Here is my take: content creators are the problem.
When Friendster, MySpace,Facebook, et al started, it was about connecting friends online. People that already had a connection. When you shared something, you wanted to share something personal with friends. YouTube was about sharing your home videos. Not for money, but for actually sharing. What a strange concept!
Then people noticed you can monetize their content. No longer was it about sharing with friends, but creating for profit.
Social networks, as they were envisioned, are a great concept. As a method for distributing content to be monetized, not so much.
Maybe at one point social networks were actually social networks, but that isn't what they are any more. They're poorly-moderated, poorly-curated entertainment distribution platforms. People who own data centers and URLs figured out you can cut out the middlemen of studios, editors, publishers, et al, and the quality of content may go way down, but the quantity will go way up and cost to produce will go way down, in many cases to zero if you just let arbitrary users create your content for you, and engagement was never correlated with quality anyway.
The fact that consumers as well as creators need permanent accounts in order to use the platform enabled a level of tracking that normal studios and publishers could never have dreamed of. Warners could never put activity loggers into their viewer's eyeballs to figure out the exact rate at which the content of frame N leads them to continue watching at frame N + n. They had to rely on some level of positive word of mouth and positive reviews. They needed to leave some lasting impression that after their viewers spent a few minutes going home and thinking about it, they still thought the content was worth recommending.
> and engagement was never correlated with quality anyway.
Well it's a different style of engagement and a different standard for "quality" from what we colloquially think of those terms to mean. Traditional media needed you to engage with the media. Social media needs you to engage with the comment section associated with the media. The qualities the system is optimizing for, then, isn't the stuff we typically consider to be good for that medium. Instead it's the stuff that's good for making people talk about it.
This is almost certainly to blame for things always gravitating towards largely subjective evaluations of where something falls on some axis for a highly charged metric. Is this racist or not racist? Queer friendly or unfriendly? Liberal of conservative? Arguing about how to 'keep score' with which boxes any specific bit of media gets is a good way to say something about something topical that keeps people engaged and arguing.
Even in the days of the old blogosphere it was well known that you needed to have a comments section to get the page views. You can only crank out so many articles as an individual. But you can make your site "stickier" and encourage people to keep clicking the bookmark for it if you can get them engaged with talking about your article. It's not surprise that the most noxious elements of the modern Internet were more-or-less born on Reddit and Tumblr. These were two sites that basically thrived on creating selective pressure for this sort of content.
For the last paragraph it wasn't quite that simple, Nielson Media Research was aggregating audience statistics for market analysis since the radio days before TV.
> figure out the exact rate at which the content of frame N leads them to continue watching at frame N + n.
I really hope they're not.
Between my habit of leaving youtube playing in the background with the sound off before randomly coming back and closing the tab, and my toddler figuring out touch interfaces for the first time on their app, they're not going to get anything actually actionable...
All I want is a chronolocial feed of all friends' posts (with ads interspersed since that appears a necessary evil).
I frequently miss life updates from people I'm in low contact with, and instead get endless suggested paid nonsense that I've tried very hard to curate personal preferences away from.
I feel it's not useful to separate out the content creators from the network itself. Most of the "bad" things we see in today's social media are byproducts of how these networks behave as a whole. Put differently, how Youtube functions today is the result of the interactions between Youtube's algorithm to maximize profit for Google, content creators' drive to get more views, and consumers' desire to find more addicting things. You change one piece of the network and the network will behave very differently.
I find this to be very hopeful, because it means we can design and form networks that elevate people, not lower them into mindless zombie states.
> I find this to be very hopeful, because it means we can design and form networks that elevate people, not lower them into mindless zombie states.
That's the interesting part about humanity though. We could live on a paradise planet together, with complete freedom, using high tech inventions to live anywhere with power and water.
Facebook became much more useful to me when I realized this, and left all groups and the like behind. Facebook was always a terrible forum interface since they didn't show me everything. Now all they have is my friends list, so I see more pictures of my friend's kid riding a horse, or vacation pictures from Montana - exactly what I want facebook to show me.
Yet monetization enabled great content creators to generate something with a high production value or live their dream by earning money while doing the things they love. Veratasium or VSauce, for example, are a great channels, but they would've never gotten where they are now if they wouldn't have been able to earn money with it.
A similar topic comes up in music all the time, too: People accuse their favorite band of changing their style in order to get mainstream appeal and, therefore, more money. Which is definitely true to some extend, but I don't think this makes paying musicians a bad thing in general. And it's the same thing with content creators on the internet.
I've noticed that before IG and Tiktok influencers become popular, their content is more authentic / less cookie-cutter. Also their followers leave better comments (they are only followed by those who genuinely like them).
Wouldn't that put the blame on the monetization of social media? Content creators are trying to make money, social media companies determine what kind of content is relevant and worthy of views, thus which content deserves the money. Content creators seem to be at the mercy of providing content that will be recommended.
I view it as a sort of "don't hate the player, hate the game." And the social media companies determine the rules of the game.
Yes, I fully agree with you. However, just connecting people that already know each other doesn't earn as much money as force-feeding them content made by "influencers" and such. Being merely a tool isn't nearly as profitable as being a manipulative villain.
Practically, it's an advertising apparatus. Creators probably fit a normal distribution for mass appeal, so your ire might be better directed at advertisers who enable and curate primarily profit-driven content.
Nothing wrong with making a few bucks off of your craft.
And over the last decade youtube creators has been providing content with quality way superior compared to what more traditional entertainment industry has been producing (mainly marvel junk food, low effort remakes and SNL)
I think that's an oversimplification of the issue. OPs main point (as I read it) was that once a profit motive became dominant, it pushed out enthusiast/passion-motivated content creators, and as a result the output is distorted towards that which is profitable.
Yep agreed. Early fb would be fine for what I’d like to have to keep in touch with friends. Because of the ‘media’ machine it’s become - the curated feed, videos everywhere, ads and creepy-level tracking I don’t use it any more.
When Friendster, MySpace,Facebook, et al started, it was about connecting friends online. People that already had a connection. When you shared something, you wanted to share something personal with friends. YouTube was about sharing your home videos. Not for money, but for actually sharing. What a strange concept!
Then people noticed you can monetize their content. No longer was it about sharing with friends, but creating for profit.
Social networks, as they were envisioned, are a great concept. As a method for distributing content to be monetized, not so much.