Social Media and Audience Capture
Tl;Dr Your audience online can get you trapped in a feedback loop, and you're not aware of this because you can't see the audience and you think you're better than Skinner's pigeon. A better basic model of Social Media would be a 1-on-1 interaction with room for other people to join.
Audience
One odd feature that is unique to social media is that you cannot see your audience. A majority of them are usually lurkers, you have 0 idea about how your posts are impacting them, nor even if they're reading it. fn1
for a fascinating overview on how outlier people posting online are; read this post from r/slatestarcodex Most of what you see online is made by less than 1% of the users. (this also means that you could be a good writer / artist / poster, but no one knows because you don't post. You'll also get better by posting and taking feedback)
fn1: (this is also a weird thing about writing on brick.do is that there are no comments section so I don't know how people feel about my writing or if they've even read it until i see them posting my writing elsewhere or talk with me about it)
Audience Dynamics
Ok, so what if we can't see the audience?
Two things:
- You have nothing to calibrate yourself on, except their engagement.
- If you're a public speaker / speaking to the group, you can look at the group to judge their level of engagement with you, their reactions, and what kind of people they are.
- Audiences actually change, so you'll be trapped in a feedback loop of echo-chambers.
- People (usually silently) vote with their feet. If they don't like your posts, they'll unfollow. If they like your posts, they will follow.
- You should post for the audience you Want, not the audience you have
The implications of this—and that we are vulnerable to Skinner Boxes—means that you can get audience capture.
Another thing to keep in mind is that audiences / groups have a sort of survivorship bias. You see only the people who've decided to stay. There are people who might have outgrown the group and left it. There are people who saw the group and decided not to join, whether that's because they don't have the same issues/interests or because they saw it as bad in some way. You cannot see the people who have left the group/audience.
Skinner Box
There was a behavioral psychologist by the surname of Skinner. He found that if you put a pigeon in a box and give it a reward (i.e. food) for pressing a button then you'll reinforce that behavior. The strongest form of reinforcement came from making the reward variable/random.
You see this in a lot of games. Random loot drops, slot machines, etc. This also works on humans, and designers use this to exploit you.
(people are not fond of viewing themselves on equal footing with pigeons. I invite you to be a bit more realistic and consider that this is a huge blindspot for you. Fwiw, they can be trained to diagnose diseases such as cancer source )
Audience Capture
Basically since you can't see the audience and are effectively in a Skinner Box, you can get Audience Capture.
You don't know what works and what does not, and so you double down on anything you see working (you like those sweet sweet rewards; i.e. engagement). The result of this, taken to its most extreme, is a reinforcing spiral of the most deranged takes and actions you will see.
A very visible and tragic example of this is Nick Avocado aka Perry. He started doing Mukbang videos (videos where people eat food) and he escalated with more and more food where it destroyed his health (see the image below,,, NSFL i guess? not sure if i should include it here, but i can't think of a clearer demonstration of this point. Audience Capture is extremely dangerous. There are ideological examples of this, but they're harder to portray)
substack link for if you want to read more about Audience Capture, and Perry's case
Better Alternatives
Ok, so I think its clear that Audience Capture is real, and we sorta weakly understand how it works. What's the better alternative?
I think the best way to use social media is to make a 1-on-1 with room for others to join in.
The real value of social media is in the audience.
Economic Sociology has shown that most people get their jobs from "weak ties." Say you have 100 friends/acquaintances, 99 of which you hang out with regularly, and 1 who you meet once a year. You will likely have the same knowledge, resources, and opportunities as the 99 you regularly hang out with. If you need a new opportunity (e.g. a job) you will likely get it from the 1 person who you rarely meet, your "weak tie." (This isn't to reduce relationships to economic terms, its only to demonstrate the power of weak ties.)
Compare that to social media, if you build up enough good will and a large enough following, you'll get opportunities that no one else has. You will meet all kinds of people, many of which you would never have a chance to meet without being online.
You will also get into discussions that you can almost only get into online. It might be hard to find someone else interested in your super-niche idea, but its quite easy to do so online.
Also people underestimate numbers games. If you have 1k followers, those are (mostly, 99%) real humans. If you have 100 followers, that's still a lot of humans. Try visualizing a room filled with 100 people, it's a LOT of people! Now, imagine asking every single one of them about something. That's a lot of effort, but surely someone has something to contribute. The numbers are in your favor.
(side note: look up fermi estimates and recongize that you can use them in your life. e.g. if you can get along only with 1% of people, that still means that you can get along with 8 million people! You don't have to be 100% accurate with your estimates, being roughly correct is good enough)
Side topic: Digital Dualism vs. Augmented Reality
As a side note, there is a tendency for people to vilify social media and the internet, claiming that online things "aren't real" or "don't count." While it is true that social media has a lot of negatives (e.g. audience capture, and abusive design as we've discussed) it isn't purely negative.
The people who view whatever happens online and whatever happens irl as seperate (i call them digital dualists. I didn't coin these terms, i got them from an online article) view the internet and social media as Bad. This traps them in a cycle of guilt and prevents them from using social media better.
Contrast that with viewing social media as a form of augmenting reality. Real Life affects what you post, and what you post affects real life. You can use social media to learn about things, meet new people, and encourage people to change. Corporations usually change what they do if there's a large enough backlash online (even if its only a symbolic token of apology, or cancelling a product or editing it.) People also change too, but that's harder to track tbh.
1-on-1
So if the audience is the most valuable part of social media, and also the cause of Audience Capture, what are we supposed to do?
We can resolve this by directing our posts to a friend (or at least a type of person.) This keeps us grounded and not swayed by the madness of mobs.
Personally, what got me comfortable with posting online was making an agreement with a friend that we'll both be posting and reading/reviewing each other's writing weekly. This also gets you some high quality engagement. They'll be open to discussing your ideas and pointing out where they're confused or where you can improve.
The other good thing is that this creates a space and norms (not sure if this is the right word) for people to join in. Watch this 3min masterclass on leadership and the importance of the first follower:
(there's also another video of two moms playing a game in front of their baby which got the baby interested and made him play the game with them. Its a wonderful video, and it also works on adults but they don't know/admit it. will link when i find it)
yeah. that's about it. post for your friends / the people you want to talk to, let other people join in, and most importantly, have fun!