Fuck the Neon God

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made...
-Disturbed, Sound of Silence

Pornhub, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok, Tinder, Twitch...

They all have one thing in common. The devil that spawned out of simple economic calculations. It's called Recommendations.

It's the one algorithm every social platform has to use if they want to stand a chance in the fight for our attention. There is no objectivity on these platforms. The moment you visit one of them the AI awakes and loads up your version of the website. (To a degree even when you delete cookies and private browse)
It's like an invisible voodoo doll that looks like your taste. Every time you click a link or hover on something, the doll gains another hair, another piece of clothing. You never see what's actually new on Twitter. You never see what "most people watch" on Pornhub. You see what the AI thinks you most want to watch. And it does that by lumping you in with millions of other voodoo dolls that are similar to yours. So it's always multiple steps ahead of you and reshaping your taste in the process.

That's why Pornhub has gotten more and more nasty. It's not that you're naturally that nasty, Pornhub's AI just realized that that's what gets your attention the longest.
That's why Youtube is littered with conspiracy videos. It's not that you're naturally a nut. You were just curious and suddenly you've watched 50 videos about the flat earth and now the world looks different.
That's why Instagram does nothing about its (probably) 50% soft porn content. It's not that you opened the app to see some cleavage. But once you saw it you couldn't help but look.
That's why Twitter is littered with outrageous comments. It's not that the platform is filled with assholes, but they are who you like to read about the most.

These companies don't do that because they're evil. They just want to make money and to compete they gotta do what they gotta do. And that's to get the most direct access to the deepest parts of our brain stem. Because that's the most efficient way to keep you watching for way way longer than you actually planned to which allows them to increase their ad revenue by god knows how much.

Fuck the neon god. I'm not saying don't use social platforms. I'm saying understand that they use unfair weapons against you without telling you a word about how viciously effective they are at turning you into an addict.

So the next time you see that very exciting looking 2min video in the recommendations, made by nice people with no evil intent, know that it's the voodoo doll staring at you. Offering you another candy, for one purpose and one purpose only. To keep you just a little bit longer..