You have to wade past a ton shit you’d never purposely look at, get side tracked along the way, and still never see everything you originally set out to see. It’s a never ending loot box for content.
I’ve never thought about it like that but you’re right. I definitely have that same burst of serotonin from finding a great post that you get when you get a rare.
Pages are so much better than infinite scroll
and ye, fuck youtube for making 80% of results be shorts, I’m not looking for this bullshit
Why do you have the bot flag set?
There is only one headline I’m looking for 🪦
Wow, this might be beyond the scope of a showerthought meme because you’ve got my gears turning. This actually makes sense – design is a series of decisions at the end of the day, never thought about it in the interaction element and intention sense. Algorithms of doom fucking everything up, puts this interaction element into dark pattern territory.
Right?
Stripped down to its core it’s innocent enough. It’s just the capacity for getting deep into the dopamine feedback loop that’s worrisome. Meta’s sites, Reddit, a ton of wannabe sites use it to its full potential. People can spend all day scrolling, brain fried, emotionally tapped out, and still feeling hungry and dissatisfied.
yup, doomscrolling is basically waiting for something alluring to grab our attention
This suggests that I expect to win or even gain anything when I open any social media site/app.
And yet here you are. 😛
So are pages, if you’re on an enshittified attention-economy website
I think it’s more useful to think of it in terms of a Skinner box. Loot boxes, gacha, and most other mechanics in modern games are all variants of operant conditioning, and doomscrolling is a different, but equally insidious, manifestation thereof. The way the Skinner Box gets you is by giving you little, consistent hits of pleasure, keeping you performing a rote act, and so you get conditioned to perform that act continuously, even after you no longer derive pleasure, or after the actual reward has been removed. This is precisely what doomscrolling is.
