Ben Werdmuller, a tech leader at ProPublica, discusses the trust crisis in Meta’s Threads app after his comment about the Internet Archive’s legal issues unexpectedly attracted a hostile audience. He was surprised by accusations of engagement farming, prompting him to question the assumptions behind such claims. Werdmuller discovered that Meta has been paying certain creators up to $5,000 for viral posts, leading to a climate where all content is viewed with suspicion.
just one of the reasons why i’ll never again want to be on commercial social media platforms.
It somehow seems to me that such platforms lack “social” in them.
I don’t know whats the pure definition of social, but as soon as a Person gets money to spread something that triggers people without it being his own opinion is… not the same social as a pub.
If a person spreads facts that trigger people, then I want the person not to profit off of it and let it be his actual opinion or desire to write/spread. Which makes it feel social again.
Carful, you start looking at areas of our society that don’t make any sense as an economic vehicle, and you might start advocating for giving food to people who are hungry and houses to people on the street!
Color me shocked that a meta product is sacrificing trust so the line continues to go up.
From a societal point of view, that’s a pretty sad read. I recently created a mastodon account–I’m not entirely sure why but I always wanted to give it a try–and this is exactly the kind of thing that has kept me from posting anything yet. It’s kind of just shouting into a void and not knowing what kind of response will come back (if any, given the platform).
At least with platforms like Lemmy, there is a clearly defined topic of discussion, and generally with like-minded contributors.
His “thread” has been featured or popped up to people who doesnt share interests though.
For Mastodon I recommend to follow interesting accounts, set own language, check instances from nearby location.
Also follow hashtags!
Extremely sad. Why couldn’t people just ask for context in a polite way, instead of bringing over all those aggressive twitterisms, and assuming the poster was “doing it for the engagement”.