This persists because it pays Link to heading

Shallowfication is not an accident. It is a rational output of the business models we built around attention.

If you make money when people stay longer, click more, and come back sooner, you will design experiences that do exactly that. Depth is not forbidden. It just competes poorly against systems that get rewarded for constant motion.

This is why “just be more disciplined” is a weak strategy. You are trying to out-willpower an incentive machine that runs 24/7 and improves itself through measurement.

The attention market has a simple objective Link to heading

Most large platforms operate on some version of the same loop:

1. Capture attention.
2. Keep it.
3. Convert it into revenue.

The conversion can look different. Advertising. Sponsorship. Commerce. Data-driven targeting. But the system-level pressure stays the same: more engagement means more inventory to sell, more chances to profile, more chances to influence the next click.

And crucially, attention is not measured in depth. It’s measured in proxies. Time on site. Session length. Shares. Comments. Opens. Retention. These metrics are easy to count and easy to optimize. They are also easy to game, even unintentionally.

Proxy metrics create predictable failure modes Link to heading

When you optimize a system using a proxy, the system starts optimizing the proxy.

That is not a moral statement. It is what happens when you connect dashboards to decision-making. If a team gets promoted for raising daily active users, the product will raise daily active users. If content that triggers strong emotion produces more “engagement,” the system will learn to surface more of it. If outrage keeps people glued to the screen, outrage becomes a feature.

Depth tends to look like this from the outside: fewer taps, fewer shares, more silence, longer pauses. Most metrics interpret that as failure.

So the system steers away from it.

Design patterns that remove stopping points are not random Link to heading

A lot of modern interface patterns share one theme: they reduce the cost of continuing.

Infinite scroll avoids the decision to stop. Autoplay avoids the decision to choose. Push notifications avoid the decision to return on your own terms. Recommendations avoid the decision to search. Streaks avoid the decision to take a day off. A polished feed avoids the decision to tolerate boredom.

None of these patterns is “evil” on its own. They become corrosive when they stack, and when the only scoreboard is engagement.

You can tell what a product values by what it measures. Most products measure motion.

Data makes the loop tighter Link to heading

Once you can observe behavior at scale, you can tune the system continuously.

A/B tests do not ask whether an outcome is wise. They ask whether it moved the number. If the number moved, the change ships. Over time, the experience becomes less like a tool and more like a behavioral experiment with shipping privileges.

This is why shallowfication feels oddly impersonal. It is not someone deciding you should be distracted today. It is a system selecting whatever keeps you easiest to predict.

Prediction likes repetition. Depth likes novelty and reflection. The business loop prefers the former.

Externalities are the hidden subsidy Link to heading

If a platform makes money by holding attention, the costs often land elsewhere.

Families absorb the distraction. Schools absorb the attention fragmentation. Workplaces absorb the shallow-work overflow. Democracies absorb the misinformation and polarization. Healthcare absorbs the anxiety and sleep debt. No one sends an invoice to the engagement dashboard.

So the incentives stay clean and the damage stays distributed.

If you want to change shallowfication, you have to change what gets rewarded. Otherwise we keep asking designers and users to fight gravity.

Next, we zoom out. These incentives do not stay inside apps. They leak into culture and start shaping what survives.