People only want to hear nothing but the good things, all of the time. Even if you’re not posting anything politically or any news that’d bring anyone down. There’s a video I saw, since deleted, about a man who posted on Facebook. He posted numerously uplifting news about his life, new girlfriend, new job and a brighter future. He got likes, support and comments reflecting this.
But, life has its turns and one by one, the man’s life fell apart where he was losing everything and was documenting it on his Facebook. Lost his girlfriend, not to death but to cheating, lost his job and everything. The likes and all that support pretty much dwindled to near nothingness. Almost as if the man was left in a worse off state.
I believed the point of the video was to demonstrate how artificial engagement is on social media. I’m pretty positive that this very thing has had to have happened to several dozen others over the years. People only seem to just want to read things to feel good about themselves, even at the expense of another’s downturns.
To an extent, I understand that too, because the news to me is just designed to project nothing but bad news all of the time that is neverending bullshit, the ratio of good and bad news is completely unbalanced. But, I kinda argue that you can avoid a lot of the news by just simply not tuning in to spare your sanity.
There are and there’s plenty of them too just to cover this base, of people who do nothing but complain all of the time about anything and it can be exhausting to read their daily bitching.
I can relate though to the video because I’ve even had close friends just blow off even legitimate concerns I’ve brought up about where I’m at, only to tell me things that simply don’t help. It almost defeats the purpose of engaging at all not just in social media, but socializing as a whole.
You mean social media in general?
Typically, social media serves one purpose: to make money. This is done primarily in two ways: selling user data and selling advertising. Both of these require user engagement and unfortunately the philosophy of all the major players has been engagement at all costs.
The impact on society at large has been overwhelmingly negative. I could go on at length about the numerous ways I believe social media has been a detriment but that would make for a very long response.
I remember before Facebook started tailoring their algorithms to maximize engagement. Your feed was just in chronological order. It wasn’t too bad. After the first algorithm change – 12ish years ago if I remember right – it started to go downhill very quickly. My feed became extremely negative in a relatively short time. That’s why I ditched Facebook and pretty much every other mainstream social media platform.
So the main problem with mainstream social media is that it’s driven by greed. That has created a whole host of other problems.