The Algorithm Hook
In recent days there has been a lot of controversy around a group of comedians in India, a big chunk of state machinery is actively working to stop the show these comedians hosted and were part of. The show is up on all prominent news channels, and YouTube is filled with content creators some in favor and some against the show, not just that if you are active on social media platforms then you must have seen reels after reels on the same topic again some in favor, some in against.
Things to observe here is that the show has been running for a while with similar level ok jokes throughout, but there was no uproar in the society then, people on the show have done similar levels of comedy on different platforms, the politicians who are criticizing this show have also been in a situation where what they are targeting now was what they were doing themselves back when they were not a politician. People criticizing the show were seen as followers and liked the show at one point in time. Police were active, politicians who were unknown to many showed up on TV and made comments on this event, and news activity following it, one of the cases involved went to the Supreme Court and they have provided their take on this event too.
All of this made many think that should this matter have such coverage and swift action in a country that is world-famous for the internal issues that its society faces on a daily basis. Here things stop making sense and In pursuit of understanding the why behind it, one thought was constructed in mind and that made sense a lot to me and wanted to share, I call it the algorithm hook.
Let's take a look at the events, in sequence, the show started taking inspiration from a show or two, the show was a hit, and with every episode, it became more and more popular for both good and bad reasons, as I have observed many liked it. Now as much as I understand social media algorithms, there is certain content that becomes viral( so famous that it spreads among people viral), if that content becomes viral, the algorithm learns that if certain content is spreading quickly enough then its good for its platform and then the social media algorithm also starts to promote the content to people who were initially not a target audience for the content but algorithm served them the content and it observes if the new audience is liking it, sharing it or skipping it. Now if the reaction of the audience is good then the algorithm keeps on repeating this action of sharing it with the masses and making it more viral and eventually helps the platform by providing what people like.
There is one caveat, while the algorithm is doing this repeated action, to determine if content is going viral or not, it first has to identify and tag that content so that it can understand what that content is about and can refer to it later. So to tag that content it has to look at its metadata which could be the description of the video, captions, or hashtags. Imagine a person John, John likes cat videos, the algorithm will first see if John is into the cat videos by observing if John likes, shares, or subscribes to any content that has Cats in its description or tags or metadata, and Algo will keep an eye on each every action that john does on its platform, the algo will make an understanding of what john likes by the things about the video and not exactly the video, remember algorithm is a computer program, it cannot see a video and tell if its cat video or not (with AI yes can be done, that is going to need a lot of cost and power and make platform usage costly, so, for now, it's focused on metadata). Now if any content is uploaded on social media then Algo checks for its metadata and if has lots of Cats in its metadata then that video will be shown to John. This is how Alog works and serves the social media members.
Now let's look at what was happening in the Case with this lens of how algo works, The show got huge traction on social media, so not just the shows themselves were getting viral but the content or clips that others were making were also getting viral because that's how algo was working or other terms people were hooking on to the algorithm wave that was pushing the show's original clips. Now there was a large subset of the community that was totally not related and wanted to hook into this wave. Then an incident happened and everyone saw a chance to hook into it, TV news ( now all of them are on Social Media), the other content creators who were in favor or against this incident started making videos to hook into it, and make their content viral because again Algo can't discriminate is the meta content is crafted in a certain way for a specific task. Once it started going viral, politicians thought why not us, they jumped into the action scene and started attracting eyes because now not just Algo would pick it, TV or legacy media would pick it too and a chance of missing an event to get fame is something a politician will never take, Police also saw a great opportunity to show to the public that they are functional, or it may be political pressure, they took action immediately and started getting the attention of TV News anchors and then Supreme court also commented on this incident that obviously caught the attention of Media all over.
Eventually, everyone who wanted to share the ride of this wave got hooked into it, some in favor some in against but all who could did.
If you liked this content, please share. More to come.
Things to observe here is that the show has been running for a while with similar level ok jokes throughout, but there was no uproar in the society then, people on the show have done similar levels of comedy on different platforms, the politicians who are criticizing this show have also been in a situation where what they are targeting now was what they were doing themselves back when they were not a politician. People criticizing the show were seen as followers and liked the show at one point in time. Police were active, politicians who were unknown to many showed up on TV and made comments on this event, and news activity following it, one of the cases involved went to the Supreme Court and they have provided their take on this event too.
All of this made many think that should this matter have such coverage and swift action in a country that is world-famous for the internal issues that its society faces on a daily basis. Here things stop making sense and In pursuit of understanding the why behind it, one thought was constructed in mind and that made sense a lot to me and wanted to share, I call it the algorithm hook.
Let's take a look at the events, in sequence, the show started taking inspiration from a show or two, the show was a hit, and with every episode, it became more and more popular for both good and bad reasons, as I have observed many liked it. Now as much as I understand social media algorithms, there is certain content that becomes viral( so famous that it spreads among people viral), if that content becomes viral, the algorithm learns that if certain content is spreading quickly enough then its good for its platform and then the social media algorithm also starts to promote the content to people who were initially not a target audience for the content but algorithm served them the content and it observes if the new audience is liking it, sharing it or skipping it. Now if the reaction of the audience is good then the algorithm keeps on repeating this action of sharing it with the masses and making it more viral and eventually helps the platform by providing what people like.
There is one caveat, while the algorithm is doing this repeated action, to determine if content is going viral or not, it first has to identify and tag that content so that it can understand what that content is about and can refer to it later. So to tag that content it has to look at its metadata which could be the description of the video, captions, or hashtags. Imagine a person John, John likes cat videos, the algorithm will first see if John is into the cat videos by observing if John likes, shares, or subscribes to any content that has Cats in its description or tags or metadata, and Algo will keep an eye on each every action that john does on its platform, the algo will make an understanding of what john likes by the things about the video and not exactly the video, remember algorithm is a computer program, it cannot see a video and tell if its cat video or not (with AI yes can be done, that is going to need a lot of cost and power and make platform usage costly, so, for now, it's focused on metadata). Now if any content is uploaded on social media then Algo checks for its metadata and if has lots of Cats in its metadata then that video will be shown to John. This is how Alog works and serves the social media members.
Now let's look at what was happening in the Case with this lens of how algo works, The show got huge traction on social media, so not just the shows themselves were getting viral but the content or clips that others were making were also getting viral because that's how algo was working or other terms people were hooking on to the algorithm wave that was pushing the show's original clips. Now there was a large subset of the community that was totally not related and wanted to hook into this wave. Then an incident happened and everyone saw a chance to hook into it, TV news ( now all of them are on Social Media), the other content creators who were in favor or against this incident started making videos to hook into it, and make their content viral because again Algo can't discriminate is the meta content is crafted in a certain way for a specific task. Once it started going viral, politicians thought why not us, they jumped into the action scene and started attracting eyes because now not just Algo would pick it, TV or legacy media would pick it too and a chance of missing an event to get fame is something a politician will never take, Police also saw a great opportunity to show to the public that they are functional, or it may be political pressure, they took action immediately and started getting the attention of TV News anchors and then Supreme court also commented on this incident that obviously caught the attention of Media all over.
Eventually, everyone who wanted to share the ride of this wave got hooked into it, some in favor some in against but all who could did.
If you liked this content, please share. More to come.
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