A walk around campus on a weekend night is one of the times where I feel zero pulls of my attention in any direction but where I want to direct it. Late enough that there is nobody around, no background sounds just me and the night sky
The app has both allowed me to connect with people who share my interests as well as facilitate creatively stimulating work, but at the same time can tank my mood depending on the topics being discussed
YouTube is something I find useful/largely benign, but its habit of re-recommending things you have already watched causes the user to search longer for things they haven’t experienced before, encouraging extended scrolling and/or consuming the same material repeatedly. The encoded value in this is convenience and familiarity for the user, if you cannot find something interesting the algorithm entices you with something it knows that you previously enjoyed and are likely to enjoy again, which then pushes a given video further and is more likely to gain ad revenue from if you sit through the entire thing.
