I love how this story emphasizes that humans are predictably emotional and tribal, and that our current media optimizes to find and propagate divisive statements. Even without an optimized scissor...
I love how this story emphasizes that humans are predictably emotional and tribal, and that our current media optimizes to find and propagate divisive statements. Even without an optimized scissor statement generator, scissor statements have no trouble arising by chance, and our society is already optimized to beat itself with scissor statements. The story doesn't have any answers but is good at framing an issue.
I think one big problem is that news companies and social media sites are encouraged to increase traffic at any cost, and needlessly divisive statements do a good job at increasing traffic. If news and social media sites didn't have to worry so much about increasing their numbers (to stay profitable, and to keep a userbase), then maybe this problem could go away, but it's hard to imagine a setup where those aren't issues or a setup that solves those without introducing other issues.
Maybe there's a way to push for a culture shift to help people want to be resistant to divisive outrage news items. It seems hard to balance that idea against the need to be outraged and take action sometimes though.
I love how this story emphasizes that humans are predictably emotional and tribal, and that our current media optimizes to find and propagate divisive statements. Even without an optimized scissor statement generator, scissor statements have no trouble arising by chance, and our society is already optimized to beat itself with scissor statements. The story doesn't have any answers but is good at framing an issue.
I think one big problem is that news companies and social media sites are encouraged to increase traffic at any cost, and needlessly divisive statements do a good job at increasing traffic. If news and social media sites didn't have to worry so much about increasing their numbers (to stay profitable, and to keep a userbase), then maybe this problem could go away, but it's hard to imagine a setup where those aren't issues or a setup that solves those without introducing other issues.
Maybe there's a way to push for a culture shift to help people want to be resistant to divisive outrage news items. It seems hard to balance that idea against the need to be outraged and take action sometimes though.
It is explicitly tagged as fictional, so yes, this is creative writing.
It's exaggerated and requires a certain suspension of disbelief.
It's difficult. I've seen the output of /r/SubredditSimulator