What is it about?
One specific design that is used by most of the social media platforms is infinite newsfeed. Infinite newsfeed is a dark pattern, which means that the design is deceptive in nature. The objective of this research is to explore how a reduce newsfeed affects users’ experiences and their time spent on Facebook.
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Why is it important?
Previous research has shown that users are unable to self-regulate their social media use and one of the addictive features that hook users to the app is newsfeed. The newsfeed has successfully led users to spend more time on the social media application. To combat this addictive newsfeed researchers have tried hiding the newsfeed. However, The real problem is not addressed by hiding the newsfeed. The real flaw is in the Facebooks design i.e., when a friend request is accepted by an individual, they not just become friends but start following each other by default which leads to never-ending content on one’s newsfeed.
Perspectives
In the future, Facebook could remove the default to follow friends, pages and groups and give user a choice which could lead to improved user experience and improve users' overall digital wellbeing
Dr Aditya Kumar Purohit
Radboud Universiteit
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Starving the Newsfeed for Social Media Detox: Effects of Strict and Self-regulated Facebook Newsfeed Diets, April 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3544548.3581187.
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