This is interesting but there's a little more to it, especially with the erotic.
If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement.
It's because you're polling for affinity or disclosed preference not for the actual engagement drivers.
For instance, if a male says they watch male pornography, they are labeling, or at least stating an affinity to a sexual identity.
However, the identities people choose to own are not the same as the preferences they actually have.
Instead if you track things like scroll velocity, linger time, revisitation, the time distance (such as 2 days apart instead of 5 minutes) a different story emerges.
For instance a given male could frequently look at male pornography but for all kinds of social reasons not want that affinity so they'd never even internally ideate the preference although their behavior of frequenting male content will be there regardless.
That's one of the problems with this approach is that not many people want to own all the social identities which map to their preferences so they don't openly identify it.
There (maybe) three levels of acceptance: admitting it to oneself, to others, identifying with it. And honestly these have a poor mapping to actual engagement with explicit content. You can have a (insert sexual affinity) rights activist who does not look at explicit content and someone protesting them who does all the time.
Man, I would pay money to see the (anonymized) trends on an adult website. Fascinating view into such an under studied area of humanity nature. I bet the porn tubes have data that sociologists could write papers on.
> If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement.
That's because those are two entirely different things. If you polled people and asked them "what causes you to spend more time on social media", then at least some self-aware folks would likely identify conflict, "someone is wrong on the Internet" (https://xkcd.com/386/), etc. That doesn't mean that's "what they want to see on social media", that means that's "what gets them to spend more time on social media".
If people were polled what they want to see on social media, few would say things that are inflammatory, upsetting, divisive, etc but those as we know are strong drivers of engagement.
It's because you're polling for affinity or disclosed preference not for the actual engagement drivers.
For instance, if a male says they watch male pornography, they are labeling, or at least stating an affinity to a sexual identity.
However, the identities people choose to own are not the same as the preferences they actually have.
Instead if you track things like scroll velocity, linger time, revisitation, the time distance (such as 2 days apart instead of 5 minutes) a different story emerges.
For instance a given male could frequently look at male pornography but for all kinds of social reasons not want that affinity so they'd never even internally ideate the preference although their behavior of frequenting male content will be there regardless.
That's one of the problems with this approach is that not many people want to own all the social identities which map to their preferences so they don't openly identify it.
There (maybe) three levels of acceptance: admitting it to oneself, to others, identifying with it. And honestly these have a poor mapping to actual engagement with explicit content. You can have a (insert sexual affinity) rights activist who does not look at explicit content and someone protesting them who does all the time.