Having worked in A/B testing in a loan marketing company, where we were pushing 300% payday loans in Mexico (you read that right), I can talk of evil. I think,

Having worked in A/B testing in a loan marketing company, where we were pushing 300% payday loans in Mexico (you read that right), I can talk of evil. I think, when you're in the day to day of a web platform, you really just simplified everything from your hiring to your board meeting to one metric: click. Everything is number of click, it becomes no more evil than a Lion in the Savanna, you just must increase your number of clicks somehow and you forgot why. It can lead to interesting "let's remove the legal text away and see what gives", "let's color ever buttons blue vs pink and see who wins", let's reorder the search result independently of what a normal human would expect (as in... cheapest first?)". I see what you mean, but it's not evil anymore. It's now part of nature, they must hunt your click. They can't stop and they can't explain why. They could put one headline "Myanmar military coup" then replace it with "Myanmar cabinet reshuffle" to see which one you click on with little input from any writer and no philosophical debate whatsoever.