I’ve noticed a pattern. Every now and then, someone leaves a rude, mean, or snarky comment on one of my posts. Occasionally, out of curiosity, I’ll check their post history, and it’s almost always nothing but negativity. They never seem to have anything positive or kind to say about anything, whether it’s politics, hobbies, personal anecdotes, or whatever else. It’s just a constant stream of bitterness and hostility. After seeing so many accounts like this, it got me wondering: what do people actually get out of being like that? The idea of willingly immersing yourself in that much negativity is genuinely alien to me.
A lot (most) social media is optimized for engagement which is really just another way if saying it rewards things that get attention with more attention. On mainstream platforms that is largely driven by content curation algorithms, but even simple up and down votes have the same effect.
It turns out humans are more sensitive to bad things than good things. We care more about risk or punishment than we do about reward, more about injustice than justice, etc. So we pay more attention to bad outcomes, which means social media amplifies bad things more than good things.
As far as personal posters go, I think there are people who desire engagement and have basically trained themselves to be as negative as possible because that negativity is rewarded by more engagement.