Success Through User Abuse

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Success Through User Abuse

Let me know if you’ve had this happen to you.

You go to your local library thinking of a book you remember seeing while perusing the aisles. You go to where you thought you’d seen the book, but it’s as if all the books have been moved to different locations. You thought it was on the second shelf in the third aisle, but it isn’t there. You wander around near that location thinking you’ll find it—to no avail. It’s one of those things where you don’t remember the author or title exactly. So the card catalog or index search terminal won’t be of any use.

You’re away at the library for hours, and when you return home frustrated, someone has rearranged your furniture. Absolutely nothing is where you remember it. You go into the kitchen, and everything in your cabinets has been moved somewhere else. Once you’ve adjusted to that and gone to bed, you wake up the next day and it’s happened again! Except this time, not even the rooms of the house are where you’re used to them. You actually have to look for the bathroom: It’s no longer down the hall, second door on the right. Where is it?

You go to work and return home—and it’s the same problem! Everything is different all over again. The furniture is different furniture, too, as well as the wall and window treatments, the floorplan and layout… Sure, it’s tastefully decorated, but still. Who did this, and—more importantly—how can you have him or her sent to Guantanamo Bay?

This is how media platforms treat users more or less.

A site like YouTube at one time used to offer a stable homepage whenever you logged in. There was new content at the top of the page with previous items that you could scroll through using your spatial memory. Then the web and app designers got busy developing “decider” algorithms. And now each time you visit the site, the items are all in different places. In fact, the thing you later thought you’d like to come back to—what was it exactly?—is gone from where you remembered it, and maybe gone completely.

It’s like a memory card game—except that some sociopath puts a bucket over your head and rearranges the cards in between turns.

Why do social media giants and others engage in this type of user torment? Because it causes us to scroll more and spend more time on their sites. To them it doesn’t matter whether we’re scrolling happily or angrily. The main thing is “engagement”, which means time spent or wasted on one of their sites.

In my book, it’s another reason to boycott their products altogether: to punish them by not permitting them to abuse you.

Now if I could just remember where the door was so I could get out of here…