The Metaverse, Robot Mark Zuckerberg, and The Matthew Effect
I was debating on writing this for my blog where I help authors understand marketing, but I decided this would be better suited to frame within my favorite topic of the myth of meritocracy.
If you’ve touched the internet or have tuned into the news in the last week, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Mark Zuckerberg’s big announcement about Facebook focusing on the metaverse. Since then, the memes have been plentiful from Mark trying to destroy the world to Facebook not being able to erase their terrible history. But most recently, Robot Mark Zuckerberg is the new hotness.
This promotional clip has over 4.6 million views, and it’s a fascinating case study about The Matthew Effect. This effect comes from a passage in the Bible Matthew 25:29.
“For unto every one that have shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but him that have not shall be taken, even that which he have.”
In essence, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. But in the realm of social media, quality doesn’t matter. It’s fascinating because you can’t even imagine the amount of time and money goes into people trying to crack the social media code. There are entire books about how news spreads and what makes posts go viral, and there are an endless amount of theories. Frankly, the only true predictor is The Matthew Effect, and the rest is pure randomness.
And if you think I’m wrong, feel free to go viral tomorrow, and let me know how it goes.
When it comes to this video of Mark Zuckerberg, the tweet above from John Harris has a little over 8,000 likes and about 3,900 retweets. John decided to take a shot at the biker jackets, but far more people decided to go with the classic robot joke.
Here are some states for the robot jokes:
Likes: 1.8k
Retweets: 174
Follower count: 110.8k
Likes: 72
Retweets: 12
Follower count: 27.5k
Likes: 558
Retweets: 33
Follower count: 705k
Likes: 1.1k
Retweets: 100
Follower count: 455.1k
Likes: 263
Retweets: 24
Follower count: 36.6k
Now, feel free to go back through those tweets and see how different they are. Do any of them stand out as much different than the others? Not really. And this is just a small sample of the thousands of people who made this exact same joke. One thing these accounts all have in common is their potential reach. Even though there’s nothing unique or original about what they said, notice how much engagement they received.
If the world worked how we assume it does, even people with a small following could make an unoriginal played out joke and get some love, right?
Likes: 0
Retweets: 0
Follower count: 168
Likes: 6
Retweets: 0
Follower count: 1,236
Likes: 0
Retweets: 0
Follower count: 5,639
Likes: 13
Retweets: 0
Follower count: 662
Likes: 8
Retweets: 0
Follower count: 1,309
This is something you can see on every social media platform you’re on. Big followings beget more engagement regardless of quality. Why does this happen? It’s those pesky algorithms that you keep hearing about, but we tend to only think about it when it comes to ads and fake news.
Think of it like a points system. Regardless of the platform, every type of engagement gives you a point. On Twitter, each like, comment, and retweet gives you point. The algorithm then believes that’s a great tweet, so it shows it on more feeds.
My personal favorite is this type of tweet:
Look at all of that juicy engagement for a simple lower-cased “hi” with a period for punctuation.
And now you’re probably thinking, “Chris, who cares? It’s social media and people are having fun. Who cares if big accounts get a ton of engagement and reach for a completely unoriginal or bland tweet?”
Well, I’ll tell you.
This matters because you need to look at the bigger picture. Aside from reach, the algorithm is also being trained for each individual account that engages with it. Do you know how many tweets, Facebook posts, and other pieces of social media you never see? Each time you engage with a social media post, your account tells the algorithm, “This user likes the content from that user. This means they’ll stay on our platform longer, which helps us collect data and make more ad revenue.”
These users aren’t just tweeting about Mark Zuckerberg and The Metaverse. They’re sharing news and political opinions as well. If you want to know how the algorithms manage to put you in an echo chamber, this is it.
Yesterday, I wrote a piece about how the anti-CRT movement spreads misinformation. Engaging with meaningless content of low-quality gets you more content from that person and hides other content from your feeds.
Most importantly, engagement spreads the reach of the content as well. On Twitter, you see content from people you don’t follow just because someone you follow liked a tweet. If Twitter thinks that tweet is performing well, it really doesn’t care what the content is, and it’ll show it to you.
This morning, I was watching my favorite independent news channels on YouTube and watched as they complained about the terrible YouTube algorithms. YouTube has a tendency to push mainstream media with its algorithms, and it’s quite awful because mainstream media is no longer the best source for news. But on top of fighting against the algorithm, if people don’t understand how engagement works, The Matthew Effect takes hold once again.
One of the biggest errors with our thinking is that we never consider all of the things we’ve never witnessed. How could you? For all of the tweets you see, there are an infinite amount of ones you haven’t seen. For every piece of news you see, there are thousands that you didn’t come across. Each opinion you’re seeing from someone you follow has a ton of counter-arguments that you don’t witness.
If this is the case, how can we ever honestly say that the best ideas rise to the top? We started this with the example of unoriginal Mark Zuckerberg jokes, and that’s an example of the meritocracy not working for comedy. But it goes deeper than that. Some of those examples of large accounts share political opinions and opinions on social issues, so they’re getting much more reach than other opinions.
The Halo Effect is a thinking error in which we assume one good quality of a person makes all other qualities of the person good as well. How many people are you following who might be an expert in one domain, but you’re mistakingly thinking they’re an expert in another domain?
Combine that with the appeal to popularity fallacy, which is when we assume something is right because it has a ton of likes and retweets. Not only is that extremely flawed reasoning, but social media algorithms make it even worse.
So, as you continue your days and nights scrolling through social media, just beware the illusion that you’re witnessing. The tweet or post you saw most likely isn’t that much better than a million others on the social media site. This is just one more reason to be more of an independent thinker and stop using heuristics to bypass system 2 thinking.
And if you’re some sort of content creator, welcome to the myth of meritocracy. There’s no guarantee that your quality will ever get noticed, so all you can do is keep trying.
Next time, if you liked this piece, we can dive into how status signals help boost The Matthew Effect even more.
I’ve been working on organizing all the books I’ve read, and I have multiple lists of books on becoming a better thinker. There are lists for education, social issues, critical thinking, self-deception, and biases. For the rest of the categories, click here.
I’m always open for a conversation and to be shown what I might be missing or where I may be wrong, so feel free to email me at TheRewiredSoul@gmail.com