Solving Tech Addiction Is an Underappreciated Market Opportunity

Having worked on a product for 3 years that attempts to target this market I can tell you the sad reality, is that nobody really cares. Sure, there are clickbait headlines and companies&#x2F;parents will feign interest, but when it comes to actually paying for a product or making any tangible change to usage habits, our numbers prove that nobody even tries.<p>For full disclosure our product turns the Internet off until they complete goals like studying, completing quizzes, commiting to GitHub, etc.<p>Our first launch was a DNS only solution which we assumed lacked usage because people had to change their DNS address to one we spun up for them. It lacked usage and we assumed it was because it was &quot;too technical&quot; for parents.<p>Next we create an iOS app that worked out of the box as a VPN without any setup. We don&#x27;t even ask the users to register in any way or pay anything.<p>Lastly we created a Chrome extension because it&#x27;s the easiest way for tons of kids with Chromebooks to use.<p>Long story short, after multiple re-launches and trying to get feedback the overall result is that it&#x27;s an almost impossible task to get parents or kids to change their habits, even if they &quot;want&quot; to. They will make up excuses and quit nearly instantly.

How many businesses can I remember around addictions? What s the most famous anti-TV addiction company? Anti-cigarettes? Anti-sex addiction? If it&#x27;s none, then the opportunity is not underappreciated.<p>Making an anti-addiction product is by its nature the opposite of a sellable product. And the people who have the frontal lobe to willingly go against their addiction, have already solved their problem.

In my own experience struggling with addiction I&#x27;ve found that it is a symptom rather than a cause. Once you craft a life that is actually stimulating the tech loses its hold over you pretty quickly, if not instantly (for example when you go on a weekend outing in nature and completely forget your phone). Of course, the time and energy wasted due to the dysfunctional behavior presents a chicken-and-egg roadblock against making this happen.<p>I recall the studies showing the difference between Vietnam veterans who got hooked on dope and those who didn&#x27;t, as well as Bruce K. Alexander&#x27;s Rat Park experiments.<p>The other thing I&#x27;ve learned is that control or blocking tools can be self-defeating, since they transform fighting the addiction into a perpetually unfinished task (&quot;It&#x27;s been Y time since I did X&quot;) that naturally remains to the forefront of your brain and leaves you vulnerable if you end up in an environment without those restrictions. It&#x27;s ultimately easier to address the underlying causes of trying to escape through technology.

From Why Haven&#x27;t We Met Any Aliens <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;seedmagazine.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;why_we_havent_met_any_aliens&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;seedmagazine.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;why_we_havent_met_an...</a><p>&quot;I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.&quot;

The idea that you can “fix” or “solve” software addiction with more software is silly to me.<p>First, This requires users to setup this software. Then, there is nothing stopping them from working around or disabling it at anytime. If the software can’t be disabled then the user will switch to another product.<p>If someone is really trying to curtail their software addiction, actual dedication will be required, not just the activation of some tool that they can easily disable with a few taps.<p>And because these tools will likely not work for the majority of people, Apple and Google have every incentive to incorporate them into their operating systems and gobble up the market share (which they are already doing in their latest operating systems).<p>A more traditional and therapeutic approach to the problem makes more sense to me, though it won’t scale well and the market doesn’t seem very big

We used to have far more focus rooms - they were called offices.<p>Tech is a convenient scapegoat for environments unconducive to focus and lack of interest in the task. It can also help with emotional state management which is useful over just banging your head against the wall. One use I find for HN is that it is usually pretty good at getting me in a rational and focused state of mind - it is similar to the benefit of a dedicated office vs your home PC. Productivity research in general suffers from a beancounting mentality in treating everything like it is turning an oar.

This problem cannot be solved by &quot;market&quot;<p>1. Get a kitchen timer, use pomodoro technique.<p>2. Realize that overcoming something is a not a viable longterm solution. If you overcome something once you have to keep overcoming it. Better option is to spend your energy figuring out how to achieve your goal by not overcoming, eg: to replace netflix, develop a passion for cooking, replace netflix with cooking.

The idea of productizing tech addiction recovery funded by the VCs which fund tech addiction enabling products seems slightly disingenuous.

I think thesis is absolutely ridiculous: &quot;we need a group of new businesses to rise up and make money off of solving tech addiction&quot;<p>There&#x27;s not a lot of money to be made in stopping people from self-abstaining from pleasure. If someone wants to quit drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes, then they can do so without having to pay for much (assuming they&#x27;re not vulnerable to D.T. health wise). And while there&#x27;s marginal amounts of money to be made off of nicotine patches or AA literature, these products pale in comparison to the amount of money generated by the alcohol and tobacco industries.

Is the problem to be solved actually &quot;tech addiction&quot; or is it really &quot;feeling like time was spent in a way that was unsatisfying or even self-destructive?&quot; In other words, the market opportunity isn&#x27;t really &quot;tech that curbs tech usage,&quot; it&#x27;s more &quot;helping me to feel like doing something restorative, meaningful, or rewarding, whether it&#x27;s tech-based or not.&quot; Addiction itself rarely is treated simply by removing the substance: there&#x27;s psychological reasons why a person is attracted to checking out versus being present or mindful. Treating the cause is quite a different proposition.

smartphones are in their smoking is cool so do it everywhere phase. the novelty will wear off. i enjoy patiently waiting in silence. if i am travelling on public transport, or sitting in waiting room, or standing in a long queue, i find my personal quiet contrasted by the various background noises relaxing and beneficial. i can remain aware of my surrounding&#x2F;map, people and objects, clocks and time, scenery. i can play memorization, prediction or pattern games, revisit some old problem or simply turn my brain off and let the time pass without incident.<p>am i a silence addict? if i enjoyed striking up conversations with strangers everywhere i went and talked their ear off in a friendly manner, would i be a social addict? some people enjoy looking at text and images on a screen during downtime in their day, it&#x27;s a habit. a potentially useful one that helps connect to a world outside of immediate physical space, should _we_ disincentivize public escapism? what about reading or drawing in public then? perhaps it&#x27;s dangerous if people look at each other too much. and why don&#x27;t _we_ standardize clothing so that everyone feels more equal. and do _we_ really need so many words, how about _we_ reduce it down to a few hundred useful ones and just stop teaching the others. who is we, we is us, and us is we.<p>if you give people freedom to do a lot of different things, they may not make good individual choices which can lead to bad collective actions. if they were individual choices they will be individually self-corrected. do you value freedom or outcomes? because you&#x27;re going to need a big hammer to get all your outcome nails nice and flat. alternatively you need to build your civilization on a different moral foundation, something like social harmony or public good. you might find a strong central government, no immigration, with an insulated and culturo-ethnically homogeneous population with a tendency towards being socially and fiscally conservative, family oriented and not prone to large unfunded liabilities in domestic ponzi schemes and international military escapades; as pre-requisites to your social engineering utopian fantasies. america is about fuck you and fuck you too.

&quot;While Apple, Google, and Facebook are beginning to offer tools to better understand how much we use their devices and services, those companies can’t viably fix technology addiction because their businesses prevent them from doing so.&quot;<p>Apple&#x27;s business doesn&#x27;t. I think Screen Time and App Limits will likely become two of Apple&#x27;s main competitive advantages going forward because of it -- there&#x27;s no way Google or Facebook could offer such a product for their services in any meaningful way without destroying their core business.

It&#x27;s what Paul Graham was saying back in 2010... <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;addiction.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;addiction.html</a>

I’m glad to see this getting ridiculed on this forum. I would be happy to see more critique of the attitude that the problems created by irresponsible technology can be solved with more technology.<p>The driver of the “phone addiction” problem is obviously direct economics. Companies are organized around profit, and more phone time means more profit (especially in ad-driven models like Facebook).<p>So how about addressing the problems by looking at root causes?

I wouldn&#x27;t say I am &quot;addicted&quot; to tech more than most people my age (26) but I was using my phone a lot more than I liked so I have taken some steps lately. The early results are encouraging that you can in fact use software to control yourself (no particular order).<p>Here are some things I did and the results.<p>1. Hacker News &quot;noprocrast&quot; setting. This is something underrated in HN, but I have set it so I can only visit every 6 hours and that my session can only be 20m long. That basically means one visit per day. I find myself not going on as much because I am &quot;saving&quot; my one visit for later.<p>2. Android &quot;Digital Wellbeing&quot; timers. I set a timer on my phone to limit me to 1hr of Google Chrome per day. This is my #1 most-used app. The first few days I was always hitting my limit. After a week or two my brain subconsciously started knowing about the limit and now my natural usage is &lt; 1hr.<p>3. Work Profile + Do Not Disturb + Grayscale. At night my phone goes full grayscale and turns off all non-urgent notifications. My work profile also turns off. The combination of these three things makes me much less likely to engage after 9pm and get ready to wind down for bed.<p>4. I made an app (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.habosa.notificationbox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.habosa.not...</a>) that helps me take control of notifications. Instead of blocking them, the app puts them in an inbox-like format. I can check them all at the end of the day without missing them entirely or letting them bother me at work. I do this for apps like NYTimes that surface interesting things but that I don&#x27;t need to know about urgently.<p>Overall I am seeing a lot of progress! I find myself more able to, for instance, wait for the bus without playing on my phone. Hopefully over time I&#x27;ll get better and better.

It seems inevitable to me that as ML-based algorithms get better at exploiting the quirks in our monkey brains and keeping us on platforms for longer and longer periods, somebody will need to develop a counter-algorithm that lives in a browser extension or (somehow) on your device and is able to recognize unhealthy engagement patterns and make you aware of them.<p>Actually implementing such a thing in a way that&#x27;s performant and trustworthy and marketing it to people who maybe aren&#x27;t consciously aware of how easily the brain can be manipulated involves a number of tough challenges, but it seems like it&#x27;ll have to happen eventually.

Would anyone care about an OS (probably Android) that specifically limited the ability to use the time-suck apps (like snap&#x2F;gram&#x2F;tube), but still left the ability to use other things (like music&#x2F;maps&#x2F;camera&#x2F;texting&#x2F;etc)?<p>I tried disconnecting a while back, but felt like those were the things i was lacking because I was using a flip phone and was really frustrating. I have actually been considering picking back up this idea to focus on modifying to allow for curated list of allowable apps.

A lot of people here are skeptical, saying basically &quot;if people don&#x27;t want to be addicted to technology they should just stop using it&quot;, but I think that&#x27;s simplistic.<p>You could say the same thing about eating, &quot;if you&#x27;re not happy with your weight then just stop eating so much&quot; The fact that&#x27;s technically true doesn&#x27;t mean there&#x27;s no market for diet books or people should have to do it all on their own. Weight watchers, for example, has a 4B market cap.

They&#x27;ve already solved it in China <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techly.com.au&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;30&#x2F;china-military-style-boot-camps-internet-addiction-rehabilitation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techly.com.au&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;30&#x2F;china-military-style-bo...</a> Pictures are priceless! Too bad, it won&#x27;t fly with the entitled brats that we have here!

What do you guys think about a bar&#x2F;club that&#x27;s inside a big Faraday cage?

1) How can a business model be created whose incentives align with their customers in the addiction-treatment market? Curing addicts permanently means losing customers. Ineffective treatment could mean repeat customers and therefore more business. How do existing rehab centers handle this conflict of interests?<p>2) Personal Anecdote. There&#x27;s no way I can stop using the internet right now and keep my livelihood, but I&#x27;ve had some success over the last week cutting my reddit usage down to 0 non-productive minutes.<p>Every time I navigate to reddit, unless it is very explicitly work-related, I close the tab immediately and log the incident in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet records date, time, duration, how I got there, and (most importantly) what I&#x27;m going to work on instead.<p>This is my second time quitting reddit. The first time was cold-turkey with no process, lasted over a year before I got sucked back in via the subreddits. This method gives me more a feeling of control and forces me to be mindful of my usage.<p>Wish me luck.

The market opportunity is in finding these people, and exploiting their problems. F2P games seem to have it covered though.

More broadly, I think we need an analogy to the &quot;Primary Care Physician&quot; for mental health (would include addiction treatment here). I&#x27;m in SF, and 1) having a hard time finding therapists that my insurance covers and 2) when I do find one many are completely booked and not accepting new patients.

Thanks for posting this. I&#x27;ve believed for a long time that tech addiction is a solvable problem and technology itself can be part of that solution. I have lots of ideas about how this would work, if only I could break my own addiction to technology and start implementing them.

&gt; An application could provide a user frequent alerts to get back to work or put the phone down if they’ve been using it for 10 minutes or more. Taking the idea further, there could be some financial or other incentive (maybe the user escrows some money toward buying something they want) if they hit their goal.<p>I recall an application made for college students that rewarded them for not using their phone during their lectures. I believe it it called Pocket Points [0].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;pocket-points-college-rewards&#x2F;id908136685?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;pocket-points-college-reward...</a>

You&#x27;ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.

I built an app to help people take a digital detox ~ 3 years ago (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bostonglobe.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;12&#x2F;need-unplug-there-app-for-that&#x2F;goAD2TP3rjiQNTWA8qg3YP&#x2F;story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bostonglobe.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;12&#x2F;need-unplug-...</a>)<p>The biggest issue we ran into was that we didn&#x27;t have API access to build something effective (at least from limiting smartphone access). We had to hack something together and it didn&#x27;t work out long-term.<p>If the tech giants cared enough about this, they would create APIs and empower devs to build stuff to help.

&gt; Dieting may be the most helpful analogy here. In the US, many of us have poor diets either on occasion or frequently. Few of us have the discipline to eat well for long periods of time to optimize our health. When we gain too much weight, we pay for a personal trainer or a diet program or a book or an app to get us back on track.<p>I agree that food could a useful analogy, but I thought the consensus was that diets don&#x27;t (in general) work. Paying for a personal trainer isn&#x27;t scalable, and I don&#x27;t see creating a job as a Personal Anti-Technologist as a salable solution.

&gt; “Dieting may be the most helpful analogy here.”<p>Considering the massive flimflam industry around dieting, deceptive food company practices to make unhealthy food seem healthy, and the proliferation of ‘food deserts’ or parts of the country where finding healthy food at the grocery store (let alone a restaurant) is a challenge, dieting seems like the worst possible analogy.<p>Unless it is an analogy for how to create an industry to profit off of human weakness and struggle without actually solving the root issue. Then it is an excellent analogy.

Unfortunately, we&#x27;re in a system with asymmetric incentives for product development. Products that addict us get more of our time and attention, and therefore higher DAU, VC funding and ad dollars. Products that help us fight addiction are in a negative feedback loop. The better they work, the less we need them or pay attention to them. The gains that users realize from addiction-fighting apps are external, often in the analog world, and by definition harder to monetize and monitor, because they have left the platform.

I leave my phone in airplane mode most of the day and only use 4g in emergencies. I have e-books and podcasts downloaded, but the interactive stuff like forums I only do when I have wi-fi. This means when I&#x27;m out and about I&#x27;m off wifi and only listening to podcasts or reading ebooks at least. If someone wants to call me when I&#x27;m out of the office, they can schedule a call. Picking up the phone is annoying because I get a couple of spam calls a day.

It&#x27;s hard to deal with addiction when the opposition has <i>armies</i> of psychologists working together to make the experiences you have online as addictive as possible.

For solutions in this realm you could go to the non-profit Center for Humane Technology [0] (formerly Time Well Spent) and join their community [1] (I did). The organisation led by Tristan Harris (ex Google) is influential on high levels of government and corporations.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;humanetech.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;humanetech.com</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.humanetech.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.humanetech.com</a>

<i>&gt; The real answer to solving technology addiction is the answer to sustainably solving most problems: innovation spurred by capitalism. A new group of businesses needs to emerge that gives us the choice to help ourselves and rediscover the benefits of disconnection.</i><p><i>&gt; Dieting may be the most helpful analogy here. In the US, many of us have poor diets either on occasion or frequently. Few of us have the discipline to eat well for long periods of time to optimize our health. When we gain too much weight, we pay for a personal trainer or a diet program or a book or an app to get us back on track.</i><p>Is this article real, or a brilliantly crafted satire of Silicon Valley VC culture?<p>The weight loss industry is worth $66 billion and obesity in the US has never been worse than it is today. Arguing that we should let unfettered capitalism solve tech addition like it&#x27;s solved obesity is... I don&#x27;t even know how to finish that sentence it&#x27;s such an inane fly-in-the-face-of-reality statement.<p><i>&gt; People that use those solutions to effectively curb negative habits will end up happier and more prosperous than others, just like it’s always been. How’s that for incentive?</i><p>Completely insufficient is how it is. If long-term incentives were enough to prevent people from making poor short-term decisions, we wouldn&#x27;t have addiction or obesity in the first place.<p>The tool that has been effective at getting a large number of people to make choices that favor long-term outcomes over short-term ones is <i>culture</i>. By attaching a heavy negative moral weight to a poor short-term choice, we leverage the emotional wiring people already have so that they are able to push against their urge and do what&#x27;s best for their long-term health and for society as a whole.<p>Cigarette use has cut in half over the past fifty years. That didn&#x27;t happen because tobacco startups invented innovative technology, and it didn&#x27;t happen because we outlawed them. It happened because we shifted the culture. Instead of cigarettes being cool, sophisticated, and intellectual, they are gross, selfish, and dirty.

The fact that they called this &quot;tech addiction&quot; rather than &quot;smartphone (app) addiction&quot; was rather disappointing, given the latter was the entire focus of the article.<p>I clicked the link wondering how they were going to differentiate addiction from reliance; as in, if we were all EMP&#x27;d tomorrow and set back to agrarian days, a lot of people will die, and not just from starvation.

Ironic reading this during an undeserved HN binge...

I feel like the article missed something: the tech companies often design their apps to be addictive. It&#x27;s part of their product.

I dunno about &quot;market opportunity&quot;, but I think very strongly about what Cal Newport said... that we have to train ourselves to be comfortable with boredom.<p>The device is very attractive at boring moments, like standing in line at a grocery store, or waiting for someone. Which causes a habit, when then interrupts you when you&#x27;re actually doing something useful.

What solved my tech addiction was losing my phone and buying a $50 phone at Best Buy to replace it until I could get a new iPhone. Using it was so aggravating that I started using my phone rarely. So I kept it. And hardly use the piece of shit at all.

Thoughtmaybe has a 2013 documentary called Web Junkie that shows how the Chinese handle it for their teenagers:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thoughtmaybe.com&#x2F;web-junkie&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thoughtmaybe.com&#x2F;web-junkie&#x2F;</a>

&quot;The real answer to solving technology addiction is the answer to sustainably solving most problems: innovation spurred by capitalism.&quot;<p>I find that when capitalism spurs innovations, those innovations work toward the sustenance of capitalism as a system, which I take some issue with. If some plucky startup solves tech addiction, it will be in a way that makes you a more effective worker or consumer.

It could be as simple as not owning any devices with shiny colored screens, which are addictive to the eyes, and instead owning only grayscale e-ink screens. I wish laptops and phones like that were easier to get.

How come the article that has &quot;market opportunity&quot; in the title doesn&#x27;t use the term &quot;marketing&quot; even once? Shouldn&#x27;t that be the central theme of this - how do you sell this to people?

App application helps you to stay focus <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forestapp.cc&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forestapp.cc&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a><p>P.S Not advertisement

The cynical part of me thinks that they’re only doing this to make themselves look better in the face of reducing the quality of life of their customers.

Meditation apps aren&#x27;t doing the job apparently.

example of underappreciation: chrome no longer respects &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts so I can&#x27;t block my addictions the simple way

I am going to create a Digital detox Startup and I am going to call it Camping. Hahahaha....<p>I promise no phone signal for 30 days.

As with all addictions, peddling the drug is going to be far more lucrative than peddling the cure.

years ago i wanted to create a restricted version of android for this purpose. so i downloaded the AOSP source. it turns out it is not so easy though and quite intimidating for your average coder. but maybe some sv wizards will create such a &#x27;restricted device&#x27;.

very famous investor once said, unless your startup has one of &quot;Seven deadly sins&quot;; its hard to be sticky (or successful). So if one is planning around tech addiction, make it about, pride &amp; envy not about how its good for your life overall....

Gaps in the market are unfortunately not the same as gaps in the psychology landscape.

I disagree. Here&#x27;s why:<p>This is a problem I&#x27;ve been toying with for more than six years, ever since I realized that tech&#x27;s purpose is to gain control of as much attention span across the planet as possible. It can&#x27;t help it.<p>Since I teach how to organize project&#x2F;product&#x2F;org information, I played a little mental game: what is the minimum amount of tech I would need and still stay connected to the rest of the planet?<p>My answer? A piece of hardware that displays plaintext, in e-ink format (to prevent the necessary communications around &quot;upgrade your device now!&quot;). Plain lists of stuff I consume that I can manipulate with my fingers (to prevent keyboards, audio sensors, kinnect, etc from getting their foot in the door). No visible O&#x2F;S or apps. (No updates, patches, app-store chicanery etc.). Important: no way to install anything or to consume any other content besides what&#x27;s on the app. No links, no follow-ups. Just what I have predetermined I want to see.<p>UI? A plain, unadorned list and for each list item some more plaintext.<p>But what about conversations? Saving stories? Doing research? Well, most of that is social-media addictive nonsense (you really don&#x27;t need to Tweet &quot;OMG!&quot;, but some it is required. For that we have buttons and a microphone. The microphone (and WiFi) have real, wired switches to turn them off and on that can&#x27;t be disabled by software. (More telemetry problems here).<p>Four buttons. That&#x27;s it. The device should try to sort your list and associated text, so you need a way of saying &quot;I like this kind of thing&quot; and &quot;I don&#x27;t like this kind of thing&quot; so it can learn. You need a way of saving something for later to download, research, study, reply, and so on.<p>The fourth button was controversial. I felt there were times when an immediate response was needed. So you push the button and speak. No writing. No speech-to-text. You say in your own words what you want. (Lots of problems here about nuance in text and non-verbal communication) Somehow that gets to the other person. Never worked that out.<p>At this point you have enough features that I&#x27;d argue you could support 80%+ of the activity people use the net for. Would you still need to research stuff? Sure. Play games? Sure. Converse in realtime about things you&#x27;re interested in? Sure. But those are different <i>physical units</i>. You need to make both a mental decision and a physical effort to do those things. It should be apparent visually to yourself and others that these are the types of activities you are now engaged in. There can be no confusion, either internally or to an outside observer.<p>Tech is supposed to be about helping others. Instead it&#x27;s become about making more tech. This was a fun exercise. Made me realize how far we are, and continue to go, from what we really need.<p>It may be an unappreciated market, but a lot of other folks have tried and failed. I got zero interest in this, aside from people who also had a problem with tech addiction. I believe the problem for most is: where&#x27;s the payout? To be done correctly, this may work best as a philanthropic effort, not a startup. This isn&#x27;t an under-appreciated market. This is the place with the greatest current gap between human suffering and people willing to help end it.<p>( This is when I started writing about the problem: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6349447" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6349447</a> I even made a crappy demo video as part of my first &quot;real&quot; F# project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;14460868" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;14460868</a> )

It is at least funny how therapy is not even mentioned in the article...

&quot;Solving Heroin Addiction is an Underappreciated Market Opportunity.&quot;<p>Even for the hyper-capitalists of HN this is beyond the pale

It&#x27;s an opportunity— not sure it&#x27;s a market opportunity.

&gt; The real answer to solving technology addiction is the answer to sustainably solving most problems: innovation spurred by capitalism.<p>On the contrary -- innovation spurred by capitalism is what sublimated the addictive aspects of human nature into a profit-making mechanism for the tech giants.

We need more tech to solve tech

&gt; On Instagram, we’re bombarded with beautiful people living perfect lives. On Twitter, we’re bombarded with short, angry arguments about politics among other things. On YouTube, we’re bombarded with endlessly interesting videos that keep playing until we stop them.<p>On Instagram you can pilfer videos by sending them to Telegram and downloading the MP4 straight to your device. On YouTube you can pilfer videos by downloading them with NewPipe. On Twitter you can collect the best GIFs from @archillect by forwarding them once again to Telegram.<p>Once you&#x27;re outside the grips of the ad industry you can once again enjoy this tech without feeling bad you haven&#x27;t hit your 5000 friend limit on Fakebook.