There are a lot of people talking about the addictive nature of social media platforms, especially the idea of doom scrolling.
That endless feed is a geat design for these platforms, you never really get to the end of it. There’s always another post, another video, another opinion, another tiny hit of something. Good, bad, funny, annoying, useful, pointless. It just keeps coming. Very good engineering design that does make these platforms "addictive", not sure if addictive is the right term, or whether they are just designed to make it hard to stop!
I had a thought earlier about whether social media platforms are built with some of the same ideas as slot machines.
Slot machines can be addictive because they offer the possibility of a “win”. You pull the lever, or press the button, and maybe this time something good happens. Maybe this time you get the reward.
And I wonder whether doom scrolling works in a similar way.
You keep scrolling because the next great piece of content might be just one swipe away. Most of what you see might be rubbish, irritating, repetitive, or forgettable, but every now and then you find something that makes you laugh, teaches you something, shocks you, or gives you that little feeling of reward, that little hit of endorphins, which is probably the same as that slot machine win.
This is only a seed post for now, because I need to read more about it properly, but I do think there’s something interesting here. The endless scroll might not just be convenient design. It might be one of the reasons these platforms are so hard to put down.
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