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by nonameiguess
1769 days ago
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Maybe at one point social networks were actually social networks, but that isn't what they are any more. They're poorly-moderated, poorly-curated entertainment distribution platforms. People who own data centers and URLs figured out you can cut out the middlemen of studios, editors, publishers, et al, and the quality of content may go way down, but the quantity will go way up and cost to produce will go way down, in many cases to zero if you just let arbitrary users create your content for you, and engagement was never correlated with quality anyway. The fact that consumers as well as creators need permanent accounts in order to use the platform enabled a level of tracking that normal studios and publishers could never have dreamed of. Warners could never put activity loggers into their viewer's eyeballs to figure out the exact rate at which the content of frame N leads them to continue watching at frame N + n. They had to rely on some level of positive word of mouth and positive reviews. They needed to leave some lasting impression that after their viewers spent a few minutes going home and thinking about it, they still thought the content was worth recommending. That is all gone now. |
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Well it's a different style of engagement and a different standard for "quality" from what we colloquially think of those terms to mean. Traditional media needed you to engage with the media. Social media needs you to engage with the comment section associated with the media. The qualities the system is optimizing for, then, isn't the stuff we typically consider to be good for that medium. Instead it's the stuff that's good for making people talk about it.
This is almost certainly to blame for things always gravitating towards largely subjective evaluations of where something falls on some axis for a highly charged metric. Is this racist or not racist? Queer friendly or unfriendly? Liberal of conservative? Arguing about how to 'keep score' with which boxes any specific bit of media gets is a good way to say something about something topical that keeps people engaged and arguing.
Even in the days of the old blogosphere it was well known that you needed to have a comments section to get the page views. You can only crank out so many articles as an individual. But you can make your site "stickier" and encourage people to keep clicking the bookmark for it if you can get them engaged with talking about your article. It's not surprise that the most noxious elements of the modern Internet were more-or-less born on Reddit and Tumblr. These were two sites that basically thrived on creating selective pressure for this sort of content.