I should know better. After all, I wrote about this in Coding matters: The scroll of doom.
I realised I had fallen into the trap of doomscrolling when Donald Trump featured in a dream. That was severe punishment for scrolling through videos on my phone late at night.
Remember Carol Smith?
In 2019, Facebook employees created a fake FaceBook page under the name of Carol Smith. “Carol” was a 41-year-old conservative mom, with an interest in politics and parenting. Two days after “Carol” followed pages for conservative figures like Fox News, the algorithm recommended a QAnon page.
That was a scary revelation. FaceBook claimed that the research helped improve their systems, and they removed QAnon from the platform.
Annoying algorithms
I hope the algorithms are less harmful now, but we can’t know for sure.
We do know the algorithms are designed to keep us scrolling. And they can be so annoying. I shared one link to a crochet pattern with Jo Ann, who is an avid crocheter. Guess what I get shown now? Endless crochet videos, despite the fact that I have zero interest in them.
For unknown reasons, the FaceBook feed for the Incus Data company page is full of sports news. Why? Nothing sport-related has ever been posted, liked, followed or encouraged in any way. Nothing I do changes this.
Variations of the scroll of doom
After my dream of Trump, I have avoided any doom scrolling. But I got stuck on videos of foster kittens. (Guess what I want to do now?)
It isn’t doomscrolling, but it is still a waste of time. We need some more names to describe this scrolling quicksand. Here are some options:
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Rage scrolling: you scroll through content that makes you mad. Avoid this – it is as bad as doomscrolling.
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Mope scrolling: the content makes you mopey and tearful. Another one to avoid.
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Echo scrolling: you watch the same kind of thing over and over, until it all blurs into a single image.
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Faux-to scrolling: watching "how to" do all those things you know you will never do.
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Fluff scrolling: you get stuck on light, airy, harmless content. Harmless until you discover you just lost two hours of your day!
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Duh scrolling: the content is so vapid you want to say "duh" each time you swipe.
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Purr scrolling: cats, kittens and more cats! Help! I have fallen into this trap.
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Mush scrolling: it turns your brain to mush.
All of the above will turn your brain to mush. So maybe we should just be honest and call them all the same: dumb scrolling!
What term describes the kind of scrolling you get stuck on? I’d love to hear your views.