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Comment by montrose | Hacker News Reader

I would not be surprised if Twitter is one day regarded as a poster child for the dangers of blindly optimizing for engagement. I'm sure all their features do increase engagement, at least in the short term. They wouldn't release them otherwise. But it is a sort of engagement that burns out users and ultimately sends them away.

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Seems like most social media is going that way now. Facebook in particular. I thought Snapchat would be a break from this since the content is temporary, but I've read news articles from my home country about kids having to get "Snapchat-sitters" to maintain their streaks while they are offline for more than a day. So they post random images to each other to keep their streak number increasing, which is total nonsense with regards to both engagement and content.

Yes, I have seen this Snapchat streak phenomenon with my little brother and his friends. They constantly send completely random pictures to each other, i.e. they open the camera app, take a picture of the ground, of the seat in front of them in the car, etc. and then immediately send it to a number of their Snapchat friends. When I had Snapchat installed for a short while he started sending me those pictures too, which in the end led to me blocking him. From what my brother said there is a lot of competition around who can keep their numbers the highest. Quite a strange thing to watch as an outsider.

> Quite a strange thing to watch as an outsider.

And working just as the cognitive scientists designed.

Indeed. At times it is scary what level of trickery and manipulation is used to drive addiction (or engagement as some like to call it) in social media. Especially when you consider that these methods are also indiscriminately used on young kids, as soon as they get their first smartphone and start installing apps like Snapchat (which can be pretty early nowadays).

Twitter and Facebook!

Yeah, I was steadily using FB more and more until a few month ago I just suddenly stopped opening it at all. And I feel way calmer now, without all the political spam 24/7.

If you follow media criticism much, that's pretty much precisely (one of) the argument(s) being put against Twitter (and Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and other forums) here and now.

Tim Wu, danah boyd, Clay Shirky, Robert McChesney, Jonathan Albright, Tristan Harris, and others are among those critics. Several have direct experience with TwitFaceGoogTube et al.

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