Recently I was thinking about how I am completely out of touch with the culture of younger generations, and was about to laugh it off cause that's how it is with every generation, but then I realized that I don't even know how I would know. In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going on about. Today, I know what Spotify is trying to push, but I have no idea if that is what is actually popular. Even if I were to install TikTok I probably wouldn't see the same things they are. I have no idea if the garbage on the front page of reddit is really reflective of how younger people think, or if it just an engagement algorithm feedback loop gone wrong where everyone reasonable has long since checked out.
I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble.
I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.
The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation.
I recently was on a plane with broken inflight entertainment, so all you could watch was a single movie in lock step with everyone else. When the movie ended, there was a weird sense of camaraderie; "we are all stuck in this tube and we all just sat through that mediocre movie".
> The extreme personalization of the internet/modern life can lead to a feeling of isolation.
The extreme manipulation, not personalisation. The latter would be for your benefit, Youtube would study how to make their users happy, have better sleep, be better informed, not fall for scams, etc.
But instead they are studying how to make us spend most time on the most clickbait cospiracy theories.
It's a for-profit company and they have never tried to hide that.
If you know a way to make money from exclusively showing users content that makes them happier, better informed, better rested, etc., then by all means go ahead -- I sincerely wish you the best. But you won't need my good wishes, because you will soon outcompete YouTube and all the rest with your healthy-yet-still-profitable alternative.
It's almost as though basing our society around profit maximization yields negative outcomes. But I'm sure this is just a blip that the Market will correct for.
Or we could collectively ask ourselves what we want and do that, instead of leaving the decision to the most selfish of our kind. That was never a good system to begin with.
>we could collectively ask ourselves what we want and do that
That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years -- and TTBOMK the system that gets chosen has so far had capitalism as an important component every single time, despite the option to vote for parties that eschew it partly or completely.
>>we could collectively ask ourselves what we want and do that
>That is what democratic countries already do every 3-5 years
Not sure what country you live in but in Canada they just give you a list of 4 or 5 names of people and you choose one, there's no asking of people what they'd like to do in the slightest. In fact, it's even worse: the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.
It is fascinating how well done story telling can make people oblivious to what physically occurs.
Is there a law in Canada that prohibits people from forming political parties opposed to capitalism, or other prohibitive hurdles (e.g., a large registration fee) that prevent most people from doing so in practice?
If the answer is no, then the fact that no one currently on the ballot represents such a party is just evidence that Canadians, today, have almost no interest in these political approaches.
>the folks campaign with certain sales pitches, but rarely follow up on their promises.
I agree this is a serious problem with existing democratic systems, but I don't know what to do about it. In theory people punish politicians who fail to deliver by voting them out, but in practice, a lot happens between elections, and people's attention wanders.
Maybe, but nobody has invaded the US or Western Europe for a while now.
I think the counterargument that I would mount is that what people want, or think what they want, isn't necessarily what is good for them. This is obviously a very dangerous line of thought - because it can justify all sorts of oppression - but I think it's nevertheless true.
I find solace in knowing that I don't have a say in it. Because regardless of what the idea was, whenever someone tried to force everyone to go along with it and base a society on it, it turned out disastrously.
The only thing we can all do it be open minded, honest, and set a good example for the next generation who will take over and hopefully improve on what we did, while making their own mistakes.
Profit-maximizing business is the engine of economic growth. Looking over the past couple hundred years, I’d say the outcomes have been nothing short of spectacular.
I think that entirely depends on the outcomes you value. If you value economic growth, then yes -- it's been spectacular. However, it has also come at great cost in terms of other desirable things.
It's a tradeoff. Some things are better, other things are worse. There's nothing wrong, and everything right, with examining those tradeoffs and deciding if they need adjustment.
Unregulated profit maximising business has killed how many people through the trans atlantic slave trade?
Without regulation, this is what happens - the bank would collect your organs for payment if they could. Buinesses have no ethical standards.
Profit maximing business did not invent antibiotics, did not invent sanitation, did not create public sewers, running water, soap, GPS, and clorination of water.
Because I'm generally aware of western economic and political history from 1600-1800. I'm not conflating them, they were in fact conflated.
Soviet russian and chinese industrialization was different, but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.
> Soviet russian and chinese industrialization was different
Of course. "Industrialization requires profit, except when it doesn't". Got it.
> but later and not relevant to the Atlantic slave trade that parent poster was talking about.
I didn't realize they used steam ships to transport slaves from Africa to Americas, where they made them work in factories to produce industrial goods.
There is no ideological war, it is just an unfounded statement that has no direct line of reasoning. What does slavery have to do with industrialization? There weren't slaves in many pre-industrial societies. And the fact that you switched 'industrialization' for 'profit maximizing businesses' as if no one would notice (then acknowledging that communists did figure out how to do it) makes me wonder if you even thought about for more than a few seconds.
I was under the impression that most pre-industrial societies had slavery. Or at least most societies that were successful.
The Bible has passages on how to be a moral slave owner.
As far as conflating industrialization with capitalism, I'm sorry, I'm actually very far left politically but this is just a fact. It's underappreciated in the west that 5 year plans worked well, but they were following a template 200 years, 2 full centuries, later. 100 years after successful British capitalists banned slavery.
You can be under any impression you want but that doesn't make you not completely wrong. The Bible is not a history book, and if it was, it wouldn't be the only one.
And calling 'industrialization' 'capitalism' and 'profit maximizing business' all the same thing and then shrugging it off after getting called out, you are just showing that you ignorant of what any of it means. And your last two sentences are non-sensical -- I literally cannot figure out what 5 year plans have to do with slavery in the west.
I'm not calling those things the same at all. I actually draw distinctions between them. But there's a historical record of how they happened together after not happening separately for thousands of years.
There's a principle of charity when reading that you may want to consider.
Sorry but you don't get charity when you are asserting a point which is completely unfounded. Please find something which will back up your point besides 'they all happened at once' because that isn't even true. There is no correlation with 'capitalism' 'industry' and 'profit' with 'demise of slavery'. I beg you to look up what was happening in the Congo by Belgium when the automobile was being popularized.
There happens to be a correlation with a bunch of nice things because we happen to live in the modern era, but you can't attribute everything to capitalism because, as we noted it was not the only system in place which did these things.
I would like you to find some scholarly research which can bolster your theory.
Before industrialization, slavery and serfdom are common for thousands of years.
After industrialization, it goes away within 1-200 years every place that industrialized. Probably because it's not economical anymore in the presence of industrial production.
You're saying that this observation is so out of pocket that it doesn't deserve a charitable hearing?
Sure -- it makes sense in the same way that it makes sense industrialization got rid of eunuchs. A barbaric practice has died out in certain parts of the world because we live in the modern age.
To say that wouldn't have happened without industrialization, which wouldn't have happened without profit maximization, which wouldn't have happened without capitalism, is not logical. There is nothing inherent in capitalism which requires profit maximization at the expense of humans, it just requires exploitation of private property (note exploitation here means 'being used' not 'being used in a necessarily harmful manner). There is nothing inherent in industrialization which requires profit maximization, it just requires a cheap source of energy and labor and a market (note that this can be a planned market as in communism, or a market in which the demand is created only for war production and is fed by looting conquered territory, as the fascists did in WWII).
And there is nothing which precludes slavery existing because any of those other things exist. In fact, there were massive amounts of slaves who toiled under Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the modern era, and we only don't have them now because they lost the war.
My "theory" is a straightforward recollection of the way things did in fact happen, on this planet and in this universe. Europeans started the industrial ball rolling with for profit companies. Sorry if you don't like it.
It's an entity permitted by society under the premise that allowing such entities is a net benefit. We can and should continuously re-evaluate that benefit and adjust what we allow accordingly.
Contrast that with the account I read about the 1930s-40s: The major media was radio, and on summer afternoons when President Franklin Roosevelt was speaking, you could apparently walk down the street and not miss a word of the speech, because every radio in every house was tuned to the same broadcast.
A one-way radio broadcast is not a dialogue; in fact, we have much closer to realtime dualogue with leaders today, despite greater scale (yes, its still moderated by intermediaries, but its much more rapid and much less wrapped up in the ability to tell different stories to different audiences without information rapidly flowing between them—politicians still try this, sometimes, but it tends to fail, and increasingly to fail very quickly.)
I suppose the FDR had better writers, and was better at sticking to his scripts.
But there were a lot of people who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House" rather than use his name. And Edmund Wilson quoted somebody at a dinner party in the 1930s, where someone denouncing Hitler was answered with "That's going too far. You're talking about him as if he was Roosevelt."
I think that's the point though, isn't it? Some people will like the speeches, some won't, but they had all heard the same speech and were all more or less on the same page about what was being discussed.
Maybe a bit more like walking into a multiplex to discover there’s only one screen and that they’ve locked the doors behind you for the next few hours, but yes.
A very back of the napkin math - so far, 2023's domestic box office total is 75% of 2019th (pre-covid). Although the number of releases in 2023 is 60% of 2019th number of releases as well. I definitely wouldn't say nobody is going to the movies. I would even say, I went to see some this year as many times as I probably went in 2019.
I see more movies than ever in theaters, because I have an Alamo subscription. It just becomes like going out to a restaurant, and you see a movie you might not have otherwise.
It also is like a restaurant where everyone is required to be silent and not use phones...
I'm not sure the official name for that is but I call it the "shared experience." Obviously something that pulls us together, but recently with less and less of it we're becoming islands in a sea of nothingness.
I was honestly kind of shocked to find out a coworker watched a couple of the same YouTubers I do.
It's probably just because my interests are obscure but my assumption has always been I live in my own bubble. Even my friends don't consume anything like the same media I do, going back to the early aughts.
About once a month I'll be watching a YouTube Short and my wife will yell out "Hey, I saw that on Tiktok"
Media makes you feel isolated and utterly unique. This is personalization deployed at scale. I worked on the first personalization systems and been involved in their implantation for decades.
It’s fascinating how they’ve affected culture to the point where people don’t even see them anymore.
Personalization is profoundly powerful technology at scale. Do not underestimate their influence. What you talk about is the ever present concern of people who know you will talk, and almost everyone talks.
If you share internet wifi you will get similar recommendations based on what others on the network have watched...not just based on "your" suggestions.
Could be that.
Metaphorically...Both of you were offered "the same meal at the cafeteria" so to speak. Based on what "others" who visited that particular cafeteria had eaten in the past.
This happens all the time to me when I visit friends. I realize the reason I have a suggestion on my youtube was because that was what the person who I was just visiting would want to watch.
Linkedin does this too with suggested contacts. I would imagine spotify and others do as well.
I said one day to a friend of mine how it was "getting creepy" and his response was "Isn't this what we have been asking for though?"
Same here. I recently discussed YouTube with a friend and I was really surprised we had lots of channels in common. I honestly thought that what I casually watch wild be more or less unique (as a set)
Cow hoof trimming (a Scottish guy Hoof GP and a US one someone the hoof guy), painting restoration (complicated name Beaumsometing), cooking (an Aussie guy Andy, and a British one who dances at the end of the preparation) and science (Veritaserum, Numberphile etc.)
I skipped the French channels about cooking (grolandiers) and science.
I now realize that I am really bad with the names of the channels :)
People who want to watch something on the plane where you have no/limited choice of quality movies and/or the screen is way too bright and warm. It's the best you've got, not the best in general.
Usually planes have a decent catalogue (remember this was a bugged entertainment system on one flight) and if we are talking about watching on a phone quality doesn't matter (if anything plane screen is bigger).
That has not been my experience unless you like a random selection of the latest big-budget movies mixed with weird artsy films.
> and if we are talking about watching on a phone quality doesn't matter (if anything plane screen is bigger).
Physically bigger (compared to a phone) but almost guaranteed to be lower resolution, have worse colors and contrast and the touch controls are barely working. You can also bring a tablet or laptop if you prefer a larger screen.
Planes used to be like this, and I'm noticing more and more they're expecting you to bring your own device, so it wouldn't shock me if they went back to having no inflight entertainment.
In-flight entertainment is one thing that I wouldn't mind being unbundled because at this point it really is just a crappier version of what you can bring yourself - both the content and the usually outdated and overloaded tech.
> I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.
I like it. Instead of sitting around talking about whatever the big media gatekeepers shoved down our throats we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things.
We have fewer cultural touchstones, but they still exist in the form of things like major events (like Covid) or heavily advertised media.
I think that's a little too cynical about culture in the past decades and also underestimating how much curated stuff is being shoved down our throats now. It's not really discovering, it's consuming what ever some ml model from one of the few big tech companies decides you should see.
I have become immunized to algorithmic content curation, I dont know exactly why that happened, but understanding how it works at a surface level I think helped. Im curious if thats a widespread phenomena or not, I suspect it is.
Or, you became aware of the most aggressive aspects of algorithmic curation, feel you are immune now, while not knowing the more subtle ways it has influenced your internalized thinking the past 5 years.
Yea, maybe. Though you can put me on youtube and ill scoll for maybe 15 secondsbefore leaving or searching for the specific content I want. Twitter, facebook, instagram, whatever it is I dont have the interest.
Sort of like my dad, a professor of finance, who had a student remark to him "I didn't know there even was a case for free markets!"
I get similar responses. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person on HN who understands how free markets work.
For example, most people would say that hard work leads to success. This is incorrect. It's creating value that leads to success. I very rarely hear the latter, in fact, pretty much never.
When I was a kid, I made some pocket money by mowing lawns. None of my customers ever asked me how I was going to do it, or how hard I worked at it. They did not give a damn. They only cared about was the lawn mowed. Using scissors, a push mower, a gas mower, or a rider mower all came with a huge variance in how hard the work was. None of that had any influence on what I was paid for it.
I can guarantee you that you're neither the only person, on HN or elsewhere, that "understands how free markets work" (if anyone can every truly fully understand a complex emergent system), nor are most people incapable of realising that hard work only pays off when you create value - it's just that for many people, hard work is the safest, and sometimes the only, way to get there.
So why am I the only one on HN pointing these things out, and legions of HNers telling me I'm wrong?
> t's just that for many people, hard work is the safest, and sometimes the only, way to get there
A lot of people are disappointed because hard work got them nowhere. It's because they weren't working on things that other people valued.
For example, the hardest job I ever had was working for the city maintaining the sidewalks. I was utterly exhausted at the end of each day. The job paid minimum wage, because the work had little value to it.
The jobs I've had since paid a lot more, and the work wasn't hard. It was just that the work was much more valuable.
> most people incapable of realising
I never said they were "incapable". I said they think differently.
> you're neither the only person
Of course there are other people that understand them. It's just that they are rare.
I'll give you some unsolicited advice: You come off as rather arrogant and I would suggest reflecting on it.
The idea that "legions of HNers" are telling you you're wrong sounds like confirmation bias. I basically see the same old discussion about free markets vs. market regulation every day on HN and it's not as if there was ever a clear-cut consensus. Maybe somewhat expectedly, radical positions such as "markets should be 100% unregulated" or, conversely, ones espousing something close to communism are comparatively rarer than ones in the middle (most people don't tend to have radical views), but that doesn't mean you can't see them often enough here (ok, maybe I haven't seen communist takes here that often, but definitely libertarian ones).
More importantly, even if everybody was disagreeing with you, it could be that they're right and you're wrong. Or that nobody is right or wrong because it's a matter of opinion. I haven't seen you take that option seriously, instead it's just other people who "don't understand" free markets
> When I see an example of a successful commune or communist society, I'll think about changing my mind.
It may not be obvious, but buying and selling land and resources for personal gain is somewhat novel in the history of humanity.
Basing the entirety of society and law on the notion of a single person being able to own a piece of the earth, which they are allowed to deny others access to if they like, is unique to our particular time and culture.
One could say with a fair amount of certainty that a 'commune' aka a village or tribe is the basis of the vast majority of the human experience.
> They only cared about was the lawn mowed. Using scissors, a push mower, a gas mower, or a rider mower all came with a huge variance in how hard the work was. None of that had any influence on what I was paid for it.
That may have been true for you, but it won't be true for everyone. Sometimes we really do value the work that went into something and that will have an influence on what we pay for it. It's why people will pay for an orchestra instead of a laptop and some software. Its why people will pay extra for "handcrafted artisanal" items that could easily be pumped out by slaves in a factory overseas and sold for much much less. The large amount of effort involved is a big part of the charm for a lot of art forms.
Sometimes hard work can result in success. Some people produce a lot of value but never see success. Some people manage success without doing anything of value at all. Some fail upwards and gain success while actually producing negative value. If we could really reduce the formula for success down to a catchy soundbite there'd be a lot more successful people in the world.
Indeed, a lot of people in America believe that there is no path to success. It's a very popular notion on HN. Another thing I'm in a small minority of is pointing out that adults of sound mind and body in America are capable of success.
> adults of sound mind and body in America are capable of success.
You are in a minority because of those caveats. 'Sound mind and body' and 'success' are vague enough to lend themselves to many interpretations and act as an escape hatch you can jump out of when someone points out any one of numerous exceptions to that statement.
I don't know what it means; that's the whole point. I want a specific definition. I'll start with a question: Is a pregnant woman of 'able body'? Is a person who speaks english as a second language 'of sound mind'? Is a person who grew up in a place with very poor schools and who had to drop in high school to take care of their aged mother 'of sound mind and body'? Expound on the reasons please.
I’m pretty skeptical that it’s possible to be immune to algorithmic content curation. It seems more than a little bit like the people who say “hey, mainstream media is all biased, but that’s not a problem for me because I’ve found the sources that are actually true”. How do you choose which content to watch and how does that process exclude algorithmic curation?
I don’t think it’s a matter of choosing content that is served up by algorithm but by finding the content that the algorithm omits. I find I then have to listen for what are truth statements, for verifiable truth statements, and sift out the emotional language. In fact, the more emotional the tone, the more intention I attribute to the engineering of it being shown to me. This has resulted in me looking at and reading what I think is garbage sometimes, but I typically find some nugget of truth in it that helps me reason about why someone would think that way. Kind of erases the left versus right thing in politics.
Why do you think content that is excluded from the algorithm is more legitimate?
How do you know it was excluded?
What do you think about the notion that many/most people who claim they are neither left nor right end up demonstrating that they are actually pretty right-wing?
> What do you think about the notion that many/most people who claim they are neither left nor right end up demonstrating that they are actually pretty right-wing?
I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Maybe this is true for the US, but in other places of the world, societies aren't yet as polarised (although, sadly, it looks as though we're copying the American model more and more).
Maybe you should make it more precise what you mean by left and right, otherwise it's always easy to call something "right-wing" just because it's more to the right than whichever positions you espouse.
(For the record, I always considered myself to be rather center-left, and I still hold many positions that are broadly left-wing, but recent events have made me realise that there's also a huge part of leftism with which I fundamentally disagree, so I'm not sure if I want to call myself that any more.)
It's the social media era equivalent to "advertising doesn't work on me, I can see right through these stupid commercials."
When I used to be on reddit there was this idea that algorithmic content curation didn't apply to us because of the upvote system. There often seems to be a similar implication (by way of omission) when these discussions come up on HN. I'm not familiar with the workings of the HN feed, I only migrated here last summer, but the reddit feed is absolutely subject to gaming and algorithmic shenanigans.
The comparison would be thinking our government is completely free from corruption and undue influence because we all have the right to vote.
I've read many books by activists, and by serious historians. After a while, you notice that the style of writing is different. The activist writers use noticeably more emotional language, draw sweeping conclusions based on flimsy evidence, have fewer cites, and no counterexamples are ever mentioned.
For a couple activist products, Showtime recently ran a miniseries documentary on Reagan, and HBO one on Kennedy. The 6 hour Reagan documentary was about everything that was wrong about Reagan (it even criticized Reagan for recovering rapidly from the assassination attempt), and Reagan did nothing right. The Kennedy documentary was the other way, Kennedy was a god among men and never put a foot wrong.
Do you think that is because the producers had some kind of agenda, or were they pandering to modern sentiments on those figures, or were they illustrating their own biases, or something else?
One thing I try to do is increase the amount of content I view because I explicitly requested it instead of what was being suggested to me. "Pull" instead of "Push". I don't ever log into youtube. I also have their related/recommended videos disabled, and I never see their homepage/trending stuff. They'll still put whatever random stuff they want you see in search results (usually pretty far down at least) and ultimately an algorithm determines what kinds of videos are included in any set of search results, but I do think it helps both to avoid being fed most of what they're pushing on people and (to some extent) limit the amount of time spent just mindlessly viewing youtube.
Same with streaming services, I'll skip over whatever their major ads are pushing at me (for example, the large banners at the top of the screen when you sign in, the "featured" category, etc.) and I won't be satisfied with whatever they decide to show you (repeatedly) in whatever random categories the algorithm presents to me that day. I use the search function a lot there too, often just entering "random" strings of 3-4 characters and seeing what comes back as I keep scrolling down.
Like with youtube, you can tell that when they're pushing something hard enough they'll just insert that stuff into the results of any search you enter, but I'm often surprised to find a lot of things I want to see that the streaming service had never shown me before that way. I'm disappointed that HBO Max decided to abandon their simple A-Z listing of everything they had in order to encourage people to depend only on their algorithm.
The more I can eliminate or avoid things being pushed at me and decide for myself what content to consume the more variety I see, but at a certain level you're always left with whatever people are willing to show/sell you which is frustrating. Exploration and recommendations from actual humans are more fun anyway.
For news and other topics I want information on I try to look at stuff from multiple sources and perspectives to avoid the filter bubble problem and to get an idea of what people who'd disagree with me are thinking or understanding about a topic. I find that when I'm reading content from people/perspectives I strongly disagree with I automatically read what they're saying very critically and that practice carries over so that I can't help but do it even when I'm reading things from people/sources I personally trust generally. Terrible arguments, bad facts, and attempts to mislead are pretty common everywhere and this does make me a lot less confident in what I "know", but that's probably a good thing.
> I'm disappointed that HBO Max decided to abandon their simple A-Z listing of everything they had in order to encourage people to depend only on their algorithm.
I wish Netflix/Comcast/Prime had a ribbon called "randomly selected" that was like shuffle play on my stereo, and have it change daily.
I have people I like watching, and find other stuff I like through that persons own recommendations.
If you want my political take, I have searched for intelligence and consistency my entire life without realizing it up until the last few years. Ive been through several different sources, from corporate news to noam chomsky, conspiracy grifters to their critics; learning the truth about what happens in the political realm requires a level of diligence that seems to defy what can be presented to another. It would require so much time to understand all the relationships, motives, and the evidence for them, that it would be a several year endeavor. Given the fact that I have other things to do with my life, I have to start with what values I can follow and the heuristics that can be applied out of them; so I have decided on the nonagression principle, arguementative ethics, anarchocapitalism and their related concepts. I have chosen these because I have found them to be logically and morally consistent, and when idle I occupy my brain by trying to poke holes in these ideas, unsuccessfully to date. Values in hand, and having enough life experience to see that values seperate pro-social and anti-social behavior, I have committed myself to placing those values above whatever day-to-day contrivances I have; however much easier it would be for me to violate those values is not my concern, I follow those values because I value them more than any personal problem I have.
Those values now firmly at the center of my thinking, I can apply the heuristics that can be derived from them, and quickly dismiss propaganda that calls me to any kind of political action. I dont vote, I dont intend to start, and if I am listening to anyone saying anything about politics, even someone I like, I am left only to try to poke holes in whatever they say. This leads to me being the most critical of people I like, which is probably a reasonable way to approach these topics.
I wish I was immunized to it. By avoiding it for years I have basically 0 immunity. Hand me a phone with stock YouTube on some short and 5 minutes later I've scrolled through people dancing, some cats, shitty DIY tips, crazy sport moments, someone talking about how traveling is great etc. Luckily I'm easily distracted so any little thing is enough to snap me back to reality and have me questioning my life on why I just scrolled and watched that garbage.
It's really scary how effective it is on me. I completely understand how it's designed to work and what it's trying to do and yet it's extremely effective.
> we can get together and share what we've found and be introduced to something new and worthwhile that we'd never heard of before, then talk about those things.
That's the theory, yes, but what I've been seeing is people increasingly just staying in their own little world and not talking about those things with each other much at all.
The bonds between people are diminishing while the bonds between people and the institutions / technology is strengthening. The normal course of technological progress. This will and is already leading to widespread unhappiness and mental illness, as bonding with others is a biological need.
Concomitant is the erosion of spirituality and its replacement with other forms of tribalism. Atheists now donate to politicians at incredible rates—more than any other group.
He also had an event in NYC recently and I went in terrified that i'd be the only millennial in the room (vs Gen Z) but it turns out the majority of the people there were millennial which was a surprise. Thinking back on it,I guess millennials were unique in that they saw the "old internet" before capital took over and they remember a time when computers weren't just walled gardens serving up what others want you to see. As a result, events that talk about the internet, what it was like and where its going appeals to that generation I guess?
>> I have a few younger acquaintances/friends IRL, but they would be the first ones to admit that they don't feel like they fit in with their peers, and even a apart from that its generally best not to project too much based on interactions in my own bubble.
Sorry to say, but this is the akin to the “We are all different” meme. The quintessence of the internet and social apps is to organize individual and hence form large quantities. This is called a bubble.
Honestly, we all still get up in the morning, eat, drink, sleep and nowadays you have to draw distinctions by what kind of apps the kids use, what values they share.
>> I feel like every decade of the 1900's had pretty distinct cultural trends and identity, and even subcultures and counter cultures of the past were more public, but now it's all balkanized. I have no idea if that is a bad thing, but it is certainly different.
You may be tricked by the phenomenon called media. Only because it is shown on TV doesn’t necessarily mean changes in behavior. Same goes for apps nowadays. Perceived importance vs actual is an old phenomenon.
In Germany for example at the height of the so called student revolution in 1968 a maximum of 10% was actively engaging in protest activities. Imagine that. These “revolutionary people” tried to engage with media and organize accordingly.
Feels like a move in the right direction. For a long while now, subcultures a
have been getting publicized and subsequently commercialized so quickly that the subcultures die before they mature. Maybe something interesting will come out of this, who knows.
I feel with some niches this already happens. The art and monetization happen in lockstep.
Partly, monetization is synonymous with release; a part of the consumption platform itself. You launch on Spotify and YouTube, monetization is already there or just a click away.
Another factor seems to be the survivorship bias. The ones that stick around are the ones with enough monetization to pay out and continue working with consistency.
It does seem like creators generally have more control though, if they don't sign away rights for an infusion of capital. This is replaced with a percentage of sales paid to some service (hosting the content and providing advertisers, printing tshirts as a service, etc...), if product isn't bought in bulk and inventoried
sure but... commercialized? Where do you think these hyperconnected subcultures live? Online... if not inside of TikTok, Youtube, Instagram or other large entity then they'll exist on someone else's servers.
You think those servers are free and those subcultures aren't going to get commercialized by companies that need $$$ to live?
But those "someone else's servers" aren't always commercial. Communities run on sweat/passion and donations feel a lot different than those that make their money more commercially. It's not always so black and white either, more of a spectrum.
Eh... the issue I have with that is a few dozen communities run on Patreon or what have you won't offset the gorillas in the room (Youtube, TikTok, discord, etc).
I think "we have no clue what's going on online" is never been more true as actions like cancel culture have moved huge swaths of people off of the big guys and created other areas like Rumble - and the smaller alternatives. but to think that these smaller more diverse cultures aren't being commercialized and monetized - except for a few rare cases - just seems, to me, silly.
I think it's true they won't offset the large platforms, but I also don't think those communities are rare. I too use Discord and YouTube (begrudgingly), but I also use IRC, wikis, and old school forums. There's also Matrix, mastodon, lemmy, mailing lists, heck even usenet. But what's rare probably stems from us being in different communities?
My opinion is that the communities I've found the most fulfillment/happiness in have are not funded primarily as a commercial operation. Sometimes they are related to commercial things (fandoms, user groups), but the community itself is not trying to sell itself, its users, its data, etc. My opinion is that it would be better for all internet-based communities if there were lower-friction ways to start an online community without giving yourself up to commercialization of a platform. Through the many layers of tech that would require changing/tweaking to fix this. All the way down from network layer DDoS mitigation to application layer maintenance and hosting.
It was even more balkanized in the days before the Internet. It's much easier now for a meme to go viral (for good or for bad) because everyone on the Internet is potentially connected to everyone else. You didn't know how many kids were actually listening to that loud radio station in the past, any more than you know how many people are actually listening to what's trending on Spotify. But Spotify gives you access to the work of many, many more people than you could possibly get access to in the past.
In my early-40's, I've found that the massive gap between youth culture and adult culture has, thankfully, shrunk. While it's still the case that no 16-year-olds are going to want to hang out with us, their language and activities and perspectives don't feel as foreign as Boomers purported to feel about, well, everything. Because unlike previous generations, who fetishized leaving behind childish things and creating stark barriers between kid world and adult world, many of us have continued to do what we like as we've grown older. And it turns out, the reason kids like to do things like play video games or obsess over anime or take drugs is because these things are fun. And because we're still "in the game", so to speak, we don't balk and criticize and feign outrage like previous generations. That leaves a tremendous amount of space for connections, because we all play games and have niche interests and like our weird TV shows, even if the specifics vary greatly (and more than ever before).
I recently bought my nephew a box of Pokémon cards. I don't play Pokémon, I have no interest in it and frankly it seems kind of dumb. But I would never say that because all I wanted at age 12 were boxes of comic book cards and Magic the Gathering cards. Equally dumb, at least! So I 'get' it, unlike my mother who, though sometimes obliging, thought all of these hobbies were incomprehensible nonsense.
This doesn't seem to be a passing phenomenon. Once you've established a perspective that respects and expects change, there's no law of nature that will magically revert that. That doesn't mean it will be frictionless. And it does require some conscious effort to keep up. I have TikTok on my phone. I rarely use it, but I'm familiar with it and it's not foreign to me. I see it as my task to refuse to let changes in technology or culture become foreign to me. And that task seems vastly easier today compared to the pre-internet era of scarce information, overwhelming monoculture and insular, defensive subcultures.
"it's still the case that no 16-year-olds are going to want to hang out with us"
That's a broad brush you're painting with, amigo. As a 49yo father w/ two teen daughters (17 and 15), I've been surprised and delighted at the strong bonds I have w/ each of them (esp. my 17yo). We "hang out", and seek each others' company, to our mutual enjoyment -- it's absolutely nothing like my relationship w/ my own parents at their age.
Edit: PS I think I agree w/ your main point; it was this one bit I wanted to counter.
>That's a broad brush you're painting with, amigo. As a 49yo father w/ two teen daughters (17 and 15), I've been surprised and delighted at the strong bonds I have w/ each of them (esp. my 17yo). We "hang out", and seek each others' company, to our mutual enjoyment -- it's absolutely nothing like my relationship w/ my own parents at their age.
This is not the norm though. I wonder why people think countering something with an individual experience that's clearly distinct from the norm is a counter? It's not. His generalization is correct, your counter isn't evidence against it.
Part of the reason for the generational gap isn't just because of different culture. But it's also because where kids and adults are all day. Adults are at work, kids are at school. So the social connections, hierarchy and the dynamics are all completely different universes.
A lot of kids don't give a shit about grades because often that's not part of the social hierarchy at school. Money isn't even that huge either. It's when they get out of school all the rules change. That's why there's always this younger generational gap between teens and adults but less of a gap between say 20s and 30s.
OP said "no 16 year-olds..." (ie, zero). A single example to the contrary does serve as a counter. But my point wasn't to be pedantic, rather it was taking an oppty to share a positive example about a rare connection I'm fortunate to have. IME it's often interesting to read counterexamples to broad generalizations, for a more complete perspective.
You should mention this in your reply because it seems like an attempt at refutation. Like the generality is obviously wrong. It's not. The broad brush is correct. Your experience is the anomaly.
Are video games actually fun? I used to spend a lot of time playing, until I had an epiphany and realized that it was more like working an unpaid part-time job. I was playing because I sort of felt obligated to reach the next level or finish the campaign or whatever, but I wasn't actually enjoying it and no one else cared about my achievements. So, I just quit and never looked back.
Definitely playing the wrong games, imho. I've been an avid gamer in one form or another since the late 1980's and a game design trend that's really been put on steroids in the last 10-20 years is designers getting a lot more sophisticated about creating feedback loops that drive you to put in that one more hour (or ten more dollars) for that incremental hit of dopamine. There is a type of game that is very specifically engineered to get you to play as much as possible for increasingly incremental rewards. World of Warcraft was my own first exposure to this philosophy of game design and they had me hook, line and sinker.
On the other hand you have games which are designed almost like an art piece or a one-and-done thing where you experience what the designer intended and then you're done. For instance it's an old game but take Battle Chess for instance, you buy it, you play it for like an hour and it's chess with extra cool animation and art. Great, now when you want to play chess, you crack open Battle Chess, and when you don't want to play chess anymore you close it. A lot of indie games and adventure games still have this philosophy where it's more about delivering a high quality good experience that is finite, not stretching everything out to infinity.
>I had an epiphany and realized that it was more like working an unpaid part-time job
I've had the reverse epiphany: That if I view aspects of my real life that seem difficult to make progress on as being more like a computer game, I can increase my motivation to tackle them.
Couldn’t that argument be used with a lot of hobbies?
I think for most people it’s like interactive light television watching. Not great to do it obsessively but it can be relaxing and/or mentally stimulating.
As someone who played on a Switch for a significant time (mostly Zelda and Mario games) and then transitioned back to PC games, I'm going to guess that by "video games for Xbox, Playstation and PC", you mean the big tentpole titles. Just within that frame of reference, I would agree. However, most of my playtime on PC is in indies, and those are just as fun as Nintendo games if you know where to look. For recommendations, look at the winners and nominees of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. (Wikipedia has the list.) Most of the PC games that I had the most fun with (and also the most significant emotional response) happen to be on that list.
I also had this realization. Part of it was that after a point, games stop being novel. I used to like playing with legos, but building a set just feels like a chore. These days, I'm doing a lot of ice skating, and what I like is the feeling of learning something new.
Video games make way more money then Hollywood. I mean not to be insulting but it's like asking the question are movies actually entertaining?
There's also many different genres of video games like there are movies and each genre scratches a different itch. The itch you're describing is sort of a "leveling up" goal oriented genre.
That's not the only genre. For example what's the purpose of VR? How does it help with "leveling up" or getting to the next "campaign"? The whole point of VR is immersion.
Too many people view gaming from a biased corner from their own little niche interest without realizing how big the industry is.
I too enjoy video games but I also think they are a massive waste of time. If I could rewire my brain to have the endurance required to constantly try to learn new things, that would be my preferred mode of existence. Unfortunately, I often seem to need to "turn off" at the end of the day, watching something lame on netflix, switching on a game, reading a forgettable piece of fiction. It is actually pretty frustrating but I have done it my entire life so I don't see this ever changing.
"Fun". Well if you have a family you need to support, I think it becomes a lot more obvious why "fun" is something that should often be dropped. There are other things that need to be done and they are definitely not "fun". You will, however, be rewarded in other ways that entertainment simply cannot.
I was talking to my younger sister (college student) the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names. This was a bit of a surprise to me, because she volunteers for the Democrats and is openly lesbian, so I would have thought her opinions are generally a great match for the current cultural milieu.
I think maybe part of the puzzle is described well by Bryan Caplan:
>Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.
In any case, she told me about one or two of her HS classmates who were actually serious in their use of social media, and how they were weird and almost maybe even poorly adjusted relative to the rest of the class.
Point being that even the youth culture you see online could just be the tip of the iceberg. (Or maybe my sister's peer group is unusual! Hard to say.)
> she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online
I'm old, but feel the same reluctance (it slips sometimes; I am only human). Not because I fear any particular reprisal, but because I cannot comprehend that that someone else gives a rat's ass about whatever random firing of neurons happens to be going on in my mind. I certainly couldn't care less about theirs.
I am okay with using my name when the post is for other people (i.e. work or occasional charity – otherwise I'm not working for you for free!). If the post is for me, then most definitely a screen name. It saves the confusion of someone who might come back to me thinking that I gave them free labour.
Maybe what they are feeling is a deep unconscious unease at the realisation that the cancellation culture the leftists have bought to life is bad karma. What goes around comes around.
Maybe what they are feeling is a deep unconscious unease at the realisation that the cancellation culture the leftists have bought to life is bad karma. What goes around comes around.
This is definitely one of the more interesting fantasies the right enjoys portraying, for sure. Part of standard playbook at this point it's becoming hard to treat these type of comments as organic.
They were rightly cancelled, but for the wrong reason. Really, the cancellation should have been for lauding his incredibly misogynistic and offensive portrayal of women.
Internet mobs have been mainstream since Kony 2012 made slacktivism a thing. Assigning cancel culture to one part of the political spectrum is not intellectually sound.
While, as other comments have said, this is the common target these days, its a red herring.
The issue and fear is as it has always been for left leaning movements: the tendency to splinter into little factions of slightly differing values and goals, and the purity testing and infighting that follows and keeps the majority of movements from doing anything remotely useful.
It’s anecdotal, but I had a friendship dissolve over one friend kind of “canceling” another for a prolonged period.
It was very much by the modern playbook, though it looked slightly different. Something offended some sensitivities, though it was a benign as an unexpected break up. My previous friend made a great effort to convince others of how immoral and cruel our other friend was, and some people kind of bought into the drama I guess.
It was a matter of reputation assassination based around some collective sense of what’s proper and what’s not. The path from reality to the conceived reasons for the cancellation was long, grey, and blurry, but they pushed hard on it.
One very common thread was how often I would think “wow, I could so easily get put in the same bucket. We all could. None of us are much better, we all make mistakes like this”. It seems true then and it’s true now. I say the wrong things sometimes. I’m accidentally insensitive. I don’t know as much as I could in order to navigate some social situations better.
What caused the dissolving of the friendship eventually was when I asked my friend why I’m any different from the person he was targeting. His response was totally irrational, unkind, and seemed almost pathological. I realized I had a very unhealthy friend who was harming my other friends and social circle. And that eventually I could be his target, too. I just had to upset him in such a way that I would be dead to him. What a precarious and unsettling way to be friends.
Anyway, all that is to say it seems familiar going back most of my life now. The only difference now is that it seems to be very identity-oriented and politically driven. It’s not as personal. That is a very eerie thing to me.
These problems seem to be limited to people who are chronically online. People who live on Facebook and Twitter. I know this is a bold claim but I’m immune to cancellation since I simply don’t have accounts on social media, and don’t use it. I live in meatspace and all of my friends and acquaintances are in meatspace, so good luck taking me down. There could be someone on Twitter right now trash talking me and telling everyone how horrible I am and how I should be fired and look! it’s not affecting my life in the slightest. Quitting these online-outrage tools is the first step.
I love the term meatspace! I feel the same way. I do have Instagram and even Facebook but I don't use either much (post travel photos on insta, use market place on Facebook). I generally feel like my friends are very much "meatspacers" first and foremost and any social media is additional and incidental.
The anecdote I'm describing wasn't a social media-driven thing at all. I agree though, social media makes it far worse. I should have clarified in the story though because I meant to indicate that these things occurred even before social media was such a major influence on this kind of behaviour.
Perhaps, but the left has the top universities, news media, popular media/Hollywood, much of Silicon Valley, the largest investors (Blackrock, Vanguard), and NGOs on its side.
(That's what makes the current meltdown/full-scale civil war on the left over Israel and Hamas—involving at least four of the above six factions—so hilarious to watch.)
"One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."
This was written by a socialist (George Orwell) in 1945.
> I was talking to my younger sister (college student) the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names
I dont know anyone who does. I think most of the 'online' is bots talking to each-other
For a time after Ukraine war began, everyone was accised of being a russian bot, and I was like 'do you think noone else has bots? Lobbyists, think tanks, dictators, secret services?
Russian bots were just low quality, and so they were obvious. The good ones would not be
Time and time again, the leftist vanguard eventually find themselves on the wrong end of ideological purity. Remember that Lenin was on the outs with Stalin at the time of his death, and Trotsky met an unfortunate end.
"like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children", Jacques Mallet du Pan said of the French Revolution.
I can’t imagine communists were too comfortable around other committed communists, being sent to the gulag was always a latent possibility if you were determined to be an ideological enemy.
Suggest to her that she voices an anti-Israeli genocide position and see how she reacts to the trucks driving around with her face on them after she's doxxed. That'll make her feel better about your fear of the left.
>>In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.
I saw a good description (on /r/4chan, no less) of leftist NPCs: People who constantly check in on each other to see what the latest things are to embrace/avoid. What a miserable way to live.
Caplan's quote sums up the logical conclusion of such living, and the consequent omnipresent fear of one day being on the outs from an errant word, thought, or deed.
Ironic that a good chunk of your comment history is evaluating this or that news story, conspiracy, or talking point from this or that social media outlet. What a miserable way to live.
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but unlike the leftist NPCs I mentioned I don't care what others think. I was never afraid to speak up during my time at an Ivy League university where the most common political posters were for the "world socialism" movement. In more than a decade on Reddit (or here) I have never once complained about being downvoted, and the first time I mentioned the concept of being up/downvoted at all was many years into my tenure there in response to some question/discussion not dissimilar to this.
The next time you are about to post something online, or say something to friends, or patronize a business, do you first ask yourself "What would it do to my public image if other people I knew saw me doing this?", and let that affect your behavior? Not me.
PS - I can also say that I have never up/downvoted a comment anywhere simply because I disagreed with it. I have upvoted many comments critical of me, or something I believe in/agree with, because of their eloquence or wit. I downvote very, very, very few comments, and only because they are completely useless (say, off topic), or ridiculously foul-mouthed in an inappropriate context (by the same token, I have upvoted such if funny enough). Even if few others seemingly believe in the original rationale for up/downvoting, I still do.
It may have been easier in the past, but most things aren't as obvious as music or fashion. Many trends often start out literally underground. How would you have found out kids were playing dungeons and dragons in their basement?
> Today, I know what Spotify is trying to push, but I have no idea if that is what is actually popular. Even if I were to install TikTok I probably wouldn't see the same things they are. I have no idea if the garbage on the front page of reddit is really reflective of how younger people think, or if it just an engagement algorithm feedback loop gone wrong where everyone reasonable has long since checked out.
In the case of youtube, you can just open the front page in an incognito tab. There's also the trending category which isn't catered to you specifically but to what's popular in your country/area around you.
I really enjoy the Garbage Day email newsletter. (disclaimer, I am a paid subscriber.)
Distills the cesspool of the algorithmic feeds to present up-to-date trends, popular memes, etc. as well as a general commentary of the sad state of the modern Internet and our engagement-driven AI-training future.
I don't have a desire to join all the 'socials' myself, but it is nice to try and view at arm's length what 'the new generation' is seeing and thinks is popular.
Hell Yeah! Fellow Garbage Day subscriber!! Ironically this was "recommended" to me by substack in the same manner that other internet sites dictate what you should see lol
In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going on about.
I agree in some ways but also just look at music festival lineups and associated set lists ?
AI probably already makes it possible to create a whole separate reality (in an online web form) for each of us. A trial version of it have been the facebook feed.
I have given up in the fight for relevance. Now I am grandpa even at age 29. My nephews think it's hilarious, at least. I know a couple of their slang terms, and I abuse them.
This seems like a persistent illusion to me. As access to the Internet and telecommunications reach has expanded, and language barriers or at least translation barriers decreased, any culture whatsoever, including whatever you might call "youth culture," is broader reaching and more uniform than ever. Hell, I'm not that old, last being a minor in 1997, but even then I barely knew what kids in the next school district were into. Radio was not national. I grew up in California and my wife in New Jersey and what was popular to us was often quite regional to the point I had never even heard of bands that were huge to her and vice versa. Television was more national but even that is only "national." Whatever got broadcast in the US was not broadcast in any other country that I'm aware of. Hollywood films were exported but not to the extent they are today. A few very popular, usually English-speaking bands became international hits, but again, that was exceedingly rare. The vast majority of what got popular in Germany or India I'd have never been aware existed.
Even Reddit was never really the front page of the Internet. That's a marketing slogan. I was pretty heavily online from at least 2003 to 2010 or so and never visited Reddit at all. I have no idea if any of my friends and other acquaintances did, but it was nothing they ever talked about to the point that I felt like I was missing out, and that includes friends I only knew from the Internet.
Go back before film and television existed and then what? You think there was any kind of meaningful cultural similarities between young people in Russia and young people in Argentina in 1890?
Where I think the disconnect you feel is very much real is that communities that cut across generations have largely disappeared. In the past, they may have been hyperlocalized, but they were real. 80 year-olds and 16 year-olds regularly interacted with each other, whether that be at church, service jobs, multigenerational housing, or simply that people visited each other in-person more often, if only because those visits were often only around the block. An old person in 1780 may not have had any clue what anyone was up to in another country or even another subnational district, but they probably felt like they knew their own grandchildren. I certainly spent quite a bit more time in the 80s hanging out with and talking to my aunts and uncles than I currently spend with any of my nephews and nieces.
The "pretty distinct cultural trends and identity" you're thinking of are what happened to get recorded by historians and/or make it into a popular Hollywood movie. It's very far from everything. As just a simply example I can think of from my own childhood, it became huge for a few years in the late 80s for kids to pull the magnets out of large speakers and use them to sift iron from sandboxes at playgrounds and schools. The idea was to trade in the metal to hobby shops for cash. Talk about it to any kid from my school district in 1989 and I guarantee they'd know what you were talking about. This wasn't obscure middle of nowhere. I lived 10 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Yet I have never seen this depicted in extant media, can find no evidence on the Internet it ever happened, and have never talked to anyone I didn't grow up with that would know what I'm talking about if I mentioned it.
I mean, I can literally see with younger peopler are doing in my country and my environment. I'm not really participating in it, so if I'm searching for good and fun date spots I'll TikTok, watching motorsports on Facebook, cool highlights on Instagram and more.
Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.
Would agree.
Some old school journalists from NYT wrote about that phenomenon. Colleagues doing a lot of stories that were basically the groupthink of their friend group or what they saw on Twitter.
Part of it is economics/incentives leading journalists to have to churn out a lot of content. Part of it is laziness as it's a lot easier than going out into the field and actually talking to people.
Are you saying that’s changed? That reporters are just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don’t think that’s the case.
Of course it’s the case! It’s the least talked-about and most insidious result of the collapse of the business model that historically supported quality journalism.
In the day when a lot happens online, purely sitting in front of a screen it’s possible to produce excellent and deep investigative stories. You do own open-source intelligence, you interview sources, etc., all while in front of the screen. Bellingcat does it on a regular basis, for example. You do not need to step out of your room to spot lies and discrepancies.
Yes & No.
Twitter, it is always worth remembering, is not real life.
The opinions you encounter as typical there tend to be the very fringe single digit percents of each political faction. Viewing the world through it exclusively is perilous.
When someone publishes a recording that is verifiably Russian bombing of Syria, and claims it to be Israeli bombing of Gaza, it is not a matter of “opinion”. And investigative journalism has nothing to do with Twitter in particular. However, do remember that Twitter (as well as Facebook, TikTok, Hacker News, Mastodon, email, Matrix, WhatsApp, or what have you) is as much part of real life as anything else, online and off, is part of real life. It is not some proverbial Las Vegas where nothing counts.
That sounds a lot like how "news" were sourced before that, with random interviews at street corners near the newspaper's office, stuff they heard at parties and from friends.
I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces.
Gregory F. Packer (born December 18, 1963), is a retired[1] American highway maintenance worker from Huntington, New York, best known for frequently being quoted as a "man on the street" in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts from 1995 to the present. He has been quoted in hundreds of articles and television broadcasts as a member of the public (that is, a "man on the street" rather than a newsmaker or expert). Although he always gives his real name, he has admitted to making things up to get into the paper.
> I don't believe there has been a fundamental shift on how much people are willing to put work into their pieces.
Publisher of NYTimes is on the record in a few interviews basically saying that yes, his journalists are putting in less work into their pieces (because they are forced to produce more pieces per day).
You used to get the same phenomena in broadsheets before that though. I saw it frequently in the Sunday (maybe Saturday?) magazine included in the big UK papers.
I remember coming to the realization when reading a fluff piece that the author had basically interviewed their mates and made it a story. I think the specific article was about marrying later, and they'd just interviewed a bunch of uni-educated people of a certain socio-economic wealth. No stats, no experts, just 'gut' feeling about what was happening. And once you saw it, you realized a significant chunk of the non-news stories were like that. This was in the 90s/00s.
I think a lot of lifestyle articles have been that way for a long time, pre-internet, it's just that the lifestyle articles are more prominent now.
Yes! I hadn't managed to sit through and read the thing until now, though I've seen a number of interesting excerpts quoted.
Two that really stuck out to me was-
Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy. I once complimented a long-time, left-leaning Opinion writer over a column criticising Democrats in Congress for doing something stupid. Trying to encourage more such journalism and thus less such stupidity, I remarked that this kind of argument had more influence than yet another Trump-is-a-devil column. “I know,” he replied, ruefully. “But Twitter hates it.”
Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”.
The NYT has always gathered the zeitgeist of highly affluent and artsy new Yorkers, who tend to be highly invested in maintaining their status quo. They may not be right wing by principle, but they get there a lot on some subjects by talking to lots of bankers and financiers.
I guess 'maintaining status quo' is to me a conservative / right wing thing. I'm recollecting for example in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent a critique of the NYT being very pro-establishment, pro-government. But I guess that critique itself is from an extreme.
The upper crust of Manhattan is filled with left of center people who think taxes on the rich are too low, but they themselves aren't rich (because Manhattan is expensive and they spend/save all their income) and that Trump is bad because he raised their taxes when he capped SALT.
I have friends here who semi-jokingly call me a republican for being more center-left than them & not wanting to watch John Oliver, while they own $10M of rental properties & don't think they are rich. The kind of upper class folks who have laid off numerous people in their career without a hint of remorse, but also think the social safety net is too weak. People who vote for AOC but plan to move to FL for tax purposes. Etc.
Basically the Loro Piana $500 ballcap demographic.
20 years ago, when I was right-wing myself (in College Republicans, etc), the AM radio I listened to and people I talked to all thought NYT was very left-wing ("liberal").
I don’t know what you mean. “Liberal” was in scare-quotes because that’s just the word that rightwing talk radio used to describe anyone on the left (or even center), and they said the word with disgust.
Yes, I know libertarians call themselves “classical liberals” and the left uses “neoliberal” as a similar epithet for anyone more centrist than themselves, but that was the connotation of the word.
I meant that this happened in the past 10 years. “Liberal” wasn’t associated almost solely to “left”. It was generally accepted. This “classical liberal” euphemism, in its current meaning, is also kinda new, and almost everybody who uses this nowadays is not associated to liberalism at all.
Yup, and it was even worse because you could drive any narrative and reinforce any bias that way. Make up a story, search 3 random Tweets that support it, and now you can report on anything to an audience that will eat it up, no real evidence needed. It is still happening of course, but at least now people rightfully look at Twitter with a little more suspicion.
This coincided with a reevaluation of the role of objectivity in journalism, and the rise in the number of journalists who also self identified as activists. While I don't think The View From Nowhere was every really possible, I do think that this reflected a shift in norms that resulted in more blatant cherry picking of facts and backfilling of narratives to support predetermined conclusions.
I think this is a bad thing for the way it was implemented.
Twitter for a brief moment used to work like a Global Broadcast Radio, where everyone could hang out to get a sense of What Is Going On, even if results skewed towards the interests of terminally online people.
Current siloed content feels more like hyper-personalized newspaper. The content is there, but there is limited opportunity or common ground to share and discuss it with friends.
That siloing, along with Instagram's discouragement of user generated content, appears to suggest that Big Tech don't want to deal with opposing users (or any user at all) interacting with each other. IMHO.
They got so sick of hearing about political bias they decided they didn’t want to be news sources after all, is my impression. Too bad they only came to their conclusion after getting news publishers to totally reorient themselves around social media though.
I can't decide if I dislike these more than the articles that just list items on Amazon where they just quote the reviews like they interviewed them. I assume they generate enough money through the link click throughs that make these articles worth while? I find these more repugnant than listicles. But twitter quotes, amazon review summaries, and listicles have to be the top 3 least favorite for me.
The problem I notice is even though we might create niche interest groups online, they're hard to translate into real life. Makes it hard to connect with others when you meet them for drinks, find a movie to watch or some other sort of entertainment.
I feel very lucky I was already out of university by the time algo-feeds became mainstream, otherwise it would be hard to chat about "latest episode of Game of Thrones". Or just generally chit-chat about "some stuff that everyone saw online".
20 years ago, we’d talk each Monday about this week’s Simpson or X-Files, and we knew that 95-100% of the people in our group watched it on Sunday. We don’t have that today.
I think Sportsball news is the last vestige of “shared culture” you can talk about over beer after work and be reasonably confident 30% or so of your mates can follow along. It’s so weird. 10 people who work together, around the same age, same social and economic class, and nobody can think of a topic that more than one of them know anything about, until someone says “How about those Warriors?”
I knew a lot of people who got into Ancient Aliens craze (paradocumental series on History Channel). Every week they would meet up and talk about whatever conspiracy they aired that week.
I was so glad to be missing out.
Sure, it's just an anecdote, no perhaps I was unlucky, but I want to show that it's not always a positive thing to have this "shared culture" that you speak of.
Eh, counter-argument to that is — it is sometimes really fun to discuss absolutely outrageous and stupid conspiracy theories. It’s a fun thing to laugh at, I would say even that gives a common ground to a group.
This is fun until one person says "well, they are kinda right". Happened in that group I'm thinking of, now some of them are unironically saying the pope has UFOs hidden in a garage.
This reminds me of how me and my friends once upon a time started browsing 4chan and jbzd (Polish nsfw meme site) for "spicy memes". We found some gems, but I couldn't stand negativity of these places. Few years later some folks developed genuine strong dislike for women and people of color. They are decent people otherwise.
Hence I cannot stand "silly"/conspiracy stuff like this, even if people say it's just for fun. Sadly, it sells well, so this is what you get exposed to when you start watching TV or online memes. And since it is simplistic, it is easier to have a discussion in a group about "why Muslims are bad" or "do you also believe that Vatican is hiding UFO incidents" than about e.g. politics of The North in Game of Thrones.
Fair, I totally get what your point. But that’s an argument for getting rid of “for the memes” media, which incites unjustified hatred towards other people. I’ve known people who got into those rabbit holes as well.
However, my argument was about “having common topics for discussion in real life”. As of now, you don’t really need to meet up with people to go down the conspiracy guy rabbithole. As you mentioned, you can be siloed and find your people online.
But yeah, I guess we’ll see where the whole “media curated for one person only” tactic takes us with all the implementations of recommendations algos.
They are not at all. You just need to establish some inclusion criteria, go through one cycle of rejecting people who don't meet it, and the people who remain following a purge tend to have elevated levels of group loyalty. Astroturfing is not that hard, and there's a lot of literature on how to engineer the outcomes you want.
Maybe not the fragmentation itself, but the general awareness of that fragmentation, yes. It sounds like a healthy thing for none of us to feel like we have a sense of "the internet" as a whole. I for one look forward to again being genuinely surprised to learn people's batshit insane opinions and theories, as I was in the early 2000s the first time I stumbled upon AboveTopSecret.
>Using the data available on Google Trends as well as SEO tool Ahrefs, domain and hosting provider Fasthosts investigated the online presence of X since the announcement of Musk’s takeover and his official purchase of the platform, just over one year on from his taking of the reins.
Man, those are some terrible statistics... 142.86% of nothing is still nothing.
For starters, searches for just the term ‘X’ have increased by 19.4 per cent,
while searches for ‘Twitter’ have fallen by 26 per cent in the same period.
While plenty of peopke still refer to X as its former title and news outlets
still often follow mentions of X with “formally Twitter”, it’s clear from this
data that interest in the term Twitter is fading, slowly but surely.
Since the switch, searches for ‘create X account’ have also risen by 142.86
per cent.
Yeah I had the same thought about the account creation metric, I agree that X is such a new name that increased searches about its name don't really mean much.
The overall usage stat does line up with X's own claims about traffic though. i.e. X is saying that traffic is higher than it has ever been and this source suggests the same as well.
These days the only persons who start to follow me, like my tweets or even advertise in my feed are those onlyfans, digital prostitutes or whatever. In fact it's the first time I have to use the block function on Twitter.
Bots gonna bot. So far they’ve not caught any of mine I setup this last year.
Each bot sticks to a context, simulates some time wasting doom scrolling at random to look human, posts affiliate links otherwise with AI generating the message payload in response to a Tweet by its mark.
I love how easy the internet made it to fleece potato brains
The article goes into that in depth, and how that hasn't really changed even on newer platforms like TikTok, just gotten harder to follow and understand.
I argue that Twitter is far superior now to it's previous incarnation. It's no longer controlled by a certain political viewpoint and now encourages all free speech. I find it extremely useful, much more so than any other source now.
Elon Musk took away a bunch of people's status, people who thought they were important somebodies because some nerds in an office met them in person and/or they paid some money to get a verification mark.
That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it - was a guy who I actually cannot stand politically, but who happened to be 100% right - Thaddeus Russell. That election was about the common people finally getting one over on the elites, and the elites freaked the fuck out about it.
Well same fucking thing about Twitter / X. A bunch of journalists - a profession generally and historically associated with the lower and middle class - have been / are being absorbed into the elite social classes of America, and they had a special widdle mark that gave them abilities the rest of the hoi polloi didn't have... and Elon Musk came around and he didn't just take it away from them - he did something worse. Same for the academics. Same for the so-called "thought leaders".
He gave it to the common people. He put the elites and the commoners on equal footing... and they freaked the fuck out about it.
X is not dying. It just isn't lorded over by the elites any longer. And they can't fucking stand it.
Good.
The Internet was supposed to be The Great Leveler anyway. We weren't supposed to have gigantic centralized platforms where only approved speech from the Party is allowed. The sooner the rest of these enormous social media platforms either die or radically change, the better.
X didn't die, isn't dying, and won't die. The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it.
And yes, the "you" in the above refers to me too... a lot of the people I followed on X no longer post there. Their loss, not mine. Nothing changed except everyone is allowed to use the megaphone now.
I’m not sure I agree that this is close to reality.
The reality is much more benign. Musk isn’t the savior of free speech, he inserts rules against it constantly, like throttling nyt or saying they’ll comply with authoritarian states. He’s complains about spam and bots (despite claiming it’s an easy problem to solve) then changes verification in a way the makes it difficult know who is actually who.
Separately, you seem very bitter toward people who have left twitter after Elon changed it. Perhaps because with the voices of the elite (a politically loaded term you’re using to describe experts or people at the top of their fields) departing, the platform is less valuable and interesting.
The sad thing is, I think Elon could have been a good steward for the platform, but instead he’d rather antagonize advertisers and a subset of his users. That’s not being the great leveler though—if people select out, it’s no longer a common/shared space for everyone.
I've always found this story so fascinating. The amount they get targeted is insane for being a satire website, regardless of if you think it's funny or not.
"Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement." [0]
Considering the thousands of deaths and people murdered by the US government in places like Libya while Hillary Clinton fumbled foreign policy as Secretary of State, the article is clearly, by definition, satire. QED.
John Oliver and Stephen Colbert (and formerly Jon Stewart) would beg to differ. Their "satire" consists entirely of making fun of anyone to the right of AOC.
Saying something that's officially forbidden is quite often satire. Saying something that you know your audience agrees with is not.
Can you explain the satire to me then? To me that article looks like another example of Clinton's have people killed. Who is being made fun of? What's the joke?
I think people with near zero empathy regard their interpretation as primary, but most humans can understand that people have different senses of humor.
> but most humans can understand that people have different senses of humor
I agree completely. And I would think that someone with greater than zero empathy would have a hard time arguing that there is one and only one correct way to interpret a piece of writing. An author with a non-zero amount of empathy should be well aware that their work will be interpreted in a variety of ways by a varied audience, and won't seek to hide behind the flimsy shield of "satire" when they publish something intentionally provocative and incendiary.
If i found out who you were in real life, and lets say I had a big platform, and started writing "satire" about you to spreading rumors, you just have to deal with it? I can hide behind the idea I'm calling it satire with no repurcusion?
Like sticking with the Halloween theme, "Mensetmanusman's neighbors are unsure if the screams are Halloween decorations, or another child locked in his basement this year"
I can write stuff like that, because lets say I want people to start thinking you are the kind of person that tortures kids for what ever reason, call it satire, and be protected?
No one’s fundamentally obligated to impose repercussions on you for such speech, and the first amendment protects those that choose to publish your speech from any government repercussion.
> if people select out, it’s no longer a common/shared space for everyone.
It's not as Twitter was a common space for everyone before Musk took over. I do like X Spaces. Great conversations with different point of views. Far superior format to cable tv talk shows. It seems like X is pivoting it's model away from advertisers. Given the out of touch "corporate friendly" message brought to you by ... it's refreshing to hear more realistic conversations. Not perfect, but they are up against Cable news & some of the corporate sponsored YouTube channels...which seem so...fake.
How is throttling the New York Times on X anti-free speech? NYT is its own media platform, among the most powerful in the world, why should it expect a separate outlet to promote it? Further, as a powerful media outlet, the Times itself "throttles" all kinds of voices and opinions with which its editorial board and majority of its employees and readers don't agree.
The narrative that Musk is "opening" Twitter is false. The game has not changed, he just swapped out some of the rules for ones he personally likes better. For example, deadnaming trans people is now protected speech, but calling a cis person "cis" is punishable. I do not care what your opinion on trans people is - this is a double standard and is not "free speech absolutism". He also banned an account that was posting public data about his personal jets. He is afraid of absolute free speech (which is reasonable - most people are).
That's an entirely different, unrelated argument. I asked about the New York Times, which is just as powerful and influential (probably moreso) as Twitter. NYT content is not free for Twitter users to read, why should it be able to use Twitter for free to essentially mine for subscribers?
Twitter can ban and throttle whoever it wants, they own the platform.
What's __silly__ about the NYTimes being throttled on Twitter is how Musk champions his platform as a bastion of "free speech", while silencing those he disagrees with (NYTimes) or can't be bothered to defend (enemies of authoritarian governments).
What __concerning__ is how many people claim to believe that Musk is actually a free-speech champion. Are they just trolling the rest of us, or do they actually believe it? Either one is worrisome.
But every NYTimes tweet is, essentially, a free advertisement. It doesn't post a simple comment or opinion (its writers do, sometimes), but every post from the official New York Times account is a brief summary of, and link to, a story on its own platform (most of which are inaccessible to non-paying subscribers). Yes - this is also true of almost every other media platform that tweets - but that makes this an argument about advertising content, not "speech."
NYT does not claim to be a platform for everyone's free speech, and their editorial board is held to account for the shit they publish. Compleyely diffetent business.
Elon wants it both ways - when u ask him, why is there messed up shit on twitter, he sats free spedch. When u ask him, why can't X post on twitter, its because he editorialized it.
He wants all the benefits and none of the accountability.
It claims, quite famously, to publish "all the news that's fit to print" and then internally, chooses stories to promote (often with very specious sourcing) and others to squash.
I only have a few anecdotal pieces of evidence but I know of two people, who didn't give a damn about checkmarks, who have stopped using twitter because it's unusable now. They were die-hard twitter users who were on it every day but now they don't even open it. They were also the only two twitter-obsessed folks I know and now both of them have no interest.
Again, just anecdotes but I feel like that's more evidence than you're sharing in this comment.
> a lot of the people I followed on X no longer post there. Their loss, not mine. Nothing changed except everyone is allowed to use the megaphone now.
That's a weird take. The people whose posts you wanted to read no longer post on X, but also nothing has changed? It would seem you're describing a personally significant change right there.
> The people whose posts you wanted to read no longer post on X, but also nothing has changed?'
He is saying that there was no meaningful change to the Twitter software that would diminish previous value found in posting on Twitter. You post your dumb quip and it shows up in other people's feeds just as it did before Musk.
> there was no meaningful change to the Twitter software
Social networks are more about the people in the community than the technical specifics. I didn't join twitter because they had an amazing way to input 140 characters, I joined because there were people I liked there.
> Yes, that's what the rest of the comment says – that the people left due to a change in the social dynamic.
The comment: "The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it."
> What's with all the replying without reading going on around here lately?
That's right, the "toys" are explained as being status. The comment explains that the community moved to reducing these people to being regular Joes like everyone else, and that is why they ran away crying, so to speak. I'll leave you to ponder the veracity of that claim, if you care. It is irrelevant here.
> I dunno, you tell me.
I am afraid I don't know enough about you to even begin to understand your behaviour. I'll assume from this you don't know yourself all that well either.
Oh, yes, I understand now how reading the comments might impede or otherwise distract from you reaching some kind of goal. Reads like bad faith participation, but thanks for the explanation anyway.
To the extent people were bothered by the change, I think it was mostly because the blue check is primarily a benefit to Twitter to make it easier to spot people impersonating folks who are worth impersonating. Making it pay-to-play defeated the whole reason for its existence.
Who are the nebulous "elites" and are you suggesting that Musk and Trump don't belong in that number? It seems like the argument is that the sheep got one over on the _maybe_ wolves by... rallying behind a couple of _definitely_ wolves who threw on some crummy sheep costumes?
Don't you love when people do that? lol "Trump and Musk aren't like the elites!" like oh I didn't realize your normal, everyday, average Joe could just leverage their assets and spend $44bn to buy a platform just to ~destroy it~ sorry, make it better by making sure no one posts there.
Given the nonsensical things I've seen declared "elite" and "nonelite", I'm certain that "elite" is just used as a synonym for "whoever I currently hate".
And you don't think that the guy with the golden toilet who owns several estates and the guy who bought a social media platform because he was mad they weren't allowing the golden toilet guy on the platform are textbook elites, even by your definition?
They really do have people brainwashed to think they're on their side...
Trump genuinely isn't. Sure he has money in the bank, maybe, but he can't get invited to the cool parties. None of the newspapers support him. The man eats his steaks well done for crying out loud! I'm not saying this makes him better, much less that it means his presidency achieved something, but he was absolutely a different kind of person from who we usually see in power.
> The people you - whoever you is reading this - just don't post there any longer because Elon took away their toys and they can't stand it.
Not quite. I used to get work through Twitter until Elon made it so you need a subscription to DM people. I used to get about one DM per week, but I haven't had any for about 3 months.
Musk has enough money to single-handedly pay for the costs of running twitter for the next few centuries, and nobody in their right mind would actually let twitter be “killed”.
I dunno. Weird that he said it like it was going to happen, then, instead of saying he wouldn’t let it die. But he says a lot of weird stuff, so maybe this is one of those cases where we’re supposed to assume he’s just saying gibberish that doesn’t mean anything.
Voting for one of the elites does not really make you get one over on the elites. For all Trump's yapping about draining the swamp, his swamp was a lot smellier.
And guess how billionaires become billionaires? By screwing over poorer people as much they can.
And all of those "brainwashed mids" just randomly happen to live close to cities, where housing is more expensive, meaning higher income, which means higher education levels.
Common sense is more valuable (in the real sense, not just money) than a diploma.
And, the GPT revolution is making traditional education even less important than before.
“Hate all you want, but I'm smart, I'm so smart, and I'm in school. These guys are out here making money all these ways, and I'm spending mine to be smart. You know why? Because when I die, buddy, know what's gonna keep me warm? That's right, those degrees.” - Kanye West
Common sense has a new meaning nowadays: it is just opposite of educated. And in that semantic space education = brainwashing. So yes, by that definition higher education (etc) leads to less common sense.
>That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it - was a guy who I actually cannot stand politically, but who happened to be 100% right - Thaddeus Russell. That election was about the common people finally getting one over on the elites, and the elites freaked the fuck out about it.
Some people get it. From before the 2016 election:
>Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.
>But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.
In other words, it isn't just a question of The New York Times (and the TV networks, and pretty much all of the rest of mass media) completely ignoring the rubes out in rural Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (which all, strangely enough, unexpectedly voted for Trump), but their ignoring the residents of their own city, just across one bridge.
I'm eager for Twitter to fail because I think it's been a net negative influence on the world almost since its inception, but it has not seemed realistic to hope that it could go away until now. Certainly, it will be replaced by something, and that thing may be just as bad, but I'm happy for the possibility that it might be better too.
I recall reading an article about the genesis of Twitter, and it included one of the tweets from one of the founders who was tweeting 'just had Ethiopian for dinner' or something like that. My response to that, and to every tweet ever since has been, "yeah, I don't give a shit."
Yes indeed. It's only "censorship" when the government demands it. Engaging in voluntary moderation is not censorship in a meaningful sense. It is, in fact, an aspect of freedom of speech that people should not be compelled to engage in speech that they don't want to engage in.
Strictly speaking, you're correct -- but it also highlights that not all censorship is wrong or bad. It can very easily be a valid exercise of free speech rights.
Twitter (or any social media) moderating people's posts isn't wrong, for instance. Nobody's rights are being infringed when they do this. You might disagree with their moderation policies, but that's a different thing altogether.
Legally speaking in the US, it's only censorship when the government is doing it.
It's government censorship when the government is involved with funding the companies doing the censoring or when the FBI "nudges" companies to suppress stories. Having spooks in executive positions doesn't help the optics either. If anything, a bunch of companies acting in lock step to suppress certain stories or opinions should face anti-trust scrutiny...assuming we have a functioning justice system. The government outsourcing censorship to private corporations is government censorship...
Huh? It is now vastly more censored - everyone who isn't paying for the blue check is essentially shadowbanned, while "conversations" are dominated by ChatGPT reply bots and grifters.
> Forbes reached out to Twitter for comment, and received an automated poop emoji, which the company has been using to respond to press requests for at least a month.
You gotta admit, the kind of shenanigans Musk pulls are hilarious. The definition of F-U money.
Call me when we've had a verified audit and report and detailed breakdown of all censorship. I want database dumps, SQL statements, verifiable guids and URLs, etc. Until then that's just a grey blob of hearsay and may very well be "true" but doesn't represent reality. We need to see the raw data.
I'm surprised that someone as interested in this as you has not followed up to try and see whether Taibbi's worrying thesis has any merit.
He, and Shellenberger and the other writers at "Public" are slowly revealing the outlines of something disturbing. Namely that social media companies take the direction of state surveillance and espionage actors -- including those of foreign (Israeli and Ukrainian secret services) governments, currently considered allies. This is being revealed to be effected through a sinister network of supposed "civil society" NGOs and 501c3s. That's a worrying idea to anyone that considers themself a democrat or a republican (in the non-partisan sense).
If you had followed up on this you would have noticed that although Taibbi rapidly admitted conflating CISA and CIS a further look suggests that the CIS is deeply inter-twined with the DHS and that Taibbi was correct about the CISA's involvement with the EIP. Taibbi is good at admitting his errors and correcting them publicly and rapidly: https://www.racket.news/p/lee-fang-vs-mehdi-hasan-round-2
With regard to the 22 million versus 3000 , Taibbi's co-author Michael Shellenberger notes that:
“Stamos & EIP worked to get entire NARRATIVES banned outright,” explained Mike Benz, the State Department official-turned-whistleblower. “Those narratives, by EIP’s own math, had millions of associated posts.”
Taibbi pointed out that the 3,000 number was chosen to hide the full extent of the censorship. “They're playing games with terms like ‘unique original URL,’” tweeted Taibbi, “where more than 1000 tweets can be "collapsed" into one ‘incident.’”
Here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how many posts they censored. No amount is acceptable.
Again, as stated in my original response to this: yes, the full dump would be ideal, but it is definitely worth considering what Taibbi says. If he's right this needs to be stopped now, if he's wrong then trying to safeguard against the massive abuses and manipulation will not cause harm.
I've never been a Twitter user, never have and never will, so I can't comment on whatever the previous regime was doing, but I see people talking about Twitter much less than they did a year ago, which is kind of what the headline article is about.
Twitter was a dumpster fire before Musk, but Musk has decided to pour gasoline in that dumpster.
I don't care if Twitter succeeds or fails, but I think that if the media and other entities stop using Twitter as their sole method of communication, that can only be a great thing for everybody.
If people stopped using Twitter as a source for reporting, that would also be a great thing. Twitter is a unique world, not representative of the larger world.
One of the benefits of being so incredibly unbelievably wealthy, pay no rent to live in many people’s heads AND buy a letter of the alphabet. Personally I would have chosen Z but with the line through the middle. X is too edgey for me. X is associated with sex, drugs, rock and roll and death. Z is my favorite, calm, pleasant to pronounce and rarified. I enjoy seeing it out in the wild when it decides to make a foray.
I know he’s owned the domain for a while but still now X is becoming his. Side note; I only started understanding Twitter after musk bought it. Can’t say my life is for the better but I can see some of the use of it. - Z
> The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet?
This is exactly it.
Consider a scenario that's likely fairly common given experiments I've done in the last several years. Say a site people still use to talk to/keep in touch with friends sometimes like IG/FB decides a user is "toxic" and either shadowbans them, or starts hiding their posts from friends. Maybe it isn't even because of a bad interaction, maybe the algorithm just decided their "content" wasn't suitable to be towards the top of this user's followers' feeds.
What would that look like to this user? It'd look like their friends were ignoring them, weren't interested in them, etc., possibly leading to depression (which has been proven pretty undeniably that high levels of social media use in teens results in higher levels of anxiety and depression).
The fact that people en masse are not pointing out how ridiculous this is, that a social media site can have such enormous influence on one's perception of "reality" is staggering and it should die and die quickly.
> that a social media site can have such enormous influence on one's perception of "reality" is staggering and it should die and die quickly.
You say this as if humanity has not been fighting over the long-distance communication of information for literally the entire history of human civilization since the invention of language. Even before written language, storytellers decided what oral traditions they would or would not pass on, changing it each time they told it. Replace "social media" with "broadcast networks" or "newspapers" or "scientific journals" and it is the same issue.
You don't have a world in which 8 billion people are connected (or even 1 billion, or even 1 million, or even 1000) without a few intermediaries whose purpose is to distribute some but not all descriptions of reality to a public audience, and who gain immense power through that.
> Even before written language, storytellers decided what oral traditions they would or would not pass on, changing it each time they told it. Replace "social media" with "broadcast networks" or "newspapers" or "scientific journals" and it is the same issue.
This is not the same thing. Pre-social media/pre-Internet I was not clueless about whether my communications with my "friends" were being received because almost every channel I had available to me was synchronous and there was much less noise.
Now, social media presents a broadcast interface and many people assume that their posts are being displayed to their friends. This is not actually the case. When your friends don't respond, you don't know if it's because your friends have stopped caring about you, they're just not interested in what you said, or some algorithm decided to hide you from them---and most people probably do not seriously consider the latter most of the time.
Whether we need intermediaries or not is one question, but whether we need feedback in our communication is settled: we do, and we leave it to the whims of algorithms optimized for engagement to our peril.
On this note, the invention of the printing press led to The Reformation with the first printing of the Bible, which up until that point had been duplicated by monks by hand, and The Word controlled and interpreted by the Church, who wielded their power like modern governments and institutions deciding what is or is not mis- or disinformation.
Yep and the solution then is the same as it is now - democratizing the means of production and communication, insulating it from the influences of capital and profit. Socialism is the boring age-old answer to every one of these.
Agreed that the social democratic solution of redistribution and welfare programs does great on this front, and I think all Western countries have some form of it. But I think here we are talking about other socialist prescriptions, which have a much worse track record.
I'm coming around to just ignoring the Atlantic. Their opinions have a rambling and stream of consciousness flow because they attempt to make something big out of something very small. Amplification of problems can be important, however when it's done in this style, you still have lots of disconnected problems and overall garbage as output.
>The most watched Netflix show that nobody's heard of
The oxymoronic style of this sentence reflects why I now ignore reading the Atlantic. Clearly it cannot be true, yet they claim it is to continue their narrative. Their next sentence, a citation of "one person posted" is also unpalatable.
> The oxymoronic style of this sentence reflects why I now ignore reading the Atlantic. Clearly it cannot be true, yet they claim it is to continue their narrative.
Not going to try to convince you to read The Atlantic, but the issue here is entirely on your end. They are not literally claiming that nobody has heard of the show. They are employing hyperbole.
If before the top show was seen by 90% of all customers, and now each of 20 shows is watched by 5%, it will be comparatively very hard to find someone who has watched the most-viewed show of today despite it being the most watched.
The most live viewers of a TV episode was the season finale of MASH in 1983[0] with 106 million.
Unless the population rises to a trillion, it seems hard to imagine there will ever again be so much cultural consciousness directed towards a single show. I do not even know what is on broadcast TV any more.
Remove toddlers, homeless and old people that believe watching TV is a pastime for kids. How many shows today are watched by half the 18-50 population?
I reckon a thing that happens to 50% of the population is as culturally widespread as if it had happened to 100% of it. Because it means one talking to another about it means you hear about it everywhere, since a conversation requires 2 people.
If the author hasn't heard of it surely nobody else has right, this from a paper that still writes breathlessly about the latest SNL episode that probably gets less views than the average semi-popular youtube channel get on a good day.
> It'd look like their friends were ignoring them, weren't interested in them, etc., possibly leading to depression
If my friends seemed to be ignoring my tweets, I'd certainly ask them what's up with that through a different mechanism (in person, through texting, whatever). If the only interaction I have with a person is through Twitter, then it's a real stretch to call them "friends" in the first place.
Ok, sure, but the parent comment doesn't really mention twitter at all. It's entirely normal for friends to communicate mostly via IG/FB, especially when separated by distance.
That's... desperate. I mean good friends will be honest with you, but you will look really desperate for validation, and actually behave like it.
I'd say most folks who are not actually earning cash from being an 'influencer' seek some form of validation, but most will deny it, and most of those will actually believe their words. We humans are sometimes a bit weird, aren't we.
I absolutely would, if it were a thing that was bothering me. They're my friends, after all. Why would someone feel ridiculous for checking in with their friends about something strange?
The trick is to auto-tune the algorithm just short of total depression, and give them a glimmer of hope and interaction with friends. Then it's back to the ads for a new cycle. What's great about AI is that the we don't even need anyone to code this explicitly, it will just happen automatically.
Regarding "Is that trend really viral?", I also think some people have stopped assigning value to things that go viral. It's not just a question of whether or not something went viral, but whether or not I should care even if it did.
People are starting to understand that engagement for the sake of it isn't necessarily desirable. The virality of something doesn't indicate its importance, just that it went viral. In some cases, it's a negative signal.
Over the last 1.5 years, I've intentionally reduced my interaction with social media significantly. I've become less and less aware of the viral trends of the week. I've stopped going to most of the content aggregators (HN is one of the last holdouts), and I've spent more time reading books and doing things in person.
My life is much better for it, and as someone who found tremendous value in Internet communities and credit them for helping me navigate a tumultuous childhood in the 90s, it now feels like the time to leave it mostly behind.
Not just because the Internet has changed, but because it is changing the people who use it. For all the good in the beginning, it was changing me in ways that I did not like. I was becoming more reactionary, less tolerant, and more pessimistic about other humans.
It seems to me that we're just not mentally equipped (or at least I'm not) to handle the Internet in its current form in the long run. It's fine for awhile, but degrades rapidly. I hope the next generation of web technology and communities will find ways to solve this, but I'm starting to think that part of the solution is to stop using it for the important stuff.
It turns out to be very possible, and very pleasant.
I skipped IRC but I was all over Direct Connect and attended hub LAN parties.
I loved digg, but that ended.
I was on facebook for 3 months when it came out before deciding it was toxic trash and deleting it.
I had a twitter but never understood it, never used it, seemed toxic too so deleted that.
Reddit became a hub of underhanded advertising and bad faith arguments by toxic actors, not to mention the restrictions that were applied to make it corporate friendly so that went in the bin too.
Like you, HN is one of the last places I visit, and discord is still scratching my Direct Connect itch with a few technology focused servers and people on the otherside of the world I've never met that I call friends.
The people in real life that I am close with can be found either in Signal, Telegram or over plain old SMS.
Recently my partners friend was visiting and she was on Tiktok the entire time. Sometimes spending time in her room on Tiktok rather than hanging out. She complained about Israels bombing runs, but had zero knowledge of the Oct 7 atrocities.
I really enjoy not being Algoritmically Assimilated like I see and hear many people are. Touching grass is good for us.
I had similar perceptions about "the modern web" affecting me like you describe, and it was quickly remedied by cutting out or always-swiftly-opting-out-from wherever the topic was "not at all pertinent to my current pursuits". If all your net use is in "utility form", then it is a pure wealth for work, side-project / hobby stuff, study, play, bureaucratic/coordination chores, communication with the folks you know (in my case it's just emails for arranging a meet or a call — don't grok "chatting", neither do my closest relations).
What's out then? What's out is all the opinion bloggeries and microbloggings, the whole feuilletonistic/debate spectrum, everything by "journalists", the reddits and chans, the economic or political or culture/zeitgeist doom or boom spectrums. Anything "news" that isn't specific-niche-or-thing news. It was only ever the lure of entertainment, spice, novelty, tickling-of-intellect in there anyway, but yeah it can leave unwanted engravements in mind over prolonged exposure. And for entertainment, spice, and novelty, there's a dozen thousand movies and a million games I and everyone else hasn't yet given play time for that hour-or-two a day of wind-down and the occasional "slow-mo day", from the past 60 years alone, let alone new stuff. They somehow seem oddly, innocently harmless in comparison, are self-contained and obviously not hellbent on "changing your path".
Of course that's what the article is alarmed about, but this way "the web" is a friendly, generously you-serving infrastructure offering of modernity and if you don't need it to be any more than that, there's just no such complication of "we aren't evolved/equipped for what we made" here..
This works especially finely nowadays vs. say 2016-2022 as "mostly-utilitarian"/non-blathery contents and discussions (whether thats a distro forum or a fandom wiki or a gaming channel or Github Issues, you get my drift) have healed from over-politization that did quite permeate them for that timeframe.
So maybe it's just really the old classic navigating-modern-mass-media skill building in yet another screamier more-blown-up iteration here.
> "Consider TikTok....Try to imagine which posts might have been most popular on the site this year. Perhaps a dispatch from the Middle East....Or maybe something lighter, like a Gen Z dance trend....Well, no: According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.—clips...aren’t topical at all. They include makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man."
so the normies finally won.
i think it makes sense that virality now is totally controlled by algorithms. there's revenues to be made. such a thing can't be left to chance, that was a blip of early internet history.
to me its all become boring, too much content and all of it seems the same, bland and unoriginal. i know there's good stuff but it's not easy to find among the noise.
>> makeup tutorials, food ASMR, a woman showing off a huge house cat, and a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man
> so the normies finally won.
I think I get your general point and I think I agree with it; but I have to point out that when I compare "food ASMR" and "a guy spray-painting his ceiling to look like Iron Man," to what was broadcast back when we only had three channels, it makes me think the "normies," have either most definitely not won, or that I'm way, way out of touch on what "normal," is now.
I'm beginning to like the revenue driven algorithms. I rarely get the BigCo ads anymore, it's usually small scrappy startups building niche products for the niche activities I enjoy. "Sponsored athletes" are now "influencers" and they're getting paid even more money to push the boundaries of the sports/lifestyles that I dream of, and now I get to experience them both viscerally during the week, and now the barriers to entry are lowered during the weekend now that the ecosystems are growing.
The pace at which hobbies like paragliding, base jumping, foil boarding, mountain biking, hiking, etc are growing is incredible to watch. Engineering talent dedicated towards "fun stuff" (aka top of Maslow's hierarchy and not influential on human survival (in my case the sports are very against raising the rates of survival lol))gets rewarded at paces never before seen.
> According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the U.S.
Maybe better to wait for an independent actor to verify that (if thats even possible). It would not be in tiktoks best interests for instance to have in that list, people reading out Osama Bin Ladens letter and exclaiming him to be correct.
I'd mostly agree. But we can verify that particular instance's popularity by proxy through political content popularity. I would make the bet that it was not anywhere nearly as effective as Crunchy Cat Luna at getting views.
that comparison offers no insight whatsoever. statistic requires comprehensive sets of numbers and random selection, not two random aggregates from a single time period.
Only if you have the data available, I believe no one does outside of TikTok, and I also believe they would not release that information unless requested through legal means.
Proxy estimation is absolutely a statistical construct, its the underlying of many branches of statistics, and in this particular case it would be a causal inference.
And I don't think terrorism or terrorist apologia is so far off from general political content that I would deem random+independent from each other.
> Popular content is being consumed at an astounding scale, yet popularity and even celebrity feel miniaturized, siloed. We live in a world where it’s easier than ever to be blissfully unaware of things that other people are consuming.
I've long been trying to communicate this trend to anyone who will listen, once needs are saturated the trend becomes building specialization that produces the most hedonism/value for the individual (per unit of inputs). Taken to the limit the outcome is a product perfectly attuned to your feel good chemical receptors in your body and brain.
Given a download of your brain, the future looks like generated content that is attuned to you alone, and is suboptimal for everyone else (relative to their own generated content). There will be a minor amount of novelty added to stimulate those circuits (and check the gradient for optima), but will mostly be a remix of what you already respond to.
So instead of Nike choosing to produce 10, err 100, colors of shoes, they will simply make exactly the color you want, just for you (and whoever collides).
Part of this will be an explosion in creativity because as an individual you will be able to express what you want and create it without the years/decades of training required to learn Script writing, or film, or the guitar, or how to sew etc.
Will it be good for us or society? That's a moral argument I'm not making here. Just an observation and extrapolation of what seems to be happening.
It would be the end of society. Society requires a common understanding of reality, and the things you're talking about are deliberately destroying a common understanding of reality.
The machines that manage the Matrix towers believe that it's the optimal human society because it maximizes the engagement metrics (measured by dopamine levels).
And for the first time in the history of those stories, reality is extremely close to that fiction.
The reasons those stories are told over and over is because we're highly susceptible to things that use our pleasure centers in ways that lead to maladaptive outcomes. You could reframe this to say we've collectively warned ourselves about this for decades, and we're still plunging headlong towards this future despite realizing how badly it can turn out in a worst case.
> The reasons those stories are told over and over is because we're highly susceptible to things that use our pleasure centers in ways that lead to maladaptive outcomes.
That’s an outdated and primitive view. People who are rich aren’t fat simply because they have easier access to food. Non-illicit addictions (like smoking) don’t happen to people uniformly simply because nicotine is at the same supermarket that everyone goes to. If people are about to “amuse themselves to death” then that is because they are leading an unbalanced life in some way, like being overworked or not having their needs met (like “social needs”, which I hear is a thing (cannot confirm or disconfirm)).
And if a lot of people have those problems? Yeah, then it becomes a societal problem.
But to talk about that you would have to look beyond the symptoms. But I guess worrying about Zappaesque sex robots is more fun.
> If people are about to “amuse themselves to death” then that is because they are leading an unbalanced life in some way, like being overworked or not having their needs met
This is essentially the point I’m making, i.e. “we're highly susceptible to things…”.
It’s not clear to me what aspect you consider to be outdated and primitive vs. what you seem to be restating. I suspect we’re in agreement and that you may have misunderstood my comment, which was not trying to claim that people have problems just because they have access. Clearly there are systemic factors that make access more or less of an issue.
Reminder that most people consume content, very few curate, and even fewer create.
Responding to your comment directly: I would argue that the opposite is happening. Things are becoming more samey. An individuals interests may be an unique amalgamation, but the pieces that make up the whole definitely are not unique.
> Will it be good for us or society?
I would say that it would be mundane or not as impactful. Not everything in life is going to be a pivotal moment for humanity. I would even argue that too many things in life are treated as if they are.
For the last ~7 years or so for me, the Internet has been specialty, curated online communities like Hacker News, Pinkbike, 68kMLA, /r/DestinyTheGame, and AudioScienceReview. It’s been absolutely great. It’s the real intersection of my real life & interests with a broader group of people than my local environment would otherwise enable.
I don’t participate in much social media. Facebook’s entire purpose to me is classified ads for furniture and bike parts. Instagram exists purely as an augmentation to Pinterest. Both of which exist simply to keep me and my partner from arguing endlessly about entirely imaginary design & decorating details. I don’t get the appeal of TikTok, and Twitter is mostly a place to make #dadjokes that I don’t want to subject my actual family to.
There was no positive value in being too online and participating in platforms and venues of the be all things to everybody variety.
I made a similar change just this year. Dialed back my Reddit usage to a few select subs, quit Instagram, tuned my YouTube recommendations to focus more on my hobbies, and get my news / commentary from NYT + podcasts.
I'm not missing out on anything by being out of the loop on the outrage of the day or meme of the week. I still kill time online but it's less mindless and aligns more with my interests.
Looking back, the mind shift was gradual but quite profound. It feels like I've reclaimed control over what I deem important, and my opinions actually feel like my own rather than being swayed by algorithmic feeds and comments.
The more time I spend detached from the internet hive mind, the more it looks like a zeitgeist of compounded absurdity.
But I feel that's the central argument of the article. There is no dominent culture or obvious trends, only groups and groups of intersections of interests.
I guess so, but that’s also how it’s always been. Not everyone was a hippie. Not everyone was a yuppie. Not everyone was grunge. Not everyone was Johnny Football.
The prevailing zeitgeist narrative about any given era is all at once revisionist, simplistic, and projected onto it after the fact.
One could assign some characteristic to the preset era like the dominance of influencers and gurus or something of that sort. It will be easy 15 years from now to look back at how everything from makeup to IT infrastructure culture became hitched to “influencers”.
The peak of this, for me, was pizza rat (late 2015) which felt like the last time everyone on the internet had seen the same thing. Kind of like the old days of TV where the whole nation would watch the same episode of something in the same evening.
Dat boi (early 2016) was the first time I missed out on the meme zeitgeist and it’s been slipping further from my grasp ever since.
Never heard of pizza rat, so there you go: not everyone.
I think the internet - and just life in general - has always been what this article is fretting about. Stuff happens, some people see it, some don't. Nothing to see here.
Pizza rat was still fairly niche. From my personal memories, the "global unified virality" peaked with Ice Bucket Challenge, Gangnam Style and maybe Harlem Shake. I have a feeling as recommendation algorithms became more prominent, it started to silo every "trend" rather than showing "most viewed things" to the people.
Note that this is the exact opposite thesis of this article[1], which I remember seeing on HN a while ago. Rather than having no counterculture, it seems the mainstream is being eaten by a thousand countercultures.
We now have maybe millions of content creators jostling for views, rather than three letter TV stations showing the same templates shows. What gets you an audience isn’t uniformity, but being different in an interesting way.
What is happening online ? Easy answer: everything. The online world is now just as complex, both globalized and fragmented at the same time in different dimensions, as humanity itself... The tools of our social interactions, public and private, can only be homomorphic to them.
The article says we probably haven't heard of the most popular show on netflix (and I hadn't), but it's important to note that they're defining "popularity" as the show most often viewed, and not by how much people enjoyed the content.
Reviews for the show (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Agent) suggest that it's mediocre and forgettable. You've very likely heard of, and watched, the most popular shows on netflix when defined as the shows most people consider to be the best on the platform.
As long as I'm able to find out about the good shows on netflix, it really doesn't matter to me if some random netflix original disappointed more people within a specific time span.
Maybe the Internet is becoming the place where good ideas used to thrive and now is where good ideas die. If some info is worth keeping or reading, it belongs in a private network where access implies accountability.
I hadn't thought of it that way until I read your comment, but it explains a trend I've noticed in my social circle, too: very little valuable discussion or information sharing is being done by them on the internet anymore. Now, it's mostly happening on private servers.
I think we never knew. There was just an illsuion of knowing with trending tags and such. You could maybe know what some subset of people were doing in a particular community. But there are just so many communities, platforms, and languages out there. We never had, and still don’t have, the capability to know.
Viral is entirely useless as indicator anyway given since platforms are known to not just use organic signals. They put their finger on the scale for advertisers etc. e.g.
There’s an awesome recent Film Theory episode called „How YouTube broke your brain” that covers a very similar topic that I highly recommend watching: https://youtu.be/RXiLAn3vUKg?feature=shared
There is no "loneliness epidemic" [1] *, and blaming every listener's anxiety+depression on X (the oldest snake oil tactic), where X is YouTube's personalization algorithm, is cringeworthy. The rest of this video was full of loose correlations. It reminded me of watching the "pizza gate" conspiracy video.
* Or rather, there was none before 2020. Obviously, in 2020+, the COVID quarantine was a massive drive of loneliness poll results, and we must assume that effect might still linger a few years later. The only way to rule this out is to look at pre-2020 polls.
I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in, to see what YouTube is pushing to the unidentified. It's just like TV used to be, aimed at a pretty low target. And that's nearly all American TV had. At least YouTube still has a longer tail of genuinely good work.
> I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in
I wonder if that actually works... It still tracks location, obviously Cookies (which you probably delete for this) and possibly a lot of other things. Maybe YouTube even maps your IP address to previous logins and uses that information "just slightly" in order to not throw you off...
It’s seems to work pretty well, based on some non-scientific testing most of the suggestions is content similar to what’s on their trending page, which is what I’d expect.
But I’m sure YouTube slowly but surely starts building a profile while in incognito to try and capture your eye balls.
i feel like this is simply due to the increasing ubiquity of the internet, such that it isn't "the internet" any more but a bunch of people doing a bunch of things, some of which happen to use the internet. replace "online" with "in the world" and the absurdity of trying to keep up with it all as though it's a single entity becomes more obvious.
I’ve given up on “news” for a long time, as I’ve recognized that most of it brings no value to myself. Because of that, I feel no guilt about reading silly stuff about subjects I simply enjoy because it has something to do with my personality.
Wanting it or not the actual important news will reach you, and we’re already overloaded with information like never before, so accepting that most of what’s happening has no value to you (especially considering the toxic nature of online news and comments) is maybe the healthiest approach.
> The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity.[1][2][3][4] Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers.[5]
This is not a new thing. SEO types have been running 'spinner' tools for a long time. A spinner is a tool/technique to make copied content look fresh and new, and non-verbatim. Then we have the advent of LLMs which I have no doubt is being leveraged right now to spam the web with synthetic content.
I'll tell you what this actually is: the overclass has lost the ability to determine what is popular. It was always forced on us by whoever could pay the most and get a bit lucky. Now we have something resembling a democracy where people have some input of their own.
> “One reason why there’s so much consternation is that if you can’t see what’s going on, you can’t rig the game anymore,” he said.
Exactly. This is part of it, but the other part is that it's become extremely expensive to rig the game on a regular basis because of how fragmented and distributed everything is.
> The internet destroyed any idea of a monoculture long ago, but new complications cloud the online ecosystem today: TikTok’s opaque “For You” recommendation system, the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk, the waning relevance of news across most social-media sites. The broad effect is an online experience that feels unique to every individual, depending on their ideologies and browsing habits. The very idea of popularity is up for debate
I can't remember where I read it, but something I read made the claim that this is the reason why TV and Hollywood seem to be stuck in a cycle of remakes, spin offs, and extending already loved franchises for the last 5 or so years. The fact that there is no longer a monoculture means it's harder and harder to guess what media will be popular across a broad spectrum of people. You can make small budget things for a single niche, but it doesn't make sense to spend $100 million on a niche movie. It's riskier than ever to do something novel because our culture is so fragmented, so they're falling back on things that succeeded when we did have more of a monoculture, since they know that has broad appeal (or at least it did at one point).
Well how old is older than you? People read books, magazines, did crosswords, got drunk and socialised. Probably more sociable than now, but lots of solo activities existed before technology.
> Popularity and virality aren’t the only metrics to determine what’s important, but without an understanding of what is happening online, we’re much more likely to let others take advantage of us or to waste precious time thinking about, debunking, and debating issues and controversies that are actually insignificant or have little impact on the world around us.
Believe that something trending is significant? Fake News because it is overblown and was only chuckled at for five seconds by two million people—most of whom housewives in New England—and then promptly forgotten. Don’t believe that something trending is significant? Same deal.
The “people are saying” headlines are already a thing. The ones where you find out that it’s three tweets with a cumulative like (or retweets? idk) of 57. Of course now they can justify them since it might be hundreds of thousands.
> A shift away from a knowable internet might feel like a return to something smaller and purer. An internet with no discernable monoculture may feel, especially to those who’ve been continuously plugged into trending topics and viral culture, like a relief. But this new era of the internet is also one that entrenches tech giants and any forthcoming emergent platforms as the sole gatekeepers when it comes to tracking the way that information travels. We already know them to be unreliable narrators and poor stewards, but on a fragmented internet, where recommendation algorithms beat out the older follower model, we rely on these corporations to give us a sense of scale. This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify.
No self-aware closing joke about how a media writer pines for a time when they had a clear role as a meta-commentator? Ugh, too sincere.
> The only assumptions are that 1) a vote reflects a users intent to give a post more/less attention (see The Law of Attention) and 2) this intent is caused by underlying beliefs that we cannot observe
The assumption #1 is unlikely to hold. People are generally biased. They will not think twice when casting a vote, will act on impulse and if presented with the opportunity, cast a downvote on things they merely dislike, without having read the article they are voting on.
In cosmology, "horizon isolation" refers to the phenomenon where regions of the universe are completely cut off from each other due to the expansion of the universe exceeding the speed of light, preventing any exchange of information or causal interaction.
Frankly I just don't care anymore what is 'the thing' online these days.
I left the whole Facebook ecosystem years ago, Twitter last year, never used Reddit nor TikTok.
The amount of time and cpu cycles I can rather put towards my own interests and going deep on them, rather than chasing what the mass is interested in, is quite big.
Sure, at times I will sound like the guy who has been living in a forest and doesn't know about the latest happening trends.
But most of the time I have deeper and better researched knowledge on the subject matters that are always relevant (rather than the fleeting trends of social media).
For me trying to find out "what's happening online" has been like trying to drink the ocean -- always. "Online" was a big place, even in the 90s, and it's even bigger now. I go to a news site and there's an article about something that "went viral" and I missed it. I go into Target and there are toys based on Really Famous YouTuber that I've never heard of despite spending a lot of time on YouTube.
I don't know "what's going on online" and I probably never have. I only know what's happening in the little corners I visit. I think I like it better that way.
The paywall on the article is ironic since the collapse of free reputable news is likely another aspect of that.
I keep hoping the Fediverse will win. After what's happened to Twitter and Reddit and Facebook, it seems self-evident that our main means of public discourse needs to be something decentralized.
But the Fediverse is struggling. UX is a disaster, every instance admin is holding on by their fingernails to stay solvent and sane, product development is comparatively slow, and bad actors have only barely gotten started attacking them.
You can either have free or you can have reputable. Real journalism costs money. You know people used to buy the newspaper for a few bucks everyday right? Now people can't be bothered to spend the same amount for a whole month's worth of news.
Why would reputable news be free? Would you expect anyone reputable to just give away their product? I have no doubt propaganda will remain free at least.
When did I say I expected it to be free? Obviously, it's paywalled because that's their only economically viable option now that advertising revenues have lowered too far for them.
I'm just stating reality: reputable news sources used to have free access to their articles on their websites. Now they do not.
Social networks definitely created that bubble where what you experience is different than your neighbor. What seems to be trendy is just for you and your related peers, but not for everyone (which can further increase extremist thinking).
The difference with the old web is (was) that it consisted mostly of blogs - public pages - available to everyone, in a way that if a piece became trendy, it would be for a broader set of people.
What’s interesting is going from cultural scarcity to the cultural abundance of the internet has led to silos. But this time on subcultural lines instead of geography.
Perhaps the problem is that most of the “news” on the Internet is now behind a paywall. Audience fragmentation is the inevitable result of steady audience segmentation. What we are looking at is the inevitable result of incredible amounts of monetization effort, which inevitably empties the commons so that audiences can be properly extracted.
This very article about the phenomenon is unreadable by the majorly of Earth because it’s behind a paywall.
I'm going to get this quote wrong, but there was an author (Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov? one of those folks) who said something along the lines of "We were lucky to be the last generation to be able to read all science fiction that was published. But considering that 80% of what is written is garbage, perhaps we weren't so lucky"
> "We old-timers," Arthur C. Clarke remarked recently, "were able to accomplish something unique. We were the last generation able to read everything in the science-fiction field. No one will ever be able to do that again."
I’ve certainly been noticing this recently, the problem I have with it is that it’s hard to get a frame of reference.
I get offered content on X and I don’t get where it’s coming from or why and I’m not sure if it’s actually something I should be concerned about. It’s all gotten a bit “weird” if you ask me.
> Don't worry guys, I teach 8th grade. You're not missing much.
> A student recently introduced me to BLP Kosher. That was... an experience.
A lot to unpack here, but it sounds to me like you don’t like or appreciate rap music, which says more about your own individual music taste than the quality of BLP Kosher’s music or this particular track.
I think the production is on point and the track low-key slaps, but that’s just my opinion.
I like rap. In my opinion, rap music embodies the last vestiges of individuality and creativity that rock and roll pioneered. Rock is now just a snake eating its own tail. All the soul is gone.
I wasn’t trying to be disparaging to you, and I guess I was responding to what I perceived as a slight against him on your part. If I made unreasonable assumptions based on word choice/context clues, I apologize.
What about him strikes you as odd compared to rap artists you’re a fan of, or odd in what respect? I’d be inclined to agree, as I don't typically assume Jews are big in rap, but there’s definitely a huge precedent in Beastie Boys.
I love tons of strange rappers. I think what rubs me the wrong way about Kosher is that he feels inauthentic in several ways.
A supposedly Jewish rapper talking about killing people and embracing that lifestyle seems weird to me. The fact that he looks awkward and uncomfortable when he tries to somewhat dance to the beat strikes me. And the way he speaks also seems very much like a put on. Like he's intentionally trying to speak in a stereotypically black manner but it doesn't come natural to him.
Generally, I get the impression that he's a white skater kid with a shtick. And being Jewish feels like part of that shtick to me.
Happy to be wrong, and I don't hate the guy. I'm not going to go around knocking people for liking him. But it does feel like something you like in middle school and then grow out of, only to go back and wonder why you enjoyed it.
from the society point of view, not have a shared cultural experience is bad. I remember the time, where we used to watch the same tv shows and, get the same news, and we collectively experienced and discussed it. It is maybe one of the backbones of a society culture. Today because everyone is consuming your own media, news, you have small opportunities to shared cultural experiences, one of them being sports (Soccer World championship, for instance), or going to Kindergarten/School/Army. Work used to be a place where we could somehow have this experience, but with introduction of remote work, for those remote, it was one step away from that..
Just last week, Netflix unexpectedly released an unusually comprehensive “engagement report” revealing audience-consumption numbers (...) Netflix’s single most popular anything from January and June 2023 was a recent thriller series called The Night Agent, (...) “I stay pretty plugged in with media, especially TV shows - legit have never heard of what’s apparently the most watched scripted show in the world,” one person posted on Threads.
That was my feel exactly. How is it possible that I'm even on the same platform and have never even heard of it?
I'm really not sure this take passes the sniff test. Each and every day I have meaningful conversations with folks who I don't share the same hobbies/interests with, and these conversations typically don't include "what's viral on the internet".
And for those I am closer with, who I do share hobbies and interests with, we obviously have things to talk about as we're following the same topics.
The author sounds out of touch. It has always been chaos, and whether something was viral has always been a curated reality. Throwing "AI" into an old narrative does not make it new and interesting. The internet has always been a twist on a gossipy book club, it's just that it has become so big it's not recognizable as such.
In comparison, those holding the most data know more than ever. That is how they built the AI tools to begin with. And in the chaos they will dictate what we get out of the internet.
I can't tell if this article and its title are satire or not. "Nobody" implies that there was, for a period, a group of "Somebodies" who did, in fact, know what was "happening online". That entire premise is the entire problem with the tweets-as-news culture and obviously false becuase "online" is a HUGE PLACE.
There appears to be a resignation that the "news" will now print whatever tiktok puts in front of them(!) and a cynical confession that drumming up clicks for random nonsense was, actually, the previous strategy.
Those of us who never took it seriously can't wait for it to keep unraveling.
There is one horrible typo in this article. It should read ‘TikTok’s opaque “Fork You” recommendation system’. It’s as if someone believes TikTok isn’t the Chinese militaries way of winning the war by melting hearts and minds .
I like it when they put breaking news/ongoing dangers such as a shooting or a volcano eruption, behind a paywall. I’m earning a decent wage, but I can’t justify paying a dozen subscriptions to stay in the loop. So I disconnect and live in my own bubble. Ignorance is bliss.
I want to fine-tune AIs on my own decision-making in an auditable way where I can review their decisions and course correct their decision-making when they get it wrong.
Where I don't need to read every letter I receive in the mail, and every text message delivered to my phone. I want to fine-tune AIs that can make approximately the same decisions I would about what is worth spending my time on, and what can safely be sent to the rubbish bin.
I want an army of executive assistants, an org chart of AIs, working on managing my information on my behalf in a way that is aligned with me.
I do not want a neutral aggregator.
I want a biased aggregator whose bias is intentionally aligned with my own. An aggregator who is accountable and aligned only with me, not a 3rd party who happens to run the servers my communication is flowing through.
I don't think this is a novel desire. Secretaries and executive assistants have existed for a long time, and have filled this role. But I can't afford to pay someone a livable wage to sort through my email for me.
I'd be happy with a site like HN where thoughtful people gather to share what they know, to both provide and consume information and insight, to amplify our collective understanding and capability.
A site that is self-moderated by the community to suppress spam and trolls while surfacing quality material.
And a site where there are consequences when community members abuse their moderation privileges by downranking and flagging legitimate ideas, submitted in good faith, that is neither spam nor troll.
I think many people would relate in some fashion to your sentiments. However, your sentiments are ironically what spurred how we got where we are.
The eviscerating 'me' movement has underpinned all other movements and social interactions. It's everywhere. Individualized everything. This started sometime in the late 1990's early 2000's. It made observational journalism briefly a few times over the last two decades, but not enough nor deep.
No longer is it just material items - no it's worse - fully digital and everything everywhere.
I speak for myself from the US but I can only assume it's prevalent everywhere else in world, at least to some extent.
One aspect no touched is how it seems on TikTok an artist/band can have a song getting very popular for a limited amount of time and that's it, it doesn't lead to anything else for him/her/them. No really new fanbase, etc.
I am assuming I was paywalled in the exact same spot as you and it's baffling from that small snippet that you came up with this claim. This is the exact quote and the only mention of that clown:
> the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk,
Arguably, Twitter collapsed into... X?... and X's value has tanked in the last 12 months. That less than 10 word phrase is not the focus of the intro - It's the overall collapse of the centralized-on-social-media internet.
Legacy corporate media outfit bemoans loss of organized narrative control due to rise of uncontrolled unmonitored information sources, fears future without panoptic observation of popular opinion trends:
> "This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify."
Suggested reading:
> "The detailed and engrossing 2008 book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, by Hugh Wilford investigates the CIA’s ideological struggle from 1947 to 1967 to win “hearts and minds” for US capitalism and to prosecute the Cold War."
That effort to control the media narratives being fed to the American public did not end in 1967 of course, it's alive and well today (although the organizations responsible are more nebulous, ranging from government bureaucracies to non-profit foundations to corporate ownership umbrellas).
It's true that the siloing of information due to the self-reinforcing effects of social media optimization algorithms (related to the desire to generate captive audiences for targeted advertising) is a problem, but having multiple independent social media accounts devoted to different topics is one way around it.
Reddit is just another segregated community, it is one that just somehow attracts the type who perplexingly think they can understand and speak for everyone.
Reddit has a structure that's uniquely suited to capturing the whole of the internet. There is no mirror of Reddit here, but there is /r/HackerNews and /r/TheAtlantic. And while I'm pretty active on Reddit, the "most popular" posts on Reddit are as alien to me as the "most popular" TikTok videos mentioned in the article.
