowly trickling out one new ad every time you get 10 new signups isn't going to work.
fullshark · 3h ago
The proposed solution is hinted at in this piece but dare not spoken: government regulation.
kixiQu · 1h ago
FTFA:
> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms.
__MatrixMan__ · 42m ago
> Every attempt to “fix” social media eventually becomes part of the problem because the economic structure creates inevitable corruption of the original mission.
Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users". Anything else will present high values targets for corruption and is doomed to fail. You're not going to get investors in such a thing, because the lack of chokepoints means you can't really monetize it. But I do think that the existing players will eventually behave badly enough that such a thing will emerge--one volunteer effort at a time.
They sold us a dream of what the internet could be and I don't think we're letting that go--we just have to dispatch with them first.
johncole · 3h ago
Thought experiment: what if these apps were owned by non-profits? Would they still be addictive?
I don’t think the VC money does much but accelerate the end state, the apps would become addictive if they were held privately their entire lifespan.
alwa · 2h ago
For that matter—the apps that communities are using that aren’t so aggressively exploiting addictive patterns—like the one you and I are using now—could it be that they’re at some level the norm, they’re just kind of boring beyond the small group of people who find them useful?
Methamphetamine is flashy and destructive, and its supply chain and sales force are the sort of thing romanticized in Breaking Bad—but billions drink tea (and nobody really glamorizes it).
To my mind, the norms of a specific subreddit or Local Co-Op Facebook Group or neighborhood gossip board tend to fall closer to the “tea” pattern than the “viral growth” paradigm. And those, and boring email, and transactional interfaces to companies that primarily do real-world stuff—those tend to take up the bulk of the time of the people in my life. But maybe I’m just old fashioned :)
andoando · 2h ago
Ive been very interested in a worker owned company, or at least representative democracy/republic style of ownership.
Now just need a successful startup to push the idea
Kudos · 2h ago
Literally Mastodon.
closetkantian · 3h ago
I'll tell you what's been working for me: an e-ink phone. It's a Bigme Hibreak Pro. The interface is a bit clunky but it gets the job done. Social media is just not fun on this phone. It's still very usable if I need it, however. I'm also knocking out books at a rate that I haven't in years.
EvgeniyZh · 1h ago
Camera and video calls feels like two major drawbacks. Also I've heard there are NFC problems.
cushpush · 3h ago
Fascinating, bet the battery life is great. Probably no games on your phone but texting works like normal I'm guessing?
closetkantian · 3h ago
Battery life isn't as good as I expected, but I do leave the backlight on quite a bit. I'm not a big phone gamer, but some people do enjoy playing original (black and white) game boy games on them.
Texting works very well. I'm typing this on the phone right now. It's one of the smoothest eink devices I've ever encountered.
braaileb · 2h ago
Can you use Android Auto with it? Props for the change
alwa · 2h ago
With technological products in particular—where an idiosyncratic nerd with an old computer under the desk can run a vibrant forum, a couple of plucky young “cofounders” can conjure a company from nothing, and HN (at least at one point [0]) can sway the entire tech culture from a single process on a single server—isn’t it an option to… not grow?
I guess the LLM era makes credible products more capital-intensive than they used to be, but even so, the vendors are pricing their stuff aggressively, and even when they try to squeeze the prices later, half these foundation models that are better-than-last-year’s-SOTA are open-source!
If you want to play with lots of money and seek out lots of money, there’s lots of money swirling around seeking to involve you in that game. But if you just want to make something nice and human-scale and small, what better time than now?
The path to billions of bucks may require mercenary bucks-extracting behavior, but that’s not the same as a growth imperative being an inevitable force of nature.
I can’t help but feel like the Small Web folks are on to something.
I enjoyed this. It feels obvious doesn’t it ? But - it’s so hard to see anything grassroots changing here for exactly the same reason the apps become attention-gamified - how can some small organically-grown thing compete with the money ?
ngriffiths · 4h ago
I agree. I see this becoming a bigger and bigger problem unless someone steps in with significant regulation or major changes like the article says.
The other challenge is the regulation part is much easier when the product is, say, heroin. Algorithms are technically complex (hard for policymakers to grasp), flexible (can be tweaked to work around guidelines?), and operating in the digital world (harder to monitor/block).
Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?
ambicapter · 4h ago
By...not competing? As long as you're profitable (read: your expenses are lower than your incomes), what does competing to be "the best" (whatever that even means) provide you?
ngriffiths · 4h ago
I think in this context "competing" means having a meaningful market share, which would help reduce time the world spends on the alternative useless gamified/addictive apps
HWR_14 · 3h ago
In many segments, especially ones served digitally, only one or a few companies will survive. It's very much "grow or die".
ambicapter · 1h ago
That's a narrative that makes no sense. If a company is profitable, it doesn't "die". If customers like your product and their friends are on your platform, they have no reason to leave to another.
aeve890 · 3h ago
Pardon my ignorance but is that expensive to run a social platform?
DeathRay2K · 3h ago
Running a social media platform can be very expensive, and it only gets more expensive every day.
Media takes a lot of storage and bandwidth, and you basically have unbounded costs if you want to meet user expectations for posting media.
api · 4h ago
The right question is: how can some small organically grown thing compete for attention?
If everyone is engaged with addiction machines nobody will use it.
Engineered addiction is mind control. It is abuse. Hacking the human brain is violence — a term that has been robbed of its impact through overuse for things that are not violence, but this is.
Engineering of addiction in any form should not be legal for the same reason that kidnapping someone and raping them or forcing them to do my labor is not legal.
Fix this problem — remove the mind control and violence — and a market niche opens up for honest business models. As it stands nobody can compete with these platforms because volition can’t compete with violence and honest commerce can’t compete with slavery through dopamine system hacking.
BTW if you work for these companies, quit. Ten to fifteen years ago ignorance was an excuse. I don’t think the original inventors of this nightmare knew quite what they were doing. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. If you are “optimizing engagement” in this context and in these ways you are a bad person.
andrei_says_ · 4h ago
It’s interesting that the examples you provided - kidnapping and forced labor - are somewhat legal in the U.S. in the context of the treatment of people of color by law enforcement and incarceration industry.
Similarly, suppression of wages, taking away healthcare, food, employee protections (at-will employment), legally required vacation days and maternity leave, and any meaningful safety nets for employees, pushes the social contract for workers toward violent nonconsensual extraction.
Maximizing extraction inevitably requires violence and cruelty.
zbentley · 4h ago
Yes. Given that, how can we do what GP suggested and move the perception and legal treatment of these behaviors towards “ethically repugnant” rather than “conditionally (and, as you pointed out, very unequally) socially permitted”?
mistrial9 · 4h ago
similar discussions around liquor and tobacco in days past?
zbentley · 3h ago
Kind of. Those examples are often trotted out as discussion killers a la “regulating these vices didn’t work, so don’t bother trying to regulate $whatever (addictive dark patterns in this instance)”.
But that’s not exactly true, is it?
Calling out alcohol and tobacco ignores all the vices that were made durably illegal all over the world: prostitution, blood sport, slavery, forced marriage, and so on—and yes, institutionalized slavery was a vice, an economic one rather than a habitual one, but every bit as behaviorally seductive for slavers as speculative investing, MLM, or subprime asset flipping are for some people today.
Sure, not all of those things are illegal everywhere, and reasonable people may disagree as to whether illegality is appropriate for some of them (e.g. prostitution). But in total they do indicate that vice regulation can “stick” better than it did for alcohol and tobacco.
Hell, we used to put cocaine in soda! Whether or not you believe that the current prohibition/penalty practices around that drug are good, I assume most folks agree that it’s better now that we can’t get addicted to it via products available at the supermarket. Even as addiction-engineered as current-generation hyper-processed foods are, it was once much worse, and that was pretty successfully addressed via regulatory prohibition.
nine_k · 3h ago
In most places liquor, while legal, is seriously regulated, and alcoholism is considered a sickness worth treating. Alcohol's effects are visibly debilitating, from poor driving to the very ability to stand without falling or speak coherently.
Addictive games though don't show such easily detectable effects. So it's more like a discussion on gambling, casinos, etc, but the current forms of addiction-forming experiences are much more underhanded.
divbzero · 1h ago
OP mentions how Facebook introduced engagement algorithms to Instagram and how Twitter followed suit, but doesn’t mention that Facebook was also the first to popularize engagement algorithms in 2011 via their News Feed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Facebook)#History
quaintdev · 3h ago
> We need a fundamental re-evaluation of what our phones should be for, whether these platforms can ever return to their original purpose of actually bringing us together instead of keeping us scrolling
Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together. Let people meet each other in real life. Let the relationships flourish organically. No amount of tech will ever build the trust that face to face interactions can build. When people are in presence of each other they are just not exchanging ideas. There is so much of non verbal exchange through body language, tone of voice, facial expressions. I think all this helps in building trust. Social media on other hand just does the opposite unless the user is very conscious of the effects of social media.
doctorwho42 · 3h ago
I love that idea, I just wish I knew how to precipitate it in my local community beyond just trying.
appreciatorBus · 2h ago
My theory is that local community is "just trying".
UncleOxidant · 3h ago
> Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together.
Agreed. Social networks not only didn't bring us together, they've actually done the opposite and made us more tribal. Excellent book on the topic is Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear us Apart by Nicholas Carr.
liendolucas · 2h ago
What I haven't found in the article is what would happen if people paid for a true social network, completely free of all the nasty things we already know. Is there any chance that a carefully crafted paid social network can actually succeed?
jay_kyburz · 1h ago
My plan is/was to structure the payments as a single annual payment that only one person in a group or family needs to pay. Then all the members of the group/family join free. That way you only need to convince one person in a group its worth the change.
ruined · 3h ago
an article on the problems of social media with no mention of the federated platforms? seems like a huge omission
waveforms · 2h ago
it is. There are many websites and applications that I use, like wikipedia and linux / kde that could help if they picked an application like Mastodon and promoted it on their site. I only use social media about once a month so I am far from expert but an ad supported open source facebook clone that stayed non profit by sending its profits to other open source sites would be ideal.
Narciss · 4h ago
My hope, and it may be a naïve hope, is that with the rise of AI will see more and more people be able to build the kind of digital experience that they envision, including social media experiences, because of the democratization of software engineering.
That being said, what does it take to build a social media app using AI and also perhaps just as important to market it worldwide?
kurthr · 4h ago
It feels like this is the optimism of early internet where "information wants to be free".
We got a solid 5 maybe 10 years of that (up through 2k)?
cornholio · 4h ago
If you can't build it with a bunch of junior coders, then AI won't help you.
Social media is all about network effects and first mover advantage, one network turned textbook fascist and it's still going strong.
blendergeek · 4h ago
I "hope" that will happen as well. It is a naïve hope indeed. Almost all current AI systems and all future ones I foresee, are made by large corporations that are looking to turn a profit. Enabling, ordinary "people ... to build the kind of digital experience that they envision" does not maximise profit. Instead AI systems will work for their owners to maximize profits by extracting revenue from the users. Some of this revenu could come from advertising. AIs could build ads that are far more personalized and convincing than anything we can imagine now. AI agents will work first and foremost for their corporate owners and will only do the users bidding if it benefits the owners. There is absolutely no reason to believe that it will be different this time and that now corporations will happily hand out everything for free and users will be empowered. I don't doubt that open source and freedom respecting AI will exist and that some will be able to use it. The great thing about free markets is that those who want to will be able to opt out. But it will always be niche and small just like it is now.
DeathRay2K · 3h ago
Building the social media platform you want to see isn’t really the problem though. They are relatively easy to build, the hard part is making it valuable enough to attract users and earning enough to keep it running.
Using AI introduces additional costs without solving the core challenge there.
MobileVet · 4h ago
I remember when ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products’ came out by Nir Eyal. It came out the same year as ‘Addiction by Design’ and was rapidly adopted in the SV and HN circles. I heard somewhere he felt bad about the impact of Hooked… but I don’t have a source.
Eyal wrote another book 5 years later trying to help people control their attention & not falling victim to the playbook he outlined in Hooked.
b0a04gl · 3h ago
addiction drives revenue but isn't the only model .monetize outcomes: charge writing tools per export, focus apps per session, design tools per final asset .soak in usage decay : session lengths shrink unless reengaged .let users set caps, pick 'read-only' or 'close-friends' modes .in social apps, rank by saves/comments, not scroll time .monetize filters, advanced DM settings, creator tools .intentional use stays high, manipulation drops .i want to build something like this someday lets see
asdf6969 · 37m ago
I like the post but I feel like it’s missing the reason why VC funding is necessary. A lot of small scale apps and old school forums can be run pretty cheap. What is stopping social media from growing slow and following a more traditional business model? For example, people regularly start things like nail salons with just personal funds and bank loans but they are so much more expensive to run than something like this website
asim · 4h ago
Honestly it always comes back to, we need a healthier relationship with our tools. The phone, social media, etc. It's all a tool. And yes it can be highly addictive but so are drugs, alcohol, TV, etc. all easily accessible and how we deal with it comes down to ourselves. It's what environment you put yourself in, and if that environment is one that includes a lot of screens then there's a sliding scale as to how corrupted you'll become by it. If you're at places where theres alcohol and cigarettes I mean it's highly likely you're going to smoke and drink. The only things that really beat all of this is a way of life that recognises that it can or is poisonous and many things must be avoided e.g get off social media. It was built to be addictive, that's not going to change.
As someone who's a lifelong Muslim and even more dedicated to that in my late 30s and now at 40 I'll say we were put on this earth for a purpose. As engineers we need to understand our own design. We need to understand that all the things we constructed for ourselves isn't all for our benefit but actually a lot of it is harmful, whether it be the digital life or processed food. This is a more holistic way to live. The author obviously wanted to get people offline. I think the issue is when the algorithm of silicon valley is making money then anything inherently social becomes about addiction and gamification. There are alternative routes forward but probably by first getting offline or reassessing ones relationship with the world..
nine_k · 3h ago
> healthier relationship with our tools
The point is that these are not tools, they provide a direct kick, which is a goal in itself. Whisky is not a tool.
echollama · 3h ago
agreed its like saying that jerking off makes you healthier
UncleOxidant · 3h ago
Wait, it doesn't? /s
djoldman · 3h ago
There are two things going on here.
The first and simpler question is what is a valuable software product? For products where the user expects to pay nothing, like almost all social media, the answer is: the product with the most user-hours. Therefore products that attract many user-hours attract much investment. There isn't some kind of insidious conspiracy to push specific types of products: investors don't care, they care about how many minutes of ads they can push down the pipe (legally).
The second question is: (again for products where the user expects to pay nothing) what products attract the most user-hours?
It seems folks dance around and rarely confront what I consider to be the main explanation here and where the primary cause is: humans choose and prefer to consume and interact with content that induces in them a set of emotions. They generally choose to experience stuff that gets them upset, looks cute, inspires longing, makes them feel lonely, etc.
If one categorizes the things that the consumer chooses as "problematic," where is the problem? The problem as stated is the consumer. One can't engineer a way out of that: folks have tried to provide alternative options and these mostly fail to attract heaps of users.
To put this in the language of TFA: the addiction isn't engineered into the consumer. The addiction was there from the beginning: a million products were tried out, products evolved to better align with preferences, and now the products are "addictive."
mouse_ · 4h ago
Last paragraph seems to speak without speaking.
> We built these platforms. We can build better ones. But only if we're willing to abandon the economic models that made the current ones inevitable. Until we change those incentives, every attempt to fix social media will become part of the problem it’s trying to solve. We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t.
> The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely.
In direct language, what exactly is the author suggesting we do here?
jfengel · 3h ago
He's not. Anything he has in mind is socially unacceptable and he knows it.
We'd all love to rebuild economics from the ground up. But as soon as you try you realize that everyone has a different idea and they can't agree on anything.
DeathRay2K · 3h ago
The author doesn’t suggest it, but the implicit solution is public funding for social goods.
That could be through a robust grant process, providing funding for social media that is not supported other ways.
Alternately, it could be through a UBI, giving people basic cash flow that could be allocated to paid social media platforms rather than everyone relying on ad-supported social media.
fullshark · 3h ago
Government regulation / laws
jay_kyburz · 1h ago
And whats more, there is only one law you need to change. You simply need to remove common carrier exemptions from hosts so that if false or misleading information is delivered to a user from a platform, that platform can be sued for damages.
Its the rule that newspapers and TV need to live by, social media should play by the same rules.
The platforms then simply need to protect themselves my making sure they accurately identify users posting on their networks, so they can pass the cost of any lost lawsuit onto the original poster.
rufus_foreman · 1h ago
The problem is not the apps, the problem is the users. Which means the problem is human nature.
Make a photography site for people to share photographs and it will inevitably turn into a site for people to share selfies of them pretending to live a life that they do not actually live and can not actually afford, but which you will inevitably compare yourself against.
Make a site for people to share opinions and it will inevitably be dominated by one particular group of users that will shame anyone with any opinion at all that diverges from the tiny area of acceptable opinion.
The problem is not the tools that the users have. The problem is not the engineers. The problem is that people are being giving exactly what they want. The problem is right there in the mirror.
There are no solutions.
cushpush · 3h ago
Do you think a nonprofit model could work?
waveforms · 2h ago
yes, go ahead and have ads but any income over server fees can be shared with open source projects.
Devasta · 3h ago
The best thing we could possibly do, besides throwing Musk and Zuckerberg in The Hague, is destroy targeted advertising as a business model. Everything, absolutely all of this is done so they can make fractions of a cent off of clicks. So long as they can, they will do everything possible to damage your brains into clicking more.
mrweasel · 3h ago
I'd go on further, we cannot have advertising as a business model, targeted or not. It worked previously, classic Google was a good example, but mixed with shareholders, it doesn't work, incentives screw up any attempt of providing a better product, because the product become the ad space.
Throwing Musk in there is strange. To my knowledge he doesn't really profit of ads, X probably have ad revenue, but that's not really his business model. Tesla stock however, that's a completely different addiction, mostly not relevant to consumers, but that stuff is immune to any type of common sense and traders can't seem to get enough of it.
Vektorceraptor · 1h ago
There is still a deeper problem, which the article didn't tackle. We don't need social media in general. Some forums and platforms for geeks and freaks are enough. We don't need perfectly orchestrated or fairly designed apps to simulate genuine connection, which works best without any digital help what so ever.
So let's imagine that the best way is to return to offline interactions and connections - which take time, trust, respect and value of each other.
The internet is better when used by the nerds, not the general public.
sneak · 3h ago
The moment you take VC money, you are obligated to attempt to achieve VC scale.
It’s nothing to do with social media, and everything to do with the wrong KPIs.
charcircuit · 2h ago
It's not about addiction. It's about providing value.
>The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”
It's more like limiting themselves to just sharing a single photo per day is limiting to how much value they can provide users and advertisers.
>Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X aren't neutral tools. They're carefully crafted slot machines engineered to get you hooked. Pull to refresh. Tap to like. Scroll forever. Random rewards. Notifications timed to spike your cortisol. The same behavioral loops that addict gamblers now hook children and adults alike.
This is quite a stretch. Users finding immense value is not the same as addiction.
>Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics.
Even if YouTube forced people to have premium they would still optimize for engagement. Loading up the home page and getting terrible recommendations is a terrible experience. Finding the best content for user provides the most value.
>Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals?
Feel free to use those metrics if you want, but most people will continue to use the apps that provide them the most value.
ec109685 · 2h ago
To add to this, BeReal flamed out because it was a gimmick that was quickly copied and then forgotten by all the other platforms.
Agree that blaming VCs for why TikTok has an algorithmic feed and hundreds of millions of users is simplistic. A non-algorithmic TikTok would have no users.
And without a personalized algorithms, the feed ranking would just be showing content from popular accounts, which is a worse experience.
egypturnash · 3h ago
yep, good luck figuring out how to make a social media site that is engaging enough for people to keep coming back, able to pay its hosting bills, and just generally sustainable, without falling into the dark patterns.
IAmGraydon · 4h ago
What this all boils down to is the major weak point of capitalism: profit over all. It’s a darwinistic system, and survival depends upon the ability to abandon ethics in the name of money. Not that ethics doesn’t have some value - it does - but only as a money generator as some customers are motivated to spend on it or at least the idea of it. By and large, however, ethics becomes a weakness in this system.
So in my view, the solution has to abide by this law of the jungle, but also short circuit the psychological mechanisms that tech companies are using to harvest attention. Somehow, people will have to pay for their freedom, similar to how drug addicts can pay for rehabilitation once they see the damage the drug has done to their life. It’s still a business, but one that contributes to the greater good.
Most of the solutions in this article require some kind of government intervention, which I don't see happening any time soon. Eventually, maybe, but probably only after society has nearly (or completely) ripped itself apart due to social media, the negatives are laid bare, and people start pushing for change.
superkuh · 1h ago
Nope. There's no addiction involved here. Engineers should know better than to mis-use terminology outside of it's context.
> We don’t all have ADHD. We have an addiction. Growing up, I barely knew a world without social media, and neither did my friends. We were the guinea pigs for Silicon Valley's great dopamine experiment, and now we’re waking up with the side effects.
Saying it's a "dopamine experiment" is just as bad an incorrect as calling your monitor "the cpu" or saying "I'm so adhd" to describe a common behavior.
Using the concept of addiction and completely unrelated neurochemistry in this context drags in all the terribly dangerous ideas of drug addiction. Drugs are entirely different things that truly do subvert incentive salience at the neurochemical level. While screens and speakers most certainly do not. And even if they did it's be "glutamergic experiment" not "dopamine". These ideas imply that in normal situations and stimuli humans do not have volition and so need state force to protect them from their own choices. This premise is far more damaging to society than screens and sounds could ever be.
jiveturkey · 4h ago
Been going on long before Silicon Valley was even a thing. Sugar industry for example.
> What might actually work
This section is idealistic. I guess the author was too damaged by his own experience to actually study the wave of twitter replacements. I would love to see an analysis of those. "Different Funding Methods" is clearly required but perhaps not sufficient.
almost_usual · 4h ago
Alcohol, nicotine / cigarettes, sugar packed junk food. The digital realm of addiction is a new face of the same pattern.
Cheap hits to increase pleasure centers in the brain that overall have a detrimental cost to humanity with entire industries to deal with the health consequences.
This is the mining of wealth from health reducing the overall productivity of humanity for the sake of near term profits. Optimizing short term gains for long term progress.
zbentley · 3h ago
True. Regulatory prohibition has sometimes succeeded at addressing these problems, though. More info on that in my adjacent comment, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44407009
MobileVet · 4h ago
For sure… but digital distribution and deep understanding of the mental processes behind addiction make it even more accessible for new products / games today.
globular-toast · 4h ago
Indeed. The first thing I think of when I read "engineered addictions" is fast food like McDonalds and Subway. People work very hard to make sure the taste and smell is addictive but that the food is not satiating.
Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook. It’s Stanford Prison Experiment stuff.
I hate being reductionist, and I am posting this on a historically YC forum so of course there’s nuance, but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering. It sucks we’re seeing less grants and less security net to encourage risks under current administration, because it leaves investment as the quickest path to starting or scaling a company. Donate to open source, IMO
When we have that mindset, we absolutely don't care about the thing that we call "our product." It's just food for the actual product, where we want to fatten it up, and sell it to the biggest slaughterhouse.
That starts almost immediately. You can't even get an A round, without an "exit plan."
I feel that the very existence of an exit plan, dooms the user. No one cares about them. It's all about fattening the company, and making it look good. When we do that, we'll feed it nothing but junk food, in an effort to make it as fat as possible, as quickly as possible, with absolutely no thought as to long-term viability.
I would love to see the tech industry return to concentrating on truly delivering good to the end-user. It's still possible to make a decent living, but maybe not at the insane rates we see.
Side note, on "exit plan" - the most ridiculous thing about raising money is you need an exit strategy but you cannot explicitly say you have an exit strategy, you have to imply it while the whole time pretending it's not a focus for you. It's a very weird dynamic.
As Action Jack Barker said, Pied Piper's product is its stock.
Really does make me cynical on investing...
If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public company, this becomes very apparent very quick.
Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your company, you will not succeed.
Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales Leadedship to drive customer outcomes, but the hyperfocus on short term deliverables AT THE EXPENSE of a long term product vision makes it difficult to push back.
Very few newly founded or public companies can do the latter - the most recent ones I can think of are maybe Datadog and Wiz (not public but they did drive a customer centric mentality internally).
Of course, a lot of this is also due to the extreme bloat that formed in the tech industry in the late 2010s to early 2020s. Teams grew unrealistically large with limited financial justification beyond cherry-picked growth metrics, and this meant a lot of companies lost the ability to innovate frugally or nimbly. Unrealistically high valuations also played a role because towards the end, founders could end up demanding IPO-sized multiples in private markets even without the underlying fundamentals (eg. Lacework's $9 BILLION valuation on what was at most $90 MILLION in revenue).
A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.
Halfway true. There's a famous quote:
> In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.
At some point, strong fundamentals will catch up with you.
There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much.
It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money ends up in too few hands, whether those hands are a government or a few private rich citizens. You end up with this giant piñata of big dumb money and everyone whacking it.
In the old USSR instead of the stock is the product it was the appearance in the eyes of other bureaucrats is the product, but it’s kind of the same phenomenon. The customer isn’t the customer.
In Magickal Faerieland, we have regulations to align those 2 things by incentivizing the "goodguy" path and/or disincentivizing the "cackling villain" path but we live in reality where money rules and regulatory capture is a thing. So a Facebook or other megacorp can get away with using neuroscience and psychology to engineer a virtual slot machine with a terrible payout and ExxonMobile et al can get away with being an architect of environmental degradation and the accompanying humanitarian disasters.
We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously destructive.
We should be suspicious of games that favor shareholder value over common good and repair them. Of course this is harder than it sounds, but letting the person with the most money in a Monopoly game also set the rules is absurd and and obviously wrong. Wrong even without having a consensus reality on what "common good" entails and this is important.
The "capital game" should serve us, rather than us serving it. A fatalistic lack of imagination is no longer an option. When we're more afraid of unintended consequences than accepting that we have a responsibility to the current consequences, our current consequences look rather intended.
That of course won't mean that you will have the privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as "the common good". It's unfortunately not like the Arch Linux terminal where you are omnipotent.
I say that sincerely, as somebody who had to do just that. It's easier for Mohammad to go to the mountain.
A good read: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/costa-rica-enli...
At least with share holder value, you know where you stand. The common good is a constantly changing thing determined by the moral authority in charge at a moment in time.
If anything those two are probably the most important needs so it's not possible to build such a system.
Besides why can't one of human needs also be an economic system that doesn't have the failure mode of poverty?
Easy peasy, no?
Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely critical to their continued existence and long-term viability.
But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
It cannot be "either/or" and it's not immoral to pursue profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Who is “we”? I can’t do anything about it. No more than peasants “allow” the king to exist..
You don't understand how kings work if you think it's equivalent to your situation in a western democracy.
"Voting obviously doesn't work." - Troll
1. Nobody forces you to use a smart phone. 2. Nobody forces you to have social media or use it. 3. Nobody forces you to watch Netflix.
We all choose what we do in life.
I say this because you used the phrase "fiduciary duty" which does not exist in this context.
Well, there was one case in the law over 100 years ago in the USA. A company had decided to sell itself for cash and go out of business. The Court ruled, that in that situation, it should sell to the highest bidder. This is long before Milton Friedman began advocating that corporations had a duty to their common shareholders that provided the only valid yardstick for evaluating corporate activities. Friedman was an economist, and a controversial one, not a lawyer, and how he got the lawyers behind him is itself a long strange story.
The idea that common shareholders own the corporation was not really obvious to anyone from the start. Common shareholders get from the corporation only what is their privilege according to the corporate bylaws and charter. There are now, and have been in the past, many different kinds of and classes of common shareholders. For example, some big corporations today have many common shareholders who do not have any voting rights. The thing that sets common shareholders apart from the other stakeholders who also hold pieces of paper from the corporation granting them various interests in the corporation, is that the common shareholders get to divide up whatever is left over if and when the corporation is liquidated and everyone else is given what they are owed first. They are more heirs than owners. It is more realistic to hold that the corporation, as an artificial person, is not and cannot be owned by other persons, and owns itself.
My understanding is those kind of cases aren't common because a) they are hard to prove, b) the people being sued if they actually have the money to make it worth suing them also have the money to fight it, and c) it's a really bad look for an investor to be suing a previous member of their portfolio and would a strong adverse affect on their deal flow
Unless you're saying there is no explicit legal obligation / fiduciary duty in law, but it does emerge from civil court cases, which is how I understand it, but short paragraphs are not a good place for the amount of nuance so I just said "legal obligation" as a shorthand for something real but very complex.
Activist investors will sue for anything alleging that executives broke securities law by doing anything that harmed their portfolio. It doesn't mean they win the cases, or that anyone is guilty.
There's also something worth noting that even if there isn't a legal obligation for executives to act on their shareholders interests, they have a really strong incentive when their compensation is mostly stock grants and the shareholders can fire them.
If you hit the growth targets, they will pat you in the back and will demand Hyperscale growth growth growth and will throw money at you to supercharge it.
If you refuse to chase the growth, they will simply kick you off the company via Board or fund your competitor that will chase the growth at all means
Chilling effect is there one way or another, and even when that does not work adverse selection does.
You have to have a very strong market position to resist the investor pressure. Kinda like Google had twenty years ago.
Or you can have a diverse set of investors who can’t or won’t be swayed by activist investors. But that usually means being public at which point your employees are incentivized by RSUs.
If you get the money and then try to U-turn and refuse to chase growth, the board will start asking questions
The legal obligation is that CEO does whatever board tells him to, otherwise board can fire ceo
This amounts to an argument that if doing something immoral gives you money and power, you can not possibly say no and no one can blame you. That somehow more money and power is good enough excuse.
In 95% of cases, the founder isn't smashing moral barriers because the VCs and shareholders are making them, or lording the threat of legal action or any some such.
In 95% of cases, the founder is smashing through moral barriers because their interests are aligned with the VCs: because they think what they are doing will lead to stupendous mega-wealth for them personally.
Like sure, I think the idea that corporate execs must be beholden to maximizing share price is a) corrosive to our society and b) not as true as often portrayed, but I don't think that's even a real factor here.
The ones who play the game with integrity and morals never have the type of growth that makes headlines. But I’m sure they exist.
And even if what you said is true, you can look at the results of years of this system, the difference between companies with outside investment vs without makes a strong case against what you're saying.
It's like saying educating people about their rights wrt police helps, but in practice police don't derive their power from actual laws and it comes at considerable personal expense to push it to courts, in the same way Delaware is very strongly biased towards shareholder rights.
Legally maybe. The market and shareholders will punish you if you deviate from the current standard behavior.
We’ve all seen companies do layoffs just because “Wall Street” was concerned about the economy and then instantly see the stock price spike up.
These negative consequences are all results of bog standard prisoner dilemma issues that need government regulation to make sure everyone picks the good square, but the tech industry and this boards community as well is allergic to the idea that regulations can improve the situation for everyone
That may be true legally, but practically it's only true if they control the board. Otherwise they will simply be replaced by people who are willing to do what the board wants.
That's what I was responding to.
But it's important for founders to understand they are not legally obligated to do any specific thing for their shareholders. It is their responsibility to act morally. Yes, there are other incentives and forces at play. "Legal obligation" is not the cop-out excuse that executives claim it is.
If you don’t play this game you’ll lose. Look at Europe for example, they haven’t played the VC game properly and thus have no really significant tech player compared to the US / China.
So what options are left? Play the game or be ruled by those that play it.
I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.
Look at Mozila for the most insidious example. Take a privacy focused product. Rope in a bunch of suckers. Then literally delete the privacy focus from your mission statment and start the "slaughter"
Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore. The Sodom and Gomorrah fable is a warning not to let this happen or your society will destroy itself.
I don't think this is a good example. Back then, the internet was a new thing only a small cohort of people cared about. Something small could just stay small because none of the big players with money cared. Nowadays, if someone wanted to start something like Craigslist, they would be outrun by someone else going the VC route before the small company could get big enough on its own. I think it boils down to the difference between slower growth, boot-strapped companies vs. VC-backed.
https://open.substack.com/pub/vonnik/p/how-to-take-your-brai...
Yes, the addictions are engineered in the service of shareholder value. There are many ways to fight it!
Fwiw, this dynamic goes way beyond VC and tech.
Douglas Courtwright writes about this in Age of Addiction:
https://www.amazon.com/The-Age-of-Addiction-audiobook/dp/B07...
Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome - Charlie Munger
It's the same with politics and money.
We don't get the leaders we want, because it costs money to buy people's attention. We get the people who have some way to pay for attention
(in recent years, one of those ways is increasingly corruption - e.g. senator of NJ, mayor of NY, etc.)
An article today talks about Cuomo following the "local TV buys" playbook, which WAS a fairly reliable way to win elections:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-show-c...
That didn't work this time, but the mechanism is simple and clear
Who watches local TV anymore? Probably not many people under 60.
https://wonderful.dev/download
Engineering addiction is also probably more often than not intentional. When all the business metrics/KPIs are stuff like "engagement time", "$ spent", even AB testing of random features leads to manufacturing addiction
I suppose we’re living in an age of unchecked capitalism. But there are other issues too
If people actually believed in something they'd make it open source or a non-profit, not a convenient vehicle for personal enrichment. Imagine if Wikipedia was a for-profit startup, it would've eventually ended up as an unusable cesspool of advertising.
Trying to bootstrap it without any funding is a lot, but necessary, and I have to run it on a shoestring. The frustrating part is that with all networks the flywheel is everything. Once you get the product on people’s phones, the value is easy to see, but to get the app in their phones, you need a bunch of money to create value to get people there.
This is why the VC funding is so pernicious and why projects like mastodon, lemmy, and pixelfed are so difficult to get off the ground. The point is almost always the network itself more than the product.
I’ll keep trying to just do it slow and steady, even if it takes me a decade. I honestly don't care if I fail because I know the people out there that care about golf course architecture just want a place to talk about the courses they love.
https://golfcourse.wiki
Why does the author need to moan about how morally destructive it was to raise VC? Just run your social network from your bedroom, while asking ChatGPT how to rewrite the landing page in React.
Commenters all across the internet will say they’d pay good money for a site that does something specific that sounds like a good idea.
Then when the site is built, you will discover that they will not, in fact, pay any money for it at all. You will continue to add the features they request and the goalposts will continue to move.
Social networks are even more difficult to bootstrap because they’re not worth paying for if you can’t find people to socialize with. Nobody wants to sign up for an empty social network.
Even the free social networks have a hard time getting started. There were dozens of Twitter competitors created after Twitter was acquired, but most of them languished. The few that have survived have their own problems that are driving many of their own fans away.
They claim to be profitable, but the TAM for services people are used to thinking of as "free" is small.
Fast forward to 2022: Evernote itself is acquired by a random app studio, and the whole service is now run by something like a dozen people. The CEO of what used to be a "100 year company" moved on.
I thought about this a lot. They never needed those 400 employees, even in 2013, it was absolutely possible to run the same service with a tiny team, it's just that the people at the company's top would be completely different people with completely different aptitude towards building their businesses. It's only if you really, really want to be on stage at Le Web, then you go to investors over and over again and convince them and yourself that a note-taking app needs 400 employees, and you're building a company as a product, not a product as a product.
Looks like the author of the original article here also didn't actually want to build a social network business but rather wants to be in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. Well, good luck to them.
The whole idea of running your company while thinking about TAM and whatever is totally from a VC playbook. If you don’t take VC funding, you stop caring about TAM. Instead, you care about whether having the profit you have makes you — yes, you, personally — comfortable about your life. This is a much, much healthier line of thinking than trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach.
Well obviously some people would pay. The hurdle that a company needs to clear is getting enough people to pay to support both an engineering staff and the infrastructure costs.
Do the math on how many people are necessary to run a web site with on-call rotation, minimum moderation, and someone to run the business. The number of $2/month subscription required to make that work is prohbitively high.
> but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work
Even large, free, well-funded social networks are failing to get significant traction or running into echo chamber problems (Bluesky).
I've been hearing for years that a paid social network would work, but if the unpaid social network competitors can't get any traction, what makes you think adding a $2/month signup hurdle would improve the situation?
If you want to see a real-world example of people squirming out of their claims that they'd pay for ad-free services, take a look at any HN thread discussing YouTube premium or their ad-block evasion efforts. The price for ad-free YouTube is reasonable for as much as people watch it, yet when cornered the same audiences who claimed they'd pay for an ad-free version suddenly come up with a multitude of new excuses for why they're refusing to pay. My personal favorite claim (which invariably surfaces in every thread) is when people say they would happily pay for YouTube premium if they weren't so aggressive about adblockers.
Difficult, but not impossible. At $5/month (the $3 difference wouldn't trigger any price sensitivity, talking from real experience) that's 10000 users. If your service actually provides value, you can crank it even higher. Again, difficult, but totally within the realm of possible.
Because the "traction" needed to make free and paid social network work is vastly different. You need insane scale (millions or tens of millions of users) to make free social network viable, hell, my stomach hurts from only thinking about it. A paid social network business, run with certain austerity, can be profitable with one thousand paid users.> Regulated Algorithms: We regulate tobacco companies because their products are addictive and harmful. Algorithmic transparency or giving users control could preserve the benefits while reducing the addictive design patterns. The EU’s Digital Services Act already requires algorithmic transparency from large platforms.
Which is why we need a social medium that is not controlled by anything more centralized than "all the users". Anything else will present high values targets for corruption and is doomed to fail. You're not going to get investors in such a thing, because the lack of chokepoints means you can't really monetize it. But I do think that the existing players will eventually behave badly enough that such a thing will emerge--one volunteer effort at a time.
They sold us a dream of what the internet could be and I don't think we're letting that go--we just have to dispatch with them first.
I don’t think the VC money does much but accelerate the end state, the apps would become addictive if they were held privately their entire lifespan.
Methamphetamine is flashy and destructive, and its supply chain and sales force are the sort of thing romanticized in Breaking Bad—but billions drink tea (and nobody really glamorizes it).
To my mind, the norms of a specific subreddit or Local Co-Op Facebook Group or neighborhood gossip board tend to fall closer to the “tea” pattern than the “viral growth” paradigm. And those, and boring email, and transactional interfaces to companies that primarily do real-world stuff—those tend to take up the bulk of the time of the people in my life. But maybe I’m just old fashioned :)
Now just need a successful startup to push the idea
Texting works very well. I'm typing this on the phone right now. It's one of the smoothest eink devices I've ever encountered.
I guess the LLM era makes credible products more capital-intensive than they used to be, but even so, the vendors are pricing their stuff aggressively, and even when they try to squeeze the prices later, half these foundation models that are better-than-last-year’s-SOTA are open-source!
If you want to play with lots of money and seek out lots of money, there’s lots of money swirling around seeking to involve you in that game. But if you just want to make something nice and human-scale and small, what better time than now?
The path to billions of bucks may require mercenary bucks-extracting behavior, but that’s not the same as a growth imperative being an inevitable force of nature.
I can’t help but feel like the Small Web folks are on to something.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522
The other challenge is the regulation part is much easier when the product is, say, heroin. Algorithms are technically complex (hard for policymakers to grasp), flexible (can be tweaked to work around guidelines?), and operating in the digital world (harder to monitor/block).
Maybe a major factor here is social acceptance vs stigma. In the future will it be considered extremely weird and antisocial to be on your phone nonstop?
Media takes a lot of storage and bandwidth, and you basically have unbounded costs if you want to meet user expectations for posting media.
If everyone is engaged with addiction machines nobody will use it.
Engineered addiction is mind control. It is abuse. Hacking the human brain is violence — a term that has been robbed of its impact through overuse for things that are not violence, but this is.
Engineering of addiction in any form should not be legal for the same reason that kidnapping someone and raping them or forcing them to do my labor is not legal.
Fix this problem — remove the mind control and violence — and a market niche opens up for honest business models. As it stands nobody can compete with these platforms because volition can’t compete with violence and honest commerce can’t compete with slavery through dopamine system hacking.
BTW if you work for these companies, quit. Ten to fifteen years ago ignorance was an excuse. I don’t think the original inventors of this nightmare knew quite what they were doing. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. If you are “optimizing engagement” in this context and in these ways you are a bad person.
Similarly, suppression of wages, taking away healthcare, food, employee protections (at-will employment), legally required vacation days and maternity leave, and any meaningful safety nets for employees, pushes the social contract for workers toward violent nonconsensual extraction.
Maximizing extraction inevitably requires violence and cruelty.
But that’s not exactly true, is it?
Calling out alcohol and tobacco ignores all the vices that were made durably illegal all over the world: prostitution, blood sport, slavery, forced marriage, and so on—and yes, institutionalized slavery was a vice, an economic one rather than a habitual one, but every bit as behaviorally seductive for slavers as speculative investing, MLM, or subprime asset flipping are for some people today.
Sure, not all of those things are illegal everywhere, and reasonable people may disagree as to whether illegality is appropriate for some of them (e.g. prostitution). But in total they do indicate that vice regulation can “stick” better than it did for alcohol and tobacco.
Hell, we used to put cocaine in soda! Whether or not you believe that the current prohibition/penalty practices around that drug are good, I assume most folks agree that it’s better now that we can’t get addicted to it via products available at the supermarket. Even as addiction-engineered as current-generation hyper-processed foods are, it was once much worse, and that was pretty successfully addressed via regulatory prohibition.
Addictive games though don't show such easily detectable effects. So it's more like a discussion on gambling, casinos, etc, but the current forms of addiction-forming experiences are much more underhanded.
Unpopular opinion but I think we need to stop building social networks if we want to bring people together. Let people meet each other in real life. Let the relationships flourish organically. No amount of tech will ever build the trust that face to face interactions can build. When people are in presence of each other they are just not exchanging ideas. There is so much of non verbal exchange through body language, tone of voice, facial expressions. I think all this helps in building trust. Social media on other hand just does the opposite unless the user is very conscious of the effects of social media.
Agreed. Social networks not only didn't bring us together, they've actually done the opposite and made us more tribal. Excellent book on the topic is Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear us Apart by Nicholas Carr.
We got a solid 5 maybe 10 years of that (up through 2k)?
Social media is all about network effects and first mover advantage, one network turned textbook fascist and it's still going strong.
Using AI introduces additional costs without solving the core challenge there.
Eyal wrote another book 5 years later trying to help people control their attention & not falling victim to the playbook he outlined in Hooked.
As someone who's a lifelong Muslim and even more dedicated to that in my late 30s and now at 40 I'll say we were put on this earth for a purpose. As engineers we need to understand our own design. We need to understand that all the things we constructed for ourselves isn't all for our benefit but actually a lot of it is harmful, whether it be the digital life or processed food. This is a more holistic way to live. The author obviously wanted to get people offline. I think the issue is when the algorithm of silicon valley is making money then anything inherently social becomes about addiction and gamification. There are alternative routes forward but probably by first getting offline or reassessing ones relationship with the world..
The point is that these are not tools, they provide a direct kick, which is a goal in itself. Whisky is not a tool.
The first and simpler question is what is a valuable software product? For products where the user expects to pay nothing, like almost all social media, the answer is: the product with the most user-hours. Therefore products that attract many user-hours attract much investment. There isn't some kind of insidious conspiracy to push specific types of products: investors don't care, they care about how many minutes of ads they can push down the pipe (legally).
The second question is: (again for products where the user expects to pay nothing) what products attract the most user-hours?
It seems folks dance around and rarely confront what I consider to be the main explanation here and where the primary cause is: humans choose and prefer to consume and interact with content that induces in them a set of emotions. They generally choose to experience stuff that gets them upset, looks cute, inspires longing, makes them feel lonely, etc.
If one categorizes the things that the consumer chooses as "problematic," where is the problem? The problem as stated is the consumer. One can't engineer a way out of that: folks have tried to provide alternative options and these mostly fail to attract heaps of users.
To put this in the language of TFA: the addiction isn't engineered into the consumer. The addiction was there from the beginning: a million products were tried out, products evolved to better align with preferences, and now the products are "addictive."
> We built these platforms. We can build better ones. But only if we're willing to abandon the economic models that made the current ones inevitable. Until we change those incentives, every attempt to fix social media will become part of the problem it’s trying to solve. We’ll keep wondering why we can’t just put our phones down, not realizing that billion-dollar companies have spent a decade making sure we can’t.
> The solution isn't another app. It's changing the rules of the game entirely.
In direct language, what exactly is the author suggesting we do here?
We'd all love to rebuild economics from the ground up. But as soon as you try you realize that everyone has a different idea and they can't agree on anything.
That could be through a robust grant process, providing funding for social media that is not supported other ways.
Alternately, it could be through a UBI, giving people basic cash flow that could be allocated to paid social media platforms rather than everyone relying on ad-supported social media.
Its the rule that newspapers and TV need to live by, social media should play by the same rules.
The platforms then simply need to protect themselves my making sure they accurately identify users posting on their networks, so they can pass the cost of any lost lawsuit onto the original poster.
Make a photography site for people to share photographs and it will inevitably turn into a site for people to share selfies of them pretending to live a life that they do not actually live and can not actually afford, but which you will inevitably compare yourself against.
Make a site for people to share opinions and it will inevitably be dominated by one particular group of users that will shame anyone with any opinion at all that diverges from the tiny area of acceptable opinion.
The problem is not the tools that the users have. The problem is not the engineers. The problem is that people are being giving exactly what they want. The problem is right there in the mirror.
There are no solutions.
Throwing Musk in there is strange. To my knowledge he doesn't really profit of ads, X probably have ad revenue, but that's not really his business model. Tesla stock however, that's a completely different addiction, mostly not relevant to consumers, but that stuff is immune to any type of common sense and traders can't seem to get enough of it.
So let's imagine that the best way is to return to offline interactions and connections - which take time, trust, respect and value of each other.
The internet is better when used by the nerds, not the general public.
It’s nothing to do with social media, and everything to do with the wrong KPIs.
>The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”
It's more like limiting themselves to just sharing a single photo per day is limiting to how much value they can provide users and advertisers.
>Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and X aren't neutral tools. They're carefully crafted slot machines engineered to get you hooked. Pull to refresh. Tap to like. Scroll forever. Random rewards. Notifications timed to spike your cortisol. The same behavioral loops that addict gamblers now hook children and adults alike.
This is quite a stretch. Users finding immense value is not the same as addiction.
>Subscription models, cooperatives, or public funding could prioritize user wellbeing over engagement metrics.
Even if YouTube forced people to have premium they would still optimize for engagement. Loading up the home page and getting terrible recommendations is a terrible experience. Finding the best content for user provides the most value.
>Instead of measuring daily active users and time-on-platform, what if platforms were evaluated on user wellbeing, relationship quality, or real-world connections facilitated? What if we measured social platforms like we measure hospitals?
Feel free to use those metrics if you want, but most people will continue to use the apps that provide them the most value.
Agree that blaming VCs for why TikTok has an algorithmic feed and hundreds of millions of users is simplistic. A non-algorithmic TikTok would have no users.
And without a personalized algorithms, the feed ranking would just be showing content from popular accounts, which is a worse experience.
So in my view, the solution has to abide by this law of the jungle, but also short circuit the psychological mechanisms that tech companies are using to harvest attention. Somehow, people will have to pay for their freedom, similar to how drug addicts can pay for rehabilitation once they see the damage the drug has done to their life. It’s still a business, but one that contributes to the greater good.
Most of the solutions in this article require some kind of government intervention, which I don't see happening any time soon. Eventually, maybe, but probably only after society has nearly (or completely) ripped itself apart due to social media, the negatives are laid bare, and people start pushing for change.
> We don’t all have ADHD. We have an addiction. Growing up, I barely knew a world without social media, and neither did my friends. We were the guinea pigs for Silicon Valley's great dopamine experiment, and now we’re waking up with the side effects.
Saying it's a "dopamine experiment" is just as bad an incorrect as calling your monitor "the cpu" or saying "I'm so adhd" to describe a common behavior.
Using the concept of addiction and completely unrelated neurochemistry in this context drags in all the terribly dangerous ideas of drug addiction. Drugs are entirely different things that truly do subvert incentive salience at the neurochemical level. While screens and speakers most certainly do not. And even if they did it's be "glutamergic experiment" not "dopamine". These ideas imply that in normal situations and stimuli humans do not have volition and so need state force to protect them from their own choices. This premise is far more damaging to society than screens and sounds could ever be.
> What might actually work
This section is idealistic. I guess the author was too damaged by his own experience to actually study the wave of twitter replacements. I would love to see an analysis of those. "Different Funding Methods" is clearly required but perhaps not sufficient.
Cheap hits to increase pleasure centers in the brain that overall have a detrimental cost to humanity with entire industries to deal with the health consequences.
This is the mining of wealth from health reducing the overall productivity of humanity for the sake of near term profits. Optimizing short term gains for long term progress.