The unquestioning supplication at the alter of 'engagement' (a sterile marketing term if there ever was one) is what lead to where we are now in the first place. This is an affliction that pervades the entire consumer internet sector, but the folks at facebook seem to have refined it to its fullest potential.

The other day I got a facebook notification on my phone, which said something along the lines of "You have 4 new messages". Of course, thinking it was from my friends I opened the app to look at them. 3 of my 4 "messages" were notifications for friend requests from people I had never met. The last one was a photo someone had posted of cake she'd baked (not to me specifically, just in her feed). To someone sitting at her desk at facebook, looking at an engagement metrics chart, the notification would seem to have served its purpose - another data point, another person enticed to open the app in response, engagement maximized. But of course, this was deception. I found this experience distasteful enough to disable notifications entirely - probably another data point for their metrics team - and annoyed enough to complain about in an HN comment.

The new "Person X has posted a photo" notifications are the worst. Their abuse of the notification icon is getting ridiculous. It used to be focused on when someone interacted with something you had done, now it's just used to drive "engagement".

I've seen people in the past make the mistake of correlating "Enjoyment" with "Higher Engagement", but you want to be really careful there.

For example - Flame wars increase engagement, even if people feel drained and frustrated afterward.

I understand why it's a useful metric - It's particularly valuable if your business model depends on time-on-site to sell ads.

But I wouldn't recommend them as a proxy for enjoyment by any means.

There’s a lot of fake profiles though and I think a lot more than they’re prepared to admit. Even brazen binary options trading scam profiles don’t get removed - it appears that they’re happy as long as the number are going up.

They’re trying to police 2.5 billion accounts with 45 thousand employees (including HR, developers). I’m not surprised they stuck. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not OK for them to suck, but I’m not surprised given the 55,555:1 accounts:staff ratio.

>and yet their published numbers continually show greater engagement.

Do you think this might have anything to do with the fact that, as an advertising company, it's crucial that they are able to tell companies that engagement is increasing?

I would be very surprised if engagement wasn't down among Americans under 50 – it may well be counteracted by growth in other markets and in other apps (especially Instagram), but there's _much_ less activity on Facebook.com from my peers than there were five years ago.

Engagement isn't just driven by "enjoyability", so that's not a particular convincing counter-argument.