Ask HN: Have you built something that users have become addicted to or overused? Have you (or your company) created a product, such as a toy or software, that led to unintended user consequences? How do you feel about its impact, and have you taken steps, like focus groups or educational initiatives, to address the issue? |
> By early February, the weight of everything – the scrutiny, the relentless criticism and accusations – felt crushing. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, didn’t want to go outdoors. His parents, he says, “worried about my well-being.” His tweets became darker and more cryptic. “I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ is a success of mine,” read one. “But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.” He realized there was one thing to do: Pull the game. After tweeting that he was taking it down, 10 million people downloaded it in 22 hours. Then he hit a button, and Flappy Bird disappeared. When I ask him why he did it, he answers with the same conviction that led him to create the game. “I’m master of my own fate,” he says. “Independent thinker.”
The dude was raking in $50,000/day. You don't just pull the plug on something doing that because of really mean and aggressive online comments, do you...?
> As news hit of how much money Nguyen was making, his face appeared in the Vietnamese papers and on TV, which was how his mom and dad first learned their son had made the game. The local paparazzi soon besieged his parents’ house, and he couldn’t go out unnoticed. While this might seem a small price to pay for such fame and fortune, for Nguyen the attention felt suffocating. “It is something I never want,” he tweeted. “Please give me peace.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/rs-gaming/the-flight-of...
Moreover, you can’t understate the psychological impact. For comparison, the success of Kony 2012 caused Jason Russel (its creator) to have a mental breakdown and run in the streets naked. And all Dong Nguyen did was post a few cryptic tweets, then decide that after he made far beyond enough money for anything he could have realistically dreamed of just a few weeks ago, he was ok with making less money from then on (he still made ad revenue from existing downloads) in exchange for less attention. It's actually impressive how well he kept his sanity during the ordeal.
Also, he probably got enough money to retire. If it did get $50k a day, he probably got more than a million before he pulled it. In 2014 Vietnam, that amount is probably more than most can make their whole life.
Heck, even in the US now, most people probably still can't make more than a milllion...
At that time I saw it as a nice, fun project.
too my knowledge I was one of the first in my market on corporate state who took on this topic. which later came to be called search engine optimization.
I was definitely one of the first who gave corporate lectures, workshop, whitepapers, books about it.
20 years later we screwed up the internet. well at least the part of the internet that shows up in Google.
> 20 years later we screwed up the internet. well at least the part of the internet that shows up in Google.
You're right... :(
> How do you feel about its impact
Even though it's not healthy, I let it happen to a point. I reach out by email about the health impacts. Some people say, "I plan to stop at the end of the month".
> have you taken steps, like focus groups or educational initiatives, to address the issue?
I set limits to how long they can be on the leaderboard, and I reach out personally to those who overdo it.
My next project is wonderful.dev [1], where I promise to never email any dev users (we don't even store your email) and have a focus on usability even if it means slower growth. This is in contrast to most apps these days trying to hook users with addictive patterns, always competing for your attention.
Not a very dramatic example, but it made me so proud that I decided then and there on the career path I'm still on today.
Both of those were an early wake-up call for me that the shit we were playing with where digital meets reality and human behaviour, was way more than just "entertainment".
The first geo-location mobile game I used to play (Xyber Mech) was from 2004; it was inspired by BotFighters from 2001, and Ingress was released in 2012 making a global craze, so I don't think you could be "one of the first ever" in 2014 ;) Pokemon Go, while certainly the most popular, was really late to the party.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RjDj [1] https://www.iphonelife.com/content/evolution-iphone-every-mo...
They really liked the dashboards so we were tasked to build some more visualizations for them, one of which was a google-maps visualization of all the antennas with active alarms/errors and the field technicians they had in the country who went to fix those antennas. They had all the GPS info in their database from the technicians company-issued phone, but couldn't see it.
The people in the operation center said the biggest problem they had was technicians pretending or taking a long time to go to the antennas. The technicians apparently often stopped for 1-2 hour breaks at coffee shops[2]. They wanted to be able to track them live so they could see if they were actually working.
After a few months that map visualization got so popular that the COO of the org came directly to us (we had no interaction with him beforehand). He tasked us to build some dashboards to be used exclusively by him. He claimed that the biggest issue he had was people from lower layers hiding information from him and we, being a 3rd party, were trustworthy to give the right info.
This was very early in my career and I was surprised by how much cloak and dagger all the layers of the org treated each other. That telco was a massive company, sometimes I wonder if they still use the dashboards we built.
We used to joke that we probably got a lot of people fired. In retrospect that was the whole goal to begin with, but we didn't realize before we delivered those projects.
[1]: They had an array of 3 by 2 1080p 42'' TVs (6 total) in which they would put our dashboards on. The TVs were arranged as a single external monitor on their operations center. Being a single web application we had a lot of performance problems trying to render one browser tab in a 6k display in 2014.
[2]: Another big issue was a technician would claim that the weather was bad and they couldn't climb the antenna for safety reasons. So we added weather information to that map visualization.
[0]: https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-01-tank-tactics-the-prototy...
[1]: https://www.engadget.com/2013-04-01-tank-tactics-the-prototy...
At a certain point we had a tournament. The prize was surprisingly rich, the club gave something quite rare and unique. So people really played! We would watch on those fancy Grafana charts I programmed how people would play night and day. I wrote an SQL query that would track the habits of the top 3 players specifically and we would comment on the few breaks in their gaming spree: "food", "power nap", "ahah, toilet break!". For an entire week. They slept an hour here and an hour there, otherwise they played. I sure hope the poor bastard who won really got their memorabilia.
The game stopped soon after that, the club decided to ditch it (for whatever reason, my employer said it was club politics but who knows). I was a bit surprised at myself that I didn't feel any really strong emotions about it.. I mean sure, the worst of it was when they were going for a real prize, but anyhow I never had a true "Oh no what have I done" moment, even before I learned the app would be cancelled. Not an emotional one anyway, rationally I do realize that entire mechanics and the tournament you could win by staking all your free time is not great to say the least.
I really have no idea how to solve this. With one of the bigger ones, I handed it off to someone still in the trenches recently. He’s closer to the work, so it makes sense that he can see when it’s broken and be empowered to fix it himself. At the same time, he learns some new skills and reaches out to me when he has questions.