Maintaining the rage bait of the new content pollution
Discover more from Unmade: media and marketing news
Maintaining the rage bait of the new content pollution
Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade. Today: Is AI behind the rise of rage-inducing low value content? And Seven crawls back above a half billion dollar market cap.
The press releases don’t give you the full story. Read our analysis instead. Only Unmade’s paying members get access to the full archive of our original, independent content.
Join today.
Rage bait, stupid food and AI inanities.
Tim Burrowes writes:
For almost as long social media has existed, people have been complaining about the decline of social media. And I’m sure they will in another decade too. Those GoJo immersive smells just won’t be as good as they were.
But in the meantime, we have a new double decline to live with. There are two new phenomena bubbling up: Content inauthentically created by humans to provoke a reaction; and content inauthentically created by AI to generate engagement. And the two are beginning to meet in the middle.
That’s annoying for users and challenging for content marketers trying to decide whether they even want to be on the engagement train any longer.
Let’s start with the rage bait.
Like, I suspect, most people, I no longer go to a single platform to extract my social media joy. Or perhaps more accurately, my focus is now stolen by multiple platforms.
Over the last few months a whole new means of elevating stress levels has emerged. It comes from hugely engaging posts in which the comments below are then united in their anger at the content.
This is increasingly content deliberately engineered to create exactly that reaction. At first glance the poster might be taken to be sincere, particularly by those who don’t think too hard about it.
Whole sub genres are emerging.
One example is the “stupid food” movement, captured on the r/StupidFood subreddit.
Much of it originates on TikTok before metastasising onto reels on Facebook and Instagram, and then onwards to Reddit.
Ostensibly, these are influencers cluelessly offering dreadful cooking hacks. But for the most part, it’s knowingly dreadful, unacknowledged because the engagement comes in the debate. It’s not quite satire - it’s too cynical for that.
It makes the commenters furious as they rush to argue that nobody could be that stupid. Exactly.
Even more toxic come niche-within-a-niche reels designed to foster annoyance at fake DJs. They’ll upload footage of a glamorous woman on the decks at a club in Ibiza or similar, obviously pretending to mix while she plays a pre-loaded set via her laptop. The poster will play it straight, expressing their admiration at her abilities, leaving it to the comment thread to call out the obvious fakery. Few will have the self awareness to realise their rage has been baited.
And another form of rage bait originates within Reddit itself. Much of the platform’s Am I the Asshole subreddit - in which readers are asked to decide who is in the wrong - is now made of stories where the author is so clearly the asshole, that the angry YTA replies are inevitable.
For some of those posters, the attraction may be the weird satisfaction of internet points. But for others there’s a more material reason. Reddit accounts with high engagement can be sold to spammers.
Even more noticeable recently is the flatness to many of those AITA posts. There’s a sameness to them that feels like they’ve been created by ChatGPT or similar.
We’re starting to see the pollution of low value AI generated content creep into the world. And of course, once it ends up on Reddit, it will end up as training for future generations of large language models. Digital cannibalism.
Speaking of AI content generation, LinkedIn has started to offer users the option of giving it a quick prompt and letting the robot take care of the rest. Insincere platitudes are moving to a whole new level.
Marketing columnist Mark Ritson rang the alarm last week:
“The most famous social network in business is now testing new AI functionality that allows managers to use generative artificial intelligence to write posts on the platform. You read that right. A user can bang out the first quick 30 words of a post and then a vacuous, generic machine takes over and adds the remaining 20 or 30 paragraphs and publishes the post. Brilliant! What could possibly go wrong?
“Surely at some level of LinkedIn’s executive hierarchy this was flagged as an existential threat? Even a false allegation that your platform is populated by bots is a dangerous, possibly fatal situation. But having a company spend time and money to develop a tool to enable human users to step out of their own social posts boggles the mind. And then to openly promote this tool to the world boggles it to another level.”
He’s correct of course.
Surely LinkedIn can’t be that stupid? It’s almost like they’re trying to rage bait us.
Mixed fortunes on the Unmade Index as Seven bounces
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
The Unmade Index, which measures how ASX-listed media and marketing stocks perform on a daily basis, nudged back into the green on Tuesday, led by a jump in Seven’s performance. The index rose 0.21% yesterday to land at 636.7 points.
Seven West Media was the clear winner of the day, rising 6.56% to take its market capitalisation back above half a billion dollars. However, SWM’s share price is still off by almost 20% for the month.
Enero Group came in second with 5.31% lift.
ARN Media was the leading casualty of the day. It fell 3.64% while audio competitor Southern Cross Austereo followed suit with a 2.63% fall.
Ooh Media dropped 1.70%, and the famously embattled The Market Herald also fell 1.69%.
Time to leave you to your Wednesday.
I’m about to board JQ746 out of Launceston for this afternoon’s Nine Upfronts.
And we’ll be back tomorrow with an audio-led edition of Unmade, in which I talk to Tony Simmons, founder of Sonnant, about how he is building one of Australia’s most interesting audio tech players.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
Maintaining the rage bait of the new content pollution
Great observations Tim. With the loss of Facebook traffic, web content businesses were already gone. Now with AI-generated pap, even non-commercial web is gone too, because your content won't be found. And it's extending within social. This is a poison like water - seems innocuous, but the flood is coming.
Enjoyable piece, Tim. Enjoyable, but I share your frustration.
Is it too impolitic to mention that numerous mainstream legacy media, and one in particular, have been using the rage bait tactic for some time as part of their general angertainment strategy and need to cultivate engagement?