Streaking for Good and for Evil
Recently The Verge reported that Facebook Messenger is stealing Snapchat’s “streaks” feature. Seriously, Messenger’s product strategy the last couple of years has felt like an improv routine:
“Games? And…bots?!”
“Yes! And…stories?”
“Yes! And…umm…streaks?”
“Brilliant!”
Sorry. Back to streaks.
Streaks, as we’re talking about them here, are a simple mechanic that keep track of how many days in a row you’ve done something in a product. They fall under the umbrella of gamification, a mostly terrible trend in products over the last several years employing cheap psychological tricks to make products more engaging. Which is to say, more addictive.
Soon after, I saw this tweet from Tristan Harris:
I’m grateful for the work Tristan is doing in bringing ethical questions around product design into the public conversation. I share many of his concerns. But the tweet’s snarky moralizing aside, let’s break down the two core claims:
Streaks are manipulative. Well, of course they are. But this isn’t a particularly useful statement. All products manipulate, it’s inherent to their nature. Products exist to manipulate, and we want them to. The thing we’re talking about is whether or not the manipulative aspects are mostly intrinsic or extrinsic, and whether or not they’re perceived as helpful or harmful. When Tristan says that FB’s capacity to “do good” is immense, he means his idea of what’s good.
Streaks are wrong. The second claim here is that streaks are unequivocally wrong, which is more interesting. It’s primarily what I want to talk about.
Jerry Seinfeld’s One Weird Trick
In an article from 2007, Brad Isaac, an amateur comedian, recounts approaching a young Seinfeld backstage at a comedy club and asking his secret on how to be a better comic:
[Seinfeld] revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here’s how it works.
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.
Notice the word “pressure” here. A streak is a kind of external force used to put pressure on performing a task. In this case, it’s applied towards a desired behavior: writing every day. But wait a minute! Why do we even need external pressure to do something we know we want to do?!
This isn’t exactly a new problem. A couple millennia ago St. Paul had some candid words to say about this struggle in his letter to the Romans:
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.
Paul was of course wrestling with the weight of sin here, and not how to pull his lazy ass away from Netflix long enough to bang out a few lines of observational comedy. But either way, being a human has always been hard. We aren’t machines of perfect reason. We’re funny little clouds of chemicals and dust swirling around in space, doing the best we can.
So is Seinfeld’s streak technique wrong? It’s certainly manipulative. But the differences are obvious. One, it’s self-imposed. And two, it moves us towards something, and specifically something we intentionally chose. The goal isn’t just to maintain the streak, in and of itself. In other words, it’s not streaking for streaking’s sake. And this starts to get at the heart of the matter.
Brooms and Cigarettes
Imagine a world where everything you bought pressured you to use it daily via streak counts, like your toothbrush. Or maybe your microwave. What about your broom? Picture it: you get a push notification on your phone just as you’re about to sit down for dinner after a long day. “You’re on 🔥!!! You’ve swept the floor 27 days in a row. Don’t forget to sweep today to keep the streak going!”
Yet, broom designers aren’t clamoring to gamify brooms. Why? Because once you’ve paid for the broom, the economic arrangement is mostly complete. The broom company has your money. They don’t care if you bury that broom in your closet and descend into squalor until the mélange of dust and fur and kitty litter piles up so thick you’re afraid to go shoeless in your own house. Not that I know about that.
Cigarettes are different. They’re kind of the perfect product: affordable, consumable, addictive. They’re so perfect, in fact, that we’ve decided as a society to regulate them in order to protect ourselves against their harmful health effects. (I still miss the clove cigarettes I used to smoke in college. Trump, please bring them back.)
Like brooms, cigarettes are a tangible good you pay money for. Unlike sweeping, though, the act of using a cigarette powerfully alters the chemicals swirling around in your little cloud’s nervous center in just the right ways so that you keep coming back for more even when you know it’s kinda bad for your health, long-term-wise.
In the consumer app world that Facebook and Snapchat play in, the economics don’t work like either brooms or cigarettes. It’s what people refer to as the “attention” economy. Consumer app companies that rely on advertising only make money when you are actively using the product. Eyeballs on ad units, that’s it. Apps that instead structure themselves as a paid service (SaaS) aren’t quite as desperate. But they still hope to keep you tapping and swiping every day so that you’ll be convinced to shell out $9.99 or whatever again next month.
Apps, unlike cigarettes, don’t have the decidedly unfair advantage of literally being little sticks of chemicals we inhale that make us feel good. But app makers have stumbled on less direct methods that monkey with our neurochemistry in favorable ways (for them).
It was widely reported a few years ago that social media usage can create a dopamine rush. When this stuff started coming out, it was treated as some big revelation among Silicon Valley types. “Bro! Our app, like, has an effect on people’s mind and stuff!”
Here’s Mauricio Delgado, a professor of psychology at Rutgers:
Often, if you have the earliest predictor of a reward — a sign of a social media alert, like your phone buzzing — you get a rush of dopamine from that condition stimulus. That might trigger you to go check out the outcome, to see what it is. That type of reinforcement is something that you now seek out.
You can read the whole, gross, post from the American Marketer’s Association, here.
Not all streaks are created equal
There’s not much information I could find on the psychology of why streaks work, especially at a biochemical level. But we know they’re being employed all over the place.
The first class of apps are what I’ll call the utility streak apps (ex: Streaks, Way of Life). They allow you to put in anything you want to form a habit around and track it as a streak. The economics of these apps are single purchase, so you pay for the app once upfront and that’s it. There’s no financial incentive to keep you engaged. You have maximum control and autonomy, because you treat it as a tool, like Seinfeld’s calendar.
I’ve used Way of Life for long stretches and found it useful, but eventually regressed. (I track “read a book for 30 minutes” alongside “brush teeth at night” because I need external pressure to not be a slovenly philistine.)
The second class of apps is different because they use streaks as a secondary feature to engage the user towards the primary value proposition of the app.
In this second category we have streaks for:
- Checking the news (theSkimm)
- Tracking our calories (MyFitnessPal)
- Working out (RunKeeper)
- Writing (750 Words)
- Learning another language (Duolingo)
- Sending selfies to friends (Snapchat)
- Traveling back in time (Timehop)
We have streaks to pressure us to meditate (Headspace). And yes, even streaks for reading the Bible (YouVersion). “Get the Bible habit you’ve always wanted!” is the actual headline announcing the feature. Yikes.
This second class of apps can justify a streak feature like this: “You obviously want to do this thing, because you’re using our app. Our streak feature will help you do that thing more.” Which is true, probably. But it’s not as altruistic as it sounds. Us app makers would pretty much add any “feature” if we thought it would “engage” our users so much that they wouldn’t stop tapping and swiping our apps until their fingers ground down to bloody little stumps and their retinas burned through.
Within this class of streaks-as-a-secondary-feature apps, it’s worth mentioning two important sub-categories: apps that charge a recurring fee (SaaS) and free apps that make money primarily through advertising.
For SaaS apps, once you’re paying for it, the goal is to keep you engaged enough so that you don’t stop paying (i.e. churn). And maybe that means it’s fine if an average user only uses the app once a month, or week, or whatever. I don’t use Netflix every day but I’m happy to keep paying $7.99 each month for it.
Apps that rely primarily on advertising are playing a different game. These apps are the thirstiest of them all. It’s what Tristan means when he calls Facebook an “attention extraction” company. Our attention is literally what pays for all those $4,000/mo studios in the Mission.
But what’s new here? Newspapers, radio and television have been “attention extraction” companies for many years before little Marky was a twinkle in Karen and Eddy Zuckerberg’s eyes.
It’s the intensity that’s new.
One of the great challenges of capitalism is that our incentive to build technology far outweighs our understanding of the impact. Wisdom lags behind progress.
And as our technology becomes ever-more powerful, the intensity of the experiences available to us become greater too.
And so back to Snapchat. Snapchat found a way to combine the powerful effects of social interaction and inclusion — particularly powerful amongst their core demographic of tweens — with the pressure of streaks. And the psychologists are scrambling to figure it all out. Here’s Jennifer Powell-Lunder over at Psychology Today:
It is not uncommon to hear a tween bragging about the number of streaks she has going as well as about the length of each of these streaks. The longer the streak, the higher it’s perceived value.”
Work with your tween to determine how much time and stress keeping up with streaks is costing her.
Streaks allow kids to interact socially and feel part of something many of their peers are doing.
Tweens (and adults too, btw) have always desired social connection and to feel included in a group. Companies have always worked to exploit this. So again, what’s new? Snapchat has more tools (technology) at their disposal to influence and shape behavior than ever before. Social media is just old media on steroids. Everything that’s new is only an amplified version of something that’s old.
I’ve debated adding streaks to Basic Weather since it was conceived. The temptation grew post-launch, when the metrics quickly confirmed that a lot of people get the daily push notification, but far fewer actually open the app every day. That’s OK, it’s what I expected, but I still want more people to open the app and swipe through the forecast. Why? I honestly think it’s the way to get the most value out of the app. Is it wrong to use a technique to modify my user’s behavior in a way that I think is mutually beneficial? Am I helping or hurting my users? What if they can turn it off? Isn’t it all just a bit of fun anyway?
We’re all figuring this stuff out as we go. As designers and product people we need to think deeply about the decisions we make. We’ve been given a responsibility that we should take seriously. The things we build have real power. But it’s rarely as simple as calling something out as right or wrong.
