[initplus]

I have a couple of friends who are much more politically engaged and insightful than myself. But all I see them post on facebook are low effort gotcha memes.

Facebook has a problem in that it seems to frown on "intelligent" content. Long form journalism, in depth analysis, professional content (industry journals, tech blogs etc.), none of this content really exists on facebook.

I have friends that read hackernews, we find similar articles from hn interesting. But I would never think of sharing one on facebook, and I would be surprised if a friend of mine did so. For some reason, facebook is just not the place where content like this is shared.

This is the advertising proposition of non-facebook media.

[chuniversity]

Low-effort memes with cheap wit get more likes, which in turn bumps your content higher in the feed which in turn invites more likes, cascading into dozens or scores of your friends liking and validating your post.

Long-form content with more depth gets fewer initial likes, resulting in being hidden from most of your ancillary friends altogether.

This has behavioral impact on all of its users. Do you want to post content that only gets 5 likes versus what gets 50 likes?

[piggybox]

While some movies may make viewers more "intelligent", most people watch movies just for entertainment.