This is what I think The Social Dilemma missed. I worked at one of these companies and did not see anybody evil looking to enslave users in front of their screen. Instead we built new features and celebrated when time spent in our app went up or a new feature was used because we assumed the user must be getting value. After some time we switched metrics from time spent in app or daily active users to Net Promoter Score but at the end of the day if analytics didn’t show that a feature was used it was dropped and if it was being used we’d double down on making it “better” (used even more).

I did not see any evidence of malicious intent towards our users but a genuine belief we were enabling them to be more productive.