[gergov]

Right, engagement at all cost it is, but there is a fundamental difference. Television required professionals where even wrestling and reality TV is scripted: it requires some sort of willful ignorance from the viewer to engage with it.

Social media pushes the illusion that you are not engaging with professionals but peers, and the dominant signals (how many views, likes, comments, etc.) of this day and age were not present with TV. This seriously messes with the innate reasoning of most humans, because for all our individualism we are norm conforming herd animals.

Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake. If the same thing is pushed by all of their friends, now we're in the territory of peer pressure which is a different ball game!

[PuppyTailWags]

I don't really agree with this. Rush Limbaugh successfully ran a platform on mostly entirely television that deeply poisoned the cultural landscape of the USA at the time (he was defending Reagan's neglect of HIV/AIDS and playing "another one bites the dust" when Freddie Mercury died), and laid the foundation on current polarized rhetoric strategies. He spread lies that Obama wasn't a natural born citizen. He blamed volcano eruptions on the Affordable Care Act. So on and so forth. It's spurious to claim that outrage bait on television hasn't messed up people's brains just because the internet is doing a better job at it. They're just modeling what television was already successfully doing.

[deltarholamda]

This is a really weird comment, because Limbaugh was almost entirely radio. His TV show was short-lived and not really popular, as he wasn't comfortable in the medium and it showed. He got his start in radio as a DJ, and went on to basically remake the AM band from farm reports and local sports talk to talk radio as we now know it.

This is really basic bio stuff about Limbaugh, and it doesn't speak well of your other assertions if you got this part so wrong.

What's really funny is that during the 90s the "Greatest Threat To Democracy Ever" WAS talk radio, more or less solely because the Limbaugh program was so popular. The targets may change, but the talking points never seem to.

[advantager]

I believe Rush did become famous on television, but after the mid-90s it was really all about his radio program. So it might be to your point, fundamentally it isn't the internet, or TV, maybe it was radio.

I do believe that the Rush style radio talk show lays the foundation for Tucker Carlson and all of the conservative pundit TV programming. Which is the basis for the problems we see with Facebook / Fake News etc.

[mawise]

Facebook brought us in with the promise of keeping in touch with friends, but the incentives are to "engagement at all costs". I'm hoping that if we can offer an alternative that lets people keep up with their friends without the engagememt incentive then we could greatly improve societal mental health. Thats why I build Haven[1] as open source and self hosted, along with several 3rd party hosting providers. No central entity means no "engagement at all costs".

[1] https://havenweb.org

[nkingsy]

This is a tragedy of the commons situation because people cannot help themselves.

What we are actually seeing is users going to TikTok because it is even more engaging.

People may say they want to keep up with their friends, but they will choose the more engaging activity.

There is no regulating or out-competing it.

Governments should provide identification, communication, community, payments, etc platforms for their citizens, but entertainment is always going to look like this unless stoicism is somehow engrained into our culture.

Entertainment itself is measured by engagement, so it will end with unlimited personalized ai generated content that will be almost impossible to put down.

[dylan604]

I never used Friendster, and thought that everyone spending so much time on MySpace was just wasting time. However, I'd love for socials to be back to just MySpace levels of people engaging with each other, sharing music, etc vs the ad engagement driven by ads instead of common interests.

[otikik]

> some sort of willful ignorance

Not "some sort of willful ignorance". It just requires "ignorance". I think most of us know someone who thinks that reality TV is ... well, reality. "It says it in the name".

> Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake

Perhaps you have very bright kids. My kid will ask me to buy two of whatever that person is pushing. He's simply not equipped to handle marketing at any level, yet.

[MandieD]

Up to now, I have vigorously shielded my toddler from marketing - as far as he knows, the TV occasionally shows holiday church services and election results, and "his" laptop shows fairly non-violent excerpts from BBC animal documentaries and bird-watching videos (he's taken to asking to watch by making the slurping sounds the desert rain frog in his favorite video makes as it's eating termites, then exclaiming "froggy!").

I know he needs to be exposed to some marketing while I'm watching along to talk about it so he isn't completely defenseless against it later, but I don't think that time is quite yet. So far, I'm going with his being able to separate "real" from "pretend" as a minimum.

[mattnewton]

I’m not sure we’re equipped as a society, otherwise why would marketing budgets be so high?

I know adults who voted for Trump because they believed the apprentice gave them an unvarnished view of his character and decision making prowess in the real world. My own grandmother would cite episodes of the show.

[kennend3]

> Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake.

No, they cant.

How many kids believe the photoshop pics they see?

Not to single her out, but Kim K is now selling headphones and her pic in her ad makes her look like a character from the sims. This is NOT how a normal human being looks without hours of photoshop work.

There is a reason we use to have laws around advertising to children.. they are too young to understand things.. this is also why you cant legally enter into a contract with a minor.

[pjc50]

> it requires some sort of willful ignorance from the viewer to engage with it.

> Show a kid a celebrity pushing something and they can tell it's fake

This does not explain the Alex Jones show.

[giantg2]

"Right, engagement at all cost it is"

Ha I actually read this as enragement, which I don't think is even a real word.

[classified]

It has become a real word by now. Culture changes, language adapts.