I think you unfortunately choose a few companies that HNers love. If you had chosen tvtropes.org, television, and ad agencies as your examples then your point m

I think you unfortunately choose a few companies that HNers love. If you had chosen tvtropes.org, television, and ad agencies as your examples then your point might be made clearer. If I am interpreting you correctly, you're saying that anything can become potentially addictive. I agree with you that our reward system is flawed enough such that as long as you provide any sort of value there are people out there who will mistakenly fall into an infinitely loop trading away all their resources (be it time or money) in exchange for the product/service. I think the intent is important distinction though. A company that maliciously constructs scenarios where they know the typical human will fail due to known bugs in their evolution is not much different from a blackhat. I think the more typical scenario is that the company has to work around our bugs (such as building user interfaces that our imperfect visual cortex can easily understand) just so we can make a fair and willing transaction that provides value to the both sides.