If something permissible could increase their user engagement but they opt not to do it for ethical reasons, they just lose share to the less ethical companies.
It's my privilege to do so on this platform.
This type of behavior is unethical which is an entirely different thing than illegal. I hope we can adjust regulations on the market to make such behavior illegal. I have this hope because I don't want to live in a society where an increasingly portion of the population is addicted.
My point wasn't that people shouldn't complain about this stuff. My point was just that businesses, by their nature, are sociopathic (regardless of whether anyone who works at them is a sociopath).
My current CEO has actually ranted about this at some length, that he'll run into people in the same game (startup founders pitching for investment or to find early customers) and some of them really do think the point of what they're doing is to get money. What is the _money_ for, idiots? Did you just really want lots of pictures of the Queen? No? Then your whole ethos is pointless busywork.
Even people who have a goal that I think is silly, like Musk's colony on Mars, at least that's actually a goal. You can look at things and say "That helps with the goal" (e.g. re-usable launch vehicle) or "That does not help" (e.g. accusing random people who disagree with you on twitter of being criminals).
If you just need to buy food and pay rent then, fine, whatever, work for the psychopath business that is just acquiring money for no discernible purpose. But if you've got to a point where you can pick, go find a business that has a purpose you at least mostly agree with.
My proviso that businesses tend to act like sociopaths _even if no one who works there is a sociopath_ is important.
Suppose I go to pick up coffee, but on the way to the stand I see a homeless man and decide he could use the money more than me, so I give him the money instead of getting coffee. Everyone wins: homeless man gets money, I get a feeling of satisfaction that is presumably better than the coffee.
Now suppose instead of getting myself coffee, I was actually getting coffee for my boss, who'd given me $5 for it. Suppose that if either I or my boss had been getting _our own_ coffee, we'd choose to give the homeless man our money instead.
The only scenario where he doesn't get our money is when I'm acting on behalf of my boss: my boss gave me a task, and I can't choose to give my boss's money away -- not even if that's what I would do in my boss's shoes, and not even if that's what my boss would do.
When I act on behalf of my boss, I'm less charitable than either of us individually.
It's not a good way for them to run a business, any business. They're failing already, get out ahead of the game.
What your coffee money analogy gets at is a culture where employees are encouraged not to do anything except tick the boxes and get through the day. The boss sent me for coffee, so the only thing I can do is go get coffee. I'm really just an over-specified delivery robot and shouldn't think about what I do, let alone why - just do it.
Boards like you've described are not providing their company with the only thing they are supposed to offer for their high salaries - direction. They're leeches. I'd like to see shareholders either embrace this, cut costs and replace such boards with just some standard paperwork saying the shareholders don't care about the big picture, so blunder along until the executives accidentally go bankrupt and too bad OR fire such inadequate boards and hire somebody who actually has opinions and acts on them for better or worse.
Now, perhaps my boss and I have an agreement such that if I see a suitably sympathetic looking homeless person, I can alter the coffee mission and give them the money instead. But the the number of potential situations that could arise exceeds the number of prior agreements we could conceivably have, and ultimately in the face of uncertainty my default position has to be 'do what the boss said'.
The scenario was between me and my boss, but the analogy is for the relationship between the board of directors and the shareholders. It's not practical for the (millions of) shareholders to communicate their specific desires in every potential circumstance to the board. The board's default mission is 'enhance shareholder wealth'. Thus _on average_ the board's decisions will probably be less charitable than those of any individual board member or individual shareholder if they weren't acting on someone else's behalf. See the Milgram experiment, for example.
The reality is that for most shareholders, the company is just an anonymous component of their retirement fund, and all they want is for it to go up. Super funds generally don't even tell you what companies you're invested in.
So the average shareholder does not want the board of directors they've never met of a company they don't even know they own to decide without consultation to give THEIR retirement money to a (figurative) homeless person who the board decided was more worthy of the shareholder's money than the shareholder. They just want their retirement fund to grow, and this is what the boards of these companies have been tasked with: if the shareholders want to be charitable, they can do that on their own.
Enhancing shareholder wealth doesn't have to be zero-sum: in a free market, transactions should be beneficial to both parties. You give customers something they want, and customers pay you for it. Everybody wins. It's up to regulators to set rules such that legal methods of enhancing shareholder wealth don't include exploitation.