Yeah but we need to be carefully about separating toxic addictive patterns from just plain ol’ effective ones. Think about the classical newspaper format: they present many partial stories on the front page, hoping to catch your eye with one you care about. Social media still needs to be effective media, IMO
>Social media still needs to be effective media, IMO
Social media needs to be more ineffective, because the effectiveness is what renders these environments anti-social. James P. Carse once made the same point about travel. A lot of people nowadays are obsessed with traveling fast and effectively, yet ironically they skip the actual traveling, which is the part between A and B, the exploration you do on the road. People will hop through 20 cities but have not changed at all, or talked to anyone, they've eliminated the experience they were looking for.
Here’s my distinction that I think is at the heart of this: effective vs addictive
I think something is effective if it helps the user accomplish a task they want to partake in and addictive if it convinces the user to check out other unexpected content. Eg Facebook is addictive because people spend hours scrolling their feed hoping to luck into dopamine, but I would say they’d just be benignly effective if that time was an intentional activity that people just find valuable to be worth it — say, searching for information on out-of-touch loved ones.
There’s infinite edge cases to evaluate and make intuitive calls on from there, but that’s my high level definition. Do you see why I would defend the proposed UX change following it?
Effective media allows consumers to listen to what they care about. Hiding information until you've clicked doesn't allow you to decide if you want to hear it or not.
