I have been less and less active on social media, in particular because it has felt less and less of a community space than it used to be, and more and more of an advertising machinery that is not about sharing and connecting. Every 3rd or 4th post has become an ad for a product, or for a post or channel I have not subscribed to. Using the platforms today leaves me with a mix of disgust and frustration. The user experience is over-engineered, filled with constant nudges to try this or that, "guiding" me to post in a certain way, or letting AI generate posts for me. I asked for none of this. The platforms have now moved so far from being user-centric. I guess they are ad-centric now.
Every time the major shifts happen, I took note. I want to list a few, just to share my outrage. I feel alone in these reactions, but I’m sure many of you see the same changes and share the same feelings.
Anyhow, in no particular orders, some recent toxic design patterns I’ve observed:
I noticed it first on Instagram. I was in my feed, and decided to search for something. I clicked the search icon and wanted to start typing. But no keyboard appeared. Instead, another mini-feed appeared, full of random content. I saw a random AI-generated GIF of a pepper transforming into a person or vice versa - anyway, I was so disgusted with this UX change that I long-pressed the app on the home screen, and immediately uninstalled Instagram. Since then, I use Instagram on the computer, and have removed it from my phone.
What’s the big deal?
Search, is when the user decides to explore an interest, something specific. Showing another feed at this stage, without letting the user "search" is just one more toxic design pattern. These micro-changes are all aligned with the goals of making us spend more time on social media; exposing us to more ads (promoted content), making us addicted to feeds where such content can be pushed; making us less intentional about our social media usage.
Removing intent
From what I see based on the evolution of design patterns in social media apps, the idea is to move more and more into a "slot machine" experience, where behind every button a bit of endorphin can be released. So, instead of showing a feed with just what I wanted at the top, I’m shown a feed where I see 1 great thing, need to scroll, and after a scroll, I see another great thing, then after 2 scrolls, and so on. The idea is to make me spend time, make me get addicted, and make me consume a lot of other content in-between.
The end-goal would be users, who have no intent, just pull down on the screen to load the next posts in the hopes of getting another endorphin rush. This fits very well also with replacing the search with another mini-feed, since we don’t really want users to find what they search, we want to guide them to consume the content we want them to see. All the while making the users feel fully in control (convenience). After enough times of going to search and instead of typing being satisfied with the auto-suggested results, the search instinct disappears. We start to think that search is exploring, and we will start using a different word for what search used to be, "research". Because search has become so convenient. What we forget is that that’s not search. It’s consuming another feed.
I have no issues with feeds. Feeds are a great way to display content. But I do have an issue with content not being ordered in the most-to-least interesting order.
That brings me to another trend.
Feeds: No more differentition between Ads and content
Today we can no-longer differentiate between ads and real content (content I have subscribed to or organic search results). That differentiation has completely disappeared in most cases, and in others it is barely noticeable. This transition happened very slowly. And today we have apparently accepted it.
In the beginning, ads were very clearly labeled as such. Google used to highlight them in yellow. Then it was just a yellow "Ad" highlight. Then it was a black and white "Ad" highlight. Now it is: Nothing. You don’t know if you’re being served an ad or not.
Same for social media: First, ads were in a designated area. Then they appeared as "promoted" content in the feed. And today: Anything goes. You don’t know where your feed comes from.
Another note on that: In the beginning of Facebook used to show the most relevant content in the feed (feed was introduced in 2006) which is when I started to use the platform... Then certain posts started to get prioritized, and the feed became more and more useless to keep up with your friends (except the few FB decided were worth showing in the feed). The user experience of going to the "most recent" feed, which is meant to list the most recent posts form the people I have actually subscribed to, is now behind the "More" menu, then several options down. Oh, and it is not a true chronological feed, since it does not expand beyond the last 24 hours. Anyway, this at least used to be the way to bypass the FB algorithm and consume my friend’s posts. But it’s not usable anymore.
Anyway, this is to explain why I have been so reluctant to engage with social media in the last years.
In the next post, I’m going to offer some technical approaches to make social media fun again, and hopefully I’ll be more verbose as a result!
