Sto leggendo un libro che si chiama the chaos machine che parla dei social media e c'é un passaggio interessante sul meccanismo del like button, che riporto qui in spoiler
A YEAR AFTER launching the news feed, a group of Facebook developers mocked up something they called the “awesome button” — a one-click expression of approval for another user’s post. Zuckerberg nixed the idea several times, believing it would divert users from more engaging behaviors like posting comments. It became “considered a cursed project because it had failed so many Zuck reviews,” wrote Andrew Bosworth, one of the developers of the news feed, who later became a Facebook vice president. After a year and a half in limbo, a new team took over what was now the “Like” button. In user tests, Bosworth wrote in a post recalling the episode, they found that the button increased the number of comments. When Zuckerberg saw that, he relented. In early 2009, a product manager named Leah Pearlman, who’d worked on the feature since shortly after joining Facebook at age twenty-three, published a post announcing it as “an easy way to tell friends that you like what they’re sharing on Facebook with one easy click.” Traffic surged immediately, well beyond internal expectations. But user behavior changed, too. For all the Nir Eyals and Sean Parkers deliberating about addict users, this was, as with the news feed and so many developments to come, another episode of social companies stumbling into even more powerful psychological hacks they did not understand. That little button’s appeal, and much of social media’s power, comes from exploiting something called the sociometer. The concept emerged out of a question posed by the psychologist Mark Leary: what is the purpose of self-esteem? The anguish we feel from low self-esteem is wholly self-generated. We would not have developed such an unusual and painful vulnerability, Leary reasoned, unless it provided some benefit outweighing its tremendous psychic costs. His theory, now widely held, is that self-esteem is in fact “a psychological gauge of the degree to which people perceive that they are relationally valued and socially accepted by other people.” Human beings are some of the most complex social animals on earth. We evolved to live in leaderless collectives far larger than those of our fellow primates: up to about 150 members. As individuals, our ability to thrive depended on how well we navigated those 149 relationships — not to mention all of our peers’ relationships with one another. If the group valued us, we could count on support, resources, and probably a mate. If it didn’t, we might get none of those. It was a matter of survival, physically and genetically. Over millions of years, those pressures selected for people who are sensitive to and skilled at maximizing their standing. It’s what the anthropologist Brian Hare called “survival of the friendliest.” The result was the development of a sociometer: a tendency to unconsciously monitor how other people in our community seem to perceive us. We process that information in the form of self-esteem and such related emotions as pride, shame, or insecurity. These emotions compel us to do more of what makes our community value us and less of what doesn’t. And, crucially, they are meant to make that motivation feel like it is coming from within. If we realized, on a conscious level, that we were responding to social pressure, our performance might come off as grudging or cynical, making it less persuasive. Facebook’s “Like” feature, some version of which now exists on every platform, is the equivalent of a car battery hooked up to that sociometer. It gives whoever controls the electric jolts tremendous power over our behavior. It’s not just that “likes” provide the social validation we spend so much of our energy pursuing; it’s that they offer it at an immediacy and scale heretofore unknown in the human experience. Off-line, explicit validation is relatively infrequent. Even rarer is hearing it announced publicly, which is the most powerful form of approval because it conveys our value to the broader community. When’s the last time fifty, sixty, seventy people publicly applauded you off-line? Maybe once every few years — if ever? On social media, it’s a normal morning. Further, the platforms added a powerful twist: a counter at the bottom of each post indicating the number of likes, retweets, or upvotes it had received — a running quantification of social approval for each and every statement. This was how even LinkedIn, a résumé-hosting bulletin board, became a networking site and sold to Microsoft for a deal worth $26.2 billion. It had added badges to users’ profiles indicating the size of their network. “Even though at the time there was nothing useful you could do with LinkedIn, that simple icon had a powerful effect in tapping into people’s desire not to look like losers,” B. J. Fogg, the head of Stanford’s Persuasive Tech Lab, has said. But by 2020, even Twitter’s co-founder and then-CEO, Jack Dorsey, conceded he had come to doubt the thinking that had led to the Like button, and especially “that button having a number associated with it.” Though he would not commit to rolling back the feature, he acknowledged that it had created “an incentive that can be dangerous.” In fact, the incentive is so powerful that it even shows up on brain scans. When we receive a Like, neural activity flares in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens: the region that activates dopamine. Subjects with smaller nucleus accumbens — a trait associated with addictive tendencies — use Facebook for longer stretches. And when heavy Facebook users get a Like, that gray matter displays more activity than in lighter users, as in gambling addicts who’ve been conditioned to exalt in every pull of the lever. Pearlman, the Facebooker who’d helped launch the Like button, discovered this after quitting Silicon Valley, in 2011, to draw comics. She promoted her work, of course, on Facebook. At first, her comics did well. They portrayed uplifting themes related to gratitude and compassion, which Facebook’s systems boosted in the early 2010s. Until, around 2015, Facebook retooled its systems to disfavor curiosity-grabbing “clickbait,” which had the secondary effect of removing the artificial boost the platform had once given her warmly emotive content. “When Facebook changed their algorithm, my likes dropped off and it felt like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen,” Pearlman later told Vice News. “So even if I could blame it on the algorithm, something inside me was like, ‘They don’t like me, I’m not good enough.’ ” Her own former employer had turned her brain’s nucleus accumbens against her, creating an internal drive for likes so powerful that it overrode her better judgment. Then, like Skinner toying with a research subject, it simply turned the rewards off. “Suddenly I was buying ads, just to get that attention back,” she admitted. For most of us, the process is subtler. Instead of buying Facebook ads, we modify our day-to-day posts and comments to keep the dopamine coming, usually without realizing we have done it. This is the real “social-validation feedback loop,” as Sean Parker called it: unconsciously chasing the approval of an automated system designed to turn our needs against us. “It is very common for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences,” Justin Rosenstein, a former Facebook engineer who’d also worked on the Like button, told The Guardian. “If we only care about profit maximization, we will go rapidly into dystopia,” he warned. “One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before.”
