Every two to three months, irrespective of exams or project submissions, I find myself a phase of much solemn and entertainment drought from the dopamine gods at Meta. Yeah, I mean uninstalling Instagram.

For my future meta employers: I think it's a great app - almost the entire population of the earth is on it - and everyone are connected to everyone else by a few taps away, it's great for companies, for people to find others, all on a free-to-use charitable service that only, only makes money from puny little ads. I also, without a doubt in my psyche, think that it is one of the worst, soul-sucking, predatory apps made in human history.

Instagram has reached everyone. I mean everyone. Heck, your bus conductor watches reels in traffic, your rapido driver has instagram opened up along with five different ride hailing apps and also WhatsApp Call all at the same time (while driving). School Teachers, students, the vice-principal, drivers, CEOs, influencers, chefs, kids barely allowed to get a phone - ALL of them irrevocally scroll reels (or youtube shorts) to fill their time up. It's the go-to escape from the awful bureaucracy - the heavy, uncomfortable work of life. The effort to move those papers, man!

The weight of responsibility and the need for connection leads us straight to the path of brain numbing entertainment. It's almost like a quick shot of tobacco - except - this one isn't marketed as something dangerous, and it's also always just a click away.

Imagine the reality most of us students have been part of - It's a day before exam. 5 modules. Fuck. I haven't touched any of them. I spent an hour downloading all the notes and now I have to start studying. And I do - two slides... it's actually kinda interesting. But I have so much to study! Fuck! I'll not make it. Let me take a quick whiff at instagram. Haha, stories, ohhh - she's put me in close friends. Damn. Okay next, next, next. Quick tap stories. These guys went to Goa, huh? Next, next, next, okay how many times they'll repost this reel? Next, next. Another club event promotion? Next. Random party. Next. Beach. Next. No more stories. Let me check my messages. "X sent you an attatchment" - I'll not watch that reel. Go back. Omo, my finger just clicked the reel icon before I even thought about it??? Boom - Reels. Haha. Scroll. Should I like it? Ehh it's only got 1,531 likes. Scroll. Haha. Scroll. Scroll. Scroll. Ohhhh floating heart - she liked this reel. Lemme like it too - what if I show up in her feed... Scroll. Scroll. Another one she's liked. Like. Scroll. Scroll. Hahaha this is so relatable. Send. Scroll. Scroll. Scroll. Scroll. What's this feeling looming behind me? Scroll. Scroll. I should probably be stuyding. Scroll. Scroll. Another floating heart. ARGHHHHHHHH

Only when the session is over, and a overwhelming feeling of regret washes over your body, you realise how much of a waste of time it has all been.

You don't even remember a single video from it, do you?

Concept Drift

There is a reason major companies spend all their time and effort to get this feature on all their apps. The moment TikTok was banned in India - YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, heck, even Spotify jumped at their oppurtunity to catch the fleeting audience. There were some irrelevant apps ( Moj, Takatak ) and what not that tried to stir the pot up. I don't even know if they are in use anymore, however, Instagram has, so far to my understanding, peaked in farming maximum engagement.

The all well known interface in the history of technology: a potrait video that's full screen. It gives us no choice to choose what video we would see, instead just feeds us with what it thinks we should watch. The like, comment, share buttons all closer to your right thumb (because majority users in the world are right handed), and conviniently smooth, tactile scrolling (try scrolling by moving just a centimeter - it's smooth), custom phsyrics engine to make it as seamless as possible, pre-loaded videos with no loading animation. Everything instant. Infinite entertainment, all seconds in length so you can keep asking for more.

The algorithm, too, is highly sophisticated. Without getting into technical depth, an reccomendation engine is trained every minute with your input preferences, interactions, engagement, and your clustered group's engagement to find a batch of videos to reccomend.

Things you like this minute, you will not after a few minutes. That's called a concept drift. So what does the algorithm do? It keeps adapting. Keeps training on new data, on demand.

All of it to increase KPI's in some boardroom, just so they could shove in more ads and make more money.

Now these are all the stuff you probably already know. There's also more to this narrative - that these apps are evil entities trying to pry on humanities brains to make money by recommending reactive, hateful stuff and ragebaiting (that's a new term!) people.

I, however, do not fully agree with that.

I think, and this is from my experience training ML models, that they did not necessarily want to shove in hateful content up our faces. In fact, I strongly believe that art is molded by it's medium - analogus in this context to - content is molded by its medium. Because the main engagement metrics are the number of comments, likes, and the "controversy" (like/dislike/share) share ratio of the video. These are deemed as "valid" candidates to increase the view-time of an average user, so in turn, pushed by the model to be recommended to more users, and it's a positive feedback loop that increases the content.

And now since the parameters just focus on increasing these metrics, there is a model-to-ethics mismatch, because the videos that go viral are the ones with the most controversy. So ofcourse, a video which makes people rage, confused, or conflicted with, is interacted more, and therefore, pushed to more people.

So that's why girls get more men-hating reels, reels about cases of harrasment, women being the victims, and patriarchy ruining society.

Guys get vidoes where women are being "evil", women getting "owned" by alpha males, street interviews where girls are "not loyal", this "generation is cooked, man".

People in relationship get reels that set up fake expectations, and single ones get reels that make them feel alone, or glorifies isolation and self-growth.

It's all bubbles with different types of vidoes catering to different audience, in the end, as long as you spend time watching, liking, reposting them, it doesn't matter, you'll keep believing into that and come back for more.

Even if the the engineers weren't evil and that they might have not seen this side effect. However, it is still strongly unaimicable that they still continue to ignore that in favour of ad-revenue.

What do you do if everyone is addicted?

Okay, I might have gone to an unintended tangent there. The point I was trying to make: everyone is addicted. Whether they know it or not, or they think they aren't.

Let me prove it to you.

First, prior to writing this article, I was working on this app called ScrollBlock - which like the name suggests, blocks you scroll Reels, Youtube Shorts, etc - it was a fun project to work on, to try out different coding models, and to design a functional, yet visually pleasing app that I can publish on play store because my verified developer account was rotting for a year and a half.

I then found out other apps already exist that does the same thing. So I went above and beyond to polisht the UX, and add SOTA features in the app. Including a reel counter. It was a simple feature that counted the reels and shorts (and any short form supported by the app) you watched when the blocker was off. Hang on with me, this is relevant to my story.

So then, I asked my friends to install the app, most said that they are already immune and have self-control to deal with their own time, but I insisted anyway.

And after a few weeks where they forgot the app was on their phone, me, with just genuine curioisity to see if my app worked, asked them to open it, and I was awe-struck.

The lifetime (of the app's existence) videos watched of some of my friends were: 24000, 30000, 12000, 8000, 19000, 47000, 11000 and more. Mind you, these were just like a week or two of use.

Mine was sitting somewhere around 5000. (6.7k as I'm writing this).

Some of my friends told me that my app was wrong. But no, it had a 99.7% accuracy, it only double counted at a rare time when there were buffered videos not loaded in the feed. If anything, it under-counted more than it over-counted. So the numbers are generously low, actually. So there was no way that the data is wrong.

Sometimes I thought I didn't watch videos that day, and then I check my app's stats and it showed me exactly when I watched how many videos. Because it's there right in the log. And then I check my screen time and it matches perfectly.

So people, self-admitted people who had enough self control, people who I personally know as ambitious enough to not want to waste time, people who absolutely did not think that they would spend time watching THOUSANDS of videos per week. And the worst part was it was almost invoulantary.

Like do you sometimes feel like you opened your phone for something else, and then suddenly catch yourself watching your 12th reel already?

That's what was happening. Our memory was being hijacked! Our will! Attention!

So many self-aware folks who find this out try to distance themselves and delete instagram. For a week or so everything is still itchy, they open their phone and by sheer muscle memory, to to the spot the app use to be, but it's not, and you're reminded again why you deleted it.

Maybe you csucceed for more than a week, and everytime your friends check their instagram, you have this inner smug feel that you are "out of the matrix", that you are better than these peasants who are still chained to the app.

You don't use instagram, yay.

But deep down, you still have these scenarios where you might need instagram.

"What if someone had texted me, a really pretty girl, and if I don't reply, then maybe that would alter my life trajectory and I'd probably end up dying single."

"I wonder what THAT GUY is upto"

(Imagines a senario where a girl asks for your instagram and you smugly say you don't use it because you don't like reels so you give her your number and text her in WhatsApp)

And if you've passed ALL of these micro-FOMO moments, and peer-pressure, and finally off the chains (maybe you occasionally still open it in the web browser on your laptop, but that doesn't really count really. Or, Maybe you had deactivated your account. Or you've replaced it with YouTube shorts, Twitter threads, reddit, whatever.)

Whatever it is, instagram's finally gone.

But why do we come back?

God forbid there is this trip that you're in, or you've attended this wedding, or maybe the sunset is toooo pretty you just have to post it. You promise yourself you'll uninstall it as soon as you do this one thing, and you install it again.

BOOM, 4 months pass.

Well, now we're back right were we started. We're now the peasant who's got the app chained to his fingertip.

And as someone who has gone through this cycle for more times than I'd like to admit, here's what I think is happening.

Its a combination of FOMO, Feeling of irrelevance, This innate desire to interact with others (escpecially if your IRL social circle is still shit and flaky), and intense boredom. Deep down, even though you're better off the stimulation, you still miss it. That's why the first reels session after a month long starvation feels really good - and you laugh at everything you see. It's that need for reassurance, that invisible hug that this souless entity simulates, the floating hearts, crushes, stories. The intertwined perception of human connection. That's exactly what makes us come back.

Not everyone comes back. There are some people who are really good at staying away from it all, because they realise the toxic poison it really is, but, its mainly because they are either: A) They have a healthy IRL support group and people they love, B) Too consumed with their work and passions, C) Never got in it in the first place or D) Banned.

Let's think about the famous people we know who aren't on social media: David Goggins, MS Dhoni, Mark Zuckerburg (how fucking ironic), And 90% of sportsmen and actors don't even use any social media and have their PR teams post for them. It's because they are so consumed by what they do that IT DOESN'T EVEN MATTER.

But why do we, people, who work, study, run clubs, ambitious dreamers, still stuck using it?

Because of the perception of reward. A aspiring founder thinks being on instagram would make connecting with investors easy (or necessary) while in reality, most of the serious investors aren't on instagram.

A single guy/girl looking for a partner thinks being on instagram, he / she might some day stumble upon and find their partner on the app (ofcourse! they have seen it happen with their friends, influencers, so it's a given!).

A student preparing for an exam has instagram so he can be updated if there's a sudden news about exams, dates, postponement or syllabus changes, while still falling into hours of wasted time instead of studying.

In the end, most people who are addicted (without self control) to these apps may just hate their work, find it tedious, void of passion.

And that's why they come back. That's why they install again.

Well, I'm one of them. But I've decided I'd not watch short form content, that way, even if I'm being wasteful of my time, atleast I intend to be intentional about it and only use it to connect with people and text. I know it's not a COMPLETE solution, the best scenario is to some day completely get off all social media and live as a digital nomad. But for now, I have a tool that helps me get away from HOURS of doomscrolling to only minutes. And I'm fine with that.

Maybe you can find out if you're addicted, or stop yourself from scrolling using ScrollBlock. It's really not promotional (although I would love it to be), but the app genuinely improved my social media intake, and so did a few people from around the world who mailed me about it. So it might improve yours too.

That being said, this blog just feels like I've brain dumped a lot. Honestly, it feels good to get it all out. There are probably a lot of other things I want to say, I might.

For now, I just want to end it with this:

We all know exactly what we're doing wrong. Yet we still do it. That's the irony of being human. Because we're really not in control. An indivudual cannot be in control of something humans as a collective have created.