Trap of Dissociated Feedback

I guess this next statement won't be a surprise to most of you: The growth of Internet usage and social media made the audience more polarized, a more dominant, less forgiving behavior pattern. The assumption is that it is happening because of several factors: Rosy retrospection. We all know the tendency of people to see things from the past better than they actually were. Cars were nicer, movies were better, music was unique and complex, and culture was sophisticated and refined - but now everything is just getting worse. Even if you don't feel that way personally, you should know at least a couple of people who think this way. Economic decline. Inflation, broader economic decline made game development way more demanding, game prices are getting higher (even though they are not, adjusted for inflation), and people tend to expect more from the larger amount of money they spend. On top of that, older games are often sold with deep discounts across sales, which makes the comparison even worse. Informational overflow. It's no surprise to anyone that we live in an information age. The amount of content released far exceeds what one can grasp. Honestly, it seems that within a second the Internet generates that much content that one won't be able to grasp in a lifetime. In combination with our rapidly declining attention span, we would rather play a game for half an hour and leave a negative review with feedback, and refund it after 2-3h, because Steam allows us to. Back in the day you didn't have much option, and you kinda needed to accept the downsides of the game, and over time stopped bothering you and you enjoyed the game. Toxicity Feedback Loop. Negative content tends to be more popular. Toxicity brings more emotions and gathers more attention, and one of the reasons is that if you liked the game, you will play it, but if you disliked it, you will probably go and seek approval on the internet, or even create your own content. Over time, that content adds up and creates a picture for a potential player that a game is bad, he takes that sentiment and through a negative bias obviously finds something bad about the game. Feedback algorithms. Most of the currently operating recommendation systems are using some sort of feedback mechanism, tuned to optimize specific parameters, like attention, or purchases (which is part of what Steam is targeting, assumingly p.43.) Whether that is neural networks, or more simple statistical models, we don't truly understand full consequences of those algorithms, which lots of the time results in "min-maxing" of undesirable properties, whether that is 10 hour brain-rot child content on YouTube or ragebaiting on Twitter/Reddit, feed-spam on newsletters. This behavior changes our perception of what is popular, or rather, "anticipated" and "wanted" in the audience.