#engagement bait

[alex51324]

Help?

I need a screenshot of a really blatant engagement bait item for an information literacy session I'm teaching, and now that I need one, Facebook isn't giving me any*.

I had in mind one of the kind that's a really dumb trivia questions--"there are no US states that begin and end with the same letter," or "Only really smart people can name five animals that start with the letter M," that kind of thing--but I could rework my text to use something else.

So if you see anything like that in the next day or so, can you do me a favor and take a screenshot? Just paste it into the replies, and I can copy it out of there.

(*It's giving me bad AI photos of patriotic subjects instead, because I fell for it and clicked into one to see if anyone had commented on how several of the US flags shown had two fields of stars.)

[hotpikmin]

which 1 r u (this is engagement bait )

[toontwink]

+1 note on this post = +1 inch on my peanis

[burgerror]

we need to start gatekeeping the division symbol we used back in like grade 3 nobody fucking uses it except for morons looking to engage in interaction bait because nobody knows how to use PEMDAS/BEDMAS/whatever. just use a fraction you Dumb Cunt

shit like this pisses me the Fuck Off if i ever catch you posting this shit i will fucking kill you dead

[critical-skeptic]

The AI Bait Farm: Social Media’s Death Spiral Toward a “Dead Internet”

Social media, once hailed as the digital agora—a global forum for connection, community, and expression—is now collapsing under its own weight. What we’re seeing isn’t just the rise of engagement bait or low-effort content farming; we’re witnessing the systematic erosion of authenticity, creativity, and relevance in real time. A plague of AI-generated imagery, emotionally manipulative captions, and algorithmic engagement farming has turned platforms like Facebook into breeding grounds for digital junk food: empty calories designed to elicit clicks, not meaningful interaction.

It’s tempting to dismiss these posts as benign annoyances, but that would underestimate the scale of the problem. These aren’t isolated gimmicks but symptoms of a much larger trend that risks accelerating the so-called “Dead Internet Theory.” And while this theory may sound like dystopian hyperbole, the patterns emerging are impossible to ignore.

What’s Happening Right Now?

Scroll any social media feed, and you’ll encounter the same formulaic garbage on repeat:

Emotionally Charged AI-Generated Content: Glamorous “old” women, impossibly muscular veterans, or attractive models in bizarrely curated patriotic or religious contexts. These images aren’t just unrealistic—they’re uncanny, almost dreamlike, betraying their machine-made origins. The posts are paired with captions like “God bless veterans 🇺🇸,” or “My husband just called me fat… Should I leave him?”—phrases designed to spark outrage or sympathy and lure you into engaging.

Engagement Loops: The visible caption is always vague or incomplete, forcing curiosity-clicks. Comments are flooded with spam or scam accounts promoting phishing links, further eroding trust and degrading the space.

Virality via Exploitation: These posts prey on universal human emotions—empathy, nationalism, anger, or intrigue. But their purpose isn’t to inspire or connect; it’s to hijack your attention, feeding the algorithmic gods who reward viral reach with ad revenue or data exploitation.

Proliferation of Bots and Bad Actors: Many of these accounts are entirely fake—AI-created personas operated by bot farms or individuals running automated content machines. Their purpose isn’t just engagement; it’s often outright malicious, funneling traffic to scams or phishing attempts.

The Connection to “Dead Internet Theory”

The Dead Internet Theory suggests that much of the content we interact with online is no longer produced by humans but by bots, algorithms, and automated systems. According to this idea, the internet as we know it is no longer a thriving ecosystem of organic human activity but an elaborate facade—an echo chamber of fake engagement designed to sustain platforms financially.

Here’s why this matters: platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are beginning to resemble the early symptoms of Dead Internet Theory in action. Just as spam and bots overtook chatrooms like Yahoo Messenger in the late 2000s, social media is now becoming a wasteland of fake interactions, auto-generated content, and meaningless noise. Back then, the spam crisis killed platforms overnight as users fled the sinking ship. Today, social media is far too entrenched in our lives to collapse outright—but it’s showing signs of terminal decay.

Why This Matters

Proliferation is Exploding: AI tools have made it absurdly easy to generate realistic images, plausible captions, and entire fake personas. What used to require a skilled designer or content creator can now be achieved by anyone with access to free tools. This democratization of fakery is flooding the internet at a scale unimaginable even five years ago.

Authenticity is Losing the War: Social media’s original value was its ability to connect real people and foster genuine conversations. When most of what you see is fake, the ability to trust anything erodes. Even legitimate content creators are overshadowed by bots churning out endless garbage.

Runaway Algorithmic Incentives: Platforms profit from engagement, no matter how low-quality it is. Every click on an AI-generated post boosts ad revenue and data collection. In a perverse way, platforms have no incentive to fix this problem because the garbage works. It keeps users scrolling and interacting, even if that interaction is meaningless.

Psychological Exhaustion: Fake content exploits human emotions, but the constant bombardment of manipulative bait is exhausting. Users disengage not just from the fake posts but from the platform itself. This creates a vicious cycle: as genuine users leave, bots and bad actors fill the void.

The Parallel to Chatroom Collapse: Yahoo Chat and similar platforms died when spam and bots overwhelmed the system. Users fled because the signal-to-noise ratio became unbearable. Social media risks the same fate—but on a global scale.

Where This Leads: The Dead Internet in Action

If unchecked, this runaway trend has clear consequences:

A Content Wasteland: As fake posts dominate feeds, genuine voices will be drowned out. Social media will lose its relevance as a platform for real interaction.

Hyper-Skepticism: As more content is exposed as fake, users will begin questioning everything—even legitimate posts. This erosion of trust has broader implications for how we engage with the internet as a whole.

Collapse of Platforms: While platforms like Facebook might be too big to fail outright, they risk becoming relics of a bygone era, replaced by smaller, niche platforms that prioritize authenticity (or so we hope).

What Can Be Done?

Demand Better Algorithms: Platforms need to prioritize authenticity over engagement, even at the cost of ad revenue. This means investing in better moderation tools to weed out bots and spam, rather than rewarding it.

Raise Awareness: Most users don’t realize how prolific and fake much of their feed is. Calling it out—not just with comments but through larger discussions—can help push the issue into the spotlight.

Support Genuine Content: Follow and engage with real creators, especially those calling out or exposing these trends. Visibility matters, and genuine content needs all the help it can get.

Educate Yourself: Learn to spot fake content. Look for subtle tells: overly smooth skin, incoherent details (like garbled name tags), or too-perfect lighting. The more you recognize these patterns, the less likely you are to fall for the bait.

Final Thoughts: A Warning Shot

Social media is heading down the same path as the chatrooms of old: a slow, suffocating decline into irrelevance. But unlike Yahoo Chat, which we abandoned without much consequence, social media is woven into the fabric of our lives. If it collapses—or worse, becomes an entirely “dead” internet of bots and fake engagement—the consequences for society are far-reaching.

What’s happening now isn’t inevitable, but it is accelerating. And unless platforms, users, and creators fight back against the onslaught of AI spam and engagement farming, we’ll find ourselves living in a digital wasteland, endlessly scrolling through meaningless noise. The time to act is now—before the last vestiges of authenticity are buried under a pile of algorithmic garbage.

[amalgamationillustration]

If anyone ever asks what trauma dumping and/or 'whataboutme-ism' is, I'm going to show them this post I saw on threads.

Like I am absolutely sorry that you went through this but hijacking someone's engagement bait post about how people prefer their boiled eggs to talk about your childhood abuse feels like the most out of pocket insanity I've ever seen.

We have stopped knowing how to converse with one another in a normal way.

Also 5 minutes is the superior egg to me.

[redeemablesnake]

Complaining about Threads #2

Somebody pointed this shit out one time and now I get one post per day on my feed about it because people on Threads just farm existing crap over and over again. I’m SURE this was first pointed out on Twitter then just made its way over.

By the way, it’s not even a valid point. People act like hitting Erase Disk immediately does a secure wipe, locks down your computer while it does it, sets the disk on fire, and charges you $80 per megabyte wiped as a data processing fee. The “…” means that it opens a dialogue. You can just hit… cancel. Or whatever. I don’t feel like booting up a Mac to test lol

It also isn’t that weird of a pairing. Both have to do with “removal” of the disk - ejecting is removing it from your computer, erasing is removing the data from the disk. I get that ejecting is more common and it’s just a funny thing to have that next to a total wipe but the more obnoxiously worded instances of this post have been like “REPLY IF YOU THINK APPLE BAD AND GOING TO CAUSE DATA LOSS???”

But OK yeah main point, it wouldn’t bother me as much if people would just stop spamming it

[cookie-nom-nom]

THE LAMB OF GOD???

[separatist-apologist]

Genuinely, and I mean this kindly, but learning to recognize bait and not engaging with it will change your fandom experience.

[wavetapper]

rb this and tag your favourite soundtracks! they can be anything like games or movies or shows or whatever i wanna know what the best ones are 👀

[kurawastaken]

i miss your oracle art :(

There she is!

[bitchfitch]

Wait thats a legitimate question

if youre normal about dog training and not into shock collars as a sex thing but know someone who would buy one for either reason, select that option, I want this as biased and unreliable as possible bc that will be funny. Commit to the bit with me.

this is to get an extremely biased data point about whether more shock collars are being bought for dog behavioral issues, or for people with specific fetishes.

reblog for reach <3

[critical-skeptic]

Crushing Reason: How Capitalism Destroys Truth

Profit Over Truth

At the heart of all of this is capitalism, and its relentless need to convert attention into profit. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others are engineered not to inform, educate, or promote critical thinking—they're designed to harvest engagement at any cost. Every like, share, comment, and laugh reaction is monetized, and the quality of that interaction is secondary to the quantity.

The capitalist framework demands growth and profit maximization, which means keeping users on the platform as long as possible. This requires content that provokes emotional responses—outrage, laughter, indignation, and tribalistic affirmation. It’s why ignorance, pseudo-science, and anti-intellectualism thrive: they are far easier to digest and engage with than nuanced, fact-based, critical analysis.

Ignorance sells, and anti-intellectualism is simply more profitable than deep discourse. The shallow, sensationalized nature of clickbait and baseless opinions doesn't require critical engagement. Instead, it encourages immediate, reflexive reactions, which drive up user engagement, even if it’s at the cost of amplifying dangerous, factually incorrect, or outright harmful ideas. In this system, your intelligent critique or fact-checking is not just undervalued—it’s actively suppressed because it slows down the profit machine.

Consumerism and The Race to the Bottom

This dovetails directly into consumerism. Just as capitalism thrives on selling products people don’t need, it also thrives on selling opinions people think they need. The average consumer of social media isn’t looking for truth—they’re looking for validation. They don’t seek out arguments that challenge their beliefs; they seek out opinions that reinforce them. Platforms know this, and they use algorithms to feed users an endless stream of content that affirms their preconceptions, no matter how wrongheaded or dangerous those preconceptions might be.

This is how anti-intellectualism flourishes: the platform is simply feeding the consumers what they want. Critical thought, nuance, and science demand effort and cognitive engagement. Ignorant sound bites and memes demand nothing more than knee-jerk reactions, which are much easier to consume in a distracted, consumer-driven world. Just as fast food is easier to sell than a balanced meal, bad ideas are easier to sell than well-researched ones. This is consumerism at its core—the elevation of ease, convenience, and profit over substance.

The Failure of Science and Critical Thought

Here’s where things become even more insidious. You’d think that in an era of unprecedented access to information, critical thought and scientific understanding would be at an all-time high. Yet, the opposite is true. Science, which should be the bedrock of our societal understanding, has failed to counteract the tide of anti-intellectualism and ignorance. This failure isn’t just on social media; it’s systemic.

Science has largely retreated into academia, often failing to engage with the public in a meaningful or accessible way. Meanwhile, anti-intellectualism has weaponized simplicity, providing easy answers to complex problems. Where science says, “This is complicated and requires understanding,” anti-intellectualism says, “Here’s a meme that tells you everything you need to know.” The very nature of scientific rigor—slow, methodical, and careful—is at odds with the instant gratification culture that dominates today.

Moreover, many scientists and intellectuals have failed to defend their work against the onslaught of misinformation, often too reticent to enter the public fray or bogged down by the fear of losing funding or reputation if they speak too loudly. This leaves a vacuum for charlatans, pseudoscientists, and snake-oil salesmen to fill. Critical thought is left fighting from the sidelines, trying to survive in a landscape that increasingly rewards loud voices over smart ones.

Anti-Intellectualism as a Symptom of Broader Decay

Anti-intellectualism thrives in this environment because it gives people what they want: simple answers, easily digestible content, and—perhaps most importantly—freedom from having to admit they might be wrong. Admitting intellectual humility is hard work; it’s uncomfortable. It’s much easier to dismiss experts, claim a conspiracy, or attack the person rather than the argument. And so, anti-intellectualism disguises itself as 'common sense' and sells itself as an alternative to those “elitist scientists” who are “out of touch with the real world.”

In reality, anti-intellectualism is little more than a defense mechanism for the insecure, and it preys on those who are vulnerable to cognitive bias. The Dunning-Kruger effect—the very thing you pointed out—isn’t just a theory, it’s the lifeblood of anti-intellectualism. People who lack the tools to understand complex topics are the most confident in their incorrectness. Social media platforms don't just allow this; they actively promote it because ignorance stokes engagement, and engagement fuels revenue.

Moderation Tools: A Broken System

But if all of this wasn’t bad enough, let’s talk about the tools that are supposedly meant to manage the chaos—moderation. These systems are flawed from the ground up, often marketed as neutral and automated, yet they disproportionately punish the wrong targets. When your content calls out the idiocy or factual inaccuracies of another user, you’re more likely to get flagged or banned than the original poster. This isn’t just an unfortunate side effect—it’s a consequence of poorly designed, automated moderation systems that can’t distinguish between harassment and valid critique.

Facebook’s moderation, for example, often works in the favor of those perpetuating ignorance. Mass reporting, review bombing, and algorithmic detection don’t have the nuance to differentiate between trolling and someone aggressively defending facts. The system treats all conflict as equally bad, and in doing so, it allows the loudest, most ignorant voices to persist unchallenged. Worse, it punishes the voices that try to fight back, creating an environment where any attempt to uphold intellectual standards is viewed as hostile or aggressive.

This creates a perfect storm where ignorance is not only tolerated but protected. The tools that should be used to elevate discourse are instead wielded as blunt instruments to suppress dissent—dissent from ignorance, mind you, not dissent from authority.

Pseudo-Science and Equal Differentiation: A False Balance

One of the most toxic aspects of this entire system is the way it treats pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism as 'differing opinions.' This is a failure on a societal level. Not all opinions are equal. Not all voices deserve the same weight. Yet, in the name of 'free speech' and 'open dialogue,' social media platforms insist on giving equal space to ideas that should be relegated to the fringes. The false equivalence between legitimate science and pseudoscience is one of the most dangerous outcomes of this.

In reality, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, flat-earthers, and conspiracy theorists should be marginalized and ridiculed, not platformed as if their viewpoints have merit. When a platform gives a climate change denial post equal weight to a scientific paper, it does more than just muddy the waters—it actively contributes to the erosion of truth. It’s not a 'differing opinion'; it’s a high offense against logic and reason, and it should be treated as such. Yet, the platform’s need for 'engagement' means these dangerous views are kept in circulation, polluting the public discourse and lowering the intellectual standards of the entire user base.

The Reward for Combating Ignorance

Instead of punishing voices like yours, platforms should be rewarding them. The defense of reason, science, and critical thought is a public service. It’s what keeps society tethered to reality. Yet, in this twisted landscape, fighting back against ignorance isn’t rewarded—it’s penalized. The very people who should be elevated for calling out bullshit are the ones most likely to get silenced.

In an ideal world, platforms would take an active role in curating truth and holding ignorance accountable. The fact-checkers wouldn’t just slap disclaimers on posts—they’d remove falsehoods entirely. Moderation wouldn’t be used to suppress intellectual debate; it would be used to eliminate ignorance at the root. But that’s not profitable, is it? The truth doesn’t sell as well as lies do. Until the very foundation of these platforms shifts—from engagement-driven capitalism to truth-driven curation—ignorance will continue to thrive.

[larachelledrawsfe]

A very, very late FE anniversary scribble.

[fjordfolk]

[cyber-therian]

EVERYONE BLOCK @.CONSERVATIVEZOOMER

Pt: Everyone block @.conservativezoomer

The troll is back, they just want to hurt

you and make you mad. Do not interact.

Do not engage. For the sake of your

community block and give this user NO

ATTENTION. Report for hate speech or

harassment if you are able to, but be

cautious.

CW FOR: pedophilia, ableist slurs and beliefs, racist slurs and beliefs, transphobic slurs and beliefs, pro-Israel content, anti-Palestine content, sysphobic content, fake-claiming, and so much more.

KEEP YOURSELF AND YOUR COMMUNITY SAFE! BLOCK AND MOVE ON