#engagement-farming — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #engagement-farming, aggregated by home.social.
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Nebezpečné psychologické hry na Facebooku v podobě emocionálně laděného obsahu produkováného „content farms“ https://pepikhipik.com/2026/03/08/nebezpecne-psychologicke-hry-na-facebooku-v-podobe-emocionalne-ladeneho-obsahu-produkovaneho-content-farms/ #AI‑generovanéObrázky, #ContentFarms, #Deepfakes, #EngagementFarming, #Manipulace, #ManipulačníStrategie
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#LastSeen
Contrary to some scammy pages (e.g. on F💩cebook) that distribute fake AI-generated photos for dubious reasons (like #EngagementFarming), these are REAL photos.❝#LastSeen: Pictures of Nazi deportations is an international collaborative research project in which renowned institutions from the field of Holocaust research and education have joined forces to systematically compile, analyze, and digitally publish photographic images of Nazi deportations of Jews, Sinti and Roma, as well as victims of Nazi "euthanasia" programs.❞
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You can’t understand ‘AI slop’ without understanding engagement farming
This is a point which seemed so obvious to me I’m surprised to realise it does need to be spelled out. Rather than ‘AI slop’ being some exogenous factor which is now swamping previously functional social media platforms, we need to see it as an outcome of existing practices of engagement farming. The political economy of social platforms has over many year inculcated a strategic orientation towards engagement because of the direct monetary and indirect status rewards which come from maximising it. What it means in practice is using whatever techniques are available to maximise engagement with your content while minimising the cost. In essence it treats other people’s attention as a resource to be farmed, with the ‘farming’ being a matter of strategic action which makes it more likely their attention will be translated into engagement with specific content.
In practice this is almost painfully mundane. It’s a matter of tweaking the content and its framings in ways which are likely to increase engagement. When people say that the algorithm creates certain effects on platforms (e.g. increases the amount of emotive content) this is the missing step through which platform architectures bring about human action. It’s because strategic actors recognise the algorithm rewards certain things (or at least imagine they do, there’s loads of folk theory here) that they take create content intended to exploit that characteristic. There’s also directly preparing content in ways to appeal to individual actors without relying on the mediation of the algorithm. Indeed the most effective engagement farming involves speaking to both ‘audiences’ at the same time: producing content which directly grabs people and feels ‘authentic’ while also being optimised for algorithm distribution.
The flood of AI slop we now see on platforms reflects a shift in engagement farming practices. It’s now possible to do engagement farming effectively at scale because LLMs make content creation so easily. There’s also a disturbing lack of AI literacy sufficient to create attentional markets ripe for exploitation by AI-content which is startlingly obvious if you have any sense of what you’re looking for. The problem is the political economy of the social platform rather than the AI-content per se, even if in practice the two things run together. This matters because we can’t have a meaningful conversation about the problem of ‘AI slop’ without talking about how fundamentally broken social media platforms are.
#AI #AISlop #algorithmicFolkelore #algorithms #artificialIntelligence #engagementFarming #platformEconomics #politicalEconomy #SocialMedia #technology #visibility #writing
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PsyPost: Negativity drives engagement on political TikTok. “A new study published in Computers in Human Behavior suggests that political videos on TikTok that criticize opposing political parties and use emotionally charged or uncivil language tend to generate higher levels of engagement.”
https://rbfirehose.com/2025/10/18/psypost-negativity-drives-engagement-on-political-tiktok/
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Poynter: Some viral videos of Texas flooding might be fake. Here’s how to spot them.. “‘Engagement farming,’ or the use of deceptive tactics to boost social media interactions that could lead to financial benefit, is common after natural disasters.”
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Seamus Hughes/Court Watch talks about the massive engagement farming/information parasites out there (particularly on Instagram and X), where people repackage stuff from them and don't credit their work or link to them. (much like the AI companies are eating and regurgitating stuff without credit, as well).
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#bluesky, I don't even know but I quit #threads already because it was the 2nd worst... just crappy wannabes #engagementfarming . I'm so fucking happy most #X, threads and #bsky users can't even figure out how to get on #mastodon .... Mastodon onboarding is not a bug, it is a feature. #socialmedia
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What’s your OS of choice?
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I've been over on #Threads a little and find mostly #engagementFarming. I really cannot. Over here on #mastodon I find legitimate conversations.
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Read that post! A measure of how different #socialmedia environments deal with #controversy.
"The #Threads algorithm apparently surfaced my post in the feeds of a bunch of other people with a wholly different set of interests, who were—inexplicably to me—incredibly angry that I hadn’t provided any further context.
But the comments that really surprised me were the ones that accused me of #engagementfarming. Why would someone do this? Why would they assume that about me?"
https://werd.io/2024/threads-is-trading-trust-for-growth -
A thread on the #Southport riots misinfo and the incentives driving the platform digital asset market that played a role in one of the sites that legitimized it.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1822244897635577857.html
#OSINT #misinformation #UK #socialMedia #platforms #hacking #engagementFarming #greyMarket
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I wrote sort of recently about engagement farming, and how ridiculous, annoying, and bad it is. How there are people out there who will post things, not because they believe in it, think it, or like it, but because it’s what will get them the most clicks and views. Either because they believe it’ll bring in monetary gain, or because they have a severe addiction to the serotonin pump of getting likes in their notifications. And that, at the end of the day, it’s money, and lack thereof in our current society, that likely drives people to waste their time on the internet in this way.
In the past couple weeks, I’ve spent a little more time on Threads. The only reason I have an account on the platform is largely due in part to the fact that I was banned from what was my home on Mastodon at hackers.town after a little over three years. At the time, I had briefly sworn off Mastodon, until I realized that federated, open source social media is still probably the only road forward online, even if millions of people still haven’t convinced themselves that corporate social media is not good, and is completely designed to wear you down.
Bluesky is a different story. Their developers have decided to create a new protocol that … uh, well, doesn’t connect to anything but their own central server. And, after missing the mark about seven different times to garner mass amounts of users, I’m 99% sure Bluesky is not a healthy platform and will likely die out sometime in the near future.
Side-tracked thoughts on Bluesky aside, yes, even after writing a few times about the issues I have with Mastodon, and how some on the fediverse view creators and artists through an uncharitable, and sometimes nasty lens, I don’t think there is any other choice besides the inevitability of remaining on the fediverse.
Now, with all of my initial thoughts as to why I wanted to write this post out of the way, what exactly am I getting to?
In spending more time on Threads over the past couple weeks, and briefly viewing Twitter here and there, I’m noticing now that because of engagement farming, whether it be a tech bro posting a bad opinion for the sake of likes, or forty-seven different bot-like accounts on Threads copy/pasting each other, or posting empty questions: I personally feel like it’s becoming harder and harder to determine, on corporate social media, who’s being genuine, who’s sharing things they actually like and believe, and who’s just saying whatever for disingenuous reasons. Who on Threads, or Twitter, is replying to something you said with genuine thoughts, and opening conversation in good faith, and who’s intentionally fanning flames, and baiting you, and others, so that maybe in some mythical future, these corporate platforms pay them thousands of dollars.
And it’s in the past couple of days, I’ve realized, this is exactly why federated social media, run on software that is not designed and maintained by billionaires, is the only way you can meet and talk to people without having to sit for minutes wondering if a person is just using you for their own potential financial gain.
It’s making me feel like, despite having met a few cool people who are genuine on Threads, it’s probably best to keep corporate social media as a way to share things I’m doing, or working on, and almost nothing else.
I work a stressful job, I spend a lot of time at home relaxing, and recovering. I don’t have the mental … space, to wonder if I’m making a fool out of myself by interacting with someone who wasn’t being genuine. I’d rather not go through any of that. And then you have to worry about whether the person you’re interacting with is even real. Although, I’m pretty good at detecting AI generated photos and text, it can still sometimes slip by my bullshit-o-meter.
But, if I’m feeling like this about corporate social media, then it’s likely others are, too.
I see, all the time, people saying things like, “If Threads isn’t a good place to be, I guess there’s just no social media!” and things about Mastodon like “The only people who use that platform are tech obsessed dudes who hate women.” And, I cannot stress enough, despite some of my grievances with people on the platform, that is by and large not true, and hasn’t been true since 2017.
Are Mastodon servers that are set up entirely and only for shitposting annoying? Yes. Are Mastodon servers full of dudes who breathe stock options and tech trends loathsome? Yup. Are these two things a reason to subject yourself to the disingenuous slog of a social media feed on Threads, or Twitter, in the hopes that at some point, someone might say something genuine, or disprove the theory of the Dead Internet? No.
Time and time again, these websites: Threads, Twitter, Instagram, even TikTok, are themselves a stark reminder as to why these places are bad for your health. They don’t need any outside help to prove this. They are, by virtue of existing, a testament to their own volatility. And I keep writing about these things in hopes that more people will someday go, “Oh, yeah, you know what? Maybe I can put up with a few tech industry dudes who have bad opinions every now and then as opposed to every single person on my feed bullshitting for clicks.”
And that’s the sauce on that, chief.
I think, personally, I’m likely finished experimenting with corporate wasteland social media. It’s like, oh boy! I got 1000 followers on Threads! And, without a doubt, more than half of them are probably bots.
It may be harder to gain a following on Mastodon. There may be people with severe issues that you need to block immediately. There may be entire servers full of assholes and jerks–But the difference is, you do have the ability to completely erase them from existence, at least from your own point of view. I can’t really say the same for corporate social media, where reporting functions often lead to dubious or a lack of results. But hey, maybe that’s a topic for another time.
Until the next time.
#billionaires #corporate #engagementFarming #mastodon #socialMedia #threads #twitter
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Sitting here on a day off from work, not really gaming, not really doing much anything besides sipping a soda, and thinking about cooking up some noodles. There’s got to be something worthwhile to write about, at least, right? Not according to a large amount of people who use Twitter, Threads, and other forms of social media with engagement based algorithms (an algorithm that shows posts to users based on how many interactions a post gets).
You’ve seen it a million times, insincere question-asking or insincere posting, in-general. Wild claims, wild statements, some of which those who do this don’t even believe in, or agree with, all to garner as much engagement (attention, clicks) as possible. So they can … maybe sell you something? Maybe make some money from Elon Musk? Fulfill a superficial need to gain as many followers as possible and never interact with any of them whatsoever, or even post anything worth seeing, or reading.
Engagement farming is something that stems from clickbait, which comes from media organizations, such as any number of websites with a payroll and staff, titling their articles with teeth-grindingly annoying claims or statements that beg you to click to find the answer or fact they refuse to reveal in the headline. These many, many both fake and real article aggregators get paid via ads on their websites, so obviously that’s where they want your eyes to be (much to the dismay of literally everyone).
And I think you can trace click-baiting all the way back to the nineties with spam e-mails such as, “Open this or someone close to you will die,” or, “Your computer has a virus!”
Corporate social media, and by extension, corporate internet, is all in a battle royale, fight-to-the-death for your attention, and over the past decade it’s become a set of tactics that regular people (who view themselves as temporarily embarrassed celebrities) use to get you to click through to their profiles. To give them follows, and inadvertently increase their view and engagement statistics, which, if you haven’t heard, results in money in places like Twitter and Youtube. But it doesn’t even have to result in money. A lot of people deploy these types of tactics on corporate algorithm based social media just because they want to fulfill a vapid sense of celebrity status they wish they had (I could go on an entire separate rant about the problem with the existence of celebrities and millionaires, and the vomit-inducing culture of worship around them).
But are the people to blame? I mean, if corporate media has shoved this type of behavior down our throats for decades, is it of really any surprise that this has become one of the main ways people interact (or don’t interact) on social media? Our society demands you have money, or you starve. Our society worships celebrities, and fame … for no particular reason. It’s just the way things are (for now). So, I guess, of course you’re going to log onto social media and see everyone and their mom posting like a sociopath who doesn’t believe in anything, just to get another click out of strangers they’ve never met, and won’t ever care about.
And maybe I’m bitter, maybe I’m not any better than anyone else. I, of course, would love to make steady cash from the things I do online. But I’ve also never, ever been any good at using scummy tactics to trick people into showing me support through engagement (if you can even count that as support). I’ve never been good at writing clickbait.
In fact, I’ve gotten the most support from the work I do, by simply sharing it, and sometimes making things that are cool and good. It would be unfair to say that this is a skill a lot of people lack, and that’s why you see so much bot-like behavior coming from randoms who have no taste, or integrity.
Unless … they are all bots.
Nah, couldn’t be. But what is true, is that the act of engagement farming is a real problem, a real “disease” of the internet. And I can only hope that one day I can look at corporate social media once again without wanting to scrape my eyes out with a spoon and stab my ears with pencils.
https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/05/15/engagement-farming-a-disease-of-the-modern-internet/
#clickbait #engagementFarming #media #socialMedia #threads #twitter #youtube
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@coreysnipes @MissingThePt
There is no financial gain with engagement farming in the fediverse. So people only do it occasionally for the fun of it. No need to ban that. -
Got the bike tuned up a few days back. Service was great. But there's so a thing as overuse of text engagement engines. You know, I already said it was great and I'd happily recommend you. We don't need to become text BFFs -- especially when there's no human on the other side of this.
#bicycling
#engagementfarming -
Who's got the better backside?
Mastodon won't let me add a poll and a photo, so reply with your favorite and I'll report the totals at 21:00 Eastern.
#Birds #Birding #Nature #Backyard #Feeder #TrailCam #CameraTrap #Outside #Poll #Competition #Compare #Backside #Style #Vs #Versus #EngagementFarming #IdDoAPollIfICould