Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don't want to

I'm so happy the economist is converting this important topic.

Now if only the dick heads running this complete rag could listen to the wonderful people who wrote that enlightened piece and let users unsubscribe: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rli0u9/how_t...

Sure, making instagram as addictive as possible seems bad but I disagree with the framing a bit. Dark patterns get users to do things they don't want, that's why they get super annoyed at the design or the process or the outcome. Addictive apps are a different thing to me.

I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! The question is can you make a compelling case that spending time on it is harmful.

IMO recommender algorithms and other dark patterns like infinite scroll should be turned off BY DEFAULT on these apps. That way those people who want a dose of brainrot still have the option to do so but most of them get a little help to turn away from screens (I never heard anybody say they want to spend more time on social media).

I've written more about this here: https://klemenvodopivec.substack.com/p/recommender-systems-n...

What's ironic is that originally one of the advantages of automation was that it was more impartial than human-delivered services. The inventor of the automated telephone exchange, Strowger, designed it because he was concerned that the local telephone operators we directing his calls to a competitor. We had several decades during which machines had only very limited decision-making ability, and so it was their ability to manipulate or discriminate was minimal. That's gone. It went years ago, but it's taken a while for the public's intuition to catch up. People are starting to get angry, but are still somewhat baffled. Industry believes that they can continue to get away with it since they've done it for 10-20 years, but I think this underestimates how strong the backlash can get.

> The burden of proof should fall on the platform, not the victim. The question is not whether a harmed user can show specific damage. The question is whether the company can show, before rolling a product out to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design.

That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features.

Could we have a regulatory agency that keeps an eye on dark patterns and deals with them as evidence emerges that something is harmful.

It takes five minutes to delete your TikTok, Meta, and Instagram accounts. Setting up forwarding rules from Gmail to Fastmail or another provider takes maybe a little longer, after three months hopefully all your emails are going to the new account after changing them. These companies can’t manipulate you if you don’t use their products.

Edit: I know what network effects are, I was talking about steps individual users can (and should IMO) take. We should be helping our friends, family and neighbors find safe and health alternatives like Signal for comms. Build different networks that are actually social and not doomscrolling.

nauseating to think that Amazon was only charged $2.5B when they made somewhere around $25-44B off the Iliad cancellation thing.

There are two separate issues: addictive technologies, and mandated technologies. Instagram and TikTok are examples of the first. Google Play Store and Microsoft 360 are examples of the second. The second is more of a concern than the first.

Google Chrome is trying hard to become a mandated technology, but hasn't quite succeeded yet.

While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed.

How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

> Dopamine neurons respond not to rewards received but to the uncertainty of whether a reward will arrive: the more unpredictable the outcome, the stronger the signal.

This leads me to think about the idea of procrastination as a mechanism of gambling by the sub-conscious. A subversive way of "raising the stakes on the game" in an attempt to "make things a little bit more interesting."

The author is a "Master of Laws" (lawyer) writing about technology and psychology. Read with some skepticism.

Isn't one of the core problems here a lack of "healthier" alternatives?

(Not only in terms of tech, but also in terms of ways of living popularized by celebrities, thought leaders, etc.)

> SOMEWHERE IN META’S servers sat a slide deck marked “Confidential”. Written in 2019, its conclusion was blunt: “Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to.”

Found this document:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-...

Headlines (quote):

Instagram is an inevitable and unavoidable component of teens lives. Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to.

Instagram has become the ID card of this generation. It is the go-to tool for both measuring and gathering social prestige.

Instagram sets the standards not only for how teens should look and act but also for how they should think and feel.

Teens feel themselves to be at the forefront of new social behaviours to which there is no consensus on how to behave or cope. They sorely lack empathetic voices to whom they can turn for support.

Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in a compulsive behaviour that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.

The pressure to ‘be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.

Anxiety around what to post and the potential cost involved in posting the wrong thing means teens are switching from proactive to passive engagement with the platform.

There are still supposedly serious people who should know better than insist "dark patterns" are not real and a mechanism to attack tech companies. I don't know how anyone these days can honestly reach that conclusion. Some of these sites use similar strategies as the old tobacco companies used to, all of this stuff is known already to marketers.

The Irony is that in order to read this entry I had to pass a cookie wall, which gave me only ‘Accept all’ and ‘Manage’. Then I couldn’t read it, because I had no subscription.

> An internal memo found that 12-year-olds were three times as likely as 32-year-olds to stay on Facebook for the long term, despite the platform nominally requiring users to be at least 13; the memo concluded that Facebook “should consider investing more heavily in bringing in larger volumes of tweens”.

Step by step I am slowly backing away from any technology that I dont like, sometimes going to ridiculous lengths to bypass certain imposed aysmmetric requirements, up to and including abandonment. Nothing in my house beeps. My only online subscription is for web space. At this point it has become fun, as I have stoped reacting, and am experimenting and planning ahead, while figureing out ways to increase my income, while reduceing my personal spend

This touches on many issues. It's kind of a confused narrative. Predatory practices against minors (in particular), sign up dark patterns, addictive behavior (eg infinite scroll). I don't think you should bundle all of these together like this.

For example, infinite scroll is a product of a news feed and a news feed is algorithmic. What this produces and what it reinforces in the user is one thing but not really related to some small grey text in an Amazon Prime sign up.

So let's break it down. Some of the issues are:

1. Intent to sign up.

2. Difficulty in cancelling a service. This is what I call the "gym model". Easy to sign up, hard to cancel. This can be handled. California, for example, requires companies to offer online cancellation. Most other states don't. This is so much an issue you'll regularly find advice from people to change their address to California so they get that option. There's no reason why every state or the federal government couldn't do that.

3. Selling of your data. Not really touched here but it's going to be a big issue going forward;

4. Addictive behavior to maximize time spent on platform; and

5. What should we allow or disallow for minors. This is going to be a big issue. We're only at the start of the Age Verification Era (like it or not). But IMHO no company should be talking about how to maximize time spent for 13 year olds. And no advertiser should be able to advertise to minors; and

6. Not really touched here but I'm going to add it anyway. IMHO we give tech companies a free pass for algorithms as some kind of mystical, neutral black box. But everything an "algorithm" does represents a decision humans made to get a certain behavior from what training data is used, what they're optimizing for (eg interactions or time spent) and what features they create.

Platforms now essentially get liability protection from publishing content even though they elevate or suppress content based on what it contains. IMHO this is no different than someone deciding what to publish and being liable for it.

Look it's either this or we adopt an economic strategy that isn't basically "assume the market magically knows what is best"—i.e., communism, as I understand Americans to know the term.

Do you want your fascist/authoritarian government to arrive via buxom CyberTruck or svelte fixie bike?

I assume this is about dark patterns but can’t confirm as I’m faced with a cookie wall where I can select from “Manage” and “Accept All”.

...but but but Innovation!

I'm no defender of engagement algorithms and social media (including upvote based algos and this site too)....but this is a ridiculous argument.

Social media is not making you behave in ways you don't want. On the contrary, it's giving you EXACTLY what you want. People want to doomscroll social media instead of engage reality, because the real world requires action, effort and social risk...doomscrolling is pure passive consumption.

If we're going to give people autonomy and freedom to choose how they spend their time, at some point we have to draw the line and hold people accountable for their own actions. Or we have to acknowledge we'd rather stay in a permanent state of adolescence and give full control of our lives to big brother.

This constant push by the urban monoculture to turn everything into an "addiction" and turn everyone into a "victim" is a terrible set of ideas to put in peoples heads and is equally as toxic as anything they claim smartphone apps are trivially doing with UI design.

Apps are not physically addictive like cigarettes or alcohol and never have been.

And if you're going to argue social media preys on reward systems in the brain, this is also true about everything that humans do. Reward systems in the brain govern every single action we take, so everything we do can turned into a victimization by some addictive outside force.

I'm so happy the economist is converting this important topic.

I've written more about this here: https://klemenvodopivec.substack.com/p/recommender-systems-n...

nauseating to think that Amazon was only charged $2.5B when they made somewhere around $25-44B off the Iliad cancellation thing.

Google Chrome is trying hard to become a mandated technology, but hasn't quite succeeded yet.

> Dopamine neurons respond not to rewards received but to the uncertainty of whether a reward will arrive: the more unpredictable the outcome, the stronger the signal.

The author is a "Master of Laws" (lawyer) writing about technology and psychology. Read with some skepticism.

Isn't one of the core problems here a lack of "healthier" alternatives?

(Not only in terms of tech, but also in terms of ways of living popularized by celebrities, thought leaders, etc.)

> SOMEWHERE IN META’S servers sat a slide deck marked “Confidential”. Written in 2019, its conclusion was blunt: “Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to.”

Found this document:

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/04/29/stop-big-...

Headlines (quote):

Instagram is an inevitable and unavoidable component of teens lives. Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to.

Instagram has become the ID card of this generation. It is the go-to tool for both measuring and gathering social prestige.

Instagram sets the standards not only for how teens should look and act but also for how they should think and feel.

Teens feel themselves to be at the forefront of new social behaviours to which there is no consensus on how to behave or cope. They sorely lack empathetic voices to whom they can turn for support.

Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in a compulsive behaviour that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.

Anxiety around what to post and the potential cost involved in posting the wrong thing means teens are switching from proactive to passive engagement with the platform.

So let's break it down. Some of the issues are:

1. Intent to sign up.

3. Selling of your data. Not really touched here but it's going to be a big issue going forward;

4. Addictive behavior to maximize time spent on platform; and

Look it's either this or we adopt an economic strategy that isn't basically "assume the market magically knows what is best"—i.e., communism, as I understand Americans to know the term.

This reminds me of the TikTok ban that lasted all of twelve seconds.

I’ve been using the internet for longer than I care to admit, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

It was like 300 million junkies all lost their drug supplier at the same time.

I absolutely did not want to go to these websites and did it anyway. I ended up blocking them in my hosts file to get me to stop.

> I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do!

I can't say I know anyone who defends extended social media usage. Do you?

What we've lost in social media just makes me so sad. I hate that reels/stories have become the "new" way of sharing things (over the past 10 years).

I took a trip to Yosemite last weekend and took the (rare) opportunity to post a reel. All of the comments and reactions are DMs. It feels so lonely and weird and isolating. Who asked for this?

I miss the days where you shared things, and people actually commented on them and interacted with each other as well as the poster. And where it wasn't ephemeral.

Do you think Instagram/Facebook is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or a sheep with fangs?

By that I mean- is the product addiction, with a shroud of media, or is it media which just happens to be addictive.

That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features.

Could we have a regulatory agency that keeps an eye on dark patterns and deals with them as evidence emerges that something is harmful.

> That's asking every company to prove a negative before rolling out new features.

That’s not as rediculous as it seems. That’s sort of model that drug manufacturers follow. It would also mean that if internally they see troubling behaviour they know they have to stop.

Practically, it would be corporate cover up. And applied earnestly it would make these businesses unviable.

While I agree with the premise, I do wonder how you can write a law that would stop the behavior we want to stop without hurting beneficial features or allowing the law to be too easily bypassed.

How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

> How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

I don't know how you'd write it in a law either, but if you're in a meeting at your tech company, and the product owner or tech lead uses language like "We need to get users to do..." and "We need to incentivize..." and "It should be easy to do X and hard to do Y..." then do whatever is in your power to steer/stop. You're not really building a product users want, you're pushing a behavior-modification scheme onto users.

> How do you describe in a legal way the difference between a useful feature people want and an addictive feature they don’t want?

For laws like this it always boils down to "I'll know it when I see it" which is such a shockingly poor way to write legislation that I'm flabbergasted it doesn't immediately fail any amount of rudimentary scrutiny. Not to mention the latitude it grants for selective enforcement. It's basically Washington asking (through the Economist) for a leash on platforms that host their critics that they can yank at any time the population gets too rowdy, with the convenient justification that the algorithm is too good and our attention spans are in danger or whatever.

You create an agency and give it a mandate that requires it to balance concerns.

One way is intent. If a company's internal communications show that they're intentionally making it addictive, or worse they know it causes harm, you have the smoking gun. This of course doesn't catch all the abuse, but at least it makes it much harder to do this down an entire reporting chain. They have to get really good at winking.

One famous case was Apple suing Samsung over patents. Hard to prove until internal comms surfaced showing intent to copy the iPhone.

Agree. My first thought is most people in early days didn’t even want to start using PCs for work to begin with. The businesses generally had to mandate it. I imagine many people are facing this today with AI.

Very simple - force companies into data interoperability. That will allow users to move to competition without any data loss. I.e. nobody actually cares that GitHub is constantly down because you can move your repos to a different git provider or to your own server.

dark patterns are pretty well documented and understood at this point. I don't think identifying them is all that hard.

Infinite scroll is one obvious one. As well as forcing algorithmic feeds of accounts we don't follow.

But are they actually serious people? I had corporate astroturf accounts arguing with me on my otherwise-ignored blog as early as 2004. All this time later, I just assume that every serious corporation employs PR firms using sock-puppet accounts to shill in favor of whatever dark shit they're doing, acting like it all just really great and good for us.

The Irony is that in order to read this entry I had to pass a cookie wall, which gave me only ‘Accept all’ and ‘Manage’. Then I couldn’t read it, because I had no subscription.

the author has no control over that

I assume this is about dark patterns but can’t confirm as I’m faced with a cookie wall where I can select from “Manage” and “Accept All”.

Same can be said about Claude, Codex, etc. These tools are amazing (technically speaking) but they don't play in our favor (most of us are regular, replaceable employees). Only the usual suspects benefit from AI (executive layer, investors, etc)

Still amazes me how engineers on HN are in awe of AI and LLMs knowing that 90% of us will be affected (we won't be able to bring money to the table) once the higher ups start to normalize even more the usage of AI to reduce headcount. Not everything is about the technical details people, grow up

It's frustrating to see this response so often, as if it weren't blindingly obvious.

After years of near monopoly status these companies have a lock on many people's social lives. To give up Instagram is akin to giving up text messaging. "Just stop using it" isn't helpful advice to those people.

If Instagram disappeared tomorrow it would be different, because everyone would be in the same position. But preaching personal responsibility in an area subject to network effects doesn't work.

It takes five minutes to just stop being depressed, it takes 5 minutes to just stop being addicted

What works for you, and me actually, doesn't work for most people, humans are complex things

You can and should do that, but it's not sufficient to individually avoid harm. You still have to live in a world where most people have their behavior manipulated, and that will impact you. Even from a purely selfish perspective you should support efforts to stop this sort of control broadly with legal action.

yeah but that's a way they want you to behave in order to set up a control group within the target group that continues to behave as expected. the questions to be answered are not which parts of that control group, and how, nudge which parts of the target group slightly off the predicted and/or confirmed results. they answered that way back when. the question is, how can we react to the unexpected results that we ourselves forced. they can't just go on doing the opposite of what's good for them and bad for the users or vice versa, they have 50 years of data on that, some of which, should be noted, was accidently burned or bombed with a bunch of incriminating evidence shortly before investigators arrived ... which should make even the last sus person understand, it wasn't on purpose

They're still distorting our political and social worlds, whether we're participants or not.

"just delete your account" assumes the exit was designed to work. this is the company that called its own prime cancellation flow "the iliad."