· opinion
Online media, in the form of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the like, thrive at one thing, and one thing only: capturing your attention and time so that it can be sold to advertising partners.
That's the whole business model.
In the before times, open TV stations (and before that, radio) did the exact same thing and, in the last few decades, built immense TV businesses around this single purpose.
IT systems that power online content can be even more enticing than TV. Content recommendation systems and algorithmically served feeds tailor the content delivered to exactly what each user would like to see.
Actually, scrap that. It tailors the content to:
- What the platform thinks the user is more likely to engage with;
- What the platform thinks will retain the user in a session for longer; and/or
- What the platform thinks will retain the user long-term.
All of these have nothing to do with what you, as an individual, want.
The natural consequence is increasingly more extreme content, catered for engagement and views, which is ultimately unrepresentative of anyone's lived reality.
The incentives reward entertainment over learning; surprise, shock and overblown exaggeration over proportional reactions; and outright intentional misrepresentation over careful and measured fact reporting.
This is a complete, as they say, dumpster fire.
As an individual, from your point of view, it might be worth rethinking which of your goals and interests are fulfilled by consuming online media and whether this is, most of the time, an intentional choice or just out of habit and boredom.
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Hi, I'm Victor -- a Brazilian computer engineer at Microsoft with 7+ years of industry experience architecting and building highly polished software. I enjoy deep technical dives, hard problems, and working across all layers of the stack. My work centers on robust, cloud-based, distributed systems and web-based applications that serve millions of users.
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