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.
What if, instead of having to doomscroll to get that sweet, sweet dopamine hit, you’d just occasionally, and randomly be sent a message with a funny meme, or interesting story, or whatever it takes to convince your brain to hook you up?
That’s basically newsletters, forum digests, podcasts, etc.