“A corpus of academic research compares the powers of positive and negative feedback, but that is not the key question for the design of commercial social media platforms, which are primarily concerned with reducing costs and increasing performance, thereby maximizing profit. Whether or not positive feedback might in theory be more effective in certain cases, negative feedback turns out to be the bargain feedback, the best choice for business, so it appears more often in social media.
Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax.
This is true in real life, but it is even more true in the flattened light of algorithms.
There is no evil genius seated in a cubicle in a social media company performing calculations and deciding that making people feel bad is more “engaging” and therefore more profitable than making them feel good. Or at least, I’ve never met or heard of such a person.
The prime directive to be engaging reinforces itself, and no one even notices that negative emotions are being amplified more than positive ones.
Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement, and yet the result is an unnatural global amplification of the “easy” emotions, which happen to be the negative ones.“
Jaron Lanier – Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts p.18
