Companies Have Affected Our Digital Wellbeing for Too Long: We Need More Friction in Our Algorithms

Companies have paid lip service to our digital wellbeing for too long. Now we need to see real change with real frictionless design. For an experience to be “valuable,” it actually requires a certain amount of friction. Instagram tried to create some friction in 2018 when they tried to reduce users’ screen time as part of a larger digital well-being movement across the tech giants. Instead, companies need to apply these ideas about friction not just to the interfaces, but also to the algorithms beneath the pixels that users see.