Social media platforms: what’s wrong (part 4)

Table of contents:

Problems with the users of social media platforms

Some of the content below has been mentioned in other sections, but I think it’s worth it to outline what I see are the biggest issues with the consuming users (and to some extent, content creator users) on social media platforms:

Users that are there just to “take” from a community

In most cases, this means users that are trying to “sell’ to other users. Common ways this manifests:

1. The suspicious fake story with an ulterior motive:

In this scenario, the user posts an outlandish story that is designed to hook you in, only for them to not-so-subtly point you to their real motive, driving a sale or subscription. You could consider this similar to engagement farming, but while engagement farming serves to raise your popularity on the platform through likes / follows / shares (perhaps with the end goal of having a highly followed account that you can sell to advertisers), the content creator skips the “build community” step and goes straight to the “sell to the community” step.

  • Common on Reddit:
    • “I made 1M dollars in 90 days, here’s a far-fetched story on how I did it, that suspiciously ends with how you can do this too, if you just DM me”
      • The goal here is that the content creator is usually selling his valuable “advice” either via a Course, a Discord, some sort of subscription, etc.
  • Common on TikTok:
    • “I was kicked out of North Korea, and here’s what I learned”
      • Here, it’s usually a slideshow of images overlaid with various “facts” (sometimes real, sometimes made up), and then there’s one slide that is an obvious promotion for whatever they are selling (e.g. “They really care about their hair, they use this shampoo brand, I found it on Amazon” ← What they are really trying to get you to buy/do)

2. The suspicious sexualization of a normally not-necessarily-sexy activity (e.g. the “OnlyFans” problem1,2):

In a nutshell, OnlyFans creators will post to an unassuming community with an image or video of themselves that is almost entirely an attempt to push users to their OnlyFans page, rather than engage with the community. If they do engage in the community, it’s surface-level at best – e.g. responding to comments in their own thread, but never commenting in other user’s threads.

  • Common on Reddit:
    • /r/RoastMe – “I think I’m pretty ugly, roast me” (submits a beautiful picture of themselves)
    • /r/Pokemon – “Look at me dressed up as Pikachu!” (is a picture of them with simply a Pikachu headband and a sexy outfit, barely being a cosplay at all)
    • /r/Cosplay – “I dressed up as Snoopy” (somehow has weirdly sexualized Snoopy)

3. The suspicious questions that ask for suggestions for some sort of very specific tool / service / product, and answers that all seem to be built for SEO optimization:

The easiest way to sniff these out is from the specificity — when asking a community for suggestions, normally users go wide with their question (“What’s the best hiking boot”) vs very specific (“What’s the best GORE-TEX™ boot made exclusively for hikers by hikers?”).

  • Examples:
    • Poster: “Does anyone have any good AI CMS recommendations?”
      • Commenters: “I love AI-CMS.com, it’s the best at providing AI CMS like functionality”, “Oh me too, they are great!”
      • You then look at the profile of the poster, and the commenters, and you notice they suspiciously always either ask or answer things related to AI CMS platforms.

4. The exploitation of a [scandal / pain point / issue] on the platform by trying to push users to another platform the user owns:

  • Examples:
    • “With the recent API debacle on Reddit, we need a place that will be [less moderated / more moderated / insert pain point here]. Come to [some forum / mastodon / community website], as it’s the way Reddit used to be!”
      • The goal of the user here is to push a community they own / manage while people are mad at Reddit / the Subreddit / the platform / etc.
      • Usually, there’s no real reason why this new community will be better than the current one – e.g. when it gets to Reddit’s scale, it will probably fail as well. But the owner gets to capitalize on the users it gains from this method, as users are currency.
    • “The WordPress CEO has gone crazy, so we decided to fork WordPress, come use our fork instead!”
      • Again, as said before, the goal is to gather power from potentially pulling some of the community to you, giving what you are working on meaning.

——-

With all the examples above, a user could innocently say they are not trying to [sell their course / promote their OnlyFans / SEO optimize their product for Google]  – they were just trying to give good content back to the community! And because there is enough plausible deniability, and the content isn’t necessarily unhelpful or completely unrelated, most communities will let the user off the hook, if the user gets scrutinized at all.

“Alt” / “Fake” User Accounts

There are many reasons users have “Alt” or “Fake” accounts on a social media platform, but most revolve around the idea that a user usually either:

  • Wants to preserve their own anonymity / privacy
    • E.g. perhaps they want to leak classified info, escape someone that’s stalking them, or just wants to minimize the info they give a third party (as they like their privacy) as much as possible
  • Wants to preserve the sanctity of their “real” account in order to do something that goes against society / the platform / a user / their own persona, etc.
    • Perhaps they want to do illegal things, mean things, or taboo things, and don’t want that being linked back to their “real” account
    • They also don’t necessarily care if their account gets banned or downvoted, as their “real” account suffered no penalties
  • Wants to compartmentalize a part of their persona into different accounts, rather than show the “full” picture via any one full account.
    • E.g. perhaps a Cosplayer that wants to show that side of their persona only to their cosplay fans, vs their boss

By themselves, none of the goals of alt / fake accounts are necessarily “bad” things – the right to privacy is very important, and everyone has secrets, so why shouldn’t social media platforms reflect that as well?

The problem is that there is no reason for any user to respect the “rules” of a social media platform if the worst penalty you can get is being perma-banned, but you are also allowed to immediately create a new account the minute that happens. 

Imagine if, in real life, humans knew they could be reborn if they ever died (and that they’d maintain their sense of self as well)  – how much “weight” would any crimes backed by the death penalty now hold? Absolutely zero  – and so the death penalty as a deterrent to crime might as well not exist, if death is more of a nuisance than a finality.

On the other hand, if you know you only have one account on a social media platform, you might never try to color outside the lines with what you say. If your whole social network is on LinkedIn or Facebook, you won’t want to do anything that will get you permanently banned there,3 as it might be very difficult to ever re-create an account4.

We need something that straddles the line between the two extremes – we need to allow for anonymity, while still making site rules still mean something.

Impersonation / “Fan” User Accounts

These are distinct from alt / fake accounts — impersonation / “fan” accounts are there to arbitrage content and “steal” engagement from the original creators who actually create content.

If you have ever searched on TikTok, you’ll see impersonation easily in action — any search for a popular creator’s username will result in hundreds of users all with usernames very similar to the content creator you are looking for, and additionally have the same profile image and profile bio as the real creator. As far as I can tell, they exist only to steal views / dupe users into thinking they are the real account.

“Fan” accounts are similar, but try to hide behind some ethics — they will shamelessly steal content from the original content creator, perhaps with a tiny bit of editing5, and then will say they are just “fans” of the creator and that re-hosting and re-sharing this content should help the original creator as well.

New users bringing the same questions

This problem has two sides to it:

  • As a new user to a community, you many times join that community because you have a question the community might know the best answer to – “What’s the best way to order a linked list”, “Who makes the best sandals”, “How do I do X in Y”, things like that.
    • If the community isn’t friendly, you’ll get answers like “Google is free” / “Use the search function” / “This has been answered a thousand times before”, which pushes you away from engaging in the community further as it is too hostile.
      • If you’ve ever Googled a question, found a forum post, came to it and saw the “use Google” answer, you know how frustrating this can be – “I’m using Google, and this is the top result! Answer the damn question!”
  • As a long-time user in a community, new users come in and ask the same questions that were just answered yesterday. “Where’s the best place to get a sandwich”, “Where are the best and worst places to live”, etc.
    • You try to answer it nicely every time, but no matter how many times you answer the same damn question, someone new comes in and does not read or search, and wants answers to the same questions, maybe even claiming their question is different, even when it’s really just a barely rephrased version of an already answered question.
      • This makes you as a moderator / contributor in a community jaded and bitter over time – why can’t people just do a little bit of research?
Question frustration is common….

Users focusing on not being helpful to others

This category isn’t intended to include users that are being malicious (I’ll touch on that in the next section), but instead when users are just not helpful to each other, for potentially reasons that are either due to incentives from the platform, or lack of platform functionality.

  • On TikTok, people will “vaguepost” (formerly known from a similar concept on Facebook of vaguebooking), as it increases engagement, which most algorithms use as metrics for having a post start to go viral.
    • Examples:
      • “I can’t believe the fifth sound under this is doing THAT”
        • Everyone’s list of videos under a song is different and also changes with time, making this useless to users, but increases the “engagement” on a post
      • “Can you believe she didn’t bring it up to him?”
        • No context of who “she” is, who “he” is, or what “she” did to “him”
      • (A clip from a movie, TV show, video, etc)
        • No mention of what the content is, e.g. what its title is, where you can stream it, etc, as because of this people will comment wanting to know, and the more people comment (“what TV show is this?”) the more “engagement” there is on a post.
  • On almost all social media platforms, replying to a genuine question with something that is obviously wrong can get you “internet points” just because it can be funny:
    • Poster: “Can anyone identify this movie?” (some movie set in the 1940s in black and white)
      • Commenter trying to be funny: “This appears to be ‘Shrek’, an animated comedy created in 2001”
  • See also from above: New users asking questions on message boards and being told to “Google it” / “Use the search function”, and it’s the top result for that question on Google

Some users are just not people you’d ever want to interact with

I’m going to include a few sets of people in this group: users that mostly intend to be malicious, and users who provide no real value with the content they provide.

  • Malicious users
    • Those who actively try to be cruel / mean / selfish to others
      • Trolls, sociopaths, bitter people, etc.
    • Those who actively try to destroy something else someone has created
      • Hackers, “haters”, etc.
Malicious users in action – we’ve all probably had something like this happen to us online
  • No-value users
    • Those whose content provides so little value as to be indistinguishable from spam
      • Single word comment responses like “Thanks”, commenting “I don’t know” when they didn’t need to even reply, etc.
Examples of unhelpful comments online

Some users just want to brigade others

There are a lot of certifiable wrong people out there – e.g. not just people with wrong opinions, but with wrong facts (think 2 + 2 = 5, the capital of Canada is Paris, etc). What’s more, there are people who refuse to believe what they are saying is wrong, and in fact, try to say it louder despite no one agreeing with them (perhaps because they are ignorant, perhaps for the fame / notoriety / money, either way it does not matter).

When these instances happen, it’s tough not to believe in online mob justice – times where the community downvotes / makes fun of / insults a user, sometimes to the point where the original user deletes their tweets / comments / posts, protects their account, deletes their account, or sometimes to the point where users take the justice off-line into real life (e.g. see the latest Johnny Somali drama).

But while there are some cases where online mob justice can perhaps be justified6, there are also cases where it is just flat out wrong:

  1. Consider Reddit users who live in Texas (a strong Republican state) deciding to go to the /r/AnnArbor subreddit (a strong Liberal city subreddit) and downvoting posts and comments there – why are the Texas users’ upvotes / downvotes somehow equal to someone that lives in the actual area the community is serving?
  2. Consider a user who makes an ignorant or edgy comment on a social message platform, intending it to be more of an inside joke between a few other users, but getting a bigger spotlight shown on them then they wanted (e.g. via the algorithm or via someone highlighting them somewhere else) and getting hated because of it.
  3. Consider a user who, at the time, made a joke because it was trendy, only for that joke to be considered uncouth at some point later on (e.g. 10 years later), and then held against them.

In the above cases, there are technically still valid arguments to enact online mob justice – e.g. with 3, perhaps one might think that if you accept riding the trend of culture upwards for popularity’s sake, you need to accept riding the trend of culture downwards when society changes its culture. But in general, none of the three brigades feel like they are enacting justice – they more feel just like bullying.

Can pillars of the community exist in a society where everything that was ever said by someone was posted online? 

Some users only focus on information arbitrage

This is slightly controversial, but I believe the dissemination of existing content is not valuable as an engagement mechanism.

Since this may be somewhat unclear, let me outline a few examples representing what I mean:

  1. When a news story breaks (Michael Jackson died!) and you go to Reddit, users will post it to as many subreddits as they can, believing either that they:
    1. Are helping the information spread to those who might find it relevant
    2. Can generate views / karma / popularity by spreading this content
    3. Both
  2. On any new social media platform, an easy way to get karma / engagement / followers is to take content from somewhere else (YouTube, TV shows, movies, other social media sites), and post it to this new social media platform.
    1. Platforms turn a blind eye to this because it’s a great way to get users to both come to your platform, and stay on your platform
      1. E.g. “Come to site XYZ.com, they allow you to watch the full Avengers movie on it!” is an easy traffic booster

The challenging thing here is that users who consume this content derive value from the above! 

In 1, If a user only visits /r/games and didn’t know Michael Jackson died, having that submission there lets them know something they might not normally know. Similarly, you might imagine that people have some game-specific conversations that can be shared about Michael Jackson, where you might not get that on the /r/music subreddit, for example.

Similarly, in 2, sometimes it’s just easier to consume content on the platform if to consume it the “correct” way you need to open up another app, find that content, and consume it there.

That being said, in both cases, someone is mainly taking information (that they did not create) from one place, and submitting it to another place, as their hope is to “arbitrage” the engagement they receive from placing that content where it does not currently exist. While still a useful mechanism for engagement, it’s not really creating new content, it’s mainly just moving that same content around.7

Up next:

“Part 5: Problems with moderators / curators of social media platforms”

Footnotes:

  1. I don’t mean to demean or diminish creators on OnlyFans in any way, only that when you yourself are indistinguishable from your business, it becomes hard to understand if you are engaging with your community for personal reasons, or for business reasons. Unfortunately, it’s many times the latter. ↩︎
  2. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/1b8h2nr/permanently_ban_all_onlyfans_porn_accounts_from/ ↩︎
  3. Although not a social media platform, imagine getting banned or de-platformed from Google Mail — it would probably be worse than losing a credit card or drivers license! ↩︎
  4. That being said, since Social media platforms are incentivized with things like DAUs, it would be improbable that anything but a heinous act would ever get you fully perma-banned. ↩︎
  5. I originally wanted to include “reaction video” content here as well (e.g. where a creator reacts and gives their thoughts on another video), as it feels very similar to stealing someone’s else’s content, but it at least can be argued that they put a little bit more effort here than tiny edits. ↩︎
  6. To be clear, I don’t think online mob justice ever really has any place in a “civilized” online society, only that sometimes it’s easier to overlook than others. ↩︎
  7. I still struggle to call this a problem of social media platforms, as it both gives value, and has existed way before social media platforms as well (newspapers being the easiest to point out, where ten newspapers will write ten different stories about the same event). ↩︎

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