[EGreg]

Actually, we are addicted because of the tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where the commons is human attention and the mechanisms are Notifications and Updates from Your Contacts.

If Facebook doesn’t do it, then LinkedIn or Twitter will. So Facebook is like Microsoft - do whatever it takes to win.

[celdon25]

If you disable types of notifications or otherwise remove sources of notifications on Facebook, and those are the notifications that you normally get, Facebook will start giving you new notifications for things that you weren't getting notifications for before. Things like "We have a new friend suggestion for you". Facebook is engineered to give you a steady stream of notifications, and as far as I know, there's no way to disable them completely, despite the slew of options Facebook gives you. Why do you think that is?

Notifications can be designed to be less addictive, but that's not what Facebook is doing.

[EGreg]

Well, you are right. I am simply pointing out that Facebook is not alone in this. Even small sites like Alignable spam you with notifications like “{{PersonYouNeverHeardOf}} has looked at your profile, you’re being noticed!” in an effort to try to get people, and it works!

We have known this since 2011 when we started Qbix to build an open source alternative — see https://qbix.com/people for a list of how it is different and more responsible. I hope other companies take on board these principles. Our tagline is “Empowering People. Uniting Communities”. So I feel passionate about this.