Measuring the True Cost of Attention-Hungry Apps
We can do more to protect people than banning kids from social media.
We shouldn’t settle for legislation based on folklore about social media harms, but we shouldn’t neglect the harms of attention hungry apps either. Many of us have experienced that moment of emerging from a social media trance, realizing we've spent far longer scrolling than intended. Parents worry about their kids' sleep and schoolwork suffering from TikTok and Roblox. If we want to bring this cost under control, the first thing we should do is measure it.
Here's a proposal: Let's treat attention costs like we treat calories in food.
The Measurement Challenge
Tech companies already track in detail how engaging their features are – this knowledge is precisely what enables them to build such engaging apps. We could leverage similar metrics, but for consumer protection rather than profit. Through controlled experiments, we could measure:
How much longer people spend scrolling than they intend
Frequency of returning to the app
Impact on sleep patterns and task completion
Subjective value of time spent
There are probably better measures, this is just exploring the idea.
From Measurement to Action
Once we can measure attention costs, several possibilities open up:
App Labeling: Imagine seeing "Expected weekly time cost: 6.5 hours" before downloading an app
Market Solutions: Companies could compete on attention efficiency ("30% less time spent, same satisfaction")
Evidence-Based Policy: Rather than blanket age restrictions, we could target features with demonstrably harmful attention costs
Understanding Costs and Benefits: Governments can make more informed decisions about top-down restrictions on apps and features
Why This Matters
By measuring attention costs directly, we move from anecdotal concerns to actionable data. This could help users make informed choices and guide both market solutions and policy decisions.
The attention economy needs a better accounting system. Let's build one.
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This is a followup from my submission to Parliament regarding raising the age to use social media.
By Claude, from my notes. I made it a little more boring.
I’m actually not particularly confident that deliberate optimization is particularly responsible for apps being too distracting, but it seems worth looking into anyway.