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.

    • ReakDuck@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      It somehow seems to me that such platforms lack “social” in them.

      I don’t know whats the pure definition of social, but as soon as a Person gets money to spread something that triggers people without it being his own opinion is… not the same social as a pub.

      If a person spreads facts that trigger people, then I want the person not to profit off of it and let it be his actual opinion or desire to write/spread. Which makes it feel social again.

  • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Color me shocked that a meta product is sacrificing trust so the line continues to go up.

  • thayerw@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • xelar@lemmy.mlOP
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    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”.