It's impressing me more strongly than ever that the unethical way these bros went about designing social media (and fuck the psychologists/psychiatrists who must have abetted this) really worsened things for people globally by playing to extreme emotion all the time in order to drive traffic and thus drive ad revenue.

Extreme expressions, extreme overblown headlines (and often outright lies that sound more "exciting"), low attention span-catering in editing, vapid "feel good stories" to counter the constant stream of panic they also encourage, variable reinforcement scheme algorithms....

It's fucking awful and I really do think that for folks who use social media in more than occasional way, over decades, it's rewired us to some extent.

I was watching an informative short DW video and noticed how nearly every second featured some kind of cut or animation or "dutch angle" because they were too afraid to trust viewers to just remain there listening to factual info.