Technology

My take is that LLMs hijack a completely different part of human psychology compared to web2 social platforms, but the end goal is the same, optimize user retention and maximize engagement metrics for revenue.

​On traditional social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and others, the primary mechanism is outrage optimization, leveraging the psychology of negative reinforcement and tribalism.

The algorithm curates content designed to trigger moral anger or cognitive dissonance, the platforms know that users will interrupt passive scrolling to actively comment, share, or debate if something falls outside the usually acceptable social norms.

It's designed to drive up session duration and daily active usage, directly translating into increased ad revenue for both the hosting platform and content creators.

​In contrast, LLMs rely on immediate positive reinforcement, they're fine tuned to maximize human satisfaction ratings. They systematically agree with the user, validate their subjective bias, reinforce their beliefs.

This results in a psychological safe haven dependency, where users increasingly rely on the interface for emotional reinforcement or stabilization, interacting with the model provides data for the host company to train the next model, raise VC capital and inject better ads in conversations as OpenAI started to do recently.

In both cases, it's definitely a form of addiction.