>(By the way, if significant portions of your userbase are capable of becoming addicted to your product, consider that it may not be fully ethical to produce it.)
Would this also apply to products like Uber? I use it all the time, and can't imagine life without it. Am I addicted to it? Is it an unethical company because people love to use it and it provides value to their lives?
I chose the word "addiction" pretty specifically - does it enrich the user's life? Uber does. (And you probably don't have a desire to use Uber for hours every day).
Social gaming (someone mentioned below) does, to a point, and then it's engineered to go way, way beyond that point.
It's complicated of course - and there's a spectrum - but I think a bad sign is if your architecture is intended to hack the reward systems of your customers.
"I use it all the time" - you might find it more economical to buy a car. I fail to see how anyone could be addicted to something as basic as transport. It's like saying you're addicted to using BART or MUNI.
I think you mean the micro-transaction social gaming industry.
If you re-read what you quoted (emphasis mine):
"By the way, if significant portions of your userbase are capable of becoming addicted to your product, consider that it may not be fully ethical to produce it."
There is a reason that long stretches of unemployment, accidents, and tragedies lead to divorce. It isn't because compassion is the default reaction to stress in most families.
Our experience with Wimdu: we found out about the site well before we found out who the Samwer brothers are and what they do (namely, rip off big sites). We accordingly signed up because hey, more exposure can't be a bad thing, right?
Wimdu failed to cross-check our presence when they gave their telemarketing list to what sounded like kids in dorm rooms robocalling us - day after day after day and sometimes three times per day - until they finally gave up (more likely) or finally got the message that we had already listed ourselves on their site. Whatever Airbnb did where they emailed people via Craigslist has absolutely nothing on the obnoxiousness of Wimdu, they're just lesser news.
I've considered this issue a lot. Having lost many friends and family members to cancers of various types, and counting cancer survivors among my friends and acquaintances, I am very keenly interested in curing cancer.
Right now, being so deeply invested in my own business, I would wish there were things I could do to simply fund cancer research. But nothing is simple, and there are a lot of problems with cancer research funding: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/research/28cancer.h...
The comment on that piece that most struck me was from the breast cancer survivor who eagerly participated in a research study, given that she knew which carcinogens she'd been exposed to in her lifetime, but found that she was asked useless questions using research money that could've been well-used elsewhere. #28 on this page: http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/0...
You will quickly find when you research cancer that acquiring a decade's worth of specialized knowledge isn't going to get you to your goal. It's much better to have a working knowledge of statistics and the ability to read medical papers, something you can do with far less than a MD or PhD.
This being the top comment, I'm assuming it got upvoted the most, but nobody chimed in verbal agreement.
I'm posting from a 2007 Compaq 8510p with Windows XP, and having the browser bog down as if I've been hacked has been the sharpest reminder of late I need to upgrade.
By far the biggest movement in porn since the internet is 'amateur'.
That's because the internet has stripped profits away. It's like reality shows being the trend in television because expensive productions don't have as much profit margin as they used to.
The only thing I'd add is that as we become more saturated in stimulation, it takes more extremes to get the dopamine hit. This goes for porn or anything else he mentions in his article.
It's simple, but there are a lot of people who do not understand this. They don't realize the taxes from the system that funded childhood educations and college tuitions to result in an employable, knowledgeable, creative mass of first-world dwellers should be paid back into through taxes on the profits of the companies in their sphere.
There is a singular lack of realization about the societies in which we live, possibly because it does feel like every man for himself most days. The societal web that makes us interdependent and upon which we rely without knowing it isn't as apparent.
Addendum: there's a lot of confusion about the differences between something being legal and something being moral/ethical in the responses to this post. Legal too often simply means exploiting loopholes.
Well, there goes the gaming industry.