[HN Gopher] Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends
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Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends
Author : kaboro
Score : 217 points
Date : 2022-08-16 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| rconti wrote:
| > I saw someone recently complaining that Facebook was
| recommending to them...a very crass but probably pretty hilarious
| video. Their indignant response [was that] "the ranking must be
| broken." Here is the thing: the ranking probably isn't broken. He
| probably would love that video, but the fact that in order to
| engage with it he would have to go proactively click makes him
| feel bad. He doesn't want to see himself as the type of person
| that clicks on things like that, even if he would enjoy it.
|
| I found this comment super-insightful. I generally _hate_ online
| videos with a passion. I DO NOT click "recommended posts" or ads
| or videos or what I consider garbage. But that doesn't mean I
| don't sometimes get interested in a thumbnail I see until I
| realize what "they're" trying to get me to click on.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I absolutely _loathe_ YouTube Face. If you 've never heard of
| the term, it's that exaggerated, wide-eyed, often with an open-
| mouth, expression on most thumbnails. I know that at some
| psychological level it works, probably because it hijacks the
| part of our brain that is meant to respond to when a fellow
| human being in front of us makes that expression - there _must_
| be something dangerous going on behind us and we need to pay
| attention.
|
| Even credible channels do this, Linus Tech Tips has such
| thumbnails and I'm sure it measurably affects their view count.
| I just lament how so much of getting people to click on videos
| has become reduced to the kinds of tricks that work on babies.
| I mean that literally, if you've ever played with a toddler or
| seen caretakers playing with them, you'll notice they use the
| same kind of exaggerated expressions and gesticulation.
| alt227 wrote:
| Veritasium has an excellent video exploring this exact topic
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
| jatins wrote:
| The problem is that it's not clear (at least to me) whether
| adding the "Youtube face" is making people click on the
| videos more, or is it just making YouTube push the video to a
| wider audience resulting in higher engagement.
|
| Is there some way to assert "Given the same audience of X
| people, adding such thumbnails results in more clicks"?
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't think that the YouTube algorithm pushes videos
| based on their thumbnails.
| NCC1701DEngage wrote:
| It is pretty obvious as a creator. The analytics available
| encourage experimentation. You find that mentioning
| subscribing or making a more visually engaging thumbnail
| will significantly boost important metrics like CTR. CTR is
| a metric almost entirely dependent on thumbnail image,
| although title and description play small roles, and CTR is
| an incredibly important metric for getting the content
| served by the algorithm.
|
| And it isn't entirely true that including a face mugging
| for the camera is always the most visually engaging
| (although representations of people are very attention
| grabbing). A person in the image is a character for a
| story, the whole "worth a thousand words" is true in that a
| whole narrative can be compressed into a single image and
| viewed with a glance. A person or other sentient being is a
| character for that story (I'm sure cat thumbnails do well
| too).
|
| Just try to think of an interesting narrative involving
| exclusively inanimate objects. Kinda hard; the whole
| "animate" thing seems to be necessary to give a before,
| middle, and after to events (ok, maybe collisions,
| explosives, and rockets might work, they'd probably do well
| as thumbnails too). A thumb with Linus looking surprised or
| disappointed or puzzled gives a short and incomplete
| narrative about the object he is looking at and how it made
| him feel those emotions. Part of this is that watching the
| video will give you a more complete narrative.
| joegahona wrote:
| "Please take a moment to subscribe" and "smash that bell
| icon" are the video version of "Subscribe to my crappy
| newsletter" popups. And before that, in the world of
| print magazines, it was multiple subscription cards that
| fell into your lap -- even if you were already a
| subscriber. The reason is an unsatisfying one: They work,
| and it's difficult to measure penalty metrics that show
| they're causing more harm than good.
|
| I would think a human face would be the most effective
| thumbnail, and that there are psychological reasons for
| this. When I worked in print magazines, there were
| metrics thrown around a lot for how well cover subjects
| did in terms of newsstand copies sold: Animals >
| inanimate objects; Humans > animals; color > b&w; photos
| > illustrations; eye contact with the camera > looking
| away; females > males.
|
| Apps are also getting into the fun, and tons are now
| including screaming faces[1] as their icon, no matter how
| related to the gameplay. Can't wait for a productivity
| app trying to pull off this icon...
|
| [1] https://i.redd.it/2t190ls2j2571.png
| fleddr wrote:
| There's so much wrong with this trend.
|
| First, from a purely operational and pragmatic point of view, I'm
| stunned how paranoid well established networks are about the
| Tiktok competition, willing to make existential changes to mimic
| them whilst potentially destroying themselves.
|
| Why can't there be differentiation? Why not improve your own
| network, fix its many issues, allow for some co-existence?
| "Innovate or die" is an exaggeration for Facebook and Youtube,
| they aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
|
| Second, I'm shocked (but not really) how not a single of these
| companies (or governments) take a shred of responsibility in even
| thinking about the human impact. There's already a laundry list
| of serious problems associated with social media and the
| trajectory is to just escalate it even more? A machine rapidly
| feeding you short videos, many to be AI generated, as the
| ultimate "solution"?
|
| Third, we've already established how the combination of social
| media and misinformation can lead to fatalities (example: FB and
| Myanmar), political interference, escalating polarization and
| instability, and more. The only counter force, ineffective as it
| may be, would be real users pushing back and trying to "correct"
| things.
|
| The next generation has no such pushbacks. It's all just one
| recommendation engine with ultimate power. Do we even know what
| the fuck we're doing?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| You have to dig through this entire article to get to the
| punchline, but here it is:
|
| > "These AI challenges, I would add, apply to monetization as
| well: one of the outcomes of Apple's App Tracking Transparency
| changes is that advertising needs to shift from a deterministic
| model to a probabilistic one; the companies with the most data
| and the greatest amount of computing resources are going to make
| that shift more quickly and effectively, and I expect Meta to be
| top of the list. None of this matters, though, without
| engagement."
|
| Relevant quote:
|
| > "The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he
| sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and
| simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."
| -- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
|
| This is slightly more complex with the social media business
| model: the product is the viewer, rather like a fish. The heroin-
| like bait to catch the viewer is the stream of short distractive
| entertainment content. The actual client buys the fish (the
| viewer) from the social media outfit. The actual client is an
| advertiser out to sell a product, a government out to push
| propaganda, a politician out to get votes, etc.
|
| The more interesting aspect of this is that the clients might be
| paying the social media providers to control the content stream
| as a means of manipulating their audience. Weapons manufacturers
| might want Facebook/Instagram/Twitter to bury anti-war content;
| corporate media giants might want independent outlets booted off
| the recommendation algorithm results; established political
| parties might want independents hidden from view; etc
|
| It's very plausible that this monetization model - i.e. not just
| the delivery of targeted advertising content to the 'engaged'
| audience, but also the targeted removal of competing content as a
| kind of shadow control of what that audience gets to see, is part
| of the revenue stream of Meta, Google, Twitter, etc.
|
| Of course, people will agree that China is doing this with
| TikTok, but many tend to get uncomfortable if asked if the US
| government and major corporations are also playing this game on
| Twitter, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.
| xapata wrote:
| They don't need to pay for removal of competing content
| directly, because people only have so many hours in the day. If
| they pay to promote favorable content, the unfavorable content
| will be crowded out.
| Banana699 wrote:
| But "people" isn't just a single thing, it's a distributed
| system of many interdependent but ultimately independent
| agents. If you only grind your own axe, yes many people will
| be indeed swept in, but a lot of other people will spend
| their parallel hours seeing others grind their own axe, which
| would include the axes of your opponents. There is an
| equilibrium where you reach all the people you would ever
| reach but your opponents still carves out their own niche out
| of other people's attention.
|
| Whereas, if you pursue both pushing your agenda and
| suppressing your opponent's agenda, you will more truly make
| it zero-sum. Now even the parallel people who would never
| see/care about your own propaganda would also never see your
| opponent's propaganda, because you suppressed it at its
| source.
| sinecure wrote:
| Your summary of this phenomenon resonates with my experiences
| navigating the internet all these years. I find reddit to be
| the most perfect example of watching something authentic,
| human, and real... devolve into a manufactured, astroturfed
| facsimile of a forum community.
|
| Years ago, reddit was filled with interesting discussions and
| analysis. Beautiful debates would rage on /r/news about current
| events, with equal showing of opposing viewpoints. Deep
| discussions on cinema in /r/movies. Excited chatter about the
| next video game and people's past favorites in /r/games. It was
| a place to talk shop for any interest.
|
| Today, reddit is a vastly different place. /r/news is a perfect
| example of how ad companies and political groups pulled it off.
| Around the height of Trumps office, the left was able to
| strongly rally around hatred for the man and therefore hatred
| for any conservative. During this time of high emotion, the
| /r/news subreddit had a mod overhaul which completely aligned
| the political framing to 100% progressive, with a search and
| destroy mentality to all right wing thought. Only certain
| "power users" with ties to established media companies and left
| wing political groups would post articles there and any
| competing user or troublesome commenter would be banned. After
| only a few months of this, anyone with a centrist or right wing
| opinion was banned or just left, and today /r/news is now a
| perfect echo chamber for progressive politics. If a newbie were
| to go visit /r/news on reddit today they would have to believe
| that surely everyone must think this way, and surely /r/news is
| a reflection of reality, but it is not, it is a curated and
| controlled echo chamber.
|
| The power inherent in falsifying organic communities and
| engagement in propagandizing and selling things to people is
| incredible. Our society is increasingly distrusting of
| traditional media, news, talking heads and the like, and have
| turned to the authenticity of social media strangers to get a
| better idea of the real discourse around current events. When
| those pools of discussion get poisoned, manipulated, and
| falsified, it further breaks down our ability to understand
| each other or feel connected.
|
| On the advertising front,/r/movies and /r/television are merely
| a constant stream of Movie/TV ads and celebrity gossip.
| /r/games might as well be the front page of a games industry
| magazine. The organic discussions are few and far between, and
| the marketing pushes from content creators are ever more
| apparent. You will see movies get odd posts by some rabid fan
| who just saw the newest release and can't wait to share how
| wonderful it was! Several comments agree that this new movie is
| a joy, great fun! Then you watch it and it's awful, true
| garbage, and if you search around you'll find out most real
| people agree... and you realize you were tricked, no human ever
| liked this dull film, some social media intern wrote that
| reddit post and paid for flair to pop it up. You start to
| realize that from mainstream reviews... to reddit posts..
| everything online is bought and paid for. What can you believe?
|
| This is the reality of the modern online social media space.
| Users are cattle to be herded towards products and worldviews
| and mindsets. Governments and companies alike prod and seduce
| us towards their desired result, and we're meant to believe
| that everything we're experiencing is authentic... but it
| isn't.
|
| The question now is... what's next? We know that people feel
| more alone and disconnected than ever before, and that
| authenticity seems to be in dwindling supply... how can we take
| back the internet? How can real discussion and community build
| up again? Maybe it's discord, maybe it's web3.0. Who can say...
| but we cannot accept that this beautiful cyberspace of human
| knowledge is becoming the worlds largest marketing ploy.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > but many tend to get uncomfortable if asked if the US
| government and major corporations are also playing this game on
| Twitter, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.
|
| De-monitization on YouTube should make this obvious to anyone.
|
| Why would YouTube recommend content that isn't going to make
| them money?
|
| Companies get to decide what makes money / where their ads are
| placed (this makes sense).
|
| The problem is - the social media companies are big enough that
| they don't really need to care about your user experience. You
| AREN'T the customer! All they care about is serving you ads.
|
| YouTube would much rather you have a mediocre experience using
| YouTube for 5 minutes and they make $0.50 off you than you have
| an outstanding experience for 30 minutes but they make $0 off
| you.
|
| You get what you pay for - and with Social Media... That's
| nothing.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >The payoff, though, will not be "power" for these small
| creators: the implication of entertainment being dictated by
| recommendations and AI instead of reputation and ranking is that
| all of the power accrues to the platform doing the recommending.
|
| This is what these companies want. Take the power away from a few
| ultra powerful users (Kardashians for example), and retain that
| power for themselves.
| thebradbain wrote:
| And yet... by doing this they're trying to socially engineer
| away something fundamental to all societies throughout
| humankind: people have been worshipping their influencers,
| celebrities, figureheads, idols, deities, demigods, and Gods
| their entire history.
|
| Even TikTok has its stars (and they're huge now).
| meowkit wrote:
| The atomisation of culture is evidence enough for me to
| believe that this erosion of worship is already under way.
| Its so much more diffuse. The cultural icons we each follow
| is so diverse already.
|
| I can imagine AI generated icons that only get to continue to
| persist if they can adequately capture the attention of X
| amount of productive apes.
| outsidetheparty wrote:
| "the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its
| users stated preference -- no News Feed -- and their revealed
| preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit."
|
| I think what it actually revealed is that you can sometimes force
| people to accept something other than their stated preference, if
| you do it gradually enough and leave them no choice in the
| matter.
| strogonoff wrote:
| > That's because the company correctly intuited a significant gap
| between its users stated preference -- no News Feed -- and their
| revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a
| bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right.
|
| Stop right there. What you mean is that their corporate wallets
| like it. These companies delude themselves if they consider
| "spend more time in the app" as an indicator for users liking it,
| in no sane world it is true.
|
| I like Mail.app because I need to spend so little time in it to
| get the most value out. I hate Instagram because it happens all
| the time that I missed a friend's post because I didn't scroll
| far enough.
|
| Curiously enough, this self-centered self-delusion only happens
| in UI teams of pseudo-free double-sided market "products" where
| you have to keep viewing ads to make the corp money.
|
| This business model also breaks how the market is supposed to
| work--the actual users and paying customers are now separate
| groups, users cannot vote with their wallets (or even leave,
| because the offering is free and my friends are here so the moat
| for competitors is infinite), and company's interests are not
| aligned with theirs.
| stavros wrote:
| "Heroin users said they didn't like heroin, but it turns out
| they take it quite often, so they must like it"
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think your comment is both wrong and spot on.
|
| IMO the "wrong" part is that most heroin users will tell you
| _they fucking love_ heroin. It makes them feel great /escape
| from life's problems, and users know this. The fact that
| users also know that heroin is destroying their lives isn't
| incompatible with loving it.
|
| The "spot on" part of your comment is that the addictive
| dynamics between social media and heroin are basically
| exactly the same. And over the past 5-10 years as this
| awareness has grown (e.g. documentaries like The Social
| Dilemma), social media companies have paid lip service to
| acknowledging some of the dangers of "endless scrolling", but
| the rise of TikTok has proven that the lip service was always
| bullshit. The _second_ another company came along with a
| stronger drug, all the incumbents are immediately trying to
| copy that addictive drug. They don 't give _2 shits_ about
| your well-being and never did.
| stavros wrote:
| > IMO the "wrong" part is that most heroin users will tell
| you they fucking love heroin.
|
| Yeah, the analogy wasn't great there but I think the point
| comes across. This is very timely for me, as I've just had
| a day spent playing chess (and losing) for hours.
|
| I hate it, but I can't stop, because I get easily addicted
| to games. Luckily, I've wasted enough time on DotA to
| recognize the pattern, so I uninstalled the app, but by now
| I recognize the pattern of "this makes me feel terrible but
| I can't get enough of it".
|
| Not everyone is, which is, I think, why social media
| (especially jealousy-fueled ones like Instagram) is so
| insidious. It's easy to mistake it for enjoyment.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yep, I think the good analogy is someone on a diet. It's
| like the social media companies are saying "Hah, see, you
| say you don't want chocolate cheesecake, but you eat it
| every time I put it in front of you!!"
|
| No shit sherlock, if I didn't love chocolate cheesecake I
| wouldn't need to be on a diet in the first place. But we
| need to acknowledge (as you put it, "It's easy to mistake
| it for enjoyment") the ability to say "Even though I am
| addicted to this thing, I know it's bad for me and I'm
| trying to stop".
|
| Social media companies are trying to pretend (as they lie
| through their teeth) that there is no difference. They
| are modern-day drug pushers and I wish society would
| treat them as such. Instead of saying "Oh cool, you have
| that great job at Facebook" I wish we would give them the
| same amount of social respect we give to corner meth
| dealers.
| cloutchaser wrote:
| This is a really silly point frankly, and can be applied to any
| product people have ever gravitated towards.
|
| You might claim to not like tv but it still became the most
| used entertainment product for decades.
|
| Same goes for the newsfeed.
|
| Any social network or product with a newsfeed will easily beat
| one without for users using it. Whether utopians like yourself
| think people like it or not is irrelevant. It's about survival.
| Not "corporate wallets"
| strogonoff wrote:
| What are those alternatives that you are comparing TV and
| newsfeed-powered social to? Point to a single product without
| newsfeed that lost to a product with newsfeed because of
| refusing to implement this feature.
| np_tedious wrote:
| MySpace?
| nprz wrote:
| Crack seems to be a product people gravitate towards, but
| that doesn't mean it's a good product or beneficial for the
| user.
| cwkoss wrote:
| (Crack) consumers like crack. Nobody likes news feeds
| filled with ads.
| mbesto wrote:
| > news feeds filled with ads.
|
| The OP's point wasn't about ads but about the algorithmic
| newsfeed. The newsfeed is designed and optimized to make
| you like scrolling. So, yes people do _like_ to scrolling
| but hate it when they realize that it might take you 20
| minutes instead of 2 minutes to get to your best friends
| new baby announcement. Sure, ads contribute to that
| frustration, but they aren 't the sole reason for it.
| cwkoss wrote:
| The key distinction is that news feeds' customers are
| advertisers, not the audience. News feeds were not built
| to maximize the audience's experience: it's an inherently
| consumer-adversarial technology.
| awillen wrote:
| Nobody said good product or beneficial to the user - the
| discussion is about people's preferences. Many people have
| very strong preferences for crack over not crack.
| gammarator wrote:
| Most of the theorizing about this episode gets the history
| wrong. The user outcry was because News Feed on rollout
| suddenly broadcast widely communication that had been
| previously been reasonably private. Suddenly pokes and wall
| posts between two friends were pushed to your entire network.
|
| Users weren't wrong to dislike this! Facebook violated their
| assumptions, just as if you learned someone was live-streaming
| your conversation with them at a bar. In response, Facebook
| provided more granular privacy controls--but more importantly,
| users changed their behavior to adapt to the assumptions of the
| new platform.
|
| (The outcry also highlighted the potential for virality in
| feed-like platforms, which was great for growth but of course
| also has negative consequences...)
| deckard1 wrote:
| Looking at Facebook is like looking at the rings of a tree.
| You can see the time where they worried about Twitter. Then
| they feared Snapchat. Now you can see how TikTok is making
| them panic.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "That was the problem with Twitter: it just wasn't convenient for
| nearly enough people to figure out how to follow the right
| people."
|
| This was never the problem with Twitter. The problem with Twitter
| is that it has no option to turn of retweets globally; don't show
| me retweets from anyone, only original tweets. If it had this, so
| that I would only see original content from people I follow, I
| would be back on Twitter.
| a123b456c wrote:
| They offer it on tweetdeck
| MintDice wrote:
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| There is something about the TikTok style swiping videos which
| just hits differently.
|
| I am far from the demographic for TikTok, but find it super
| addictive so just keep it off my phone.
|
| I barely use Instagram, but having checked in a few times
| recently I find myself mindlessly swiping their "Reels" for hours
| before pulling myself away from it.
|
| YouTube is my goto timewaste, but now when I pick it up on mobile
| I find myself in their "Shorts" feature which is the same kinda
| thing.
|
| Just that cycle of short videos in rapid fire.... humour,
| interesting fact, attractive woman, aspirational products,
| beautiful scenery, political argument then back around the cycle
| again is just like digital crack.
|
| Just say no!
| mike10921 wrote:
| YouTube is my time waster as well (besides when I actually
| watch technical info).
|
| YouTube Shorts are decent but I must keep the volume off
| because for some reason creators think they must add the most
| annoying music to any video clip they upload. Similar to the
| way you describe TikTok I feel like I need a cold shower after
| endlessly scrolling those videos.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I suspect they do it because they are trying to snap your
| attention back to their video. Kind of reminds me how a few
| years ago people would intersperse "ear-rape" segments in the
| video. It's that thing where the blast the volume up and the
| audio gets all distorted for dramatic - and infuriating -
| effect.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| same here with the youtube/tik tok shorts, a barrage of video
| diarrhea to make my brain light up.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| You can almost feel it grabbing your brain, and it takes real
| will to stop scrolling and get up. These products are really
| powerful.
| distrill wrote:
| > I am far from the demographic for TikTok
|
| I don't know who you think is in and out of their target demo,
| but it has pretty good penetration in lots of age and interest
| brackets. I would argue that pretty much every demographic is
| fair game.
| cloutchaser wrote:
| Isn't this basically what 9gag also does, but TikTok just built
| a better interface and recommendation algorithm?
|
| 9gag seems almost exactly the same as tiktok, it just never got
| personalized
| josefresco wrote:
| Also StumbleUpon which was(?) personalized but was for
| websites not short-format video.
| andsoitis wrote:
| _That's because the company correctly intuited a significant gap
| between its users stated preference -- no News Feed -- and their
| revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a
| bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right._
|
| That is also why you don't rely solely on your own preferences
| and behaviors for deciding what product features to build.
|
| Also interesting:
|
| _1. The Pre-Internet 'People Magazine' Era
|
| 2. Content from 'your friends' kills People Magazine
|
| 3. Kardashians/Professional 'friends' kill real friends
|
| 4. Algorithmic everyone kills Kardashians
|
| 5. Next is pure-AI content which beats 'algorithmic everyone'_
| swyx wrote:
| "the replacement of humans with machines will continue until
| morale improves"
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| My AI-generated content is being virtually consumed and
| clicked on by thousands of AI readers. No actual people in
| the loop. _Happiness increases._
|
| I also have an AI that filters out AI generated content so I
| only see things sourced directly from people I know to be
| people. Granted, Cortana sometimes slips and gets it wrong
| and lets through something that obviously came from an AI...
| Hmm... I wonder how that happened. _Happiness decreases._
| trebbble wrote:
| I'm so glad the gap between "we can keep very-long-term
| records" and "AI now dominates content creation" is going to be
| large enough, even for very recent things like video games,
| that I'll have enough _excellent_ "content" to last multiple
| lifetimes without ever having to pay attention to the AI stuff.
| jrm4 wrote:
| At the risk of being overly optimistic: Number 4 is an
| interesting inflection point that could potentially (hopefully)
| sow the seeds of it's own destruction (or at least radical
| transformation?)
|
| Which is to say, the move from 3 to 4 strikes me as a move
| toward "real human interaction," owing to the fact that the
| "content" there is much less prepackaged Kardashianism and much
| more "real person sharing real thing."
|
| Hence why I think 4 to 5 is very far from a sure bet. I'm not
| sure even what Pure AI could even meaningfully signify here.
| ketzo wrote:
| If content-generation AI is given sufficient resources and
| training input, I think 4>5 is pretty much guaranteed.
|
| The recommendation systems that power "algorithmic everyone"
| are not optimizing for real human interaction, or real people
| sharing real things; they're optimizing for the _absolute_
| most engaging content that they can find.
|
| This is Kardashian-killing because no one person or brand --
| not even Kim -- can create the most engaging content in the
| world on every single post; and even if they could, they
| can't do it at a rate to fill an entire feed.
|
| Sufficiently good recommendation systems kill the Kardashians
| because they can crawl through an _ocean_ of user-generated
| content and find the winners.
|
| If you combine a sufficiently good content- _generation_ AI
| with the data you glean from the world 's best recommendation
| system, you can just _create_ the most engaging possible
| content, without even knowing what that would be.
| telchior wrote:
| I don't think that "Algorithmic Everyone", the one you're
| phrasing as "real human interaction" is really either
| everyone or real humans. Instead, it's turning a handful of
| Kardashians into a million Kardashians. The number of
| performers, and niches, vastly grows but it's still all
| performance.
|
| I think that's one reason that a lot of kids love TikTok but
| adults generally can't stand it. Kids are looking for sources
| that show them how to act. TikTok is basically a giant tips
| channel. Here's how to be silly, here's how to dance, here's
| how to be a goth... It's like an enormous highschool, but if
| the highschool were completely made up of amateur actors
| trying to get the most attention.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| > Which is to say, the move from 3 to 4 strikes me as a move
| toward "real human interaction," owing to the fact that the
| "content" there is much less prepackaged Kardashianism and
| much more "real person sharing real thing."
|
| I believe we are well into number 4 and let me tell you,
| neither the "person" or the "thing" feels "real". Everything
| is so contrived, scripted, architected, and manufactured that
| the entirety of social media feels like The Truman Show at
| this point.
| jrm4 wrote:
| So, my take is the following: I still believe that it's all
| getting "more human," and that this isn't necessarily
| mutually exclusive of "contrived, scripted" etc. The
| difference is "Kardashianism" is filtered through big media
| selling ads, vs. e.g. "TikTok" -- at the point of creation
| -- is filtered through nothing but the sensibilities of the
| creator and mostly stays what it was at the point of
| creation. Ergo, much more human.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| A good perspective on the ever-shifting mediums.
|
| Isn't the whole premise of modern social media to get you to
| engage in stuff you would not normally engage in out of societal
| norms, but is data driven to prove you can't look away?
|
| Most modern "personalized infinite feeds" are preying on these
| psychological tricks where we can't look away from something
| shocking, seductive, or comforting. i.e. show something painful
| and then show something pleasureful to play games with your
| dopamine and adrenaline.
|
| Technology will continue to get more persuasive until we find
| moderation with it. The medium will continue to evolve and we'll
| continue to increase our screentime year over year cutting into
| our sleep and work until we do so.
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/multimedia/infographics/ge...
|
| I even wrote a book on this topic from the perspective of a
| millennial. While most of my mental health issues were because of
| my addiction to the internet/technology/media, I can only begin
| to wonder how this fares to the rest of the world given some of
| the known statistics about depression, anxiety, self-harm, and
| more at younger ages.
| notacoward wrote:
| > Isn't the whole premise of modern social media to get you to
| engage in stuff you would not normally engage in
|
| I think "whole premise" is a bit of an exaggeration, but there
| is only so much "organic" engagement to be had. Some social
| media (e.g. Tumblr) don't try to reach too far beyond that.
| They're content in their niche. Facebook and TikTok, on the
| other hand, have infinite ambition and infinite appetite for
| engagement. They're well beyond the point where they need to
| employ manipulative dark patterns (and keep inventing new
| ones!) to keep those numbers up.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| > Facebook and TikTok, on the other hand, have infinite
| ambition and infinite appetite for engagement. They're well
| beyond the point where they need to employ manipulative dark
| patterns (and keep inventing new ones!) to keep those numbers
| up.
|
| Mind elaborating here? I'm interested in your perspective
| regarding social media not employing newly discovered dark
| patterns (infinite video feeds, shorter content, targeted
| ads, personalized algorithms, etc)
| notacoward wrote:
| Well, "social media" covers a lot of things including this
| right here. Tumblr is IMO one of the best examples of less-
| manipulative social media recognized as such. There are
| ads, but they're so ill targeted that they're often the
| butt of jokes among the denizens. There also is a new-ish
| algorithmic feed, but the _default_ is strict reverse-
| chronological people you follow. While people do post
| videos - often from the bigger or modern sites - they 're
| far from dominant. I think Reddit is at approximately the
| same "evolutionary level" but I don't hang out there much
| so I could be wrong.
|
| Personally I find my time on Tumblr much more gratifying
| than my time on Facebook (yes I still actively use both)
| but that's more cultural rather than technical. Is the
| relative lack of vapid "influencer" types a function of
| culture or format? I think Reddit is at approximately the
| same "evolutionary level" but I hardly hang out there so I
| could be wrong. Reddit might also be the main
| counterexample to the general rule that sheer size and the
| OP's three axes all go together.
| svnt wrote:
| It was confusingly worded but the parent probably holds the
| same position you do.
|
| They're saying big social media is beyond the 'natural'
| resting size where they would exists if they did not engage
| in dark patterns, and so must make and use new ones to stay
| there.
| k12sosse wrote:
| This must be the whole "medium is the message" thing he was
| talking about
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| Does an addict "like" the thing they are addicted to? Or have the
| chemical responses in their brain been manipulated to the
| advantage of the person selling the addiction?
|
| Recommendation media is the perfection of a system that uses our
| dopamine response to control the behavior of those viewing it. At
| some point, I think we can agree that this isn't good for those
| consuming the content, especially as research shows that
| increased consumption decreases feelings of happiness and
| increases loneliness.
| jkkramer wrote:
| A rule of thumb I sometimes use to assess products, including
| ones I've built:
|
| Looking back at the last year, are you (or your users) happy
| with the time spent using the product? Do you/they regret it?
|
| Juicing short-term engagement can be effective for startups,
| but it isn't everything, and doesn't necessarily lead to
| lasting value.
| [deleted]
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| There's a middle period in addiction where you still get novel
| enjoyment from the thing you're doing, but finally realize it's
| bad for you. It seems to be around that time when people choose
| a path - either quitting that thing or leaning into it,
| consequences be damned.
|
| So yes they still like it, but the ratio between enjoyment and
| suffering starts to invert such that it's beyond the point of
| diminishing returns. Beyond that point you are mentally or
| physically dependent, and it starts to become simply avoiding
| the withdrawls. The addictive behavior becomes the new normal
| even if it's totally destructive.
|
| This is why addiction is so hard
|
| Note here: most people are thinking about intoxicants when
| reading the above, but it's equally true for anything in
| unhealthy amounts (food, games, running, collecting stamps
| etc...)
| pvarangot wrote:
| > It seems to be around that time when people choose a path -
| either quitting that thing or leaning into it, consequences
| be damned.
|
| It's not that simple. You can fool yourself into thinking
| there's no consequences like "being on social media 12 hours
| per day is completely normal, I know a lot of productive
| people that do it", and then lean into it more. There's also
| the chasing the dragon thing "maybe Trump will kill himself
| and if I make the first most upvoted Reddit comment I may
| become an online celebrity", in which every time you do
| something it feels like a novel thing because you are waiting
| for the time you actually get the dragon.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Addiction becomes more problematic when 'everyone is doing
| it', as you say with food/games, these are things everywhere
| in society and are hard to get away from. I'd say it's just
| as difficult to get away from social media since there is no
| general stigma that it is bad.
| rconti wrote:
| My question is, what happens to social media when it stops being
| social? I _liked_ the fact that everyone I knew in college was on
| Facebook, and _disliked_ having to remember what silly username
| my friend was using on Twitter this week, or how I knew this Joe
| Blow person I followed at some point for some reason.
|
| I _like_ seeing my friends' vacation photos and other friends
| commenting on them.
|
| I _hate_ how reels and stories move from social to broadcast. Why
| can't my friend group comment on an IG story and have a
| discussion? Why does it have to be in DMs? (Unless we do that
| stupid thing where you share out a scene from a story (ugh, yes,
| I realize how old it makes me that i don't even know what to call
| it) and tag everyone involved)
|
| The less a platform has the _kinds of content_ that drives the
| network effect, the less reason for there to be a network at all.
| It just becomes TV. And I use that comparison purposefully;
| television is extremely popular, I watch plenty of it myself. But
| without the _active_ network effects of social media, what drives
| user-to-user engagement? How do you get new people to sign up,
| beyond "hey, look at this tiktok I saw"? Or is that enough?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The problem is current AI generation contain no creativity, they
| are trained from human made data set. And machine generated data
| set is also learnt from human data
| mlboss wrote:
| I would argue that human creativity is also recombination of
| existing images/thoughts/experiences. There is no ghost in the
| machine who comes up with novel ideas that didn't exist before.
| Everything new is just a combination of old ideas combined in
| new ways.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| The leap from "recommending" content to "generating" content
| reminds me of the leap from cars that we drive on the ground and
| cars that fly.
|
| It seems like the future, but it's much further away than we
| think.
| personjerry wrote:
| If you're an innovator and think along this trend, then you're
| fighting the fight in the trenches where Facebook and TikTok are
| already embedded and winning, and AI already promises to win the
| next round.
|
| For me, the question is where can there be a shift that causes
| the existing competition to become derailed altogether? And how
| can you help induce such a change, and ride the wave?
|
| For example, imagine a social shift away from the "online all the
| time" trend to "hanging out with people IRL", riding the end-of-
| covid wave.
| pixl97 wrote:
| If there is such a shift, it will be a paradigm shift and very
| difficult to predict before it happens.
| stevewatson301 wrote:
| Such shifts are more likely to happen due to legislation and
| lawsuits than people voluntarily opting out of using FB/TikTok.
| (Similar to how the Sackler family was responsible for the
| opioid crisis which was only brought under control by
| government action.)
| erichocean wrote:
| > _the opioid crisis which was only brought under control by
| government action_
|
| "Coming wave of opioid overdoses 'will be worse than ever
| been before'" Source:
| https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/07/coming-wave-
| of...
|
| I guess there's still work to be done if this is the
| government having things "under control."
| ape4 wrote:
| We hate it but we also wish we'd invented it.
| upupandup wrote:
| im afraid this short attention optimized dopamine manipulation
| system is going to be deterimental for our collective mental and
| cognitive capacity, especially with covid.
|
| in particular im fearful of the impact on young developing minds,
| this is literally setting them up for failure or maybe this is
| the end goal?
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| I am on a crusade to regulate my wife's instagram usage and
| will pretty much ban social media for my children (or at-least
| heavily regulate it). My wife agrees that she is much happier
| on the aggregate when she uses instagram less. Having worked in
| industries close to social media, the people here have no
| qualms about doing anything possible to increase revenue, whats
| worse is how smart some of the people are.
| arwineap wrote:
| > whats worse is how smart some of the people are
|
| Smart people can use instagram, I'm not sure what you're
| getting at.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| i meant more like those who are doing whatever to increase
| revenue for their companies not actual users themselves.
| Jensson wrote:
| That sentence referred to the people working at Instagram,
| not the people using Instagram. The poster meant that it is
| sad that smart people spend so much time and energy trying
| to get people addicted to these things.
| tboyd47 wrote:
| It already has. The ultimate expression of this dopamine mill
| is on-demand porn, and that's already run its course addicting
| practically the entire population and giving them sexual
| dysfunction. Social media is like "porn lite."
| [deleted]
| sytse wrote:
| Great article. The author mentions: "Machine learning models can
| now create text and images for zero marginal cost". Another step
| was just taken in this direction with TikTok launching an 'AI
| greenscreen' based on text prompts
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/15/tiktok-in-app-text-to-imag...
| nassimsoftware wrote:
| I don't think we have solved image generation with DALLE-2 yet.
| There are still many challenges before we move on to video:
|
| - generating drawing that upon close inspection don't have
| obvious defects.
|
| - generate hand drawn text.
|
| - being able to replicate the same character along multiple
| angles consistently with the same style.
|
| I feel like this is going to become increasingly hard because
| there are many things in drawing that can't be capture quite well
| with words.
|
| It's analogous to code being more expressive than no-code drag
| and drop.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| A little bit dubious about the last one, it doesn't seem like a
| straightforward progression to me. But the first 2 for sure.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| The Three Trends (according to the article):
|
| 1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR
|
| 2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate
|
| 3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay
|
| By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive
| consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real
| world. (I may be exaggerating a touch.) It might stop short of a
| wire into the pleasure centers of the brain... but not by much.
|
| Makes me wonder if there's a market for the equivalent of health
| food where we go back to social media and deliberately avoid
| "recommendation media" (which may be the most important two words
| in the entire post).
| fossuser wrote:
| Urbit is trying to build the tools that enable this (in part by
| fixing the ad driven engagement incentives that lead to
| centralization and the current state).
|
| One interesting bit is if you're making vegetables when
| everyone else is giving away heroin it's not enough to just to
| make great vegetables, you really need to offer something that
| can't exist outside of what you've built because your core
| technology does something different.
|
| I think Urbit's distribution and handling of auth could be that
| for distributed DevEx and building collaborative apps in a way
| that's way simpler than on the current web stack. It's not
| quite there yet but there's a path to this reality and success
| is among the potential outcomes.
| elefanten wrote:
| Do you have any recommended introduction to Urbit that
| touches on these possibilities in particular?
| fossuser wrote:
| Which particular ones? The DevEx auth stuff or the
| incentive fixing bit?
|
| The ID model is probably where I'd start since it's what
| fixes spam/moderation problem in a way that can actually
| work without centralization. When IDs have a small, but
| non-zero cost spam becomes uneconomical and it's easy to
| block an ID. IDs also accrue pseudonymous reputation. From
| there you can start to fix a lot of the other stuff.
|
| The DevEx bit also heavily depends on that. When you build
| the OS to handle IDs you move the abstraction up the stack.
| Modern operating systems don't do this in part because they
| were built before the web. As a result modern operating
| systems are largely just machines user's use to open a web
| browser and every centralized web application has to
| rebuild their entire auth stack and all of the
| collaboration tooling. They're incentivized to do this and
| be incompatible with everything else because centralization
| tends to lead to ad-driven business models and all the
| incentive problems associated with that.
|
| If the OS handled IDs and collaboration you could just
| build your app, distribute it to the network and rely on
| built in OS libraries to do the complex work relying on
| guarantees from the OS itself. The users wouldn't need
| accounts on a bunch of centralized services.
|
| People have tried to do this on the unix stack, but it
| fails for a few reasons[0][1]. It's not impossible to build
| something else that could work though and rethinking the
| stack from first principles leads to something that could
| work.
|
| Imagine if all linux users could just dm each other because
| the OS itself handled encrypted communication between IDs.
| You could build and distribute linux apps without a mess of
| complexity just by publishing it to your node. You get the
| capability to build really collaborative applications out
| of the box because of a lot of these guarantees without
| having to give up control. There's a lot more possible than
| this in this model - I think it's a path to escape the
| local maximum we've been trapped in and get closer to the
| web the 90s cypherpunks imagined (and the personal computer
| hackers before them).
|
| [0]: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-
| progra...
|
| [1]: https://urbit.org/overview
| shalmanese wrote:
| The final social network will be named Tasp.
| Kiro wrote:
| > a wire into the pleasure centers of the brain
|
| Sounds like the dream. I hope I live to experience it.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Allow me to recommend Jenny Odell's book, _How to Do Nothing_
| [1], or watch a ~30m talk by Jenny[2]
|
| 1 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-
| no...
|
| 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dveUrpp6vs8
| benreesman wrote:
| You might enjoy The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1]. It
| addresses these themes quite directly.
|
| The thing is, we're sort of talking (still somewhat
| hypothetically) about the Internet becoming more like hard
| drugs here in terms of entertainment/pleasure/addiction
| potential, which puts pretty much everyone except for (by HN
| standards) serious conservatives in a bind on slamming social
| media: liberals like me and the many libertarians on here
| usually feel that the War on Drugs has been a catastrophe,
| alongside pretty much all prohibition aimed at people who are
| turning to escapism because the rungs of the real-world
| achievement ladder have been knocked out above them.
|
| I personally believe that explosive growth in escapism (see:
| opioid crisis) is driven by shitty opportunities in the real
| world. There is always going to be some set of highly potent
| diversions, and there will always be some fraction of the
| population that has a hard enough time with them to need
| professional help. But IMO none of Internet pornography,
| painkillers, video games, or crazy-optimized recommender
| systems are going to destroy lives and societies in job lots if
| those societies have high mobility in real-word achievement.
| So, not our society right now.
|
| I'm probably biased having worked in social media in my life,
| but the flip side is that I also know how how the sausage is
| made, I think that sort of balances out. Everyone has to form
| their own opinion here, my point can be TLDR'd as:
| "decriminalize drugs" and simultaneously "fuck TikTok" isn't
| really a consistent worldview. It's reasonable to say "fuck
| marketing TikTok to children" alongside "decriminalize drugs",
| and I'd probably agree with both.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| There is most definitely something different at play here,
| though I can't point out exactly what. It's hard to imagine a
| 60-year old grandmother hooked on crack, porn or painkillers,
| but I know several who spend 8+ hours a day glued to a screen
| playing Candy Crush.
| gen220 wrote:
| I think it's that crack, porn, and painkillers are, to
| varying extents, counterculture or taboo. Whereas an
| "innocent" Candy Crush addiction is more socially
| acceptable.
|
| It's fun to speculate on why that's the case, but it seems
| likely intractable to nail down.
|
| Although, I'll point out that while they're both categories
| of addiction, pension funds can only invest in and make
| profits from the more "innocent-feeling" category.
|
| I'd guess that, if there were a regulatory environment that
| allowed for public companies that could legally encourage
| people to indulge their $taboo_addiction, then said
| $taboo_addiction would cease to be taboo and become more
| prevalent, for better and worse.
| benreesman wrote:
| We might come from different socio-economic backgrounds
| then, because the idea of a 60-year old grandmother
| addicted to painkillers far in excess of medical need is
| depressingly mundane to me.
| drekipus wrote:
| > if those societies have high mobility in real-word
| achievement. So, not our society right now.
|
| Our society isn't high mobility? Who has a higher mobility?
|
| (* I realise this is the internet but I'm assuming you're
| talking about one of the five-eyes nations)
| scottmcdot wrote:
| Can I coin the term "recommedia"?
| austinjp wrote:
| "Recommercial"
| cwkoss wrote:
| VR is never going to be a replacement for short form video.
| Casual passive consumption of video benefits from being able to
| fit in between other activities easily. I'm never going to want
| an immersive experience when I have 2 minutes to kill waiting
| for a friend to show up at a bar - I just want easily
| digestible content snacks.
| hammock wrote:
| >Casual passive consumption of video benefits from being able
| to fit in between other activities easily
|
| The same was said of video vs. reading. "I'm never going to
| want a video experience, it doesn't fit in between other
| activities as well as reading a page of something."
| evouga wrote:
| Sure, but plenty of people still browse Reddit or Instagram
| (or HackerNews), listen to podcasts, etc.
|
| There is a middle ground between "AR will never take off as
| an entertainment medium" and "AR will kill
| video/images/text."
| johnmaguire wrote:
| To be honest, I still feel this way. I can't stand when
| content is only available in video format. Give me text!
| mike00632 wrote:
| I feel this way when I click on a news article and it's
| actually a video with a headline.
| nomel wrote:
| To be fair, I think most everyone agrees that XR is the
| future, not VR. XR could easily take the replacement.
| bmazed wrote:
| over/under 2040 ?
| evouga wrote:
| Under. Way under.
|
| Google Glass's spectacular failure had a chilling effect
| on the entire industry, but it failed due to (1) lack of
| killer apps, (2) poor aesthetics, and (3) consumer
| concern about privacy.
|
| But ML has revolutionized image and video processing,
| Apple etc. could design a less hideous headset, and
| nobody cares about privacy anymore.
| nomel wrote:
| > could design a less hideous headset, and nobody cares
| about privacy anymore.
|
| I think it would help to not make most of the promotional
| material about video recording, and not make a _huge_
| camera the most visible feature. I don 't think it's a
| coincidence that the Quest lineup, including rumored
| Cambria and Apple renders, obscure the forward looking
| cameras.
|
| Google Glass picture, which looks like a webcam on your
| face: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/19/
| google-gl...
| monkeydust wrote:
| Isn't VR a type of XR?
| nomel wrote:
| VR is the world real-world excluding half of XR.
| Excluding the world is often not desirable, which is why
| VR, alone, definitely isn't the future.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Likewise. I'd never want to have to take out my handheld
| computer, boot it up, and connect it to the internet just to
| kill 2 minutes looking at pictures of cats, when I can just
| as easily look at my wallet full of cat Polaroids.
|
| I see a future where you blink twice to power up your ocular
| nerve implants for a few minutes of stim, then power 'em down
| when you get a popup that your buddy is nearby and ordering
| drinks.
| tacotacotaco wrote:
| You think people in the future will have experiences in the
| real world with other real humans. That their buddy isn't a
| bot algorithmically refined to maximally connect with it's
| user. And that the user can power down their ocular
| implant. How cute.
| layer8 wrote:
| If/when VR becomes as easy as putting on a pair of
| sunglasses, then it won't be much different from pulling your
| smartphone out of the pocket. Luckily, we're probably decades
| away from that being feasible, on the technological front.
| cwkoss wrote:
| VR is by its nature immersive. Immersion is inherently at
| odds with quick and easily digestible.
|
| 3d video served by an AR sunglass display is plausible (but
| probably way overkill for the next decade), but feeling
| like you're in an entirely different environment while
| waiting in line at the post office is never going to be a
| thing people want.
| layer8 wrote:
| I disagree that it's that much different from people
| being immersed in their smartphones, not taking notice at
| all of their surroundings anymore. With a sunglasses-like
| solution, you probably would/could still see the actual
| surroundings in your peripheral vision, or via pass-
| through, similar to how you can still hear your
| surroundings through non-sealing earphones, or via pass-
| through for sealed ones.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Very implausible imo, have you used VR before? Will never
| be safe to use in public spaces: what and who is around
| you is unpredictable, so only AR will be viable.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Casual passive consumption of video benefits from being
| able to fit in between other activities easily. I'm never
| going to want an immersive experience when I have 2 minutes
| to kill waiting for a friend to show up at a bar - I just
| want easily digestible content snacks.
|
| This presumes the existence of important "other activities",
| and relegates this content consumption as some lower-priority
| thing done between these activities. I know people who really
| don't have any important other activities: passively
| scrolling through video after video is their primary
| activity. For this [I'd guess growing] group, VR's ability to
| block out the unimportant real-world is the next obvious
| step.
| nomel wrote:
| > It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers of
| the brain
|
| I don't think we'll ever reach that. I'm sure there will be
| non-invasive methods, soon enough.
| croes wrote:
| Do you remember the passengers of the Axiom in WALL-E?
| ssalazar wrote:
| > By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive
| consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the
| real world.
|
| Doesn't seem all that different from 99% of media consumption
| thats existed in my lifetime.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| The novel element is combining the passive medium with
| infinite content. In my circles, sitting slack-jawed in front
| of the TV for hours was something that only those with little
| mental energy or drive did[1]. By contrast, probably 75% have
| some non-trivial degree of slack-jawed passive social media
| consumption, even more so since IG and Tiktok.
|
| To wit, I think what's interesting about this Era of media
| relative to the TV Era is the vanishing proportion of the
| population that's able to escape the habit.
|
| [1] Not a value judgment: my sister and her husband consume
| massive amounts of TV but they're also both early-career
| doctors. I would be braindead at the end of the day too.
| 650 wrote:
| Idk how people do this, its just so boring. I tried tiktok
| and the first 200-300 scrolls were interesting, but then
| its just people regurgitating the same comedy/meme. Sure
| you can find a niche subject you're into like cooking, but
| most topics do get kind of dry after a while. I do think
| I'm in a minority though and know quite a few who spend
| hours a day on tiktok/insta.
| EricMausler wrote:
| It's enjoyable for 20 minutes a day, especially when
| waiting on something.
|
| The key things are:
|
| 1) time offline is on your side. you can saturate
| yourself with current trends that interest you pretty
| quickly. You need to allow actual real world time to pass
| for those trends to update.
|
| 2) scroll with purpose and intent. aggressively dismiss
| things that don't immediately get your attention from any
| unknown source. (Helps the algorithm actually cater to
| your interests)
|
| 3) tell the algorithm when you don't like something.
| There's usually a "don't show me content like this"
| option somewhere. I felt dramatic about it at first, but
| it's the only tool you have to keep the algorithm from
| incorrectly assuming you enjoyed the content when you did
| watch the entire thing (out of sheer curiosity / hope /
| general inaction).
|
| I noticed I now get a lot of low profile things in my
| feed that are actually pretty cool and fit the medium
| nicely. Lots of trade work stuff, before / afters,
| machines doing stuff, stand up comedy bits, etc. Those
| personalized things do not have room to flourish if I am
| giving too many things a chance.
| croes wrote:
| In my lifetime the content didn't get automatically adjusted
| to my needs to get me hooked.
| tshaddox wrote:
| No, but it was undoubtedly produced with the intention to
| get the most people hooked as possible. Traditional media
| was just less effective at hooking people because of the
| limited number of distribution channels and the cost of
| producing content.
| prox wrote:
| From Edward R Murrow famous speech: _This instrument can
| teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But
| it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to
| use it to those ends. Otherwise, it 's nothing but wires and
| lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle
| to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference.
| This weapon of television could be useful._
| csixty4 wrote:
| yeah that's basically describing broadcast tv & radio
| Banana699 wrote:
| None of those are AI-generated (therefore don't have the
| potential massive automated scale) or auto-play.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| Broadcast radio & tv are definitionally auto-play,
| arguably much moreso than social media apps which have
| pause and rewind and browsing functionality.
|
| I digress, the scalability point is fair and this is an
| irrelevant sidebar
| dylan604 wrote:
| are you sure? it sounds like the exact same playlist on
| every station with the same owner in the same market with
| such little care about the content in the playlist but
| only based on an algorithm.
|
| so maybe AI === brain dead corporate owners?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| IMO the differ here is less about AI vs human curated,
| but curated/generated for a very broad audience vs one
| specific consumer, ideally live as their mood or
| interests change. We aren't there yet with the highly
| dynamic mood and interest changes (e.g. interest fading
| after 5 Dr pimple popper videos, let's throw in some
| wingsuit stuff), but it's on the same trajectory. Address
| broad audience -> address smaller, niche audiences ->
| address individuals -> address individuals in the moment
| mola wrote:
| Yes, we already have "slow AI". It's the corporate
| paperclip machine. It's has a strict value function; make
| money to shareholders. And it will do what ever it takes
| to make more of it.
|
| All these ppl scaring us with AGI are either distracting
| us from the clear and present dangers of slow AI so they
| can keep profiting from it , or are just duped by silly
| technooptimism.
| oefnak wrote:
| Why do you think that a malevolent AGI wouldn't use these
| tactics to make money / influence public perception?
|
| I think these are two sides of the same coin.
| mftb wrote:
| You can't ignore matters of degree. It does sound
| similar, but just by reducing the content chunk length to
| ~20 secs, they've dramatically improved the algorithmic
| manipulation and ad insertion (from their point of view),
| making it all far more effective.
|
| In the old model people left the tv droning in the
| background, in the new model, people are riveted by their
| phones (with 2nd and 3rd screens (and radio (and
| billboards)) droning in the background).
| throwyawayyyy wrote:
| Being only semi-serious, but: wouldn't an auto-generated
| Netflix look pretty much like Netflix?
| adolph wrote:
| Max Headroom was a human powered simulation of such a
| future.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom
| mftb wrote:
| There was a time I hadn't thought about Max Headroom in
| years, now I feel like he's all over the place again.
| guelo wrote:
| TikTok isn't that far off from America's Funniest Home
| Videos.
| karaterobot wrote:
| No, that's not what he's saying. Broadcast TV & radio is
| human-generated, audio and video, and not immersive. It's
| several steps behind the trend he's predicting. And they
| are also not equivalent in terms of getting user engagement
| and attention, which is why those industries have shrunk so
| much.
| dzuc wrote:
| > Makes me wonder if there's a market for the equivalent of
| health food where we go back to social media and deliberately
| avoid "recommendation media"
|
| See: https://www.are.na/
| froidpink wrote:
| BeReal's growth is probably a good example of this kind of
| "organic" and "healthy" social media
| alpha_squared wrote:
| Disclosure: I haven't used BeReal.
|
| I fully expect BeReal's model to change in less than two
| years from now (probably within a year). I see it quickly
| devolving into tedium after a while. Users will disable
| notifications to post, become passive consumers.
| "Influencers" drive adoption of platforms and it's hard to be
| the same type of influencer unless you're constantly living
| that lifestyle, which almost no influencer today actually
| does.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| David Foster Wallace predicted it all in the 90s
| LordEthano wrote:
| Exactly what came to mind
| majormajor wrote:
| I was thinking the wireheads from Hyperion
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Arguably, Aldous Huxley got pretty close half a century
| earlier than that, but I guess he failed to anticipate that
| the United States would become and remain so ideologically
| committed to keeping recreational drug use illegal that we'd
| need to find a more expensive and convoluted means to
| approximate wireheading.
| skyyler wrote:
| I've heard this sentiment before, could you explain what you
| mean?
| ZantaWB wrote:
| He touches on this idea a lot, but most deeply in Infinite
| Jest where the parallels between between addiction to media
| and addiction to drugs is a major theme. In that story
| people have developed 'Entertainments,' basically video
| segments. Someone makes an Entertainment so unbelievably
| good that anyone who watches it is immediately stupefied
| and has no will to do anything but watch the Entertainment
| over and over. This Entertainment becomes a potent
| terrorist weapon since it can essentially take out anyone
| to whom it's broadcast.
| allenu wrote:
| > Someone makes an Entertainment so unbelievably good
| that anyone who watches it is immediately stupefied and
| has no will to do anything but watch the Entertainment
| over and over. This Entertainment becomes a potent
| terrorist weapon since it can essentially take out anyone
| to whom it's broadcast.
|
| There's a Monty Python sketch where someone comes up with
| the funniest joke in the world and dies laughing after
| penning it. It's eventually learned that anyone who reads
| or hears the joke immediately laughs themselves to death.
| Of course, eventually the army gets a hold of it to use
| as a weapon.
| swyx wrote:
| see also Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death
| (fantastic title)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
|
| they were calling this out since 1984 - hard to
| distinguish between luddism and genuine problems
| reginaldo wrote:
| The book "Technopoly", by Postman, is also very well
| worth a reading. But I'd say the most relevant to this
| trend is "The disappearance of childhood". The book's
| thesis is that childhood is a modern invention, in that,
| before the printing press, and mass education / literacy,
| there was no need for childhood as a learning period. In
| the middle ages, childhood ended at age 7, as soon as
| children became more or less self sufficient in their
| bodily functions.
|
| Literacy requires effort, and protected time to acquire
| analytical skills that are not natural to humans.
| Childhood was, then, embraced, because it's the way to
| get literacy.
|
| All-encompassing technologies that require no effort,
| e.g. TV or, as it appears to be the case, AR, might end
| the need for childhood, hence the book title. Among the
| novel technologies, the computer would be the one to
| "save" childhood, but only if society requires active (as
| opposed to passive) competency with computer technology.
| Quoting Postman:
|
| "The only technology that has this capacity is the
| computer. In order to program a computer, one must, in
| essence, learn a language. This means that one must have
| control over complex analytical skills similar to those
| required of a fully literate person, and for which
| special training is required. Should it be deemed
| necessary that everyone must know how computers work, how
| they impose their special world-view, how they alter our
| definition of judgment--that is, should it be deemed
| necessary that there be universal computer literacy--it
| is conceivable that the schooling of the young will
| increase in importance and a youth culture different from
| adult culture might be sustained. But such a development
| would depend on many different factors. The potential
| effects of a medium can be rendered impotent by the uses
| to which the medium is put. For example, radio, by its
| nature, has the potential to amplify and celebrate the
| power and poetry of human speech, and there are parts of
| the world in which radio is used to do this. In America,
| partly as a result of competition with television, radio
| has become merely an adjunct of the music industry. And,
| as a consequence, sustained, articulate, and mature
| speech is almost entirely absent from the airwaves
| \\(with the magnificent exception of National Public
| Radio\\). Thus, it is not inevitable that the computer
| will be used to promote sequential, logical, and complex
| thought among the mass of people. There are, for example,
| economic and political interests that would be better
| served by allowing the bulk of a semiliterate population
| to entertain itself with the magic of visual computer
| games, to use and be used by computers without
| understanding. In this way the computer would remain
| mysterious and under the control of a bureaucratic elite.
| There would be no need to educate the young, and
| childhood could, without obstruction, continue on its
| journey to oblivion."
| ru552 wrote:
| What you describe as the "end of the line totally passive
| consumption of endorphins" we already have. It comes in various
| forms of drugs and you can pick the type of world blotting
| experience you desire.
| josefresco wrote:
| Reminds me of the Pixar movie Wall-E
| 0000011111 wrote:
| Its the next step of facebook - meta. Think ready player one.
| sh4rks wrote:
| That would fit under the "video" category
| monkeydust wrote:
| I keep thinking of Wall-E more frequently recently - with
| macro trends such as global warming , automation as and great
| resignation plus Elon and his rockets.
| evouga wrote:
| "Medium" and "AI" are spot-on IMO, but the "UI" track seems
| suspect to me.
|
| "Click" and "Tap" are essentially the same thing (on a desktop
| vs. on a mobile device): the user actively selecting what
| content to view next. So are "scroll" and "autoplay" (for
| text/image and video content, respectively). In the former, the
| user has agency over what to view, and in the latter, the
| transition is automated.
|
| I'm very skeptical that fully automated UI will ever replace
| giving the user a small selection of recommended items.
| seydor wrote:
| They remind of the characteristics of TV just with different
| technologies and AI generation instead of sitcoms.
| thelock85 wrote:
| This reminds me of the evolution of the slot machine (as read
| in Matthew Crawford's _The World Beyond Your Head_ ). A rough
| analog would be:
|
| 1. Medium: Mechanical reel > Digital reel
|
| 2. Gameplay: Fixed odds > Adjustable odds > Programmatic
| adaptive odds
|
| 3. Experience: Pull the lever and win or lose > Pull the lever
| and win even if you lose (e.g. get back change) > Swipe a card
| and win even if you lose > Swipe a card and watch the game
| auto-play until you're out of money
|
| After reading that book (in 2014), I made my last Facebook post
| (the history of the slot machine) and promptly downloaded my
| data and deleted my account. I'm paraphrasing but Crawford's
| point was basically that social media is a socio-emotional slot
| machine.
| BigHatLogan wrote:
| Fantastic book. The stories about the slot machine players
| who wear black pants so that they can urinate without being
| noticed was shocking, to say the least. They are so addicted
| to the machines that they won't even get up to use the
| restroom.
|
| The phrase he used, "playing to extinction", very much
| reminds me of what's happening now across most entertainment
| categories, broadly speaking (autoplay, loot boxes, slot
| machine-style gaming content, etc.)
| HappySweeney wrote:
| It isn't so much that they are addicted (though they are),
| but that someone will take their spot while they are up.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| That's just a rationalization they tell themselves.
| HappySweeney wrote:
| It's more than that. In a game like roulette, probability
| has no memory. In slots, the payout must come eventually,
| and playing losing rounds only brings you closer to that.
| There are slots players just waiting for others to go
| bust so they can swoop in.
|
| Also, one would hope that those that are so addicted that
| they are fine to just haul-off and piss themselves would
| be able to think ahead and simply wear a diaper.
| drekipus wrote:
| > In slots, the payout must come eventually, and playing
| losing rounds only brings you closer to that.
|
| Riiiigggghhhhttttt
| bigtunacan wrote:
| The payout is always less than the take, but the parent
| is correct. In most areas (of the US at least) casino
| slot machines are pretty tightly regulated to have to pay
| out a certain percentage of the take.
|
| To give an example, slot machines in Nevada must pay out
| a minimum of 75% of the take. Additionally, no
| programming/odds updates or machine resets may be made to
| the slot machine until the machine has sat idle for a
| minimum of 4 minutes; and if an update/reset is being
| made the machine _must_ clearly display that this is
| occurring.
|
| So the sick thing here is that each loss does in fact
| bring you closer to the winning spin. One of the only
| real strategies of slot machines (in the sense that there
| can be a strategy to a game of luck) is to stand around
| idling watching other people lose, then after someone
| leaves a machine with a bad run you immediately drop in
| to the spot and start playing the same machine.
| guelo wrote:
| The 75% isn't calculated per player or per session. It's
| the theoretical minimum payout over the long run.
| Basically it's just code that does win =
| rand() < .75
| ryandrake wrote:
| Reminds me a little of Star Trek TNG's _The Game_ [1], where
| the crew becomes addicted to an automated AR/VR game that
| just sits there autoplaying, directly manipulating the
| brain's pleasure sensors. Something like this, but one that
| also slowly transfers the contents of the user's bank account
| to a corporation, could be the ultimate end-result of our
| current capitalist-technologist trajectory.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Nex
| t_...
| beckingz wrote:
| "To unlock more Dopamine Crystals, please do this
| Mechanical Turk task and complete a side quest for Pepsi
| flavored Vat Fluid"
| jjeaff wrote:
| Hmm, so basically you just sink into an overstuffed recliner
| and stare into a huge screen while it feeds you content
| interspersed with commercials?
| 62951413 wrote:
| Idiocracy was a documentary
| mike00632 wrote:
| How much is this recliner you speak of? Can I pay to skip
| ads?
| gzer0 wrote:
| "The implication of entertainment being dictated by
| recommendations and AI instead of reputation and ranking is that
| all of the power accrues to the platform doing the recommending."
|
| I found this quite profound.
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