../

- Social Media Algorithms -

The current landscape of the popular internet is bleak, there are only a handful of sites that constantly have the highest SEO scores. Each of them using algorithms one way or another. If you do not see one of these sites when searching for something mundane then it's some AI generated article with the contents being irrelevant to the headline but I digress.

Algorithms are very useful tools, they are used by popular sites, being fed the interests of users to give other similar results. This leads to companies being able to cater content dependent on your tastes and habits to you.

I believe it is very important to be aware of the implications of having such a technology constantly trained on a person's habits and tendencies. Not knowing will mean that one would become highly susceptible if not guaranteed to being glued to a service and/or not realizing getting stuck in an echo chamber. The latter can become dangerous as you become conditioned to people strengthening your views AKA radicalization. Have you ever wondered why you spend so much time online? "one more video and I will head to bed, oops, it's 4:40AM"

To add, I don't think I need to say why being conditioned to only expect people with the same opinions/viewpoints as you is a horrible thing, it does not allow you to think about different viewpoints as the short bursts of happy chemicals being delivered to the brain when someone agrees makes you mentally stagnant as this does not get new information in. Isn't the point of the brain to understand and learn? take some time to reflect on this.

What you click and observe WILL be analysed and recorded to offer you more similar content, even if said content is negative because it has been proven that humans perceive & think about negativity more often than positivity, this is called the negativity bias. The human brain is very exploitable, many tactics, like dark patterns for example, can be utilised to keep the user's attention, try to keep this in the back of your mind when browsing cute sheep pictures on the web, baaaah.