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I see this issue as an issue far greater than Facebook. With that I mean the mass production of content that is illegal, harmful, misinformation, divisive, sto
by fleddr 5y ago
I see this issue as an issue far greater than Facebook.
With that I mean the mass production of content that is illegal, harmful, misinformation, divisive, stolen or down-right low quality.
The internet is a crowded place now, people have a lot of screen time yet a low attention span. Hence, content creators have perfected the art of short form content that achieves maximum engagement. This won't change, not even in a world without Facebook. Even journalists work this way now.
Even though it harms us, it's what we want. We pay attention to bad news, outrage, the unusual. We want black and white and good and bad narratives, not complicated and reasonable takes.
Imagine a world without Facebook. It only consists of blogs, and there's no timeline at all. One day one of the blogs publishes a controversial article. All other blogs will link to the outrage article. Everybody reads the controversial article, nobody reads the moderate ones. The unreasonable ones will always win.
The bad algorithm is within us.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago> With that I mean the mass production of content that is illegal, harmful, misinformation, divisive, stolen or down-right low quality. 100%. Look at the front page of most popular websites. It's mostly outrage in some form or another. Reddit r/popular is so bad now. It's mostly videos of public freakouts, idiots in cars, or someone yelling about something on tik tok with the occasional uplifting post. Outrage content makes websites more money.
- fleddr 5y agoVery much so. I'd even extend the outrage phenomenon to real life and non-tech. "I just had a perfectly reasonable conversation with my neighbor on a matter of no consequence" Said nobody ever. "Omg did you hear what that idiot down the block said this time?" Said everybody, all the time. The very act of gossip is to dramatize something mildly unusual and escalate it into an ever juicer story as it passes around. We are Facebook.