[burningChrome]

I feel like social media has changed human behavior for the worse and we're too far gone in trying to get it back.

I was just getting into development when social media was coming on the scene. It was so cool to be engaged in communities with people who I loved to see what they were doing, finding emerging technologies and development frameworks and techniques. People were willing to tell you about stuff they were working on. It really felt like a community. Every new platform someone at work would find it and send out invites or get us to sign up and run it through its paces. It was such a great time and I really felt like my growth as a developer was accelerated by being apart of these early communities.

Now? Its not about bringing people together with common interests. Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes.

It would seem the entire purpose of social media these days is just about getting people to react negatively to what you're posting in order to generate MORE negative content. It turns into a self fulfilling cycle that is now in a space where I have no idea how it will be broken.

As a footnote to this, there are still very good people, still posting very good content that does not have that purpose. One account I found a few months ago was trailerparksports on instagram. Its a black guy who got interested in Hockey after the Four Nations Cup and how crazy that tournament started out with the Canada/USA game. His interest was 100% genuine. In the last four months, he's detailed how much he's learned and the outpouring from hockey fans AND the teams themselves has been unreal. The LA Kings flew him out for a few of their games, he's been going to games in other cities. He's 100% into the sport now and its been really cool to see him go through the process of picking a team to support, learning the rules and the strategies.

So yes, there are still very honorable and decent content creators who are sharing ceratain aspects of their life with the internet and getting a lot of positivity in return. But man oh man, it takes a LOT of digging to find them these days.

[eggbrain]

> [...] Its 100% about getting people to stay on your platform as long as possible and engage with your content. Usually that means creating content that gets people to negatively engage with your content. So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money. Political posts are made to inflame either side and get more shares and upvotes.

I touch upon this in https://www.scottgoci.com/social-media-platforms-whats-wrong... and https://www.scottgoci.com/social-media-platforms-whats-wrong... -- but as you mention, this is a result of engagement being a core metric of social media platforms, and users attempting to game the platform's algorithm for their own purposes.

An easy way to solve for this is customization -- if no two users have the same "algorithm" powering their feed, it becomes hard for anyone to do this, because perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.

[Karrot_Kream]

> An easy way to solve for this is customization -- if no two users have the same "algorithm" powering their feed, it becomes hard for anyone to do this, because perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.

The problem, and where I strongly agree with the parent's statement that "I feel like social media has changed human behavior", is that the users themselves seek the engagement. Content creators want feedback about their content. You can codify that as "views", "likes", or whatever, but the whole problem here is fundamentally that most creators try and pursue strategies that increase whichever metric they are tracking to get value out of their posting.

I watched Bluesky grow up and become a "real network" and once Bluesky hit a certain scaling point it became the exact same as all the other supposed algorithmic-engagement optimized sites. Posters started posting snippy, sneery comments because it made the Like count go up.

> perhaps one user's algorithm filters out anything tagged with politics, or with a low Flesch–Kincaid score, or non-text posts, etc.

Zuck talked about how Threads specifically filtered out political content [1] and how that decision was reversed [2]. It turns out that users didn't like filtering out political content even though as most of us know, it tends to turn into dunking competitions online.

So I largely agree with what the parent said. The expectations in the game have changed. Content creators want big number to go up. People want to dunk on each other because it's fun and feels righteous. No algorithms or manifestos seem to change this fundamental change in the way folks post and engage with social media. Maybe a protracted education campaign can, though.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/26/1240737627/meta-limit-politic... [2]: https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-anno...

[aspenmayer]

> So much so, its now referred to as "rage bait" where Only Fans women purposely post content that gets men to engage with their posts in order to make more money.

Did you intentionally call “thirst traps” “rage bait” erroneously so that someone would correct you? Engagement bait works surprisingly well on HN, I just wasn’t sure if that was an ironic wink at the audience.

[burningChrome]

I've seen them referred to with both terms. At first I believe they were "thirst traps" where women would post pics of them with skimpy, revealing clothes and ask questions to get men to engage like, "My new see-through top, what do you think?" and at some point, it seems like men would just skip through these, realizing what they were trying to do.

Now, you see posts from women leaning up against say a Ferrari saying, "Thank you to all 2,000 men who helped buy this Porsche for me!" which is what I refer to now as "rage bait" where people flood the comments talking about how stupid the person is that they don't even know the difference between a Porsche and a Ferrari. And then you get all the other comments about "Your father must be so proud" comments. All the while, the account is making money by getting people to engage in her content that she purposefully posts to get people going in order to drive engagement.

So I think it started out as "thirst trap" and has since migrated to "rage bait" because the former wasn't working well enough.

[aspenmayer]

That tracks with my observations. I think they’re combining some “pay pig” kinks with rage bait/troll bait posts for maximum positive/negative feedback. Now that X and TikTok have pay-for-engagement schemes for users, this kind of content has become endemic to those platforms.

[dragonwriter]

> Did you intentionally call “thirst traps” “rage bait” erroneously so that someone would correct you?

Misogyny and slut shaming in particular are so common on social media that thirst traps also function as rage bait, and the more transparent content creators are quite open about the fact that they often benefit quite a bit from the hostile response/QRTs (not just in terms of engagement on the regular social platform they are posted on, but in terms of direct boost to subscriptions on their pay sites traceable to the degree of hostile engagement.)

This isn't surprising, the negative responses are often from the same people complaining about, and with networks of followers expressing concern about, porn addiction, a behavior that correlates positively with both "being a conservative Christian" (probably not helpful on its own) and "being an active porn consumer" (bingo!), so the hostile engagement tends to also serve as promotion of the content within a set of social media users that is unlikely to be current followers but is likely to be interested in the service being promoted (even if they show public disdain for it.)

[aspenmayer]

I notice how certain content or phrasing acts as shibboleths for affinity groups, with your reaction to the stimulus itself being the gatekeeping test by proxy. Like, if you take the bait, I know you’re a tourist, because regulars know that it’s bait for newbies. There are interesting interactions at play between insiders in these threads, as many normal users seem unable to understand that they’re interacting with promotional content, regardless of whether there’s a real person on the other end.

[soupfordummies]

And this comment doesn't even mention all the entitled narcissistic self-centered-ness, shallow and image-focused vanity, misinformation bubbles etc.