What Makes The “Four Big” Social Apps Addictively Engaging For Teens?
The Core Motivators of TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat Explained
This analysis will use the Octalysis Framework to explain the core motivations at play in the big four social apps for teens: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat.
All four share video. All four are social. But the differences in how they trigger repeated engagement are quite different.
Although there are other big players in this sector (Facebook, X, Discord, Tumblr etc) they capture the parents of the users of the Big 4 more than the teens.
I write this in the context of a national mental health crisis. Teens report higher loneliness and anxiety even than working parents (who also struggle to connect with friends and family). So despite the fact they are more connected to their peers than any other generation via these apps, they are also the most alienated.
I hope this analysis will be useful for those who want to understand digital wellness and how to build positive online spaces for young people.
Core Motivators of TikTok
TikTok relies on a number of different core drives to motivate engagement (and addiction). Social Influence and Relatedness is strong (as it is with all four of these), but it expresses in a unique way.
If you are a creator on TikTok, likes and shares serve as a metric of social influence. But many TikTok users do not experience it in this way, and only view content. Social Relatedness is still important for TikTok viewers, however. Being up on the latest “trends” on this fast-moving platform ensures that you are relevant in conversations with your peers, whether they are in person or on other platforms.
However, whether you create or view only, the strongest drive expressed in TikTok is actually what Yu-Kai Chou calls “Unpredictability and Curiosity.” This is considered a “black hat” gamification technique because it taps into the same addictive drive as gambling games like roulette and slot machines.
Slot machines are painstakingly designed for their addictiveness, employing many psychological tricks to keep people engaged. TikTok relies on the same basic principles. In fact, most of these apps do, at least a little bit.
Every time you open the app, you see fresh content. If you don’t like what you see, you can seamlessly skip to the next option. There is a high degree of variety in what TikTok might show you and creators are incentivised to build suspense, interest, shock, and humor into their TikToks. Therefore, TikTok employs what is known as random, intermittent feedback. On a slot machine, you can lose, win a little, or win a lot. TikTok is the same, and the cost to a “spin” is trivial.
Slot machine addicts report getting into a “flow” while seated at the machine. Time slips away as they repeat the same pattern again and again. For anyone who has lost hours scrolling through their social apps, this should sound familiar.
As you can see with the above analysis using the Octalysis Tool, TikTok uses both white and black hat gamification techniques, chief among them unpredictability. It also privileges intrinsic motivators over extrinsic ones, which helps build meaningful engagement.
Core Motivators of Instagram
Like TikTok, Instagram employs social influence and relatedness. In fact, since the vast majority of Instagram users produces content on the platform, social influence is heightened compared to TikTok.
There is the same drive to be up on trends, but since the content is more likely to be created by peers and celebrities instead of social stars, it’s stronger and more personal on Instagram.
The desire to be validated with “likes” is also incredibly strong here.
Among the four apps featured in this analysis, Instagram ranks the highest on Empowerment & Creative Feedback. On Instagram, it’s easy for teens to express themselves: it’s almost all they do there. And those expressions are rewarded with strong in-app metrics, so users can tell which of their posts are the most effective. Users can then modify their behavior, post content, post structure, post timing, and so on to achieve the best possible results in terms of Insagram’s metrics (views, likes, shares, and comments).
This is Creative Feedback in a nutshell.
Like TikTok, Instagram uses intrinsic motivators to build sustained engagement, but teens invest much more of themselves into their Insta accounts.
An Instagram account is highly customizable in its look and feel, as is a user’s feed. This is another form of empowerment, but it also spotlights Ownership and Possession, another of the Octalysis core drives. By customizing and taking possession of their space, the user makes a significant investment in it. They are therefore less likely to abandon it. In behavioral science, this is called “The Endowment Effect.”
Core Motivators of YouTube
For non-creators, YouTube ranks lower on Social Relatedness, Empowerment and Creative Feedback than the others. But for creators (and there are a lot of teen creators on YouTube) it probably ranks the highest of all thanks to the long-form nature of YouTube content, the significant investment it takes to create it, and the potential for monetary reward.
For a non-creator, YouTube offers a similar or slightly reduced level of social relatedness compared to TikTok (staying up on trends and sharing content with friends).
Like TikTok, YouTube also takes advantage of unpredictability, using the YT algorithm to suggest random-seeming content that fits the users’ sensibility.
However, unlike TikTok, YouTube promotes social groupings and identity through fandoms of topics, genres, creators, and issues. This closely aligns with Core Drive #1: Epic Meaning and Calling. This is the drive that asks us to identify with something larger than ourselves.
Core Motivations of Snapchat
Unlike the other three apps spotlighted here, Snapchat focuses on one-to-one communication (though group communication is also an important part of the app’s appeal).
Expression and Creative Feedback is high, like in Instagram, and so is Ownership thanks to the app’s highly customizable avatars.
What Snapchat excels at is manifesting a personal relationship as a quantitive figure. It does this in several ways: first, the people you communicate with the most become “best” friends with you on the app. The desire to be “best” friends with their peers drives teens to engage with the app more often, send more messages, share more images, and so forth.
This is a form of Social Influence and Relatedness to be sure, but is also a form of Loss & Avoidance, another black hat gamication technique. After all, what teen wants to lose their “best friend” status with a cherished peer?
This brings us to the snap streak, another example of Loss & Avoidance.
Snapchat laser focuses on their core engagement: sending “snaps.” A snap is a picture or video that can be viewed once (or twice) before vanishing. It is the action that users take on Snapchat that cannot be replicated on any other platform, and offers a unique value proposition for them.
To make sure that users are sending snaps, SnapChat features a streak mechanism similar to the one used by DuoLingo. But unlike DuoLingo, the snap streak represents closeness with a friend. To keep the snap streak going, both of two users must send at least one snap to the other within the same 24-hour period. A longer streak is represented by a more intense graphic and of course a higher number. A long streak requires a significant investment of user effort over time.
Users don’t want to lose this investment, so they continue sending snaps. Furthermore, since the snap streak is shared with a peer, this example of Loss & Avoidance is tied with Social Influence, an intrinsic motivator, doubling its strength. No one wants to let down a friend.
Sam Liberty is a gamification consultant, serious game designer, and professor of game design at Northeastern University. He is the former lead game designer at Sidekick Health.
