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The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

coryzue.com

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Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#51

Post by phatskat »

passion__desire wrote: post #2

Community Notes is the best feature. I wonder why wouldn't original Twitter implement it. Maybe it would deflate the bias they wanted to project on the rest of us.

By the time Community Notes are added, the damage is done. We see it with inflammatory tweets from Elon all the time:

- Tweet inflammatory thing not based in fact - Followers eat it up and retweet - A day or two later, Community Notes says “well actually”

By the time we get to number three, the original message has done the rounds and Elon won’t be walking it back by any means.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#52

Post by Clubber »

daoboy wrote: post #24

This very issue is why I haven't had a social media account in years. Even something as benign as posting here on HN entails editing to avoid downvotes. While we all make necessary and unavoidable judgements, the explicit nature of being judged and acting as a judge on social media lends itself to being inauthentic and narcissistic. Hans-Georg Moeller has an excellent YouTube channel called Carefree Wandering. There…

>Even something as benign as posting here on HN entails editing to avoid downvotes.

Just edit to make sure you are clear in your thoughts put into text. Don't censor yourself, karma points are largely meaningless anyway. You don't get to trade them in for an eraser or anything. Speak your mind, that's the main benefit of the platform.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#53

Post by coffeebeqn »

j45 wrote: post #33
the_snooze wrote: post #26

>And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And yet, my felt experience of this change is the exact opposite—as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? It always tickles me when terminally online people realize that human connection doesn't scale . It's valuable precisel…

To me there’s a difference between better content and engaging content. Better content seeks quality connections that may scale so far. Engaging content seeks quantity of connections. Of course this could be further argued. Maybe the better and engagement is interpreted to mean too distribution in quantity focused. Edit:typo

Everyone is getting paid by the number of impressions - not the quality of them. With incentives like this..

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#54

Post by daoboy »

hotpotamus wrote: post #34
daoboy wrote: post #24

This very issue is why I haven't had a social media account in years. Even something as benign as posting here on HN entails editing to avoid downvotes. While we all make necessary and unavoidable judgements, the explicit nature of being judged and acting as a judge on social media lends itself to being inauthentic and narcissistic. Hans-Georg Moeller has an excellent YouTube channel called Carefree Wandering. There…

Or just accept some downvotes now and again? They'll stop at -4 anyway. I've hit it (and once in awhile I've probably deserved it), and known some nice thoughtful people IRL who also post here and had it happen on comments I thought were perfectly fine. Sometimes you just hit a weird mood in a thread or whatever; it's not worth worrying about unless the moderators tell you to cool it.

The system of likes/dislikes, upvotes/downvotes, etc are a feedback mechanism specifically designed to leverage the fact that we are predisposed by evolution to worry about that exact thing.

So while I accept it to the extent that I still post here, I feel like 'don't worry about it' completely misses the point of 'it'. It exists specifically for you to worry about.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#55

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

the_snooze wrote: post #26

>And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And yet, my felt experience of this change is the exact opposite—as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? It always tickles me when terminally online people realize that human connection doesn't scale . It's valuable precisel…

There may be exceptions ( MMO guilds may be an examle ), where it is not meatspace, but authenticity may be higher.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#56

Post by Enginerrrd »

the_snooze wrote: post #26

>And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And yet, my felt experience of this change is the exact opposite—as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? It always tickles me when terminally online people realize that human connection doesn't scale . It's valuable precisel…

I think the ugly truth of it is, just like there's a noticeable difference between shopping at costco and shopping at walmart (because of the annual fee at costco), there's just some people that are going to have an undesirable influence on your community.

The temptation to try and rope in those extra users is often irresistible but to get them you have to tank your content to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Very few growth minded companies or content creators have escaped that trap. It requires prioritizing your principles and long-term outlook over short-term growth which is so antithetical to the typical silicon valley situation trying to tap into and keep the spigot of VC money flowing.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#57

Post by PaulHoule »

Something on my mind is how to build a non-toxic engagement model and I am finally getting a clear picture of how to do it.

You can make a pretty good engagement model for Hacker News based on headlines by filtering for posts with > 10 votes and predicting the ratio of comments to votes. The trouble is that "high engagement" posts are frequently clickbait.

I suspect that the trending toots on mastodon.social right now are about a person who got elected to the Speaker of the House who I'd like to call a "clown" but that would be an insult to clowns so I won't. If a trained a model to maximize boosts and favorites I'd create a monster (e.g. if the US was truly a "democracy" today we'd write a constitution enshrining a one-party state, the only disagreement is which party it would be) I know though that I get really good engagements on (low-effort) pictures of flowers that I post as opposed to the sports photos I take which I work really hard at it. That is, there are paths to high engagement that aren't toxic, a model just has to be trained to reward them.

In either case it would take developing a training set of a few thousand non-toxic but high engagement posts, it's probably easier to do that for HN than it is to do it for Mastodon.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#58

Post by Veuxdo »

SleepilyLimping wrote: post #18
_fat_santa wrote: post #16

One thing I've realized about social media, especially X/Twitter, is that it's not a singular place, that is you can have 4 feeds on twitter from different users that might as well be different social media platforms. I've noticed if you follow the "Indie Hackers" on X then you will get lots of self promotion (ie. "My startup just hit $X/MRR!!, here's how I did it: substack.com...."). On the other hand there are othe…

I feel like these conversations condense down to "the death of authenticity... if you want to make money/get mainstream." There's plenty of people doing it for free, but there's a melancholy from people who saw the myth of "being yourself and getting paid well for it" dissolve.

Selling Out has been going on forever...

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#59

Post by sixhobbits »

> The people in my feed—most of whom I’m not following

Every now and again Twitter switches me to the "For you" tab. I always immediately notice because there are like 5 BuzzFeed-esque tweets in a row from accounts I am not following. I switch back to the "Following" tab, which is still a simple chronological list of tweets from people I follow and Twitter is good again.

I can see why Twitter is losing users if it keeps showing people the algorithmic feed though.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#60

Post by falsaberN1 »

joduplessis wrote: post #44

Twitter? Try going out to dinner without your phone. It goes way deeper than any single social platform. The way we relate to technology has become so weird.

I don't know about you, but if I go out with someone for dinner and that someone is constantly on Twitter with their phone, I consider that terribly rude.
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