During the presidential election, and afterwards, in the period around Donald Trump’s inauguration, Roddy Lindsay found himself doomscrolling.
The contents were darker than usual, but the feeling of “mindless consumption activity,” as he describes it, was familiar enough. Prolonged periods lingering over YouTube slop and Twitter clickbait, often late at night when he should’ve been sleeping, had grown habitual.
He doesn’t consider himself an addict, he said, “but it’s just too much time on your smartphone.”
A former Facebook engineer, Lindsay, 39, has a better understanding than most of the forces at work keeping him glued to his phone. Starting in 2007, he spent six years as a data scientist at the social media company parsing statistics on user behavior. More specifically, he studied what users were posting about different Facebook pages and brands and how their “sentiments” trended over time.
Social media has developed rapidly to keep users on their apps, and their phones, Lindsay said, and in the US, the model has accelerated without meaningful regulation of the technology that creates behavioral dependencies.
“The economic incentives are too strong for all these consumer technology companies to maximize engagement, maximize time spent on their platforms,” he said. “People need the tools to combat that.”
One of those tools, Lindsay hopes, is Zabit. Launched in January with his own bad habits in mind, and $2.6 million in seed funding, he founded the company to help people drink less alcohol, or exercise, sleep and read more, quit vaping, spend real time with their friends and kids – or cut the amount of time lost and wasted on smartphones.
From BetterHelp to habit-forming services like Streak, there’s no shortage of wellness apps. But they rely on the same psychological mechanisms, like gamification – the awarding of points or tabulation of streaks – that keep people on their phones, Lindsay said.
What differentiates Zabit, he says, is that users are held accountable to “coaches” – five of them so far, including a licensed therapist, a nutritionist, and advanced clinical psychology students. Their interactions with clients at critical junctures, mostly by text, with video or photo messages sometimes added, offer the critical element of accountability to a person, he said.
“I just feel like what’s needed is something else, and that the other thing is humans,” Lindsay said. “It’s a very basic, simple, quaint idea that, yeah, humans still feel something when they talk to another human, engage with another person, have a relationship,” Lindsay said. “So I think that has to be the answer.”
A Zabit user wanting to reduce compulsive scrolling, for example, chooses which apps on their phone Zabit will apply time limits to. If the limit is reached, the app is blocked. Users must send a written “justification” to their coach to unlock 15 more minutes. Zabit can be used as an app but doesn’t need to be; it will soon offer a version relying strictly on SMS messaging.
Lindsay wouldn’t say how many users the service has.
The irony that Zabit relies on a smartphone to hopefully free you from it is not lost on Lindsay. He studied symbolic systems at Stanford, which he describes as an amalgam of computer science, philosophy, psychology and machine learning. He dropped out of a statistics master’s program at the university to join Facebook.
After leaving the company, he co-founded Hustle in 2014, a marketing company focused mainly on advocacy groups, nonprofits, political campaigns, and labor unions. His first customer was FWD.us, the immigration reform nonprofit founded by Mark Zuckerberg a decade before the Meta CEO launched himself into the manosphere. At Hustle, Lindsay quickly figured out the basic truth that people hate telemarketers, but don’t quite mind text marketing.
“It’s gotten spammier than I had hoped for the channel, but people recognized that conversational engagement works pretty well, because people prefer to talk to a real person, and have a conversation with them.” (Venture capital firm Social Capital acquired Hustle in 2020. Lindsay declined to say how much it paid.)
Zabit was born in part out of Lindsay’s attempts to modify his own bad behaviors. He considered a dumbphone and tried using a digital watch to measure his reforms sans smartphone. But he is resigned to smartphones being an inevitable, if forced, feature of modern life.
The sad effects of compulsively checking our phones are by now obvious, if they were ever really in question. Social media addiction is an established cause of anxiety and depression, a fact supported by the surgeon general’s warning last year of a mental health crisis. While many studies point to the problem among teenagers, signs that adults are overusing social media (or at least, Facebook) were identified as far back as a decade ago.
Dr. Adrian Aguilera, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, said generally speaking, pairing technology with behavior change or mental health can prove beneficial. He found success in a program he set up for people in therapy for depression, who received periodic texts to practice what they discussed in person and to track their mood. They were more engaged in their treatments and showed up more often, he said.
He declined to speak on the particulars of Zabit, but services that emphasize accountability and goal-setting could be beneficial to users, he said. Rather than rate such products as amazing or horrible, he wants to focus on who can benefit and under what circumstances. Where texting is concerned, it’s “less about the content of the message, and more about the meaning and authenticity,” he said.
“Any message that comes to us has a different meaning depending on who is sending it,” Aguilera said. The same exact message will carry different meaning if it comes from a loved one, a boss, parents, or kids, he said.
During my interview with Lindsay in the Dogpatch last week, I asked him if founding Zabit is a reaction to a problem he helped to create earlier in his career. He said no, that Facebook was a different product during the years he was there, primarily focused on users interacting with friends and family.
“It was more, you know, like chatting with friends, that was the emphasis,” he said. “Now I think a lot of the services have turned to consumption-based feeds, driven by algorithms designed to keep you engaged,” he said.
Zabit is hardly purely human driven. It relies on a still-undetermined amount of artificial intelligence to draft texts, for example. Early test versions of the program relied on AI “assistants,” or bots, to nudge users to curb or alter their drinking or sleep at late hours or on weekends, when company coaches weren’t working.
“So my thought was, I’ll have the bot do it,” Lindsay said. Zabit launched and got a bunch of feedback. “People hated the bot,” he said.
Users were sold on the idea of a coach, and counted on getting a real person, he said. In a weird twist, he added, some users thought the coaches were bots. Lindsay said he’s still “tweaking the mix” of artificial intelligence and human interaction users get.
In March, he published an article in The Information explaining his broader thinking on the subject. In it, he asks readers to consider the “humaton,” a hybrid of human and automaton, which describes human workers who function partly “as a skin” for AI coordinated and generated communication.
Like smartphones, Lindsay said, the influence of artificial intelligence isn’t just inevitable – we’re already immersed in it. “We’re all humatons already, to some degree,” he said.
He’s aware of Zabit’s limitations beyond the humaton meditation. The website warns that it’s no solution for pathological behavior. It won’t help with something like a debilitating sleep problem, Lindsay said. But he believes the infrastructure he built to run Zabit can be applied to other businesses. His coaches also serve as Zabit’s sales team, customer support, and account management, trying to get people to convert from a trial plan to paying nearly $36 a month, and renew their subscriptions.
“Whatever the formula is for getting people to exercise three times a week is the same formula that’s going to work for pre-diabetes or alcohol cessation,” Lindsay said. “We’ll sort of figure out what that formula is, and then be able to use it in these different domains.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly reported that Zabit users thought human coaches were pretending to be bots. In fact, they thought the human coaches were actually bots. We have amended the story to denote this.
