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I personally think "user retention" is a harmless sounding euphemism for induced addiction.

Only if your revenue comes from ads or a pay per play style product. There exist many services that can retain users without them needing to log in every five seconds to maintain the revenue stream.

Square vs rectangle issue here. If your product is ad supported then you definitely depend on creating addiction, but if it's not, you may still be trying to create addictions (e.g. Netflix)

It depends only on how closely your profit is tied to the amount of time the customer spends on the product.

To take Netflix for example, it's probably better for them in terms of subscription profits if your "addiction" causes you to watch one episode each month, and not use it at all the rest of the time.

Unless you have non-revenue reasons to addict people, but that's probably headed into conspiracy theory territory... :)

That said, I'm pretty sure netflix has ad revenue, so the point is kinda moot.

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