Dozens of U.S. states, including California, New York, Arizona and Indiana are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people’s mental health and contributing the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to the platforms.
Okay, I have no problem admitting I’m naïve on the subject. If I guessed wrong, though, what is addiction about? It’s hard for me to imagine getting addicted to something you aren’t likely to use and don’t like.
Sure, I can see people changing their mind about something once they’re already addicted, but that’s not the same thing.
You can decide to use something because you like it and have a positive value for you, and then end up abusing that same things because of addiction.
Facebook and other social media actively engineer their service to exploit our natural brain functioning in order to became addictive. On top of that, they also give well designed services which can be useful and fun to use. People decide to use those services because of that and ends up becoming addicted and using them for a lot more time. This has nothing to do with good design.
It’s like with smoking: people can find it a legitimate pleasure because of the taste, the social meanings and the gesture, but you ends up being addicted because of the nicotine, not because it’s a pleasure per-se.
Thank you! I was starting to wonder if I simply expressed myself poorly, but you explained what I was trying to ask about. Now I get it!
This is an oversimplification, but do you think drugs don’t feel fucking fantastic? Like, how would they hook you if there wasn’t something about them on the first dose? Facebook does it by dopamine hits and confirmation bias, but the pathways are not far off.
Did you mean to reply to me? You’re kind of asking what I’m asking. I wouldn’t imagine there’s a “first dose” if the website is shitty and annoying to use. Instead of dopamine, wouldn’t there be bad memories and unpleasant associations?
Sorry, had a long day and parsed your comment as the opposite of what you meant.