“Just as people can level terrain and build canals, so people can alter the incentive landscape in order to build better institutions. But they can only do so when they are incentivized to do so, which is not always. As a result, some pretty wild tributaries and rapids form in some very strange places.”
— Scott Alexander
Over the past two decades, social media companies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing their platforms and refining their algorithms. Yet, while we may spend more time on these platforms than ever, the benefit we gain feels increasingly hollow. We are fatigued by countless hours of mindless scrolling, questioning whether we are truly gaining anything of value.
If the major social media corporations have invested so much into the optimization of this technology, who is actually reaping the rewards?
The answer becomes clear when you examine the incentive structures underlying our digital social networks. These platforms provide spaces to interact with friends and stay connected to cultural trends, but what is their actual product? How do they achieve such staggering revenue while offering their services for free?
It is no revelation that these platforms are sophisticated marketing machines, perfectly tuned to capture our attention and deliver targeted ads directly to our fingertips. The algorithmic optimizations are geared towards maximizing the value of our engagement and data to be packaged and sold to advertisers. With some of our most capable engineers leveraging immense capital resources, the fight for our attention is nearly maximally efficient.
The rise of short-form content exemplifies this trend, as it allows platforms to rapidly iterate on understanding our unique personalities and defining our desires to match us with the product links we are most likely to click. Social media companies can charge a premium for these higher click-through rates, driving top-line growth. In this marketplace for attention, we are the products. Our incessant craving for effortless dopamine has been exploited to harvest our attention and sell it for profit.
We feel this impact. We are aware it, and yet we continue to accept this reality because these platforms offer us shared social experiences and curated content to stimulate our curiosity. They are designed to appeal to our very nature. However, their intent is not to optimize for any benefit we gain. Instead, this attention market steams towards efficiency, bound to the predictable path dictated by rigid incentives, all while extracting our data to fuel advertising throughput.
This process highlights the concept of “enshittification” as coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022 and referenced by Kait Lucas in the recent post on another realm, “I want to read Proust, but the internet has made me stupid”.
Fortunately, we no longer have to rely on this model for producing digital content. The early internet’s ad-supported strategy was only meant to reduce barriers to entry to increase user adoption of an unfamiliar technology. Today, with exponential decreases in computing costs and the now ubiquitous use of the world wide web, we can construct a new form of information-sharing network — one that aligns incentives to support writers in creating thoughtful, long-form content and connects them directly with engaged readers seeking a focused, intentional digital experience.
On that theme, we are focusing this week’s spotlight on Kait’s piece, which explores the experience of today’s digital media landscape more eloquently than we can convey here. We highly recommend the read and encourage you to support another realm if it resonates with you.
another realm
Written by Kait Lucas
“Our TL;DR culture loves quick fixes and fast, accessible content, and short-form platforms have trained us to accept that as normal to the detriment of our attention spans. We already see the effects of this in our culture as it pertains to the politicization of just about everything deemed “intellectual.” This rapid decline in critical thinking and misinformation spread by a problematic algorithm that prizes watchability over integrity only feeds the beast, creating an endless feedback loop of superficial, forgettable content.”
If you want to support any of the writers we spotlight, we highly encourage you to subscribe to their individual publications. If you want to support independent journalism more broadly, we offer both paid and free subscriptions for you to stay informed!
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Sources:
Satici, S.A., Gocet Tekin, E., Deniz, M.E. et al. Doomscrolling Scale: its Association with Personality Traits, Psychological Distress, Social Media Use, and Wellbeing. Applied Research Quality Life 18, 833–847 (2023).
Thank you for sharing 🙏🏻