Yeah no shit.
I wanted to view an account. Do to that you need to make an account yourself. So I made one, solely to look at this one account.
I was dragged through this long set up process where I said I was into trains and technology. What was the first thing they served me after making an account?
A tweet celebrating the death of a black 14 year old murdered in London by a white guy with a Samurai sword alongside a load of right wing tweets.
Same with reddit. Needed to comment on something: said “I like Trains and Linux”. What did they give me? Ragebait from various UK subs.
I hate the outrage economy and it’s why I love Lemmy and Mastodon.
Elon has molded Twitter into his own image. If you’re on it, you’re endorsing him.
thankfully I shut down that account. Fuck that shit.
I seen a bunch of misogynistic posts on Facebook targeting the England womens’ team and women’s football in general since the Euros. And the constant “🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣” captions when the “humour” is about as funny as herpes. Pure ragebait/engagement farming.
Mainstream social media platforms have reached a level of toxicity and hate that makes them completely unbearable to use, the content is just bottom of the barrel shite.
I’m no expert, but I feel like anywhere they use an algorithm to drive up “engagement” it leads into people being fed rage-bait and then them acting accordingly. This “attention economy” needs to end somehow.
No, you’re exactly right.
We’ve known for quite some time that engagement maximizing algorithms eventually learn that hatred, outrage and anger are the path to maximum engagement.
Unfortunately, the owners of the tech companies have made the decision that they would rather the entire world tear itself apart in a mass of anger and hatred than to earn 6% less next quarter.
Glad to hear I’m not alone with these thoughts!
I propose, as a counter movement, automatic engagement; Instead of “liking” or “upvoting”, leave a comment every time you see something you support. And try to abstain from commenting on ragebait or otherwise intentional attention seeking. If enough people start doing this, the algorithm should start adapting to prefering more substantial or positive material, right? I know it sounds naive, but worth a shot!
You’d be fighting against the combined ‘mass’ of everyone else. We’re hard wired to pay attention to things that scare us, so the algorithms just scare us and make us angry and disgusted (which are probably the 2nd and 3rd most primate things to pay attention to).
Until Zuck decides he is tired of poisoning the discourse of the entire planet for ad revenue, we’re stuck with it.
Put a hard ban on any form of personalized and unsolicited advertising in public space, and define SoMe as public space.
It still doesn’t remove trolls and rage bait, but it lowers monetary incentive to keep users on the platform.
The problem with regulation is that most of these data giants are US companies, and due to regulatory capture since the 1980s you can’t expect much to change there.
