This is my first post, but I am down the “social media is bad for you” - rabbit hole for quite some time. Reading Cal Newport’s stuff, Adam Alter’s book, listening to and reading Jaron Lanier, your own Tristan Harris, deleting most of my own social media and so on, I’m sure some if not most of you went down a similar path. I also started to talk a lot about this topic with friends and family, but it seems like they brush it off as a miniscule issue in a sense that noone can actually “make me do stuff” just by having a website or an app.
So what I did was I started to develop my own web app to make it as addictive as possible, as a sort of “eye-opener” if you will, to demonstrate that this was not only possible, I did it by implementing the exact same “features” that have been rolled out on major websites in the last decade or so.
In this blog entry you can read about the thought process behind the project (and also find the link to it). I would love if you used this to demonstrate to others how easily they can be manipulated and how timely they should think about restructuring their relationship with social media and the likes.
I hope this helps someone in getting the message across.
Hi, we can review this tool for addition into Humane Tech awesome list , a curated list of humane technologies where curation is done by community members.
Can you raise a pull request to HTC Humane Tech Awesome List repo at
I don’t know that more evidence that crack is addictive will necessarily deter people from using it. Although perhaps we can ultimately shame developers into stopping by showing everyone their tricks and tools to manipulate us for money?
I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t think the knowledge about addictive software design is quite as ubiquitous as for crack. I have heard the “I have total control”-argument over and over again, even when it is blatantly untrue, like my dad who has a hard time holding a conversation for 10 minutes without “showing me something” on his phone, yet sternly denies this is a problem.
Hello, so I have uploaded 5 videos. I had a really hard time keeping the content concise and to the point. If you guys could give me some feedback on which points to leave of and which ones to emphasize, I could revise these. Explicitly pinging @sidnya.
@saintPirelli Hi. An awesome effort like yours should be preserved for future generations in https://archive.org - can you also post the clips there under ‘community videos’ category?
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