(Header image from Black Mirror: One Million Merits)
The problem
A while ago, Instagram pushed a new update to their app in which they introduced ad breaks.
These ad breaks require you to stop scrolling and watch an ad for a set amount of seconds. You're not able to scroll past the ad, and when you scroll up, the timer even pauses (!) until you scroll down again
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(Screen recording of my Instagram feed)
When I first found out about this, I was quite outraged, and it reminded me of a specific Black Mirror episode called "Fifteen Million Merits" in which the main character is also forced to watch ads, and when he closed his eyes to ignore them, alarms would go off until he opened them again to finish watching.
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(Screenshot of Black Mirror: Fifteen Millions Merits)
I find it interesting that as time goes on, more and more Black Mirror situations seem to become reality in a way.
Bottomless bowls and infinite feeds
Anyway, while I was (obviously) quite upset about this update, after a while I noticed something. I've been using Instagram way less!
The way Instagram and many other infinite-feed social media apps work is that they're using a technique called "Bottomless Bowls" or "Infinite Feeds.".
A study from 2005 held by Brian Wansink, James E Painter, and Jill North was held to test if the visual cues of portion size could influence intake. What they esentially did was ask fifty-four participants to eat a bowl of soup. However, a part of the participants had a bowl of soup that would slowly refill itself during the meal.
The results were that the participants with the self-refilling bowls of soup ate 73% more soup compared to the participants with normal bowls. These participants did not believe they consumed more and didn't feel more sated than those eating from normal bowls.
Based on this(?), Aza Raskin developed the infinite scrolling technique back in 2006, where the pagination of webpages is removed in favor of endless content. You never reach the end of a page.
This means that the user never experiences a natural stopping point in which they may decide to close the app.
Strange choice...
But by introducing ad breaks, in which you're suddenly interrupted from your brain-rot infinite scroll, you break that loop.
For me, because I'm petty, every time I run into an ad break, I immediately quit the app. Which means I probably won't get further than one post on my feed. Addiction cured!
But I do find this quite interesting. Is the extra bit of ad revenue really worth the risk of reducing screen time for users?
Sources
Bottomless bowls: why visual cues of portion size may influence intake - PubMed