Yeah i opened reddit recently and was immediately hit with those fake AITA stories that somehow i once kinda believed, and now, after being in more sane communities, those stories just look fabricated for maximum interaction.
It baffles me how i never realised reddit, twitter and other socials leveraged the outrage machine so much until i joined lemmy.
I was surprised to see so many “AITA for cutting out certain foods? Yes, buy Weight Watchers, asshole!” ads disguised as posts. I’m sure they’re not new, but using a third party app meant I never had to see them.
Twitter is bad too. On top of the outrage bait, there’s a ton of garbage posts that are just designed to farm engagement: “Which of these 12 movies from the 1990s is your favorite?” - and the post is just 12 numbered movie covers.
I’m pretty sure the stories themselves are fake but a lot of the situations are plausible that I can kind of see happening some time. The comments sometimes have a lot of useful guidance for navigating complicated social situations. But yeah I do agree with you overall.
Yeah i opened reddit recently and was immediately hit with those fake AITA stories that somehow i once kinda believed, and now, after being in more sane communities, those stories just look fabricated for maximum interaction.
It baffles me how i never realised reddit, twitter and other socials leveraged the outrage machine so much until i joined lemmy.
I was surprised to see so many “AITA for cutting out certain foods? Yes, buy Weight Watchers, asshole!” ads disguised as posts. I’m sure they’re not new, but using a third party app meant I never had to see them.
Twitter is bad too. On top of the outrage bait, there’s a ton of garbage posts that are just designed to farm engagement: “Which of these 12 movies from the 1990s is your favorite?” - and the post is just 12 numbered movie covers.
I don’t mean to bitch or anything, but this kind of post (other social platforms are bad) is a pretty decent engagement farm as well.
I think this post is likely to get people talking, but the intent was just to make something funny.
The stuff I’m referring to on twitter is this kind of (borderline phishing in this case) nonsense:
I went back and got irrationally angry… immediately realized Reddit was pure cancer.
I’m pretty sure the stories themselves are fake but a lot of the situations are plausible that I can kind of see happening some time. The comments sometimes have a lot of useful guidance for navigating complicated social situations. But yeah I do agree with you overall.