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Likes and Swipes

‘Cause you only swipe right if you f*ck for follows
Welcome to the days of the broke and shallow
-Cautious Clay, Cold War

Now that I’ve gotten a few bamboozle columns that shout, “Look how
clever I am,” out of the way,1 I think I can go back to my lawn again so I
can yell at people to get off it. It’s a tough job being this cynical while also
backtracking and calling myself out as much as I can so that I’m not
exempt from the very things that I criticize. I imagine it must be some
bizarre form of lampshading I’ve developed to protect my fragile ego,2 but
you wouldn’t notice because of how dope my Insta game has been lately.

Understandably, my travel lifestyle these days has led a number of old
friends to bring up the whole, “your life looks amazing abroad” thing, and
I just can’t help but think, “No… my s​ ocial media ​does.” It reminds me of
whenever someone tries to tell my family that my two siblings and I don’t
look alike (which is true), “but you all have the same smile.” My brother
will invariably step in here and say “No… we h​ ad the same o​ rthodontist​.”
It’s his favorite original line of all time considering how often I’ve heard it
coupled with how seldom I see my brother.

Anyway, the truth is I could just as easily be in a deep dark place
emotionally or mentally or whatever and maintain a habit of concealing
that online. So could everybody else. And that’s really the pernicious
nature of social media ​– ​because we’ve established that it is not a place for
your psychological problems,3 yet it’s somehow used for psychological
answers. Meanwhile we act surprised at all the related hoopla surrounding
mental health as if the articles and studies could somehow be overblown.

At its core, social media is a natural market answer to serve low-esteem
vanity needs. It’s the place to generate synthetic gratification in the form
of likes, and the lengths at which we go to obtain it are objectively ugly.
The end result might not be, but it’s pretty odious to see 8-year-olds taking
countless photos of mom on mom’s phone by mom’s orders so mom can

1 But I am clever, though, right? Please love me.
2 See, there it goes again. Very meta.
3 Grain of salt please.

post one later, or when hot drinks go cold after the thirteenth boomerang
attempt, and when Apple pretends it invented Bokeh photography because
there’s boatloads of cash to be made with portrait mode.

So when it comes to everybody getting caught up subconsciously trying to
show that their life is the big thing going on in the world, Facebook-owned
Instagram systematically is an easy target for blame. People learn by using
it that the more effort they put in, the more attention they can get –​ w​ hich
can go on until it becomes a single source of attention. I mean, if this were
just about attention I’d be all over it because (along with nonpareil
peripheral vision as well as an incredible ability to end up with my own
row on airplanes) needing attention is my superpower. But it is not just
that. There’s also no compounding or lasting nature to this content and
there’s no compounding or lasting nature to the gratification either, so it’s
a breeding ground for addiction. What we’re left with is a manufactured
psychological need where people are driven to outdo themselves with their
own content over and over in order to feed the beast.

To keep up, we’ve taken exploitation to the next level. How else could
you explain half of the things people hijack as excuses for new posts? For
example, if you’re anything like me in the sense that you follow almost
exclusively dog accounts on Instagram, then you’re well aware of the
blatant pandering surrounding whatever the dialogue of the day is. Yeah
it’s cool that your dog can use a smartphone, but what was he thinking
with that 9/11 photo? Like, “Umm hey I see that you guys are never
forgetting the victims, but I’m wearing a red white and blue bandana so
would you mind never forgetting me too?” Your dog is an asshole.

We’ve nearly jumped the shark on exploitation as well, since the time has
come and gone when it was edgy to say you accidentally wished your
mother a happy birthday in person instead of posting about it on a social
media she doesn’t have. That kind of negative reinforcement or feedback
is otherwise pretty uncommon, which is probably the real danger that
leads to the vicious circle where good enough never is, and each new post
is merely a stopgap until the next one. And if you’ve reached this far and
are still thinking that this doesn’t apply to you, and that all this detriment
only affects people who have a real problem, and that your online activity
is totally and unequivocally healthy, do you ​really know? It’s not a
shameful question but it certainly i​ s something we’re not used to asking –​

especially because our default setting is to think that if it’s us doing it then
it must be from a good place and not for attention or whatever. But can we
really go on some exotic vacation or be dressed up at a fancy wedding and
not feel utterly compelled to post something? (Yet it’s other people that
are phone addicted and not us, remember?)

So at what point down the road do our values change and what might
future generations think of our selfies? At what point do we look back on
all this behavior and cringe? I don’t know, but anytime we get close, it
gets covered up by “Doing if for the gram” jokes. At least we’re somewhat
self-aware, but there’s also a lot of self-aware memes about Millennials
and Generation Z having crippling anxiety and depression and whatnot but
who knows if that’s helping.

Back when the internet changed the exchange of information forever, a
natural market response was for amateur journalism to become a thing,
and that sort of ushered in the great race for clicks. The news was an
amazing thing we once invented and it’s a shame what we did to it. The
same can be said for social media because it plays such a big role in daily
life that the mental health concerns are totally real and justified, and the
implications trickle into social development and interpersonal
relationships for sure. Hell, half of the time even dating today is basically
just going places and doing things while begrudgingly accepting to take
photos for someone else’s Instagram until this person decides if you can or
can’t cross the line into being in the photos together.4

Look, at no point am I going to claim that I’m not a part of it too. This
isn’t even a backtrack.5 I can pretend to see through it because I’ve been
the guy behind a few social media accounts with millions of followers and
I’ve literally been paid by Snapchat to snap content for millions of views
both on and off camera, but I’m just as guilty whether I’m on or off my
high horse. Even right now as I spout off all of this animadversion, I’m
absolutely still going to be blasting out my own content and chronicling
my travels on the gram anyway. My excuses and qualifications for this
behavior include A: I have a rule that I’m only allowed one post per trip,
B: It helps me keep track of where I’ve been, and C: I’m trying to flex on
girls so they’ll slide in my DMs, d​ uhh​. Gotta play the game. All that said,

4 That’s harsh AF I know, but is it wrong? Conceptually, yeah sure. But practically is it not like that?
5 Lmao who am I kidding, yes it is.

you may rest assured knowing that I’m disgusted with myself every time I
make a post and I teem with self-loathing every time I add to my story.

You know, I realize that all this has been super negative and not everyone
uses Instagram, but social media overall isn’t something that was ever
intrinsically designed to promote social well-being, even if we think it
should. Again, it’s just a natural market answer to an opportunity, and it’s
a business that shoots first and asks questions about societal impact later.
Instagram, for example is going to keep feeding it because there’s a billion
monthly active users who keep eating it. The platform continues to
implement new ways to create content within the app, and it makes its
money by keeping people occupied on it. Instagram’s ad revenue has
doubled or more every year since at least 2015 and it’s likely to approach
7 billion by the end of 2018, and all of it relies on that sweet, juicy screen
time. If they can keep you on the app longer whether you’re primarily
producing or consuming content, that’s a win they can convert to ad
impressions. That’s also why there’s no lasting power to the gratification,
since they rip it away and you’ll just want more again soon enough.

In fact, Instagram is so keyed in on serving up content it thinks you’ll
engage with based on your activity, if you open the app and wait five
seconds, hard close and reopen it, whatever the top post was five seconds
ago that you didn’t engage with will not only be replaced, but it’s likely to
be completely absent from your feed altogether. I may be stating the
obvious but the point of emphasis is that this was an active choice to have
the app load a freshly catered feed in hopes that you engage longer this
session and increase your screen time. You can kiss whatever that post
you saw for five seconds goodbye because five seconds is simply too long
for you to not have engaged with it according to the values of the
platform.

But that’s what it’s all about. I’ve had many fortunate learning
opportunities while running those big-time accounts over the years, and
one of the things that I could probably give an off-the-cuff Ted Talk on
tomorrow is the mystical and illusive organic reach algorithm (formerly
EdgeRank if we’re just talking Facebook) that decides how and what
content populates a user’s feed. But to sum it up instead I’ll just say that
when Facebook decided to make the (somewhat morally objectionable)
genius business decision to curb organic reach and tell businesses that they

now had to pay to have their posts reach the audiences that had already
intentionally elected to receive updates, it was (for lack of a better
analogy) a gigantic kick in the dick to anyone trying to grow a business or
brand online. It was also the catalyst leading towards a near homogenous
product behind the scenes of nearly all platforms of social media.6

Due to the fact that you (and your time and your activity) are ultimately
the product for whichever networking app or platform you prefer, they all
utilize affinity scores, engagement levels, and/or advanced rating systems
to dictate what content to tee up for you.7 The dating app Tinder and it’s
Elo scoring system make a perfect example of one of the simpler ones
conceptually. If you’re familiar with the game of Chess, serious players
have a rating that changes based on the outcome of a match against a
given opponent and his/her rating. Altogether it’s a self-correcting system
that relies on the players to ultimately perform at their presumed true skill
level. In order to move up in the ranks, the system values defeating a
higher ranked player more than it values defeating a lower ranked player.
Tinder has a very similar and somewhat disconcerting Elo score for its
users, where matching with “higher” or “lower” rated users will
incrementally nestle them into their perceived desirability as human
beings.8 As these ratings solidify over time, the app will frontload a given
user’s feed of potential matches with a majority of profiles it considers to
be in his/her league, with the occasional outlier on either end.

So of course that sounds pretty superficial in one sense, but in another it’s
realistically the only way it can work. The plain fact is that some profiles
do get swiped more than others, and besides, if you wanted to be
wholesome you would have stopped the moment we got to an app
designed for people to say yes or no to others based on their photos. At the
end of the day, Tinder (or any similar app for that matter) is a business that
can only exist with an active user base, and giving its users a streamlined
chance at maximizing their matches is a sensible retention tactic to
minimize the amount of discouraged users who leave the app.

6 ​Referring to pretty much everyone else’s implementation of similar machine learning algorithms to phase out
chronological feeds (despite user outrage which was promptly ignored), as well as how any new feature on one
platform is fair game for the rest.
7 B​ ecause user screen time is paramount and generally greater with curated feeds versus unsorted and chronological,
and it’s easier to sell ad space with users who spend 10 minutes on the app than with users who spend 10 seconds.
8 Lol I tried to make that sound as unconscionable as possible.

Now, since there’s hardly any bones to pick about that, all of this would
have been good and well if things stopped there. But remember, this is a
business built upon the screen time of its users first, and a so-called dating
service second. So what’s the main action or behavior that Tinder wants
its users to perform from a business standpoint? I’ll give you a hint: it sure
as hell is not to connect with a match and leave the app. On the contrary,
it’s to stay on the app swiping away until you get arthritis. Maybe even
carpal tunnel if you really go for it.

By design, the reward inside Tinder’s user journey is and always will be
the moment of making a match; nothing beyond it matters. Why do you
think the chat function is still janky and terrible after however long it’s
been? Who do they think they are, Skype?9 They don’t improve it because
it’s just not a priority, and possibly even counterproductive. Instead, the
app celebrates the match so the user can feel the accompanying
gratification and it leaves everything else alone so that swiping will
always be the easy core activity. When the user comes back to swipe for
another satisfying match, that’s the slippery slope leading down into the
same dopamine feedback loop that got everyone in trouble on Instagram.

Tinder makes somewhere around half a billy in annual revenue now, and it
margins a profit of nearly half that to boot. Believe it or not, almost all of
it comes from subscriptions to the paid version(s). That’s crazy, but not so
crazy when you think of it as people subscribing to the addictive
gratification of new matches, especially when the subscriptions promise a
consistently greater number of matches (and more matches equals more
times to feed the beast). It’s not even a secret that the app withholds
potential matches behind a paywall because it’s right there in the free
version encased in gold. I’d be really interested to see the numbers and
data on brand new users who download the app and buy a subscription
right away, because I imagine it to be almost nonexistent. But once they
get hooked on the taste of a match, though.. oh boy.

You know, hypothetically if Tinder ever went rogue and decided to make
the ancillary things better, I guess the first thing would be to improve the
chat. Actually no, it would be to remove the ability to forward someone’s

9 Remember when Skype came out 15 years ago and never got any better? Makes me think of those cups of ​Dippin'
Dots​ ice cream that called itself the ‘ice cream of the future’ at amusement parks for the last 20 years. Hate to break
it to you but it’s the future now and ice cream is not like you.

profile to a friend on seemingly any other app you have. Wtf is that? I bet
whatever madman uses that feature also uses the share button on porn
videos. Next I bet users would probably benefit from being able to sort or
I guess organize their matches by l​ iterally anything other than time of last
message. Maybe current city would be good. Then there’s also the whole
notion of doing ​literally anything creative to incentivize users to engage
with matches instead of collecting them in silence like that weird ladybug
kid from elementary school. Oh, and for the love of god I would have
returned to Tinder years ago if they allowed you to modify your search
parameters to set multiple age ranges so you could deliberately avoid the
23 and 24-year-old segment known as the No Go Zone.10 A single line of
code could take care of adding that capability, and it would change at least
one (but maybe even two) dozen people’s lives. The baker’s kind. 

But I don’t want to go all scorched Earth in bashing Tinder because A: it’s
an easy target since most people know it, and B: it’s not entirely a bad
thing. It certainly helped pioneer the rise in people’s comfort level ahead
of encountering someone they met online, and there’s tons of possibilities
for the app to bring about positive change in other areas too. So while I did
delete the app once I achieved a milestone number of matches that only
served to point out the extent of my ineffective time wasting, I feel bad for
talking smack ​– ​especially because waaayyy back in 2013, Tinder sent me
a goodie swag box filled with stickers and T-Shirts and actual matches.11

I think the only lasting issues I have with dating apps in general have to do
with me anyway, since they rarely do anything for you post-match and I’m
not willing to put in the extra work either. I’m just not going to out-effort
all the other thirsty dudes, and I’d rather not weed through the girls who
are only on there to boost their Instagram followings.12 Straight women on

10 This is highly autobiographical and more relevant from my life outside of Tinder, but it’s a hard rule that I never
followed and always got burned by, so it applies here as well. Anyway yeah the No Go Zone is girls that are 23 and
24. Just don’t date them. Here’s why: The 21 and 22-year-olds are fine, they’re great. These girls don’t know what
they want yet, and they don’t care. Life is good. Now on the other side at 25, 26, going up, this is fairly safe as well.
These girls have mostly figured out what they want, but they’re also refined enough to not care so much if they
haven’t. They’re comfortable not taking life too seriously despite having goals. Then there’s the treacherous cocoon
stage of 23 and 24. These girls don’t know what they want, yet somehow they care. They’re confused AF, caught
between coming to terms with reality and letting go of some noxious Disney fantasy or something. The worst is
when they cross over from 22 to 23 because the venom gets you before you know you were bit. Oh, and nobody has
ever lived to witness what happens in their return to light during the final stage of metamorphosis from 24 to 25.
11 I’ve been told I should never have revealed to anyone but it was really great, tbh. Still have the shirts.
12 Nice growth hack, btw. Also before I forget, there’s another one that anyone can use. Remember the thing about
the Elo score? Yeah, you can reset that and start over from scratch by doing a hard delete of your profile.

Tinder already get right-swiped by men upwards of 50 percent of the time
(compared to about 15 percent the other way), so standing out to a girl
who has a pile of insta-matches waiting in her feed any time she opens the
app sounds like too much work for me. I mean, what do you expect me to
do, send a couple messages and then sit around waiting for my turn like
I’m Hillary Clinton? Lol, no thanks.

Anyhow, all this bitching and moaning calls for a mood shift.13 Granted
I’ve had my pitchfork out and come at these topics full tilt, they’re still
dangerous tools that we don’t understand well enough. Even from the
most perverse and the most beneficial perspectives, we can’t definitively
say that they make society better or worse off because it’s too complicated
without foresight and hindsight. And look, while I claim to have some
digital media chops, surely I’m no dating expert. I definitely give advice
more than I follow it, and the only relationship I’ve ever had where both
sides said the three magic words was when we were too young to mean it,
and not that I look back and think it was going anywhere because it
definitely wasn’t, and really this is just for morbid emphasis ​– like, really
morbid, so forgive me ​– but I look back on it and have to think about how
that was the only person who reached that point with me under any
circumstance and I heard she’s dead now.

The serious big picture here is that social development is changing on the
fly, without precedent, and way too fast for us to not be concerned as a
group, obviously. We know that much. But what we also have to figure
out is how to confront it individually (and only individually) since literally
everyone’s online experience is different due to everything being
customized specifically for them. That’s the first reason why Facebook
gets called a reality distorting echo chamber, because people post with the
underlying feeling that they’re shouting off a mountaintop for all to hear,
but in reality they’re only reaching the select subgroup within their
existing network that Facebook’s algorithm decides would be interested in
hearing it first. That means there’s virtually no possible way for people to
be informed in the same way using such a platform.

We are essentially guinea pigs without any kind of control group, and
meanwhile digital nativity is still in its infancy. This is the first time in

13 Side note, I feel like ‘bitch and moan’ ought to be a phrasal verb, so like, instead of ‘bitching and moaning’ it
would be ‘bitch-and-moaning’ as a package deal. Hmm, maybe.

history that pre-teen (or younger) boys started carrying smartphones in
their pockets next to their balls for what may turn out to be the rest of their
entire lives, and we don’t know what that could do over time because this
is the inaugural run. Back at that age for me, the unprecedented
technological change was being able to go on a desktop computer (tying
up the family phone until we got a second line) and logging into AOL to
chat with classmates who were sitting at their family’s home computer
doing the same thing. Damn, that was magical. You could set statuses full
of song lyrics,14 or write melodramatic away messages aimed at unnamed
people like passive-aggressive tweets, and it was d​ esktop only​.

It’s wild how Instant Messenger was maybe the thing that effectively
kick-started digital courtship and led us to Tinder and all the others we
have today. Remember trying to nurture a budding romance on AIM?
Asking for someone’s screen name and then adding it to your Buddy List
was exhilarating because now you could see when he/she was online (i.e.
your window of opportunity to flirt). The gratification back then was
suddenly hearing the custom music tone that meant your crush had just
gotten online. It’s definitely not like that anymore. I mean, do you
remember how cute the movie You’ve Got Mail was? Shit, that
rudimentary one-to-one style was amazing.

Maybe departing from that style has a lot to do with how far off course
we’ve gotten. I mean, the original one-to-one concept of Snapchat was
kinda groundbreaking, but as soon as they came out with stories it all went
to hell. Not only did it lose its intimacy and personal touch, but this
fundamental change towards posting to your own profile for others to
view also opened the door for Instagram to come dominate because
you’ve just changed your platform to become a game in which Instagram
is already beating you. That’s digging your own grave if I’ve ever seen it,
and when Conor McGregor made an exact parallel decision by changing
to boxing rules to fight the undefeated and perhaps greatest
pound-for-pound professional boxer of all time in Floyd Mayweather, at
least he was doing it for 100 million dollars.

14 RIP Third Eye Blind and Red Hot Chili Peppers. (JK, they’re still alive, but I’m paying respects before they die
instead of waiting until the day after and posting something about buying my first CD to remind everyone that even
though it wasn’t me who died, I’m important too because they played an entertainment-based role in my life. RIP.)

Anyway, while the move away from the one-to-one may not have been the
start of all this trouble, it was probably the peripeteia when content truly
stopped being about the recipient and started being about the sender. The
whole “everybody look at me” aspect of stories was just a fast-track to the
dopamine addiction, which today comes in limited edition due to the
24-hour shelf life. That means the shameless disconnect between who we
really are and who we need to be digitally is capable of widening on a
daily basis​. However, with all the brushback finally coming out, there’s a
chance that maybe it’ll reach a head. At least people are already throwing
their hands up and leaving Facebook, so perhaps the market is correcting
itself. And for the majority of us that stay out of convenience, maybe we
can power through and remember that these competitions for likes and
attention are either against our friends or they’re against ourselves.

The solution here cannot reasonably be to close our eyes and stop our
online activity altogether. Meanwhile, since the platforms aren’t helping
us with it, individually we’ve got to find a way to differentiate between
when we’re genuinely offering our time, money, and/or compassion to the
issues and people we care about, and when we’re just seeking approval. I
mean, deep down we all just want to affirm that we’re valuable to others
and that we’re worthy of being loved too. Deep down we just want the
validation that what we’re doing with our lives is good enough for a right
swipe. But we’re not supposed to be people who guilt our friends into
liking our shit, and we’re not supposed to be people who hate ourselves,
on or offline.
  
It’s still way too easy to get lost in the sauce of phone addiction, but
there’s a good chance future generations will have more important things
to look back on than our stockpiles of selfies. All this ​could become just a
blip on the radar, say, by taking responsibility and ultimately letting go of
feeding the beast. If we can manage to do that, then maybe we can reach a
point where it’ll be OK every so often to go get high on a bit of bogus
attention. Whether we reach that point or not, it might be best to go follow
me on Instagram now just in case. I may need it.

…

I wrote this on a flight from London to Austin, 5 April 2018.

XXX