Nov. 21 2025 - Content score desire bargaining thought experiment

If a platform were to serve you the best content right around the time you usually log off and go to bed, in an effort to keep you engaged for longer, would that be a bad thing? Should it be prevented? All they would need to know are your access times and an algorithm score for any given piece of content -> things we know modern platforms have. Laid out in plain English like this, this would clearly be a predatory and underhanded way of tricking users out of their time and wellbeing for your own profit, and will lead to great cumulative social harm. But these algorithms are not laid out in plain English, they are entirely opaque; if an AI discovered this "optimization", it is not going to comment it with /* Trick users out of sleeping so we can make more money here */, it is going to move a score variable (and a million other variables) around in reference to a user time schedule variable (and a million other variables). I am not claiming that platforms are currently doing this. But, if their algorithms and content delivery AIs are so smart, why wouldn't they be using this sort of optimization? And, if I'm able to come up with an example like this on my own, in my bedroom, what other sorts of optimizations are these systems implementing, that nobody even knows about? That nobody understands? These things are playing the evolution game thousands of times every day, on each of the nearly 5 billion users of the Internet, and they are changing us to more closely meet their metrics.