“A legitimate business can survive a satisfied customer. A grift cannot. It needs the customer frightened, aggrieved, lonely, sick, or greedy forever.”
Diehl names the mechanic instead of complaining about vibes. Recommendation systems are tuned to find the thing you are anxious about, then keep you there because a resolved anxiety stops generating sessions. The grift economy needs your dissatisfaction as inventory. Every platform metric that gets reported to investors rewards exactly that.