You don't know much about the advertising or food businesses, I take it.

Suggest Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. It'll open your eyes.

The problem isn't X domain of business is more scummy than Y. They all are. That's kind of the problem. Tech is just egregious though in it's non-reliance on physical matter, meaning anything that can be digitally rendered is instantly a world scale fucking problem.

If it were one building in one state doing this shit, no one would care, and we'd just block or tell people don't go in the building. That doesn't work with digital products that started benign, then had the addictive qualities turned up to 11. That's malice, at scale. If every ice cream parlor, or link in the ice cream supply chain started adulterating ice cream with drugs, regulators would have dropped the hammer at the site of adulteration. Meta et Al have had no such presence forced upon them due to lack of regulation in some jurisdictions, or being left to self implement the regulation, thereby largely neutering the effort.

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aprilthird2021 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> If it were one building in one state doing this shit, no one would care, and we'd just block or tell people don't go in the building.

Most retail environments do design their storefronts, logos, placement of products, even foods have higher than normal sugar, oil, and butter content, all in the service of keeping people coming back for more whether or not it is healthy for them.

How do we draw the line? Without regulations in place how is it fair to say companies are negligent in allowing people to become addicted to their products?

	▲	salawat 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>How do we draw the line? Without regulations in place how is it fair to say companies are negligent in allowing people to become addicted to their products? How about, "If it involves exploiting aspects of human psychology that have to be taught to be mitigated it's not allowed?". There. No more marketing. For anyone. As it should have been. My heart to the artists and creatives that'll have to find employment somehow els, because it's clear that we can't both allow for creative, artistic campaigns without big industry going and sinking a psych ward worth of researchers on making themselves indispensable. Also, I don't find questions of fairness to come into play on the topic of "getting people addicted". If you set out to do that, that's not something we should condone. Also, if you've ever cooked, you damn well know the "oil, butter, and sugar" is not what keeps people coming back to those foods. It's that they're cheap and low cognitive load to generally make. So no, I won't even entertain the question you're asking by putting food manufacturers on the same level as bloody social media. Every time I've seen A/B or marketing tests/focus groups done by the food industry, they at least have a proper psych experimentation setup. Bloody Meta made a regular habit of A/B testing without even getting consent from the parties involved. As far as other stores with marketing and all that jazz? To be quite honest, if you bother to get a psychology degree, and you are weaponizing it against the public, I really think that deserves a life reconsideration. So refer to my first paragraph. You will find no sympathy from me for usage of psychological manipulation tactics against the unawares.