Your Influence on Engagement
Algorithms are funny. You show enough interest in a piece of content: a like, a comment, watching a certain number of seconds of a video before scrolling away, and all of that counts as engagement. A vote for content and concepts that you find engaging. You can’t even say it’s content you like because people often engage with things they hate.
It always baffles me when I see an article that mentions a celebrity who people don’t like and the comments are flooded with “who cares?”, “eye roll emoji”, “this is news?”. And I think I get it. I think people are trying to communicate clearly their disappointment that this person is gracing their screens. What they are trying to say is “this person is irrelevant, please stop talking about them.” What they are actually saying is “the more you post about this person, the more I’m going to engage with your content.”
Who cares? You do. And anyone who creates and monetizes content knows it. It’s funny to me that people are much more likely to engage with content they hate versus what they like. Companies know, love them or hate them, putting up an article that features a controversial person almost ensures the clicks will pour in. Every time you can add a Kardashian or Jenner into the piece, the comments will flood in with people stating how much they want to get rid of this famous family and never see them again. But each time you rage comment requesting they leave the stratosphere, you are providing social capital for them to stay. At this point, adding a KarJenner to your content in any way is just a good business strategy.
I’m currently obsessed with the idea of social media engagement. The algorithm pushes content to us that it thinks will keep us on the app for longer. Our attention has been monetized with likes, comments, followers, and time spent. In the age of digital engagement, any interaction counts as a point towards content that captures attention and thus should be promoted and repeated. Every time I see disparaging comments about a subject, I wonder if people know they are voting to see more of it. Not only does the account get positive feedback that this content gets attention, the algorithm picks it up as something that you and other people with similar profiles would also like, thereby expanding its reach.
The attention economy is fierce. In the Digital Age, exponential amounts of pieces of information are available to us now compared to prior generations, all competing for our eyes, ears, and wallets. With so much information coming at us, on multiple platforms, media outlets, and other sources, content needs to elicit a reaction from us to get us to stop scrolling. It’s thought that we spend mere seconds on a post before we scroll by, all the time a post has to capture our attention. Sometimes you stop scrolling because you see a cute animal, sometimes it’s your favorite creator, sometimes it’s because you see something or someone you hate- so much that you feel the need to stop and share the sentiment.
We make whatever we give our attention to relevant. We can decrease relevancy, at least in our own life, by controlling what we interact and spend time with. Train your algorithm to show you what you actually want to see. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. If you truly don’t care about something, if it doesn’t cause a visceral reaction within you, you’re not going to stop to comment on how much you don’t care. And let’s face it, sometimes we see awful things on social media. While a fun tool, it’s also a social one and it’s a method of sharing information that can benefit others. Sometimes a visceral reaction is a sign to speak up, in the hopes that this specific problem in the world can be solved. But some trends should just starve for attention. Let the lack of oxygen speak for you.