Item — HN Reader

> To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature

> But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.

I'm not ignorant of human nature and tribalistic tendencies. The undercurrent of my comment is of an optimistic hope (or cope) that we can move past competitive individual validation programming. I'm aware that it's due to our nature, but also aware that it's exploited by dark patterns and extraction at scale through software.

1 comments

Thanks for replying. I agree that dark patterns and other psychological manipulation is a problem, I just don’t think it’s necessarily ego-centric in origin any more than gambling. These companies have found very efficient methods to extract attention and money from humans by exploiting their brain’s natural reward functions. I’m not sure what the answer is, because it’s obviously a problem (again just like gambling addiction), but I do support people’s rights to engage in things like gambling.

Since we don’t live in a perfect world, I suppose some regulation of the industry would be fair, just as we mitigate the harms of gambling somewhat through regulation. I just worry about regulation being used as a Trojan horse to stifle political organization and/or open communication about corruption, cronyism, and oppression.

It may be that the future is more small platforms where conflict is limited to in-group conflict rather than global platforms where all of humanity’s disagreements are surfaced and turned into fodder for monetization.

Gambling is a great example. When I say "ego" I really mean the reinforcement of the individual pattern through survival-resource games, power play, or external validation. I'm not using it in the classic psychological way, perse.

Regulation could work, but in my opinion the problem isn't devious mastermind product people attempting to entrap humanity -- it's self entrapment in a recursive way.

Regulators could add red tape and boundaries for what is or isn't kosher or legal, but in the end can prohibition fix systemic integration with addictive technological superagonist of our own creation?

I guess I just don’t see humanity awakening to transcendent egolessness any time in the near future (if ever). Based on my experience, the average person is fairly constrained by their biological reality. We often like to pretend that this isn’t the case, and pretending may work for a while, but eventually sufficient stress causes the illusion to unravel forcefully.

Regulation isn’t perfect; in the best case all it can do is limit the worst harms. It’s still a bad idea to engage in regulated gambling, as you are very likely to lose money. Almost everyone knows this, yet many people do it, and I can’t see that changing any time soon.