“The conventional logic of the entertainment industry was let's make stuff that people like and want to see. And that didn't even have to be good. … Algorithmically oriented entertainment is less concerned about whether someone likes something than whether they will watch them at all. Pleasure is as useful a reaction as disgust, confusion, yet bafflement. … As long as it's provoking a reaction of some kind and compelling someone to keep watching, one strong reaction is as good as another.”
sputnikintelligence.com
Asked whether microdrama view counts mean people like the shows or just that they capture attention on a feed, Kolitz, who reported a magazine cover story on the format, says algorithm-driven entertainment is built to provoke any reaction, not to please.
…often outrank like Netflix in the App Store, you know, on like phones. So there clearly is an audience of some kind. But, you know, that audience is, I think, in large part acquired just by spraying social media with advertisements. And that's a model that I think many are saying is unsustainable.
…errors racked up millions and millions of views. Does that mean that people liked it more than this really quality long read on a literary publication like The Baffler or something? Does that mean people liked it more? And I'm curious if you get the sense that this is like passive or active.
No, totally. I mean, I feel like, you know, the conventional logic of the entertainment industry was let's make stuff that people like and want to see. And that didn't even have to be good. I mean, a superhero movie or something. Something is not, I don't really watch any, but that at least those movies are made with the idea that there is an audience that will sit down and smile and say, Oh, I love this stuff. Algorithmically oriented entertainment is less concerned about whether someone likes something than whether they will watch them at all. Pleasure is as useful a reaction as disgust, confusion, yet bafflement. You know, it's like it doesn't really, as long as it's provoking a reaction of some kind and compelling someone to keep watching, one strong reaction is as good as another or anger or outrage or, yeah, you know. No,
like I'm a really big animal person, and on certain meta algorithms, Meta has discovered that when they show me a picture of a suffering animal, I will stop and look at it. So they're like, oh, Emily likes images of suffering animals. So we're going to show her all this terrible, like, graphic…
Yeah. I mean, my feed is filled with stuff that I find repellent and hate, but am fascinated by. And so I just see more and more of it. And, you know, again, yeah, it is just strong reaction as opposed to like delight, which I think was the prevailing sort of idea. It's optimized for capture. Yeah.…
That's funny. Because another, yeah, another thing I was going to flag