Remember, our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect. We read these articles with different eyes. There are people who are the real audience and salivate when they read these sentiments.

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MarkusQ 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Who's making money off our misery exactly?

I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful).

But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot. How is that supposed to work? Are they secretly feeding creatures from the 4th dimension by harvesting misery or something?

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vinyl7 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Emotionally charged headlines generate clicks, and in 2026 displaying ads is the primary source of income for all major companies

	▲	MarkusQ 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right, that was in my list. That's a clear case of the misery being incidental / collateral damage.

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s1artibartfast 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Advertisers make money on clicks, and content creators get a cut. This is the backbone that the entire internet operates on.

Fear is the best driver of attention and clicks.

Someone can choose to pass on a light-hearted fun article. If they feel their life or the fate of the universe is in the balance, they will read it.

There isn't some evil mastermind behind it, just the banal economic incentives and evolutionary psychology.

Edit: by way of example, when every woman I know got pregnant, their social media instantly filled up with stories about dead babies. Nobody hard coded that, but the algorithm picked up on the fact that pregnant women will pay attention to stories of dead babies. After all, it is incredibly heartbreaking and the next Tick Tock might include the fact that will save their own baby.

It takes a lot of self-awareness to say "while I might learn information that saves my baby, that is incredibly unlikely so I will refuse to watch this 30 sec video or read this article"

	▲	MarkusQ 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That was my point exactly. There isn't some evil mastermind behind it--at least, in the click-case; in the psyops or vote-for-us! cases there might sort of be, but even there they aren't profiting from the misery per se.

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bdjdjdjdh 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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