Of course Lemmy and such inherit some of that design even without the money behind it - there's certainly a little dopamine hit when I see that one of my comments has gotten a reply, or when I check and see that it's been upvoted.

Not having the incentive to enshittify is good though.

If a product makes money on engagement metrics (ads, eyeballs, time), they'll do everything they can do to maximize for that.

The slot machine analogy is apt. There's research out there on how much time to optimize the dopamine hit and how long to go before you dispense the hit.

The trick is, as a consumer, to set limits and step away. Considering we're here, best of luck to us all.

Honestly, this isn’t a surprise or really a big surprise. Gamification like this has been a thing since the 90’s or earlier. As soon as the web became ad revenue driven, sites figured how to drive clicks and keep people on them. More engagement == more page views == more revenue. Video games have done achievements for decades. AOL even did this in the 90’s. More “you got mail”, more AIM messages, more things available, more engagement, more likely you’re going to pay that hourly charge for access. It’s the same reason there’s clickbait everywhere and everyone has a newsletter the automatically sign you up for. Here Facebook does it… everyone’s slightly different, but all have the same premise. Gotta keep you hooked, give you that dopamine hit and make you keep coming back.

This goes back to the age old “if we could make the internet monetarily self sufficient without ads, how would that work?”