3 ms·

Every other day, my feed seems to be filled with pro-Republican posts, followed by pro-Democratic posts the next. It’s fascinating how the model decided this wa

• 01100011 2mo ago
  To some degree I think social media algorithms already altered our behavior enough that extreme and controversial content generation would continue even if we disabled the algorithms. They've reinforced the memes enough now that they are self-sustaining.
• mrguyorama 2mo ago
  "The Model" didn't decide anything. Facebook and these other attention economy companies have been A/B testing for two decades now, and there have been multiple "Metas" they have found. They have all converged eventually on ragebait being an extremely effective engagement driver. They didn't just run a linear regression or whatever on some data and magically get the most rage inducing system. They made conscious decisions at nearly every step to make changes to optimize for "Engagement", which at this point is a code word that means "Controversial" the same way that a video of someone eating a toddler would be "Controversial" It's digital crack pointed at a subsection of our brain that evolved to do group signalling.