The Engagement-Prolonging Designs Teens Encounter on Very Large Online Platforms

TL;DR

This work analyzes how Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) design interfaces to prolong teen engagement within the attention economy. Through a two-phase study—an inductive-deductive taxonomy development followed by structured content analysis on 17 VLOPs (web) and 16 VLOP apps, using teenage personas—the authors identify four core strategies: pressuring, enticing, trapping, and lulling. They develop a hierarchical taxonomy of 71 EPD features, reveal 583 instances across platforms (with social media showing the highest counts), and illustrate three usage vignettes where patterns chain, converge, and fuse to extend engagement. The findings highlight pervasive, aggressive patterns and their interactions, offer a conceptual model linking affect and cognitive load, and discuss regulatory implications and potential design countermeasures to bolster youth autonomy and wellbeing. The work provides a data-rich foundation—including a video dataset of 583 EPD instances—for researchers, regulators, and designers aiming to curb manipulative interfaces affecting teens.

Abstract

In the attention economy, online platforms are incentivized to design products that maximize user engagement, even when such practices conflict with users' best interests. We conducted a structured content analysis of all Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) to identify the designs these influential apps and sites use to capture attention and extend engagement. Specifically, we conducted this analysis posing as a teenager to identify the designs that young people are exposed to. We find that VLOPs use four strategies to extend teens' use: pressuring, enticing, trapping, and lulling them into spending more time online. We report on a hierarchical taxonomy organizing the 63 designs that fall under these categories. Applying this taxonomy to all 17 VLOPs, we identify 583 instances of engagement-prolonging designs, with social media platforms using twice as many as other VLOPs. We present three vignettes illustrating how these designs reinforce one another in practice. We further contribute a graphical dataset of videos illustrating these features in the wild.

Figures (23)

• Figure 1: Attention economy incentives. Advertising-based businesses are most successful when users spend as much time as possible with the product. This increased time-on-task gives the platform the ability to serve additional advertisements and to profile the user to make these advertisements more tailored.
• Figure 2: Overview of study procedures.
• Figure 3: Final version of the EPD codebook. More details can be found on the EPD website.
• Figure 4: VLOPs pressure users by exerting peer pressure and a sense of social obligation, for example, Booking.com uses subtle anthropomorphization to emotionally manipulate a user who attempts to delete their account (left); and by nudging users to generate content or otherwise do work on the platform, for example, immediately upon sign up, an AliExpress user has multiple notifications to tend to, as indicated by the red bell in the upper right corner of the screenshot above. The salience of this design creates a sense that the user should be checking on these notifications and dealing with them, but they are often irrelevant or promoted content (right).
• Figure 5: VLOPs cite urgent circumstances and fleeting rewards to pressure users into staying on the platform and deepening their engagement with it. For example, if the user continues to use booking.com regularly, they will receive travel rewards (top left), LinkedIn warns the user that they may have only a brief window of time to consider a job opportunity they have missed (top right), and AliExpress offers the user a maze of endless content surrounded by timers and coupons suggesting they must browse now or forego these savings.