Humans are easily attracted by beautiful text, beautiful speech and anything harmonious in communication. Ding dong, era of the internet, and humans are attracted by well made posts. Though it is a bit eerie : your beautiful sentimental model of the world is being influenced by carefully crafted posts aiming to either change your ideas or just gain more money through ads. What about it then?
Ad-oriented posts
Yup, the clear obvious example of social media posts aiming to sell you a product. This goes from small brand endorsements hiding within the text (by mentioning the brand name or so) up to clear unrelated parts of the post (generally the case for videos) showing the product being used. Ad-oriented posts have one clear goal : make money by shifting your attention to that product, even slightly, or by inserting it in the back of your head. What’s phenomenal about this, is that social media figures mastered their audience and their manipulation so well that it has sometimes become hard to differentiate between an ad-driven post and a regular one, if the latter even exists.
Influence-oriented posts
Here are the more normal ones : the posts aiming to change your opinion on a certain topic, through arguments, examples, so on and so forth. Though these posts get critical during important events like elections, impeachments, reacting to police brutality… They can aim for good as well as aim for evil. The most influence they have on people is when people are drugged by social media (as they usually are, unaware) or drugged by hate/dogma… If you want to be safe from them : never take them for granted right away, rather read them when you’re focused and aware, and let the ideas sink in a few days before you can judge their high value or their stupidity.
Image-building post
In a nutshell : people love showing off and building a good image of themselves in front of their communities. Most do anyway. And people will push so far to grab your attention just because they want it, they define themselves through it. Examples are not lacking here, it’s just that saying names is taboo, we can only directly point fingers at big companies (or orange-haired presidents) in here. Nonetheless they’ll attempt to build an image of themselves they consider perfect. Whether it was the image of “open-minded unbiased non-racist equality supporter” for that community or “conservative supremacist xenophobic nationalist” for that, other, community. Here double-faced people will have the hardest time satisfying both communities. Don’t ask me my own preferences! This phenomenon exists even within the Linux community (The Gentoo humble users stereotype, in contrast to Arch Linux showoff users stereotype). (PS : I love the Linux community.)
There are more categories where you can fit attractive posts in. I’m just using my own terminology here. The interesting posts are usually those not seeking attentions. Picture the silent scientist doing his work and publishing his papers if you will. Posts not seeking attention from foreign communities but suddenly gaining it tend to be more awesome than posts seeking the attention of most wallet-holding people. Exceptions are more common than you think though (that is because my model is imperfect.)
Have a great day!
indepthed 