Iris McLeary talks about ADHD and how she can’t use social media anymore

Iris tells us that "The web has gotten more and more inaccessible over my lifetime". Transcript Nic Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout. And you're listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairment, and what barriers they encounter on the web. Today I'm talking to Iris McCleary. Hey, Iris, how are you? Iris I'm doing well today made it to work in time to record which is that smallest. Nic That's a bonus.  I'm very, very happy to talk to you. We've been, we've been trying to organize this for a few weeks now. And finally, the stars align. So let me ask you this, what's your disability or your impairment? Iris Three main ones, ADHD, bipolar type two and chronic pain. The ADHD is definitely the one that gets me in the most trouble on the web, it's gotten more and more inaccessible over my lifetime. Nic More and more inaccessible. That's that's actually a dire indictment of the state of the web. If you had one major pet peeve or barrier to talk about what, what would be the biggest thing that causes problem for you? Iris Oh the monetization of everything, and the rise of the addiction based model of value measurement, the idea that the best thing you can do as a product is keep eyes on your product or on your website for as long as possible, because that very intentionally hooks into those parts of the brain that are involved in hyperfocus and addictive tendencies. And I can't use social media anymore since the rise of infinite scroll and the algorithmic feed, because it's designed to hook and keep your attention. And I can't get out. I f I open Facebook, I'm losing minimum an hour of my life no matter how self aware I am, so I just can't use it anymore, which is a shame because there are friends whose contact info I primarily have on there, and it's a struggle to get back in touch. Nic That's actually quite a massive barrier considering more and more of our human interactions are happening on social media. Iris Yep, for example, I live in San Francisco and Munis primary method of an most reliable method of disseminating service alerts is Twitter. And I don't have an active Twitter account, it only lets you scroll so far without giving you the little login block. Nic Right. That is, yeah, that's quite, quite something. So what's the solution? Iris I think fundamentally, the incentives for the industry are pretty majorly broken. The incentives to monetize everything at all costs, the ignoring of the effect on human attention. I understand wanting, there's a difference between getting people to return to your product and holding them on it for as long as possible in each interaction. And that is, I think, something that the company I work at, has started to recognize and we've started to do in our product where we're much more interested in did we get you to value fast? Because if you're spending your entire day looking at your product analytics and Mixpanel, we have failed as a product because we're not giving you answers, and you're not spending your time doing your actual job with that data. And then, then the question is, okay, well, Was it useful? Did you come back and do it again, and then go do whatever your actual job is, then do to come back and find more data and then go do whatever your actual job was? Like? I think that kind of model is much. It's much healthier. And also, interestingly, it's much more. We are a b2b company. And so that is part of it. Like we know that people are using our product to do their jobs. Nic Yeah Iris They're spending their entire day on it. That's no one's 100% day job. But I think that kind of model for something like a social platform could also be valuable. It's like, you logged in and you did some stuff and you and you had good interactions with some friends. And then you wandered off and did something in the real world. You chose to come back and it's