How your apps are designed to manipulate you

Every notification is a dollar sign.

Every day I get a notification from Twitter. “This person you follow just liked this person who you don’t follow’s tweet”.

Ok, what’s this tweet about?

I’ll look at the tweet for a few seconds, most of the time it’s nothing I care about.

But then I fall into the trap.

I start scrolling through Twitter.

In this moment, the social network (and I’m not just saying this is a Twitter thing — a lot of companies employ this tactic) has taken me from a state of not being on my phone, to browsing their app.

And guess what?

I’m now sat there, scrolling through my Twitter feed — a feed that never ends.

It’s a lazy-loading infinite stream of tweets that I could look through for hours without ever seeing any visual cue to actually stop and think: “How long have I been doing this? Maybe I should stop.”