In Addition to Ragebait and Doomscrolling

My first instinct when reading this was to open Reddit in incognito mode to attempt to reproduce the 25% measurement. I had intended to collect statistics of 100 posts. I closed it after <10 to avoid memetic contamination.

Minor nit, but it's worth noting that while /r/TikTokCringe started as a contempt subreddit, it's now just the main subreddit for TikTok content enjoyed genuinely.

I don't think that outrage is different from contempt in terms of being a free hit of righteous moral superiority. Outrage may create more motivation to do something, but that "something" will be biased towards protest and/or punishment, not actual problem-solving... and in the case of online media, the protest and/or punishment is likely to take the form of more posting to the same media outlet. So the optimally addictive mix would need both outrage and contempt. Too little contempt, and pure outrage would be exhausting. Too little outrage, and not enough people post vs. read.

For me, the optimum solution to these problems is to avoid as much as possible any media streams that are consolidated by Big Social. For example, I never, ever, ever look at my Facebook account's main page, or look at my notifications. Instead, I browse things I want to browse in their own little information silos. (That is, specific groups or pages.) RSS feeds are helpful tools for this, which is why RSS is so largely dead.

The problem with Big Social isn't that you end up with filter bubbles, it's that Big Social tries to consolidate things in such a way as to control your information consumption priorities, while pushing "discovery" of things you didn't actually want or need to know... like Twitter randomly showing me stuff from people followed by people I follow, or stuff that people I follow liked or replied to.

This reminds me of the sentiment Eliezer expresses here [LW · GW]:

 
When someone politely presents themselves with a careful argument, does your cultural software tell you that you're supposed to listen and make a careful response, or make fun of the other person and then laugh about how they're upset? What about when your own brain tries to generate a careful argument? Does your cultural milieu give you any examples of people showing how to really care deeply about something (i.e. debate consequences of paths and hew hard to the best one), or is everything you see just people competing to be loud in their identification?

I guess I should at least attempt to make a decent neologism here:

contemptbait?
scandalscrolling?

Meh. Maybe someone else will think of a good one.

>perhaps a social stigma can develop
Social stigmas get traction via contempt, so that sounds promising.

There's a similar pattern in Rap music, the misanthropic self promotion. The message of basically every lyric is either "I'm super successful" or "I know no bounds in what I will do"; either case has the listener emphasize with the sentiment of being better than others/not caring about others. I stopped listening when I noticed the avarice it was promoting, how I could only fantasize about being a $MM success, which not having a path to improve toward just gives the fantasy of becoming $MM.

"Contempt porn"?  Related to "outrage bait", which describes much of the rest of social media.  Both imply a sort of trick played on the brain, without outright saying there's no place for a little of the base emotion.

Or perhaps go further - I figure out if contempt is ever a useful emotion.  It can save time and help choose strategy for dealing with aliens (including children and <dispreferred political party>).  But in all cases, accurate modeling would be more useful.  And it's certainly not beneficial to most stated goals to seek out things to be contemptuous of.

In any case, I don't think "isolate yourself from the sources" is the best primary approach (though it's perhaps part of the approach, or an effect of a working approach).  Figuring out something like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wJutA2czyFg6HbYoW/what-are-trigger-action-plans-taps [LW · GW] for the undesirable reaction is probably a better direction.  Notice when you're attracted to this judgement, and interrupt it with a more compassionate and nuanced evaluation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRBsaJPkt2Q

If you’re interested in this topic more and have an hour and a half to burn, there’s worse ways to spend it.

A while back I published an article about a similar idea on my blog, the Thinkateria. 

I'm currently reading Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges.  This theme of contempt figures prominently in that book.