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Social Media Copies Gambling Methods 'To Create Psychological Cravings' (theguardian.com)
Social media platforms are using the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies and ingrain their products in the lives of their users, experts warn. From a report: These methods are so effective they can activate similar mechanisms as cocaine in the brain, create psychological cravings and even invoke "phantom calls and notifications" where users sense the buzz of a smartphone, even when it isn't really there. "Facebook, Twitter and other companies use methods similar to the gambling industry to keep users on their sites," said Natasha Schull, the author of Addiction by Design, which reported how slot machines and other systems are designed to lock users into a cycle of addiction. "In the online economy, revenue is a function of continuous consumer attention -- which is measured in clicks and time spent."
"But is this really a bad thing? If there's something I want to use, why not enjoy using it more?"
Because its not something you actually want to use that much. You've been conditioned to want to use it more than you objectively wanted to.
"The only issue I see is when people don't realize something has an addictive element to it"
Some things are inherently addictive; education and social support mechanisms are the only reasonable response.
Some things are designed to be addictive. Or that are inherently slightly addictive are honed until they are maximally addictive. A lot of social media, and free2play games are in this category, and this is evil. It's basically hacking people's brains.
There is nothing wrong with, say, making the user interface to Social media more intuitive, and more pleasant to use. There is nothing wrong with adding features that are genuinely useful.
But consider some of the tactics in play. If you don't login for a few days for example, you might get messages saying 'someone said something about you... login to find out what!' is that REALLY helpful... if i wanted to login i would have. If someone really said something so important that you had to reach beyond the platform to send me a an email just to let me know... why isn't what they said IN THE EMAIL ?? The answer because its NOT about being a feature to my benefit... its trying to lure me back; trying to trigger that craving.
And 'gamification' with achievements and scores or for example 'reputation' ... creates feedback loops in lots of people where they want to 'finish' or 'have the most' or something, and then they stop doing other activities to spend more time 'playing this game'. But this game really isn't that fun, and its been designed not to be as fun as possible while you play it, but to be as addictive as possible so you never stop playing it even after you realize its shit you still keep doing it... because that's what addiction IS. And it only exists precisely to be addictive so it can keep your eyeballs.
The problem is that all of these platforms are businesses and the most successful will win out over their competition. This naturally leads businesses to stumble across this behavior even if they don't understand what they're actually doing and for those businesses which don't follow suit to lose out. There are a lot of games that are essentially Skinner boxes, but I don't think anyone sat down in the 90's and intentionally built them that way. Instead they probably tried out a lot of things and discovered what felt the most pleasurable to them and other developers saw the success and followed suit. Eventually some people more well-versed in the scientific literature noticed some similarities between the research and these games (or other domains) and pointed this out. People were already doing it without actively understanding what they were doing, but at this point I think there were some developers that realized that could build even better boxes instead of the sloppy approximations that had been created up until then. Now you've got shitty microtransaction games that cost perhaps a few tens of thousand of dollars to develop, but can pull in millions because they've been purpose built to addict people.
I'd be less worried about it if Twitter were trying to create a useful communication platform. That, however, appears to be something of an afterthought. We can certainly use these techniques for ill, but if you're using them to get people to exercise more, eat better, etc. I have a hard time finding fault in using such cognitive tricks. Hell, I've intentionally used some of them on myself in order to adjust my behavior. The only way I view it as dishonest or deceitful is to do it to someone else without explaining to them what is being done and how it works. If someone wants to keep buying game coins, collecting virtual points, amassing followers, etc. after the nature of what they're doing has been explained to them, I have to conclude that such is their own business.