Things are going downhill far too quickly. Attention grabbing headlines and no useful content from articles rule the internet.
It makes no sense.
I cannot understand if this is due to AI, corporate greed, propaganda, or a mixture of all of the above.
I love exploring new and creative content. It brings me such great joy to learn new things.
Recently I’ve felt that I’ve been backed into a corner on every platform/service that I use and can’t get out of getting the same spoon-fed content they think I’ll like rather than allowing me to actually discover something fun and new.
Honestly, clickbate works. That is why it is used.
Until people stop clicking on it, it will remain.
In a way I feel like this is a dangerous cop out.
“It works” can’t be the justification for everything. Somethings work at the expense of far too much for it to be tolerated.
This sounds less like a justification and more like an explanation. It does work. That’s a fact.
Well the part that’s missing an explanation is what incentive structures exist or do not exist.
The reason it is done is because it works. However, shifting responsibility for the individual to reject it is simply a divide and conquer method. It is wholly impractical to try and get billions of people to conform to a behavior, it is, however, possible to force a few thousand companies to curtail the practice.
That is how the business world works. It is why in the early 2010s emoji in social media kicked off because messages with emoji had more engagement then without.
But the world is not just the business world. The internet is not just businesses. Much beyond business logic shapes our world, including the biases of business logic. Presuming pure logic is an easy fallacy to fall into.
With the greater majority of the world in the grips of capitalism, the business world is the world. All most governments care about is furthering business, therefore the “economy”, mostly because they’re all corrupt and owned by the corporations. America in particular is Corp owned and most of the internet as we know comes from that ultra-capitalist hellscape
I’d argue the internet is primarily business. It’s primarily ran by businesses.
The free internet of the 90s is long since gone and anyone born since has no other reference for the internet before commercialization
But it does work. You’re asking people who’s job it is to get eyeballs on things to abandon the one thing that they know will be successful.
I agree it sucks, but the answer needs to be that a savvy public rejects it. Nobody is going to regulate this.
Practice what you preach. Talk about it at parties. Teach your kids.