Social media company's addition formula.

Nowadays, we see a documentary released every other day which tells us how social media addiction is bad for our society and what harm it’s causing. People wonder why each and every social media app gets us addicted. Do these social media companies have some sort of formula to design these apps? that somehow every app gets people addicted.

And the answer to the above question is yes. These companies have formulated certain rules that they follow while building these apps. A well-known user behavior expert Nir Eyel did some research and found out a model that these companies use, which he called the “hook model”. Hook model is a four-stage loop in which the user constantly gets circulated, and that’s what we call addiction. I will explain briefly what the hook model is because believe me “ This is it”, this is the holy grail for all those websites and everybody should know how these apps affect your behavior.

The hook model consists of four stages Trigger, Action, Reward, and Investment. A trigger, by definition, is an event that causes an action, so in the case of Facebook it’s a push notification that somebody liked your post or in the case of What’s App, it’s the notification of the reply from your friend. Push notifications are the most useful triggers for these apps, that’s why you will notice, whenever you visit a website or download an app the first thing they ask you is to allow push notifications because that’s how they get you in this hook cycle.

The next thing is the action, once you click on push notification and you’re inside the app, you perform a certain action. Like in the case of Facebook it may be scrolling through a feed or liking somebody’s post or in the case of WhatsApp replying to somebody’s message. These companies put a huge amount of money into research and development in user experience, to make sure users should be able to do these actions seamlessly and sometimes even without thinking.

Now you’re inside the app and you have done the hard work of doing those actions. Comes the next thing for which we all use social media. The reward. So in the case of all these apps which have fed, the reward is a variable reward, like a gambling machine. When you scroll through your feed you don’t know what the next post will be. This taps into one of our human behaviors that “ Unknown is fascinating” since we don’t know What’s coming, it gets us excited and we keep on scrolling. And there is another type of reward called social reward. The best example of social reward is liked on these social media apps. These social rewards somehow give us the feeling of social acceptance and achievement.

Now comes the last step and that is an investment. Investment in general is when you do a certain action in anticipation of a reward afterward. In the case of these applications, the investment is an action done in anticipation of the next trigger. So like on Facebook you did the action of commenting on somebody’s post. Now that action acts as an investment for the next trigger for you. When a person comments on your comment and Facebook sends you a push notification regarding that and that’s it you click on that notification trigger and you are sucked back into the loop.

If you notice carefully you’ll find that all the apps that you are addicted to having implemented this loop one or the other way. Now you know how these apps make you addicted, you can take the necessary steps to avoid being sucked into that loop. What that action could be, is outside the scope of this article but remember you have to do a lot of amount of work to keep yourself outside that loop because these companies are working ten times harder to keep you inside the loop.