Table of contents:
- INTRO: Social media platforms: what’s wrong, and what’s next
- Part 1: Problems with the platforms themselves
- Part 2: Problems with the community aspect of social media platforms
- Part 3: Problems with the content of social media platforms (this post!)
- Part 4: Problems with the users of social media platforms
- Part 5: Problems with moderators / curators of social media platforms
Problems with the content of social media platforms:
1. Memes / controversial / taboo topics will always win, unless moderated
Memes are easy to create, easy to distribute, easy to read and understand, and easy to upvote / like / share. If your platform is organized so that things with more “upvotes” rise to the top (e.g Reddit), you can have this happen fast simply by creating a meme – even if your content didn’t rise to the top, it only took you 20 seconds to create the meme in the first place, and so you can try again without much lost.
Because memes are also easy to make, anyone can feel like they are a creator that is adding content to a platform – so it’s consequently one of the fastest ways an average person can reach social media platform “fame” for 15 minutes, which makes it very attractive to the masses that might not get into the spotlight very often, if ever, in real life.
Due to the above, memes end up being an artifact of both talented and average creators optimizing to a platform’s algorithm in order to achieve their goal (upvotes, engagement, societal acceptance, fame).
Controversial subjects / ragebait are similarly great ways to get people to argue with each other, or against a controversy that never existed, which can drive huge amounts of engagement:
Whether good intentioned, just trolling, or somewhere in-between1, this type of content not only drives engagement, but also has an “echoing” effect!
As an example, imagine two people on Twitter say that they hate onions, along with anyone that associates with onions. As people respond to these tweets, the original onion haters keep doubling down and arguing with the people engaging with them, driving more engagement.
A reporter for a newspaper sees the drama, and decides to write an article called “Many people are hating onions in 2024” (referencing just the two tweeters as “many”), which drives more engagement.
Now other people write, in response, articles such as “Onions shouldn’t be hated in 2024” , “Why onion hating might be right”, and more. Sides are taken, and the whole thing magnifies to 100x what was the original “real” story.
From two tweets, a national controversy arises that was never important.
Taboo content, on the other hand, drives engagement as it can elicit responses from our “animal” side, feeding on our craving for more “forbidden” / less known knowledge, and of course stems from engagement from the controversy that taboo content usually comes with.
Outside of the known phrase of “Sex Sells”, we know as humans that sex, drugs, and secrets are enticing to us, especially in picture or video form. Interestingly, even the textual form of these topics is not immune to this – if we look on /r/AskReddit, there is always a large grouping of posts that revolve roughly around “[NSFW] What’s the sexiest sex you’ve ever sexed?”
Taken together, memes, controversial topics, and taboo subjects can dominate a feed if not moderated against, as they all have easy mechanisms for either creation, engagement, consumption, or all three.
Most well-moderated communities limit the influence of the above through rules and moderation, but at a certain scale these concepts will almost always break through and start dominating spaces (e.g. when a moderator leaves, when the moderation team decides to change rules due to overwhelming demand, etc).2
Up next:
“Part 4: Problems with the users of social media platforms”
Footnotes:
- In my mind, it’s ~90% engagement trolling, and 10% good intentioned. Looking at TikTok lives, for example, there’s always quite a few versions of “what’s wrong with this picture” / “solve this equation or riddle”, where the riddle or equation is intended to be confusing or vague, the picture has nothing wrong with it, etc. ↩︎
- The downfall of communities over time has been long discussed, and is worth a post eventually on its own, as I believe these downfalls always follow roughly the same pattern of: Good content -> More Users -> Worse Content. ↩︎