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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

#41

Post by spacecadet »

spacecadet wrote: post #31

Just abandon these products, they are useless and I think we have all seen enough evidence to suggest they do more harm than good. Dont start splitting hairs here either, I understand and was there when Twitter was the only way to communicate when governments were putting down protests... There are other tools. Go out there and build them... I wont ever touch a spycloud again while protesting...

This actually infuriates me. All those people who spent the last 20 years building adtech and social media. Thanks! You created a world that is now skeptical of tech and makes the rest of our jobs harder.

Frankly, Id be worried with social and ad tech companies on my resume. I basically throw these away now.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#42

Post by efitz »

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"…

There are two fundamental problems with social media. The first is the ad-driven revenue model as you pointed out.

The other is the dopamine economy that is driven by getting your stuff to have “engagement”, which is financially reinforced by the ad revenue model.

If any one platform by themselves tries to fix these problems then it will be suicide. The industry as a whole has to do it, and they won’t without regulation.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#43

Post by kogus »

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 agree 100% with what you are saying, but I don't think you need a human connection to have good content. The encyclopedia Brittanica didn't establish a human connection, but it was a valuable resource. An ugly problem with an attention economy is that you are rewarded for seeming useful and interesting, but once the attention has been given, there is no incentive to actually deliver. So we get clickbait headlines and veneer-grade content because that's enough to get the ad dollars, without the investment that original content would require.

To be fair, most web users are happy with the arrangement - they get an endless feed of free tiny doses of dopamine while they avoid the real responsibilities of life. The large-scale effect is decidedly negative, though.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#45

Post by fullshark »

People aren't authentic when they are talking to everyone on the planet at once, unless they are incredibly naive. They are authentic talking to their friends, or family, in private conversations. A lot of people were naive in the early days and it made for amusing conversation, not any longer and these platforms are just about brand management / advertising now.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#46

Post by mrtksn »

Previously I objected to Musk's "Town Square" idea:

>The whole feed based "internet town square" concept is flawed, if anyone have seen an actual European town square you would have noticed that it's nothing like Twitter or similar. In a good town square, you have people minding their own business and the public activities are actually curated(a few agendas that fit in the physical location) and people visit those if they they are interested in.

However, maybe it is a town square but a bad one. Bad town squares are places where everyone tries to sell you something or make you do something and there are plenty of crazy people trying to grab attention and do things you would rather not see.

My "for you" tab is filled with "ChatGPT is great but you are not using it right" posts that look like copycats, the only organic looking content is from anti-vaxxers and all kind of conspiracy theorists and fascist(maybe because ChatGPT refuses to generate such content, therefore the only organic content is that one). Oh an that is organic but not really authentic, that is it is not independent thinkers but solders of a cult or a movement that keep repeating same talking points.

On the other hand, Twitter has become a better product overall thanks to making some stuff like lists more prominent so you have some tools to avoid the crazy town. However, the problem is that even the curated lists are not immune because now the people in those lists are incentivised to grab as much as attention as possible so they can monetise it. Thece are courses and tools made to optimize for that so the content becomes "made for Twitter to boost engagement". Youtube also has it but maybe of the higher production costs and longer to consume content format, a race to the bottom hasn't happen as dramatically. They still can get good engagement by creating higher quality videos.

So what about actual people who don't produce content professionally? The actual authentic content? The authentic discussions are happening in groups of people who know each other(online or offline), that is WhatsApp/Telegram or other channels that allow small groups interact privately.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#47

Post by bertil »

The most insightful piece of analysis I’ve ever seen was at Facebook, from the rockstars who were looking at Instagram for the first time — a couple of years after the acquisition, when it was time to apply some informed strategic thinking.

The graph was super simple but very powerful:

* On the x-axis, you had how many followers (or views) a poster had: me and my 5 followers would be on the left-most bucket, someone popular was in 50-100, 100-200, etc., until the fashion brands, footballers in the 1M+ bucket at the far right of the graph.

- The y-axis was the total number of views over a period.

So, if you tend to see friends posting, there would be a big lump at the left of the graph. If the platform were like traditional media, there would be a lump at the right. As things were, the lump was moving slowly towards the right.

The problem was not that footballers and models don’t make good content — they do. The problem is that if you see that, you don’t post. So, the overall amount of content posted was dropping. Why put your wonky cake next to Amaury Guichon sculpting a peacock with nothing but chocolate and edible paint?

I think there’s a big cultural difference there, one that Americans won’t instinctively appreciate. Of course, you want your cooking show to feature the best of the best, but to keep people engaged? Ask funny people to mess up and tease each other instead. “The Great British Bake-off” isn’t successful because the cakes are world-class. But have people who can riff for five minutes on penis-related puns because a cake looks like it should be blurred to appear on the BBC, and people behind their screen will spout their own joke like it’s a Reddit thread.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#49

Post by test1235 »

watwut wrote: post #23

> 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.…

There's some quote somewhere along the lines of "classical books being the ones you want to have already read" which is basically saying you want the kudos of having reading war and peace, pride and prejudice, les miserables, great expectations, etc, even though you may hate the experience, or have no interest.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1035168-a-classic-is-someth...

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#50

Post by wussboy »

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.

And every time you think of reaching for it, think “what evolutionary desire was I about to short circuit, and what important aspect of being a human does that circumvent?”
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