Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media

Advertising incentivizes engagement driven content amplification which is usually best manifested in outrage unfortunately. On Twitter (X), Instagram, TikTok, it seems any minute signal (view, like, scroll, linger) algorithmically retunes your posts to maximize engagement, which is the root of all the problems.

I can't speak to twitter and instagram, both of which seem to be terribly confused about what sort of content I like, but this works very well for narrowly tailoring TikTok videos to be content I appreciate.

I do personally wish the role of ad based monetization models were included in these conversations more often. With both traditional media and social media the conversation tends to blame ideology for their shortcomings but in reality it's just, as you noted, a bad incentive model. They aren't ideological, they're just maximizing the amount of your attention they can capture because that maximizes the amount of ad revenue they can bring in.

There are certain people in certain, specific, situations that have a strong enough ideological stance to make a decision based on that ideology, counter to the one they're incentivized to make. But the majority of the people in the majority of situations are going to make the incentivized choice. If you want to really change something, you have to change the incentives.