Ben Werdmuller, a tech leader at ProPublica, discusses the trust crisis in Meta’s Threads app after his comment about the Internet Archive’s legal issues unexpectedly attracted a hostile audience. He was surprised by accusations of engagement farming, prompting him to question the assumptions behind such claims. Werdmuller discovered that Meta has been paying certain creators up to $5,000 for viral posts, leading to a climate where all content is viewed with suspicion.
Color me shocked that a meta product is sacrificing trust so the line continues to go up.
From a societal point of view, that’s a pretty sad read. I recently created a mastodon account–I’m not entirely sure why but I always wanted to give it a try–and this is exactly the kind of thing that has kept me from posting anything yet. It’s kind of just shouting into a void and not knowing what kind of response will come back (if any, given the platform).
At least with platforms like Lemmy, there is a clearly defined topic of discussion, and generally with like-minded contributors.
His “thread” has been featured or popped up to people who doesnt share interests though.
For Mastodon I recommend to follow interesting accounts, set own language, check instances from nearby location.
Also follow hashtags!
Phrasing!
Extremely sad. Why couldn’t people just ask for context in a polite way, instead of bringing over all those aggressive twitterisms, and assuming the poster was “doing it for the engagement”.
