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:
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 202X” (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 202X” , “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” side2, 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?”
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Taken together, memes, controversial topics, and taboo subjects will dominate a feed if not moderated against, as they all have easy mechanisms for either creation, engagement, consumption, or all three.
Why is this a problem? Because any platform that lets the above subjects dominate will push out content creators that actually want to create good content. Imagine working on a music video that took months to shoot and was an incredible feat of engineering and talent, only for it to be pushed off the front page by a rage comic that took maybe 10 minutes to create. When a creator can spend 1/1000th of the effort and they get 80% of the result they were looking for, what kind of creators do you think that will cultivate on your platform?
To that end, most well-moderated communities limit the influence of the above through rules and moderation, but at a certain scale3 these subjects 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).4
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. ↩︎
- This statement feels too close to pseduo-science for my tastes, but the point remains. ↩︎
- This happens when content can be created faster than the moderator can moderate it, which is a factor of A) The size of the community, B) The size of the moderation team, C) The amount of time it takes to create the content, and D) The tools available to the moderators to moderate. ↩︎
- 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. ↩︎