Honestly it’s crazier that social media convinced us that “likes” are compliments and not just a dopamine hit for the person clicking it lol

A very good example of this is birthdays on Facebook. When the birthday message posting started a few millennia ago, everyone took it very seriously - they would sit up at night and reply to each message. With each passing year, the number of messages increased - 20 to 50 to 70 or even 200, depending on how many “friends” you had on the evil site.

That’s when everyone realized that it’s just impossible and impractical and most important - unnecessary to have so many people posting on your “wall” to wish you birthday.

So the game became - you reply to the few folk you really care about - close friends and family. Everyone else got a like or a copy pasted “thanks”.

The hellsite even saw their “engagement” dip and built a product using the time of highly paid software engineers, product managers, SREs, and managers. What did the product do? It let you do a one click prepopulated “happy birthday person-I-met-once-at-a-party” message to their wall.

Of course people caught on to how disingenuous that was and just stopped replying to wall messages on that Satan’s Armpit.