"We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible... We took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset."
Tim Kendall, former director of monetization at Facebook, goes deep on the analogy and how engagement (read as 'keeping people on site') was the only thing that mattered and probably still is.
"we also started to realize that engagement could also mean [users] were sufficiently sucked in that they couldn't work in their own best long-term interest to get off the platform... We started to see real-life consequences, but they weren't given much weight. Engagement always won, it always trumped."
Comments
# The latest muse-letter has gone out to those good folks who've trusted me to inhabit their inbox (thank you.) Unfortunately it went with a couple of markdown glitches but I've fixed the online version.
Why not join us?
@colinwalker straight from the horse’s mouth. Glad I ditched FB.
And so many "smokers" either don't know or don't care.