OkCupid founded by Chris Coyne, Sam Yagan, Max Krohn, and Christian Rudder, all Harvard alumni. The site is notable from the beginning for its data-driven, algorithmically-transparent approach to online dating. → Case Study 02: OkCupid's Public A/B Testing Disclosure (2014)
2005
Reddit launches. The upvote/downvote voting system is a core feature from the beginning, though the aggregated karma score visible on user profiles is introduced somewhat later. → Case Study 02: Reddit's Karma and Awards System
2006-2010
Reddit's karma system evolves from a simple content quality signal to a form of social capital within communities. "Karma farming" begins to be discussed as a recognized problem in some subreddits. Subreddit-specific karma sub-economies develop — different types of content reliably generate differen → Case Study 02: Reddit's Karma and Awards System
2009
Foursquare launches at SXSW with check-in, mayorship, and badge mechanics. Immediate adoption among tech-savvy early adopters in urban areas. The mayorship mechanic generates significant press attention. → Case Study 01: Foursquare's Mayorships and Badge System
2010
Foursquare reaches 1 million users. The mayorship competition intensifies in major cities; users check in compulsively to maintain or capture mayorships at valued locations. Businesses begin recognizing mayorships with real-world rewards (free drinks, discounts) — an organic commercial ecosystem bui → Case Study 01: Foursquare's Mayorships and Badge System
2011
Foursquare reaches 10 million users. Academic researchers begin publishing studies on Foursquare's gamification mechanics. The company raises $50 million in Series C funding on the basis of its location data assets. The badge system expands significantly. → Case Study 01: Foursquare's Mayorships and Badge System
2011-2015
Reddit grows rapidly, crossing 100 million monthly users. Karma gaming intensifies as the user base expands. The "front page of the internet" reputation generates significant status competition around appearing on the front page, with karma as the primary metric. Botted karma farming — using automat → Case Study 02: Reddit's Karma and Awards System
2012
Foursquare reaches approximately 25 million users. Check-in frequency peaks. The company begins exploring advertising and data licensing business models. First signs of user fatigue with the check-in mechanic become visible in engagement data. → Case Study 01: Foursquare's Mayorships and Badge System
2013
Foursquare begins research into user behavior that reveals a bifurcation: heavy users who treat Foursquare as a discovery and review platform (like Yelp) and casual users who primarily engaged for the gamification. The two user populations have different needs that the single app serves poorly. → Case Study 01: Foursquare's Mayorships and Badge System
2014
Foursquare splits into two applications: Foursquare (a venue discovery and review app, Yelp competitor) and Swarm (a friends-and-check-in app that retains some gamification elements). The mayorship system is removed from Foursquare and significantly redesigned in Swarm. Active users decline sharply. → Case Study 01: Foursquare's Mayorships and Badge System
The OkCupid case is regularly cited in academic and policy discussions about platform experimentation ethics as a counterpoint to the Facebook emotional contagion case. Rudder's arguments become touchstones in debates about the legitimacy of commercial behavioral research. → Case Study 02: OkCupid's Public A/B Testing Disclosure (2014)
2015-2016
Swarm reintroduces coins and stickers as gamification elements, attempting to rebuild the engagement that mayorships had driven. Foursquare pivots toward a B2B business model selling location data to enterprise clients. The consumer product becomes increasingly peripheral to the business. → Case Study 01: Foursquare's Mayorships and Badge System
2016
Streak culture accelerates as Snapchat use among teenagers reaches critical mass. Social science researchers begin noticing the salience of streaks in qualitative interviews with teenage Snapchat users. Journalists begin publishing accounts of teenagers' streak anxiety. → Case Study 01: Snapchat Streak Culture and Teen Mental Health
2017
The "streak sitter" phenomenon is first documented in academic literature. Researchers conducting ethnographic fieldwork in high schools find that teenagers routinely share login credentials with friends before vacations and school trips for the purpose of streak maintenance. Snapchat reaches 166 mi → Case Study 01: Snapchat Streak Culture and Teen Mental Health
2018
Snap publishes its first report on platform wellbeing, acknowledging concerns about streak anxiety but defending the mechanic as a driver of genuine social connection. Multiple qualitative studies on teen streak experiences are published, uniformly finding high prevalence of streak-related anxiety. → Case Study 01: Snapchat Streak Culture and Teen Mental Health
2018 onward
Foursquare completes its transition to a B2B data company. The consumer social network is largely dormant, though the apps continue to exist. Swarm retains a small, dedicated user base. The company is financially stable as a data business but has effectively exited the consumer social media market t → Case Study 01: Foursquare's Mayorships and Badge System
2019
A study by Kelly Burchell and colleagues finds that over 60% of teenagers who report significant streak engagement describe at least occasional "streak anxiety," defined as distress related to the possibility of losing a streak. 15% describe streak anxiety as a regular feature of their daily experie → Case Study 01: Snapchat Streak Culture and Teen Mental Health
2020
Researchers begin studying streak behavior during COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, when school closures and social distancing dramatically altered teenagers' social landscapes. Some studies find that streaks became more, not less, important as a source of social connection during this period. → Case Study 01: Snapchat Streak Culture and Teen Mental Health
2020-2021
"Reddit Coins" become the currency through which awards are purchased. The awards economy generates significant revenue for Reddit. Specific award types (particularly "Wholesome" and "Helpful" awards) become culturally significant in certain subreddit communities, generating their own social norms a → Case Study 02: Reddit's Karma and Awards System
Snap introduces "streak restoration" features allowing users to restore accidentally lost streaks, suggesting the company's recognition of how psychologically significant streaks had become. → Case Study 01: Snapchat Streak Culture and Teen Mental Health
2022-2023
Reddit introduces significant changes to its awards system, removing some award types, simplifying the awards hierarchy, and adjusting the karma implications of various award types. These changes generate significant user backlash, illustrating how deeply invested Reddit communities had become in th → Case Study 02: Reddit's Karma and Awards System
2023
Ongoing research continues to document streak anxiety, with longitudinal studies beginning to examine whether streak engagement patterns in early adolescence predict later mental health outcomes. → Case Study 01: Snapchat Streak Culture and Teen Mental Health
3. Emotional patterns:
Looking across all your mood-before vs. mood-after entries: did social media use, on average, improve or worsen your emotional state? - Which platform was most consistently positive? Most consistently negative? - Are there any conditions under which social media use seemed to reliably help you? (Be → Appendix D: Templates and Worksheets — Practical Tools for Digital Agency
| # | Statement | Rating (1–5) | |---|---|---| | 1 | I fear others have more rewarding experiences than me. | | | 2 | I fear my friends have more rewarding experiences than me. | | | 3 | I get worried when I find out my friends are having fun without me. | | | 4 | I get anxious when I don't know wha → Appendix D: Templates and Worksheets — Practical Tools for Digital Agency
An economic framework treating human cognitive attention as a scarce commodity to be captured, held, and sold to advertisers. The term was formalized by Michael Goldhaber (1997) and Richard Lanham (2006), building on Herbert Simon's 1971 insight about attention scarcity in information-rich environme → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
Attention Scarcity
The economic condition created by information abundance: because there is more content than any individual can process, the bottleneck resource is not information but the human cognitive capacity to engage with it. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
August 2014
Media and academic commentary on the OkCupid disclosure continues. Comparisons with the Facebook emotional contagion study are widespread. The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly monitoring the disclosures. → Case Study 02: OkCupid's Public A/B Testing Disclosure (2014)
August 2017
Independent studies by researchers at UK and US universities begin examining Snap Map's effects on teen social experience. Initial qualitative findings document FOMO intensification and social exclusion visualization as major concerns. → Case Study 02: Snap Map and Location Tracking Anxiety
data used to personalize your feed, remember your settings, improve the product for you 2. **Behavioral surplus** — data used to build predictive models sold to third parties for commercial advantage → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
Behavioral Prediction
The use of historical behavioral data to forecast future user actions, emotional states, or commercial decisions. The output of behavioral prediction models is the core commercial product of surveillance capitalist platforms. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
Behavioral Surplus
Shoshana Zuboff's term for the behavioral data collected by platforms in excess of what is needed to provide user services, repurposed to build predictive behavioral models sold to commercial third parties. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
C
Can do with existing authority:
Challenge specific dark patterns as deceptive or unfair practices - Require companies to change specific design practices - Impose civil penalties for violations of consent orders - Require consumer redress in some cases → Chapter 38: Regulatory Approaches — What Government Can and Cannot Do
Cannot do without new legislation:
Establish comprehensive baseline privacy standards for all platforms - Require affirmative product safety testing for algorithmic systems - Mandate algorithmic impact assessments - Regulate platform business models directly - Impose structural remedies (like separations between advertising and platf → Chapter 38: Regulatory Approaches — What Government Can and Cannot Do
Classified advertising
want ads for jobs, apartments, cars, and merchandise. At their peak in the 1990s, classified ads generated approximately $19-20 billion annually for U.S. newspapers and accounted for more than one-third of total advertising revenue. This was not glamorous journalism-adjacent revenue; it was the econ → Case Study 2: The Newspaper Industry's Collapse
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The percentage of users who see an ad or content item and click on it. An early dominant metric of digital advertising effectiveness, largely supplanted by time-based and engagement metrics as platforms developed more sophisticated measurement. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
**Content Type:** News, entertainment, personal update, advertisement, influencer content, political, health/wellness, sports, humor, other. - **Emotional Valence:** Positive (+), Negative (-), Neutral (0), or Outrage/Anger (A). - **Confirms or Challenges Views?** Confirms (C), Challenges (Ch), or N → Appendix D: Templates and Worksheets — Practical Tools for Digital Agency
Company and Business Model Documentation
Platform's revenue model (advertising, subscription, freemium, data licensing, or combination) - Known details about the platform's recommendation algorithm (what is publicly disclosed) - Platform's user base size and key demographics - Parent company, ownership structure, relevant corporate history → Capstone Project 2: Dark Pattern Analysis in the Wild
Contextual advertising
ads matched to the content being viewed rather than to the individual viewer's profile — does not require behavioral data and can be effective for many advertisers. DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, operates entirely on contextual advertising and has demonstrated sustained profitability → Chapter 39: Design Ethics and Humane Technology: Building Differently
CPM (Cost Per Mille)
The standard unit of digital advertising pricing: the cost an advertiser pays per thousand impressions (ad views). CPM rates vary based on audience demographics, purchase intent, ad format, platform context, and time of year. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
D
Daily emotional summary:
Did social media use improve, worsen, or not change your mood today overall? ___________ - Which session left you feeling worst? What were you doing? ___________ - Which session left you feeling best? What were you doing? ___________ → Appendix D: Templates and Worksheets — Practical Tools for Digital Agency
Dark Patterns
User interface designs that work against users' stated preferences or long-term interests while serving the platform's commercial interests. In social media contexts, typically refers to design features that extend session lengths or increase return visit frequency by exploiting psychological vulner → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
DAU / MAU (Daily/Monthly Active Users)
Engagement metrics measuring how many unique users interact with a platform in a given day (DAU) or month (MAU). The DAU/MAU ratio, sometimes called the stickiness ratio, indicates how frequently monthly users return on a daily basis and is a primary indicator of habit formation. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
Display advertising
retail chains, department stores, grocery stores, automotive dealers, and local businesses buying large ads to reach mass local audiences. Macy's, JCPenney, Sears, and their regional equivalents spent hundreds of millions per year buying newspaper display ads. This was the second pillar. → Case Study 2: The Newspaper Industry's Collapse
E
Engagement Metrics
Quantitative measures of user interaction with platform content, including clicks, likes, shares, comments, time-on-platform, and scroll depth. Used both as advertising pricing mechanisms and as optimization targets for content recommendation algorithms. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
Examples of useful digital intentions:
"I will not open any social media platform before 9:00 AM for the next 30 days." (Specific, time-bounded, measurable.) - "I will spend no more than 30 minutes per day on TikTok for the next two weeks, and I will track this daily." (Specific, time-bounded, measurable.) - "I will post one photograph p → Chapter 40: Your Personal Manifesto — Digital Agency in an Algorithmic World
[Chapter Content](part-01-foundations/chapter-01-attention-economy/index.md) — ~10,000 words - [Exercises](part-01-foundations/chapter-01-attention-economy/exercises.md) — 35 problems - [Quiz](part-01-foundations/chapter-01-attention-economy/quiz.md) — 22 questions - [Case Study 1: Google's $112B Be → Algorithmic Addiction: The Dark Pattern Psychology of Social Media
the region of social life where performances occur, where we consciously present a managed version of ourselves to an audience—and the **back stage**—the private region where we prepare for performance, let our guard down, and allow the gap between the performed self and the authentic self to be vis → Chapter 31: Adolescent Identity Formation in the Age of the Algorithm
G
Green flags (markers of higher quality):
[ ] Pre-registered hypothesis and analysis plan (check osf.io or clinicaltrials.gov) - [ ] Large, diverse, representative sample - [ ] Objective behavioral measures (screen time from device logs) rather than self-report alone - [ ] Effect sizes reported alongside p-values - [ ] Findings consistent w → Appendix A: Research Methods Primer — How to Read Social Media Research
I
index.md
Main content (8,000–12,000 words) - **exercises.md** — 25–40 practice problems (⭐ to ⭐⭐⭐⭐) - **quiz.md** — 20–25 self-assessment questions with answers - **case-study-01.md** — Primary case study (2,000–3,500 words) - **case-study-02.md** — Secondary case study or application exercise - **key-takeaw → Algorithmic Addiction: The Dark Pattern Psychology of Social Media
A condition in which the volume of available information exceeds an individual's capacity to process it, leading to reduced decision quality and attention management challenges. Simon's 1971 insight that abundance creates this condition was the theoretical foundation of attention economics. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
J
July 2017
Reports emerge of parents and teenagers in the United Kingdom raising alarm about the feature. The NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) calls for Snap to change the default to Ghost Mode. Snap declines. → Case Study 02: Snap Map and Location Tracking Anxiety
July 28, 2014
Rudder publishes "We Experiment on Human Beings!" The post describes three OkCupid experiments in detail. The post simultaneously generates admiration (for transparency) and criticism (for the content of the experiments, particularly the false match compatibility disclosure). → Case Study 02: OkCupid's Public A/B Testing Disclosure (2014)
Snap Map launches globally. The default setting shares users' locations with all Snapchat friends. Child safety advocates and journalists immediately raise concerns about predatory access to teenagers' locations. Snap responds by pointing to the Ghost Mode option. → Case Study 02: Snap Map and Location Tracking Anxiety
The low-cost American newspapers of the 1830s (beginning with Benjamin Day's New York Sun in 1833) that pioneered the advertising-supported media model by distributing content below cost and monetizing through advertising sold against mass audiences. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
Platform Valuation
The market capitalization or investment valuation of a social media platform, which in practice represents a discounted estimate of future advertising revenues, which are in turn a function of projected DAU/MAU trajectories. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
Prior Research and Reporting
Identify at least two credible published analyses of this platform (academic papers, investigative journalism, regulatory filings, internal documents if publicly available via whistleblowers or litigation) - Note the key claims in each and their evidentiary basis → Capstone Project 2: Dark Pattern Analysis in the Wild
Programmatic Advertising
The automated buying and selling of digital advertising space through real-time auction systems, replacing the manual negotiation that characterized earlier media buying. Allows precise targeting at scale. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
Q
Quality Score
Google's rating of the relevance and quality of keywords and ads, influencing both ad positioning and effective cost per click. Incorporates predicted click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
R
Real-Time Bidding (RTB)
A form of programmatic advertising in which advertising inventory is auctioned in real time as a page loads, with the winning bid determined in the milliseconds between a user clicking a link and the page rendering on their screen. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
S
September 2017
School districts in several US cities send home notices to parents about Snap Map, advising teenagers to enable Ghost Mode. Some schools informally prohibit Snap Map use on school premises. → Case Study 02: Snap Map and Location Tracking Anxiety
Signature framings:
"The question is not whether platforms are manipulative — it's how, to what degree, and what we can do about it." - Structural analysis before individual blame: explain system incentives before judging individual behavior - The asymmetry of power as a constant frame: billion-dollar engineering vs. o → Continuity Tracking Document
Social-behavioral psychology
how platforms exploit known cognitive vulnerabilities - **Neuroscience** — the biological mechanisms of engagement and reward - **Practical skills** — how individuals and designers can resist and redesign - **Humanities/philosophy** — the ethical and historical dimensions of persuasion technology → Algorithmic Addiction: The Dark Pattern Psychology of Social Media
Stated Values and Policies
Locate and read the platform's Community Guidelines or Terms of Service - Locate any public statements about user wellbeing, mental health, or responsible design (press releases, blog posts, annual reports, testimony to legislatures) - Note any design changes the platform has voluntarily made in res → Capstone Project 2: Dark Pattern Analysis in the Wild
Surveillance Capitalism
Zuboff's broader framework describing an economic system in which human behavioral data is the primary raw material for commercial prediction products, fundamentally reorienting the relationship between corporations and individuals. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
T
Techno-panic
the sense that the situation is so dire, the platforms so powerful, and the individual so compromised that nothing short of abolition could address it — is analytically inaccurate and practically counterproductive. The platforms have made design changes in response to external pressure. Regulation h → Part VI: Resistance, Reform, and Agency
what the system is instructed to maximize 2. **The feature set** — what information the system has access to 3. **The exploration-exploitation balance** — how much the system diversifies vs. reinforces established preferences → Chapter 22: How Recommendation Algorithms Work: A Technical Introduction
Time-on-Platform
The total duration a user spends actively engaging with a platform in a given session or period. Replaced click-through rate as the dominant engagement metric as platforms recognized its stronger correlation with advertising effectiveness and habit formation. → Chapter 1: The Attention Economy — What Your Eyes Are Worth
Total: 100 points
*This project is not an exercise in self-criticism. It is an exercise in applied analysis. The goal is not to conclude that you are addicted, that platforms are evil, or that you need to delete everything. The goal is to know, with evidence, what is actually happening — and to be in a position to ma → Capstone Project 1: Auditing Your Own Digital Behavior
Toxic positivity
the reassurance that individuals empowered with the right mindset can navigate any information environment, that the market will naturally correct manipulative design, that technology will inevitably improve — is equally misleading. It locates the burden of response in the wrong place, it ignores th → Part VI: Resistance, Reform, and Agency
She is an iPhone user accessing via the TikTok app - Her account location is Austin, TX; her system language is English - The time is 11:15 pm local time — late-night usage - She has been in this session for 22 minutes - In this session, she has watched 18 videos; she completed 14 of them fully - He → Chapter 22: How Recommendation Algorithms Work: A Technical Introduction
What the algorithm predicts:
The late-night session context suggests Maya may be in an anxious or reflective emotional state (late-night usage correlates across the user population with higher engagement with emotionally resonant content) - The high session duration suggests she is in an engagement-positive state - The recent l → Chapter 22: How Recommendation Algorithms Work: A Technical Introduction
What the algorithm recommends:
Art process videos (high predicted completion rate based on consistent history) - Content about managing anxiety and late-night thoughts (strong recency signal + time of day correlation) - Fashion content from creators she follows - Some exploratory content outside her established profile (the "expl → Chapter 22: How Recommendation Algorithms Work: A Technical Introduction
What to do:
Enable screen time reporting on your device (iOS: Settings > Screen Time; Android: Digital Wellbeing). If you have not already looked at this data, look at it now, for a full week, before taking any action. Do not change your behavior yet. Just observe. - For each platform in your top five, record: → Chapter 40: Your Personal Manifesto — Digital Agency in an Algorithmic World