this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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There's a war on negative feedback.
It's not good for business.
Now be happy.
The thing is, people themselves outside of business motives hate negativity.
People regularly get angry at others for bringing up criticisms of everything from foods to their favourite media products.
Even decades ago they'd give them names like negative Nancy, and within social settings the worst people often can win by weaponizing civility to quell legitimate backlash against immoral actions.
I mean, fuck, think about how many stories you've heard of people who have been the victims of sexual assault, who get told by normal people to shut up and whose experiences were diminished because it harshed other peoples mellow?
People suck, and one of the biggest reasons people suck, is they would prefer a harmful peaceful positivity than a tumultuous improvement causing negativity.
I think these companies are hooking into these human flaws in ways that hurt us, and benefit them with information asymmetry.
I don't think we can properly fix these flaws without somehow getting normal people to acknowledge that negativity is not just good, but vitally important.
Oh, companies know. Social media have definitive data that show most users engage on anger. That's why it's in their core interest to promote rage baits and disinformation. More engagements means more traffic. More traffic means more advertisers. More advertisers means more revenues.
Hell, even before social media, news tends to report more on negative news than positive ones. Because bad news is tantamount to hearing gossips, and we all love gossips. I know many of us will say bad news makes us sad, and yet we still tune in to any news.
Kind of on a tangent, I notice this as well that some people seem more predisposed to negative thinking. I think it's just hardwired into them. Although, I have to say, in my field of work, negative thinkers tend to have good attention to detail. Being suspicious and mindful all the time, they will check every nooks and crannies, and examining and scanning for almost everything. It is a good trait to a limited degree, but it could impair relationships both at work and outside, if one is too suspicious and distrustful of everyone.
I think you might be misunderstanding my point here. Rage bait, and hate are separate to the idea of toxic positivity, which is a separate concept companies also use and abuse, and which is the subject of my comment.
I actually disagree with this one fundamentally.
Good news just isn't as important as bad news on average.
Good news is typically long term, progressive and rarely has singular big moments. "X number of people moved out of poverty through the effects of economic policies started XX years ago" isn't something that it makes sense to give time over "flash flooding hits current location".
More than that, the news cycle is ill equipped to go into detail for more nuanced stories, and it would be rife with organizations like the world economic forum cooking stats to present much more peachy societal outcomes under policies they favour vs more objective or neutral viewpoints.
Quite frankly, I hate absolutely everything about the sentiment of this snippet. The idea that negativity is bad inherently is, I well, looking at my previous comment, I think I've already expressed that point.
Negative points are goals to hit. Positive ones are literally just less important. They're check offs on your todo list. Important perhaps for internal motivation, but not so when communicating news, events, research (mostly) etc.
I would say this doesn't seem wholly unreasonable.