Defeatist thinking is a very easy trap to fall into, especially in this age of hyperconnectedness. It's not even about the selective projection of only the good things that one has going in one's life, but the sheer numbers of them that is the main cause of defeatist thinking.
I have, on many different occasions, taken breaks from the so-called social media, not because I have shitty friends (that's uhhh... a different story for a different day), but because all that deluge off ``good vibes'' (or ``how fucked are we from a scale of 1 to ${insert-villain-of-the-week}'') keeps appearing and appearing and appearing like some broken record that either makes me feel like I have failed completely (because I'm not doing as well in comparison with my ``peers''), or that there is no point in trying to put one's best foot forward because the world is going to all the different hells simultaneously anyway.
It's easy to blame it on the nefarious ``algorithms'' without further qualification, but I will do an iota better than that by explaining how the ``algorithms'' are to be blamed.
Remember my rant on agenda? The summary of that post is, corporate entities make the choices they do because they are ``good for business''. Social media, for all their original lofty goals of ``connecting people'' and ``expanding people's connectivity with others'', have devolved into yet another way of mass marketing/advertising, with the key difference of people voluntarily offering themselves to be advertised to.
Businesses thrive on maintaining some kind of relationship that is more than transactional. There are many business books that begin with talking about how having a so-called die-hard hard-core ``whale'' customer group is important in ensuring that the business can thrive. In many ways, this concept is sound---a business that chooses a sufficiently general niched area to operate in can net nearly 100% of the market by serving the needs of their customers as compared to one who tries to over-expand into multiple not necessarily related markets.
The pre-Internet days of businesses relied largely on informal networks that are maintained by influential people in an unaccountable (as in, not recorded formally anywhere) manner. Thus, all that business networking was actually important, as was interacting with middlemen whose sole purpose was to act as the matchmakers between service/product providers and consumers.
Nowadays the idea of a business networking session is considered quaint, and only because its highly localised reach is deemed to be less useful as compared to the globalised nature of the matchmaking that is provided for by the social network. Part of the reason why social networks are of such a great draw come from the fact that those old-school informal networks that were originally unaccountable are now quantifiable in some manner.
And anything that is quantifiable can be worked with using data mining and machine learning processes. This shouldn't be new to anyone living in the second decade of the twenty-first century---data mining and machine learning uses lots of statistics, and statistics are the OG of making sense out of quantifiable things. This is, of course, where the nefarious and nebulous ``algorithms'' come in.
See, the problem is that algorithms are, by definition, deterministic. The input are well-defined, the inner operation are also well-defined (human readablility/understandability notwithstanding), and their output are also well-defined. All these well-definedness means that for the same input and same model, we expect the same output. The main reason why it sometimes is stochastic instead of being deterministic is only because of the relaxation of the computation technique used to ensure that a good enough answer is produced in the limited time instead of the perfect answer being produced some impractical amount of time later---such relaxation of computation methods often rely on stochastic outcomes over a deterministic one.
Now the reason for raising all that is to point out that for most purposes and contexts, these ``algorithms'' are not innovative at all, no matter the hype. This means that they can only interpolate, and never extrapolate. Now to be fair, there are ways to break out of this through the use of more stochastic techniques to explore areas of the search space that are not well-spanned by the training/observed data, but from the business perspective, these are generally not good investments from the ROI perspective.
Relating the behaviour of such ``algorithms'' back to my earliest observation, it means that what we see in our social media feed [in its default non-reverse chronological state] is based on strong association of so-called related topics as opposed to being an actual objective temporal snapshot. And this acts as a type of bootstrap to a loop where reactions to these related topics are further related, which lead to other reactions to these related topics... which ends up drowning out anything else that isn't related to the topics at all.
It helps the companies running the platform for that social media because now they can specify a nice demographic to talk to investors/their customers (not the participants of the social media platform, mind you) and get money. And money is often really good for corporate entities, especially when they are large enough that they literally cannot afford to not get more money.
And so, the cycle repeats itself, and as a low-level individual, one just keeps on seeing the same bloody thing again and again. ``Good vibes'' stories like being married/pregnant/x-month age of child keep appearing, and general anger against the ``big bad world'' keep appearing as well.
God I sound more depressed than usual.
As I mentioned in the beginning, it is very easy to fall into such defeatist thinking traps. And funny enough, the way out of it is to stay away from such biased systems, ideally for good. But the value proposition of pre-corporate-centric nature of social media platforms [of providing a means of connection/communication with friends across a wider area] still hold, so it becomes a case of balancing between one's sanity of being repeatedly hit with marketing/advertising friendly materials or to cut off communication forever.
It is a hard choice to make.
Anyway, till the next update.
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