[Gustoo]

No one triggered it on purpose. It's instrumentalized on purpose but products were made to be as addictive or useful or engaging as possible and later people developed business models that exploited the data generated by those interactions. Facebook wasn't originally a data harvesting tool for nefarious purposes, but that is what it became.

This is the result of the people that Americans tend to think of as overseeing and regulating their commerce activities (they don't allow me to open a hair salon without some kinda state or county certificate so of course they are considering the impacts my cell phone or internet activities) but the fact is that the regulators don't know enough or care enough or benefit too much from letting companies like facebook run rampant.

Headphones in an office is another thing that people never really considered but it just became OK. Some offices do not allow them.

EQ was engaging enough for full attention span when it came out and it could crash at any second. Now that it runs better, it's more likely that a person is going to play two servers at the same time to manage downtime, and have a movie on or at least an audiobook or something.

I used to be engaged in /tell conversation and /ooc conversation and /shout conversation and /auction selling activities 100% of my time online in EQ but these days its pretty quiet in the text based world of EQ and people are in the equivilent of teamspeak/vent/now discord with a smaller group of people they interact with and don't generally need to use /tell

Plus since the game is beaten they know its a bit of a waste of time to travel around to sell 20pp gloves to a noob versus vendoring them and focusing on getting phat loots.

So theres some stuff thats fixable and some that isn't but the thing that never changed is we should encourage people we love to engage in more fruitful activities.