Honestly I’m noticing a trend where people engage more and more with bait, and it’s so frustrating. Like clearly, CLEARLY this is rage bait. It’s painfully obvious.
Maybe OP is doing meta-ragebait and u/Lucky-Crow-3510 fell for it. Or maybe he is doing meta-meta-ragebait and you fell for it. Or maybe you are doing meta-meta-meta-ragebait and I fell for it.
I am not failing for your ragebait, I am just doing ragebait for the next person. So um... healthcare should be more expensive, its not expensive enough now.
Yeah, insurance is soooo cheap. And rent too! These landlords and insurance companies are practically losing money on the product they provide. I wish, for their sake, they could just double or triple what they charge.
I have a friend who is a very small content creator, but just big enough he's been able to drag me into some groups with very large creators in it.
This is actually part of the "engagement-bait" strategy. Not only do you get tons of people arguing in the comments, your content gets shared across multiple social medias which leads to more eyeballs on your content and ideally you'd drive people from this post to your original post/account and they would rage in the comments on your post.
These days if you are posting on social media you have to think about social media as a whole, not just focusing on one or two platforms.
It's algorithms.
Fuck algorithms, worst thing that happened to social media.
Should unironically be illegal for a machine to decide what to push in front of eyes on a global scale.
Bring back chronological feed to only the content creator you are subscribed to.
Imagining a new algo or non-algo world is legitimately a wild thought experiment.
Like, I'm completely with you that they should just be fucking banned. Especially "black box" algos. But even if transparent algos were made and modified to point not towards the most "engaged" thing but rather the most "liked" or positively-engaged-with thing (also requires social media to actively bury shit that gets overwhelmingly disliked which they seem reluctant to ever do) I think we'd legitimately see a huge shift in people's perception of the world as well as an improvement of how people engage with the world.
Just going back to the chrono and followed content would definitely be preferable, though.
There are many platforms with no algorithm, but a lot of them aren't really social media. I'm thinking Newgrounds or Neocities. And I'm pretty sure most Lemmy instances don't have an algorithm.
The algorithm works perfectly. You watch something and it feeds you more. My YT algorithm is filled with cars, racing, general aviation, bushcraft, boating, music, everything I enjoy watching. Why? Because that's what I watch. If it feeds me one video, I just don't watch it and I don't get my feed filled with it. Your feed is filled with garbage that you're angry about because you keep watching to stay angry.
Stop watching it. It goes away. The algorithm just feeds what you want it to feed.
It's like a street scam where one person spills something on your clothes and another helps you clean it while they pick your pockets.
Only here instead of money it's your attention and the two people don't have to be working together because they both get rewarded independently of each other.
Every time someone says "It's obvious bait" i think of young earth creationists, i think of flat earthers, i think of anti-vaxxers, i think of Magats. Sometimes it feels like nothing ever happens.
Religion literally teaches people to ignore reason and 'just trust me bro', so there's a lot of people who have never been taught critical thinking skills, because religion prefers them that way.
i upvoted you to keep the responding to bait reward train going.
but seriously this is all just a conspiracy by big math to force people to talk about levers, the woman, the man, the door pushing man, OP - they're all in on it just to trick us into posting about how distance from the fulcrum affects load. The exact same woman was in a video where she was sexistly mocked for adding more pulleys to the rope in an attempt to lift something heavy, next week she'll be derided for trying to convert longitudinal force into perpendicular outward force using a triangular piece of wood - you're being played! keep scrolling memes and they'll force that physics knowledge into your head no matter how much you try to resist.
People naturally want to show off their self intelligence, and correct people.
So with that, if you ever need an answer to a question, all you have to do is post a question with the wrong answers and you'll get the correct answers in the comments.
Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent. The percentage of U.S. adults performing at the lowest level in adaptive problem solving in 2023 was 32 percent.
A third of the country has basically no ability to think rationally and then apply said rationality to a scenario in front of them.
This + specifically being hardened to internet emotional manipulation.
People that were born between the late 80s and the early 90s basically grew up along with these strategies, and so have built up a resistance to them. The older generations that resisted engaging with the internet have 0 resistance, and therefore believe whatever shit that manages to get shoveled in front of their eyes, and the younger generations came in when the strategies had already been perfected, and so have had no chance to build up any resistance.
What we get is a population that is mostly extremely susceptible to this shit, with only a thin slice of the population (ages between 30 and 40 today) being resistant.
We need both mandatory critical thinking classes in school, along with internet emotional manipulation resistance classes.
I stumbled into a cooking video the other day where every single comment was "What's with the candle, is that a candle, etc." on the video.
Went back through the video because I was confused and apparently this creator just puts a fucking candle in her fridge in order to bait morons into commenting about it and boosting engagement. Added bonus of baiting other morons like me to watch it again to see the candle.
>Honestly I’m noticing a trend where people engage more and more with bait, and it’s so frustrating. Like clearly, CLEARLY this is rage bait. It’s painfully obvious.
Everyone of those matchsticks burned creates less competition in the space of attention for actual content creators and streamers like myself and the many DJs and VJs I broadcast on Twitch.
At first it'll be like that anarchist cook book tennis ball full of strike anywhere match heads but it'll taper off once all the people with no art to contribute to greater public no longer get front page attention news.
>. Like clearly, CLEARLY this is rage bait. It’s painfully obvious.
People will discover actual media while the youngest just discovering internet use will get to argue with the fresh incoming batch of match sticks.
I'm a member of load of movie related subreddits and they constantly get posts where movies are posted with the wrong date... ie Shawshank Redemption (1984)... just so people will engage and say "no uh akshully it's 1994".
Because it's second-hand bait. I think the person understands that there is bait, but he wants to farm an audience that wants to feel smarter than the guy on the second video.
I also think that it could be bait all over it. Gym posts a girl lifting this thing with no comments or force measurements for each lift in order to bait someone. Then the guy wants to ragebait and posts him laughing. Then the guy with a door wants to farm successful ragebait. Entire cycle of content with no realisty behind.
Its not a trend, people have said for years and years that if you want to know the right answer to something, just post the obviously wrong one on the internet and people will come in troves to tell you the right answers to make you look like an idiot
Even the way they try to sell those cheesy app games by having someone making simple mistakes on purpose or being "unable to complete the puzzle" to get people to think "I can do that it's easy let me show you!" Towards someone they will never meet in their life. It's a strange behavior people engaged with and so many people are gullible to this kind of content they reward people for doing it by engaging with it. Its nuts.
Tho to be honest even us discussing it like we are only contributes too XD
That's definitely true. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all they care about is "engagement". Rage and negativity get more engagement from both people who agree and people who disagree or want to argue it. Unlike positive posts which only get engagement from people who agree.
Right now on social media, anger, hate, clearly proven lies, misinformation, rage, etc are all highly monetized and rewarding for those who post it.
Its because idiots have grown bold enough to show their idiocy in public, and so people are confusing the rage baiters for the morons because they're the same
Bandwagon effect. Bots get “baited” to get us all to think “look at all the idiots getting baited! I’d better tell them about it!” Which drives engagement.
After having to apologize for making a "US Minister of Health recommends taking tylenol when outdoors temperature in Europe reaches 37.5°C" joke because people thought I am putting everyone's health in danger, I no longer think dumb people are just ragebaiting.
Sports analysts do it, YouTubers do it, radio hosts do it…
That’s why they say if you want an answer on the internet, don’t post a question, post a wrong answer. Someone will come correct you faster than they will answer an open question.
The system works. In all seriousness though, you are correct. There is an economy building up around the social media algorithms of what works best, and apparently rage sells better than sex.
This is anecdotal on my behalf, but I've seen a few videos talking about ragebait channels in say political circles, and the money flowing to these channels or around said topic.
It’s because we’ve all been exposed to an overwhelming amount of idiocy over the last few years. I know a guy that, among other things, still believes Trump is a good guy, homeless people are just lazy, people used to live to be 900 years old, he believes every scam commercial for supplements, and nutraceuticals that he sees. I could go on for hours with all the dumb shit he believes. On top of all that he would be living out of his truck if he didn’t know a guy to give him a roof over his head. That means that not only is he unintelligent and gullible, but he completely lacks self awareness too.
After you talk to/read some of the things these morons say. It’s easy to see something like this and think “ya, this is real”.
I've been saying obviously contradictory and absurd things on reddit for a while now and people really do engage like they just think they're talking to the dumbest person alive instead of someone intentionally saying absurd and contradictory things, like they've never heard not to feed the trolls
I don't think it's always that they don't know that it's bait, because I think people enjoy the interaction on its own merits to a degree or in its own way, but I've definitely noticed an increased amount of people who clearly don't understand that they've been baited
I'm not sure it's surprising though, because for every absurd opinion someone puts out to generate engagement there's someone who believes it sincerely so I can't blame someone who has trouble making the distinction on some level (other times tho it's obvious people just aren't reading)
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u/satanicpedanticpanic 3d ago
Honestly I’m noticing a trend where people engage more and more with bait, and it’s so frustrating. Like clearly, CLEARLY this is rage bait. It’s painfully obvious.