"Facebook flipped a switch, favoring comments and reactions over shares, and suddenly a food blogger from Utah became the largest publisher in the country, if not the world."
While the firehose volume is disproportionate, the direction wasn't random. Whoever is copywriting these messages is an artist, drawing an outstanding number of responses. I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself. There's a lot of power in asking someone the right personal question.
I agree - The author hits at topics that are somewhat controversial but at the same time everyone has a story. I suspect, and I could be wrong, but majority of the comments on that DUI post are people over the age of 40 or 50. They all want to share their story of how drinking and driving wasn't a big issue when they grew up, that their dad always had a drink in hand. People love to talk about themselves and this topic, combined with that audience creates a lot of "nostalgia" for lack of a better term.
I mean, you must see the primal appeal - essentially the posts are "haha, who else does {{COMMON_THING}}?!". Millions of people want other people to know they too are just like them.
Facebook's algorithm is optimized for engagement - but people aren't desperate to engage - they are desperate to be engaged with.
> I mean, you must see the primal appeal - essentially the posts are "haha, who else does {{COMMON_THING}}?!"
No, and I feel like I'm explaining to the AI what human behavior looks like here. Yes, the sort of meme discussion you quote is fairly common, but it's not just "common thing", it's some sort of shared experience that's probably private; you're not sure if everyone else experiences it, but saying you experience it might sound weird to others, and the (usually unneeded) thoughts of potential embarrassment maybe prevents you from doing so. Until someone does, in such a post, and yeah, those take off as the day's lucky 10000 are all sighing a collective "I'm not weird!" sigh of relief. Eye floaters come to mind as an example.
But … that's not the case here. "Who the heck sleeps with a Fan (sic) and AC on?". Heck, that odd capitalization just makes it even more uncanny valley. Like Zuckerberg really is a robot, and he's just tried a new social subroutine out on me.
Have you ever considered the fact that because clearly much of the world's population _does_ in fact comment on these posts, that _they_ have said normal "human behavior" and not you or I? We're the outlier on Facebook.
While several million is a lot, yes, it is a far cry from the 7B people in the world, or the just shy of 3B users FB claims to have. The question is how many ignored that post; it could very well be that they out number the ones who commented, and those who comment are the outliers.
It could also be sockpuppets are commenting to drum up the numbers to make the post look hotter than it actually is.
I don't get why you're being down voted. It's a fair argument. We really don't know how many ignored the post.
Yes, since Facebook picked to promote it, probably a low percentage ignored. But what is "low percentage" to Facebook algo?
Maybe usual average is 90% ignores without "engaging". With this one, "only" 60% ignored.
Which means the majority are not triggered by this sort of thing.
This is only speculation, but just to illustrate the argument may be valid indeed and these networks like Facebook end up giving an impression that something is "normal" across humans, but they're actually not.
You're on the right path, but you're missing the milquetoast sting at the end; something that's controversial, or slightly embarrassing that makes the activity seem niche, but really isn't. "Who the heck eats Food with the Fridge door open?" - or "Who the heck eats Food slowly, so the crinkly wrapper doesn't wake the kids?".
Yoi can find the same sort of viral drivel under "relatable tweets" on Twitter.
you have what I call a "Kardashian problem" - I don't understand why the Kardashians are popular. Who the hell would be interested in these people? Why would anyone waste any time watching them or paying them any attention? And yet people clearly do, as the Kardashians are (or were) making millions from other people's interest in them. Clearly it's not their problem, it's that I don't understand their market.
If you're struggling to understand why this FB page has such an enormous following,the answer isn't that "they're doing it wrong, people aren't like that" - because they're clearly not wrong, and enough people are like that to give them that huge following. The answer is that you don't understand that market.
I know the name "Kim", and I know they are in plural, but wouldn't be able to tell them apart - or give any reason why they should be interesting either. The word "implants" springs to mind, before my brain shuts down to what I perceive as infinite stupidity overload.
I understand there's a significant number of people who quite clearly excel at getting through life worrying about rather different things than myself.
Now you're getting it, although you need to think of something that most people do, and then mock them. The key is to trigger confused/shock engagement. Plenty of people are obviously falling for this.
I mean, the "who here has never had a DUI?" question is tailored for engagement. The actual % of people who have had a DUI is really low, and so the number of people who can engage with that honestly is really high. Then there's the fact that DUIs tend to evoke a strong moral response, so people will dive into the comments to wag the finger at all the DUI havers.
We're all here commenting on posts about tech and tech-adjacent concerns, so the community is pretty niche and interesting (to us). This is what you get when someone crafts content for literally everyone, and you'd be right to find it simultaneously bland and bizarre. But people, it turns out, do engage with it.
Reminds me of those posts from a few years ago that were like:
"[Simple math problem, like what's 5 x 4?]: 95% of people can't solve this! I bet you can't either!"
With hundreds of thousands of commenters "engaging" with it. I don't understand anything about this behavior. 1. What does the poster have to gain from a post like that, 2. What do all the commenters have to gain, and 3. What does SocialMediaCompany gain? The promise of social media is long dead. It seems to now just be bots (or people who behave as bots) responding to bots (or people who behave as bots)... everywhere.
Well, for (1) the poster gets engagement from low-effort posts. The end game is usually monetizing their social media presence, and though there's multiple ways to do that, they all involve getting eyes on your page.
Your (2) should be evident from the phrasing of your example: if 95% of people can't do it, people want to prove they're in the 5%. They get a few minutes' distraction, some self-satisfaction, and maybe some conversation. I'm not going to play psychologist, but that's enough for some folks. And it really only has to be some: if your post is seen 32 million people and 30 million dismiss it, you still got 2 million people to engage.
(3) is, I guess, money again? Active users means SocialMediaCompany can tout the value of their platform to advertising partners. The bot problem is a good observation, though, because platforms with a reputation for bots are less valuable to advertisers who want human attention. People who act like bots are probably great for advertisers, though, so idk; maybe that's a wash.
Those posts really are a curse. And they are usually not quite that simple, there is always some PEDMAS quirk to it so ~70% of the people get it wrong, causing yet more comments pointing out how they are wrong and further inflating engagement. Those are worse than the stupid Farmville/Mafia Wars posts that used to horrendously clutter up the platform, at least those are easy to block. Those math things come from all different sources so blocking them isn't effective.
For folks that are out of the loop, the post looks something like “24/4*3: 80% of people get this wrong!” and the arguments in comments are between people who do this the way most computers do (multiplication and division have the same priority and the leftmost one goes first, so you first calculate 24/4 to get 6 then multiply by 3 to get 18) versus the way that the acronym literally says to do it, (multiplication comes before division in the acronym so you first multiply 3x4 to get 12, then divide 24/12=2).
Part of the reason that it generates so much animosity is that we condition people to think of math as always having a right answer, it is the Fount of Objective Truth. The idea that math is sublimely subjective, is indeed an artistic medium, does not seem to be well-appreciated and is often not even acknowledged. This is usually chalked up to the fact that math has “rules,” which is a very strange sentiment because the points in a sports game also follow “rules” of a similar sort but we usually don't regard those as either objective or subjective, they exist in a murky third world where we do not ask those questions...
The poster gains by getting a large amount of interaction with their page, which is certainly a ranking factor for future posts. e.g. SocialMediaCompany will say "This new post by Poster will get higher placement because their previous posts were enjoyed (interacted with) by many people, and therefore Poster must be producing good content."
I totally agree with you. These posts all seem like a way to scape data about me. Why would anyone want to know if someone else had a DUI? If I sold insurance I would like to know that about you so I can increase your cost and lower my risk. All these questions seem to ask questions you are better off not answering because it builds a profile about you. I just don’t get it but definitely see aunts and coworkers who are totally into posts like these. Bizarre
Have you ever seen the posts? Some relatives comment on them so they show up on my feed, but the post will be something like "do you like dogs or cats better?" And my aunt and 10 million other people will make a post just saying "cat" or "dog"
It's sort of weird to have watched the target demographic switch from college kids to everyone's older aunts and uncles. We went from "you should know better than to post that picture" to "you should know better than to engage with that order of operations question".
To propagate (show up on more feeds), they need people to interact with it. So successful content will be that that best drives interaction, and I guess comments still weigh more heavily than likes?
Consequently, Facebook itself is a brute force algorithm for discovering the more virulently memetic content and phrasing.
Facebook really ruined the opinion I had of my relatives because of that kind of stuff.
Man, you taught me how to fish but look at you now, jumping on every bait thrown at you...
While the firehose volume is disproportionate, the direction wasn't random. Whoever is copywriting these messages is an artist, drawing an outstanding number of responses. I felt the urge to react when I read them and bravely restrained myself. There's a lot of power in asking someone the right personal question.