I think advertising is a misalignment of goals between user and company, full stop. And if time on site is a way to realize more revenue from advertising, the creators of the platform will engineer ways of increasing time on site, and the further down the brain stem they can get with this objective, the more success they'll find, and they'll spend less effort retaining that.

Large ad-supported online networks do this on a scientific level, and it's hard for engaged users to break free. I quit Facebook on January 1 and there are still multiple times per day that I open a browser tab when bored or frustrated and type 'f' thinking I'll go to Facebook. They're in my brain stem.

Really, anything that is used as a means to improve revenue by exposing users to more ads is misaligned with the users' goals.

http://www.timewellspent.io/

Why don't they just report revenue per user though?

Reminds me of this article by Dustin Curtis: https://dcurt.is/facebooks-predicament

As a more explicit example, Facebook used to allow you to type a friend's name into the search bar on desktop, and a card would come down (with other possible people too you could select/down-arrow to) so when you hit enter you would go straight to that friend's page. Now, all search queries take you to a search page, where you can then click on your friend's name. That extra page load and click multiplied a few times a day probably keeps me on Facebook an extra minute or so every day, which I'm sure was used during the feature testing to justify its greatness. Instead, it noticeably and nearly daily negatively impacts my life.

> https://doi.org/10.1145/2600428.2609627

> Impact of Response Latency on User Behavior in Web Search

> Query response latency. :

> In [18], the authors exposed a commercial search engine’s users to response time delays of varying magnitude and observed the impact of different levels of delay on users’ long-term search behavior. They observed that the users who were exposed to higher time delays issued fewer queries than they usually do. Interestingly, the effects were shown to be persistent in the long-term even after the response latency had returned to the original levels.

I think that to increase user time on their website, search providers do well to try and improve search result latency.

Page / tab transitions and unnecessary animations are very in vogue.

Also consider the "pagination" model, Amazon and Google still use pages for their search results when they could do infinite scrolling a bit faster.

EDIT: And creates more ad slots, obviously

Snapchat and Instagram share some of the same purposes, but most use them for very different things. This article is Facebook trying to say "Look we beat Snapchat at another thing!" in order to leverage their network effect power. What likely happened is they optimized their app to do exactly this with the goal of this press release (and ad revenue as well likely). None of this actually speaks to the app experience of either inherently.

Despite both having app use times over 30 minutes, the reasons for each are entirely different. Instagram is because you are scrolling on a feed. Snapchat is because you're messaging people or taking pictures to send.

As mentioned here: The relationship between social media use and well-being | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14082130

I would argue one is morally acceptable (building the app) and the other isn't (selling crack-cocaine).

Attention is a zero sum resource, and humans can be manipulated into spending their time in ways that are not in their best interest.

Edit: Tristan Harris has written interestingly on this topic:

http://www.tristanharris.com/2016/05/how-technology-hijacks-...

What if it teaches users the habit of selling crack cocaine? (stupid example, but you get the point)

In that vein of thought, maybe OP had a point. Snapchat/Instagram seems to feed our narcissistic egos more than anything, so maybe it's not as morally inert as I had thought.

PS: Despite being recorded "with a potato", to borrow the first comment, very relevant to basically all social media and moral good. And Bo Burnham is an amazing watch generally anyways, PSA. All of his specials are gold.

Nowadays, everything in this line of business is designed to be addictive.

Comparison aside, I do think social media platforms have a negative net value to society due in no small part to optimising only for this kind of metric. Everything is designed to be addictive. We know addiction isn't healthy but it's cool because users can choose to not get addicted to this thing which is designed especially to take advantages of human weaknesses.

when Google Sheets starts bragging about their minutes per day metric then i'll start getting worried.

2) Minutes per day is highly correlative to the amount of inventory of ads that you can display to users. More time spent on platform = more money you can potentially extract. Given that time is limited, there is only a finite amount available to competing platforms, so it is actually an interesting metric to track (it combines both opportunity of TAM and individual revenue opportunity).

3) There's no misalignment when you don't pay for something you use. This should obvious to you or anyone else that uses free online services by now.