this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
1370 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37739 readers
832 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's seriously disturbing from a mental health perspective. They're doing exactly the same things Facebook did that made it most damaging
The app always gives you something, it will add filler (in the form of front-page content) to your feed, changing the reward schedule and (very literally) training you to doom scroll longer with fewer posts you actually care about. It also gives the opportunity to shove something controversial in your face, which drives outrage based engagement
It also always gives you messages - if you didn't get actual replies, it gives you sub suggestions or puts random posts in your notifications to try to get you back in the app
They also been doing A/B testing to try to maximize in-app time
It's a literal recipe for addiction
They want you to experience reddit the way THEY want you to, not how YOU decide to. Put it like it is: predatory.
Enabling paging in Apollo to stop myself from doomscrolling was a huge thing for me. Reaching the end of a page was a reminder and I could actively decide if I want to go further down the procrastination route or not. Guess what option is not available neither on web or the official app...
This actually just helped me make the connection. Whenever I was consciously trying to close the app because I had something else to do I would always make sure to say "one more" then not scroll even a little past otherwise I'd want to keep scrolling to see what was hidden.
If I'm in this situation again I'll make sure to turn paging on. I am not sure mlem (lemmy app) supports this, though.