Two recent landmark court cases found social media companies liable for harming children; Meta and Google are appealing and maintain their products are not addictive. Still, more than a decade of research has identified specific app features built to capture attention and prolong use, especially among young people.
Cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll — who spent 15 years studying video slot machines — says these design techniques act like “superglue.” Originating and being refined in casinos, they migrated onto phones and tablets and now appear across social media, games and streaming services. Together they can usher users into a dissociative, trancelike state Schüll calls the “machine zone” or “dark flow,” where time and self-awareness fade.
Schüll points to four core features that create that pull:
1) Solitude
Design that encourages solo use removes social cues that might prompt stopping. When kids use devices alone — often in bedrooms — the external brakes on use disappear, making it more likely they’ll continue despite consequences to sleep, schoolwork or relationships.
2) Bottomlessness
Apps erase natural stopping points by offering endless content: autoplaying videos, infinite scrolls and never-ending feeds. Without a clear finish line, users lose the sense that a session is complete.
3) Speed
Faster feedback — quicker loading, rapid scrolling, instant new content — deepens immersion. Schüll’s gambling research showed that faster play lengthens sessions; the same dynamic applies to app interfaces and high-speed connections that make it easy to merge with the screen.
4) Teasing (the near-miss)
Algorithms can predict what a user wants but often deliver something just short of full satisfaction. That “almost-getting-it” pattern keeps people searching, because each successive item might be the payoff. The intermittent promise of reward encourages longer sessions.
These elements reinforce one another: solitude removes social brakes, bottomlessness eliminates stopping cues, speed accelerates immersion, and teasing sustains the chase. While harmful for many adults, the combination is particularly risky for children, who are more susceptible to persuasive design and less able to self-regulate.
Schüll recommends treating these features as a simple rubric: parents can evaluate apps for solitude, bottomlessness, speed and teasing to judge potential harm. Beyond individual management, Schüll and neuroscientist Jonathan D. Morrow argue that children need both help learning to manage device use and stronger product-level protections against harmful design.
Michaeleen Doucleff, a longtime science journalist with a Ph.D. in chemistry, is the author of Dopamine Kids.