This does indeed help! I greatly appreciate your thoughtful response, and can only apologize for my inexcusable tardiness in following up further.

I'm not sure it needs secret teams of behavioral economists to produce dark patterns which drive motivation even to the detriment of the users they artificially engage. You can hypothesize and A/B test your way into such patterns as well, I think, and never quite realize what you're actually doing - for those of us who develop software on a professional basis, how many of us can maintain the perspective of an end user into the software we ourselves work on every day? Certainly I can't, and the next one of us I meet who can will be the first. Granted Facebook's engineers operate on a higher level than the norm, but in that regard? If anything, they're far more isolated from their users than the norm, too.

I'm sorry to hear your book sold poorly! I have to admit I've contributed to that trend, since I have no application for the information it contains. But I assume the book must differ markedly from your thesis, which appears much more concerned with factual documentation of the patterns it describes, and much more muted in its expression of opprobrium toward the dark patterns you cite there. I'm not sure I agree that the use of even those patterns you recommend is as innocuous as you suggest, but that's something on which we can reasonably disagree, I think.

Finally, I'd note that my concern with Facebook isn't so much its effect on its users, and on those who aren't its users but are surrounded by those who are, today - to be clear, I'm not at all sanguine about today's effects either, but what concerns me far more is that Facebook has almost without notice amassed an extent of power utterly unprecedented in human history, and it has done so in a fashion which permits that power to be exercised in total opacity - quite aside from the limited nature of options for curbing that exercise should it prove noxious, it's very hard even to know when and how that power is being used.

Until recently, Facebook has been satisfied simply to exist, and to grow. After the events of 2016, though, we've already seen initial gestures on the part of Zuckerberg et al toward a more active exercise of that power - and whether or not you agree with the direction in which it's been suggested that power be exercised, I should think the mere existence of that power, in the hands of people who can do what they damn well please with it and never need fear being gainsaid, should be worrisome in its own right. Perhaps it's being used today in a way that accords with your preferences. Will it be ever thus?

I do, though, take your point about the conflation of social media with Facebook, and I agree that it's understandable but not helpful that people equate the two. Facebook's model is, I think, an accident of history - when it came along, there were no good ways for people to both connect socially on the Internet and maintain ownership and control of their identities and information, and Facebook solved the first problem well enough that for a long time nobody much thought hard about the second. But there's no clear reason why both can't be simultaneously solved, and I know of at least one credible project currently underway which intends to do precisely that.