We know slot machines are addictive...we know gambling can consume vulnerable people. We prevent our kids from doing it. But we let kids use TikTok for hours a day. Rather than focusing on the medium of SFM itself and its mind-fragmenting power, let’s look at why people keep using SFM despite it eroding our capacity to think. No one feels “good” after 3 hours of SFM.
TikTok knows what you want. Not at first, but your swiping habits define you algorithmically after 50–100 videos. Every extra second and slight thumb motion gives them info: watch time, rewatching, likes/reposts, comments/follows, skips, shares -- it’s all being built into your profile in real time. The algorithm is crafted for retention (to get you back tomorrow) and time spent (right now). That is all it wants. It craves those two things and it will be fed. It knows “interest clusters” from users “like you,” and it forces “diversity” outside your core to prevent “entropic boredom.” Look this up. TikTok uses these terms internally.
It rates candidate clips and will only show the top ~10 out of 100, but here’s where real darkness gets injected -- it is incentivized to show you slop or videos it knows you won’t like 70–80% of the time. Why? Variable reward! The oldest habit-forming trick in the book. TikTok is a massive digital slot machine tinkering with your dopaminergic reward system. Humans anticipate reward and are hardwired to re-engage with systems that unpredictably stimulate them. The optimal hit rate (from slot-machine data) is a “hit” every 5th ± 2 trials. So 1 in 3–7 videos will be a small/medium “win,” and 1 in 20–30 will be a big win (share, comment, rewatch). This means you will swipe away from about three-quarters of videos. This maximizes engagement more than if 100% of videos were amazing. If it’s too good, you habituate -- you expect good -- there is no surprise and hence no dopamine. This is the classical variable-reward schedule of slot machines that lets them hook their claws in so deep.
But the connection to slots has more layers. Losses disguised as wins (LDW) are also present with the “social” counters of views/likes/comments. Sure, the video is low-quality slop, but we see it has 10k views, so we dwell to see if there’s payoff or to avoid “missing out.” You’ve lost time, you didn’t enjoy the video, and you didn’t miss something special. This is LDW, manifest repeatedly. We also have the ubiquitous near-miss effect (think “Bar-Bar-Lemon”) where a video is almost right -- e.g., a beautiful influencer in a tropical setting talking about her vegan lasagna recipe. It almost satisfies you but just misses and activates your ventral striatum (reward center) much like actual wins, which prolongs viewing. These near misses likely represent ~20% of views and ~30% of watch time and put you into a zombie-like “machine zone” of dissociative flow -- like automatons pulling slot arms in a rhythmic trance. With infinite scroll, the normal bet-spin-resolve cycle becomes swipe-watch-resolve -- you can thumb up immediately to the next video to try to “win.” You are digitally hypnotized, mechanically thumbing to collect your perfectly honed 1 in 3–7 “good” videos for a maximally addictive variable reward. The local uncertainty of reward is tuned so you never habituate to only good videos or get frustrated by only bad ones.
This 1 in 3–7 variability makes the behavior hard to extinguish -- we keep watching and coming back even though we don’t like most videos (say ~80%). Assume slop videos are swiped within 3 s and represent 50%; LDW 10% at 10 s; near-misses 20% at 20 s; true hits 20% at 30 s -- after 100 swipes we’ve watched ~21 minutes, with ~10 minutes on videos we actually like. We spend >50% of our time on bad videos -- and a roughly 50–50 unpredictability ratio (of time) maximizes dopaminergic output with variable reinforcement. We’re talking about time spent rather than event probability (which is ~20–30%). So we maximize phasic dopamine and uncertainty -- a slot machine on steroids.
We stack one more dopaminergic accelerator on top of the others -- variable rewards are hardest to extinguish. Our brains get maximally hooked when we don’t know when or how much of a reward we will get. With slot machines, this reward is unidimensional: money. With TikTok, the when, the how much, and the what are all variable, making the platform even more addictive. There are multiple “affective currencies” you get rewarded with: anger, sexual arousal, envy, curiosity, nostalgia, learning, etc. There are both positive and negative emotions, which heightens uncertainty. This prevents hedonic adaptation and keeps the prediction-error signal large -- we never get used to not knowing what or how good the next video will be. We never know when, how much, or what emotion will be triggered, so we keep swiping. It’s the perfect addiction algorithm.
On the superficial content layer, SFM is optimized to give us ~80% garbage so we spend ~50% of our time wasted and ~50% gratified unexpectedly across a high-dimensional emotional vector. It is tuned to our idiosyncrasies to be a perfectly inextinguishable habit -- just enough engaging content to keep us in digital limbo, swiping up, because we maximally don’t know what’s coming next.
Okay, that's all pretty bad. It has the same dark arts slot machines use (illegal for kids) plus extra unpredictability on type of reward, supercharging novelty and prediction-error gaps. But this is the superficial layer.
TikTok is just trying to sell ads. Sure, maybe down the road the CCP weaponizes it for propaganda (see: Daryl Morey searches circa 2022), but for now it's mostly a dopamine slot machine.
What about the deeper process layer that the content layer sits above? Well, that's even bleaker. The medium is the message. Short-form media gives us unconscious/subconscious information about information itself. Media changes how we think -- from orality to literacy to the printing press to electronic media to now. Read McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy for dense but beautiful exposition of how and why.
SFM is changing our minds by its process on our psyches. It tells us information is bite-sized, that focus should jump every few seconds, that we can skip any content not immediately stimulating, that reality should be bespoke -- if we don't like it, it doesn't exist. This is not TikTok's goal or intention. TikTok might not even know this is happening or that it's due to the nature of SFM itself. They know they are making a diabolical digital dopamine slot machine -- nasty, but not (to them) society-dissolving.
Unfortunately, overuse of SFM due to its designed addictiveness will have consequences beyond SFM addiction. It will lead to the erosion and disintegration of our ability to think deeply -- to tolerate and process contrasting points of view, to work toward growth and synthesis through sustained effort. SFM could destroy the capacity to be functionally adult. It starts with a lack of focus, epidemic among U.S. adults. It ends with the death of hard-earned competence across society and the implications that has for our survival as a country or a species. And all because of some dumb dance video app.