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Comment by phailhaus | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't make sense, since it's advertisers who are the ones putting pressure on sites like Twitter to stop spreading extremist content.

The problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers where they are told they are right all the time. That's what they will do by default. So if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly. If you figure out how to power a social network without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.

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Wrong take. The social or political positions that advertisers take are all strategically calculated to maximize sales and they take those position regardless of the advertising platform.

Correct take: Monetization pressure creates engagement pressure which is unnatural for human social communities outside of temporary fads and social upheaval events. In social terms Facebook, X, Truth Social... are thirsty and can only continue to grow if they convince you to be thirsty too.

Like I said: any system that optimizes for engagement has this problem. Advertising revenue scales with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Advertisers are not picking and choosing particular policy positions to place ads on. They're targeting certain demographics, and want to make sure their ads are not next to trash content. So ironically, ads both cause companies to optimize for engagement but they also force moderation.

If you fixate on dropping ads but still optimize for engagement, you get the worst of both worlds.

People forget that there a billionaires at the helm of these companies putting their feet on the scale of what is shown.

They are not impartial nor are the benevolent. They have a vested interest in influencing the content people are exposed to. They can hide behind the “social” components and say “we’re innocent here we just show the content people engage with” meanwhile they directly influence what content gets a chance to be interacted with.

it doesn't even matter. I've run a small community at a loss, for "fun", for the better part of a decade and people just go elsewhere when the winds change and they find themselves no longer in an echo chamber they agree with. everyone just wants to shout into the void and be validated and it doesn't even matter who the audience is

it's extremely disheartening actually

I am trying to build a Wikipedia for golf course architecture. Free shared info, genuinely about showing pride in your home club, printable yardage books if people make them…

The biggest response I get is “yea but the info on my course is blank, this sucks.”

I suspect there are only like 10% of folks who are remotely altruistic, and maybe 0.1% that would bother to even quickly edit Wikipedia if they found an error.

The vast majority of social media is carried by a few folks who genuinely want to connect and share things they love. After that the follow along is people critiquing, which is fine (I’m doing it now) but it doesn’t actually build anything.

"People forget that there a billionaires at the helm of these companies putting their feet on the scale of what is shown."

Yes, people do realize that.

problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers

and the walls of the echo chambers are built of addicting infinite feed algorithms, that's the core of it, outrage exchanging outrage amongst people who agree on one thing - THIS OUTRAGES ME

Case in point, 4chan

Funnily enough it still has ads.

For sex toys, Ozempic and ED medication.

> if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly.

Agree completely

> without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.

Disagree: without ads, moving the needle from “quite enjoyable” to “utterly addicting” doesn’t make your site twice as profitable. With ads it does. So the need that all social media has today, to promote ragebait and drive them to obsession is far, far less if you weren’t on an ad-based monetization.

> pressure to moderate content

We didn’t have censors in every living room in America before FB making sure you don’t say anything doubleplus ungood and yet political discourse is horrifying now compared to before. I question the need for “moderators” to combat wrongthink by deleting it.

That has nothing to do with ads, that has to do with monetization. Every site needs to be monetized somehow. Ads scale with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Any monetization scheme that scales with engagement will have this issue.

So, a flat-rate subscription would not have that issue.

Something Awful was ahead of the curve by charging $10 for access.

Yes. Nobody has figured out how to get people to pay for social networks though, at scale. The free ones destroy the competition.

The problem is not ads per se, it's that in order to be effective, ads need to be intrusive. And as a site becomes more successful, it attracts more advertiser competition, which in turn forces ads to become more intrusive to cut through the noise. And that's the start of the enshitification we all know and love. :)

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