There could also be some enantiodromia going on. That's my new favorite word... Things become their opposites, psychologically.

Pushing too far in one direction creates an attraction to the opposite as a kind of release. In individuals, it causes people to have phases, times of different interests.

But in groups, some number of the group will agree at first, then swing to the extreme opposite because that balances where they were at that moment in life. The effect is that groups or movements create their own enemies.

There's probably a lot more to it - I only read like the first page about it

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Sounds interesting! I'll add that to Wikipedia Sunday 😄

yeah, it has to do with left/right brain stuff as well, there's lots of axes of polarity going on and people tend towards one side of most of them

manipulating large groups of people they actually play both sides off against each other, and part of this has to do with the brainwashing/cult thinking dynamics that is commonly referred to as "identity politics" these days

people do it a bit, but they deliberately push it hard, influencers are generally some kind of cult figure who gives their followers all their soundbites and hot buttons, and in the background behind the curtain they are directing things using various techniques, like the one that stopped me using Facebook about 8 years ago was that they were deliberately making my feed boring, and then they started putting ads in between the posts that were already repetitive and uninteresting that they thinned out from what my follows actually were posting

this is how they do the opposite of driving engagement, trying to push a demographic to the margin by isolating them

and then there is the opposite, of course, so if you do a lot of identity bullshit associated with some influencoor or category, they will often poke you periodically with the 2 minutes of hate to give you the struggle session and reinforce your cult identity

i'm pretty sure the techniques are even more meticulously designed than that, i'm just giving a quick summary of some of the main techniques to do with polarities

Facebook is notorious. I quit FB when they integrated facial recognition to automatically assign tags to pictures. Right around the same time, they announced a rule that fake names aren't allowed. Two good reasons not to stick around, so I didn't

haha yeah that was just before they started injecting ads, i was using FB Purity and it didn't block them and that was it for me... if i wanted a fucking television i'd buy a fucking television

i was paying for youtube pro for a while, but i've decided to stop sending them my money and actually use my fancy flash drives to store full 16 and 24 bit lossless versions from bandcamp and only use youtubefor one thing, to watch suspicious observers and not any more sit idling watching it... waste of bandwidth and information they don't need to have (and it's mostly just my weird taste in music)

I didn't know you could watch things on fb. I guess I quatted before that