Shocking trend! Wordle, BeReal, Even Facebook Get Less Addictive

tech.hindustantimes.com:

How did Facebook become a business worth $1 trillion at one point last year? Not just by fulfilling its mission of “connecting people,” but by keeping them hooked on the site, sometimes for hours on end.

Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube and Twitter Inc. have spent years perfecting the art of building habit-forming products, whether through the social affirmation of “likes,” the allure of a never-ending newsfeed or the way YouTube hits your dopamine receptors each time it recommends a new video.

Guillaume Chaslot, an engineer who left Google in 2013 after helping to design YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, remembers being told to program it to encourage larger amounts of time spent by people on the site. “When you optimize for time spent, then you optimize for addiction,” he says. “At the time, I did not even realize that.”

But now, several years into a broad backlash against Big Tech platforms over their safety, more consumer internet services seem to be disregarding the pressure to be “sticky,” in Silicon Valley parlance, or to reward attention-seeking behavior. It’s a promising trend.

Some of these services are actually taking off with consumers.

BeReal is a social app developed in France where all users are told to post a photo of themselves and their surroundings at one randomly appointed time each day. Instead of perfectly angled selfies on the beach, you get double chins, laptop keyboards and crowds of bus commuters — in other words, the mundane moments of everyday lives. As of May 2022, BeReal had been downloaded more than 10 million times and is growing steadily among teens and college students in the US, UK and France, according to app analytics firm data.ai.

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