PayPal Honey extension has again "featured" flag in Chrome web store

I absolutely love how fired up the average YouTube commenter was about Honey... for about 72 hours. People completely unaffected in any way were demanding class action lawsuits, etc with seemingly no clue why they were even upset. Then the subject completely left their minds.

This observation is of course entirely anecdotal, but manufactured outrage is so fascinating, even if it currently eroding the very foundations of society.

Where a lot of online content to be consumed is about dopamine, a lot of other stuff is about spiking cortisol.

There's people on every forum (and regularly here) that suggest, sometimes explicitly, that we must have elevated anxiety and stress levels in response to specific presented content as a moral imperative.

I think cortisol makes the "content" feel more "important" or relevant at the present moment in time. 72 hours later assuming no other exploits our body systems adjust and the content isn't important. It's weird when we notice it, but most of the time our cortisol is being directed to another topic so we don't notice.

There's a ton written about our dopamine addiction and how it's exploited but not much about cortisol and our negative emotions are being exploited.

Many people say that overthinking, anxiety, and stress are moral imperatives as a response to something they don't like: content, political ideas, celebrities, technology companies, and many other things.

It is a completely ineffective method of making a change. I wish they'd stop spreading their anxieties online. I know it makes them feel like they're doing something, but one phone call to a relevant decision-maker is 100x more effective and 100x less destructive to those around them.

It's sort of logical: if a "bad thing" is observed, a "good" observer must feel bad as a negative reinforcement against the "bad thing". Ideally the pressure of the negative emotions must force the "good" observer to stop just watching and go fix things, and afterwards prevent the "bad thing" from occurring again.

This works in simple cases, like spilling your drink: it: it feels bad, the feeling makes you clean it up, and be more careful.

It fails in cases where the immediate effectual action is impossible, or not known. The only reasonable course of action then is to spread the word, because you can't actually fix anything.

And here ingroup / outgroup signaling jumps in! Feeling bad about some issues becomes a signal of group belonging, a kind of virtue signaling. Not feeling bad and not expressing outrage becomes suspicious, if not defiant. This is one of the streams that feeds the outrage machine.