Why Social Media Feeds Work Like Slot Machines

At the end of the 19th century, dusty fairs drew crowds to giant wheels of fortune. The prizes? A few coins, a small toy. But that’s not what kept people gathered.

Even today, when we watch someone else playing slots or roulette, we’re not even part of the game – the prize won’t go into our pocket, and the loss won’t come out of it. What grabs us every time is that moment right before the end. The wheel spins, the speed slows down, the pointer is about to land. I don’t blink.

In that moment – before the result is even revealed – the heart already knows what we still know today: the anticipation itself is the reward. And that’s something people at 19th-century fairs already understood.

Now it was time to harness that anticipation – and that’s exactly what Charles Fey did in San Francisco in 1895. He built a metal machine with three reels and a single lever: the Liberty Bell.

This machine wasn’t built to change lives, but it did. It knew how to replicate “the pause” again and again – the wait until the reels stopped. Genius. The same thrill, over and over, and we never knew what the outcome would be. Each spin created an “almost”: two symbols aligned, the third hesitating. Close, but not quite. And the hand already wants to pull the lever again.

That was enough. That was the brilliance: creating something so simple it can’t be refused. You didn’t need a huge win – you just needed the endless loop. Pull, spin, stop. Again and again. Starting to remind you of something? :)

In those same years, cinema began to bloom. And again, the logic was identical: movies were built on pauses. Scenes ended halfway through, and the audience couldn’t move.

Television sharpened it further. Episodes ended with cliffhangers, and commercials dropped right at the peak of suspense. Viewers didn’t stay only for the result – they stayed for the waiting.

That same pattern that lived in the fairground wheel and the slot machine crept onto the big screen and became a cultural language of its own. Suspense became just as important as the story itself.

Let’s be honest: how many bad shows have we kept watching, simply because the ending always left us in that tension of what’s next? We can’t stand not knowing how it will end. And when we finally do know, we want more. That’s where something new emerged – or more precisely, something evolved: a product designed around the same endless loop of anticipation.

Now we’ve arrived at the present. The formula is clear: phone in hand, infinite feed. Every scroll – a new spin.

Most of the time, the media is mediocre, “almost” satisfying: routine posts, random photos, average videos. Then – jackpot. A post that makes you laugh out loud, a viral video, or breaking news.

And then we’re back to mediocre content again, waiting for the next prize. Sometimes we watch a video too long, already bored, but we tell ourselves, “The payoff is coming. This one’s going to hit.” That’s the infinite spin of the slot wheel.

The algorithm is the new wheel. It doesn’t hand out a reward every spin – only at the right intervals. Enough to keep you pulling, to keep you scrolling. In slots, they call it bonus rounds, lucky spins. It excites us just enough to keep us going.

The feed didn’t invent the game. It’s simply the slot machine of the 21st century.

Put all the spins together and you see the picture:

• At the fair – anticipation was a communal attraction.
• In slots – it became a personal machine.
• In movies and TV – it became a continuous story.
• In social media – it became daily life itself.

This isn’t a path of imitation, but of parallel evolution. Every generation found a new way to engineer the same ancient moment – the moment before.

That wonderful moment before. The thrill before a first date. Or, even more familiar: the little buzz when you hit “refresh” on your email, or when the three dots appear in WhatsApp before a message arrives – another version of the same game.

Anticipation is often sweeter than the result. Think about it: when we buy ourselves a gift at the mall, the best feeling is during the purchase. For me, it’s always the moment of unwrapping. After that, it’s already less exciting – we want another box to open.

We like to believe that the infinite feed is something new, proof that we’re modern. But the truth is simpler: we love the moment before.

And that moment before is the same wheel that started spinning more than a century ago at dusty fairs, lit up casinos, jumped onto the big screen – and now lives in your pocket.

The wheel never stops. Each time it changes color, symbol, technology – but it always returns to the same place:
The pause. The stop. The little moment of anticipation that keeps us hooked.

And in the future… it will reinvent itself again. And once more, everyone will write about how “we’ve become more advanced.”

The shared history of slots and social media isn’t a story about addiction. It’s a story about a single, unbroken lineage – the lineage of anticipation.

We love to wait for things. And when it’s done well, the waiting itself rewards us.

What made crowds hold their breath in front of a fairground wheel in the 19th century is the same thing that makes us scroll endlessly today.

Not the result. Not the prize. The little moment before.

And for me, that’s the moment before a bonus game.

So whether it’s a slot, a feed, or a message with those three typing dots – we’re all chasing the same tiny instant. Not the victory, but the promise. Not the after, but the before.

And maybe that’s the reason why even now, as you finish reading this, your brain is already waiting for the next spin. The real question isn’t why you enjoy the game – the only question is whether you know when to stop.