[eggbrain]

> [...] Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes.

I touch upon this in https://www.scottgoci.com/social-media-platforms-whats-wrong... and https://www.scottgoci.com/social-media-platforms-whats-wrong... -- but as you mention, this is a result of engagement being a core metric of social media platforms, and users attempting to game the platform's algorithm for their own purposes.

An easy way to solve for this is customization -- if no two users have the same "algorithm" powering their feed, it becomes hard for anyone to do this, because perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.

[Karrot_Kream]

> An easy way to solve for this is customization -- if no two users have the same "algorithm" powering their feed, it becomes hard for anyone to do this, because perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.

The problem, and where I strongly agree with the parent's statement that "I feel like social media has changed human behavior", is that the users themselves seek the engagement. Content creators want feedback about their content. You can codify that as "views", "likes", or whatever, but the whole problem here is fundamentally that most creators try and pursue strategies that increase whichever metric they are tracking to get value out of their posting.

I watched Bluesky grow up and become a "real network" and once Bluesky hit a certain scaling point it became the exact same as all the other supposed algorithmic-engagement optimized sites. Posters started posting snippy, sneery comments because it made the Like count go up.

> perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.

Zuck talked about how Threads specifically filtered out political content [1] and how that decision was reversed [2]. It turns out that users didn't like filtering out political content even though as most of us know, it tends to turn into dunking competitions online.

So I largely agree with what the parent said. The expectations in the game have changed. Content creators want big number to go up. People want to dunk on each other because it's fun and feels righteous. No algorithms or manifestos seem to change this fundamental change in the way folks post and engage with social media. Maybe a protracted education campaign can, though.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic... [2]: https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-anno...