>Isn't that a fancy way of saying they are making their product do things that people enjoy Humans have a tendency (called "hyperbolic discounting" in the lite

>Isn't that a fancy way of saying they are making their product do things that people enjoy Humans have a tendency (called "hyperbolic discounting" in the literature) to choose a small immediate reward over a larger delayed reward. In this case, the small immediate reward is reading an interesting post on Facebook, and the delayed reward is... pretty much anything else. If we're lucky, people will become aware of this bias and start making better decisions, by designing their life to align their available immediate rewards with their choice of distant rewards. This is basically what things like Fitbits do -- provide small immediate rewards (number of steps going up!) that align with your desired larger distant reward (being in shape). Or the very notion of "getting off Facebook" -- increasing the personal effort/mental distance required to claim a small reward that does not align with a more distant goal. The reason this is particularly challenging is that "the Internet" is very useful for doing things that do align with our legitimate, long-term goals, but once the Internet is available, the distance to "Facebook rewards" is low. It might be interesting if Facebook, as a response to this backlash, finds a way to offer short term rewards that do align with your long-term goals...