All this talk about social commerce has gotten me thinking about attention and how social media treats it like a sort of currency. And in a way, it kind of is. Monetization strategies for platforms like YouTube reward people for their view counts. In other words, people are paid for the attention they can attract. And that's not always a good thing.
Social commerce is a clever way to do business, but it can bring out the worst in some people. It's generally assumed that people will do anything when money is on the line and social commerce makes attention into a new form of money. So now people will do anything for attention and there's a lot of bad stuff that will get you attention very quickly.
I don't know if anyone else remembers this, but there was a viral Twitter thread a few months back. I don't remember exactly what it was about, but the thread got attention by just being really stupid. People did some digging and it turned out that the woman who posted the thread also had a Patreon account where you could commission her to post stupid stuff about any topic to start arguments. Now that's an innovative business strategy. Of course it's also causing a ton of drama where none needs to exist, but people are clearly getting their money's worth.
I guess there's nothing inherently wrong about starting fights online as a business model, but it just feels scummy. Most people don't like arguing, it ruins their day. So it seems generally detrimental to social media as a whole. On the other hand, it apparently pays pretty well.
I watched a YouTube video recently explaining why longer videos are favored by the YouTube algorithm. Each click on a video counts as a new view, so for longer videos people might watch it in several chunks at a time, getting multiple clicks from one person. It sort of explains the "40-minute monetized apology video" genre of YouTube videos, doesn't it?
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