You vs. 1,000 Engineers

Imagine you installed a new navigation app and entered the address of your destination, but instead of taking you to visit your parents' house in Tampa, it directed you to Disney World because it thought you would enjoy that more. Or what if every time you used your calculator or entered a formula into Excel, instead of mathematically computing the correct result, it gave you the most common answer for people your age who live in your area?

You wouldn't use a navigation app that deliberately took you to the wrong address or a calculator that gave you the wrong answer - so why do we accept similar behavior from our social media feeds? We follow our friends, family, local businesses, and the creators we are interested in to see when they post something new, but so often their posts are not shown to us and other content is inserted into our feeds instead.

Why are so many apps - instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok - designed this way?

What you want vs. what they want

What are your goals for the day, the week, the year? How much of the time you spent scrolling on your phone helped you achieve those goals?

What do you think the goals are of the people who designed the social media apps you use? They say that they want to connect people to each other, but if you look at what they measure and optimize for and what they report to their boards and stockholders, a different picture emerges.

Most social media companies care about two things: "daily active users" and "engagement." This means how many people use the app every day and how much time they spend on the app. Their goal is to make these numbers as high as possible. The higher these numbers, the more money they can make. So every app, every screen, every notification, every algorithm they create is designed to serve these goals.

The fundamental problem here, as James Williams puts it, is that "we trust these technologies to be companion systems for our lives: we trust them to help us do the things we want to do, to become the people we want to be." But "there’s a deep misalignment between the goals we have for ourselves and the goals our technologies have for us." [1]

How we got here: follow the money

Most social media companies don't sell apps - they sell ads. This is a very profitable way to run an online business, and has become the default way that social media apps make money. The original promise of free services online was great functionality with a few ads shown to support the cost of operation, like the old days of newspapers and magazines. But somewhere along the way, businesses realized they could potentially show you more ads and make even bigger profits.

They figured out that the more time you spend scrolling, the more data about you they can collect to target those ads, and the more ads they can sell to show you. This is why everything about the design of these apps tries to get you to use them as much as possible. This is also how "free" apps like instagram and facebook can make billions of dollars for their parent company.

As Jeff Hammerbacher, facebook’s first research scientist, said after working there: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads ... and it sucks.” [2]

How they hook you

There are several different ways that apps are designed to get you to use them as much as possible that will probably sound familiar. Many of these design choices exploit the way our brains are designed to help us survive to hook us even more.

The Slot Machine Effect - every time you open the app or pull to refresh, you have a chance of seeing something new and interesting. Each time that happens, you get a little hit of the feel-good hormone, dopamine, which encourages you to do it again and again. Like slot machines, you don’t “hit the jackpot” every time, but it happens just often enough to keep you coming back and trying again. [3] This variable reward mechanism also ties into our fear of missing out (FOMO), causing us to keep checking to be sure we don’t miss anything important. [4]

Infinite Scroll - feeds with no end remove the natural stopping points that are usually inherent in lists. Without the page number or the friction of having to tell the app to fetch the next page, there are no cues to stop. [5]

Notifications - these often interrupt what you intend to do on your phone (in the case of push notifications) or hijack your cleaning/grooming and danger responses by showing ever-increasing numbers in a bright red colored dot (in the case of app badge notifications). [6] The more you are interrupted, the hard it is to get back on task and the more likely you are to respond to further interruptions. [1]

Gamification – this looks like using rewards such as streaks to create habitual use that can turn into addiction.

The Amplification Loop

Apps that are designed this way must keep ratcheting up the ways to hook you because they are competing with other "engagement maximizing" apps for as much of our attention as possible. They also compete with your friends, family, work, school, hobbies, and sleep.

Beyond the tactics mentioned above, the algorithm that determines what's in the feed or what is recommended next is one of the most important tools for keeping you using their app for as long as possible. Most social media algorithms are tuned to promote emotionally charged content because they’ve measured that it gets 17%-24% more engagement. [7]

As this has become more common, people have noticed that their posts are being pushed out by the type of content the algorithms favor, so they begin adjusting the way they post or how they speak so that it's more likely to be seen. You've probably seen this phenomenon with influencers and content creators, but it pushes even normal people to post increasingly fake, sensational versions of themselves. This works; people get rewarded for posting this way by getting better placement from the algorithm, which translates into more likes and comments and views. As this reinforcing pattern plays out, we lose or miss out on more and more authentic expression in favor of an optimized thing we call "content."

The result of all of this is that we get stuck in a feed bubbles that don't show us reality - they just show us whatever the algorithm thinks will keep us scrolling.

The True Cost of "Free"

When an app is free, you're not paying with money, you're paying with attention.

"What do you pay when you pay attention? You pay with all the things you could have attended to, but didn’t: all the goals you didn’t pursue, all the actions you didn’t take, and all the possible yous you could have been, had you attended to those other things. Attention is paid in possible futures forgone. You pay for that extra Game of Thrones episode with the heart-to-heart talk you could have had with your anxious child. You pay for that extra hour on social media with the sleep you didn’t get and the fresh feeling you didn’t have the next morning. You pay for giving in to that outrage-inducing piece of clickbait about that politician you hate with the patience and empathy it took from you, and the anger you have at yourself for allowing yourself to take the bait in the first place." [1]

Individual Solutions Aren't Enough

Like I said in the last post , the problem isn't your lack of willpower–it's the asymmetric warfare you are being subjected to when you use these apps. It's you vs. teams of behavioral engineers. It's the way that each new app then copies these behavioral hacks and invents new ones to pull you in even further.

Individual friction strategies can help you fight back now, but real change requires systemic solutions.

We need to be using apps that support our wellbeing and our goals, not fight against them. What this looks like it to be determined. It might be different business models or regulation, but it definitely requires design standards that center something other than endlessly optimizing our attention.

As Kate Raworth said on the Your Undivided Attention Podcast, we need to "shift from the idea that success lies in endless growth to success lies in balance. [...] What's the balance in our use of digital technologies? Where do we find that point where it's engaging, it's useful, we feel like we belong, but without getting addicted, drawn, depressed, thrown off-course by it? [...] What kind of structures and ownership and designs would enable us to be in balance with the phenomenal power of these technologies?" [8]

Join the Conversation

We will only get better technologies when we start demanding them.

We need to talk to our friends and families about how these apps actually work and what effect they have on our health, well-being, and society. The more educated we are, the more we can spot these patterns and look for alternatives.

Giving direct feedback to the apps we use can help. Email support or find a high-level person in the company to send your concerns to. Using the app less is also feedback–it tells them what they're doing isn't acceptable and they need to rethink their design. If you're able to find an alternative that respects your attention and meets your needs, use that and encourage others to join you.

Ask your government representative to research and regulate addictive technology, the way we do other harmful things like cigarettes, gambling, and hard drugs.

If you're part of a team building an app, stop and think about each design before just blindly copying it because it's what everyone else does. Make sure you are serving the wellbeing of the people using your product as well as the goals of your company.

frequency social is an ad-free, private, mindfully-designed social network for sharing your life's moments with family and friends.

Citations

[1] Stand Out of Our Light - Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy - James Williams

[2] This Tech Bubble is Different - Ashlee Vance - Bloomberg Businessweek

[3] Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas - Natasha Dow Schüll

[4] Fear of missing out and social media use: A three-wave longitudinal study on the interplay with psychological need satisfaction and psychological well-being - Ellen Groenestein, et. all

[5] The Loop and Reasons to Break It: Investigating Infinite Scrolling Behaviour in Social Media Applications and Reasons to Stop - Jan Ole Rixen, et. all

[6] Color and Psychological Functioning: The Effect of Red on Performance Attainment - Andrew J. Elliot, et. all

[7] Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks - William J. Brady, et. all

[8] Your Undivided Attention Podcast - Episode 29 - A Renegade Solution to Extractive Economics with Kate Raworth