This video explores the reasons behind the increasing trend of people quitting social media. It examines how social media platforms have evolved from tools of connection to potentially harmful environments, driven by a focus on profit over user well-being. The video discusses the design choices, algorithmic changes, and psychological impacts that contribute to this dissatisfaction and the growing movement to disconnect.
The introduction of advertising shifted the focus of social media platforms from user connection to profit generation. Once platforms went public, they needed to monetize, leading them to run ads. This scaled up to a model of growing larger, showing more ads, getting more users, and holding user attention longer to gather data for selling more expensive ads. The core business model became converting user attention into revenue, with the advertiser as the primary customer.
Infinite scroll is a design feature that replaces natural breaks on websites with a never-ending feed of content. Before its existence, websites had pages that allowed users to decide whether to continue or stop.
Asa Rascin, the interface designer who conceived this idea in 2006, regrets creating it because it was adopted and used "not for people, but against people." He realized that while optimizing an interface for an individual might seem morally good, being blind to how it would be used globally was "globally amoral at best or maybe even a little immoral." He felt it could quietly steal hundreds of hours from users' lives annually without them realizing it.
According to Johan Hari, algorithms are not inherently biased towards negative or outrageous content with any intention. Their sole concern is user engagement, specifically, "Will you keep scrolling?" The bias arises from a quirk of human behavior: people tend to stare at negative and outrageous content for significantly longer than they do at positive and calm content. Therefore, algorithms, optimized for maximizing scrolling time, naturally surface more of the content that captures and holds attention, which often turns out to be the negative or outrageous material.
