Certain things make people happy, and people repeat behaviors that made them happy in the past. The fact that happiness is communicated throughout the brain by dopamine concentrations has no predictive value in figuring out what new thing might also make people happy.
s/dopamine/happy juice/ and the article has exactly the same information content. People like to throw around names of neurotransmitters in order to sound scientific. But to then claim a special connection between dopamine and 140 character messages is pseudoscience.
Right, if someone were trying to use this information to, say, cut down on their news.yc surfing, they'd probably be better off not worrying about dopamine and just focusing on the actual net-addiction behaviors and feelings they are actually experiencing.
Thinking "I should do X, because the dopamine levels in my brain are changing" is probably going to be less effective and more ambiguous to you compared to thinking "When I click a link on news.yc I feel X, when I tell myself maybe I should stop ycing and work on something else I feel y, so maybe I could try z".
"s/dopamine/happy juice/ and the article has exactly the same information content."
That is the opposite of what the article states, which is that behavioral reinforcement is distinct from pleasure. The point being that habit formation is strongly driven by processes other than euphoria [1], and that those processes can be characterized and understood.
[1] Novelty is important, especially the variable timing of repetition.
s/dopamine/happy juice/ and the article has exactly the same information content. People like to throw around names of neurotransmitters in order to sound scientific. But to then claim a special connection between dopamine and 140 character messages is pseudoscience.