I'm a little concerned with the prevalence and popularity of topics and videos seemingly designed to upset people and "get people fired up" in social media
I was part of the reddit exodus, and I just discovered that when I sign out of my account, I'm still able to browse RIF from my phone. But my feed was no longer curated by me, so I saw what most people see when they visit that site from the "sort by hot" option of browsing.
I was a bit shocked. Almost every other top post was something ragebait-y. Something filmed to get you upset, to get your heart rate up and release something pleasurable in your brain. The comment sections followed suit, with folks bashing people in the videos(deservedly most of the time) and hundreds of upvotes following.
I believe what I'm witnessing is the real life version of the "10 Minutes Of Hate" described in Orwell's 1984. People enjoy getting mad. We've all felt it - an increase in heart rate but something, maybe dopamine being released at the same time, and a need to share that anger with others.
I don't like it, and I don't see it stopping. An entire generation has been raised on videos and stories designed to upset them and evoke this feeling.
The scale is new but overall it isn’t new. “Flame wars” have happened in online forums since dialup BBS’s.
I believe that with enough scale it would happen anywhere, unless the system is designed to prevent it. It’s why tabloid newspapers are popular too.
Orwell wrote about a system where you were required to watch it. Fortunately we don’t have that.
We're not required, no, but I'd say for the average person it is almost forced. Like OP mentioned, unless you've curated your feeds, that is the type of media you're going to be flooded with on every social media platform and news site.
Personally, I don't use social media outside of Reddit, and I guess Tildes now, and had my Reddit feed pretty heavily curated to my specific interests and locality, but still saw that type of content creeping in more and more, especially in larger subreddits.
It's becoming really hard to escape.
Agreed without strong media and technology literacy, and historical insight it's hard to avoid. I have to make a conscious effort regularly to check in with myself after doom scrolling. Yes there are things going on we need to change but constantly worrying and getting angry about it is also not going to bring about the change. Rather I try to spend time finding ways to help the issues I feel passionate about and acknowledge I'm just one person, I'm not going to radically change things overnight.
"I have to make a conscious effort regularly to check in with myself after doom scrolling."
This needs to be taught in schools at this point.
I agree and not just in schools, but to everyone. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say people are having their attention stolen by this type of content and it's not even making their lives better, but only giving the satisfaction of feeling morally superior.
I've had to teach myself not to react emotionally to these triggers. All of the headlines fall into a few specific categories and I already know how I feel about them so any additional hate or anger only serves to negatively affect my mood. Does knowing we've had the hottest month on record make me feel bad about climate change? Yes, and I also know what will be the usual points of discussion around it. I journal about my main concerns and add thoughts there. I've tried to avoid seeking validation for "thinking the right thing" by seeing points I agree with online and avoid seeing those same opinions repeatedly on the same topic, even though the 'news' being reported on might be different. But all of this requires a much more conscious effort to consuming content than the satisfaction of consuming more quickly and for a longer time, which is what all algorithmically driven feeds aim to do.
I don't have proof, but there's a growing feeling in my head that rage inducing attention grabbing social media is a social ill that transcends stuff like "personal responsibility" or "just cut it from your own media diet." We're saturated in it nearly everywhere whether we wish it or not, kids just grow up with it so it's normalized, and this kind of diseased social media is literally algorithmically optimized by trillions of pageviews to hack into our brains and get our attention. It reminds me more like a psychological virus or "meme" in its original intended definition found in Dawkin's book The Selfish Gene.
The Internet certainly be addictive. I don’t want to downplay that given my own Internet habits. But it’s still much like TV: you can turn it off. Also, it can be easier to escape than TV in shared living situations where someone else likes having the TV on.
Compare with being really into a video game. You can be consumed by it while the people around you don’t care about that game at all. It’s just a thing you do that they’re not into.
But you’re right that there is a creeping insidiousness about how online behavior in some forums ends up bleeding over into others. I’ve noticed being influenced by the content I read and how I pick up writing styles from other places like Twitter. Memes often seem witty and fun when they’re new to you, and later they can seem like a common cultural reference, when actually a lot of people aren’t familiar with them.
Isn't that one of the purposes of algorithmic feeds? My TikTok feed for example has very little ragebait and is almost all niche interests I follow.
If the question is that most users will "eat junk food" unless forced otherwise, it becomes a really hard question. To go with the food analogy, in the developed world we have lots of healthy food options (assuming you have a minimum amount of money), and yet several people continue choosing only junk food. Do you force them to eat non-junk food? Hard question abound.
Stuff like the obesity epidemic in the US has informed my worldview that many (though not all) problems in society require collective solutions to have any real effect. People makes choices for all sorts of reasons and bad choices can become "rational" when given sufficient negative external pressures. A good example: Why are poor people in the US more obese on average? This is purely a modern development in human history. Are poor folks just stupid and don't know that soda is unhealthy?
Well, consider the following:
Poor folks have less free time and find less time to cook, so they turn to fast food, which on the whole is incredibly unhealthy.
Many poor folks live in "food deserts" which lack accessible or nearby grocery stores making fast food that much more attractive.
Healthier options are often more expensive, or simply not available in their neighborhoods (more affluent neighborhoods are more likely to support healthier fast food).
The US heavily subsidizes foods like beef and dairy which are main ingredients in many unhealthy foods artificially lowering the price of say McDonald's Big Macs over a salad.
Unhealthy fast food may be a source of personal comfort, which is considered "worth the downsides" if their life is severely unhappy in other ways.
It's actually pretty difficult to shop for foods that don't have a ton of added sugars. Go to any grocery store in America and you'll find most everything has copious amounts of "added sugar." Does peanut butter or grape jelly need a ton of sugar poured in to be those substances? No, but they put it in anyway because it makes it taste better. Only a minority or brands will be the "healthy" option which might not even be widely available.
All of this (and more) compounds into an unhealthy food culture in the US and elsewhere which puts a big fat thumb on the scale making it easier, more economical, convenient, or even necessary to make bad food choices. In other words, it's not a fair fight for the consumer. We can write a frighteningly similar line of logic for harmful social media.
Or poor folks live in what is known as a food swamp, which is a area that has grocery stores, but do not have access to the healthy foods or they have large amounts of fast food restaurants in that area.
Edit: changed from love to live.
So much of what seems to be popular on the wider internet feels like what the Two Minute Hate was all about. If Orwell was wrong about anything, it's that he thought it would be a form of government control instead of a dopamine fix for the individual.
It's actually wild to consider that the Two Minute Hate is not only something people actively seek out but something they seek out enough to be a Six Hour Hate.
Full disclosure: I did read 1984 but it was a long time ago and I can't remember the "Two Minute Hate" part.
That being said, I don't think the term "hate" is broad enough. I think "outraged" is a better term. I think about the time I came across a (politically left) person on reddit who outright stated "I hate Ashkenazi people." As someone who is Ashkenazi (and also a leftist) I did not feel hate for this person, but I did feel an addictive sense of outrage. I of course am outraged by right-wing/white-supremacist anti-semitism, but I'm so used to it now that it doesn't rile me up like it used to and I avoid consuming content that passes on such disgusting sentiments not because I hate these sentiments (which I do) but because it no longer riles me up (it's "same old, same old"). But a bold statement of hate from a leftist? This was new and interesting and boy did it make me mad.
So instead of just ignoring the guy and moving on with my life, I went through the guy's comment history and learned all about him and his belief system, and every time I saw him state something I disagreed with I got riled up which gave me the burst of dopamine I was looking for.
For real, I thought about the guy for days, so offended that he could be anti-semitic and leftist (how dare he!?).
The reality is though that there will always be people from all walks of life filled with hate and ready to spread it, and engaging with it is just a drug. I'm still interested in anti-semitism as a topic, of course, and believe it's an issue that needs to be talked about, but as a healthy human being, I try not to seek out examples of it just to get a rage-induced dopamine hit.
Honestly, though, I think it's a bit like a drug. In my case I build a tolerance to rage-bait posted by the left-wing to get us angry at the right-wing and it no longer had an effect on me and so I stopped engaging with it and felt better until I discovered something from a leftist that made me rage. Fortunately there's not too much on the left that causes me to rage (there's little enough that I still consider myself a leftist) so it's not become a problem, but I see how it could escalate.
Some people, though, just seem to get pulled more and more into rage-bait and get stuck in the cycle of doomscrolling endlessly. It can't be healthy, nor can I imagine that it's productive, but I suspect that we've evolved to get a dopamine hit from outrage so as long as people get that high, they keep seeking out reasons to be outraged.
The two minute hate was exactly that outrage. It was a clip compilation of people saying ignorant and objectionable things, and everyone watching was encouraged to be outraged, to insult the people on the screen, to rage at their ignorance.
You might be surprised to learn that it's a mechanism for resilience against being traumatised. It's basically combat high that is chased. The more you can enjoy an adverse situation, the less PTSD symptoms will be experience.
I think that biology is very energy efficient - there are in fact a limited range of reactions that are applied to many situations and then pre-consciously framed so that we experience a new, unique emotion attached to specific memories. The 4-way trauma response is a universal in mammalian biology. Fight, freeze, flight and fawn. We are all using them all the time, you've probably heard about it in connection with war veterans and people whose battlefield was the family home but all of us can be considered the walking wounded to different extents.
Here's a quote from a veteran of war participating in a study about PTSD: "At first I hated it. Then I was just doing my job. Then I felt nothing about it. Then I began to enjoy it."
Perpetrators of human rights abuses almost completely lack a traumatic response to the inescapable situation, including children who are taught to scapegoat another child and abuse them alongside their parents. No PTSD symptoms. Witnesses and victims however, who also experienced near or total powerlessness had significant and lasting trauma reactions.
Also not forgetting, men (mostly) seek out combat high during peacetime too in order to protect themselves against schizophrenic conditions when their ego, the force holding the organism together, is compromised.
At least on Twitter and Reddit, I’m doubtful that very popular topics get a lot of attention from any one person. People see a meme, upvote it, maybe write a brief reply, and move on. It’s between other things they do. If it’s hateful, it’s more like the five second hate, or a bit more if they reply.
YouTube videos are more like TV in that they can take a lot of time to watch.
I agree, but I also think there's a cumulative aspect where people will do their six hours of hate five seconds at a time. That's pretty much the experience of the unfiltered reddit frontpage, where you can go from story to story and comment section to comment section, with each maxing the outrage meter. It's not particularly about any one story but the effect of them all together.
Don't have that yet.
Generic news is awful. In the UK, the likes of The Sun and Daily Mail are rammed full of clickbait rage articles.
There needs to be an awesome news for each country as well, full of stories of people getting from the streets to their lives on track, dog shelters that get extra funding and give them a better life or environmental fixes local councils are doing to improve quality of life for all.
Guess what though? That kind of news just doesn't get you the clicks or the ad revenue. Also, not enough people enjoy awwww over arrrgghh!
Don’t have that and will likely never have that. I don’t see any reason to expect a 1984-style dystopia.
“Flame wars” might have happened in online forums since dialup BBS’s...but lately it feels like it is being weaponized in unprecedented manner. And this is not only limited to online discussion spaces, even main stream news feels like much more rage-baity than it used to before.
The issue is it's VERY hard to avoid unless you avoid the subject all together. So, either get rage baited constantly or you end up uninformed. It's basically a win-win for the "bad guys".
I'm not sure what you mean by "it" in "it's very hard to avoid," but lots of people don't read Twitter or Reddit. There are many sources of news.
Also, the OP was writing about stuff they didn't see unless logged out.
This is true, but a lot of the things Orwell outlined in the context of authoritarianism have flourished under (nominally) democratic capitalism.
The difference is we are complicit in it happening to us and it is heavily tied in to our identities as consumers.
Being subject to surveillance and data harvesting, fear and hatred through the "if it bleeds it leads" 24h news cycle, weird levels of geopolitical ignorance, historical amnesia, ... a large swathe of the population in our societies willingly lives like this.
Honestly, you're seeing Reddit for what it truly was if you see that stuff. Though I was fascinated to see the difference between "UK View" and "US View" on the desktop version when not logged in.
There's so much of this stuff online now that is really has taken the fun out of being around for long periods of time. It was always around, but never to this degree. It's less about it being online, more about the stuff that people do in their day to day life. Take for example the guy who I saw fall off his bike the other day in London, two people ran over to help... others just grabbed their phone and started recording. It was their ticket to 'going viral', despite this being an awful day for the other guy.
The sheer lack of empathy that is shown throughout society these days is repulsive, it's permitted because 'social media' and leaves nothing but an ashen taste in your mouth.
Am I the only one who literally never records videos? I also rarely take pictures (except of my cats). I figure if I record an event I'll miss out on living it.
That being said, I think recording video is a good thing if it can help someone legally at some point down the road.
I've got some videos of my dog being adorable. But I'm very similar, life is now.
I've got a gopro that is attached to my motorbike helmet. But generally? People aren't recording for that reason.
I think a big part of that is it’s actually quite rare.
Sure, we see some crazy person doing something crazy online, and it’s easy to assume it must happen often. But it really doesn’t. Most people go their whole lives without seeing someone thrown off an airplane for setting fire to the emergency exit.
So it’s actually pretty normal to never record anything. Because most of us don’t actually have anything to record.
I suspect it's always been this way, but social media has an amplifying effect. The fact of the matter is, we have a hard time empathizing with people outside of our monkey sphere.
I doubt that people are any more sadistic now than they've ever been. It's just that modern social media gives them an endless outlet for indulging that impulse. America's Funniest Home Videos was an early form of this – more often than not, the entertainment value of that show was predicated upon laughing at someone's misfortune. I never saw the appeal, but there was obviously a market for it.
I suspect that, once a social media platform has reached a critical mass, this type of lowest common denominator "casual sadism" becomes popular. Shitposting dominates. But as @fruitybrisket observed, the nice thing about Reddit was that it allowed you to filter all of that garbage out.
You're not wrong of course, it's very much the case that I think Social Media just amplifies and acts as a "come see your bad shit here" beacon to so many.
The bystander effect is a heck of a thing. But I've never before actively seen people just wang out phones for their own gratification at someone elses suffering, it felt very alien.
On the bright side, at least we don't have crowds of people showing up to witness public executions, right?
That happens in the US, I think?
Ha! No, I was thinking more like medieval/early modern Europe.
The gladiator games in Rome were extremely popular.
The stocks and the pillory drew crowds to throw rotten vegetables, fruit and rocks at those sentenced to them.
Human nature can be very ugly.
Indeed. I've seen the worst of the worst in my life and career choices.
But it never shocks me how tribal and easily led groups can be.
I had always recognized reddit was a site that focused on negativity but since leaving and spending time reading here and browsing tumblr it's very noticeable.
One theory I had for that on reddit was that people realized they were performing for a large audience that would reward them with karma. That led to escalation instead of de-escalation as you needed to one-up the last commenter to win more points. Reddit communities tended to get worse over time, both due to size and due to the establishment of dug-in cultures that frequently rewarded terrible behavior. If you add subreddits dedicated to re-contextualizing violence as justified or deserved you get a hellsite.
Something in the early days that was absolutely hammered into people that this is not what it was ever for eh?
Shame that went by the wayside. Bit like Redditquette in general.
Or my favourite. Moderator bias.
I am externally friendly with a few mods of a very big, British subreddit. Who turned into absolute nasty pieces of shit with their power when the place got big. Even called them out in person and proved that nailed a few of my throwaways with un-needed bans, arguments and all sorts. Lost a few friends in that, but my word did popularity contests end at 16... not 36.
We're all subject to the lordship of Deimos here, but I think he's a cool dude with a level head -- but that's not too relevant, eventually when this place will get too big for him alone to moderate and while he could in principle add trusted users as mods, I really hope they roll out the plans to have community self-modding where all users eventually gain limited modding powers and self-police the community. Perhaps it doesn't work out, but I like the idea of distributed power. The rudimentary label system is a first step towards that goal.
It's a great idea. It's just always at the whims of people who may desire that power over others, how does the community keep that in check?
That's what happened with Reddit. Powermods who all kind of... related it back to power or a popularity contest.
I'm one of those reddit powermods you speak of lol, or at least formally. I can't speak for anyone else, but for me it was a hobby I did alongside commenting and posting. I once tried to tabulate all my mod actions and I was somewhere far north of 500,000 actions back in 2014.
The issue is very few people have the stomach to moderate long term -- especially big forums. The good ones were unicorns, the bad ones who derived enjoyment over abusing their privileges were obviously awful. Bad mods were also highly visible because of all the drama they cause. But almost every community (even ones with a publicly bad moderator) likely had a quiet mod doing the heavy lifting and peacefully doing all the janitorial work required in the community. Oddly enough a couple of these people I knew were old retired folks who just enjoyed it even if they hardly posted otherwise. These are the people who keep the lights on and you hardly ever know they're there.
It's this latter kind of modding I'm referring to. Right now Tildes itself has at least two such people (at least that I've noticed) who are those quiet janitors keeping the lights on: @cfabbro and @mycketforvirrad who go around cleaning up titles, moving posts, retagging, etc... At the moment, this isn't too different from the reddit system as we have those folks because of legacy and seniority: they've been here a long time so they've gotten some extra responsibilities. Many reddit mods similarly became mods because they got in at the ground floor when their community was small. This makes sense as Tildes isn't too big yet, but as it gets bigger, that system here will moreso resemble a big sub which requires a lot of trust between a huge community and a small number of powerusers. This is not ideal for a variety of reasons, but also mod burnout is a serious drawback.
That's why I liked the idea that such tools become distributed to a wider portion of the community. It makes modding easier (hopefully) for the small number of users with the most responsibilities, and let's the community as a whole run itself. This kind of already happens -- you'll notice at the bottom of big thread a collapsed low effort comment or two. That happens because at least two or more regular users considered that comment "noise" and just cluttering up the conversation. The other options currently are "joke," "off-topic," and "malice" which do different things. Only the last one gets the site admin involved. The other labels let users police the discussion themselves automatically and through consensus. "Exemplary" is the positive version of this where the community highlights especially useful posts which boosts its visibility.
It's sadly a very effective way to get people's attention, and since attention = engagement = money it's a lousy feedback loop.
It is extra dangerous in how it desensitizes serious topics. I am not a fan of trump. I think he's horrible and a criminal. And yet nearly every day since the moment he was elected there was some headline or another explaining how they'd get him, regardless of the authenticity or logic of the claims. It's what finally kicked off my desire to look for better sources and sites to get news from, as the constant deluge of nonsense made it insanely hard to tell what was actually important and what was just preaching to the choir.
I've always felt An Inconvenient Truth is one of the best examples of this in a very dangerous way. Let me be clear, climate change is a thing, and a dangerous one. And it's why I will always despise that the movie very intentionally sensationalizes certain claims and misrepresents data, when it absolutely didn't need to.
I hear a lot of people argue that it's fine when this is done to support a good cause, and even if you think it's morally ok, I think it objectively sabotages the goal you're trying to support. You just give the opposition plenty of "see they cried wolf about this!" points, and some % of those you could've convinced are going to stop trusting you. It leads to the exact same problem I described above where you'll read some headline and think "ugh. I'll have to research this later and see if it's accurate" because you do care about the issue, but are aware of the exaggeration for clicks.
That’s the crux of the problem I think. It’s why headlines are misleading and clickbaity, it’s why outrageous articles are so prevalent, and it’s why ads are so deceptive. All to get clicks by any means necessary. Facts, nuance, context, and rationality aren’t as important as getting someone’s attention long enough for them to click on your bs headline/article/post/ad.
It's the 21st century version of yellow journalism. The newest thing about it is the volume.
I am inclined to believe you when you say that sensationalizing something desensitizes you from it. I’ve learned many times over that people will not learn things if they intend not to learn them. Sensationalization gives them yet another excuse to not pay attention to the issue.
It was about 2018 when I finally reached my breaking point with Facebook and all of the news that got posted there. For the most part, I was seeing legitimate news sources like NPR and the New York Times. But I was only seeing the articles that were the most sensational/salacious – the stuff that was getting the most "engagement" according to Facebook's algorithms.
So I disconnected from all of it. It was hard to separate the signal from the noise – to focus on what was legitimate news and what was just the latest outrage I had no control over.
For a while, I let the pendulum swing rather far in the opposite direction. I didn't pay any attention to any news at all. It was good for my mental health and I can't say that my behavior changed dramatically (no matter how powerfully affecting a news story is, it often doesn't motivate us to actually do anything differently), but I felt embarrassed by how woefully uninformed I was becoming.
What I really wanted was a once-a-week roundup of the top news stories. Only the most important stuff, not just up-to-the-minute updates on the Trump Administration's endless misdeeds.
I never found it. But the closest I did find was two email newsletters that attempted to summarize the day's top stories. One from Quartz (which is a little more business-oriented than I would prefer) and the New York Times' Evening Briefing. Between the two of them, I feel like I am adequately abreast of current events without feeling like I am drowning in a perpetual outrage machine. There's probably still some stuff I miss, and there are still some stories that it featured that aren't really "important" in the grander scheme of things, but it works for me.
It's turned into a psychotic game of whisper down the lane where each message gets more and more hyperbolic. An author with an idea or point of view sits and writes a story on a given subject. That story is then handed over to someone whose job it is to write an enticing headline to get you to read the story. The story is then posted on a news aggregate site with many times a completely different headline that is also trying to get you to click on the article. You then go down into the comment section of the aggregate site and read other anonymous users comments about a story they may or may not have actually read. And that's how many people get their news... Frightening.
Agreed. In the end, we as humans have designed a system to be engaging as much as possible, without making it as constructively engaging as possible. And unfortunately, it is far easier to be engaging without doing so constructively. It is essentially an emotional deregulation spiral on a cultural level.
It's had its upsides as well of course, such a more globally connected world. I can talk to my friends in Australia and America everyday despite being in the EU. But whether that instant connection is worth it, I don't know.
Measurement and metrics tie to this. It's easier to measure engagement. It's easy to build in telemetry to track it and there are common measures and industry standards that all measure the amount of time people spend looking at your thing and the number of actions they take on it.
It takes more effort to track if that engagement is driving a culture or a community in the right direction or not. Coming from reddit, places like AskHistorians were able to do that but it took a lot of concerted effort from real people who shared goals and values and took efforts to shape their community towards what they wanted. It wasn't something you could do from a dashboard in a presentation and it required having an idea of what you wanted to end up with. It also directly conflicted with the idea of an open forum where anyone could say whatever they wanted. It required aggressive moderation from real people to work.
On your last point I agree with you. I was around for the early optimism of the internet in the late 80s and 90s and I think a lot of those values of free information and decentralizing participation and creation are so far from what we have now its not recognizable. I really have enjoyed the perspectives from people all over the world but I think we're generations away from being able to fully grapple with what it means to connect the planet.
It's a problem.
Angry content spreads like a virus on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Mastodon as outrage is the most reliable path to get people to "like", "retweet", or "boost". The classic feed based on your followers is pretty bad, an algorithmic feed could be better or worse.
Anger plays well on traditional media too. I remember when Fox news was running nonstop news about a "caravan" approaching the U.S. border and wasn't saying anything rational like "these people will come to the U.S. and work and pay taxes, keep our agriculture industry the world leader, alleviate labor shortages, help pay for your retirement, ..."
In the wild anger can have the positive role of motivating people to take action against injustice. Mass media makes it dangerously addictive, in particularly people feel they "cannot look away" from sources of outrage.
Personally I think algorithms can be part of the solution as opposed to part of the problem and I'd be very interested in filtering angry toots out of Mastodon but I don't know if I can stand to collect 5000 angry toots to train the model. A model like that kind could be used in a few ways: (1) in a reader, (2) in a writer to filter your own output (YOShInOn is a much nicer "person" than I am!) or (3) in the network itself to suppress negativity.
(1) and (2) I can do for myself and not trouble anybody but (3) is a toughie in that a lot of people are "angry about politics" or "conservative and angry" or "gay and angry" and a model like that is (a) going to suppress a lot of "politics", "conservatism" and "gay" (so says the conditional probability distribution) and (b) be accused of doing such suppression (more so than than it is), that the model is "unfair", etc.
My take is that Facebook has a type (3) model which has numerous commercial benefits, for instance advertisers don't really want to be associated with angry content, in the long term the negative atmosphere drives people away. (I think it's some of the reason why Twitter's appeal is relatively limited) A type (3) model run in reverse could improve engagement in the short term like a sugar rush but it limits the appeal and profitability of a platform in the long term. Suppressing news in places like Canada and California might be all for the good because a major function of the news is something to be angry about.
On Mastodon I do think there are "good people who occasionally boost something that they shouldn't" but I have found being careful who I follow and being quick to block protects my serenity. I was glad to see science fiction writer Charlie Stross on Mastodon for instance, first I thought he was just boosting stupid stuff, then he wrote a toot about how Keith Starmer, leader of the UK's Labour party is a "borderline fascist" and thought "if leftists in the UK are like that, no wonder they've had the Tories in charge for 12 years". So I unfollowed and blocked him because I just don't need to be exposed to that.
Well said. I also think anger is probably the hardest emotion to externally mitigate. We, of course, can't really control others' emotions, but we do manage our own in part from the social cues we pick up from others.
Ever try to tell an angry person they shouldn't be angry? It doesn't work. Nobody likes being told how to feel, and when someone is fired up in anger, telling them not to be angry usually just inflames the anger more. Additionally, if the anger comes from a sense of being wronged (as is very common on social media), then countering the anger can contribute to that sense of wrongness and further validate the person's anger on a conceptual level.
Even if you don't directly say anything to the angry person though and just give a more measured response for the audience, the problem is that the more measured response tends to get drowned out. Anger has a way of taking up all the oxygen on a topic even on neutral ground, but it's especially true on platforms that optimize for it.
The other problem is that anger, as a strong emotion, feels strongly genuine to the people who are experiencing it. We all have things that make us legitimately angry, and it is difficult for us to assess whether or not that anger is the correct response or "worth" it, in part because our angry response already affirms that it is. This is where we see very weird distortions where, from an outside perspective, people get hyper-angry about inconsequential things and don't see any absurdity to that.
I remember, in the mid 2000s, a website my friends and I loved made some UI changes. They weren't even big ones. I ended up ranting to my friend about one of them, which was essentially nothing more than a font change. Why was I ranting? I can be honest about that now, but only in hindsight. It was kind of fun; it got me attention; I felt "wronged" by those changes as an All-Important User of The Site. I can see now that there was a narcissism to expressing the outrage that I had no conscious idea of at the time ("this is about ME!"). I think I was just echoing what I'd seen other people do when UI changes happened.
One of my friends politely listened to my ranting and then said "I don't know -- it just doesn't seem to me like it's that big of a deal? I honestly think you might be blowing it way out of proportion." He might have even said something like "I don't think it has anything to do with you at all" or something to the effect, but that could just be me mixing or inventing memories. At the time he said that I didn't hear him, of course, and was mad that he checked my outrage. In hindsight, however, that moment has stuck with me. He was modeling a measured response -- giving me a cue and a tool to help me identify and manage my own anger. It's something I try to keep in mind about a lot of things now -- is my anger proportional to its stimulus? Sometimes the answer is yes, but a lot of times the answer is no.
On the internet, I think it's very hard to do what my friend did. We usually don't have the solid personal relationships that can ground a redirect like that. We are in a social media environment that doesn't promote mitigating voices because they hamper engagement. We are also in a polarized environment where we are trained to see any social pushback as coming from "the other side" and therefore hostile rather than helpful. Finally, mitigating social cues that are visible in person (like calmness, listening, or thoughtful questioning), are pretty much invisible online.
You opened with angry content spreading like a virus, and I think it's because everyone looks around online and sees everyone else being angry, so they follow suit. What they're doing isn't out of the norm and, in fact, is often enforced as the norm ("you SHOULD be angry about this").
In the interest of not letting this become an angry rant about anger itself, I will say that Tildes has been a breath of fresh air for me in the years I've been here. It is not an anger-forward place and, when anger is expressed, it tends to be the springboard for something more, like reflection or advocacy, rather than just outrage for outrage's sake. It doesn't mean we're perfect in that regard, but this site seems to have a lot of people who are more willing to evaluate their own anger and its proportionality. In some ways I feel like this place has been a years-long detox for me of unlearning bad habits and conditioning, some of which were steeped in the anger-centric paradigms of places like reddit, Twitter, and general internet culture at large.
Yep. Anger is an emotion driven by passion. I am not passionate about piracy in Somalia so I don't get angry about piracy in Somalia. You were passionate on some level about your web page. It is nearly impossible to reason someone out of that emotional response.
Toss in some good old fashioned persecution complex that a huge swath of the population seems to suffer from and add in a dash of algorithm and you have an advertiser's wet dream--a population that holds themselves captive while doomscrolling no matter what you put in front of them.
Outrage media is a real concern of mine and should be for everyone. Just last week or so Trump put up Obama's address and, sure enough, an armed loon showed up the same day. I'm sure nearly everyone has seen at least one family member get sucked into the rabbit hole of Fox News and their faux outrage advertising platform.
One of the most indious componants, however, is the cross platform tracking and algorithms that create a feedback loop/echo chamber for 1 person at a time. I believe it was the documentary The Social Dilemma that laid bare the outline of how they sucked my MIL into the whole "Stop the steal" BS. Because of her friends sharing a few links she started seeing "articles" everywhere about it. Literally her whole FB feed, ads on random sites, etc were pushing this narrative. From her perspective the "news" about it was everywhere so how in the world could we all be so blind about it??
The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher is a book that tells many similar stories and also some of the back story in major social media companies.
I've heard it called "Enrage to Engage". WaPo broke a story a few years back showing that Facebook would purposefully boost content with Angry emojis:
...which had the side effect of also spreading mis/disinformation:
It took some time, but the 'defaults' don't really show up on r/all too much anymore. It really does seem like the most popular communities over there are ragebait (well the NSFW communities are actually the most popular, but they don't show up that much).
That's basically what reddit always showed potential to be and was led to become, at least for the most part... ragebait and porn.
Out of curiosity I went back and looked at the main page I am fed on reddit now that I've closed and deleted my 10 yr old account. After looking at all the posts on the front page, it was about 85% "rage-baity" content and 15% neutral content.
Thats one of the best reasons for leaving - I spent HOURS on there every morning arguing with people and "winning" points in my head for being wittier or more logical than someone else. Why? To what end? It was weeks, months of my life just wasted.
Leaving reddit has been good, and I consciously read far less news now too because its almost always negative, and I just dont need more of that in my life.
All that negativity is going to eventually cause a massive problem, so massive that it'll make our legislators take note when it starts costing them more than its worth - and unfortunately that may come in the form of a massive increase in suicides, violence and rioting because all that negativity has to go somewhere. When it hurts their pocketbooks enough, and likely far too late, we will see new laws that actually regulate all the crap that we get addicted too online.
Twitter is so bad in this regard. I've never found anything that doesn't have a little bit of negativity slapped onto it by the original poster or by people who comment. I'd love to curate positive feeds only on social media platforms so that logging into a service does not guarantee that my mood will be spoiled by someone else.
I have noticed what you have noticed in the past, and I have wondered what the implication is for, when meeting people in public, realising that we are both avid fans of reddit.
I have had a reddit account for a long time, and over years I have tried to curate my subscribed subreddits away from ragebait and towards subreddits with more high-quality and constructive discussions, or otherwise niche things I'm interested in. In that time, the default subreddits have also changed to include more clickbaity content, and previously quite nice subreddits have devolved into low-effort content.
So when I am talking to people about reddit, I have to wonder, are we talking about completely different websites? Looking at the default feed, I think it's possible.
Then I wonder, does it give a different impression about me than I intended?
Who knows. I think there's definitely a relationship between popularity of an online community and the quality of discussion, previously called the Eternal September problem, where people flooded in without regards for the previous culture, but now also a problem due to bots posting low-effort content for… advertising reasons I guess?
As other people in this discussion have commented, once people start treating it as a game of 'who gets the most popular posts', then posts which trigger an emotional response beats thoughtful and nice content.
Only half on topic but man I subscribed to a “bigger” YouTube channel because I’m getting into their specific type of content and the arrows and !!!!!! and shocked faces gets on my nerves. Almost makes me sad that that’s the way it has to be nowadays to get people to click and to get engagement. Sad, necessary evil.
I feel that, too. There are some legitimately good Youtubers who put a lot of effort into the video, but then sadly need to use that exaggerated, but vague type of language to get people to actually watch the video.
Veritasium and Linus Tech Tips have both talked this issue in various videos over the years. They both hate doing the clickbaity titles, and the over-the-top, exaggerated thumbnails, but they also simply can't afford to stop doing them, because every time they do stop their views plummet. So it's basically a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing cycle at this point, and unfortunately unlikely to just be a phase as a result of that... unless YouTube fundamentally changes something about how engagement gets driven on the site. cc: @Wad49
p.s. Related links:
Veritasium - Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective
$h!tty Thumbnails on Linus Tech Tips - Honest Answers Ep. 5
My favorite phrase to describe this is:
Tactical manipulation of outrage
I recently read a book about social media and the role of algorithms in amplifying and spreading anger inducing content, The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58950736-the-chaos-machine?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=XuTXn3v9Az&rank=1
The book cites interviews with engineers inside major social media companies. It also mentions incidents, especially in Asia, where non English speaking hate mongers fomented the equivalent of pogroms using Facebook and (if the accounts are true) Facebook declined to staff sufficient moderators in these languages and did not respond to warnings that the content would cause violence. The book likewise discusses Youtube, Twitter, Reddit and others. Reddit actually appears favorably for choosing to eliminate certain hateful content at certain moments in internet history.
It's not my area of expertise, and I'm not convinced that the book is either complete or nonbiased, but I learned a lot about social media from this book.
I think there is just no active company working towards removing it because there is no regulatory bodies wanting to stop it.
Take Threads, it’ll be Twitter without the bigots because Meta knows that’s how you lose market space in Europe (as a quick example).
Now like you I try my hardest to nope out of ragebait and news that is targeted to make people worry about every thing (bad shit happens, but unless it’s extraordinary I don’t want to know). It’s kinda why I like I making Reddit my news source as I could subscribe and unsubscribe to my desires.
But there is no filters for this anywhere else. I can’t read a local news website because of the garbage and there is no filter I can turn on to remove it - but at least I can expect there is no pro-nazi extremism there.
So I guess what I am trying to say - that realistically nothing will appease us until it’s seen as a problem that needs governmental intervention.