the losing fight over your engagement
Every time you unlock your phone, every notification, app and widget is fighting over your attention, wether you like it or not. We live in an attention economy in which content providers prioritise engagement and visibility over quality[7].
As highlighted in this recent paper:
“…competition for fragmented attention can depress information quality and may even incentivise misinformation when short-term gains outweigh long-term credibility.”[7]
Not only that, once users can’t tell good content from bad, platforms could suffer an ‘informational collapse’, where both user attention and high quality content vanish[7]. This has been slowly happening over the years, the algorithms that were marketed to us with ‘personalisation’ in mind have quietly done the opposite. As Kyle Chayka says, “the net result of so many algorithms is a homogenisation of culture”, it has caused a sameness in interests, aesthetics and humour[5][6].
This system has transformed active, engaged users to passive consumers[3][5]; yet consumption isn’t the only thing it reshaped, it inherently changed the way we create too. When the visibility of a post depends entirely on the algorithm, the question people ask themselves drifts from does my content have substance? to how can I get the most views?
The algorithm isn’t designed to measure meaning or value. It’s designed to keep you engaged for as long as possible.[5][6][7] Imagine your digital landlord planting weeds in your digital home to keep you on their platform for longer. By designing algorithms that reward engagement over quality[7], the system incentivises the rapid production of slop, resulting in a kind of ‘digital dumping’.