I looked over at fedinsfw and all I could think of was the titles’ attempts at being provocative or enticing and how it just seems really…lame? I’m ace so this whole subset of the site really does nothing for me.
My shower thought is just about responding to the titles neutrally.
For examples:
“Just stretching, don’t mind me”;
“oh, sorry; as you were, then. Sorry to interrupt.”
“If I sent you this by accident, what would you reply?”
“Hey I don’t think I’m the one you meant to send this to”
Asian girl waiting for your orders…
“Can I get two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip…”
Do people really get turned on by such things, or is it more that the people posting them just have to put something in the title?
They are engagement bait, all over NSFW reddit as well. If you reply, regardless of it being positive or negative, they win.
Is it still really a win for them here on Lemmy where such algorithms are, to the best of my knowledge, non-existent?
No, the algorithms are always there - otherwise, there is no “feed”. It’s just that the algorithms here have no hidden weights to drive engagement towards specific topics/posts. Not that it can’t still be manipulated, but that’s often detectable behind the scenes, too.
Probably yes? We do have some algorithms, “sort by hot”, “sort by active”, etc, so there is value to getting to the top of those lists.
sort by scaled is my current setting. To my understanding from the description (I forgot where it’s described) it is sort by hot but taking into account the size of the community of a post and put it up more the smaller the community is.
I think so personally, because it’s still engagement and I’m assuming it probably contributes to the MAU number which could in turn attract more users
Any intentional choice made to capture human attention functions as an algorithm.
For instance, when a creator posts an intentionally silly title, it triggers a predictable urge in users to comment on that silliness. This deliberate cause-and-effect cycle means the creator’s strategy itself is the engagement-driving algorithm. A good example of this human-designed system is ragebaiting which systematically uses manufactured outrage to multiply views and comments