Kavya Wadhwa
Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Social Media: The game of manipulation
Have a glance at any social media platform and you’ll see folks creating content, but not because of heartfelt motivation or intuition to create content, but rather because the massive giants put forth content creation as a commodity, as if it is like cocaine.
In order to avoid becoming addicted to creating content purely for the sake of getting likes, think about what makes us use Instagram, and it is most certainly to stay connected to our friends or our favorite influencers and to share a glimpse of it with others. So why do we need the LIKE button or the numerical counts of likes on the post?
As a result, they want you to interact with their platform, just as an amusement park will offer you rides to thrill you and then set up stalls nearby in an attempt to profit from the crowd,
Exactly the same is true with social media platforms, which show you the number of likes and number of views to keep the audience on their site. Those numbers thrill your dopamine, which makes you want to create more content so that they can put ads and set up marketplaces to capitalize on that audience.
In the same way, Snapchat’s streak is their ultimate weapon to retain customers, as nobody wants to see their streaks ceased. So you open Snapchat even on the busiest days because of the satisfaction of doing something that gives you a brief burst of Dopamine.
Taking advantage of you, and making billions for themselves,
Creating a behavior you cannot reverse is the ultimate path to success because even if you know that the streaks you are making are only virtual statistics, you are doing them just to display them to your friends, and that is the thrill of dopamine