>Generally speaking I'm sharing with friends and family ... there's more to it than likes when it comes to human social activity IMO. I feel like this post boil

>Generally speaking I'm sharing with friends and family ... there's more to it than likes when it comes to human social activity IMO. I feel like this post boils it down to too little. Agreed. Referring to it as a "dopamine hit" doesn't help. Those chemicals in our brains aren't scary demons to avoid. From the view of evolutionary psychology, they remain because they led to beneficial behaviors. In this case, social bonding. If my wife posts pictures of our toddler on Facebook, and my mom hits the Like button, my wife will get a small dopamine hit from it. If that were all that's going on, it'd be a good thing. I'm glad my mom can see my kid having fun. I'm glad my wife can bond with her mother-in-law. The problem is social media companies making a focused effort to (1) exploit user content for purposes the user would never want, like building a profile for targeted advertising, and (2) specifically targeting the action-dopamine-repeat loop to maximize engagement. For an example of an alternative that (hopefully) isn't as terrible, my grandmother has a digital picture frame from Skylight. I can send pictures to an email address for that frame, and they'll show up in the rotation. I get a "dopamine hit" when I receive an email saying she liked one of my photos, or when she tells me herself. Dopamine's still there, but the system doesn't suck.