It's more specific than social media. It's engagement maximizing (read: addiction maximizing) algorithms. Social media wasn't nearly as bad until algorithmic engagement maximizing feeds replaced temporal or topic based feeds and user-directed search.
Two people walk past you on the street. One says "hi," and the other strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken. Which one maximizes engagement?
A politician says something sane and reasonable. Another politician mocks someone, insults someone, or says something completely asinine. Which one maximizes engagement?
This is why our president is a professional troll, many of our public intellectuals are professional trolls, and politics is becoming hyper-polarized into raging camps fixated on crazy extremes. It maximizes engagement.
The "time on site" KPI is literally destroying civilization by biasing public discourse toward trash.
I think "trash maximizes engagement" should be considered an established fact at this point. If you A/B test for engagement you will converge on a mix of trolling, tabloid sensationalism, fear porn, outrage porn, and literal porn, and that’s our public discourse.
Two people walk past you on the street. One says "hi," and the other strips naked and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken. Which one maximizes engagement?
A politician says something sane and reasonable. Another politician mocks someone, insults someone, or says something completely asinine. Which one maximizes engagement?
This is why our president is a professional troll, many of our public intellectuals are professional trolls, and politics is becoming hyper-polarized into raging camps fixated on crazy extremes. It maximizes engagement.
The "time on site" KPI is literally destroying civilization by biasing public discourse toward trash.
I think "trash maximizes engagement" should be considered an established fact at this point. If you A/B test for engagement you will converge on a mix of trolling, tabloid sensationalism, fear porn, outrage porn, and literal porn, and that’s our public discourse.