I would bet there’s a phenomenon at work here where you can addict almost everybody for a short time by doing X but long term a few become hardcore addicts and most become alienated.

It’s hard to tell that your actions have changed the kind of user who is most engaged until your platform is destroyed and consists of users who barely pay attention and addicts that feed off of each other and not much else (Facebook).

Metrics lie and optimizing for certain performance metrics ends up optimizing for exploiting human weaknesses which is actually somewhat uncommon in the population, which explains the process of optimizing your platform into irrelevance.