The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World a book by Max Fisher

Remember that the number of seconds in your day never changes. The amount of social media content competing for those seconds, however, doubles every year or so, depending on how you measure it. Imagine, for instance, that your network produces 200 posts a day of which you have time to read about 100. Because of the platform's tilt, you will see t

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Slot machines leverage this psychological weakness to incredible effect. The unpredictability of payout makes it harder to stop. Social media does the same. Posting to Twitter might yield a big social payoff, in the form of likes, retweets, and replies. Or it might yield no reward at all. Never knowing the outcome makes it harder to stop pulling t

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