Pandering

I'm going to write a post later today about the session we had Friday, but for now I'm going to write something short about a trend I'm seeing in social media.

Imagine that I've just written a post eviscerating 4th edition D&D. I've talked about its design, then its bad choices, the failure of the concept in just seven short years and the creating company's decision to throw the version to the winds in favour of getting a "democratic" game design to put in its place. I've systematically gone through each element of the decision-process and I've tied it to technological, social and personal attitudes about the world in a way that clearly makes my politics self-evident. Then, at the end, you find this paragraph following such a post:

"Thank you so much for reading. Do you like 4th edition? What do you think of the game's design? Let's start a discussion in the comments. I'd love to hear what you think."

Now imagine that you've just finished the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and at the end you find this mixed into the book's epilogue:

"Do you think that O'Brien was right to do what he did to Winston? Perhaps you feel that seeking power entirely for it's own sake is a good thing. Write your opinions to my editor. It would be terrific if we could get a dialogue going."

I am seeing this sort of thing all the time now.  Youtube's social algorithm rewards those creators who get comments, so every time a viewer writes a comment, it essentially puts money into the creator's pocket. We could solve every youtuber's dream overnight if we all, the six billion of us who use the editor, just wrote six random comments about nothing each day, like a bot, on random youtube videos. We'd also collapse the youtube algorithm overnight and ruin everyone's experience by destroying the foundations for how people get paid, but hey, it's not like people don't hate youtube.

Pandering is a ritual performance of openness after the creator has already provided their opinion about something... which states clearly and plainly that what the creator actually cares about is MONEY, not educating a reader, not ideals, not taking a stand, not belief.  Dropping the sort, chirpy, "let's discuss" demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that what the creator is doing is spewing out the opinion they're able to think up, and then immediately wanting to sell out that opinion as rapidly as they can. The trend isn't "let's discuss," the trend is, "help me enrich myself."

I find it repulsive.

When George Orwell wrote his book, he was not concerned about  people who did not agree with his premise. He was not counting on his money coming from people who were ready to "have a discussion" about it. He knew there would be people who did disagree, who considered it simplified, unrealistic or unnecessarily dark. When he wrote it, he had no idea whether or not it would do well. He did not care. He wrote what he thought.

We don't do this anymore. We write in the hopes that someone will like us. And give us money. And we pray we won't get cancelled. And as a result, we don't need A.I. to produce slop for us.

We're more than able to make lots of slop on our own.