oh no, i'm in my 30s

Tumblr

philosopherlikes:

Tumblr provides instant access to achievement happiness, humor, self-affirmation, and high-res porn. Below is a full explanation of why tumblr is so addicting.

Achievement Happiness

The way Tumblr provides achievement happiness is through the reward system of followers, likes, and reblogs. The more you get, the more you feel you have accomplished. Getting a stream of little notifications telling you X person has followed you or your photo has been reblogged is a reward mechanism that triggers dopamine release in your brain. You can think of it like gathering rare gemstones or mining diamond in Minecraft.



The more likes/follows/reblogs you receive, however, the more normal these things become. If you experience a period of consistent follower growth, it becomes the norm that people are joining your follower ranks. Thus, in order to feel you are achieving something, you need to increase the rate at which you acquire followers, rather than the actual aggregate number of followers you have. Cue the posts about gaining followers:



So the entire tumblr experience can be boiled down to a sort of game, where the object is to acquire as many reward points in the form of likes/followers/reblogs as possible. The meaning behind this is to determine who has the most social clout, but getting followers and having social clout are not directly connected. It is possible to ignore the meaning behind tumblr and go straight for the dopamine, rather than find a following that actually reads what you write. This is the explanation for posts like this:



I had to block the name of the page 3 times for the sake of privacy. Notice it says nothing about the actual content of their tumblr page, just an appeal for a following. If you search for “followers” on tumblr, you will see an endless cavalcade of similar posts either thanking their X# follower or asking for more follows. And this is normal behavior - this is rational - since the dopamine reward is tied to the act of people following you, to obtain more happiness the rational thing to do is to try to get more followers. The method of going about this depends on how shameless you are (having shame is a product of negative contribution happiness, if one feels they are violating some sort of moral code by plugging their own tumblr then unhappiness is created when doing shameless plugging).

Humor

Another reason tumblr is so addicting is that it provides a great deal of humor. It’s basically the same reason you spend hours on youtube, twitter, or collegehumor - instant gratification hilarity. Not much to say about this other than the ability to track multiple tags and see them updating in real time is a unique feature that gives tumblr an edge over other humor delivery systems.

Self Affirmation

This falls under the category of contribution happiness, indirectly. Tumblr allows you to validate your lifestyle by finding other people who like what you like. It gives you a feeling that you are doing the right thing, that your life is justified. It works off of confirmation bias - you track topics you like and follow people who are talking about things you like. Thus, you are only really exposed to things that you are already familiar with. The phenomenon is called the internet filter bubble.

Porn

Yes, it’s on tumblr. Yes, its everywhere. No, I don’t think its evil but rather its just something ubiquitous to the internet. Tumblr porn is different though, because most porn on tumblr attempts to masquerade as art. We all know it’s not art; making it black and white, high resolution, or fast-animation gifs doesn’t make it artistic. It’s porn. Porn falls under reproduction happiness - I’m pretty sure I don’t have to explain why.

And that’s why tumblr is addicting - a steady, diverse, dense stream of reward mechanisms flooding your mind in real-time and pumping your brain full of dopamine, while changing your perception of normal to want more and more of it.