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.
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.)
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.
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.
I had a family friend in the 90s who had a small team of friends who would keep track of progressive slots all over America. When the jackpot got big enough that they knew they could win it by going and pumping cash into the machines non stop, they would all book tickets and just sit in casinos for sometimes days straight pumping away. This mans 9-5 job was a federal judge on the DC circuit.
>To give an example, slot machines in Nevada must pay out a minimum of 75% of the take.
Machines plural - which means a machine that just paid out (in a casino with a large group of machines) can theoretically pay out again before a machine that has a string of losing spins.
The takeout is configurable. With older machines they have to be manually set at the machines, but with more modern machines it is controlled by a server. The period of time while the takeout remains unchanged is referred to as a cycle. Casinos are generally free to change the takeout so long as it is a minimum of the regulated amount. Then there are the regulations requiring idle time at the machines like I mentioned in my previous comment. Additionally, the casino may need to notify the gaming commission prior to making a takeout change depending on local regulations.
Right, it's more complicated because there are different payouts with different odds. But when you add up all the payouts with all the odds it has to add up to >.75.
What I'm objecting to is your idea that machines are more likely to payout after they've lost for a while. Each spin is independent of previous spins. The 75% is just a statistical average over the long run.
Ok, I can see what you mean. This is also why when I made the comment about a "strategy" I put this in parenthesis "(in the sense that there can be a strategy to a game of luck)".
My intent was not to imply that each individual losing pull increases the odds, but more that if you just keep rolling the same two dice long enough eventually it's going to come up snake eyes. And this leads to people (especially gambling addicts) continuing to pull that lever after they are long past what they can afford. They know if they just keep pulling the lever (or more likely pushing the bet max button these days) that eventually it has to pay. But the reality is the casinos are predators that feed on that behavior.
Most casinos actually have a much higher takeout rate than the legally required minimums as well; it's very common that they are set closer to the 90-97% range. It's generally observed that a higher takeout will result in more money for the house. With a higher takeout people are more likely to keep winning a bit and feel like they are getting lucky, so they will actually spend more money than if the aren't hitting at all.
Yeah, I was a bit confused why they thought that is what I was implying. I was just trying to explain high level how it works. I previously worked on a couple of online "slot machines" and several of my former colleagues write software now for WMS on physical machines.
Not all slots are connected to one big pot, but a few (the progessives) can be. In which case yes, the takeout requirement is applied to the set of the machines rather than a single machine. So if you had four machines that are fed 250K each and one machine hits for 750K and no other machine hits then that would comply with a 75% takeout. This is majorly oversimplified, but I think you should get the idea.
Worse yet with progressives is they may even span multiple casinos. So that grand prize someone is grinding for and wasting their money on... it may never hit at that casino.
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.
> 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.
Huh. That appears to be a mostly-accurate summary of Wikipedia's description of the episode, which heavily features the term "addicted". But it's an awful summary of the episode itself, which doesn't use the concept of addiction at all. (Also, the game doesn't autoplay; it is shown on screen requiring effort from the player.)
The game is a malevolent agent which intentionally makes very specific modifications to the players' minds. The relevant concept is infection, not addiction. The plot of the episode is essentially identical to that of the TNG episode Conspiracy[1], or the Buffy episode Bad Eggs[2].
And while not completely identical, the plot is also very similar to Invasion of the Body Snatchers[3]. It's a very, very common theme. (As shown by the fact that TNG did it twice!)
Interesting take. As a TNG geek who's watched the episode multiple times, all I ever took away from it was an extremely overt, stereotypically early-90s "Drugs/addiction are bad" message. Particularly, Wesley and Robin's discussions about addiction sound like they are straight out of a DARE pamphlet.
Here are some plot elements associated with addiction:
- People neglect their responsibilities in order to indulge their addiction.
- People consume their resources (e.g., by selling their property) in order to indulge their addiction.
- People fail to achieve their goals because they are distracted by their addiction.
- People alienate their social contacts, either through neglect (see above) or through what is seen as excessive focus on their addiction.
None of these elements appear in the episode. No addiction-related themes appear in the episode.
Here are the plot elements that do occur in the episode:
- A foreign influence infiltrates the group and spreads uncontrollably. It is difficult to perceive directly.
- The foreign influence brainwashes and enslaves everyone who is exposed to it, substituting its own goals for theirs. Far from neglecting responsibilities, brainwashed victims will happily do extra work for no other purpose than to further the foreign goals.
- People who should be absolutely trustworthy, such as Captain Picard or Wesley's mother, are "replaced" by impostors who share their knowledge but whose goals are nefarious. (In this case, the person is not replaced in their entirety, but their mind is replaced with a new one.)
How would you describe that plot?
If you want a TNG episode themed around the perils of drug use, that would be The Naked Now, where the altered mental state of the crew threatens to destroy the ship. If you want one themed around addiction, that would be Hollow Pursuits, where Barclay's "holodiction" severely interferes with his performance of his duties.
> Also, the game doesn't autoplay; it is shown on screen requiring effort from the player
I don't have the clip handy but at one point a character points out to Wesley something along the lines of "want to know the trick to this game? It plays itself!"
You could make the argument that everyone misses their first shot for no other reason than that it gives them a false feeling of accomplishment when they make the second one.
But it would make more sense to say that victory in the game comes from assuming a particular state of mind, presumably one that allows the game to do its thing.
You don't need to "let the game happen" for an autoplaying game to play itself.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
One idea I had was being able to share your curated algorithm to others. ie. Your instagram explore page, or your specific tiktok recommends. People could subscribe to x person's recommends and see what they see.
In this spirit, I think Tiktok would actually be a tremendously good matchmaker for finding either friends or romantic partners. I think a lot of their recommendation AI actually figures out what you might like ahead of actually showing it to you, by trying to sort you into a cohort of people with very similar tastes. Which is why as a new user its sometimes scary how Tiktok can almost predict what you might like. E.g. people into cars, 30-40 yrs old, rural probably also like DIY.
That's a good point. A simple k nearest neighbors search of users would likely turn up very similar people to you even if you don't explicitly include any demographics.
What a coincidence, me too. I think there should be a marketplace for them. Ability to lock changes, or go back to an earlier version of your algorithm. Power user tools for curating it better.
That's the next influencer game imo. Having people want to see your feed(s)
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.
I wonder if there are individual YouTube compilations of similar videos (think "Funny Cats" montages) that have generated more profit than Funniest Home Videos shows.
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.
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).
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
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.
Of course it will, but it's something happening now by slow AI. We don't need any research on some hypothetical.
We don't need to frame this as a technological problem, it's clearly a social one, of which we suffer the consequences today.
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.
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.
> 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.
The fact that a lot of viral videos are produced with built-in video game split-screens proves that people don't want full immersion. To fully engage our focus-deprived adhd brains you need multiple inputs at once.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.”
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
The Snapchat glasses, as well as the Instagram/RayBan glasses don't seem to have suffered from having a prominent camera, which suggests there was a change in mass acceptance of cameras.
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.
This is true. Majority of influencers lean on a back catalogue of material, and remix it to maintain the pretext that they're living that lifestyle constantly. Even for people that could afford to live that life, it's exhausting to be switched on and shooting/editing material at all times.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
I’m personally quite grateful that to me the computer is an actively engaging machine. If I hadn’t become a programmer, I’d would, like most, find it difficult to resist becoming more and more passive as computer touchscreens engulf our lived environment.
I’ve read both Postman books, and Infinite Jest, but I’m adding End of Childhood to Goodreads, thanks.
> 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.
"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.
> I'm very skeptical that fully automated UI will ever replace giving the user a small selection of recommended items.
The TikTok fyp is vastly better than the Instagram discover tab, which gives you a menu of videos as jumping off point before you get sucked into scrollhole. I agree about autoscroll though. Sometimes I want to watch a video like 10 times, and feel very annoyed when Instagram had the auto scroll feature. I think it's gone now. Instead it just nudges the video up with a little messages that tells me to scroll for more. I always thought that must be a first-time user tutorial, but it never stops, so either it's broken or it's broken.
> "Click" and "Tap" are essentially the same thing
Click in the article refers to plain old web navigation. There are links on the page, you move the mouse around and click on whichever one you want.
Tap is referring to "Stories" interaction, which is more narrowed and less user choice than click. A story is playing, you tap anywhere on the screen and the next story replaces it and begins playing.
I actually think "tap" and "swipe" are basically the same? They are both just a "give me the next one please" interaction. But the rest do progress from more user-directed to more computer-controlled.
I think a distinction between tap and swipe are that a tap progresses a discrete amount whereas swiping is less discriminating. Almost feels like the attention span is shorter. If tapping is turning a page in a magazine, swiping is more like flicking through the pages and getting glances at content before stopping at something you like.
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.
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).
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.
You and I are not in the majority on that. For many, the people they know and want to interact with will be on platforms with constant entertainment, and you'll either have to tag along or exist in a sparser environment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I mean us after the New Deal but before smash-and-grab, “how many gold bars can I carry” politics and economics starting gaining steam in the Reagan administration.
I appreciate that’s like one human lifetime and high economic mobility had barely started to come in for e.g. black people before rich people decided to loot the place, but we were headed in the right direction for many decades before this kleptocracy-in-broad-daylight shit kicked in.
I wasn't even aware such a metric existed. You've saved me countless frustrating conversations where I am trying to articulate something that's plain as day but difficult to find citations around (why would that be).
And #27 is worse than it sounds, because most people know there are ~200 sovereign states in the word (195 at the moment I believe), and the WEF only has data on 82 of them for this metric (I'm willing to assume that the "no data" ones wouldn't score highly in most cases). So that's "a bit better than halfway up the list", not "clearly competitive with the leaders".
We might agree about the problem, but I doubt a pinko social welfare lefty like me and an arch-Randian libertarian “eat the poor” John Galt wannabe agree whatsoever on the solutions.
I put all the qualifiers around “libertarian” precisely because plenty of libertarians are perfectly nice people with no designs of building a Bond villain hideout in New Zealand once there’s nothing left to loot.
Let's not get carried away. He's far more into infusing the blood of the youth than he is about being a Bond villain. Does he fund even a single true doomsday project?
> 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…)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> IMO the "wrong" part is that most heroin users will tell you they fucking love heroin.
It's totally possible to choose to take a drug regularly and at the same time hate it (along with your own guts for choosing to take it). Source: former smoker.
— In case of some addictive substance, one might choose to do it to “get the kick” associated with that substance. Yes! The addictiveness makes the term “preference” highly questionable, and I can totally see how big social is pushing similar bio-psychological buttons with impunity. It’s an important point, but different to mine.
— In the case I described, the preference is in favor of keeping in touch with friends; and using Instagram is a necessary suffering to achieve that preference. There’s no alternative: all my contacts are there, APIs are closed, no competitors, etc. It’s more or less similar to claiming that my revealed preference is driving/taking taxis in a city where there is no public transport: I’d rather avoid both, but I do like to go places.
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”
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.
Since we’re discussing preferences, drug sellers have a strong preference for people choosing crack over not crack.
Furthermore, their preference is the one that is consequential. Once you are addicted and chemically compelled to choose crack over what is more or less torture, the amount of agency you have is relatively insignificant.
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.
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.
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.
If you are really suggesting MySpace lost to Facebook because of the lack of newsfeed, you should do your research. FB introduced the feed—in the sense that we’re talking about, as a non-chronological selection of content by an algorithm that maximises ad revenue—only after MySpace was no longer a threat. That’s when FB could get away with it, since the critical mass has been achieved and users had nowhere to run anymore.
Facebook’s news feed in 2006 was not even remotely what’s being discussed in this branch.
It was a simple timeline of all of your friends’ actions. A raw chronological feed.
The outcry it caused was because it felt like stalking. The following dominance of Facebook did not have anything to do with people’s “revealed preferences” in favour of the algorithmic instrument being discussed (which individually selects content to appal or otherwise engage you so that you spend the most time and generate the most ad profit). News feed wasn’t that instrument—until MySpace went away and Facebook had users reliably locked in.
Facebook didn’t win because users liked the algorithmic news feed that maximises corporate profits by amplifying troll takes and aggravating our psychological well-being, Facebook won before that. It’s important to get the causal relationship right.
> 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.
I belive it was tiktok of wendover productions guy (or one them, idk), he said there, that making a typos in videos is one another method of generating views on yt, becouse people likes to point the mistake in comments. And comments generate engagement so yt promotes that video
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"?
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.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
Spot-on analysis. These days, I use sheer volume of personal, human-generated content as a filter: I visit a blog, and if there is a history of quality posts, I know I can at least trust that this opinion is genuine and human. That's not to say it's correct... but at least I won't feel manipulated any more than if any friend recommended a crappy product, TV show, or movie to me. Spam redditor accounts are relatively easy to screen based on history -- real people have varied comment histories with passionate comments based on their thoughts and feelings. Spam accounts do not.
With stuff like GPT-3 and DALL-E, I'm not sure how much longer this metric will suffice. But I don't think impermanent, semi-synchronous mediums like discord will fill the gap for me. Nor will web3, which, as far as I can tell, is simply a pile of increasingly abstreuse ponzi schemes.
I continue to hope for a decentralized blog + RSS solution. It's as simple as growing the community with existing standards, after all.
Yes, that seems to be the norm on Reddit. A couple years ago I signed up to Reddit and the first thing I tried to post was something to r/news on what I thought was pretty relevant, an Indian news site covering a major China outreach to Pakistan on an energy deal relevant to China's overland effort, the whole 'Belt and Road' thing. I follow energy news, and this was a pretty important thing, I thought, but r/news blocked the post because it wasn't from their 'approved list of news sources' or something. After watching Reddit for a while, I realized most of it was just a corporate media mirror.
I didn't bother to post anything after that, and recently deleted my account there.
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...)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's a bleak view of humanity. I think there's a "spark" in actual humans, who will take content in a completely different direction than something ever seen before. Think Time Cube (https://timecube.2enp.com/). Or Neil Breen movies. I just don't think an AI could ever put together something quite like that.
I agree with your assertion, but the Time Cube site seems like the worst possible example.
It strikes me as being as close to machine generated content as possible. I'm not sure I could have thought of any single thing that felt more like a GPT3 fever dream: disconnected assertions that are divorced from a underpinning understanding.
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?
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).