Psychology Explains Why Your Medium Stats are So Addictive
And how to stop refreshing
How many times have you looked at your Medium stats today? Once? Five times? Twenty times?
Did you want to stop checking your stats but your fingers just reflexively hit the “Stats” button?
I’m also guilty as charged. Once I published a new story, I usually refresh my browser multiple times a day in hopes of getting new notifications.
Annoying, right?
In his book Irresistible, social psychologist Adam Alter characterized modern technology as a behavioral addiction, which affects our brains and our behaviors in similar ways like gambling and video-gaming.
Understanding the psychology behind the design of social media will help us control our addictions and develop healthier relationships with technology.
Intermittent Reinforcement
Intermittent reinforcement is a fancy term for unpredictable rewards based on the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner’s theory on operant conditioning.
In Skinner’s original experiment, he gave a treat to his lab rats in irregular intervals and observed how many times his rats would press a bar in their cage. That means sometimes the rats received a treat every 4 bar presses, sometimes 9, sometimes 2.
Compared to other schedules of reinforcement, Skinner found that intermittent reinforcement made the lab rats press the bar the most. Intermittent reinforcement also produced behavioral patterns that were long-lasting and “hard to extinguish” — the rats kept pressing the bar even though there were no more treats.
A classic real-life example of intermittent reinforcement is slot machines in casinos. Casinos precisely calculated ‘random’ intervals of rewards that keep gamblers going.
What About Medium?
Your Medium stats are like slot machines. The application is two-fold.
First, most writers on Medium tell you that some articles go viral, some tank. Mostly, you can’t predict the performance of your articles until you hit ‘Publish’.
The unpredictable performance of your articles keeps you going. Because you cannot know which article will produce the most earnings, you keep coming back to write more.
Second, your stats are equally unpredictable. Some articles generate many views, but the read ratio is so low that it only earns you a few bucks. Other articles might not have that much traffic but the reading times are substantial.
Additionally, you cannot predict what time of the day will you get a rush of notifications on new claps and responses.
In other words, Medium is throwing multiple intermittent reinforcements at our brains every day.
Our brains are wired to crave unpredictable rewards and it is difficult, if not impossible, to stop.
Cliffhangers
Your stats are addictive because they are like cliffhangers.
Cliffhangers are exciting because they are preceded by a hook and a buildup. Just before the climax comes, there’s a cliffhanger that leaves you wanting for more.
Take the example of the last 5 minutes of a TV episode. Have you seen the first two seasons of Twin Peaks? (Spoiler alert!)
The hook is the mysterious death of an attractive young woman, Laura Palmer. The buildup is the murder investigation in season 1.
The cliffhanger appears at the end of season 1 when the investigation of Laura’s death came close to making a breakthrough, a mysterious man strangled the police’s prime suspect. Then the season ended.
I was like what!? This can’t be the end of an episode, and certainly not a season!?
Congratulations, I started watching season 2 right away.
What About Medium?
The hook for Medium is the MPP. The fact that you are eligible to earn money even if your stories only garnered a handful of views.
Now you’re in, the buildup is the claps, the followers, and the earnings. Once your readership gains momentum, there’s always more to come, getting you more hooked than when you first started.
The cliffhanger on Medium is the wait.
“Hang tight! Your story is being processed.”
“Earning last updated through [yesterday]”.
Exciting, right?
Medium stats are worse than the TV cliffhangers because there are multiple, endless climaxes to come.
If you got 100 claps yesterday, you will come back today to see if you have reached 200. The next day, you will come back again to see if you have reached 300.
Lack of Stopping Cues
Modern technology is addictive because they got rid of stopping cues. Stopping cues are signals that tell our brains it is time to stop, time to move on to something new.
As Adam Atler pointed out in his TED Talk, before the internet existed, our lives contained many stopping cues. Commercial breaks, end of a TV episode, end of a newspaper article, and end of a working day. We had no way to continue our indulgence even if we wanted to.
The internet has none of these.
You have endless new emails to check, Netflix automatically plays the next episode in 5 seconds, while your Instagram feed is bottomless.
What About Medium?
Your Medium stats updates whenever you hit refresh. You can post new stories 24 hours a day. There are countless publications for you to read. There are also numerous Facebook groups for you to engage with other writers.
Nothing in the Medium ecosystem tells us to stop. In contrast, the algorithm learns what your interests are, feeds articles based on your activities, and does everything to make you stay on the platform.
Creating Stopping Cues
There is nothing inherently wrong in wanting to stay engaged with your Medium community. But we should be cognizant of the fact that Medium and social media sites have studied the science of rewards and are designed specifically to get us hooked.
Okay, so what can we do to cure our technology addiction?
An Amsterdam company has desks that vanish after 6 pm. The firm hooked its employees’ desks to the ceiling. Every day at 6 pm, no matter what work they are in the middle of, their desks and computers rise to the ceiling. The office then transforms into a yoga studio or a dance floor depending on the day.
Sound absurd?
Hooking our laptops to the ceiling may be unrealistic, but we can still create some stopping cues into our to help us temper our digital addiction.
Downtime
iPhone’s ‘Downtime’ function is helpful. You get to set downtimes that limit your access to a customized list of apps.
I set a 2-hour limit on all social media apps, including Medium. 11:30 pm to 8 am is my daily downtime, during which only emergency calls and specific people in my family could reach me.
2 hours is still a lot. I’m trying to get better.
Draft Your Stories Offline
Try drafting your Medium stories somewhere offline. Import your drafts to Medium’s editor later in the editing process. That way, you will be less tempted to click on your stats page and you won’t be distracted by new notifications.
Drafting offline also allows you to limit your access to certain websites. For example, I use the Self Control app when I’m writing or working. I usually put Medium, Facebook, Youtube, and Netflix on the app’s blacklist and set a timer of 90 minutes. During those 90 minutes, even restarting my computer would not gain me access to my blacklisted websites.
Disable Notifications
This is more of a bandaid solution but it stops me from picking up my phone every 5 minutes to check if anyone clapped for my stories.
To recap, your Medium stats is so addictive is because there are unpredictable rewards, limitless cliffhangers, and no stopping cues.
Although being online is inevitable in today’s day and age, there are incremental changes we can implement to free ourselves from the hooks of modern technology.
Steve Jobs famously told a New York Times reporter that his kids are not allowed to use the iPad. Many Silicon Valley executives are similarly low-tech parents. You should be, too.
Technology has many wonderful properties. Your Medium stats should serve you, not the other way around.
