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.
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?
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"
Impressive work, but surely there were suspicions?
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.
They choose sweet and salty fats in the real world and they choose things that make them feel the strongest emotion online. The system based on consumer choice delivers.
> But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot.
That’s a curious one. I think it’d be healthier if you reflect on why you perceive it that way.
When I'm trying to model a situation I consider a wide variety of possible explanations, and then rank them by how well they fit the facts. I also note when someone is trying to push a narrative on me, and consider what might make them do that. I also watch out for instances of trope-thinking, where the explanation is just a pattern match to some other situation, and am careful to distinguish cases where the exemplar is fictional (thus the B-movie tag above).
And thanks for your expressed concern about my mental health!
On the other hand investors benefit when they competitors are crashing.
For many labor is just expensive cost running company - I can see how some people salivate