When famed game designer Peter Molyneux came back out of hiding to launch his mobile games with a company called 22cans he also used the "social experiment" lab

When famed game designer Peter Molyneux came back out of hiding to launch his mobile games with a company called 22cans he also used the "social experiment" label to justify a pay-to-win clicker game and a "crowdfunded" god game with in-app purchases (that were later removed). The answer is: "social experiment" apps and games are just cash grabs with a veneer of clever marketing to them. The Million Dollar Homepage was probably the first one this blatant though. The outcome of the "experiment" is known in advance: people will pay unreasonable amounts of money for objectively worthless things if you can convince enough of them that it's cool. If it were an actual experiment, there would be some analysis published after the fact and the money would either be reimbursed or donated. Social experiments aren't experiments and they're mostly anti-social if anything. In video content it's code for (staged) "prank" (or harassment). In cases like this it's code for "grifting".