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).
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.
“You only started trying it out once they moved to GANS and VR headsets. You are not pathetic or anything, could get a real girl if you wanted to. Just don't have time. Have to focus on your career for now. "Build your empire then build your family", that's your motto.
You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.
She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.
In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.
It strikes you that true love does exist after all.”
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.
> 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).
I think there's definitely a product in there for people who want a tool to help manage their attention, one they can intentionally shape.
But that product cannot be primarily ad-supported, since the fundamental purpose of ad-supported tech is to command (and sell) attention. Users would need to be customers, not the product, which means they would need to be willing to pay. And since attention is power, anyone producing this would either have to be past motivation for more power, or principled about not abusing the potential in abusing an attention management tool.
I'm sure the userbase and builders who can make this happen exist, but they are smaller. The incentives against it are powerful currents. Most of us will choose the opaque cost of selling our attention and behavioral trail over the transparent cost of our currency. Most of us are not past motivation for more power.
"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.
Social media is working hard to try to turn itself into TV without realizing that the major component of channels is that they leverage tons of content from independent creators, and that was their distinct lane that made them valid. If they turn into pre-set and pre-programmed media, they are finished... Virtual reality or not.
The discussion concerning trends needs to clearly address which perspective the analysis involves... The OP looks as if it involves recommendations for development trends moving forward, rather than serving advice based on the perspective of creators and contributors of content... That's fine, but the article refers to the Kardassians being upset as creators, as if there aren't tons of other unsponsored creators and app users (without their own TV shows) involved in the process of keeping these platforms vibrant and alive.
As social media apps brutally run towards profit making, they are underestimating the value of creators. If they continue that trend, they will basically turn into pre-programmed TV channels... Losing the very aspect of participation they are built upon. If most app users on TikTok are publishing content, after cycles of being ignored, they simply stop logging in... Not viewing other content, not buying items shown in ads, not engaging, and thus making the app die.
The ideal of opportunity and growth on platforms for independent creators is largely being hijacked on a regular basis, and creators are catching onto it just now, after years of working for little to no reward on platforms that became rich.
There seems to be a constant sentiment to capture the market in order to be a monopoly among social platforms, but the rug gets pulled whenever they do things that alienate users and creators. Instead of thinking about technological advancement and capabilities of platforms, we need to start looking deeply at the value this platforms add to the lives of individuals beyond frivolous entertainment, because instead of creating a user account, for entertainment we could simply watch television, which doesn't sell us the ideal that we can all meaningfully participate and require us to scroll through it on a phone all day.
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.
The fediverse is by design about manually managing your subscriptions. You only see content from people you follow and you're the one who completely controls the presentation of that content.
This entire article is built on the wrong premise that people use social media for entertainment. I certainly don't — I'm not open to any content discovery on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter at all. I use social media to connect with people I mostly already know, and the platforms getting in the way, begging with their "you may enjoy this" is bloody annoying. I'm building my own fediverse project for a reason, after all.
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.
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.
> 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.
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…)
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”
> 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.
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.
Agree that this insight is well expressed. Helps me understand more why auto play is probably more important and powerful on junk-social-media platforms.
On Netflix, auto-play is just pulling forward what you would probably watch later. On TikTok and Facebook, you’re autoplaying and auto-opting into a class of content you normally would retreat from.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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’
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.
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.
“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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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...
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?
"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."
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?
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.
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."
The tweets from Sam Lessin quoted in the article seem deeply dystopian, particularly the idea that FB/IG's fundamental problem today is interface-based, something Tiktok has apparently solved. Currently, users actually have to make a decision to click to view something, e.g. comments on a post.
Infinite scroll UI and pageless SPA frameworks fixed this to an extent, but apparently that's not enough anymore. Today, the algorithm "knows" that you want to watch this trashy sensationalist video, even though you aren't physically tapping the button to view it.
So Tiktok's format of fullscreen autoplaying video is designed to pass that final hurdle: remove decision making from the user entirely. Throw AI-recommended (and soon, AI-generated) material at them, forever, until they physically exit the app.
No wonder Zuck wanted a Facebook phone back in 2011. iOS and Android actually let you exit the FB app if you wanted to.
The 'Medium' trend seems to most off to me, but I've seen it repeated as truth by a number of people
Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR
A lot of people/companies don't seem to appreciate that the appeal of images and video come from the fact that they represent 'real' (or at least staged-real) events/people/places. Animated videos and scenes from movies seem like categorically different kinds of things, less likely to get attention in news feeds other than as fodder for memes.
3D graphics + VR are never going to be real, and I suspect will never (or not for a long time) have the engagement of images + videos despite being ostensibly more 'immersive'.
The article presents the various media as existing with some inherent ordering of value or preference. Text is not less than Image in any sense, just as VR is not greater than Video. These media may have different characteristics in terms of desirability for business metrics (especially in terms of product differentiation) which make it seem like there is some ordering.
Consider Twitter, which while it might not have the MAU of Facebook (a tall order!) is still a testament to the enduring value of text. And again, this isn't any case for Text being superior in any sense, but rather a way of pointing out that appetites for all of these media happily coexist and probably always will.
A similarly poor ordering (from the past) might look something like:
Medium: print (text) -> radio (audio) -> television (video) -> multimedia (CD-ROM hahaha)
We know of course that audio has not become less relevant over time.
OTOH the effort required for people to participate by creating works in these different media varies hugely. Text and Images are very accessible and are still far more accessible than Video (user research in my job suggests that they struggle to create quality video content more so than still images) and 3d graphics and VR are likely to remain inaccessible (relative to digital photography).
Generated content doesn't necessarily need the output to be entirely algorithmically generated. It'll probably initially use real people as meat puppets - with things like AI generated filters, scripts and prompts in order to generate content that hits the right niche, then use the recommendation algorithm as a fitness test - no need to autogenerate video content if people will do the hard bit for free.
"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.
For me the biggest reason to never install apps is that with my browser I never am force fed videos. I have to click them. If it's an app, they can shove them down my throat with autoplay. Not so with current browser policies.
The world is going to shift to sheeple only using apps (shapples?) and those only using services inside a browser (browseers?). Browseers will be much happier and live richer lives.
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
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.
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?
slowmovintarget|3 years ago
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).
thelock85|3 years ago
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.
psychomugs|3 years ago
You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.
She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.
In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.
It strikes you that true love does exist after all.”
- 8fhdkjw039hd
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418657
ssalazar|3 years ago
Doesn't seem all that different from 99% of media consumption thats existed in my lifetime.
cwkoss|3 years ago
froidpink|3 years ago
wwweston|3 years ago
I think there's definitely a product in there for people who want a tool to help manage their attention, one they can intentionally shape.
But that product cannot be primarily ad-supported, since the fundamental purpose of ad-supported tech is to command (and sell) attention. Users would need to be customers, not the product, which means they would need to be willing to pay. And since attention is power, anyone producing this would either have to be past motivation for more power, or principled about not abusing the potential in abusing an attention management tool.
I'm sure the userbase and builders who can make this happen exist, but they are smaller. The incentives against it are powerful currents. Most of us will choose the opaque cost of selling our attention and behavioral trail over the transparent cost of our currency. Most of us are not past motivation for more power.
josefresco|3 years ago
Invictus0|3 years ago
evouga|3 years ago
"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.
jjeaff|3 years ago
croes|3 years ago
winternett|3 years ago
The discussion concerning trends needs to clearly address which perspective the analysis involves... The OP looks as if it involves recommendations for development trends moving forward, rather than serving advice based on the perspective of creators and contributors of content... That's fine, but the article refers to the Kardassians being upset as creators, as if there aren't tons of other unsponsored creators and app users (without their own TV shows) involved in the process of keeping these platforms vibrant and alive.
As social media apps brutally run towards profit making, they are underestimating the value of creators. If they continue that trend, they will basically turn into pre-programmed TV channels... Losing the very aspect of participation they are built upon. If most app users on TikTok are publishing content, after cycles of being ignored, they simply stop logging in... Not viewing other content, not buying items shown in ads, not engaging, and thus making the app die.
The ideal of opportunity and growth on platforms for independent creators is largely being hijacked on a regular basis, and creators are catching onto it just now, after years of working for little to no reward on platforms that became rich.
There seems to be a constant sentiment to capture the market in order to be a monopoly among social platforms, but the rug gets pulled whenever they do things that alienate users and creators. Instead of thinking about technological advancement and capabilities of platforms, we need to start looking deeply at the value this platforms add to the lives of individuals beyond frivolous entertainment, because instead of creating a user account, for entertainment we could simply watch television, which doesn't sell us the ideal that we can all meaningfully participate and require us to scroll through it on a phone all day.
gonehome|3 years ago
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.
grishka|3 years ago
This entire article is built on the wrong premise that people use social media for entertainment. I certainly don't — I'm not open to any content discovery on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter at all. I use social media to connect with people I mostly already know, and the platforms getting in the way, begging with their "you may enjoy this" is bloody annoying. I'm building my own fediverse project for a reason, after all.
cratermoon|3 years ago
1 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-no...
2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dveUrpp6vs8
scottmcdot|3 years ago
seydor|3 years ago
ru552|3 years ago
benreesman|3 years ago
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...
xivzgrev|3 years ago
And the ratio keeps getting “better”. Better content, less friction.
Scary.
nomel|3 years ago
I don't think we'll ever reach that. I'm sure there will be non-invasive methods, soon enough.
shalmanese|3 years ago
Kiro|3 years ago
Sounds like the dream. I hope I live to experience it.
dzuc|3 years ago
See: https://www.are.na/
dharma1|3 years ago
strogonoff|3 years ago
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.
gammarator|3 years ago
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…)
stavros|3 years ago
cloutchaser|3 years ago
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”
rconti|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
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.
thundergolfer|3 years ago
On Netflix, auto-play is just pulling forward what you would probably watch later. On TikTok and Facebook, you’re autoplaying and auto-opting into a class of content you normally would retreat from.
photochemsyn|3 years ago
> "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.
onlyrealcuzzo|3 years ago
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.
xapata|3 years ago
sinecure|3 years ago
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.
mjamesaustin|3 years ago
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.
AndrewKemendo|3 years ago
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...)
jkkramer|3 years ago
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.
unknown|3 years ago
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benjaminwootton|3 years ago
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!
distrill|3 years ago
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.
mike10921|3 years ago
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.
strikelaserclaw|3 years ago
cloutchaser|3 years ago
9gag seems almost exactly the same as tiktok, it just never got personalized
andsoitis|3 years ago
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’
jrm4|3 years ago
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.
swyx|3 years ago
trebbble|3 years ago
outsidetheparty|3 years ago
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.
pixl97|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
Even TikTok has its stars (and they're huge now).
thenerdhead|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
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.
personjerry|3 years ago
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.
stevewatson301|3 years ago
pixl97|3 years ago
sytse|3 years ago
nassimsoftware|3 years ago
- 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.
rconti|3 years ago
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?
gzer0|3 years ago
I found this quite profound.
upupandup|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
tboyd47|3 years ago
rchaud|3 years ago
Infinite scroll UI and pageless SPA frameworks fixed this to an extent, but apparently that's not enough anymore. Today, the algorithm "knows" that you want to watch this trashy sensationalist video, even though you aren't physically tapping the button to view it.
So Tiktok's format of fullscreen autoplaying video is designed to pass that final hurdle: remove decision making from the user entirely. Throw AI-recommended (and soon, AI-generated) material at them, forever, until they physically exit the app.
No wonder Zuck wanted a Facebook phone back in 2011. iOS and Android actually let you exit the FB app if you wanted to.
CognitiveLens|3 years ago
Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR
A lot of people/companies don't seem to appreciate that the appeal of images and video come from the fact that they represent 'real' (or at least staged-real) events/people/places. Animated videos and scenes from movies seem like categorically different kinds of things, less likely to get attention in news feeds other than as fodder for memes.
3D graphics + VR are never going to be real, and I suspect will never (or not for a long time) have the engagement of images + videos despite being ostensibly more 'immersive'.
pdinny|3 years ago
The article presents the various media as existing with some inherent ordering of value or preference. Text is not less than Image in any sense, just as VR is not greater than Video. These media may have different characteristics in terms of desirability for business metrics (especially in terms of product differentiation) which make it seem like there is some ordering.
Consider Twitter, which while it might not have the MAU of Facebook (a tall order!) is still a testament to the enduring value of text. And again, this isn't any case for Text being superior in any sense, but rather a way of pointing out that appetites for all of these media happily coexist and probably always will.
A similarly poor ordering (from the past) might look something like:
Medium: print (text) -> radio (audio) -> television (video) -> multimedia (CD-ROM hahaha)
We know of course that audio has not become less relevant over time.
OTOH the effort required for people to participate by creating works in these different media varies hugely. Text and Images are very accessible and are still far more accessible than Video (user research in my job suggests that they struggle to create quality video content more so than still images) and 3d graphics and VR are likely to remain inaccessible (relative to digital photography).
rsweeney21|3 years ago
It seems like the future, but it's much further away than we think.
jasongi|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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rossdavidh|3 years ago
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|3 years ago
xrd|3 years ago
The world is going to shift to sheeple only using apps (shapples?) and those only using services inside a browser (browseers?). Browseers will be much happier and live richer lives.
m3kw9|3 years ago
mlboss|3 years ago
ape4|3 years ago
KaoruAoiShiho|3 years ago
ansmithz42|3 years ago
fleddr|3 years ago
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?
k12sosse|3 years ago
MintDice|3 years ago
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