Extraction looks highly efficient until the second-order effects arrive. The internet is littered with platforms that optimized solely for user engagement, only to discover they had strip-mined their user base's goodwill in exactly three quarters. They mistook a temporary spike in dopamine for long-term loyalty.
When product teams optimize strictly for aggressive metrics without a moral constraint, they invariably externalize costs. They push the cost onto the users' mental health by manufacturing urgency. They push the cost onto the operators' weekend hours to manage brittle systems built for speed. And they push the cost onto the future maintainers of the codebase who inherit technical debt in the name of 'velocity'. You can borrow trust to fuel artificial growth, but the debt always comes due.
A healthier metric stack goes far beyond daily active users and monthly recurring revenue. It includes service quality, operator load, and user clarity. If a user can delete their account easily in one click, understand exactly what they are paying for without reading a dense legal document, and only receives emails when absolutely necessary—you are building for the decade, not the quarter.
We must reject the idea that manipulating human biases is a legitimate form of product design. Dark patterns, arbitrary lock-in mechanics, and forced notifications are the tools of fundamentally insecure products. If your product requires a trap to retain its users, it does not deserve to retain them. If your business model requires user confusion, it is a grift masquerading as an enterprise.
Sustainable systems are not anti-growth. They are anti-fake-growth. Real growth respects reality, accepts constraints, and deeply respects the humanity of the person on the other side of the glass. It trusts that delivering genuine utility is a superior strategy to engineering artificial dependency.
Build things that actually solve the problem, rather than things that merely drag out the engagement. If a user spends less time on your platform because you gave them the exact answer they needed instantly, that is a triumph of design, not a failure of retention. Measure your success by the autonomy you grant your users, not by the attention you extract from them.