oh, very much agreed
we elaborated on this a bit in our post on Twitter and feelings a while back
the people actually doing the work probably don't think of it this way - they think of themselves as following best practices in UX design - but it is absolutely correct to say that Twitter's development process includes psychological experiments intended to produce addiction. except they call the metrics they optimize for things like "engagement", and the deployment framework makes randomized controlled trials so easy to do that they aren't even called that, they're just called A/B tests. they're not even done by people with a background in psychology, which also means there's no professional ethical obligations...
