In my humble opinion: anyone optimizing for "engagement" is trying to make a product inherently addictive.

Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted - intentionally not just let them write that one message, but distract them into other stuff - would qualify.

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weatherlite an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Having a great product is not, but designing your product intentionally so people spend more time with it, than they wanted

So Netflix, Youtube, basically all ad based websites and social media should be hit with the same requirements no ? Even the news try to get engagement - it's usually not like they really care about honest and facts based reporting.

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lukan an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes please.

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weatherlite an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't think that's what most people want though. Most people are fine getting entertained and addicted. Even in China they allow them to watch 100 episodes of one minute micro dramas created by an A.I per day. People hate boredom more than they hate becoming a zombie.

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lukan an hour ago | parent [-]

I am pretty sure most people do not want to become zombies. But entertainment is not the same as intentionally creating addictive mechanisms, the lines are blurry though.

	▲	weatherlite 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> I am pretty sure most people do not want to become zombies Well yeah they hate to think about themselves that way, but that's the life they choose. Now - would they like that choice to be taken away from that or substinatially reduced? Would they like to live without Netflix, Meta, Youtube, porn, junk food etc etc - or have these products completely transformed ? Seems like they wouldn't.

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Mattified 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed.

https://zerodha.tech/blog/user-disengagement/

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mm263 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How would you prove this? What if the product was not intentionally designed to be engaging but ends up being more engaging than TikTok?

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lukan 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Check for the targets of the dev teams. What gets them promotion. Right now they openly optimize for 'engagement".

	▲	zos_kia an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed, why would we have lawyers and judges if it wasn't to adjudicate exactly this kind of delicate issues ? We're not in a procedural show where you can gotcha the judge with a logical backflip. "Oh but your honor if you find me guilty then you must also shut down YouTube", he said with a confident smirk. As if it was not trivial to establish intent in the case of meta, who were probably high fiving while sharing reports titled "Basic methods to make teenage addiction go up".