I’ve been running experiments with my social media use. For instance, I stopped looking at Twitter notifications, for years. Hundreds I didn’t look at (I’m sorry if you were replying to my tweets and if I know you, I love you and hey, my bad).
I decided to pay attention to them again. Enabling the dopamine loops and all that brain hacking stuff.
Man, notifications are the devil. I’m fairly immune to them: I don’t have any for anything. Not on my phone. No push, zero, ever, none. But a couple weeks using Twitter –just the PWA client- while paying attention to notifications and I’m already feeling like
It’s horrifying. Y’all are addicted like a mf and you don’t realize it. It’s so ingrained in your computer use that you can’t even do something on the most amazing tool humanity has ever gotten without “trying” to check some notifications. “Just” in case.
I knew notifications were bad before social media. Email and RSS had told me it was wrong. Just noise and anxiety. But with social media, you are rewarded with a little picture of a heart or some other bullshit to make you feel validated. It’s fucking stupid, yet it works wonderfully.
What freaks me out is that folks at Twitter have so much power and are probably doing some wild shit: “look at this user who’s engaging like crazy. Let’s send him/her a bit more notifications than the average and see how it goes. Okay! She/He is doubling down on posting. Good. Let’s starve them to see how they react”. They can decide of the virality of your extremely honest, personal tweet that day. And so forth. There’s so much manipulation there. Notifications are the vessel.
Social media has been popular for a decade. Ten years, 24/7, the world. Imagine the amount of data and the accuracy they have on how people behave and react to the carrot that is notifications. Trust me, they’re not using that data to change the world in the way you want it. It probably makes a lot of Silicon Valley executives –who are tied to government, military and all- believe with the intensity of a thousand suns that people are really and absolutely idiotic, predictable, dumb ass apes. Look at the data!
Fuck notification and its clicks it claims.