"Social" Media is Unsatisfying

Snacks are Unsatisfying

As of late, the tea I've been drinking tastes significantly better than it usually does. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this has led to me drinking less tea than I'm used to. The same pattern used to hold for chocolate, back when I ate chocolate on a regular basis: if the chocolate was merely okay, I'd snack on it throughout the day, consuming perhaps more than is healthy. But whenever I got my hands on the Good Stuff (tm), I'd eat just one piece a day.

When you eat a wholesome meal, you don't just enjoy the tastes (and textures, and aromas) of food. You also derive nutrition from the food, and eventually, having eaten enough to satisfy your body's needs, you feel satiated and stop eating. Highly processed snacks have poor nutritional value, so you can keep stuffing more and more of them into your face-hole. Because they don't contain much of what your body needs, some nutritional needs are going to remain unfulfilled, and therefore your body will not give you the signal that says "that's enough, you can stop now".

The Feed is made of Snacks

Beej correctly points out that some online media tends (by design) to trap its consumers in a loop of endless scrolling, whereas with other kinds of media what tends to happen is after a short while you feel like you've had enough, and so you go do something else.

I disagree with their characterization of the latter type of media as "boring". On the contrary, it's media designed / selected for the endless feed that's uniformly tepid and unsatisfying. If some piece of media that's too rich in some spiritual nutrient accidentally slipped into your feed, you might suddenly feel like you had "enough (of whatever) for today" and stop scrolling. And this the "business model" cannot abide.

This actually happened to me several times, back when I regularly consumed such feeds: a bout of scrolling was cut short because I stumbled upon a post so {insightful, witty, beautiful, &c} that I wanted to keep thinking of it as I go about doing stuff, rather than keep scrolling and have the good post get pushed "out the other ear" by the next few pieces of drivel.

See Also

Pica is an impulse to eat things that are not actually food.

In the linked post, Alicorn generalizes the concept of "pica" to additional impulses. In the comments, I've found this succint restatement of what I wanted to say regarding the addictiveness of feed-scrolling:

You can never get enough of what you don't really need in the first place.