Pulling down for notifications is a form of addictive behavior in itself, much like pulling the arm on a slot machine. You might get nothing, you often get some

Pulling down for notifications is a form of addictive behavior in itself, much like pulling the arm on a slot machine. You might get nothing, you often get something boring, you rarely get something great. Perversely, they can taper off how often it pays off which makes it more addictive (deep instincts tell us to keep trying when we know the odds are bad), which is a pattern that's easily observed in a lot of games. Sorting ads to the top is, as far as I know, not a mechanism for increasing addiction so much as a way to try to monetize it. It's more likely to run into anti-trust regulations than public health concerns in my opinion. But as to regulation, it's likely to run behind the technology but it's not hard to document dark patterns and write laws against them, just like bait-and-switch and various con jobs that were well known before the Internet age.