Sometimes you win by not playing.

Recently my feeds been awful, i mean more awful than it usually has been in the years since Cuck Rat took over. Now im not talking about the live streamed genocides and battlefields, that's awful but its an awful truth that bares witnessing.

Im talking about all the other slop, such a ferocious tide of it that it seems to have swept aside near every bit of actual human creation and thought that we once enjoyed so thoroughly here.

I know, i know "train your feed" and I had done so. But in this latest fools gold rush for engagement pay-outs yall have destroyed that. Because everyone i trained the feed to show me is now leaving comments so inane they may aswell be bots, on posts by accounts that are most likely actual bots, so now everyone's commenting on content even more mind numbing than their contributions. My following page is now the for you page, the for profit page, and i dont want to see any of it.

There was a time when id admire this steadfast determination to make a dollar and take a swing at misinformation online, but you must see that the landscape has changed. Honest online debate cannot be found in throwaway sentences under bad memes. You aren't really waging a war against idiotic influencers, rage bait, and AI slop. All you do is engage with it, propagating it on to more peoples pages, increasing the view count and snowballing the damn thing. You're doing exactly what they want, spending time and energy on them.

You're reducing yourself to repeated soundbites and we're all going deaf from the noise.

I get it, I do, any extra income helps, it really does. Christ I remember spending months performing mechanical Turk tasks for amazon once upon a time. Hardly an innocent or fulfilling task, training visual recognition models for fractions of a cent per input. But at the very least it served a purpose, and it didn't contribute to this vapid rage filled self indulgent form of "discussion" that has defined our online spaces, and now our physical ones as well.

But are those extra dollars a month really worth what you're putting yourself through. Not only are you willingly walking in to a black mirror episode where you scroll all day, the human fertilizer to a crop of falsehoods, lending legitimacy and visibility to an array of accounts many of which are aiming to sew division so as to support the profit margins of the most rich an influential. You are also poisoning your own feed by doing so. You're watering down the whisky you'll later drink all so someone above you can make more money.

And they'll keep moving those goalposts, that engagement criteria will keep climbing, its not profitable to have too many of you being paid. All the while the "work" they previously paid for is now being done for free as yourself and others pursue the "new" target.

So where does all this leave us. The base content is worse as ragebait, reactionary, absolutist content drives more engagement, the actual engagement is lower quality as its being churned out en masse and as in the former, the more inflammatory, the less nuanced, the better. The algorithm becomes increasingly focused on this content as its the most profitable (though im not sure how much worse it can get) and so we end up wit ha flywheel of idiocy, unrealised potential, and outrage.

The social landscape this creates is... well you've got eyes...

So maybe we win this one by not playing, by sticking to our guns, creating and commenting how we want to, not how an algorithm tells us its profitable to. We need to not be playing chess with pigeons, even if the pigeon breeder offers us a dollar for every 5 games we win.