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Reminds me of this article that had been submitted a couple times in recent months, "User Engagement" is code for "Addiction" https://medium.com/swlh/user-engagement-is-code-for-addictio...

I hope we can come up with a new phrase that sticks for these. Some good ones have been posted here in the comments. Ideally, an altruistic entity will trademark them.

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"User Engagement Networks" Sounds perfectly fine to me. At least there would be an idea of what these apps are trying to accomplish at the expense of the user.

"User Engagement and Data Collection Networks"

"Spy networks"

This might sound like a nit, but I'd call it habit-forming, not addictive. I watched friends go from obsessed with Facebook when it launched to mostly using it for sharing family photos, and this is at a time when there was a focus on user engagement. It just seems like people lost interest too easily for it to be actual addiction.

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