The Wet Rot Think Tank

Social media platforms employ editorial teams because algorithms are written by people.  An algorithm is a digital editor, sifting through material to decide what is shown to readers, informed by principles set by people.  When editorial teams don’t agree with algorithms, they correct them.

Social media is highly addictive.  Some fast video platforms interlace very bright and very dark videos, using HDR, like a slot machine.  Characters on social media are more charismatic than you or I.  Their emotions are exaggerated.  Videos are very salient, containing fast flashes between very agro content.

Social media platforms contain a lot of political content.  Much of the news reporting is not from traditional news sources, such as journalists.  If social media firms didn’t intend this, it should be corrected.

Algorithms rely on the concept of interlacing.  Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths explores this idea.  It creates an overall narrative from a set of supposedly unrelated, interlaced short stories.

Social media platforms create social relation to content that is not from your friends by interlacing it with content from your friends.  This is why videos by other political creators are interlaced with your social feed.  By intergrating them in the same group, they are trusted as friends.  Perhaps this is not intentional.

Social media itself makes people lonely.  It elicits comparison with the best parts of other people’s lives.  It encourages vanity by showing off the best part of yours.  It encourages social gratificaiton from the envy of others.

Pornography makes people impotent.  By watching lots of high-stimulation sex videos, the brain thinks it is partnering with lots of people.  This makes ordinary sex unstimulating, and ordinary relationships mundane.

Many people are interacted with on social media, at a rate faster than you can physically walk around a pub.  It is socially overstimulating. 

Therefore, ordinary social interactions feel socially understimulating. 

Real people are tired, and uncharismatic.  The lonlieness itself comes from social media.

Lonely people feed social media algorithms.  The unemployed, those with few friends, and those without family post the most and interact the most.  This exaggerates depressing messages in the algorithm, without the intervention of an editorial team. 

Messaging making people feel lonely keeps people on social media, because it reflects their reality, and makes them want to be socially stimulated.

Social media algorithms are not tailored to individuals, but are tailored to groups.  Your friends have the same social media references as you. 

Few people create social media posts that are public, public posts are created by a limited group of people.  Most people do not know how to make memes.  Most people rarely comment, and the comments regularly viewed are probably the top five, which is a limited range.

Social media thus makes users less socially potent, develops parasocial relationships with online creators by interlacing them with the lived reality of your friends and shows a limited number of a public posts created by a small group of people.  But you reinstalled that app after deleting it?

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