We have all been there: you have an important deadline coming up; you have to go to bed early in order to wake up in time for that big event; chores you could be doing. Instead, you are on your phone, watching some video by an account you do not know. At some point in the coming 30 seconds, you will scroll from this video and will forget all about it, already onto the next one. An hour will pass til you eventually put down your phone and wonder where all the time went.
While the internet has always had its fair share of timesinks, this endless loop of algorithm-generated content has only come to be the norm in the past five years, starting with the success of the popular social media app, TikTok. Thanks to the app’s algorithmically powered ‘For You’ page, users never have to go searching for videos to watch. As soon as a user opens the app, they are greeted by a random video, infinitely looping until swiped away to be replaced by another video. Every little action tells the app something about you, in order to keep you hooked. Any hesitation or interaction with the video shows that you are interested, while a quick skip teaches the app to show you less of whatever that was. Fairly soon, the app has built a page just ‘for you’ where each video is specifically chosen from billions of options to keep you watching.
The app was created as a rebrand of the already popular video-sharing platform, Music.ly. By 2018, the app had surpassed other social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube. The lockdowns imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic influenced even more people to flock to the app, with the company reporting a 45% increase in monthly active users between July 2020 and July 2022.
TikTok has only continued to dominate our phone screens since. According to a Washington Post article from late 2022, the average American viewer watches TikTok for 80 minutes every single day. Considering the average video length on the app is between 15 to 45 seconds, that’s a lot of content. 1 in 6 American teenagers told the Pew Research Center they watch TikTok “almost constantly.” The app’s domination has led to other social media adopting algorithm-based short-form content funnels, such as Instagram’s ‘Reels’ and Youtube’s ‘Shorts.’
The mysterious workings of these algorithms can help small creators grow and find niche audiences that they may not have found otherwise. It can also create a sense of community as the same viewers are shown similar videos over and over. However, this constant consumption of content is structured in a way that intentionally makes users addicted to the app. University of Southern California professor and author, Dr. Julie Albright describes the app as working like a slot machine: “When you’re scrolling […] sometimes you see a photo or something that’s delightful and it catches your attention and you get that little dopamine hit in the brain […] in the pleasure center of the brain. So you want to keep scrolling,” Albright told Forbes. Every time a user swipes, they can find the best video they have ever seen in their life. It is likely that they will not, but it is that chase of that dopamine that keeps them going.
The addictive nature of this format is far from an accident; it is a feature. A marketing document from TikTok itself markets the app’s “continuous cycles of engagement” to advertisers, claiming it makes the app’s “emotional and immersive experience” better than anything you can find on TV. According to internal documents that were leaked in 2021, the app is optimised to maximise the amount of minutes per day a user spends on there, rather than maximising clicks or views like other social media platforms.
Albright believes the effects of these algorithms are already affecting our attention spans, especially in young people. “Our brains are changing based on this interaction with digital technologies and one of these is time compression,” she explained. More and more studies are coming out about the addictive nature of these algorithms and frequent users are noticing as well. Dopamine detoxes have become increasingly popular, as people try to free themselves from lost time spent scrolling. As the internet marches forward at a breakneck pace, it is anyone’s guess as to what techniques these apps will employ next to keep users glued to their screens. Something important to keep in mind is that while the next Instagram Reel will always be there, the time lost to endless scrolling is something you can not get back.
