Engagement Farming: A Disease of the Modern Internet

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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.