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I think outrage amplification may be a side effect of optimising for engagement. Do you think that changing that would be tantamount to having a social credit

by scanr 9y ago

I think outrage amplification may be a side effect of optimising for engagement. Do you think that changing that would be tantamount to having a social credit system? Or that a social credit system is the only way to price in outrage amplification?

oldcynic 9y ago
> outrage amplification may be a side effect of optimising for engagement I tend to agree, but I suspect that is the last thing the networks would be willing to change, as that is what keeps people there and gets advertising clicks. If it were to reach the point of attracting regulation, what could be regulated? Maximum engagement by the networks, impose some sort of ration, or regulate the users and their twitterings? So I could see it all too easily ending up solving the wrong problem in the wrong way. Honestly off the top of my head, I don't know how I would approach this. Especially when some of the possible approaches would be a conflict of interest for the networks.
- scanr 9y ago
  Agreed. It’s a tough problem. Do you think we could reliably measure outrage?
  - gt_ 9y ago
    No. But we could compare against our individual cultural alignments and use that. And we can call it whatever we want.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Robert Heinlein, in one of his novels (don't remember which one), had a scale of how emotionally loaded individual words were, and regulations that prohibited news organizations from using the more loaded words. Of course, nobody's going to agree which words have what rating on the scale...
bobthechef 9y ago
> I think outrage amplification may be a side effect of optimising for engagement. You don't say. That's very much a reason and was something Facebook and others were being criticized for profiting from during the last presidential race. Engagement means you spend more time on Facebook, which means spending more time looking at ads and supplying Facebook with user data.

by scanr 9y ago

oldcynic 9y ago

> outrage amplification may be a side effect of optimising for engagement I tend to agree, but I suspect that is the last thing the networks would be willing to change, as that is what keeps people there and gets advertising clicks. If it were to reach the point of attracting regulation, what could be regulated? Maximum engagement by the networks, impose some sort of ration, or regulate the users and their twitterings? So I could see it all too easily ending up solving the wrong problem in the wrong way. Honestly off the top of my head, I don't know how I would approach this. Especially when some of the possible approaches would be a conflict of interest for the networks.

scanr 9y ago
Agreed. It’s a tough problem. Do you think we could reliably measure outrage?
- gt_ 9y ago
  No. But we could compare against our individual cultural alignments and use that. And we can call it whatever we want.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Robert Heinlein, in one of his novels (don't remember which one), had a scale of how emotionally loaded individual words were, and regulations that prohibited news organizations from using the more loaded words. Of course, nobody's going to agree which words have what rating on the scale...

bobthechef 9y ago

> I think outrage amplification may be a side effect of optimising for engagement. You don't say. That's very much a reason and was something Facebook and others were being criticized for profiting from during the last presidential race. Engagement means you spend more time on Facebook, which means spending more time looking at ads and supplying Facebook with user data.