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.
If a product makes money on engagement metrics (ads, eyeballs, time), they’ll do everything they can do to maximize for that.
The slot machine analogy is apt. There’s research out there on how much time to optimize the dopamine hit and how long to go before you dispense the hit.
The trick is, as a consumer, to set limits and step away. Considering we’re here, best of luck to us all.