"User Engagement" is code for "Addiction"
Social media is a civilization-level problem
Jan 11, 2021
There is something about social media that human beings are not psychologically
prepared for. It is a perverse and unnatural abstraction of the human social
community to which our brain does not react well. As a facsimile of genuine
humanity, it plunges into something resembling The Uncanny Valley for social
interactions. It might be, for all we know, that the primary reason someone
posts on social media is anger. If a proper study was done, I bet it would
show exactly that.
Quarantines and lockdowns forced people indoors and onto social media. That
means that everyone's own emotions became the most important thing in their
world. Suddenly, everyone is in the daily habit of unhealthy and irrational
solipsism. Not because we wanted to be, or would be under other
circumstances, but because we are all being conditioned to be introverted
and consumption-obsessed egomaniacs.
I believe that human beings, on some fundamental level as social creatures,
need to have trusting face-to-face community with others. Forcing people
indoors and abstracting their social interactions, forcing human contact into
a communication channel that is both easily monetized and easily monitored
harms our brains in a way that we don't yet fully understand, in addition to
giving untold amounts of power to private tech companies. When Facebook says
they want to "make the world more open and connected," they mean they want to
become the middle-man for all interpersonal interaction.
When looking back at this era of humanity future humans will say, "How could
they have just scrolled and scrolled all day? Didn't they know what it was
doing to them?" Social media is the new cigarettes. Everyone does it, it's
addictive, it's harmful, and you should quit.
The strangest part is that, while social media is extremely habit-forming, it
also seems to consist of mostly negativity. Webcomic Name accurately called it
"an endless stream of the most horrible things in the world". That means that
it adversely affects our mental health in ways we don't fully understand yet.
As a UI developer by trade, I can pinpoint precisely the Dark Triad of Web UI
Design Choicesthat addict people to social media and drive us all slowly crazy
(by design!):
Relative timestamps ("3 hours ago" instead of "6:56pm"). This creates
IMMEDIACY.
Relative timestamps make everything feel immediate and time-sensitive. This is
necessary for social media companies because otherwise, these textual
interactions can feel asynchronous. That's the perk of email; You can respond
whenever you want. Without relative timestamps, social media would feel just
a bit more like an old-style internet forum or BBS, and less like an instant
messaging service. This minuscule feature change has a massive impact: it
subconsciously increases FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), which encourages longer
and more frequent use patterns at the direct mental expense of the user.
Infinite scrolling with no "more" button or link. This creates PERPETUATION.
Infinite scrolling is also problematic because it makes users stick around
longer. If the app allows for scrolling down forever and never stops or
interrupts, this means that any user can now scroll compulsively, half paying
attention, without being interrupted, indefinitely. The result is that users
unthinkingly keep themselves glued to their forever-feeds for a much longer
period of time, which increases profit for the company running the app. Again,
this is all subconscious. The user has no idea that they are being drawn into
addictive use patterns to improve the profits of Big Tech.
Fake internet points (clickable, often animated icons with incrementing
numbers. Likes, reactions, upvotes, retweets, etc.). This creates ADDICTION.
Most alarming is the "internet points". On Reddit, this is called Karma. On
Twitter, it's likes and retweets. Ostensibly, this simple numeric score
displays the community's overall attitude toward a given piece of content. On
its face, this appears to be a radically democratic concept; Everyone can
vote! The reality is very different. Reddit, for example, has always
obfuscated the true Karma score ("to prevent vote brigading"), and the
position of a piece of content within the feed can be purposely decided by the
Reddit home office, not by the community. This is incredibly, deeply sinister.
The most addictive part of social media is chemical addiction. When you can
click an animated icon to show your appreciation for or reaction to a piece of
content, it gives you a shot of dopamine. It adds value to the interaction,
and it makes the user feel empowered. Likewise, if you get a lot of reactions
to your content, you get rewarded by your own brain. This leads to, quite
literally, a chemically addictive component to social media.
Reddit has created an app that supports a community such that it appears to be
democratic in its general functioning but is actually very specifically
curated toward a preferred set of political and social ends. It fosters a
feeling of being an outsider in anyone who dares to disagree with what
"everyone" purportedly already believes. This makes it incredibly easy to fall
into irrational rage fits over "the other," or what one imagines them to be,
and to allow one's political and social views to slip ever more deeply toward
extremism, destructiveness, and the worst of the mob mentality. "Everyone
already believes X," the user says to herself, "why in the world don't I?
What's wrong with me?" And thus, the user is gaslit out of her own principles
and conditioned to follow the herd without question. Who doesn't want to fit
in and be seen as "normal"?
Reddit has only developed into this Great Beast With Seven Heads And Ten Horns
fairly recently. Facebook has actually been doing this exact psychological
manipulation tactic for years. They tell you that your friends all think a
certain way already, and that leads you to believe that you are the odd one
out for having your own opinions. They even infamously tell users on occasion
that their friends are "liking" the Facebook pages of big-name sponsors. Some
users noticed this when they saw that their deceased relatives had "liked" an
advertisement's Facebook page. How much more evil can you get?
Facebook invented the monetization of peer-pressure. Everyone else just
followed suit.
At the risk of sounding like the massive nerd that I absolutely am, this
reminds me of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Commander Riker
happens upon a "game" which is actually an extremely efficient dopamine
delivery device. Basically, placing this device on your head (image to the
left) makes you feel like you're getting a shot of straight dopamine, or
morphine, or some pleasurable brain-drug, and it's incredibly addictive. So
addictive that it causes problems across the whole crew. To me, that's the
episode that tried to warn us about social media. We should have listened.
The great spectre haunting the twenty-first century will not be any sort of
–ism. It will be the great beast of global technocracy, and Big Brother will
not be a government. On the contrary, the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love,
and Plenty will all be private (or publicly traded) entities. In this way, no
Constitution, or Magna Carta, or any other foundational document designed to
keep government tyranny at bay will be able to operate as intended. It won't
be "the government" depriving us of our rights. It will be private companies
with their own verbose and opaquely worded Terms of Service, and wide-ranging
End User License Agreements. Right now, we can get by without Twitter or
Reddit or Facebook if we really have to (and many of us do quite happily).
Soon, you will not be able to opt-out of the technocratic dictatorship that we
are all to be subject to.
