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Are You Being Influenced or Manipulated?🤔
There have been numerous incidents of children becoming addicted to the popular online game PUBG. Recently, I read a news that kids become violent and starts abusing their parents whenever they are not allowed to play PUBG.
This begs me to question, why do we build products? To solve a problem or to make the world a better place, right? To build a successful product, there’s no denying that you need to bring users back. But ethical lines get blurry when addiction becomes a substitute for retention.
To be honest, if you want to build a successful product, some form of manipulation is indeed important. In the name of building a successful product, if your end goal is to exploit human addiction, and build cigarettes of the 21st century such as PUBG, Fortnite, TikTok, then clearly there’s something very sinister about your intentions. It’s bad manipulation.
If your product makes lives better in the short term, it’s your moral and ethical duty to make sure that they don’t engage with the product more than necessary. Therefore an ethical approach would be to implement self-censoring within the system to prevent any kind of addiction.
The goal is not to build a big business, but a better one. Not growth at all costs, but growth at a healthy pace. For example, the mission should be to build healthy office communication, not Slack-based distraction.
#dontgetmanipulated #manipulation #manipulativeminds #englishstory #bealert #bevigilant #writcostory
© Ashish Oberoi
This begs me to question, why do we build products? To solve a problem or to make the world a better place, right? To build a successful product, there’s no denying that you need to bring users back. But ethical lines get blurry when addiction becomes a substitute for retention.
To be honest, if you want to build a successful product, some form of manipulation is indeed important. In the name of building a successful product, if your end goal is to exploit human addiction, and build cigarettes of the 21st century such as PUBG, Fortnite, TikTok, then clearly there’s something very sinister about your intentions. It’s bad manipulation.
If your product makes lives better in the short term, it’s your moral and ethical duty to make sure that they don’t engage with the product more than necessary. Therefore an ethical approach would be to implement self-censoring within the system to prevent any kind of addiction.
The goal is not to build a big business, but a better one. Not growth at all costs, but growth at a healthy pace. For example, the mission should be to build healthy office communication, not Slack-based distraction.
#dontgetmanipulated #manipulation #manipulativeminds #englishstory #bealert #bevigilant #writcostory
© Ashish Oberoi
