What's your threshold for doomed? The kinds of conversations/actions that have happened haven't changed all that much since the Internet as we know it began. Th

What's your threshold for doomed? The kinds of conversations/actions that have happened haven't changed all that much since the Internet as we know it began. The term "flamewar" and "troll" were coined on Usenet. The only differences between now and then is scale and visibility. In addition, how does one define "engagement" and "healthy usage"? Way back when, people spent much of their free time on a landline. Does one go on to blame AT&T for "optimizing for engagement" by providing a service that could keep people connected to any person in the country for hours upon hours while the phone company made millions minute-by-minute? Ultimately this depends on the person and his/her wants/needs (however "unhealthy" you think they might be) and those can only be determined by oneself regardless of how much data someone else collects. Your AB experiment would only work if you had sentient gingerbread men as a control group. Even then, I doubt it would say or change much about what people do on a person-to-person basis.