have you ever noticed how when you open Instagram or TikTok, all the notification symbols are red, even though that's not a common color used within the rest of those apps? Well, that is a very deliberate decision because psychological studies have shown that people respond quicker to red than any other color because we associate it with danger that requires immediate action. And like, have you ever come back from a holiday when you've not been using your phone as much, and all of a sudden you have way more notifications from X than usual, often about stuff that you've never even interacted with? These are called recapture notifications designed to make you feel like you've missed out on so much that you need to get right back into a new session as fast as possible and reintroduce the habit of using the app regularly. Like, if you don't use Facebook anymore but you still have the app installed, I bet this is like 99% of your relationship with the app. It's a very similar trick to what shopping websites use when you abandon

your basket halfway, and unless you've been very literally living under a rock for the last few years, you'll have guessed why social media companies do this stuff. Their entire business model is the attention economy. Get more attention, they get to show more better-targeted ads, they get more money. But here's the thing: if you've seen one of the thousands of videos all about social media addiction, they tend to boil it down to dopamine. They basically say that in order to get this attention, companies have got to persistently make the user feel good. They've got to persistently stimulate a user's production of dopamine, the reward chemical in their brain. But that is not the full story. Like, I mean, for example, you know how some apps have unique notification sounds and vibration patterns? Like Slack, for instance. Clearly, Slack wants you to know when you have an important work alert. But then how come apps like X don't use custom sounds and instead resort to your phone's default notification sound? I'm getting there, but the point is the reality of what these

tech companies actually do to keep you addicted is quite a lot deeper and to be really frank more twisted than it first seems. The psychology is very much not oh, let's just make our app really good so people can't stop using it. So, let's talk about it and then how you can be one step ahead. So, here's the thing with dopamine. The common perception is that when good things happen, your brain releases dopamine, you feel good. But dopamine isn't just triggered when good things happen. Research conducted by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that when monkeys were taught that if they pulled a lever when a light came on, they would receive a treat. Their dopamine levels actually spiked more when the light came on than when they actually received the treat, revealing that dopamine is, in fact, more involved in the anticipation of a reward. And biologically, this makes sense 'cause imagine if you only got that reward when you succeed at something. You'd never learn how to do anything that you

couldn't immediately perfect on your first try. Dopamine isn't there in our brains to make our existences filled with joy. Dopamine is there to drive goal-oriented behavior that makes us want to aim for things and improve ourselves. But here's the real kicker. When Spolski varied the experiment, randomizing the likelihood so that monkeys would only receive the treat on average 50% of the time when they pulled the lever, their dopamine levels skyrocketed to double, even though they were only receiving the reward half the time. This is called variable intermittent reward, and it's one of the most fundamental principles that social media devs use to keep you hooked. Think about your own life. Have you ever had a crush on someone, and it feels like you can't think of anything except when you're going to get that next text from them? Now let's say that you're in this zone, and you hear a Slack work notification while you're waiting. Your brain doesn't light up because you know it's not them. Well, I guess now

In my case, it actually could be because Rich is on our team, but you get what I mean. But then, let's say that you hear your phone's default notification sound. Your heart's going to start pumping. You'll immediately drop everything you're doing, all your priorities, and lunge for your phone, only to find it's Twitter letting you know that your friend tweeted a pic of their six out of ten Lune. But do you see the point? Social media doesn't addict you by always giving you something good, which is the common perception. It addicts you by making you feel like there can be something great, that if you just keep checking those notifications and keep scrolling just for that little bit longer, you might win the lottery. And so, that's why many social media platforms actually specifically choose to not have their own unique notification sounds. It's to social media's advantage to have their notifications blend in with each other. It's the same way that Milo always makes the same noise for everything, no matter what the problem is, which compels me to always have to get up, go to him.

and find out in case it is something serious. He knows what he's doing, and you might be thinking of this point. Hey, this concept reminds me of something. Oh yeah, it's called gambling, and that's not a coincidence. Now you know where else you find variable intermittent rewards in abundance: slot machines. Slot machines might not look like they have the biggest stakes. I was in Vegas recently. I spent quite a while strolling around casinos, and it was fascinating because while on the betting tables where people were playing poker and blackjack, the minimum amount you could bet was between $10 and $50 per turn, depending on the time of day. On the slot machines, you could bet with as little as 5 cents, and yet slot machines still generate over half of an average casino's revenue. How well? Because they have been fine-tuned for decades to be the perfect attention traps, just like social media. Their profit is directly proportional to time spent on device, and just like social media, they've gotten very good at maximizing that on a traditional slot.

machine. You pull a lever to spin, and just like the monkeys in Spolsky's experiment, you're fed with a variable intermittent reward. You have no idea when you're going to win big; all you know is that if that lever is pulled enough times, then eventually, at some point in the future, it will pay off with a large jackpot. And so, it makes it really hard to walk away from, even if you might have to spend 10 times as much as the jackpot amount to actually win it. Now, where do you notice that exact same action and feeling? Oh yeah, refreshing your feed on a social platform. There's something more exciting and, oh come on, this time for sure, about pulling that screen down to refresh than just clicking a refresh button. How often do you find yourself just going for one more spin? I'm not going to lie to you; sometimes I do this action just for fun because of how tactile and responsive they've made the feeling of it. And yes, that is not an accident either. And SL machines have only gotten better over

time at engineering your attention nowadays. They are so intelligent. They give people options of how to gamble to give them the illusion of control, which makes them take bigger risks. When people face big losses and are ready to leave, the machines kick up and start teasing them with very near misses, making them feel like they're working towards a goal and they're now so close to getting it. And the machines are nowadays, they're also processing in real time. New slot machines are fitted with powerful chips that can subtly manipulate the odds as you play to keep the up and down smoother, to make sure you stay on the device as long as possible. Trust me, the more you look into it, the scarier it gets. But in the exact same way, social feeds are using the exact same type of highly secretive, highly complex algorithms to decide what content to show you, to keep your attention for as long as possible. And probably the worst current offender of this is X. Ever since Elon Musk bought the platform, researchers have found with what you and

I already see on our timelines every day that the new algorithm is designed to actively promote content that will make you angry and disgusted and therefore more likely to engage and keep scrolling. It's slowly deprioritizing what you came on there to see in the first place and prioritizing the sticky web that's going to keep you on there for as long as possible to the point where I mean normal comment sections barely even exist anymore. When you click a public post and scroll down, you're essentially just in yet another feed within the feed. But here is where it gets really dark 'cause it goes beyond the slot machines. Casinos themselves are designed to eliminate any and all stimuli that might prompt someone to make a choice outside of their games because if you can make a choice, then you can choose to leave. Like just as an example, almost all walkways you find in a casino are gently curved without right angles so that you can remain in that mindless Flow State instead of reaching a stopping point where you might actually mentally check

in with yourself and decide that you want to go. This same logic is crucial to social media design. Once you have a user's attention, you don't want them deciding to leave, so you might as well stop them from even thinking about it. And to achieve that, what every single one of these social media platforms does is eliminate any and all friction in the experience to make the easiest thing to do in any given moment to just keep floating along. A great example of this is TikTok's user interface. The second you enter the app, a video is playing. You don't need to choose what to click on. The vertical video takes up most of your screen automatically, whereas usually to full-screen a video, you'd have to either consciously switch your phone to a different orientation or click a fiddly button in the corner. All of the important toggles for interacting with the content and going deeper into the app are at the bottom of the screen, right where most people's thumb would naturally be. So you don't need to choose to dive deeper into the experience and

As you probably guessed, the only action that is made less easy is leaving. Like when you're on Android and you're trying to use the back gesture, you actually have to swipe away once to indicate that you want to leave, and then the app will actually show you a completely different Tik Tok to try and grab you again. And then you have to swipe away a second time to confirm it. And crucially, you can scroll through videos infinitely. It will never end with every single piece of content also autoplaying, eliminating yet another choice, which all leads to, you guessed it, Doom scrolling. Which, just like the curved walkways in a casino, provide you with no natural point to stop and check in with yourself. And that's why we all end up in these scrolling sessions where we completely forget where we are, who we're with, and the entire passage of time until some sort of external trigger comes in to remind us. Now, the thing that really gets me about all of this is that we know these are deliberate decisions, and we know this very well because there

Are people out there blowing the whistle on it, like AAR Ruskin, who actually invented the infinite scroll in 2006? He figured at the time that it would make for better search engine results. You know, clicking through to the next page was just a little bit of friction that he saw he could eliminate to smooth things out. But he didn't realize what it would be turned into, and now he's found out. Raskin has publicly apologized a million times for inventing it and has now gone completely the other way to found the Center for Humane Technology with ex-Google ethicist Tristan Harris, who went from working at something literally called the Persuasive Technology Lab when he studied at Stanford to then working at Google, trying to change them from the inside, only to quit when he realized he couldn't. You might have seen this guy give testimony multiple times in US Congress, talking about what these big tech companies do, but also Shan Parker, the first president of Facebook, has publicly called Facebook's business model a social validation feedback loop.

exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology and has himself admitted that we understood this and we did it anyway. Yikes. So now that we understand the beast from the inside, it's not like the companies are going to change of their own accord. So what I would recommend is on a personal level, you take control. Take 20 minutes once to go through and disable all notification types that don't actually serve you, which just exist to prod you into mindlessly starting a new session for a few minutes. I promise you, you don't need to know every time a friend comments on another friend's Instagram pic that you haven't even interacted with. Turn off autoplay wherever possible, and if you're on an iPhone, use the scheduled summary feature, which means you're not missing notifications, you're just saving them all for later together. And the key thing is just reintroduce a little bit of that friction back in yourself. Even just pushing your most distracting social media apps from your home screen to the one page next to it is already enough to

reduce your unintentional usage time, and that's all I'm trying to save you from. I think there's loads of great things to be entertained by and to learn from on social media, but I don't want you to feel manipulated against your will by hyper-intelligent algorithms that understand your psyche better than you do. Now, this video is also sponsored by Surfshark VPN, but I don't want to do a normal ad and just explain how it works again and again. I just want to show you one image. This one image explains basically everything you need to know. One Surfshark account supports unlimited devices; others don't. Surfshark has one of the highest number of server locations, which gives you access to more countries and higher speeds. And Surfshark has a ton of other safety features, which complement the VPN, and they're all included in that one price, which also happens to be rock-bottom with the code BOSS. Surfshark VPN is stupendously cheap right now. It's $2.09 a month with an extra 4 months for free.

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How Social Media is actually a Casino.

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I'm Arun Maini, I'm a 27 year old Economics graduate whose life's passion is Technology, and I'm on a mission to make the most FUN and USEFUL Tech videos on the Planet! 🙏



