To save the world/Internet, please start sharing content tha
Source: Caitlin Dewey
One of the lead stories on Mashable right now is about a dog who got her head stuck in a tissue box. Buzzfeed’s most-shared Super Bowl stories include a ranking of football player’s butts and a retrospective on dancing sharks. According to the “trending” tab at the corner of my Facebook page, my friends are really into some soap opera actress and Jimmy Kimmel today.
But you know what the Internet really needs less of?
Sober coverage of serious issues. (Like, the measles outbreak: such tired, depressing news.)
That is at least the basic takeaway from “What’s Working,” a new and ironically dispiriting editorial project from the Internet seers at the Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington, in all her mindful imperialness, has rightly observed that both Facebook’s news algorithm and human nature prefer to share stories that make you feel good. So the HuffPost of the future will include a lot more “relentless telling” of “people and communities doing amazing things.”
Things like … dudes saving money to take their wives on vacation. Pit bulls wearing ill-fitting pajamas. Grandmothers dancing at some party. I have seen the future of “the nice Internet,” as the New York Times named it in July 2014, and it is a sticky-sweet Candy Land of willful ignorance and self-flattering “positivity.”
Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate a hero-dog or a dancing grandma as much as the next office drone. But the issue here is that, when Facebook shares become your primary measure of editorial quality, you begin pandering to the curious and not entirely pro-social whims of Facebook’s News Feed. (The “lowest common denominator,” as Mashable’s editor in chief once told me.)
See, the News Feed algorithm has historically tried to privilege content that it thinks you will like ― a sensible approach, when there’s an overwhelming amount of content and you’re a massive social network trying to keep eyeballs on the site. To do that, News Feed surfaces stories that are getting lots of likes and shares from people you engage with often.
But people don’t “like” and “share” just anything. Instead research suggests that Internet-users are motivated largely by raw, animal-brain feeling: awe and amusement get those clicks, but people rarely share articles that make them sad or confused or angry.
This is essentially the cycle off which Huffington Post and the whole of the “nice Internet” profit. People share what makes them feel good → highly-shared stories become more visible in News Feed → more visible posts get more shares … on and on, a relentless whirlwind of rescued homeless people and fundraisers and puppies. The monthly reports of Newswhip, a social media analytics service, back that up consistently: Its most popular articles on Facebook for December included “Holiday newborns go home in Christmas stockings.”
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