In some of the music communities I’m in the content creators are already telling their userbase to go follow them on threads. They’re all talking about some kind of beef between Elon and Mark and the possibility of a boxing match… Mark was right to call the people he’s leaching off of fucking idiots.
People obviously enjoy The Algorithm. They enjoy a feed that is constantly full. The fact that it is full of noxious shit is irrelevant. Those that come here from The Algorithm to mastodon or lemmy or anywhere else where The Algorithm is not present are immediately put off. Effort is required to fill your feed, it is an active rather than a passive experience. There is something entirely sexual about this dynamic. People enjoy being brain fucked by The Algorithm.
Different people have different preferences. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
There obviously is nothing wrong, superficially, with people having different preferences. There is something very obviously wrong with Algorithm based commercial social media platforms that deliberately ‘gaze farm’. Framing this as ‘just a choice’, is not really engaging in what that choice is, in this case, and why people are making it, and how hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people being continuously gaze farmed is altering social consciousness. But sure, “There’s nothing inherently wrong with that”, for some value of ‘that’.
Building a sign on a highway is also gaze farming.
It is. Would you agree that it is a bit less problematic than social media gaze farming?
Once upon a time, back when broadcast tv was how most people consumed media, governments recognized that advertisers on tv needed to be regulated, there were limits on how much advertising could be crammed into an hour. But as ‘gummint regulation bad’ we’ve allowed an entire generation to grow up enthralled by 24/7 gaze farming on their phones. This was a really bad idea.