From Billionaire Sean Parker:
The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’
“And that means that we need to sort of give you a dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and more comments.”
It’s a social-validation feedback loop … This is exactly the kind of thing that hacker like myself would come up with, because it’s exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. the inventors, creators — me, Mark, Kevin Systrom of Instagram, all of these people — we understood this consciously. And we did it anyway
God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.
Honestly, this isn’t a surprise or really a big surprise. Gamification like this has been a thing since the 90’s or earlier. As soon as the web became ad revenue driven, sites figured how to drive clicks and keep people on them. More engagement == more page views == more revenue. Video games have done achievements for decades. AOL even did this in the 90’s. More “you got mail”, more AIM messages, more things available, more engagement, more likely you’re going to pay that hourly charge for access. It’s the same reason there’s clickbait everywhere and everyone has a newsletter the automatically sign you up for. Here Facebook does it… everyone’s slightly different, but all have the same premise. Gotta keep you hooked, give you that dopamine hit and make you keep coming back.
This goes back to the age old “if we could make the internet monetarily self sufficient without ads, how would that work?”