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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7jar4KgKxs

  • davidgro@lemmy.worldEnglish
    86·
    4 days ago

    Of course Lemmy and such inherit some of that design even without the money behind it - there’s certainly a little dopamine hit when I see that one of my comments has gotten a reply, or when I check and see that it’s been upvoted.

    Not having the incentive to enshittify is good though.

  • ileftreddit@piefed.socialEnglish
    37·
    4 days ago

    So he’s confirming they knew what they were doing all along, they did it anyway, and now he’s wondering about the impact on children? Fuck outta here bro. What an asshole. He’s also building a 60 foot wide mansion in the west village, mf bought 3 adjacent townhouses. Very easy to find his address.

  • fubarx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
      10·
      4 days ago

      Here is better. No one profits off us per eyeball hour (at least not on my instance)

      It’s all about incentives

      • Kyuuketsuki@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        4 days ago

        Any post you click through on (like the YouTube link in this one) ostensibly profits off us per eyeball hour, regardless of instance.

        Which is why I really appreciate people that mirror the content in their posts or comments (though I sometimes click through anyway to make sure the content isn’t editorialized).

        • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          Yeah, but here there’s no real algorithm. That’s a huge difference, even if you jump into their platform, you just have to jump back before they serve up the next thing

        • lemming741@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          4 days ago

          I come straight to the comments where an article is either copy-paste if it’s worth reading, or called out immediately if it’s click bait or raw propaganda.

  • thejml@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    4 days ago

    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?”