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How They Hook You on the Internet
Over here, Ricochet member Susan the Buju laments, sort of, the power of the Ricochet addiction. We here at Ricochet HQ, of course, don’t see it her way at all. We’d like to get more people addicted. (And soon, too!)
If you’d like to get the addiction, click here. But she has a point about the addictive properties of the web. From Aeon:
As a consultant to Silicon Valley startups, [Nir] Eyal helps his clients mimic what he calls the ‘narcotic-like properties’ of sites such as Facebook and Pinterest. His goal, Eyal told Business Insider, is to get users ‘continuing through the same basic cycle. Forever and ever.’ In Hooked, he sets out to answer a simple question: ‘How is it that these companies, producing little more than bits of code displayed on a screen, can seemingly control users’ minds?’
The answer, he argues, is a simple four-step design model. Think of Facebook’s news feed. The first two steps are straightforward – you encounter a trigger (whatever prompts you to scroll down on the feed) and an opportunity for action (you actually scroll down). Critically, the outcome of this action shouldn’t be predictable – instead, it should offer a variable reward, such that the user is never quite sure what she’s going to get. On Facebook, that might be a rewarding cat video, or an obnoxious post from an acquaintance.
On Ricochet, that could be just commenting away. (Or arguing about gay marriage, Trump, refugees, whatever…) Find out for yourself here.
We use the terms “addict” and “get hooked” in a lighthearted way. But people seem to be actually hooked, in a physical sense:
Natasha Schüll is an anthropologist at New York University who studies human-machine interactions. She fielded requests from interested Silicon Valley designers after the publication of Addiction by Design (2012), her ethnography of gambling addicts and machine designers in Las Vegas.
People expect gambling addicts to care about winning. But according to Schüll, compulsive gamblers pursue a kind of trance-like focus, which she calls ‘the machine zone’. In this zone, Schüll writes, ‘time, space and social identity are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process’.
There are differences between a slot machine and a website, of course. With the former, the longer you’re engaged by variable rewards, the more money you lose. For a tech company in the attention economy, the longer you’re engaged by variable rewards, the more time you spend online, and the more money they make through ad revenue. While we tend to describe the internet in terms of distraction, what’s being developed, when you check email or Facebook neurotically, or get sucked into Candy Crush, is actually a particular kind of focus, one that prioritises digital motion and reward.
In the gambling world, people tend to blame the addicts. Overwhelmingly, the academic literature on gambling has focused on the minds and behaviours of addicts themselves. What Schüll argues is that there’s something in between the gambler and the game – a particular human-machine interaction, the terms of which have been deliberately engineered.
Yet we keep blaming people. As Schüll puts it: ‘It just seems very duplicitous to design with the goal of capturing attention, and then to put the whole burden onto the individual.’
Ah. There is is. You knew this was coming, right? It’s not my fault!
It might be better to ban certain features of compulsive design outright. The most obvious target here is continuous or infinite scroll. Right now, sites such as Facebook and Twitter automatically and continuously refresh the page; it’s impossible to get to the bottom of the feed. Analogously, Tinder will let you swipe left or right pretty much indefinitely. YouTube, Netflix and similar sites automatically load the next video or show.
Ban certain features? Never! Believe me, it’s hard to run a web business these days. And when we here at Ricochet get a little more cash in the bank, I’m going to be approaching Mr. Eyal for help. We need more addicts around here.
Oh, and if you’d like to be one, too, click here.
Published in General
Pssst…
Look…
Down here
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Keep Scrolling
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Come on…
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Keep scrolling…
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A little bit further…
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Almost there…
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BANNED.
This addict has caved–here I am, the second comment on your post! And I have no one to blame but myself. Happy??!!
P.S. Not all addictions are bad . . .
What are you talking about?
I really struggle with this. I feel like I’m looking for something–the solution to the nation’s ills mostly, and that I might find them online, but of course, I never do. Thanks to you and Susan for bringing this up, Rob. I don’t have an addictive personality in general, but I do need to fight this. It’s been nice knowing y’all! (Kidding–but need to do more of the daily work of the world and scroll much less.)
What gets people hooked on Ricochet isn’t anything that can really be programmed for. It’s the personalities of the membership, I think. Take away my 25 favorite members and the appeal of Ricochet drops by at least half.
You have 24 others!?
Men are so fickle.
I recently reviewed an interesting book on the mechanics of addiction: The Biology of Desire. It models addiction as a compulsive habit – one with negative consequences. It is the same pattern followed with productive habits, but even though the mechanics are the same those are not considered addiction.
Seawriter
Ricochet is a choice! (And as choices go, a darn good one!)
The anthropologist went to the wrong city. Reno, Nevada should have been her destination for slot game design (and poker). Right there, her credibility is gone–she just wanted to goto ‘Vegas.
Perhaps your best work ever…
A Songwriter would say that.
I kinda walked right into that one, didn’t I?
OMG . . . did EJHill just get bested?
*air high-five*