mossyfawnron

When I was a teenager, I would watch things and not scroll away. No matter what it was, it was like someone was jingling car keys in front of my face and I would just watch mindlessly.

Empty “funny” memes, anger-inducing photos, ill-willed reaction videos, actual gore, and just media that has no purpose other than to have eyeballs on it.

I brought this up with my dad today. He said there was something similar happening back in the day in American households… he said, “Everyone would go home from work, everyone would watch a show, then go to bed, wake up the next morning, and talk about it at work.” And repeat. That used to be the way media had a vice grip on us. Nowadays, it’s worse. It’s now tailored for you. It’s called the Internet!

Back to being a teen; I would watch no matter what the media I was consuming made me feel. Most times it would mane me feel fine, but sometimes, it would make me feel scared and dreadful, like watching gory awful videos that I felt like I couldn’t look away from.

Nowadays I practice more mindful consumption to preserve my mental health. If I see something that has a sensitive content warning, I now scroll away despite my morbid curiosity screaming at me to watch it. I think this has rubbed off on other media I consume, like I now scroll away from content that isn’t interesting to me or will grow me as a person. I’m trying to avoid mindless media now more than ever.

But! Internet algorithms are meant to keep a vice grip on your attention, so this is extremely difficult as algorithms get even smarter! “The further you fall the better they get at sucking you in,” my dad said. Apps trap you by adjusting the content they feed you to your interests. And when they show you something weird you don’t want to watch, and you watch it anyway, the AI algorithm thinks you enjoyed it and tries to show you more of it. It’s really hard to escape. Especially if you don’t know what to look for!

There’s something I call “engagement bait”, which are posts that are purposefully infuriating, or those posts that ask you to continue an ongoing content train. Content trains can be “ruin a song by adding the word ‘moist’ into the title!!” for example. Just mindless nonsense that asks for you to engage with it, for no reason. You’re not getting anything out of adding the word moist to a song title. You’re just giving this random internet user more engagement and boosting their ego by giving them fake internet points. And when you interact with that, your algorithm will feed you more pointless content just like it. It’s a vicious cycle! Breaking this cycle can start with just recognizing it and scrolling away with intent.

Going back to engagement bait, like I said, it can also be posts that infuriate you (whether mildly or strongly). They serve no other purpose than to make you enraged and comment on how enraging it is. I used to be really into r/mildlyinfuriating, r/extremelyinfuriating, and other similar engagement bait subreddits. I have since realized that following them isn’t productive at all, in any sense, so I left. I only subscribe to subreddits of topics I care about, like bands and games I’m into and like-minded communities.

I’m breaking my own cycle, in little ways. If you can pinpoint where you are falling victim to engagement bait and content that isn’t worth your time, you can get closer to reaching your true potential.