Facebook insiders have admitted that it is. Mike Allen, Facebook's first president, said this in an interview:

“The thought process was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’,” he said. “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop. … You’re exploiting a vulnerabilty in human psychology.”

So that underscores their general attitude towards user behavior. The 'every once in a while' piece applies to the newsfeed too - it's designed to keep you searching for things you care about, and they carefully mix in things you don't, so that you're never too satisfied or unsatisfied, just constantly craving more.

It's also why Twitter wants to 'curate' your timeline, instead of simply displaying tweets from people you follow in temporal order.

Other networks I watch, they still do the same thing. On the NHL Network, you'll see a story about a big trade coming up and they will continue to shuffle it down during commercial breaks until its one of the last stories they cover before the end of the broadcast. It's the same thing with highlights. You'll see your team's game in the left hand column like they're about to show the highlights. Come back from a commercial break and suddenly two more stories have shifted above your local team's highlights. Same thing with several ESPN shows like PTI (Pardon the Interruption).

It can be incredibly frustrating to watch sometimes.

The killer feature with circles is being able to post different things to different audiences IMHO, which Facebook can't do without different accounts.

No one would directly attempt to be evil, it'd just turn out that way.

“The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.” ― Jean Renoir

Really? Especially a FB PM you mean? Because PMs otherwise have been known to use exactly such techniques and worse:

https://darkpatterns.org/

Some low level PM was tasked with optimizing time-on-site. They had some negative user feedback, but it didn't show up in their low sample UR and segmented rollout. Since they had good results in their primary success metrics and the secondary metrics did not tell a consistent story, they rolled it out to 100%. Any negative feedback from there was chalked up to change aversion among a small segment of users.

Increasing "time spent" means spreading out relevant posts. I'm sure that Facebook is tuned to optimize for some combination of "time spent without drop-off in engagement". This is a "Good" version of the algorithm because it nets them the most revenue, while still fulfilling the need for the larger user base.

It's milkshake marketing[0]. People don't want the most efficient method of content consumption. That's why most "feeds" are no longer chronological. People on Facebook want to scroll around, look at posts, comment on articles, like a few things, etc. for X minutes/day without seeing things they've seen before, and without seeing things that are boring.

The job-to-be-done isn't to consume a certain relevant piece of content, it's to waste time and not get too bored.

[0] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/clay-christensens-milkshake-marke...

The thing to realize is that there's not actually a functional difference between that and the "numbers-driven" guy you describe. Evil isn't just the sadistic maniac; it's the affable businessman who doesn't care, doesn't even consider, whether his product helps people or hurts them, so long as it maximizes profit.

Someone else posted an interview with the former president of Facebook, and it's pretty enlightening: https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...

For example, in Aldi stores, the milk is usually kept quite near the entrance, along with the kind of things you'd keep in the fridge (butter, cheese, etc) and the bread. In the likes of MS and Waitrose, it's usually somewhere near the side of the store, not too far from the entrance but past the fruit and vegetables. Same sort of deal with Tesco, Sainsburys, etc. Smaller convenience stores are usually just kind of random.

Nah, if you want real exploitative design, note how many shops are designed to draw out your shopping time as much as possible, by having a nice Z pattern that 'encourages' you to trudge through the whole store before ending up at the checkout. I think in that sense, most over here seem to have taken inspiration from the likes of Ikea or Costco more than anything else.

There's also the obvious 'fake sale' dark pattern, as well as the 'move everything round every few weeks to disorientate regular customers' one.

"If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold."

IIRC, Facebook never really promoted those features or tried to make them easy and intuitive to use. Recently they've also made changes to make them less useful.

It's sort of like difference between having a well-designed and usable feature or a similar feature that only exists to check off a checkbox.

I remember Facebook having it first; this blog post (https://jessicavitak.com/2011/09/01/facebooks-circles-how-to...) confirms that.