The Slot Machine in Your Pocket

YouTube and Reddit are incredibly valuable resources. For example, without YouTube, I would’ve never managed to restore my bike or properly tie a necktie. Similarly, on Reddit, there are many users discussing and exchanging opinions on almost every topic imaginable. It’s not Wikipedia, but if you’re interested in whether a phone is good or not, you’ll likely find an insightful discussion on Reddit about it. It’s insane that we can wield such powerful tools, almost completely free.

Yes, almost. I guess most people nowadays know what you’re paying with when you are visiting these websites: your attention. Marketers pay YouTube, Reddit, and whatever other platform money to show you their products. That’s the core business. And with every working business model, people try to optimize it. For these platforms, that means capturing more of your attention, and one way to do so is to show you more content that is interesting to you. That’s exactly what these infamous algorithms try to find out: what can we show you next to keep you engaged.

However, if you become too good at this game of manipulating how people want to spend their time, you’ve effectively created a machine that’s good at making people addicted to it. I know this sounds drastic, but you can think of it like this. When interacting with a slot machine, you’re pulling a lever, sometimes followed by a reward. This process is called intermittent reinforcement. Instead of getting a reward every time, you’re only sometimes receiving one. This form of reinforcement is much more effective regarding response rate (how often you want to execute the behavior) and resistance to extinction (how long it takes to unlearn the behavior) than if you got a reward every time. This can also be explained in terms of dopamine release. According to the reward prediction error, the dopamine signal increases when you receive an unexpected reward.

All right, enough about slot machines. What about YouTube and Reddit? You don’t pull any levers there. No, but you scroll. You visit the website, and it recommends you an unexpectedly hilarious video. Awesome, you share it with your friends. You start scrolling, and most videos aren’t as hilarious or interesting as the previous one. They’re not bad, but also not IT. Then all of a sudden, there is another super interesting video. I’ll end my case here.

I wrote this blog post because it’s also a personal topic of mine. As I said, I love YouTube and Reddit, I’m a curious person by nature, but I also found it extremely hard to find a good mode of interacting with them without losing control. I think the first step to regaining control is understanding what actually makes it so hard. In my next blog post I want to explain what else I did to find a responsible use of these apps.