Fortnite's really started to lean into "BRING YOUR FRIENDS" quest design in order to buff player counts.

Also the new-this-season timers add FOMO to quests themselves to further incentivize regular engagement.

All of this sucks.

One of the best things about starting a season of Fortnite halfway through was that there was just this mountain of quests waiting for you, and you ended up doing stuff to progress without even meaning to. Now they auto-expire, and so you need to keep regular effort.

And I had all of this in my mind as I was reading this article about Instagram engagement, and how that platform incentivizes specific behaviors by rewarding you with impressions if you engage 'correctly' : https://rainylune.com/blogs/blog/why-your-instagram-engagement-kinda-sucks-right-now

And *then* I got to thinking about Twitter's recent disastrous attempts to remove retweeting and making quote tweeting the default. So much of this stuff is about trying to shape user engagement with a platform to conform to platform holder interests by force.

And this isn't exactly new - hostile architecture is a thing in meat space, and it's not like hostile systems design doesn't predate modern online platforms. But this also feels a bit different - more about promoting behaviors of interest in the short-term than core design.

I.e., a lot of this isn't attempts to fundamentally shape how one engages with the platform, but to instead, say, increase user counts this quarter or ensure engagement metrics with Feature Y appease the board. The burden to meet those goals get passed to the users artificially.

I don't really have a way to end this other than to say I'm frustrated that acute hostile design has become a common practice, and that people just want to be able to play video games and share photos and tweets without worrying how they're indirectly being pressured to behave.