YouTube "Badges"

[RoninRicker]

Just saw this new "feature" on YouTube (mobile) that is clearly designed to spark dopamine when you interact in the comments to keep you on the platform. I find this disgusting because humanity doesn't need another intentionally addicting algorithm. I forgot to take a screenshot of the "badges" I received before I disabled it, but the phrasing was kinda evil. "You received love from [YouTuber name] (your comment got a heart)"

[rejectconvenience]

sigh super cool, thanks youtube

[December_W_Wolf]

I'll admit this is the main reason why I deleted my Reddit account. It did take a while, as I did find it fun to try out new things on Reddit, and I ended up earning a few of these by accident, but yeah you can definitely tell these were made to keep engagement up. The main ones that deterred me were the "potassium" ones that would require you to scroll the length of a banana for it to count - those things went up to over 100k banana-lengths. I tried to just scroll really really quickly on my phone with one hand while doing something else, but the constant flashes in the corner of my peripheral vision gave me eyestrain so I just gave up.

Just had a look at YouTube's, and theirs look a lot more like poorly disguised " give us money " attempts (be one of the first people to join a YouTuber's membership program, hype long-form videos by either using your 3 free daily hypes or pay-to-hype, spend loads of time to be in the top listeners for selected music artists - does this just apply to ones you already listen to or is this to give the already huge ones more money?), and they kind of remind me of the "make a post that receives 100k upvotes/comment that receives 10k upvotes" achievements. All in all, they're to farm engagement and make us empty our pockets for them, so I'm not going to bother. It does seem they actually allow you to opt out of achievements though, which is at least one silver lining that Reddit users cannot do without some external browser plugin that hopefully won't get blocked.