Miss the good old days

[SKAshe]

Believe it or not, the internet did undergo a major change in how it operated in the 2010s, and that's because companies realized that the thing that seems to make us most engaged in their content, and therefore advertisement, is not our enjoyment, but the feeling of strong emotions.

In 2009 Facebook changed how their newsfeed worked. They changed it from reverse chronological order of the people you follow, to trying to predict the amount of engagement a user would spend on a particular post. This resulted in users being much less happy and giving negetive feedback, which was ignored when Facebook realized people were spending double the amount of time they spent on the site, resulting in massively increased revenue for the company.

Ultimately, making money is all corporations care about. This resulted in pretty much every social media site and content hosting platform changing the landing page of their websites from subcription and follow focused, to recommendation algorithm focused. Youtube used to show you the most recent videos of the channels you were subscribed to by default, now it's recommendations. Same with Twitter and all sorts of other websites. Tik Tok is straight up built off of these recommendations.

These recommendations are not designed to make you happy, they're not designed to bring people together, they're not designed to show content that will get you to think, or become a better person, they're not even designed to show you things you will necessarily enjoy. They show you content designed to give you a visceral, emotional, reaction. Hate, schadenfreude, rage, fear, misery, things that our brains evolved to pay attention to more then anything else.

The fact that gamergate and all this other divisiveness happened after that is no coincidence.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11894805/