Why not take a break?
On the table opposite the open window (see picture) lies the Wii Remote. This is a controller for Nintendo's Wii game console. People who grew up with the Wii will remember Wii Sports occasionally popping up a message box politely reminding you to take a break. This may be somewhat counterintuitive, but there are several reasons for this intrusion into your life. In subscription-based online games, the company could really benefit from logging out from time to time (don't worry, we'll talk about social media too). After all, you will not cancel your subscription, and every second of your stay on the network, you "ate" precious server power. In other games, things like grinding, while tempting, can ruin everything. In Pokémon, for example, if you bring your entire team to level 60,before you fight the Elite Four, you will win, but not in the most spectacular or fair way.
With the Wii, the story is different. It seems that the Nintendo team knew that their audience was mostly children. The developers felt the need to intervene, in the interests of the player himself (and possibly to reassure the parents), when the child spent too much time playing the game. We rarely see this kind of thing these days, and I've always wanted to know why.
Servers are no longer as expensive as they used to be. The mechanics of many modern video games no longer allow for grinding. Has Nintendo stopped caring for our children? Well, the industry has changed a lot. Today, many online game developers, on the contrary, benefit when players spend more time online. In the mobile game Clash of Clans, players can prevent an attack on their base by staying online. The faster you finish the game, the faster you will be forced to buy its DLC or, better yet, the Season Pass.
The more time you spend in the game, the more often you will come across players who were able to get their hands on beautiful (and expensive) skins and other valuable in-game items. The more of these people you see, the more often you will feel pressure and want to buy yourself the same. This is an alarming trend and seems to be the case for most AAA games.
But who else should we thank for keeping our eyes glued to the devices?
It has always been beneficial for social media developers to keep us online for as long as possible. It's very simple: the longer you look at the screen, the more likely your eyes will bump into ads. They have invested billions of dollars in technology improvements to maximize audience engagement.
TikTok is a striking representative of this trend: an adaptive algorithm, short, colorful content that is broadcast without interruption. The only thing that could make it more addictive is if they injected sugar directly into your veins while you watch content. And yet, TikTok is likely investing billions of dollars each year to improve its platform to make it as attractive as possible.
Instagram is also going in this direction: every month it becomes more and more like TikTok (especially since they introduced the Reels service). It's no wonder my generation spends so much time on social media. But can they be blamed for this? While doing research on this topic, I carefully studied Instagram's user interface and my biggest problem was keeping myself from diving into an endless stream of algorithmically selected content.
All this stuff with user retention is great, but what if they don't need it? What if we create products that are not addictive?
Dark patterns and Fediversum
I understand that much of the addictiveness of an application depends on its usability, and the idea of developing an application less user-friendly seems ridiculous. Nevertheless, such a product will find its admirers. Last week I wrote an article called Fediverse only solves half of the problem.“Where I talked about the problem of dark patterns, such as infinite scrolling, for example. The fact is that the moral duty of technologies belonging to the FLOSS category (Free / Libre / Open Source Software, this includes free and open source software) is to put users first. In the case of social media, much of this process has been to create a decentralized ecosystem (i.e. Fediverse, Fediversum) where you are in charge of your own data. While Fediverse is a big step forward, we still have to deal with dark patterns.
Most open source developers (myself included) don't have a lot of commercial experience in UI / UX design. This is why so many open source software is either extremely brutal (see Blender) or very, very closely related to the design of its proprietary counterpart (see KDE). Fediverse seems to fall into the second category.
Mastodon's user interface (and all of its clients) is very similar to Twitter. In a sense, this was done on purpose. The more the user interface design of Mastodon resembled Twitter, the more newbies could quickly get up to speed with Fediverse when they first encountered it. At the same time, the problem of dark patterns is becoming more acute. Again, Twitter's interface was deliberately designed to maximize the amount of time a person spends online. Unfortunately, Fediversum "inherited" this too. This is why I propose to revisit the design principles for Fediverse application and client interfaces. I also propose to discuss how we can best find a balance between ensuring a positive product experience and the psychophysical well-being of users.
What is ethical anti-design?
Ethical anti-design is built on two aspects. But more on that later. First of all, it is worth asking a more general question: what is anti-design?
Github's "danger zone", where all the risky manipulations of the repository take place.
Historically, anti-design originated in Italy and became part of the aesthetics directed against the culture of consumption. While there is something in common, this is not the anti-design I'm talking about. I'm talking about a much more pragmatic anti-design that is really used when designing interfaces. Anti-design is the opposite of design: everything is done not to make the application usable, but to make the application unusable for long-term use.
This definition is somewhat counterintuitive, but it can be very useful to us. In our life, we have encountered anti-design many times. Remember when the Recycle Bin on your computer asks you for confirmation before permanently deleting your files? This is anti-design. After all, from time to time we perform such dangerous actions as deleting files. However, designers want to make sure you don't accidentally do this. That is why they interfere with our work every time and send a request to confirm the action.
One of my favorite examples is how Github works with deleting a repository. On the settings page of your Github repository, all "dangerous" activities are grouped together in a very scary red box. At the very bottom of this field is the option to permanently delete the repository. If you click on it, Github takes it one step further and asks you to enter the repository name in a dialog box. All this makes you from beginning to end aware of what you are doing, how you are doing it, and how right you are doing it.
Deleting a repository by mistake can frustrate you. And if you are dealing with the coordination of a large number of employees, this can have dire consequences for the entire team. Fortunately, you don't have to delete a Github repository every day, so the company reasonably makes the process difficult from a security standpoint.
Ethical anti-design recycles these ideas and tries to cross them with a code of ethics.
If we were all like Marcus Aurelius, then perhaps we wouldn't need to worry about social media addiction. The point is that not all are pure stoic creatures; most people respond very well (or rather very poorly) to behavioral design. Anti-design involves interfering with the user's work so that he does not accidentally commit dangerous actions. Ethical anti-design asks, "What else could be considered dangerous according to my code of ethics?" As I made it clear already, one action that I find dangerous is infinite scrolling. So, if I want to rely on ethical anti-design, then I need my application to prevent a person from falling into a trance and scrolling through social media feeds all day long.
What does ethical anti-design look like?
In the case of the endless tape, I think there are two ways. To help the person using the product scrolling the tape dosed, you can get rid of scrolling altogether, or at least sometimes automatically interrupt this action.
Before endless scrolling appeared, we had pagination. In fact, pagination is still relatively common. Content is split into separate pages. When a person scrolls down the page, he must click the "next" button and wait for the download if he wants to continue watching the content. Now that we have efficient asynchronous web applications, this technology seems outdated, but there are two key features. First, the time it takes for the website to load new content interrupts smooth scrolling. This period of time - be it a moment or a few seconds - makes the person stop and perhaps even think about what they are doing. If there is time to reflect on this, then perhaps he himself will understand whether he should continue to do this. Secondly,the "next" button is also here for a reason. She says to the person: "This is all, although there is more, if you want it." This makes the user wonder if he really wants it. Here is such a simple two-step algorithm to prevent meaningless scrolling.
Another option is to simply interrupt the infinite scrolling. This may or may not be very similar to pagination. The main thing is to get the user to be active, invite him to pause and choose whether he wants or does not want to continue watching the content. Imagine: you are browsing Instagram posts. After about twenty posts, you will come across a button labeled "Show more". To see more content, you need to hold the button down for a little over one second. When you start holding it, you are shown an animated circle that fills up over time. Once the time has passed, twenty more messages will be shown. This will ensure that not only a bad Internet connection can interrupt your browsing and make you realize that this process is not endless. Button, again,forces the user to physically interact with the interface to see more content.
However, infinite scrolling is not the only thing that causes addiction to social media. Another way to get us hooked is to engage in quantitative play using a competitive element. My self-esteem grows with the number of followers, likes and comments that are left under posts. In fact, I know few people who sincerely condemn such things and consider them nonsense. Most people get involved in the game and are rather self-critical of their results.
Interestingly, Instagram seems to really know about this. They redesigned their profile page several times to focus on follower count. More recently, for some reason, they updated the appearance of posts to hide the number of likes they received. It is technically still possible to see how many likes a post got, but for that you have to jump over a sufficient number of hoops. I would also see this as an example of ethical anti-design: people are tempted to compare themselves to others, and Instagram decided to protect them from this. Personally, I think this case could be developed. For example, Instagram already shows reciprocal followers on a person's profile page; what if they don't show your subscriber count at all? If we were to use social media as a way to communicate with people,which we know, then the number of your followers shouldn't matter much, right?
Where does it all go?
Behavioral design and the resulting standard for social media interface design have brought the world a lot of problems. Naturally, these dark patterns seeped into Fediverse. Now you need to make great efforts to get rid of them. It won't be easy; in particular, I will have a hard time getting myself to visit websites that still use rudimentary pagination. But do not forget that all this is in the name of a good cause.
You might not have guessed yet, but I'm developing a new client for Fediverse on the concept of ethical anti-design. I may take this idea to the extreme, but my goal is not to create a popular product, but rather to showcase what it might look like. I hope that eventually other developers will get inspired by my project and try to translate these ideas into their own projects.
To be honest, I'm still at a very early stage, but if you want to know more, I would recommend that you follow me on Fediverse , where there are plans to talk a little more about the project itself.
Our servers can be used to develop applications.
Register using the link above or by clicking on the banner and get a 10% discount for the first month of renting a server of any configuration!
