11 ms·

How Social Media is Built for Addiction

164 points by zipwitch 9y ago

0xcde4c3db 9y ago
The headline claims it's "no accident", but couldn't these properties evolve out of a lot of A/B testing without the product managers or engineers realizing the broader behavioral implications?
- trebor 9y ago
  Sure. But that also doesn't mean it's an accident. They're trying to increase engagement, and what do they have at hand other than addictive techniques?
  - graphitezepp 9y ago
    Would it be fair to say addiction is just a state of near maximum engagement?
  - yourapostasy 9y ago
    > ...and what do they have at hand other than addictive techniques? Reaching for addictive behavioral models is like reaching for management policies when the hard work and long-term investment into leadership is more sustainable. To directly respond to your question, they can for example move to a facilitation model; engagement is encouraged through longer discourse, or through editorial staff whose job is to summarize viewpoints/trends/patterns that quickly bring newcomers up to speed, but they do not moderate. Another possibility is an aspiration model that shows the small steps and decisions it takes to succeed, rather than orient towards the highlights reel view favored today. Say someone you admire and follow wakes up at 3 am to go work out: the social media connection time-shifts to your timezone, corrects for your distance to your gym, and encourages you via your smartwatch to do the same, in realtime. They eat exactly 100g of oatmeal for breakfast; the social media connection corrects for your body measurements (lean body mass, gender, height, etc.), and says you can eat 90g to follow your aspiration person. Yet another possibility is community-wide goal setting and pursuit. Engagement through groups creating their own layouts, platform-based applications, etc. to both decide and pursue their goals. There are more models to consider. I posit they are not pursued by FB because they decided they cannot monetize those models under their current ad-driven monetization model, which in turn is governed by the capitalist (though not necessarily free market) model they operate under. Relax some or all of those constraints, and the other kinds of engagement models might emerge?
- j-c-hewitt 9y ago
  It's not really an emergent property but anything driven by selling attention has been engineered and tested to draw attention reliably. From print media to radio and TV the formats are chosen in a way that boosts engagement. From publishing short stories in serial in the 19th century to closing a local news segment with a teaser for a breaking story, these products are designed to be habit forming.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    I think it's actually difficult to untangle the two aspects. Especially when you consider the success ... or more accurately lack thereof ... of attempts to deliberately counter the tendency. I think this is fairly deep psychological wiring, and possibly informational dynamics, period. This from someone who detests the practice and would much rather see alternatives.
danso 9y ago
This is a good topic -- I mean, in the sense that I believe the appeal of social media is firmly rooted in our desire for social connection and validation. But that doesn't mean that the design of buttons and interaction-loops can't meaningfully add to the addictive nature. That said, I thought the OP's examples were a little flimsy without citing evidence (that the "few moments to load updates" is deliberately designed around psychology of intermittent variable rewards. I mean, sure, but the time to refresh for updates is not non-existent, even with high speed internet). Examining the simplification of choices to binary is a nice example, IMO, of how to make social media feel less "work": > Following the introduction of Facebook's like button in 2009, YouTube moved to a binary like/dislike format in 2010. Instagram launched that same year and came ready-made with a Like function shaped as a heart. Twitter adopted this same heart-shaped system in 2015, while, in the years since, Silicon Valley has come up with a multitude of new ways to gamify our need for social validation. I've never really liked FB's multiple emotions, though that is partly because of the interface design in which it just takes longer to register one of the other non-Like emotions. Netflix's move from stars to thumbs-up/thumbs-down felt controversial, but I'm pretty sure I've "thumbed" more things in the past month than I had made star ratings in the past year, simply because it was easier. And the data that Netflix provides me in terms of potential movie appeal -- a likelihood described as a percentage, versus a five-star scale -- feels more straightforward, and doesn't seem to significantly differ in accuracy from what I remember of what Netflix used to recommend for me. Roger Ebert's print reviews used a 4-star scale, but his Thumbs-Up/Down with Gene Siskel was still very popular and widely influential. On the topic of social media engagement design, I would love to hear more about the recent Facebook feature that prepends my name before every notification. e.g. "Dan, you have 32 new notifications and 3 pokes today." versus "You have 32 new notifications and 3 pokes today." It's such an easy an obvious feature to implement, I wonder how long it was in the making? e.g. A/B testing, psychology studies, etc. Can't say it's really worked on me except to make notifications feel more of a nag but I'm likely an outlier in that I generally rarely visit FB.
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  On the topic of "few moments to load updates" while I also could not find anyone claiming to have solid evidence on this practice, FB having a history of being intentionally being anti user with it's android app is pretty well accepted. I wouldn't put it past them, though I suspect it is obfuscated in the form of javascript bloat. Anticipation plays a big role in addiction.
spaceribs 9y ago
I'm surprised they didn't bring up that this is throughly described in this book: http://www.hookmodel.com/ http://www.hookmodel.com/ The ethics chapter is awesome by the way...
- hammock 9y ago
  This concept is much bigger than a pop science book. For example, the article quotes the author of a different pop science book on the same subject; quotes a different source on ethics; and references intermittent variable rewards which were pioneered by BF Skinner almost 90 years ago.
  - spaceribs 9y ago
    Yeah, I was just wondering out loud because it's a source "of the times" from people building these sorts of addictive products knowingly. I just read the book and was surprised it wasn't used as proof that people are knowingly doing it.
    - hammock 9y ago
      Scanning the article one more time, it seems pretty limited in focus to "like" buttons and social validation. You could probably write a whole book on the other types of products and devices :)
Alex3917 9y ago
This article also uses manipulative tricks to maximize your time on page. Notice that each paragraph is relatively short and approximately the same length. This is done purposefully to reduce the cognitive overhead of reading and makes it easier to keep going from one to the next, always with the hope that maybe the next paragraph will deliver some key insight.
- slig 9y ago
  > always with the hope that maybe the next paragraph will deliver some key insight Or that the user will scroll more and see more ads.
  - everybodyknows 9y ago
    Firefox reader mode worked perfectly for me -- no ads.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gavinpc 9y ago
  The site is called "Vice"... at least they're forthright about it?
- nerdponx 9y ago
  > Notice that each paragraph is relatively short and approximately the same length This technique is also called "good writing" in some fields. You see it in newspapers a lot.
  - lmm 9y ago
    And most of the things social media do to increase engagement are called "user friendliness" and so on.
  - zebrafish 9y ago
    Correct. News style prose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style In disagreement with the parent's snarkiness, I would argue there's a fine line between efficiently structuring written information to convey important news in a time sensitive manner and using bright red numbers to keep users swiping your app all day. Especially when it comes to messing with peoples self-worth and validation! "You may have won $100! Watch these 5 advertisements to find out!" is gross but palatable to me. "People might like you! Refresh the page and view another ad to find out!" is appalling.
typetypetype 9y ago
When I opened facebook this morning, I had almost 10 notifications. I would say 1, maybe 2 of them were related to an actual interaction.
lyra_comms 9y ago
I used to work for a social network. We used to have 3-hour meetings every week to discuss how to get the users addicted and keep them that way. That's why I now help to develop Lyra, an open, ethical conversation platform which respects language and attention. www.hellolyra.com We're also a nonprofit with no marketing budget, so excuse the plug ;)
- ikeyany 9y ago
  > I used to work for a social network. We used to have 3-hour meetings every week to discuss how to get the users addicted and keep them that way. This makes me curious. How was the company culture while you were there? Did the company treat its employees any better?
  - lyra_comms 9y ago
    No, management had no respect for the developers or marketing team. The company eventually folded. But I made some friends and got to learn Ruby!
- lyra_comms 9y ago
  We just made a demo conversation to show how Lyra works without having to log in :) https://hellolyra.com/c/343 https://hellolyra.com/c/343
  - 3xnis 9y ago
    Have you seen the Imzy submission [1]? People have argued that they failed because there was no content on their front page. Why have who chosen to require logins? >1. No front page (for lurkers): They force users to join to be able to view content. The 90/9/1 rule is real, ESPECIALLY in the "community" space. 90% of users just want to lurk and that's just the nature of the internet. It's probably the same here on HN. 9% will participate in some ways, voting, etc. 1% will submit and comment, etc. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411499
    - 9y ago
ar15saveslives 9y ago
For those who want to get rid of facebook addiction without losing facebook account: just unfollow everybody in your "news feed". It is not visible to anybody, you're still friends, but stuff just stops appearing on your fb page. In a couple of weeks you'll end up with empty page, and facebook will disappear from your life, because there's nothing to see there anymore.
localhost3000 9y ago
I built a chrome extension to help me with this addiction. It replaces the distracting parts of social networking sites (like Facebook's News Feed) with a todo app to keep me on task whenever I look to these sites to procrastinate. The app unlocks the site for a configurable amount of time after I've completed my tasks. Also supports Hacker News, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, and Product Hunt. It has helped me a lot with a. Recovering lost productivity and b. Feeling less addicted to these sites. If curious: Todobook https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/todobook/ihbejplhkeifejcpijadinaicidddbde?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/todobook/ihbejplhk...
- bencollier49 9y ago
  Now if someone can figure out a way for Facebook to rewrite their site in pure WebAssembly, they won't have to worry about pesky programmers like you breaking people's habits.
  - ravenstine 9y ago
    That's the most vexing thing I've read in a while. I manage Facebook addiction by not having the app installed on my phone and only using the browser(which works just fine). If they ever compiled their site to WebAssembly, that would be the end of them for me. The whole idea of WebAssembly is simultaneously awesome and scary.
    - bencollier49 9y ago
      Yeah, I think I only just cottoned on to the true appeal of WASM for certain sectors of the web industry.
  - hello_newman 9y ago
    I guess I'm new to the whole WebAssembly thing. Could you please elaborate more on that statement? If FB were to do that, how does WebAssembly stop you from doing what OP suggested?
    - 9y ago
makesthingspos 9y ago
I don't like how Reddit only shows the user top posts for past 24 hours or past week. It means one can't easily not look at it today and see what one missed today tomorrow. Web news is generally like this, making it hard to see yesterday's stories today. That's one reason my preferred news source is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- dang 9y ago
  You can look at previous HN front pages. Here's yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2017-05-24 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2017-05-24. (We count 'day' using UTC so there's overlap with today depending on where you are.)
  - everybodyknows 9y ago
    The article sets of adjacent days intersect. A merging query of recent days would be helpful. Viz: query-front-pages-recent --numdays 7 | sort --key=HN_priority | uniq
r3bl 9y ago
The name Tristan Harris didn't ring a bell at first, but as soon as I heard the slot machine analogy, I immediately recognized his work. I recommend his TEDx talk[0], his essay on the topic[1] and finally, his Time Well Spent[2] project to get a firm grasp about his side of view. (0) https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3 https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peop... (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5rRh9AZf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5rRh9AZf4 (2) http://www.timewellspent.io/ http://www.timewellspent.io/
simmons 9y ago
I'm skeptical about some of the examples provided. (Do we really know that Instagram's 3-second delay is gratuitous?) But I don't doubt that social media is pushing people's mental reward buttons. This seems to be happening not just on social media, but throughout the consumer technology space. The most obvious example is how video games skinner-box the customer, but I've also become cynical of how my industry (television software) is driven by consumer addiction. When I started working on television applications years ago, I saw it as an opportunity to help people experience art. Now I see people spending every spare moment glued to video, and I just feel like a drug dealer. :/
alexchantavy 9y ago
Getting likes is addicting, sure, but scrolling through my newsfeed and seeing autoplay videos with obnoxious text banners in impact font ('me af rn crying-laughing-face-emoji fire 100 100') has made it so that I'm very annoyed with social media.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  It's getting a little like this, huh? https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-bpIIJYLwDps/TXzOnVIwaPI/AAAAAAAABlY/aFwAfBf7-tg/s1600/idiocracy-05.jpg https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-bpIIJYLwDps/TXzOnVIwaPI/A... edit: Personally left Facebook a little while ago. It had reduced in my time to the odd few minutes scrolling threw the news feed. It just did nothing for me. I don't miss it.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  > Getting likes is addicting, sure, but scrolling through my newsfeed and seeing autoplay videos with obnoxious text banners in impact font ('me af rn crying-laughing-face-emoji fire 100 100') has made it so that I'm very annoyed with social media. I have never understood this complaint. Why don't you just unfollow those people? How many of them could you possibly know? This seems like a problem that can't exist for more than a week or two if it actually bothered you, since unfollowing someone when you see low quality posts like that will clean up your feed pretty rapidly. (Note that unfollow is different from unfriend on Facebook)
chad_strategic 9y ago
I don't have a facebook account. I had a twitter account that I used for a news feed for many years. Meaning I really didn't tweet, I just read other people tweets. Long story, but my account got suspended. Then it occurred to me that maybe I don't need it any more. It's been 20 days, I really haven't looked backed. It kind of feels like when I quit smoking...
imgabe 9y ago
This is a side effect of their dependence on advertising. It's spillover from the traditional media business model. The consumer doesn't receive any real, tangible benefit from the product. If they did, they would be willing to pay money for it. The only way social media, and much traditional media, can profit is by collecting attention and selling it to advertisers, so that's what they are optimized to do.
- guntars 9y ago
  It's an interesting thought that, if the users really got a value out of Facebook, they would be willing to pay for it. I think people do, but if Facebook asked everyone to pay even just a penny, they would instantly lose hundreds of millions of users. There just isn't a way to charge users directly for occasionally useful products.
  - imgabe 9y ago
    Almost all of the services people actually use Facebook for were things that they paid for in the past. It's certainly harder now that these things are "free", but I think there would be a market for a Facebook clone that said "Hey, just give us $5 a month and we won't sell your data or bombard you with ads". Let's see, keeping up with your friend? That used to be the telephone, for which people paid by the minute - an hour long call with your friend or family in another state might run $5, every time you wanted to talk to them. Or you could mail a letter. Slower, but still costs money for paper, envelopes and a stamp. Wanted to share photos? First you had to buy a camera. Then you had to buy film. Then you had to pay to get the photos developed (extra for duplicates). These are clearly things that are (or at least were) worth money to people. But a stream of random snippets from people you haven't spoken to in 20 years, asinine clickbait, and political rhetoric? Yeah, nobody wants to pay for that.
- MockObject 9y ago
  For years, I would have happily paid $10/mo. for Facebook. It's probably more than the ad revenue they got for ads I blocked and never saw.
cflewis 9y ago
I wrote my thesis on this stuff: http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~ejw/dissertations/Christopher-Lewis-dissertation.pdf http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~ejw/dissertations/Christopher-Lewis... which I turned into a book: http://a.co/3uR0koj http://a.co/3uR0koj I find these sort of articles annoying. I've not read the book referenced in the article, but I've seen some of Tristan Harris and I think he's a smart guy but stuff like the 60 Minutes interview plays into him looking like a hack who is far more interested in self-promotion than in the actual topic. It just doesn't compute that "knowing what drives users" == "addiction manipulation". Yeah, there are slot machine-style techniques that you can use in those areas, but they don't work well or for long and users grow to resent them. But the stuff that keeps getting brought up, like "people on Facebook are desperate for validation and connection" makes it sound like users are forced to be there. They aren't. They're going there because Facebook can provide those things, and those things are meaningful. It's meaningful to me that as I grow older and my time is more and more committed to family and work, that I can connect with my best friends from my home town. That means something to me. I'm at work so I can't write a lot more, but I am super happy to answer questions. I just hate these articles that assume that people are dumb, that social media is inherently vacuous, and that UX designers have some evil necronomicon of addiction recipes. It's cheap journalism. Disclaimer: Everything here is my own opinion and not that of my employer in any way shape or form.
- ouid 9y ago
  who is your employer?
  - cflewis 9y ago
    It's in my profile. I work for Google.
    - 659087 9y ago
      No offense intended, but given Google's "privacy for me but not for thee" secrecy and anti-leak stance, this kind of makes it hard to take some of your claims at face value. I imagine honesty could put you at risk of job loss or worse. If documentation for implementing dark patterns existed at Google, I don't expect you'd be disclosing that information. Full disclosure: I find Google pretty repulsive as a whole, so that could be clouding my thought process here.
tdaltonc 9y ago
I built two tings: One makes apps more addictive, the other makes them less addictive. The one that makes apps more addictive is https://useDopamine.com https://useDopamine.com The one for making thing less addictive is http://youjustneedspace.com http://youjustneedspace.com
magic5227 9y ago
Unlike potato chips? What product is not designed to be as addictive as possible? One could argue they are being more manipulative but this is not unique or special to social media. Anyone remember subliminal messages in advertising? I don't think capturing it as "addictive" is totally fair. If people don't get utility from these hooks, they'll leave. Growth hacking doesn't ensure long-term retention, product utility does.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
smitherfield 9y ago
"You know when you open Instagram or Twitter and it takes a few moments to load updates? That's no accident. Again, the expectation is part of what makes intermittent variable rewards so addictive. This is because, without that three-second delay, Instagram wouldn't feel variable. There's no sense of will I win? because you'd know instantly. So the delay isn't the app loading. It's the cogs spinning on the slot machine." Can anyone confirm if this is true or not? Do social media apps insert `sleep()` calls on startup for gamification reasons? I've only seen that for things like save dialogs, but I also don't work in social media.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  It could happen by accident. They insert a new feature into the app which increases load times a lot. It A/B tests better. Not because the feature itself is good, but just because increased load times do better.
- meagher 9y ago
  This seems especially devious if it's true. (I seriously doubt it is.)
  - 659087 9y ago
    What makes you doubt it? We know these companies have people working to exploit psychological quirks/flaws to increase engagement. We also know that ethical concerns are somewhere below the bottom of the list of considerations when creating/implementing new "features". Given the things we know, I'd be more surprised if this wasn't true.
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    Oh the cute naivete of your innocent optimistic doubts… This sort of thing is well-known, so doubting this particular case is not a well-founded doubt.
    - blauditore 9y ago
      How is this "well-known"? Do you have a source?
failrate 9y ago
One thing that helped me manage my addiction to Facebook was the realization that the number of notifications I get is nearly constant no matter how long the interval between using it is. That is, if I am frequently active, I am reacting to the same number of notifications as if I am occasionally active. The more you react to social media, the more it reacts back. It is a feedback loop.
Clubber 9y ago
I wish writers would stop diluting the word addiction. Go smoke a carton of cigarettes a week for a month and you'll see what addiction feels like. Habitual is the word they are looking for.
meagher 9y ago
1. Delete all social apps from your phone (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, etc.) 2. Turn off push notifications or turn on Do Not Disturb (you can whitelist favorites, all contacts depending on your OS) 3. Be intentional when you pick up your phone
alfon 9y ago
The funny thing is that when I think about this, it always comes down to government regulations; when big corporations (whose interest is always to maximize profits at any cost) are allowed to get inside your pocket, your kitchen, and whatnot, and spend billions in learning how to influence our brain's reward systems without little limitations, I am not surprised they achieve so much success, after all, we are limited by our biology, we like it or not.
misterbowfinger 9y ago
Same could be said of TV/Sports/Games/Any form of leisure The only difference in social media is that we have actual data on how we're spending our data, vs. in the past when we didn't. To suggest that this is new is silly. Perhaps, perhaps there's a point to be made about the scale of social media and how many people it impacts. But it's hard for me to believe, without any data, that it's tangibly harming us more than any other form of leisure.

164 points by zipwitch 9y ago

The headline claims it's "no accident", but couldn't these properties evolve out of a lot of A/B testing without the product managers or engineers realizing the broader behavioral implications?

trebor 9y ago
Sure. But that also doesn't mean it's an accident. They're trying to increase engagement, and what do they have at hand other than addictive techniques?
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  Would it be fair to say addiction is just a state of near maximum engagement?
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  > ...and what do they have at hand other than addictive techniques? Reaching for addictive behavioral models is like reaching for management policies when the hard work and long-term investment into leadership is more sustainable. To directly respond to your question, they can for example move to a facilitation model; engagement is encouraged through longer discourse, or through editorial staff whose job is to summarize viewpoints/trends/patterns that quickly bring newcomers up to speed, but they do not moderate. Another possibility is an aspiration model that shows the small steps and decisions it takes to succeed, rather than orient towards the highlights reel view favored today. Say someone you admire and follow wakes up at 3 am to go work out: the social media connection time-shifts to your timezone, corrects for your distance to your gym, and encourages you via your smartwatch to do the same, in realtime. They eat exactly 100g of oatmeal for breakfast; the social media connection corrects for your body measurements (lean body mass, gender, height, etc.), and says you can eat 90g to follow your aspiration person. Yet another possibility is community-wide goal setting and pursuit. Engagement through groups creating their own layouts, platform-based applications, etc. to both decide and pursue their goals. There are more models to consider. I posit they are not pursued by FB because they decided they cannot monetize those models under their current ad-driven monetization model, which in turn is governed by the capitalist (though not necessarily free market) model they operate under. Relax some or all of those constraints, and the other kinds of engagement models might emerge?
j-c-hewitt 9y ago
It's not really an emergent property but anything driven by selling attention has been engineered and tested to draw attention reliably. From print media to radio and TV the formats are chosen in a way that boosts engagement. From publishing short stories in serial in the 19th century to closing a local news segment with a teaser for a breaking story, these products are designed to be habit forming.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I think it's actually difficult to untangle the two aspects. Especially when you consider the success ... or more accurately lack thereof ... of attempts to deliberately counter the tendency. I think this is fairly deep psychological wiring, and possibly informational dynamics, period. This from someone who detests the practice and would much rather see alternatives.

danso 9y ago

This is a good topic -- I mean, in the sense that I believe the appeal of social media is firmly rooted in our desire for social connection and validation. But that doesn't mean that the design of buttons and interaction-loops can't meaningfully add to the addictive nature. That said, I thought the OP's examples were a little flimsy without citing evidence (that the "few moments to load updates" is deliberately designed around psychology of intermittent variable rewards. I mean, sure, but the time to refresh for updates is not non-existent, even with high speed internet). Examining the simplification of choices to binary is a nice example, IMO, of how to make social media feel less "work": > Following the introduction of Facebook's like button in 2009, YouTube moved to a binary like/dislike format in 2010. Instagram launched that same year and came ready-made with a Like function shaped as a heart. Twitter adopted this same heart-shaped system in 2015, while, in the years since, Silicon Valley has come up with a multitude of new ways to gamify our need for social validation. I've never really liked FB's multiple emotions, though that is partly because of the interface design in which it just takes longer to register one of the other non-Like emotions. Netflix's move from stars to thumbs-up/thumbs-down felt controversial, but I'm pretty sure I've "thumbed" more things in the past month than I had made star ratings in the past year, simply because it was easier. And the data that Netflix provides me in terms of potential movie appeal -- a likelihood described as a percentage, versus a five-star scale -- feels more straightforward, and doesn't seem to significantly differ in accuracy from what I remember of what Netflix used to recommend for me. Roger Ebert's print reviews used a 4-star scale, but his Thumbs-Up/Down with Gene Siskel was still very popular and widely influential. On the topic of social media engagement design, I would love to hear more about the recent Facebook feature that prepends my name before every notification. e.g. "Dan, you have 32 new notifications and 3 pokes today." versus "You have 32 new notifications and 3 pokes today." It's such an easy an obvious feature to implement, I wonder how long it was in the making? e.g. A/B testing, psychology studies, etc. Can't say it's really worked on me except to make notifications feel more of a nag but I'm likely an outlier in that I generally rarely visit FB.

graphitezepp 9y ago
On the topic of "few moments to load updates" while I also could not find anyone claiming to have solid evidence on this practice, FB having a history of being intentionally being anti user with it's android app is pretty well accepted. I wouldn't put it past them, though I suspect it is obfuscated in the form of javascript bloat. Anticipation plays a big role in addiction.

spaceribs 9y ago

I'm surprised they didn't bring up that this is throughly described in this book: http://www.hookmodel.com/ http://www.hookmodel.com/ The ethics chapter is awesome by the way...

hammock 9y ago
This concept is much bigger than a pop science book. For example, the article quotes the author of a different pop science book on the same subject; quotes a different source on ethics; and references intermittent variable rewards which were pioneered by BF Skinner almost 90 years ago.
- spaceribs 9y ago
  Yeah, I was just wondering out loud because it's a source "of the times" from people building these sorts of addictive products knowingly. I just read the book and was surprised it wasn't used as proof that people are knowingly doing it.
  - hammock 9y ago
    Scanning the article one more time, it seems pretty limited in focus to "like" buttons and social validation. You could probably write a whole book on the other types of products and devices :)

Alex3917 9y ago

This article also uses manipulative tricks to maximize your time on page. Notice that each paragraph is relatively short and approximately the same length. This is done purposefully to reduce the cognitive overhead of reading and makes it easier to keep going from one to the next, always with the hope that maybe the next paragraph will deliver some key insight.

slig 9y ago
> always with the hope that maybe the next paragraph will deliver some key insight Or that the user will scroll more and see more ads.
- everybodyknows 9y ago
  Firefox reader mode worked perfectly for me -- no ads.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gavinpc 9y ago
The site is called "Vice"... at least they're forthright about it?
nerdponx 9y ago
> Notice that each paragraph is relatively short and approximately the same length This technique is also called "good writing" in some fields. You see it in newspapers a lot.
- lmm 9y ago
  And most of the things social media do to increase engagement are called "user friendliness" and so on.
- zebrafish 9y ago
  Correct. News style prose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style In disagreement with the parent's snarkiness, I would argue there's a fine line between efficiently structuring written information to convey important news in a time sensitive manner and using bright red numbers to keep users swiping your app all day. Especially when it comes to messing with peoples self-worth and validation! "You may have won $100! Watch these 5 advertisements to find out!" is gross but palatable to me. "People might like you! Refresh the page and view another ad to find out!" is appalling.

typetypetype 9y ago

When I opened facebook this morning, I had almost 10 notifications. I would say 1, maybe 2 of them were related to an actual interaction.

lyra_comms 9y ago

I used to work for a social network. We used to have 3-hour meetings every week to discuss how to get the users addicted and keep them that way. That's why I now help to develop Lyra, an open, ethical conversation platform which respects language and attention. www.hellolyra.com We're also a nonprofit with no marketing budget, so excuse the plug ;)

ikeyany 9y ago
> I used to work for a social network. We used to have 3-hour meetings every week to discuss how to get the users addicted and keep them that way. This makes me curious. How was the company culture while you were there? Did the company treat its employees any better?
- lyra_comms 9y ago
  No, management had no respect for the developers or marketing team. The company eventually folded. But I made some friends and got to learn Ruby!
lyra_comms 9y ago
We just made a demo conversation to show how Lyra works without having to log in :) https://hellolyra.com/c/343 https://hellolyra.com/c/343
- 3xnis 9y ago
  Have you seen the Imzy submission [1]? People have argued that they failed because there was no content on their front page. Why have who chosen to require logins? >1. No front page (for lurkers): They force users to join to be able to view content. The 90/9/1 rule is real, ESPECIALLY in the "community" space. 90% of users just want to lurk and that's just the nature of the internet. It's probably the same here on HN. 9% will participate in some ways, voting, etc. 1% will submit and comment, etc. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411499
  - 9y ago

ar15saveslives 9y ago

For those who want to get rid of facebook addiction without losing facebook account: just unfollow everybody in your "news feed". It is not visible to anybody, you're still friends, but stuff just stops appearing on your fb page. In a couple of weeks you'll end up with empty page, and facebook will disappear from your life, because there's nothing to see there anymore.

localhost3000 9y ago

I built a chrome extension to help me with this addiction. It replaces the distracting parts of social networking sites (like Facebook's News Feed) with a todo app to keep me on task whenever I look to these sites to procrastinate. The app unlocks the site for a configurable amount of time after I've completed my tasks. Also supports Hacker News, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, and Product Hunt. It has helped me a lot with a. Recovering lost productivity and b. Feeling less addicted to these sites. If curious: Todobook https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/todobook/ihbejplhkeifejcpijadinaicidddbde?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/todobook/ihbejplhk...

bencollier49 9y ago
Now if someone can figure out a way for Facebook to rewrite their site in pure WebAssembly, they won't have to worry about pesky programmers like you breaking people's habits.
- ravenstine 9y ago
  That's the most vexing thing I've read in a while. I manage Facebook addiction by not having the app installed on my phone and only using the browser(which works just fine). If they ever compiled their site to WebAssembly, that would be the end of them for me. The whole idea of WebAssembly is simultaneously awesome and scary.
  - bencollier49 9y ago
    Yeah, I think I only just cottoned on to the true appeal of WASM for certain sectors of the web industry.
- hello_newman 9y ago
  I guess I'm new to the whole WebAssembly thing. Could you please elaborate more on that statement? If FB were to do that, how does WebAssembly stop you from doing what OP suggested?
  - 9y ago

makesthingspos 9y ago

I don't like how Reddit only shows the user top posts for past 24 hours or past week. It means one can't easily not look at it today and see what one missed today tomorrow. Web news is generally like this, making it hard to see yesterday's stories today. That's one reason my preferred news source is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

dang 9y ago
You can look at previous HN front pages. Here's yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2017-05-24 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2017-05-24. (We count 'day' using UTC so there's overlap with today depending on where you are.)
- everybodyknows 9y ago
  The article sets of adjacent days intersect. A merging query of recent days would be helpful. Viz: query-front-pages-recent --numdays 7 | sort --key=HN_priority | uniq

r3bl 9y ago

The name Tristan Harris didn't ring a bell at first, but as soon as I heard the slot machine analogy, I immediately recognized his work. I recommend his TEDx talk[0], his essay on the topic[1] and finally, his Time Well Spent[2] project to get a firm grasp about his side of view. (0) https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3 https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peop... (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5rRh9AZf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5rRh9AZf4 (2) http://www.timewellspent.io/ http://www.timewellspent.io/

simmons 9y ago

I'm skeptical about some of the examples provided. (Do we really know that Instagram's 3-second delay is gratuitous?) But I don't doubt that social media is pushing people's mental reward buttons. This seems to be happening not just on social media, but throughout the consumer technology space. The most obvious example is how video games skinner-box the customer, but I've also become cynical of how my industry (television software) is driven by consumer addiction. When I started working on television applications years ago, I saw it as an opportunity to help people experience art. Now I see people spending every spare moment glued to video, and I just feel like a drug dealer. :/

alexchantavy 9y ago

Getting likes is addicting, sure, but scrolling through my newsfeed and seeing autoplay videos with obnoxious text banners in impact font ('me af rn crying-laughing-face-emoji fire 100 100') has made it so that I'm very annoyed with social media.

52-6F-62 9y ago
It's getting a little like this, huh? https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-bpIIJYLwDps/TXzOnVIwaPI/AAAAAAAABlY/aFwAfBf7-tg/s1600/idiocracy-05.jpg https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-bpIIJYLwDps/TXzOnVIwaPI/A... edit: Personally left Facebook a little while ago. It had reduced in my time to the odd few minutes scrolling threw the news feed. It just did nothing for me. I don't miss it.
wutbrodo 9y ago
> Getting likes is addicting, sure, but scrolling through my newsfeed and seeing autoplay videos with obnoxious text banners in impact font ('me af rn crying-laughing-face-emoji fire 100 100') has made it so that I'm very annoyed with social media. I have never understood this complaint. Why don't you just unfollow those people? How many of them could you possibly know? This seems like a problem that can't exist for more than a week or two if it actually bothered you, since unfollowing someone when you see low quality posts like that will clean up your feed pretty rapidly. (Note that unfollow is different from unfriend on Facebook)

chad_strategic 9y ago

I don't have a facebook account. I had a twitter account that I used for a news feed for many years. Meaning I really didn't tweet, I just read other people tweets. Long story, but my account got suspended. Then it occurred to me that maybe I don't need it any more. It's been 20 days, I really haven't looked backed. It kind of feels like when I quit smoking...

imgabe 9y ago

This is a side effect of their dependence on advertising. It's spillover from the traditional media business model. The consumer doesn't receive any real, tangible benefit from the product. If they did, they would be willing to pay money for it. The only way social media, and much traditional media, can profit is by collecting attention and selling it to advertisers, so that's what they are optimized to do.

guntars 9y ago
It's an interesting thought that, if the users really got a value out of Facebook, they would be willing to pay for it. I think people do, but if Facebook asked everyone to pay even just a penny, they would instantly lose hundreds of millions of users. There just isn't a way to charge users directly for occasionally useful products.
- imgabe 9y ago
  Almost all of the services people actually use Facebook for were things that they paid for in the past. It's certainly harder now that these things are "free", but I think there would be a market for a Facebook clone that said "Hey, just give us $5 a month and we won't sell your data or bombard you with ads". Let's see, keeping up with your friend? That used to be the telephone, for which people paid by the minute - an hour long call with your friend or family in another state might run $5, every time you wanted to talk to them. Or you could mail a letter. Slower, but still costs money for paper, envelopes and a stamp. Wanted to share photos? First you had to buy a camera. Then you had to buy film. Then you had to pay to get the photos developed (extra for duplicates). These are clearly things that are (or at least were) worth money to people. But a stream of random snippets from people you haven't spoken to in 20 years, asinine clickbait, and political rhetoric? Yeah, nobody wants to pay for that.
MockObject 9y ago
For years, I would have happily paid $10/mo. for Facebook. It's probably more than the ad revenue they got for ads I blocked and never saw.

cflewis 9y ago

I wrote my thesis on this stuff: http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~ejw/dissertations/Christopher-Lewis-dissertation.pdf http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~ejw/dissertations/Christopher-Lewis... which I turned into a book: http://a.co/3uR0koj http://a.co/3uR0koj I find these sort of articles annoying. I've not read the book referenced in the article, but I've seen some of Tristan Harris and I think he's a smart guy but stuff like the 60 Minutes interview plays into him looking like a hack who is far more interested in self-promotion than in the actual topic. It just doesn't compute that "knowing what drives users" == "addiction manipulation". Yeah, there are slot machine-style techniques that you can use in those areas, but they don't work well or for long and users grow to resent them. But the stuff that keeps getting brought up, like "people on Facebook are desperate for validation and connection" makes it sound like users are forced to be there. They aren't. They're going there because Facebook can provide those things, and those things are meaningful. It's meaningful to me that as I grow older and my time is more and more committed to family and work, that I can connect with my best friends from my home town. That means something to me. I'm at work so I can't write a lot more, but I am super happy to answer questions. I just hate these articles that assume that people are dumb, that social media is inherently vacuous, and that UX designers have some evil necronomicon of addiction recipes. It's cheap journalism. Disclaimer: Everything here is my own opinion and not that of my employer in any way shape or form.

ouid 9y ago
who is your employer?
- cflewis 9y ago
  It's in my profile. I work for Google.
  - 659087 9y ago
    No offense intended, but given Google's "privacy for me but not for thee" secrecy and anti-leak stance, this kind of makes it hard to take some of your claims at face value. I imagine honesty could put you at risk of job loss or worse. If documentation for implementing dark patterns existed at Google, I don't expect you'd be disclosing that information. Full disclosure: I find Google pretty repulsive as a whole, so that could be clouding my thought process here.

tdaltonc 9y ago

I built two tings: One makes apps more addictive, the other makes them less addictive. The one that makes apps more addictive is https://useDopamine.com https://useDopamine.com The one for making thing less addictive is http://youjustneedspace.com http://youjustneedspace.com

magic5227 9y ago

Unlike potato chips? What product is not designed to be as addictive as possible? One could argue they are being more manipulative but this is not unique or special to social media. Anyone remember subliminal messages in advertising? I don't think capturing it as "addictive" is totally fair. If people don't get utility from these hooks, they'll leave. Growth hacking doesn't ensure long-term retention, product utility does.

deleted 9y ago

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smitherfield 9y ago

"You know when you open Instagram or Twitter and it takes a few moments to load updates? That's no accident. Again, the expectation is part of what makes intermittent variable rewards so addictive. This is because, without that three-second delay, Instagram wouldn't feel variable. There's no sense of will I win? because you'd know instantly. So the delay isn't the app loading. It's the cogs spinning on the slot machine." Can anyone confirm if this is true or not? Do social media apps insert `sleep()` calls on startup for gamification reasons? I've only seen that for things like save dialogs, but I also don't work in social media.

Houshalter 9y ago
It could happen by accident. They insert a new feature into the app which increases load times a lot. It A/B tests better. Not because the feature itself is good, but just because increased load times do better.
meagher 9y ago
This seems especially devious if it's true. (I seriously doubt it is.)
- 659087 9y ago
  What makes you doubt it? We know these companies have people working to exploit psychological quirks/flaws to increase engagement. We also know that ethical concerns are somewhere below the bottom of the list of considerations when creating/implementing new "features". Given the things we know, I'd be more surprised if this wasn't true.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  Oh the cute naivete of your innocent optimistic doubts… This sort of thing is well-known, so doubting this particular case is not a well-founded doubt.
  - blauditore 9y ago
    How is this "well-known"? Do you have a source?

failrate 9y ago

One thing that helped me manage my addiction to Facebook was the realization that the number of notifications I get is nearly constant no matter how long the interval between using it is. That is, if I am frequently active, I am reacting to the same number of notifications as if I am occasionally active. The more you react to social media, the more it reacts back. It is a feedback loop.

Clubber 9y ago

I wish writers would stop diluting the word addiction. Go smoke a carton of cigarettes a week for a month and you'll see what addiction feels like. Habitual is the word they are looking for.

meagher 9y ago

1. Delete all social apps from your phone (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, etc.) 2. Turn off push notifications or turn on Do Not Disturb (you can whitelist favorites, all contacts depending on your OS) 3. Be intentional when you pick up your phone

alfon 9y ago

The funny thing is that when I think about this, it always comes down to government regulations; when big corporations (whose interest is always to maximize profits at any cost) are allowed to get inside your pocket, your kitchen, and whatnot, and spend billions in learning how to influence our brain's reward systems without little limitations, I am not surprised they achieve so much success, after all, we are limited by our biology, we like it or not.

misterbowfinger 9y ago

Same could be said of TV/Sports/Games/Any form of leisure The only difference in social media is that we have actual data on how we're spending our data, vs. in the past when we didn't. To suggest that this is new is silly. Perhaps, perhaps there's a point to be made about the scale of social media and how many people it impacts. But it's hard for me to believe, without any data, that it's tangibly harming us more than any other form of leisure.