It's a great explanation of a fairly basic point: in the internet marketing era, virality matters more than how good the thing you're marketing actually is, which means you need to trip the emotional engagement hooks to get people to hit the retweet button (or other platform equivalent).

This has all sorts of negative consequences for what content gets produced.

And by virality you mean well-tuned for the algorithm.

This issue seems like one that Google (or search more broadly) addressed early on, and spared no expense at making sure their pagerank algo surfaced quality pages no matter how people tried to game it.

It doesn’t seem that social media platforms have taken the same approach with their algorithms, for one reason or another

Quality of the content is not the concern of platforms; they only want to maximize eyeballs for the ads. Whereas google, incredibly, had to establish itself as better than the competition at providing quality pages.

Yeah, what is the insight though as to why the difference? A social platform and Google both rely on active users, visits and time on site. Both make their money by selling ads. Both risk losing users if their algorithm sucks. Yet they tune their algorithms differently.

On reflection, two factors come to mind:

1) Social content is inherently emotional - people come to the platform get a dose or three of dopamine. Search is unemotional in that way, people are only looking for accurate information. In the way that Wikipedia straddles the line between dopamine-driven content and search information, I wonder what Wikipedia would look like if it had ads on it?

2) Social ads are built for reach and impressions, not clicks (this is changing though), while search ads are built for clicks off-platform

3. Network effect / lockin. People don't want 2 social networks, and they have to move with their friends.

4. With search, you know what info you want. With social, you are looking to be told what is important.

> virality matters more than how good the thing you're marketing actually is

And people have reverse engineered how viral content on the Internet spreads, and there's entire playbooks on how content can go viral. Things like:

- Is it short and quotable?

- Does it trigger an emotional reaction?

- Is it recent or related to current events?

- Does it spark outrage?

- Is it novel?

- Is the author credible and do they have a large following?

Basically any viral tweet are all those.

Or also many of the points made extensively in the actual linked article.

> - Does it spark outrage?

Feeding the outrage machine seems to work well.

AI cat videos for the win.

I knew you mean chicken videos, but whatevs.

These are some circumlocutious explanations on how and why platform owners have tended to implemen recommendation algorithms that drive content to their preferred creators:

> "They’re driven by incentives to earn engagement and amplification on their own platforms. This means they’re unlikely to amplify, reference, or publish your work unless there’s an obvious connection to that goal."

Translation: Their revenue is driven largely by advertising revenue, and upsetting advertisers is bad for the bottom line. Issue: how consolidated is the advertising market? They're selling services. So how many buyers are there? If there's just one buyer, that's called monopsony, and the buyer can exercise all kinds of control.

> "They have audiences with affinities and preferences of their own, and unless your work resonates with both the amplifier and their audience, you’ll struggle to get the share."

As we've seen, a major interested audience is the local authoritarian state power, which wants to amplify state-produced propaganda while censoring a wide variety of content it views as inimical to its interests. This is not just a theme in China, as the current RESTRICT Act push by Congress and the White House demonstrates.

Now, if the corporate interests buying advertising are joined at the hip to the government authority pushing propaganda and censorship, well... the only content that will get amplified is the bland neutral drivel that doesn't displease either party.

Sure, there's still a market for high-quality content that's driven by popular audience interest - but it's getting to be a bit narrow in scope, isn't it? More and more topics have become tripwires for cancellation bombs.

> the only content that will get amplified is the bland neutral drivel that doesn't displease either party.

That is comically contrary to most of engagement on social networks. Social networks are pushing people to civil wars around the world.

Excellent piece for content creators wanting more eyeballs but perhaps a little naive on what triggers virality (hint: sadly it’s not a meritocracy)

Its literally the point of the article, as well as it's title. Perhaps you should try reading the material - It's clearly a title about marketing, and looking at the article, it's about marketing.

I'm not taking either of your sides in this mini-debate, but I clicked on this article because I thought it would be about amplifiers, electronic circuits, for a specialized purpose

> Perhaps you should try reading the material

I like this HN guideline:

> "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

Sadly, HN guidelines strongly prefer decontextualized titles that mislead HN users more than they mislead viewers at the source