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The FB algo helps this happen. The more you participate, the more content it shoves in front of you. I participate in groups that rotate every few months, and
by rconti 6y ago
The FB algo helps this happen. The more you participate, the more content it shoves in front of you.
I participate in groups that rotate every few months, and it can be astounding how "engaged" I get in a new group after awhile, assuming I start participating in the first place; but sometimes when I join a new group, it takes me a long time to realize I'm not seeing any content from it at all.
- tweetle_beetle 6y agoI used to frequent a relatively niche forum that I think was built on custom code. I don't know how common this is in the popular forum packages now, but it started publishing a list of top posters (by quantity of posts). Gamifying engagement led to a subset of people competing for the top 10 positions and commenting on literally every thread. This was rewarding for a handful of people, but created a worse experience for everyone else. And from the outside, it looked like these people were suffering from serious addiction. I suppose it's a universal truth that a small group can poison a large community when given a poorly (or excellently depending on your view) conceived incentive, but Facebook has shown how well this model scales in the digital world.
- testfoobar 6y agoThe algorithm almost certainly maximizes engagement. But I suspect FB's systems have found a local maxima (at least for me) - my engagement did increase for a period and the toxicity in a couple of the groups was so high, that I stopped reading.