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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

#21

Post by bachmeier »

> Elon’s political antics chased away a lot of good people. Many of my favorite follows have moved to Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Also, more and more people are waking up and realizing that social media is actually quite bad for you, and leaving it behind. Good for them. Bad for me.

It's common to blame the move from Twitter on Elon's politics. And that's perfectly valid. I moved away for a much simpler reason. He killed Tweetdeck for anyone not willing to pay $8/month. Regular Twitter hits you with ads (very disruptively), related tweets they know you want to see, and an algorithm that tries to get you hooked on hits of toxicity. Mastodon is pretty close to what I had with Tweetdeck, but less toxic due to lack of quote tweets.

Edit: Rereading this comment, I want to add that the things the author is saying make Twitter bad were to a large extent things we didn't have to deal with when we had Tweetdeck. That's not clear in the original version of my comment.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#22

Post by talkingtab »

The use of the words "Attention Economy" is what I personally call the pablumization of a problem.

If we want to address the problem we need to use the correct term: clickbait economy. The internet as we know it, is bought and paid for by clicks. And the way to get more clicks has nothing to do with authenticity. Just the opposite.

Which article would you click on to read - "More and more Americans sink into poverty"? - "Trump and Biden have food fight at restaurant?".

And Twitter takes this even further. `if isdemocrat title = "trump throws food at biden?" if isrepublican title = "biden throws food at trump?" if istrump title = "lock em up"

It is actually worse than that, because the clicks are then used to sell you a bill of goods. How you should hate 'xyz'. How you should spend $10,000 for a new desk chair. Or how you need a $1000 a month obesity drug to fix the fact that you have been eating clickbait food?

Tracking ads are toxic. They threaten our personal well being and the well being of our society. They are right up there with air pollution.

Oh wait, no one will want to think about those issues, so why post this comment?

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#23

Post by watwut »

> My feed is full of posts that have obviously had more effort put into it than most of what I used to see. Megathreads about AI, thoughtful, longform narratives that could have been blog posts, carefully curated images, and super-positive business updates. It’s mostly engaging stuff.

I think that simply, it is NOT an engaging stuff. That is why author is bored by it. It is content author think "should" be engaging. Seriously, following two are pretty much opposite of engaging: carefully curated images, and super-positive business updates.

These two are definition of the boring. And while the long form narratives have potential to be engaging, just being long form does not make the thing engaging. The content actually have to be engaging.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#24

Post by daoboy »

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 several very good episodes on authenticity and social media.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#25

Post by trgn »

jjoonathan wrote: post #17
kiwikan wrote: post #6

this phenomenon exists outside Twitter/X as well you know, Youtube is an example

Here's a complaint about the printing press enabling the same dynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#/media/File:...

Things can always get worse.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#26

Post by the_snooze »

>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 precisely because it takes a lot of time, energy, and luck to establish. You want authenticity? Go find community in meatspace. You want authenticity online? Talk to those meatspace friends in private group chats.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#27

Post by trey-jones »

talkingtab wrote: post #22

The use of the words "Attention Economy" is what I personally call the pablumization of a problem. If we want to address the problem we need to use the correct term: clickbait economy. The internet as we know it, is bought and paid for by clicks. And the way to get more clicks has nothing to do with authenticity. Just the opposite. Which article would you click on to read - "More and more Americans sink into poverty"…

Unfortunately, the loss of authenticity has also overflowed into life outside of the internet. Marketing today is just another word for "telling our customers that our new product or service is exactly what they want, agnostic of reality".

Hype through loud talking is big too, but my mother-in-law has been doing that since before the internet age began.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#28

Post by notac23 »

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…

I hit this just recently here. Discussing a simple math problem that happened to be attached to a political point ended up w/ me getting downvoted by a person who I actually agreed with, but they couldn't see past their own nose to understand what I was saying.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#29

Post by userinanother »

daeroth wrote: post #14
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.

2021 January - Birdwatch launched with first 1000 users 2022 October - Elon acquires Twitter 2022 November - Birdwatch renamed to Community Notes 2022 December - Community Notes feature made available to tweets around the world Maybe Elon pushed the release schedule timeline up, but it would not be correct to state that pre-Elon Twitter didn't develop and launch the feature. It had been live for almost 2 years by the…

No way original twitter would have allowed community notes on ads or political posts

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#30

Post by littlestymaar »

daeroth wrote: post #14
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.

2021 January - Birdwatch launched with first 1000 users 2022 October - Elon acquires Twitter 2022 November - Birdwatch renamed to Community Notes 2022 December - Community Notes feature made available to tweets around the world Maybe Elon pushed the release schedule timeline up, but it would not be correct to state that pre-Elon Twitter didn't develop and launch the feature. It had been live for almost 2 years by the…

You forgot

2022 October - birdwatch made available to everyone in the US as of November[1]

Just before Musk acquisition.

[1]https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2022/helpful-b...

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