grasshobby6

[grasshobby6]

the unending stress

today, i'm going to talk with you for a bit about the endless stress that i find myself in, and it is entirely due to addiction.

recently, for one of my classes i had to watch /thesocialdilemma on Netflix, and in it i realized that my usual web usage on YouTube is extremely manipulative.

what i realized was that the YouTube algorithm was designed with a psychological trick called "positive intermittent reinforcement," and this means that the interval of which a reward is delivered is ultimately irregular--

this presents an incentive to continually commit to a behavior, with the incentive being the trained expectation of eventually receiving a reward.

this trick was specifically linked to the image of slot machines, with picking up a phone and using social media/refreshing a page representing the pull lever of a slot machine-- the social media developers said that using social media, or rerolling/refreshing the recommendations page is like pulling the lever of a slot machine-- as "positive intermittent reinforcement" is the same psychology that gambling uses.

The way that /thesocialdilemma spoke about how YouTube and its algorithm was designed to keep users on for as long as possible made me finally realize that YouTube was a social media.

For the longest time, I completely convinced myself that YouTube was not a social media, as I refused to comment on any videos, and as such I was not participating in the 'social' part of social media.

In my mind, I told myself that I was better than others, as I existed outside of the hatred and anger of 'real' social media sites.

But, having now watch /thesocialdilemma, I realize just how much of that same addictive psychology that I despised other sites for maintaining was in my very own YouTube.

Having it explained to me that these designs were effectively gambling features (and this is not even mentioning how Facebook's Massive Scale Contagion Experiments are used to create the most 'engaging' features),

/thesocialdilemma helped me to realize that I have rationalized my media dependency-- with the help of algorithmically designed incentives/feedback loops.

And, further proof of how social media algorithms are designed to keep me addicted it this very account that I created for this blog post.

This is a new account, and yet I find that the recommended blog for me to follow include a blog called anxietyproblem.

Because of my recent revelation about how dependent my happiness is and how addicted I truly am to YouTube, I have been thinking about anxiousness.

And while I am not sure if everyone receives a blog recommendation to anxietyproblem, I would like to say that because I have been thinking about the type of anxiousness that gets my legs shaking from boredom when I am not spending time on YouTube that I have unintentionally spent more time engaging with content that related to anxiety and the experiences therewithin.

I know about digital cookies, and I know that creating a social media account essentially allows that media access to those cookies in some degree (most likely from your search patterns and view; like; and repost engagements).

So, if i had to make a bet-- based only on my knowledge of other social media--

I think that despite this account being new, tumblr had some sort of access to my cookies.

^^^^^^^^ Either this, or tumblr has recognized that a majority of its users interact with the anxietyproblem blog, and the tumblr algorithm is testing what kind of person I am so that it can better present me with 'appropriate' content (read: engaging)