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I remember reading a story in "Trust Me, I'm Lying; Confessions of a Media Manipulator" where the agent of an author wasn't getting any good marketing coverage for his client's new book, so the agent starting pulling the "angry consumer" shtick, calling/writing into different media outlets (bloggers, radio, etc..), pretending to be pissed off about the book. No one had heard of it, but eventually some of them started writing about how insulting & disgusting it was, just based on the agent's complaint.

It worked. No publicity is bad publicity.

edit: Since people are seeing this, you should read this book. The guy (former American Apparel advertising exec) did this tell-all book because he saw the media's standards dropping and his industry's tricks starting to be used in things like politics. It will destroy your confidence in ever believing anything you read on the internet, reddit definitely included. Good for honing your bullshit detector.

edit 2: I am not affiliated in any way with this book. You are not being manipulated ��

That came from data pulled off OkCupid and you can read more about this and other findings in Dataclysm, which was written by OkCupid founder Christian Rudder. It's actually a very interesting read and it covers trends in behavior beyond just that which applies to dating or attractiveness.

It's worth noting that the same data showed that a vast majority of men find women most attractive between the ages of 18 - 23 or so whereas women were pretty consistently attracted to men with a few years of their own age. There are also a lot of variables that affect what metric they're using to gauge "attractiveness" so I would take that figure with a grain of salt.

A large percentage of men don't even put much effort into their baseline appearance, either because they don't want to, don't have to, or don't think to. If we're talking about looks and looks alone, then I'm not entirely surprised. Maybe it's not 80%, but if you're comparing one group of people who have been conditioned to put a little extra effort into their appearance, to another that hasn't, or has even been discouraged from doing so, then I could see why perceptions of attractiveness would skew in one direction more than the other.

Basically, don't take a line from an OkCupid blog to heart.

As much as I wanna say this guy is a douchebag/idiot and karma will come back around... that’s not how the internet works. We’re all giving him free press right now.

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285

Yep. It also contributes to the vicious cycle of partisan politics. The Internet has made it so easy to find people with similar views, it leads to folks becoming even more emotionally invested in those beliefs, to the point where it gets increasingly difficult to consider other points of view. That's why you and Grandma will laugh at each other WAY more than you'll consider each other's points. On top of the fact that we're all using memes to make fun of each other, you're already conditioned to support other folks who agree with you.

By the way, it's not just social media and human nature causing the problem. Google is making it worse too. Consider reading up on the concept of a filter bubble, and if it strikes your fancy, I just started reading a book I'm recommending to a lot of people called The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think. Basically, when Google, Amazon, and other sites try to tailor search results and ads to what they already know you like and agree with, you become even less likely to be introduced to viewpoints outside of our own.

We can talk all day long about how partisan and segregated we are in today's global society, but in reality, it's the things that connect us that are feeding the problem.

You should read Trust me I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday. It brilliantly digs into the media ecosystem and explains exactly why you are right.

https://www.amazon.ca/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285/ref=asc_df_1591846285_nodl/?tag=googlemobshop-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=292905515425&hvpos=1o2&hvnetw=g&hvrand=2803731859655008491&hvpone=&hvptwo=&...

Spoiler: media went through this in the early 1900s when newspapers were sold individually. Subscriptions to papers is what Bred modern journalism as a virtuous pursuit like we understand it.

The attraction graphs look very similar to ones that I saw in a book I read recently -- Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves. It's written by the co-founder of OkCupid, so loads of the data came directly from there. That's what the OP graphs look like to me. You can use the "look inside" feature and search for "attraction"; page 47 has one of the graphs I'm referring to.

>I wonder whether online work changed things because there are few occasions for people to have conversations that socialize them into the ethical expectations of the profession.

Journalism didn't have ethical expectations a hundred years ago, because every story was sold on 'hot sheets', cheap 2-page papers sold by newsies. The most sensational headlines made the most money and there was zero accountability.

Then for 50+ years, journalists became dependent on monthly newspaper subscriptions and reputation and audience trust became paramount. Suddenly, ethics were necessary to do the job.

Now, news is all click-driven and we're back to zero accountability. Trust Me, I'm Lying is a great book about our current era of news and how it can be manipulated.

A lot are clearly copy and pasted. If it doesn't reference or ask about something in my profile, I don't bother responding.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, you should read Dataclysm.

You are right. And it doesn't apply only to TV, but other media as well.

There's an excellent book about the subject: Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

I think T-shirt slogans and Twitter hashtags are just another type of "performative wokeness" that lets your colleagues demonstrate to one another how seriously they take racial injustice. It's really not attacking white people, because it's more likely than not to be a white person wearing the damn thing.

At this point, these activists are not interested in generating a dialogue with others outside their in-group. They're looking to solidify bonds with each other. It's a bit of ass-backwards tribalism, but liberals are sick and tired of having to be the adult in the room, so college-aged academics are happy to adopt a sarcastic, countercultural, 4chan-style "burn it all down" approach in order to build a foundation to stand on against out-group members. It's an emotional release rather than a productive move in favor of social liberalism.

I really enjoyed reading Kill All Normies, which breaks down the politics of transgression (attacking what we think is socially acceptable or polite) that both Tumblr reactionaries and alt-right superstars have engaged in. I see the "white tears" stuff as a natural extension of that, an attempt to reclaim a transgressive voice on the left that falls on a lot of deaf ears because of its inherent contradiction.

In other words, those slogans are not inflammatory or counterproductive to social liberalism, because they never were intended to advance social liberalism. Instead, they have been successful in uniting certain voices in this blip of time during the Trump era (for better or for worse), though I'm not sure how much longer that kind of rhetoric can sustain itself beyond that.

Algorithms reward negativity. Algorithms are designed to make you anxious and upset and keep you tethered to the Internet, so as to sell you more ads.

Read “10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.”

I got rid of everything algorithm-based and I use duckduckgo as my search engine. I use reddit sparingly and check a few twitter star wars fans that I enjoy, but I no longer have a twitter, so the algorithm can’t affect me. I deleted my accounts for youtube and facebook. I have youtube set up to not track my search history for the occasions I do look something up.

I’ve gotten rid of (as much as I can) algorithm based media sites for a year and it’s made everything better.

https://www.amazon.com/Arguments-Deleting-Social-Media-Accounts/dp/125019668X

https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285/

“I am, to put it bluntly, a media manipulator—I’m paid to deceive. My job is to lie to the media so they can lie to you. I cheat, bribe, and connive for bestselling authors and billion-dollar brands and abuse my understanding of the internet to do it.”

Anybody who wants to know more about Ai algorithms should read this book

https://www.amazon.ca/Arguments-Deleting-Social-Media-Accounts/dp/125019668X/ref=nodl_

It’s written by a computer scientist who talked about this bc he was there in Silicon Valley during the second life era right before Facebook blew the fuck up. There’s also this ted talk that kind of feels like the basis for this documentary:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_vBggxCNNno

> I guess the question for me is, when someone creates a work of fiction where the viewpoint character is an arsehole, are they doing it because they want to say something about unreliable narrators, or are they doing it because they don't have the imagination to write as anyone but themselves, and they are that arsehole?

This particular book is actually an autobiography, if that helps you decide...

I was my understanding that it wasn't fictional. It was based on his real life experiences in Scilicon Valley. If you read the amazon description it says:

> Now, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world.

https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Monkeys-Obscene-Fortune-Failure/dp/0062458191

Like personally I don't hate the guy. I'm just saying it's kind of a shitty way of describing / viewing women.

Youth? Funny how data shows that men of almost any age prefer women in their early 20s while women have a more proportional age preference

Source: https://metro.co.uk/2019/02/22/men-regardless-age-will-always-attracted-women-early-20s-8718590/

This is the book they got it from: https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-When-Think-Ones-Looking/dp/0385347375/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412948960&sr=8-1&keywords=dataclysm

Also, I started this book on recommendation from a bud today. I’d never leave y’all behind but:

10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

TLDR;

1. You are losing your free will.
2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.
3. Social media is making you into a [jerk].
4. Social media is undermining truth.
5. Social media is making what you say meaningless.
6. Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.
7. Social media is making you unhappy.
8. Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity.
9. Social media is making politics impossible.
10. Social media hates your soul.

Excuse me for geeking out here. The New Yorker has an excellent piece on Lanier. He is fascinating. Here and a book. (Maybe more than one.)

‘Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right’ by Angela Nagle

It’s a book that was published in 2017 and it references the ‘Exiting the Vampire’s Castle’ piece mentioned below.

Product Description:

> Recent years have seen a revival of the heated culture wars of the 1990s, but this time its battle ground is the internet. On one side the alt right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.

Fair warning - it’s about online culture as a whole, so not specifically all about cancelling and not from one political perspective.

It is good though, and I do recommend it if you’re looking for something to pick up that touches on this.

Check out the book Active Measures: https://www.amazon.com/Active-Measures-History-Disinformation-Political/dp/0374287260

It has a really great rundown of the past 100 years of Russian disinformation campaigns, and how they've evolved for the modern age.

One really enlightening thing I got out of the book is that Russian intelligence very frequently will take credit for things that they had a very minor role in. Apparently internally, the KGB/FSB/SRV take credit for a ton of things, like the conspiracy theory that AIDS was manufactured by the US government, but when you look into it, it turns out that it was mostly crazy people in the US that came up with it, and their alleged campaigns really didn't do more than spread it around slightly more than it would have been.

Similarly, they'll retweet some crazy ass tweet with a few no name bot accounts, and get maybe an extra 20 people looking at the tweet, and then they'll claim that it's a successful influence operation.

Russian intelligence has certainly had a number of incredibly successful disinformation campaigns, though it's almost impossible to gauge how much influence they actually had in any given campaign, especially when the agents running the campaigns have every incentive to exaggerate the hell out of their involvement.

Are you a sleazy bastard? Christian Ritter suggests douchebags find each other but nice people tend to date other nice people.

If you aren't matching then get more attractive. It's actually not that hard for men because we usually blame our lack of attractiveness on others (like you are doing here) instead of taking some pretty obvious steps. Think about the number of men in your life who are simultaneously:

• In good shape
• Well dressed
• Charming
• Good listeners
• Have their shit together

Not that many right? If you can make yourself above average in all of these categories (not even exceptional, just competent) you'll do fine.

You could try it, say for a month, and see how you get on. It doesn't have to be forever.

It seems, from reading between the lines of what you've written, that you're finding social media is a) absorbing a lot of your time; b) making you feel fearful and sad, and; c) actually contributing towards your feelings of isolation anyway. Those are great reasons to take a step back, at the very least.

I think if you really want it to work you need to find ways of occupying your time in the hours that you would otherwise have spent on the socials. Get out and do stuff. It doesn't matter if you end up not liking the stuff. It doesn't matter if you don't like all the people you meet. Just try things. Eat lunch at a cafe, hit the gym, volunteer for a charity, go running, join a class, crochet blankets for orphans... whatever you like.

I don't use social media at all (except LinkedIn) but my reasons for deleting my profiles were more to do with disliking the business models at work within most of the big tech firms. Have you read Jaron Lanier's book? It's an interesting perspective and might give you other reasons to consider whether social media use is right for you longer term.

My friend wrote this book, he was American Apparel's Marketing Director and basically their entire PR while Dov was in charge. Some of the better chapters were on managing your reputation in today's world and against the Internet.

But to be honest it sounds like shitty work. Here's his last interview where he basically says his life was putting out all these fires he never started and it stressed him out to the point ruining himself.

There's an awesome book called Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday which talks about these sort of shenanigans people do to generate cheap publicity for themselves or whatever product or idea they're trying to perpetuate. One example is "trading up", where people will seed shit on small blogs in a clickbaity way that maybe gets linked to a small news site, then to Reddit, then to Buzzfeed/etc, then to the national news. It works really well apparently.

The book is fucking great; I haven't finished reading it yet myself but I highly recommend it to all redditors, especially if you're reading this here in /r/news. Most of the shit we see was probably influenced by someone doing the kinds of things Ryan writes about.

I agree with you. I know this subreddit (and myself included) have a preference for center-left politics, but it's starting to become a hate platform against every party except NDP. I wouldn't be suprised if the NDP actually pays someone to win over /r/canada, and OP's 3 days old account doesn't help.

Or maybe that's just my spidey sense being overstimulated. I read this book recently which talks about media manipulation and I've become very cautious of social platforms now.

I am very sorry to hear you are feeling awful at the moment.

You have done nothing wrong.

You will always be kind, caring and very intelligent.

Nothing will change that.

Your command of English is outstanding.

A difficult, rare skill that is very impressive.

I only have admiration for the amazing person you are.

You have obviously identified things in your life you are not happy with.

To give you a greater understanding of modern dating, you might like to read this book.

Maybe a library or bookshop has a copy, so you can see if you are interested in reading it.

https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offline-Selves/dp/0385347391

You have done the right thing by not going with people who don't value you.

Always and forever, stay away from narcissists.

They destroy everything eventually.

Find friends and find possible matches with people who value the things you do.

I wish you all the best and be extremely careful regarding personal safety.

Persistence is key. Try not to give up even though things don't initially work out.

You will succeed eventually.

You may want to check out this book. He explains in detail how FB tracks you. He came up with the methodology. It’s a fairly complex algorithm.

https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Monkeys-Obscene-Fortune-Failure/dp/0062458191/ref=nodl_?dplnkId=c543bf24-71ea-40f3-b05b-8f5f07ac9a97

How do you know a Republican is lying? Their mouth is moving.

I can't even remember the last time I heard a notable Conservative figure say something that was actually true or factually correct.

Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator was published in 2013 and perfectly describes the GOP playbook for spreading misinformation.

Republicans have made lying so much their strategy that I don't know they even know how to tell the truth anymore.

So much for the 9th Commandment...

>"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" (Exodus 20:16)

This book covers it pretty extensively with sourcing. https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offline-Selves/dp/0385347391/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=2VJKP656HN5G&keywords=dataclysm&qid=1660579247&sprefix=dataclysm%2Caps%2C504&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Came-Something-Awful-Accidentally-Donald/dp/1250189748 there's a book about how Something Awfuls FYAD eventually spawned 4 chan, a the right wing meme army that resulted in the last POTUS.