Disconnect Your Devices
Written by Calee Schmidtberger. Edited by Emme Spero.
Today in class, we talked about the design of different websites and apps that make us want to spend more time on them and keep us coming back for more.
Almost everybody our age has been told by their parents something along the lines of: “You kids and your damn phones!” or “You’re addicted to the internet!” Kids usually will just shrug it off because their parents “don’t understand” them anyways.
But I think that the disconnect occurs when parents haven’t actually used these apps. They aren’t subjected to the apps’ design techniques that are meant to keep users on for extended periods of time.
My mom doesn’t understand Snapchat. She wonders: “Why do you just send people random pictures of your face? Why do people want that?”
What is missing—and what is hard to explain without using Snapchat yourself—is the concept of streaks.

Snapchat will display the number of days in a row that you and another user have been in contact with each other, incentivizing users to engage in daily contact. This number is the length of the two users’ “streak.” These streaks are things that people become incredibly attached to, getting excited when the streak hits 50, then 100, then 365.
Currently, I keep streaks with over 30 people, the highest number being 412 days in a row. This practically forces me to check Snapchat at least five times a day, just to make sure my streaks don’t end, let alone actually use the app to contact someone.
Each social media app that teens use have a bag of these design tricks. Today, when former Instagram engineer Greg Hochmuth came to our class, he explained that many social media companies monitor users by daily “time spent” on their app, making user’s time the most valuable thing about them to companies.
This explains why these apps add so many details that are made to hook us, and why spending endless amounts of time on social media isn’t entirely voluntary.
Until someone uses the application themselves, it is hard to understand how momentarily addictive these sites are. I think that that is something the generation before us blames us for instead. I have seen my mom get sucked into Facebook for an hour at a time, and then be confused when I scroll through Instagram in the car. Being aware of app’s marketing techniques is the only way to understand how much time we’re spending on social media, and for parents to understand why.

