It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.

Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?

I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.

You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.

@Haste I think it's a question of aligned incentives. A lot of journalism has to drive eyeballs to advertisers to stay in business. And they use the same ad networks with the same engagement metrics as corporate social media, which also has to drive eyeballs to advertisements through their algorithms. So the strategy that boosts engagement one place will boost it everywhere. Then these folks try to play that same game here on Mastodon...and it doesn't work.