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Comment by jankyxenon | Hacker News Reader

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jankyxenon

I agree the world was better with chronological feeds.

But humans prefer to spent more time on enraging/outrageous content.

So in a competitive social media environment - the platform with the most engaging content will win.

When TikTok launched short form Video - instagram’s choice was to copy or lose.

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I don't think before is the right way to describe this. We are just more predisposed to react to that type of content. And if you see it more in your feeds then you have more interactions with it. I think in this case the blame is more on the people creating the content and the people putting in in front of us. It is pretty much hijacking our way of thinking

Didn't the US have a very vibrant culture of highly partisan outrage papers and pamphlets in the 19th century?

Martin Luther's 16th-century triumph was not in nailing his theses to the door, but having Gutenberg to distribute the pamphlets produced by him and his colleagues, far and wide, outstripping any measures to control or rein them in.

Have you read any of them? (Many are digitized.) That is longform text more akin to the early-millennium blogosphere than modern social media. Moreover, the USA's early pamphlets were at a time of lower literacy rates and limited print runs, and reading one could involve real social interactions, not like screen-mediated ones, because one might also be reading out loud for one's fellows.

"prefer" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

it is intentional, or is it engineered?

I really think it's intentional. I've seen a number of people explain, self-reflectively and in detail, that mainstream media outlets are bad because they don't spend enough time covering various outrages and taking heated positions on issues.

Consider that those people might be right. A lot of mainstream media outlets have been sanewashing a lot of insane behavior for a few years now.

that is definitely true, calmly saying something completely outrageous while chastising the person passionately pointing it out... and the over-the-top behavior of some public personalities make it so easy to look sane while saying insane things because the optics are so contrasting.

What an oddly phrased piece of rhetoric.

Is reporting on outrage the same as "taking a heated position"?

Is a media outlet's entire purposely merely to parrot what others have said?

Is reporting actual facts the same as "taking a position"?

Worse, data-driven. They researched what fat people preferred and concluded they prefer fat.

Agreed, the state of social media today is basically a result of market failure.

The market seems to be doing what it does best just fine, actually.

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