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.
Simple. Companies don’t get money from you reading the title.
Garbage content has been the most accessible for a long time. Most tv shows are kinda garbage, good ones are harder to find. Same with movies and writing.
Modern clickbait is no different from the tabloids in the supermarket, also the most visible and accessible option, screaming their latest celebrity gossip in bold font at you. No different from daytime soap opera tv. Or tv evangelists offering miracles for money. Or the bottom half of Steam releases, the stuff hardly anybody ever buys except because some youtuber made fun of it. Just the garbage stuff.
Also worth noting, the first amendment protects garbage and lies just as much as it protects facts and the truth. It’s not a right to true speech, it’s just literally free speech. So it always comes down to the same consideration–in a free world, people are free to consume garbage if they want. This should probably not really be changed, either, as that would also come with consequences.
This goes back ages though. Was ancient Greek mythology particularly helpful for them to understand the world around them? Tough to say, but I kinda doubt it.
Final note, but one of the reasons why garbage can appear to be a recent phenomenon, is because the old garbage doesn’t tend to stick around very much. We keep the good stuff from the past, they eventually get called “classics”. But the garbage will not be retained, future generations will look at your garbage and find it dumb, and will have different, perhaps slightly better, garbage that they prefer.
I guess it just makes me upset that the internet is turning into a grocery store checkout lane.
Was ancient Greek mythology particularly helpful for them to understand the world around them?
Well, I’d say their polytheistic structure made them more open minded and assigning reasons to events even if they’re made up made them look for causality. Not that I’m an expert by any means but I’m sure it wouldn’t stick around if it was useless.
Utility is one thing. Utility can be anything, it can assist in the pursuit of some goal that someone, somewhere, has.
Specifically though, I asked if it helped them with understanding the world around them. Not if it helped them do anything at all. I’m sure it helped them do quite a lot, starting with such simple things as passing the time with quality storytelling. Just for starters.
Fair enough. Also, it wouldn’t even need to be useful for the general populace. It might’ve been a controlling tool like monotheistic religions in the middle age or a good way to dupe some wealthy people into buying cheap trinkets.
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.
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
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.
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.
Honestly, when you feel like you’ve consumed enough, it’s time to get offline. Find your hobby, go for a walk, cook something good, go to a museum or a planetarium or a national park, live your life in real time.
It has this power because we give it this power. The second we step away, its hold weakens. Stepping away more often is difficult, but a good and necessary change.
I agree with this completely. It’s essential to step outside, enjoy time with friends, and disconnect for a bit so as to not go too far down the rabbit hole.
SEO and the attention economy are the main drivers of clickbait that are increasingly pervasive in our lives.
Since we don’t like to pay for stuff, advertisers are competing over our limited headspace, to get us just to think about them enough to spend money (preferably in a recurring manner so that you forget you’re paying when your attention is driven elsewhere).
I dunno how you made it here to Lemmy, but I’d consider it a step towards searching and contributing to communities and their contents that are user driven instead of advertiser driven, and finding things that you are interested in rather than being force-fed to you. This is how I like to use the internet, anyway. Maybe I’m getting o l d.
I try to contribute when I can. I miss organic feedback and interaction.
You wrote you like new and creative content. How do you like this?
I’m sorry if it feels contrived. In my opinion it’s like a combustion engine that needs to be primed, you need some activity, even if mostly from power users or people posting for the sake of it to get things going…
Even Reddit started out with company employees pretend to be random people posting and commenting with each other, what we have is way more organic than that, at least.
*As someone correctly points out, maybe taking a break from being online all the time can help you better connect with the world around you, if you find yourself frustrated and bitter.
I wonder if it’s because people are starting to see the commercialisation of every waking moment as normal. My hobby forums, which have mostly been a safe space from all this, are starting to see an increasing number of people trying to monetize the fun.
You make an interesting point, and I can see it a little across many hobby sectors…
Sports was about cheering your home team, waving colours and fawning for your favourite star players or rookies, now the gambling and betting aspect is pushed front and center to the point that you can’t go to any game or broadcast without hearing about it.
Crypto and NFT bullshit came and went through a number of industries.
Etsy (not that this is necessarily bad) has people spending more effort in selling their hobby because it’s easier to do than ever.
Hobbies involving collecting things other than bullion, coins and beanie babies has had more focus on the monetary value or rarity rather than design.
Add scalpers to the mix buying up anything expected to be limited in order to make a quick buck. More and more it’s about the money part and less the fun part…
People’s attention has become one of the most valuable commodities on Earth. If someone is looking at your thing, that means you can sell them stuff, influence their views, and entice them to look at more of your stuff. That’s why companies are constantly clamouring with psychological trickery to get you to give them your attention in the first place.
Because it is.
I love exploring new and creative content
Sure, but are you willing to pay for it?
If not, this is just a popular form of choosing beggars.
I’ll pay my dues and sit though ad breaks. That being said, I loathe the current model of being endlessly tracked. There’s a firm line in the sand for me between collecting anonymous user data and direct user data collection.
You could explore RSS feeds as a way to consume content. It’s more work for you up front but will be worth it. Feedly is very popular. I like feedbin but pay for it.
corporate sites make money by selling your info to advertisers and data brokers. Their goal is to keep you on the site and clicking links. Youtubers make money by people waiting their stuff; they are incentivized to clickbait for watches, some channels are very effective at this. I don’t know that you will fall into interesting things as there is no incentive in the algorithm for it. You have to seek it out, forums, small sites, blogs, small communities or instances here…
Corporate greed! Algorithms essentially decide everything now and if you want to make money you have to appease the algorithm.
Google is useless now. Everything is some clickbait AI blog. I use metafilter.com, the weblog, which at least is an organic selection of interesting content.
Clickbait works, and that’s all there is to it. People click on clickbait, so the algorithms promote clickbait, and subsequently the authors need to use clickbait or their content won’t be visible. Counter it by finding people with integrity and good content to follow, regardless of whether or not they use clickbait to keep pace with the algorithms.
It’s because of marketing & blogging “gurus” giving advice like this: https://copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/
The goal is for you to… click the headline when you see it in Google search results or elsewhere, so that they can then convert your visit to ad revenue when you see their ads and/or click on them or even buy stuff through their affiliate links (mostly the case when they link you to a product on Amazon) in which case they’ll earn a commission.
Beyond the emotions which are stoked from these practices, we are seeing technology help refine these practices for business purposes at a rate never seen before.
It can really tilt the table to one’s favor quickly. We are seeing these refinements in investing, markets, and pricing practices too.
It will be interesting to see how it continues as the efficiencies are squeezed out of these processes and what is left after.
