Addiction of Auto-Scroll: Tiktok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts
The reason why I decided to delve into this topic is that I have caught myself, numerous times in the past couple of months, mindlessly scrolling for hours on my phone. Don’t get me wrong though, I would not be spending hours on Instagram and Youtube if these short clips weren’t entertaining to watch. The interests of browsers on the Internet reach far and wide. Some people might access YouTube to search for a quick tutorial on how to make waffle batter for breakfast. Some people might access TikTok for a bundle of cute cat videos for their daily boost of serotonin. Some people might access Instagram reels for a collection of winter fashion inspirations. For your information, I am “some people”. The amount of information available for people through a couple of clicks seems infinite as it is nearly impossible for users to ever engage with it all. When there is such a high demand for information, but so many sources to choose from, it comes down to the competition. It has become a race to develop the best method for capturing people’s short attention span and the most convenient viewing experience. The coupling of short video clips and auto-scroll across platforms, such as Tiktok, Instagram, and YouTube, creates a vicious cycle for their users. While this combination provides short-term positive effects, such as instigating bursts of happiness and amusement, the detriments of addiction that unknowingly arise over time override them.
Before I get into my argument, this is a TikTok I came across during my browsing. I want to share this with you because who doesn’t want to watch a video on what Justin Bieber would sound like if he were French? Also, it currently stands at a solid 1.6 million likes!
The reason why the auto-scroll coupled with short video clips is so successful is due to marketers being aware of the attention span of users today. Over the course of the past 15 years, people’s attention spans have decreased significantly from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds. Some scientists even argue that we may have a shorter attention span than goldfish, which reportedly is around 9 seconds.
Consequently, people are constantly distracted. Here are some more statistics to better put this into perspective. The average person will pick up their phone more than 1,500 times a week, totaling around 3 hours and 16 minutes a day. The average office worker will check their email inbox around 30 times an hour, which also means once every 2 minutes. People don’t even realize these types of impulsive actions since it’s become so habitual. While I can’t confirm that I live up to these statistics, I can say that my phone and I are almost inseparable. When I can’t find my phone, I feel anxious or nervous even though I have no emergency that would require it at the moment. Do you relate?
Even though people are constantly using their devices and scrolling through content, they actually don’t read and process a lot of the provided information. Users will read at most 28% of the words on a given web page. Furthermore, a typical page visit often lasts a mere 10–20 seconds. These published statistics may come as a shock, but it is more the reason for marketers to brainstorm methods to hold their users’ attention. The method I am talking about here is limiting video content to mere seconds and pairing those videos with auto-scroll. These are the ingredients for ultimate addiction.
The reason why short video clips are now utilized by companies, such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts is obvious due to the pea-sized attention span people have. I already explained this point earlier, so let’s move on to the auto-scroll. A couple of researchers at the Harvard Business Review conducted a total of 6,445 studies on U.S.-based students and working adults to explain the psychology behind why auto-scroll is addictive and why people fall into these rabbit holes. There are a few big takeaways from the studies. The first one is that watching 5 videos made people 10% more likely to watch an additional video in comparison to those that only watched one video. This debunks the assumption that users would get bored after watching consecutive videos. The second discovery is that purposely framing videos with similar category labels, such as “educational” made people 21% more likely to watch another similar video. Lastly, users who consumed videos uninterrupted were 22% more likely to continue in comparison to those that took work breaks. The similarity and repetitiveness of videos, along with uninterrupted scrolling are proven to enhance user engagement. This sheds light on the fact that auto-scroll can instigate addiction among users without them even realizing it. In conclusion, platforms that use auto-scroll on AI-personalized content are absolutely foolproof. Companies devised this ingenious method to reel in a large and loyal user base. Their gains infinitely sprout from all the “stolen” time from users give through browsing on their platforms.
TikTok is a pioneer in this space and has successfully dominated the market by targeting the Gen-Z population. It has a global internet penetration of around 18% and growing of users aged 18 to 64. TikTok reached 3 billion downloads in June 2021, which made it the 7th most downloaded app in the 2010s. This is honestly such a huge feat as an application purely for entertainment.
“The reason for its success is that they’ve taken the knowledge companies have learned from making catchy advertisements and have given the creativity to the masses. If you watch a commercial on TV, the advertisers spend thousands if not millions to gather your attention for up to 30 seconds.”
- Jon Stenstrom, the founder of Cast & Spear
This catapulted TikTok into a whirlwind as users kept hopping onto the bandwagon. It served the people who strived to be content creators. It also served those that like to spend their time browsing and watching. Undoubtedly, other companies started observing TikTok and wanted to figure out the key to its enormous success.
After around 2 years, this type of media spread to YouTube and Instagram and their corresponding Short and Reels. Due to how similar these videos are formatted and created, content creators can now share one video on all three platforms. In addition, watchers are able to download and repost videos on various platforms. Because of this, videos are now able to spread exponentially fast on multiple modes of media. There have been many instances when I was scrolling on YouTube and I was suddenly fed a chain of videos with the TikTok logo. This was when I realized the power and interconnectivity of all these videos on all platforms. It became almost impossible to escape the content from one platform even after deleting the app, which in turn makes it difficult to lessen the level of addiction.
I have dabbled in all of these three platforms before and have been wound into several unintentional 2-hour watch sessions. The personalized algorithm, addiction from the auto-scroll, and ingenious short-clip-style videos have done quite an outstanding job at not only catering to my short attention span but also keeping me continuously intrigued. In addition, I am confident that I’m not the only victim of this vicious cycle.
Now, realizing the power TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have using short-style videos with auto-scroll made me consider another source of frustration. Media manipulation is defined as the “sociotechnical process whereby motivated actors leverage specific conditions or features within an information ecosystem in an attempt to generate public attention and influence public discourse through deceptive, creative, or unfair means.” The fact that these platforms are able to capture the attention and loyalty of such a large user base makes it easier to infiltrate and manipulate people’s feeds. Similar to how Facebook was able to spread curated content to sway citizens during the election, these media platforms can be the host of crimes. Campaigns could spread memes, viral videos, forged documents, or leaked information. Activists, that are typically constrained by heavy censorship, could use this space to evade these information controls. Extremists could also use this space to widespread dangerous and hateful speech.
The auto-scroll is the cherry on top that makes everything even more dangerous. Users could potentially be brainwashed to believe misinformation or be heavily affected by hateful speech after a single browsing session. Also, the watching algorithm could mainstream false news to a large percentage of a generation.
To summarize, platforms that provide short-style video clips, along with the auto-scroll feature are able to capture the hearts of billions of users due to the shockingly small attention span people have today. Users are satisfied with the bursts of amusement that come from watching these videos. Little do they know, they are drowning in a vicious cycle of addiction. Videos are now easily cross-shared between platforms, leaving users with no way of exit unless they delete all relevant social media platforms. The auto-scroll feature boosts engagement and rapidly eats away people’s time on a daily basis. The interconnectivity and power these platforms hold also give rise to ethical issues around media manipulation. The stage is set and many people are watching. The choice to manipulate and curate the content is now left to the companies.
Tech companies have a track record of implementing features that make their products more addictive. As a result, they are able to artificiate loyalty from millions of users. Snapchat is a great example of this as it dominated the engagement from teenagers to young adults in the late 2010s. Users were bound to Snapchat due to its addictive features such as limited-time pictures and growing streaks. The psychology behind sending impermanent pictures increased engagement since there is no saved record of snaps that have been sent. In addition, pictures are uncovered only if users click on the view button. This made users more inclined to frequently open the app since there were no “previews” like seen in text messaging apps. Furthermore, Snapchat added a streak feature that increases for every consecutive day a user sends snaps to a friend. Just to maintain all their streaks, users would have to send at least one snap to every friend. Over time, many users opened Snapchat purely just to send a “streak snap” to their friends rather than actually keeping in contact. This destroyed the essence of Snapchat, but some argue that this was part of their plan all along. This only minorly affected the app’s longevity because user engagement still stood strong for years due to the existence of the streak feature.
Over the past decade of booming technological advancement and social media presence, companies have played their part in shaping whole generations. There have been countless astonishing discoveries that have made digital interaction efficient, productive, and life-changing. At the same time, media has been proven to have detrimental effects on users’ mental and physical health and serves as a potential source of mass manipulation. I am unsure what our future holds, but this media-centric path we all walk on may be grimmer than we imagined.
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