How Social Media is Built for Addiction
I wrote my thesis on this stuff: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.soe.ucsc.edu&#x2F;~ejw&#x2F;dissertations&#x2F;Christopher-Lewis-dissertation.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.soe.ucsc.edu&#x2F;~ejw&#x2F;dissertations&#x2F;Christopher-Lewis...</a><p>which I turned into a book: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;a.co&#x2F;3uR0koj" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;a.co&#x2F;3uR0koj</a><p>I find these sort of articles annoying. I&#x27;ve not read the book referenced in the article, but I&#x27;ve seen some of Tristan Harris and I think he&#x27;s a smart guy but stuff like the 60 Minutes interview plays into him looking like a hack who is far more interested in self-promotion than in the actual topic.<p>It just doesn&#x27;t compute that &quot;knowing what drives users&quot; == &quot;addiction manipulation&quot;. Yeah, there <i>are</i> slot machine-style techniques that you can use in those areas, but they don&#x27;t work well or for long and users grow to resent them.<p>But the stuff that keeps getting brought up, like &quot;people on Facebook are desperate for validation and connection&quot; makes it sound like users are forced to be there. They aren&#x27;t. They&#x27;re going there <i>because</i> Facebook <i>can</i> provide those things, and those things are meaningful. It&#x27;s meaningful to me that as I grow older and my time is more and more committed to family and work, that I can connect with my best friends from my home town. That means something to me.<p>I&#x27;m at work so I can&#x27;t write a lot more, but I am super happy to answer questions. I just hate these articles that assume that people are dumb, that social media is inherently vacuous, and that UX designers have some evil necronomicon of addiction recipes. It&#x27;s cheap journalism.<p>Disclaimer: Everything here is my own opinion and not that of my employer in any way shape or form.