Enragement Farming

https://skinnedcartree.com/engagement-farming-on-social-media

https://www.vanguardngr.com/2024/04/musk-to-suspend-x-accounts-involved-in-engagement-farming/amp/

And in addition to the Vanguard article linked there’s a gazillion more media articles covering Musk’s claim about his plans to crack down on engagement farming on Twixter.  Claims I find dubious as his actions compared to what he says align only briefly as his lack of attention span makes that alignment shorter than the half life of lithium 4.

Let’s start with some crappy anecdotal evidence, three stories of mine.  The last two are somewhat related.

1)  One of the reasons I’ve talked about internet strategy games is to cover how instead of concentrating on the game there are aspects in the framework to encourage multiplayer activity.  Alliances, or you’re a member of a team of adventurers and such.  Farming in the context of these games is the person that gets the bright idea to create multiple accounts (invariably against the rules) to interact only with themselves.  A game where you have land and mineral resources, the farm is a throwaway - destined for a short life.  Growing without any substantial defense and the farmer attacks themselves to swallow the resources for his main account.  Social media engagement farming akin to this is like a sock puppet account promoting how the main grifter account is the bestest most truthiest information available without any regards to how they are putting out inconsistent information.  “I see you are interested in the gematria of that bridge collapsing.  Check out Zachary Hubbard to gamble on sports.”

2)  I have a person that makes me want to schedule a different time to show up at the laundromat.  He screams into his phone.  The other party, most often the same woman, is on the speaker.  And he’s done odd things like accusing me of avoiding him when I really just wanted to leave to fill up my gas tank during the wash cycle and not holding the door for him.  Unconcerned that I had a laundry bag full of clothes to struggle with while opening the door for myself.  The intent is to create engagement when I don’t want anything to do with him, especially since his actions prove he’s an attention whore.

3)  I know someone with a deep, booming baritone voice that knows he has that loud voice.  And he can’t dial it back while I’m on a business call.  It gets tiresome to remind him that he needs to tone it down.  He likes to go to bars and he likes to talk about his political views.  I’m sure he’s grown accustomed to being loud getting him extra attention.  His political views are polluted by confirmation bias.  Quite literally stopping one speech about how the government needs to intervene about one topic then he next sentence segues to how the government needs to let the states decide marijuana legislation.

Those last two, there isn’t a need to consciously make an effort to farm for engagement.  Some people’s psychological make up leads them to do it just because they like attention and fall back on what worked in the past.

Thanks to the grifter economy on social media, engagement farming is more properly referred to as enragement farming.  They already know the highly polarized buttons to push.  They know about mass shootings, racism, censorship and all the other outrage porn topics.  

Engagement farming may be something like a long drawn out video cooking some weird concoction just to get people to post their opinion on how great or stupid they think it is.  Engagement farming can be the many gematria video makers that start every single video encouraging you to hit the like button because “it helps the algorithm spread the message”.  Engagement farming can be the guy that posts in an MLB recap video, “For every like I get to this post I’ll buy tickets to our team’s home game!”  Engagement farming can be the person who feels the need to claim your joke wasn’t funny regardless of hundreds of others hitting the like button and commenting that it was hilarious.  Engagement farming can be the person that posts the same innocuous and meaningless, “Have a blessed day” comment on the daily end of the world the Antichrist is here video.  Engagement farming can be the ever annoying, “First!” comment made by several people of which only one was truly first.  

Some of these people just want a reaction to the immediate situation before recency bias makes the video fade into obscurity.  Some of these people whether they are correct or not think it will cross pollinate and boost their own content which may or may not be similar.  I’ll like your sports decode, maybe you’ll send over some of your followers to scratch my back since I scratched yours and help out my blossoming rap music career!

And then there’s the bright idea that seeing that outrage porn is far more effective at getting attention.  Enragement farming appeals to those base instincts that an artificially created scapegoat to hate is getting people likes and views.  And then some of that starts to stick to a certain subset of people susceptible to being groomed into enjoying the attention so much that they keep at it without realizing that others don’t want their adult conversation being interrupted by off topic nonsense.

Gematria *could* be used for engagement farming.  But based on riding the coattails of the biggest grifters the biggest gematria leaders throw in an occasional engagement farming clickbait post amidst a sea of Enragement Farming.