[bluetomcat]

> you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following

Ultimately, it's a zero-sum game for all the "posters". The attention and time of your following is finite, and other posters are fighting for it, too. The "cloud algorithm" defines the rules of the game and matches your content to its consumers.

[grimblee]

Exvept you actually pay with your time, both by thinking, writing amd following stuff on that platform wheb you could have done something probably more productive, but also with your brain time watching ads. Not to mention ads will ultimately shape you into buying something, no matter how smart you think you are.

[pas]

No, it's not. If there's good quality content, scintillating discussions, amazing insights and whatnot on twiXter it will attract more users. If all of that is there but the toxic sludge level in the cesspool is already at the dear users' elbows, then it probably discourage new (and old) users from jumping in.

[bluetomcat]

It might be subjective, but I'm having trouble finding any quality content on media platforms driven by engagement. Most content is engineered to provoke an initial dopamine reaction with a funny face, a shiny product or a curious situation. Even tech articles feel promotional. You rarely get any deep insight about a topic.

[pas]

Yep. Same experience here. Basically uncurated/unmoderated spaces are shit.

(Mastodon is very fragmented, so YMMV based on instances and who do you follow ... though I'm pretty happy with infosec.exchange , and surprisingly nowadays most quality stuff is on Youtube in the form of long video essays.)

[ctrw]

So long as the user base is growing its not zero sum.

[mzitelli]

Exactly, X userbase is going down. So less than zero sum.

[TheOtherHobbes]

That's because Musk doesn't understand what he bought and lacks the finesse to manage it productively.

And that's a good thing, because if someone as toxic and unhinged as Musk understood how SM really works, it would be a global disaster.

We've already seen what happens with that in the MSM space. So far, SM has only had fragmentary versions of that kind of propaganda monolith - Cambridge Analytica, bot farms, and so on.

Those are all bad enough. But a global platform that existed purely for propaganda and disinformation while pretending not to would be horrific.