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votes
I can kinda see why social media sites use divisive topics to solicit engagement
Step 1: Post anything with a rage bait title
Step 2: Some poster comes in with an obviously bad take
Step 3: That obviously bad take gets upvoted/liked/whatever
Step 4: Now people have to engage with it because it's been pushed to the top
Step 5: Drama/engagement/so much traffic tho
Social media sites just automated steps 1-3 and all us dummies fall right into it.
I wish there was a meta category? Is there? #meta-tildes
Edit: oh there is a ~Tildes. apologies.
Yeah. Virtually every popular social media site is almost entirely ragebait, or content aimed at children nowadays.
There are content creators who's entire career is based on pissing people off.
I think "the attention economy" is the thing I hate the most about living in the post mobile internet era, if I had to put my finger on it.
I'm under no illusions that society used to reward people based on the benefit they provided to others, but you used to be able to convince yourself of that if you squinted hard enough.
When you see people who are able to make millions per year on going around and intentionally making people upset, or staging fake scenarios like they're real to ruffle people's feathers, it really kills the motivation to work at your 9-5 job that, maybe isn't saving the world, but is at least making someone's life a little easier or better in some small way.
Once you start seeing content through that ragebait lens, you start noticing that almost all of the stuff on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, twitter, and so on falls into that category. It makes me wish I could go back in time to before the internet existed, or somehow wave a magic wand to radically change the financial incentives behind it.
I don’t think it’s entirely financial incentives, I think this is natural human behavior and they’re just taking advantage.
Our entire economy is built upon taking advantage of people. Some group decided that it happens anyway let’s just build a world upon our worst instincts.
The thing that bothers me about it at the end of the day is the same as what bothers you though, we’re being herded like cattle into a state of alienation, anxiety, and combativeness so that we can be used for profit.
In 2018 I was arguing on HN that very point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16685576
Facebook is a paperclip maximizer. (2021)
https://tildes.net/~tech/vbz/the_technological_singularity_may_have_already_happened_and_perhaps_bitcoin_is_the_result#comment-67w5
Also lol:
And heeeere we are
Kinda reminds me of gambling, like you know how it’s all legal now and theres apps and stuff being marketed to kids even?
Like we know it’s an issue. We’ve always known. Theres just so much short term profit to be made we cant help ourselves.
Oh yeah, Ive been reading this stuff for a decade too, that movie about how bad Facebook is came out in what like 2016? I watched that, and all the reactions to it.
It was just really wild to see it first hand in a small forum, not driven by bots, but entirely by humans. Kinda freaky to see it happen naturally for once.
There's a ragebaiter in all of us. It's human nature to ragebait, from teasing your siblings to Socrates trolling the citizens of Athens (which, even though it's probably apocryphal, nonetheless says something about society at the time that his characterization by Plato was so engaging that it endures to this day).
There does seem to be a difference between in-person and online. There is a desire for harmony in person. A natural human instinct to dislike conflict and avoid disharmony, likely mostly down to body language. This doesn't transmit at all on the internet, or any type of communication where you're not in person.
And so the ragebaiter in all of us no longer has anything to counterbalance it. Is what it is. I think people harken for the olden times, but trust me, there were plenty of trolls and ragebaiters on IRC, vBulletin forums, you name it. 4chan was one of the OGs and you all know its reputation. Hell, you can see people ragebait in letters.
I forgot that this always worked though cause I haven’t seen it happen naturally in like, probably over 15 years.
Like I remember 1. Rule on some forums was literally “don’t feed the trolls” cause it used to be when that kind of engagement happened it would explode the whole forum and make it such that something thats normally ~100 posts a day and modded by 5 college kids is suddenly 1000 and half of it is actual flaming.
We had it wrong the whole time on how to attack this. We were worried about people and content (#1 and #2) when we should've been focused on exposing curation and algorithms. If we stopped #3, a lot of that rage-bait dies in the sea of slop. Not all, but a lot. Which creates a feedback loop of 'well, rage-bait isn't valuable '
Companies were never going to do this willingly, so that's where legislation comes in. A real shame the median congressman in the US barely understands why social media is bad. They were the same ones who'd say "TV rots your brain" yester-decade, but this time it's actually true.
I don’t even know how to legislate “alright guys stop profiting off the fact that people engage with ragebait willingly”
You regulate the algorithms (must be open source and/or chronological) or you ban advertising. The entire reason engagement is valuable is because more time on the site = more data about you = more targeted ads.
The algorithm is their product though. You’d be regulating innovation at that point and thats a weird thing to do in a society running entirely on tech innovation.
Some products are ultimately a net negative for society, and in this case hollowing out the core of society.
Personally, I think that companies would find ways around an algorithm ban, which is why I’d do a ban on advertising. Much harder to get around and has several other benefits.
A ban of targeted advertising specifically might be the approach that is the most surgical while producing most of the intended result. Non-targeted ads aren't nearly as lucrative and are much more difficult to build things like social media around.
I think influencer culture really did a number on the collective psyche.
People internalized the idea that being able to nudge people, even a little, translates to power. And now so many people seem to have alternate objectives beyond having real conversations. They choose to be problems in other peoples lives for no reason other than to be able to affect them at all.
I think there's a Behind the Bastards episode that just came out discussing this: "How Nuisance Streamers and Rage-Baiting Ate the Internet".