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The Hook with sites like Reddit, HN, etc is that they ARE addictive. Actually addictive in the sense of gambling. In gambling addiction the gamblers aren't addicted to winning, they are addicted to losing, or "almost winning". Now if they never ever won the addiction wouldn't form. If they ALWAYS won the addiction also wouldn't form.

The old thing was email that people were addicted to checking because you MIGHT get an interesting email. It's the same way with training a dog. You don't always give them a treat for behavior. If you only randomly give them a treat they are more likely to perform the behavior because they don't want to miss the reward. If they know they will get the reward then they know the exact opportunity cost and can weigh that against performing the behavior.

That's how social media and more specifically sites like reddit and HN are addictive.

I think we all feel that we occasionally get some beneficial information from them. I know I do, and even this very post I feel has some benefit. But we also see it as time wasting because the majority of the time, that's what it is.

But we are compelled to continually check because of the fear of missing out on some piece of beneficial information. If we were always presented with good information then we could more easily delay checking the sites.




> In gambling addiction the gamblers aren't addicted to winning, they are addicted to losing, or "almost winning".

I disagree. I remember my DotA addiction, I wasn't addicted to losing or "almost winning", if anything I was addicted to "almost losing". Stomping the enemy wasn't fun, getting stomped wasn't fun, almost winning but losing in the end was VERY not fun, almost losing but winning in the end was a huge high, and that's why I'd play. To get that feeling again.


That's why I try not playing competitive video games anymore.

Matchmaking is set up so that you have a 50/50 win/loss rate. When you take into consideration all the outcomes you mentioned, maybe 1/20 games was fulfilling.

Not to mention the "can't quit on a loss, can't quit on a winning streak" mentality.


I also gave up on competitive games right about the time everything switched to matchmaking. For all its faults, the old way of just joining servers manually led to a lot of community servers where you could actually get to know the other regulars. When you know the people you're playing with winning and losing aren't nearly as important to your enjoyment. You end up going to the server not because you're chasing a high, but because you just kinda like hanging out with people. Regulars talk to each other about their life, movies they just saw, Harry Potter lore, whatever. It's like a virtual pub.


> Not to mention the "can't quit on a loss, can't quit on a winning streak" mentality.

Yeah, I've spent 12 straight hours (on a workday, no less) playing because of that. Fuck that game.


This is why I play things like factorio (or used to mindcraft) I think they hit a nice medium. Slightly addictive but very enjoyable, easy to pick back up, and easy to freeze and come back to later without "losing anything"


It's not about fun, it's about what kind of activities cause addiction.

You were addicted because when you played there was a chance of getting a high, but it wasn't certain. A certain high would not be as addictive, if at all.


No, it is about both. If you don't have anything you want to do then everything with any fun elements at all become "addictive". Removing those "addictive" activities from such a person wont help them at all, it just makes their life more boring and they will take it up as soon as you give it back since they have nothing else to do.

Some people have problems with addictive activities. But lots of people just do it since they lack alternatives. If you try to fix the second as if they were addicted then it will all feel frustrating and hopeless since you aren't addressing a real problem.


I don’t think your experience contradicts what the parent comment said. If you won literally every DotA match you played and were very sure you’d win future ones, my guess is you’d probably grow tired of the game pretty quickly. It was the real possibility of losing that made winning rewarding.


But I was very specifically playing to get another "almost loss", not another "almost win" like the parent is saying.


Maybe that’s the difference between games of skill and games of chance.


Could be, yeah, that's a good observation.


That's pretty much the story of One Punch Man


Ah, the best anime, yes.


So what you're saying is, you need to post great comments like this on every article so my addiction can be broken?

Man, why are you holding out me? You're ruining my life!


HN is addictive but I don't think it's deliberately designed to be that way. The posts and comments here really are interesting.

Modern games are designed from the ground up to form habits. Steady random chance rewards, timers, daily tasks... Basically Skinner's box simulators designed to impose a schedule on players via psychological conditioning. Then it's a simple matter to hook up the reward button to the player's credit card.


I think HN is very different from Reddit, in the sense that I don’t think is addictive at all (for me).

HN doesn’t have infinite scroll, doesn’t have infinite pages with different posts. And that’s what I think would make something addictive. You keep finding new content, without leaving the site, as long as you want, until you get some reward.

On HN I have to reload the page to see something new. And I would have to keep reloading the page for several minutes until I happen to see one new post in the front page.

I want to keep up with everything that gets to the front page all I have to do is come back every hour. With a good chance of keeping up with everything checking just every 6 hours or so.

There is no way to mindless get new content in front of you.

Even keeping up with new comments is hard.

HN is no where near Reddit and other social media sites in addictiveness.


Ehh, HN is just like any social media site in that the pleasure of using it is similar to that of IRL social interactions both good and bad. To be incredibly reductive, it's that you have a chance of having a really engaging conversation, or hearing some really awful takes (can you believe what he said earlier?!). HN isn't as bad as reddit for the reasons you stated, but it is addictive for the same core reason.


Yeah, from a UX perspective, HN is the same as Reddit, simply un-optimized.


That’s the point, it is un-optimized to the point where it’s addictiveness is an order of magnitude lower.

Optimization is what generates addictive behavior in social media. Optimize to feed you with infinite new posts with minimal fraction. HN simply doesn’t feed you with infinite posts in a day and adds friction to find new posts (UX focus on a front page with 30 posts and pagination).

Also, moderation plays a role. Social media addiction thrives in controversial topics while HN bans flame wars. The heated the discussion the heavier the moderation.

HN is not in the same league of Reddit, IG and others regarding addictiveness.


I disagree. The subreddit system breaks up content on that site into classifications. Yes, major subreddits have an unending stream of content just like the site as a whole does. But if one is interested in only niche subjects, the flow is rather low. HN, being unorganized with no sort of category or tag system, forces one to reckon with the stream in realtime.

There's often good nuggets that are buried under new, that don't make it to the front page. Sometimes one only serendipitously finds that content when being dumped into new after posting one's own submission. So if one really wants to search for content on HN, they'd be continuously refreshing new.

There are also plenty of heated discussions on HN. Just because they are using highfalutin pseudo-intellectual speak instead of common vulgarities doesn't mean there aren't as controversial topics here. And these days, HN is scarcely less politicized than Reddit, or any other place in the world online or offline is. Moderation can only go so far, and there are many threads that fall through the cracks.

The comment system of HN, without notifications, also invites one to continuously refresh threads. I personally use Dan Grossman's HN Replies service, but those who don't and wish to see replies on their content would have to no choice but to refresh their comment history.

HN can be just as bad as Reddit, but in different ways.


>all I have to do is come back every hour

You don't see coming back to HN every hour as a problem?


You missed the point. Try to keep up with everything on Reddit or Facebook or Instagram or Twitter if you follow enough people. You can’t. It is impossible. It is designed to be impossible in order to be addictive.

HN it is not only possible, as you can wait a whole hour without any relevant update in posts. In the other sites soft reload of the feed after 1 second will change the posts.

But answering your question, I don’t see coming back every hour as a problem. Precisely because it is enough interval time to not incentivize an addictive behavior so you don’t feel the need to come back every hour. It is much easier to ditch any addiction you might have on HN because you are forced to take a break since you know there won’t be any new thing to give you a reward. On Instagram you can consume it 24/7.

Imagine if slot machines had to make you wait 5 minutes between plays. They would be exponentially less addictive


Lucky you are so unaffected. I suspect however that HN is addictive for quite a few people here, even doing the behaviors as you describe.


I agree with that completely, I don't think it's designed to be addictive, neither was email. But the randomness of the reward can create that compulsion to check.


In the video game space they have intentional implementations of those: Loot boxes and the acronym FOMO (fear of missing out) in content that can only be obtained in a given game season (quarter.)


> If they know they will get the reward then they know the exact opportunity cost and can weigh that against performing the behavior.

So you need to to randomize the value of the treat. Otherwise the dog knows the upper bound of the opportunity and the same reasoning applies.


Yeah, same for punishment too, or like a shock collar / geofence. If the dog knows the shock is always coming they can weigh it. Obviously not just dogs too, it's how humans in some cases stay in an abusive relationship. Every encounter is a roll of the dice and that variability creates an addiction.


Classical "variable reward". Manifests in all areas of life.


I wonder if there's an evolutionary reason for that preference or if this is just an edge case in our rewards system that never mattered until it became heavily exploited by other humans in the modern world.


I think it is a learning mechanism. The real world is very deterministic, if a process has seemingly random outcomes then most likely there is something about it you don't understand, so you repeat it over and over trying to make connections to understand why the different outcomes happens.

You can see this a lot in gambling addicts trying to find different ways to beat the system etc, trying to predict which number will appear (even though it isn't possible) and so on. Our brains just aren't made to deal with lotteries since lotteries isn't a thing found in nature. Some things looks like lotteries, some nuts might be bad after you open them so was a waste of time, but then you open many nuts and think hard trying to predict which nuts will be bad, and then you no longer need to open the bad ones saving you lots of work. But the artificial nuts are just random, there is no system to solve, so people just get stuck.


Nice explanations there.


This should be a post


Thought experiment:

Imagine that a flaw is exposed in a cheap slot machine that slightly shifts the odds in the player's favor. Because of the low bet value in the slot machine, the rewards ends up being something like $10/hour.

Case A: The bug neutralizes the slot odds and adds a constant $0.005 usd that accumulates every pull. Times 30 pulls per minute times 60 pulls per hour = 9 bucks an hour.

Case B: The reward neutralizes the odds but adds a random $600 drop with 1/126,000 probability (ie, once a week).

The expected value of both games is the same, but I feel like people would get addicted to the second while the first would feel like a job.


Hunting and gathering. There may or may not be an animal when you Go out. Even if you track it, it still might get away.

Animals may have made it to the berries before you did, so you need to keep looking to find the next patch.


This. Hunting is like 99% boredom or encounters where you can't get in close enough to connect and 1% action.


> I think we all feel that we occasionally get some beneficial information from them. I know I do, and even this very post I feel has some benefit. But we also see it as time wasting because the majority of the time, that's what it is.

When a chess engine searches a billion of notes to find the best one, it wastes time, because the next move of the opponent will make the most of found nodes as unneeded. /s

If I read random articles and one of ten is interesting for me, it doesn't mean that I wasted my time reading nine others. (Though I do not read random articles, I read headlines first, I click may be on one of 20, and then I do not read every article through.)

Yeah, I know about addictive behavior in general and the gambling addiction in particular. But we shouldn't believe to an opinion that an addiction is inherently bad. It doesn't. If it was bad, it would be wiped out by an evolution. People just talk more about negative consequences of an addictive behavior, while positive consequences they tend to explain by a "dedication" or something like that. When some socially awkward nerd hiding from people in his basement did something great, no one is going to paint this story in a way that makes his awkwardness to be the reason of his achievement. People will appoint something else to a role of a cause, something that is considered "good", like his skills, brains, dedication, and so on. "Good" outcomes we like to explain by "good" reasons, while "bad" outcomes we like to explain by "bad" reasons.

Addictive behavior supports us when we search for something valuable in a vain. It doesn't mean that addictive behavior is an inherently good thing. (This last sentence doesn't need a justification, so I'll skip it, to not talk about completely obvious things)

So we have: addictive behavior is neither inherently good, nor inherently bad, it just is. But what the collective unconscious does next? It says "addictive behavior is fun, therefore it must be avoided". But it is bullshit. As addictive behavior is neither inherently good nor bad, so fun is neither inherently good nor bad.

The very idea that we must consciously drive ourselves through the life, to think rationally and do not allow self to relax is a bad idea. We have no mental capacity to predict our life good enough. We are doomed to make choices that turns bad in a hindsight. So when we allow our mind to wander a little, to do some activity that have no rational justification, we are preparing ourselves to unexpected turns. We cannot know what information or skills will come useful for us. We do not know how different learned things interacts in our mind (does learning chess makes me a better coder or vice versa?) Therefore a "rational" behavior rejecting fun just rejects the evolutionary tools we have to keep ourselves adapted to a changing environment. We are rejecting our intuition (with its evolutionary roots and deep neural nets to see patterns), that uses "fun" to say what it predicts would be better for us.

From other hand, just following fun is worse than rejecting it entirely. So a lot of people choose an easy way, they reject fun, because it is a guaranteed one step from the worst strategy. But I personally see it as a weakness: people are afraid of themselves, and doesn't dare to make the next step, because it may become a step back.

Or, if we stop listening for what people say, and look at what they do, we'll see that they are exploiting a great strategy. They are using an idea that addictive behavior is bad to restrict it, but nevertheless allow themselves some fun of reading HN and commenting. =)




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