Insiders say that they conceived social media as "behavioral cocaine" – BGR

One of the recurrent citations often uttered with humor by a member of the Bluth Family Arrested Development was the perpetually possible phrase, "I made a huge mistake."

This is the kind of thing that appears in the mind of a cynical listening to some of the engineers and technicians interviewed for a new edition of the BBC program Panorama in which a selection of insiders from Silicon Valley They talk about the deliberate engineering of these products and services to keep us hooked as it 's been in a digital form white powder – virtual cocaine that makes us fans of the product, but in extreme cases almost unable to pass it.

And now, faced with the scope of what they've helped bring into the world – you can almost hear Gob Bluth's excuses, "I've made a huge mistake."

"It's like they're taking behavioral cocaine and just spreading it over your interface and that's what makes you come back and come back," Aza Raskin, formerly of Mozilla and Jawbone, declared to BBC . "Behind every screen of your phone, there are usually a thousand engineers who have worked on this thing to try to make it extremely addictive."

He should know. In 2006, while Raskin was working for the Humanized consulting firm, he designed infinite scrolling, one of those types of FOMO behaviors that keep us constantly scrolling. Always have to see the next thing, you keep going down the page, it never ends. Almost your brain never want that to end.

The BBC team also heard from Leah Pearlman, a co-inventor of the Facebook "Like" button, who admitted that even she was hooked to the product. "When I need validation – I'll check on Facebook," she said, adding that the button should never be considered addicted to the validation that it provides.

I interviewed Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. years ago, and he described it that way. Too much of the internet, he explained, is built around feedback loops such as likes and retweets that are "carefully crafted" to maximize certain behaviors. They also measure the bad things on the other side of the screen, so if you see a metaphor, if you consider a site or content company to have the role of feeding people, then What do these feedback loops do, it's

Of course, he had a big chunk in that, and when I asked for natural follow-up, we then had a discussion on Medium, which is a story for another time.

Facebook – by virtue of its 2.2 billion users only – probably the most critical here, and rightly so. Last year, the company told us what we all know: too much social media is not good for you.

Of course, no one is under the illusion that something like cigarettes is anything but bad for you, but it does not stop people from lighting up anyway.

Fans, as they say, will love.