[bbor]

Here’s my distinction that I think is at the heart of this: effective vs addictive

I think something is effective if it helps the user accomplish a task they want to partake in and addictive if it convinces the user to check out other unexpected content. Eg Facebook is addictive because people spend hours scrolling their feed hoping to luck into dopamine, but I would say they’d just be benignly effective if that time was an intentional activity that people just find valuable to be worth it — say, searching for information on out-of-touch loved ones.

There’s infinite edge cases to evaluate and make intuitive calls on from there, but that’s my high level definition. Do you see why I would defend the proposed UX change following it?