"Do not stick on your own fool." Why social network owners do not use social networks

Developers of Facebook-like platforms admit that they were designed to be addictive. Should we follow the example of social network managers and refuse to use them? And are mere mortals capable of it?

Mark Zuckerberg does not use Facebook in the same way as ordinary people. According to Bloomberg , the 33-year-old head of the corporation has a team of 12 moderators who remove comments and spam from his page. The “small number” of employees help him write posts and write speeches; several professional photographers take carefully prepared pictures of his meetings with veterans in Kentucky, small business owners in Missouri, or chistayk dealers in Philadelphia.
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Facebook's ability to restrict access to records means that mere mortals do not see private posts from the Zuckerberg Chronicle, but it’s hard to imagine that he breaks into a dispute over a racist post with a meme against migrants. And this is not only Zuckerberg. None of the key executives of the company has a “normal” presence on Facebook - they cannot be added as friends, they rarely make public records and store a private piece of information that the platform offers to open by default, for example, the number of friends.

Twitter is the same story. Of the nine top executives, only four leave tweets on average more than once a day. Ned Sigal, financial director, has been on the site for six years and sends tweets less than twice a month. Jack Dorsey, one of the company's founders, a relatively active user of the service, has made 23,000 tweets since the launch of the site, but this is much less than the number of tweets left by more or less regular users over the same period. Dorsey rarely responds to strangers and avoids discussion and debate. He does not comment on live television shows or sporting events. In general, in fact, he does not “use” Twitter, just takes notes from time to time.

This pattern of behavior is repeated throughout the industry. Despite such a popular idea of ​​using their own products, the most loyal users of social networks are rarely those who manage them.

I am a manic user of social networks and left 140 thousand tweets since I registered in it in April 2007 - six times more than Jack Dorsey. Every day I use instagram, Snapchat and Reddit. I have accounts in Ello, Peach and Mastodon (remember these? No? Do not worry). Three years ago I managed to leave Facebook. I tears from him, deleted the account at the time of enlightenment, when I realized how it makes me feel and act. I never regretted it, but I could not turn a similar trick a second time.

One time I looked at the leaders of social networks and it annoyed me that they did not understand the structure of their own sites. Regular users find bugs, vulnerabilities, see bad design decisions that managers will never understand if they do not use the site themselves. How, I wondered, can they create the best product in the world if they don’t use social networks like ordinary people?

Now another question comes to my mind: what do they know of this, what do we not know?

Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, violated Omertu last October by telling a conference in Philadelphia that he was “a kind of conscious opponent” of social networks.

“The reasoning behind creating these apps — and Facebook was the first of them — was:“ How do we absorb as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? ”To do this, we have to give you a dose of dopamine from time to time, because someone“ likes ” “Or left a comment on your photo, post or something else. Which in turn will force you to upload more content, for which you will receive even more likes and comments, ”- said Parker.

“This is a closed chain of social confirmation. Exactly what a programmer like myself would come up with to exploit vulnerability in human psychology. Inventors, creators - I, Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Sistrom from Instagram, all these people - are aware of this principle. And still created such a product. "

A month later, another Facebook opponent, Chamat Palihapithia, a former vice president of the company who was involved in increasing the number of social network users, joined Parker.

“The short-term closed feedback loop created by us and powered by dopamine destroys the normal functioning of society. “There is no discussion here to reach a common understanding, there is no interaction — there is misinformation, a lie, ” Palihapithia said at a conference in Stanford, California. - And now it's not about Russian propaganda. This is a global problem that destroys the basic principles of human communication. I can control my decision, and it is to not use this shit. I can control the decisions of my children, who are also not allowed to use this crap. ”

Palihapithia’s statements have led Facebook into such confusion that the company has issued a press release acknowledging its past failures — a rare step on the part of the company, which, despite its mission to “unite people,” is notorious for concealing its shortcomings.

“When Chamat worked on Facebook, we focused on creating new social networking opportunities and growing around the world,” the press attaché said. - Facebook at the time was a different company than now. Together with this growth, we realized how much our responsibility increased. We take our role very seriously and we work a lot to be better. ”

A few days later, the site made a more interesting move and published the results of the study, which said that Facebook makes users feel bad, but only when they make few entries.

“In general, when people passively absorb information for a long time - they read, but do not interact with others, they say they feel worse after that,” said two Facebook researchers in a review of existing papers on this topic. On the other hand, "active interaction with people - especially the exchange of messages, records and comments with close friends and memories of communication in the past - is associated with improving well-being."

How convenient.

According to Adam Alter, a psychologist and author of a study on technological dependence called “Irresistible,” the question of whether social networks make you happy or dark in the short term is almost not relevant. A deeper question is that you use them obsessively or even suffer from addiction.

“The concept of dependency is used more broadly and concerns more behavioral patterns than we think, and thus applies to more people,” Alter says. - Almost half of the adult population has at least one behavioral addiction. Few of us suffer from addiction to any substances, but in the structure of the modern world there are a lot of behavioral patterns that we find it hard to resist, and many of us develop self-destructive attachment to habits that border or become addictions. ”

Alter argues that these dependencies do not appear out of the blue. On the contrary, this is a direct result of the intentions of companies such as Facebook and Twitter, creating “catchy” products, to which we want to return again and again.



“Companies that produce these products, especially very large technology corporations, are investing in their intention to catch the audience. They do everything possible so that we spend as much time as possible on their programs and applications, but do not care at all about preserving our well-being. This is their key goal: it is not to create a product that will bring people pleasure, and therefore will make a profit; but to make a product that people cannot refuse, and therefore it will be profitable.

What Parker and Palihapitiya mean is that companies that they personally dealt with at the highest level even during their formation were created according to the principle: “We must do everything in our power to crack human psychology, to understand that makes people involved, and use these techniques not to make them happier, but to maximize involvement. ” And this is exactly what they are doing, ”says Alter.

Parker and Palihapitiya are not the only residents of Silicon Valley, revealing their concern about the nature of modern, addictive technology. As reported in October , an increasing number of programmers and engineers are leaving because of the negative consequences that their work entails. Starting from Chris Marsellino, one of the creators of Apple's push-notification system, to Lauren Britcher, who is now building his home in New Jersey, and earlier came up with a pull-to-update action that turns many applications into miniature gaming machines. Many user interface developers have doubts.

Others realized the same thing, but decided to take advantage of this absurdity. For example, Dopamine Labs from Los Angeles offers a service that personalizes “moments of joy” in applications where it is used. The company promises its customers: “Your users will yearn for it. And they will yearn for you. "

In this case, social network managers simply follow the rule of drug dealers and dealers - the fourth of the Ten Crack Commandments in the hip-hoop song The Notorious BIG: “Never Stay on Your Own Fool.”

“Many managers of large IT companies are very careful with the use of technology in their personal lives, as they allow their children to use them, with children's access to monitors, various applications and programs. But then some of them go up to the stage for a performance and say: "This is the greatest product of all time." But if you study the problem, you will see that they do not allow their children to use the same product, ”says Alter.

In January, Apple executive director Tim Cook said : “I have no children, but I have a nephew, for whom I have set limits. Some things do not allow. I do not want them to be in social networks.

Technology alone cannot be good or bad. We need people to make sure that you do the right thing. And people are needed in the development process to make sure that the right product is being created. ”

Alter says that a classic example of such an approach is Steve Jobs, the predecessor of Cook, who "talked about all the virtues of the iPad, and then even did not allow it to come close to his children."

“Children don't use it. We limit children to using technology at home, ” Jobs told The New York Times journalist a few months after the iPad appeared.

And not only children.

“You can notice this in the behavior of managers. It seems to me that Jack Dorsey is very careful with how much time he spends on Twitter. Obviously, this is a busy person, with a large load, and probably distracted by other worries, so he can tear himself away from the site.

But this cannot be said about all Twitter users - many believe that they are “addicted”, if you use the colloquial expression. You can consider this dependence clinical or not, but users feel that they could spend less time in it because it destroys their well-being. And I think this is true: for many users, Twitter is a black hole that is dragging you down, and it’s very difficult to stop using it. ”

These are my thoughts on twitter. I wanted to reduce the time of its use - after I realized how much time I spend in it, staring at the tape with short sentences that range from slightly amusing to slightly traumatic to the psyche. I deleted 133 thousand tweets in an attempt to weaken the feeling that I was not able to give up something I spent so much time on. Removed the application from the phone and computer to sit in it only through the browser. Repeatedly arranged a pause, but still returned.

One thing is to be a child under the protection of parents protecting you from technology. It's quite another to live as if you are the head of a technology company, and reflect the joint efforts of thousands of the smartest people from all over the world who want to inspire you to open the app every day. I am not alone in this fight.

Kevin Holesh, freelance developer, one of those who tried to reduce the time to use applications. He wrote the program Moment, which tracks how much time you spend with the phone. For the average user, this is more than three hours a day. Statistics was enough for him to have a desire for change.

“As soon as I had the data ready, they themselves helped to use the smartphone less. Since then, I have taken a few steps in this direction, but even seeing the numbers - that was half the battle. The numbers I saw actually changed my attitude. I didn't do anything productive for more than an hour a day, I just wasted my time, ”he says.

Holesh eventually deleted accounts from all social networks, and work email from the phone.

“This step helped me the most - just the lack of accessibility. First, my task was to understand how much hanging out with the phone makes you happy. But now I practice a more extreme approach, less worried about the news or provocative posts of my uncle on Facebook. I discovered that I am better able to communicate using old methods. ”

Alter says willpower can help to a certain extent, but at the same time, the lack of electronics available for casual, thoughtless use can be even better. However, ultimately, it is difficult to get rid of addiction alone.

“Could it happen that in 20 years we will take a look at the current generation of children and say:“ Look, in social terms they differ from previous generations, and this is a big problem. Maybe we need to regulate their behavior? “Or, suddenly, we look back and say:“ I don’t know what all this hype was about, I don’t understand why we were so worried. ” Until we get any data, until the facts appear, I think it will be difficult to change the behavior of people in the mass, ”says Alter.

If you are not able to force yourself to reduce the time of using social networks, you can follow the example of Zuckerberg and hire a team of 12 people who will do it for you. Maybe it will not be as cheap and easy as deleting a page on Facebook, but probably easier.