Racing Turtles

it really is sad that algorithmic feeds have broken peoples' brains so badly. people really do come here and go "wait, i have to CHOOSE who i follow to get posts on my dashboard???" because a social media site working the way they were always supposed to work is so alien now. people will assume the site is a ghost town because they don't follow enough active users. there has to be a constant stream of New Content every time you refresh, regardless of whether or not said Content is any good

you can never just get caught up on your feed and put the phone down, because that's not what tiktok and insta and twitter and facebook have conditioned users to expect. putting the phone down means you're not looking at more ads and generating revenue for the site. when you venture off of the following feed twitter's algorithm is very transparently designed to show you bait tweets and other things that will make you angry, because getting people to argue is one of the easiest ways to drive engagement. it's no wonder threads just launched with no following feed whatsoever, just an infinite stream of algorithmic slop. these sites don't want you to curate your own experience because then you might develop a healthier relationship with them. that's not what they want. they want addiction

For those asking, this is a very nice primer on the subject:

and you know I'm always gonna trumpet Jesse Meadows on all things critical adhd studies:

and in fact Jesse is working on a book on this subject, so please subscribe to their substack to follow them as the project develops!

edit: oh shit they just dropped a new piece on the subject!

The myth that we all need "dopamine detoxes" from social media apps (because they're supposedly TOO pleasurable and TOO rewarding to use) only serves the interests of social media companies.

These apps overstimulate, isolate, and depress us. Our problem isnt too much pleasure. Pleasure is not the enemy.

#who is getting pleasure from social media is my question(via@xaveria)

Yeah, and like, compulsive behavior is not a pleasure thing. Nobody who played WoW for hours everyday for a decade did it cuz they were having fun. They did it cuz it felt like progress; cuz each quest was this (intentionally)frustrating but trivial little Task that sent you out to see some new place and maybe discover some resources for your crafting and, no matter how frustrating it might be, it would EVENTUALLY be done, and you could move on to something else(until they made them all into dailies, at which point it became a job-simulator and people started leaving en-masse). The emotional payoff is more like scratching an itch or working a job than anything else; it's "THAT'S Over with!" not happiness.

And you see the same manipulative design in social media. This is why Twitter started throwing all that "For You" stuff into your feed(so you'd never catch up with it and "be done" for the day, so you'd spend more time on the app), this is why Instagram shows you, like, 5 posts from the accounts you're following and then jumps to showing you random accounts, and it's why TikTok's interface is the frustrating autoload horrorshow IT is(I've never had an account on that but I have clicked through to a vid a few times).

None of this is to induce "pleasure"; it's to INTERRUPT your brain's "task complete" function so you spend more time on the site, and far from making you feel good this actually stresses you the fuck out cuz, when a task takes more time than your brain thinks it should that causes Frustration, and the longer the task takes to complete after that point, the more Frustrating it gets.

what farming items in mmorpgs has taught me: i used to think using ice trays to make ice cubes was free but after thinking about it i have to pay the electric bill to power the freezer so every moment that i’m not freezing new trays of ice cubes is a moment that i’m underutilizing the freezer and increasing the cost of ice cubes. i have to constantly swap out ice trays for new ice cubes on an hourly rotation on a 24 hour basis or else i won’t produce the maximum amount of ice cubes possible and will underutilize the full potential of my electric bill. i need to stop using all other appliances and utilities in my home to make more ice cubes