These are the tricks social media platforms use to trap you

When Twitter or Facebook notify us with a new notification, the brain’s reward circuit is activated, which gives us a pleasant dose of dopamine. You get your mobile to check the weather forecast but you end up checking out Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Slack before going back to Facebook. Immediately after checking all notifications, posts and comments, you begin to wonder why you picked up the device in the first place. All websites and applications want us to spend time using them. The usual way to do this is to offer a useful and attractive product, but given people addiction to using their phones, sometimes people do not even need that to get hooked. Often, it is not enough and websites, applications and social networks rely on an architecture that turns mobile phones into black holes of time. A time that, on average, exceeds two hours a day per person in the case of social networks, according to Statista data. In essence, social networks are becoming “the new state of normal,” a parallel world that is quickly being recognized as the place to be while ignoring the real world. It is there where the depressed go to learn about the perfect lives of celebrities and their friends. Given this scenario, we run the risk of not asking ourselves what forces us to share, just as we open the tap for water to come out, without wondering how it has reached our kitchen. It is time to recognize that we often tweet or enter Facebook because of mechanisms that we are not always aware of. You don’t know what to look for? Let us advise you. Imagine a newcomer on YouTube. Its users upload 500 hours of video to the platform every minute. The algorithm recommends content from the front page; maybe some music, or the latest video about fitness or electronic devices. Every time we click on one of those videos, the right column is filled with new recommendations with similar clips. Although the platform does not detail how its algorithm works, we know what personal characteristics take into account, how many people have seen each video before and if they have seen whole or only in part of them. The algorithm is so effective that 70% of the time we spend on the platform is thanks to these recommendations, according to the company’s own data. Then, we must also consider that as soon as you finish a video, the next one begins. It may even be too effective: by proposing videos that we like, biases and views are reinforced. In what is called the “rabbit hole” effect, in reference to Alice in Wonderland, it is easy that after watching a couple of videos we continue to add to what we believe and that which makes us feel better. The recommendation algorithm is not exclusive to YouTube. Facebook also uses its own to decide what posts or what news it shows us. TikTok, a new social network composed of short videos, follows a similar strategy, with a personalized recommendations label. The application “analyzes each video and follows user behavior in order to provide an endless waterfall of options, optimized to keep your attention, of course.” The dopamine factor In 1971, psychologist Michael Zeiler carried out a series of experiments with pigeons. When they pressed a button with their beak, a compartment with seeds opened. During some tests, Zeiler programmed the button to always give food. In other cases, he only gave food once in a while. These animals pressed the button more insistently when the food appeared between 50% and 70% of the time. That is, when they were not sure if they would have a prize or not. When Twitter or Facebook notify us with a new notification, the brain’s reward circuit is activated, which gives us a pleasant dose of dopamine. They are our prize, our seeds. When a photo we have published adds hundreds of likes on Instagram is an incentive to continue sharing content. But, as in the case of pigeons and as the psychologist Adam Alter tells in his Irresistible book, so is the following publication that goes unnoticed. This unpredictability of the response encourages us to share more content in search of more prizes. On top of that, notifications not only sent us when we have published content and it is being shared and commented on. They are also one of the ways that social networks have to get our attention periodically. On Facebook, for example, there are notifications when a message arrives, when a friend posts in a group we are in, when a group organizes an event, when we tag or are tagged and so on. In total there are 15 different categories of notifications (friends, videos, groups … etc, that we can receive, either in the application, by email or even by text message. The spider web that catches you and doesn’t leave you alone Harry Brignull, an engineer specialized in user experience, coined the term dark pattern, with which he refers to how websites and applications are related to the use of our biases and preconceived ideas. For example, some websites still put the cancel button in green and accept in red, trusting that we will not read the word inside each box. Others only give two options when it comes to avoiding notifications: accept them or click on “not […] Read the rest below at the source link