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Comment by warp_factor | Hacker News Reader

The utility_function of facebook (what it maximizes for) is for your attention grab. This in itself makes the product bad. They will hack the endorphin in your brain in order to keep you hooked.

the utility_function of email is utilitarian. No email server wants to keep their user hooked on their emails.

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How are you measuring this utility function? What is the evidence that facebooks objective is to hack endorphins?

All the conversations I’ve heard discuss how to make products better for users. Even if it hurts standard metrics.

For example, the goal of the feed team hasn’t been to increase engagement for a couple of years now. The metric of choice is meaningful interactions.

The outsiders perspective of FB seems to be a couple of years out of date, compared to what I’ve seen.

I mean, those notifications everyone gets that have no actual pertinent info/are super blatant engagement hacks have been widely discusssed/experienced, and there's no strong argument that those make products better for users (and it's obvious what metrics they're attempting to inflate).

This sums up the advertising industry as a whole.

I wish the person who replied didnt delete their comment. They asked you if you felt the same way about netflix. Are products who want to keep people hooked, and have all their attention universally bad?

Obviously so. If you're into music/movies/arts you should come up with a crappier product. I hope you don't come up with tunes that are addictive and get people hooked to your music.

Same with sports teams: I hope they all play crappy so that people are not hooked onto them.

I replied on another thread on this topic where the same question got raised. (TLDR: Not perfect, but definitely a magnitude better).

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