A 'like' on Facebook is a treat. You get a little red pop-up on your notifications icon, you see the little box on the-hand corner of your screen describing the like, and you get that warm, albeit fleeting sense of pride. Someone liked your post. Your post! You savor it. You inevitably want more likes. You wait.
To keep its 1.3 billion users clicking and posting (and stalking), Facebook scatters numbers everywhere. While it collects many metrics that users never see, it tells users plenty of others, too. Facebook tells you the number of friends you have, the number of likes you receive, the number of messages you get, and even track the timestamp to show how recently an item entered the news feed.
And these numbers, programmer and artist Ben Grosser argues, directly influence user behavior by being the root of Facebook addiction. In October 2012, he set out to find exactly what Facebook's metrics were doing to users after noticing how much he depended on them.
'There were times when I was more focused on the numbers than the content itself,' he remembers. 'I was more interested in how many likes I had instead of who liked it. I realized every time I logged in looked at those numbers. Why was I caring? Why do I care so much?'
In response, he built a browser extension called The Facebook Demetricator, which, when installed and activated, hid all numbers on Facebook. Instead of seeing the little red pop-up showing the number of notifications you have, you'd simply see the icon take on a lighter blue color. Instead of seeing the number of likes a post received, you'd see the phrase 'people like this.'
Ben Grosser
Since releasing the extension two years ago, more than 5,000 users have adopted the tool, sending Grosser feedback on how the tool influenced their understanding of the social network. Grosser used their observations to write a paper examining the impact of metrics, published Monday in the journal Computational Culture.
Ben Grosser
His findings are illuminating. Sure, Facebook addiction is probably the oldest social-network-related epidemic, but Grosser's tool allowed users to experience a pressure-free Facebook. This experience demonstrated that metrics changed user behavior by encouraging competition (the more likes, the better), emotional manipulation (deleting posts when there weren't enough likes), reaction (liking more recent posts instead of older ones), and homogenization (liking because others liked).
Put simply, the numbers encouraged users to feel compelled to want more numbers. For example, friend count is seen as a mark of status because Facebook places a small '+1' next to the 'Add Friend' button. Even if the user isn't aware of doing so, the number encourages her to make more connections, because she's shown that adding a friend is a positive action. That results in an overall and innate need for more on Facebook.
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