I’ve long heard people (including myself) long for the days of the “old” media, where you had broadcasters like Walter Cronkite that were less biased than the media today. It seems to be true, and the problem today is one of incentives.
Years ago, it was in the interest of media outlets to stay in the center and be a reliable source of information. Everything was vanilla because there weren’t many choices; if a news anchor drifted too far toward an edge, it’d be troublesome.
Today it’s the opposite, with millions of options to choose from. People are seemingly forced to pick a side and those that try to remain moderate get squashed. Being extreme (on either end) is where the audience and the money lies.
In a recent episode of Seth Godin’s “Akimbo” podcast, Seth laid it out like this:
And so you’ve got anti-vaxxers who are actually hurting the lives of children, putting stuff up on Facebook with no actual scientific proof about what they’re saying. But because it touches a nerve and because it’s easy to spread, they get a bigger audience. And there’s little or no incentive for them to become conservative about their point of view because the more extreme they make it, the more of an audience they get.
And so if we are chasing popularity or chasing monetization, the pressure has flipped. It has flipped from being a reliable curator who doesn’t take payola, who is very careful about what they are picking because they want a reputation for being careful about what they’re picking, to a different environment. Amazon did the same thing with the Kindle.
The lack of moderate viewpoints is becoming a bigger and bigger problem, and it’s not an easy fix. Social media algorithms reward extreme content, which makes it tough to solve. My two hopes:
- That many of you will continue to share valuable content, algorithms be damned.
- That Fediverse-based sites like Bluesky will continue to flourish, to help put an end to companies and algorithms with incentives that lead to dollars over goodness.
Whether you like Bluesky or not, I hope that their approach will do good things for our future. Are you on there yet?
