The human brain is susceptible to engagement bait. There are different flavors of bait, but some of the ones that are most effective need to simultaneously avoid triggering moderation (whether automated or human) while jumping out of the containment of only people who subscribe to the person or place where it was created.
So a post that is sexy might encounter too much resistance to sharing from people’s NSFW filters (and reluctance to share nsfw content with people they actually know in real life).
A post that is interesting or funny or fun might get spread around, but is hard to replicate and takes a lot of effort to get right.
That leaves posts that trigger people’s responses, whether they feel compelled to correct a grammatical error or angrily correct a factual error, or vociferously defend an idea that isn’t being treated fairly. The comments themselves breed engagement as the commenters then interact with each other, and the commenters keep coming back to the same post to see whether new comments have been posted. Anger and pedantry are the types of bait that work best on most platforms.
None of this is inherently corporate or profit-motivated, so it would be naive to assume that only for-profit corporate platforms would have that stuff.
The human brain is susceptible to engagement bait. There are different flavors of bait, but some of the ones that are most effective need to simultaneously avoid triggering moderation (whether automated or human) while jumping out of the containment of only people who subscribe to the person or place where it was created.
So a post that is sexy might encounter too much resistance to sharing from people’s NSFW filters (and reluctance to share nsfw content with people they actually know in real life).
A post that is interesting or funny or fun might get spread around, but is hard to replicate and takes a lot of effort to get right.
That leaves posts that trigger people’s responses, whether they feel compelled to correct a grammatical error or angrily correct a factual error, or vociferously defend an idea that isn’t being treated fairly. The comments themselves breed engagement as the commenters then interact with each other, and the commenters keep coming back to the same post to see whether new comments have been posted. Anger and pedantry are the types of bait that work best on most platforms.
None of this is inherently corporate or profit-motivated, so it would be naive to assume that only for-profit corporate platforms would have that stuff.