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https://slate.com/culture/2021/08/netflix-top-10-movies-shows-clickbait.html

I worked at Facebook for some time, and did a bunch of data work. We had this culture of building something, looking at the results between the experiment groups, and then choosing the statistically more successful one -- i.e. a newsfeed algorithm that had better engagement.

This sounds great at first, and certainly is straightforward if you want a promotion. But behind the scenes some of us had this thought that our observations only amounted to short-term gains. Although we had small long-term experiment holdout groups, the truth is they were rarely reviewed because it was unsexy.

My current thinking is that features like the echo chamber effects from Facebook's algorithms, Snapchat's snap streaks, and clickbait like this, all serve to optimize short-term engagement. Yeah, I want to watch that sexy new show or keep my streak going or have my opinions validated. But there's a diminishing return on clickbait, hollow articles isn't there? I can only fill up so much time with garbage like that before I'm bored. I can only like so many posts before I feel like they're all the same. And once my snap streak is broken I hate snapping.

The data/engineering/product loops at tech companies favor boosting short-term metrics; The employees are incentivized to do so and this is what they measure, so this is what they build. That's why we end up with features like this. That's why Snapchat fell off. That's why Facebook fell off. And that's why Netflix feels increasingly stale (despite there being a lot of quality content if you dig).

People talking about the benefits of games reminds me of people talking about the benefits of, say, a glass of wine with every meal: it's worth looking into but at the same time it's the sort of thing that obviously doesn't scale linearly with the amount / intensity of consumption.

I similarly have mixed feelings as well, but for slightly different reasons. I've read about studies that say that musical training (which is often believed to translate to improvements in other cognitive aspects of life) doesn't actually correlate to said improvements, and I suspect that the same might be true for games (e.g. solving game puzzles doesn't necessarily mean you get better at school math or whatever)

This line of reasoning is also supported by research on correlation between games and violence (i.e. the consensus is that no such causation relationship exists).

All of these suggest (to me) that gaming is just its own activity without much impact on life other than opportunity cost itself.

However, there are some aspects of gaming that can affect overall well-being, specifically aspects related to repetitiveness (e.g. grinding). Repetitiveness is something that does come up in a lot of disciplines (e.g. its soothing effect in autist kids, or repetitiveness as tool in the context of meditation, etc).

The "addictive" aspect isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Games are, almost by definition, supposed to be engaging. But that addictiveness may come in a form of trade-offs. The one aspect that I think is justly vilified is monetization strategies that tie to addictive elements of gameplay and this is something that I'd actually commend China for trying to address via regulation.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-rolls-out-new-rules-minors-online-gaming-xinhua-2021-08-30

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