From an interview with an anonymous Silicon Valley engineer:
When you’re an engineer, you’re constantly being told to do things that are clearly not good for the user. If you’re building any kind of app or platform that makes its money from advertising, you are trying to maximize “time spent”—how long a user spends with your product.
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But every worker knows this is bad. Every engineer and designer knows this is awful. They’re not happy making these features. But they can’t argue with the data. The engineer and the designer who care about the user don’t want to put these features out in the world. But the data says those features are increasing time spent—which means they’re good. Because more time spent means selling more advertising, which means making more money.
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But there's no way they can push back on it. They can talk about it—in their company Slack, in their public forums, at their all-hands meetings. They can express a lot of malaise about it. But they can’t argue against the experiment succeeding, because you can’t argue against increased profits.
"Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!""