[quarkral]

I think recommender systems are the biggest culprit in this. Most recommender systems are probably trained with a simple objective of maximizing the amount of time the user spends browsing through the list of recommended items.

The whole idea of continuously giving your users content so that they can passively scroll down and be entertained is just like putting users in a box where they can pull a lever to get food. When users are given all these options without having to think and to actively search for them, they just become vegetables.