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TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

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Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#401

Post by el-salvador »

vishnugupta wrote: post #104

Purely anecdotal. In India WA does an excellent job of being that social graph. There are segregated groups of family, colleagues, collage friends and what not. Messages, memes, updates are shared on those groups. Lot of commercial transactions also take place. So Facebook usage has dropped significantly. Of course WA is owned by FB.

We have a similar experience in Latin America.

WhatsApp has become the main method for sharing messages, pictures, video or memes.

WhatsApp groups here are what Google+ Circles attempted to be.

With smaller audiences people are more open to express their real selves in groups.

It's also an integral part of business, like even used for negotiating loans with the bank, getting covid test results or day to day stuff like ordering lunch.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#402

Post by BeFlatXIII »

imgabe wrote: post #212
askafriend wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why default to blaming the students/employees? The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees. I'm not saying there's no problem with overconsumption of cheap media. But I think we're too quick to jump to blaming individuals. We can just as much flip the question around and ask what educators and employers ar…

This just reeks of entitlement. “Entertain me and engage me! Let no moment of my life ever be touched by confusion or struggle! Spoon feed me everything I can ever want or need!” Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot. So if you care to have any agency and control over your own life you better f…

> As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then.

Now all the employees have moved on and we have a labor shortage. Now what?

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#403

Post by BeFlatXIII »

thow-58d4e8b wrote: post #210
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are in for big problems. I graduated from college in 2017 and my adult classmates couldn't even pay attention in class. If adults are hooked then children stand absolutely no chance.

The most chilling is that this also inflicts the military. Lieutenant Colonel Heffington on West Point, published in 2017: > Academic standards are also nonexistent. I believe this trend started 10 years ago, and it has continued to get worse. West Point has stated standards for academic expectations and performance, but they're ignored. Cadets routinely fail multiple classes, only to be thrown back into the mix. The…

Is that a problem of shortened attention spans pervading the entire populace or the overall quality of recruits going south thanks to politicians who insist on using them as muscle for unnecessary wars?

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#404

Post by BeFlatXIII »

wizofaus wrote: post #54
klodolph wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying that for centuries or longer. Kids these days have shorter attention spans. People said it about millennials, about gen-x, about baby boomers. There’s a record of people complaining that kids are ruined by their reliance on writing things on paper, rather than slate. There’s a record of Socrates complaining that the written word is ruining people’s memory. The record exists because Plato wrote…

Doesn't mean it's not true. There's an argument that given the world's population today we should be churning out geniuses (of the caliber of Newton or Einstein or Beethoven etc,.) all the time now, but the fact we're not suggests there's something about the social environment we grow up in that strongly discourages the level of sustained commitment to a particular specialty neccessary for genius to develop. Having s…

Alternative (but not exclusive) explanation: the easy pickings for geniuses have been picked over, and it takes longer than before to achieve genius-level accomplishments as a solo prodigy. Neither Einstein nor Beethoven contributed to multiple fields like Newton or Leonardo DaVinci did.

[Though Beethoven—or any musician—may be bad example(s) to include here: music is a field that is much less objective in ranking quality of ideas compared to ranking impact]

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#405

Post by BeFlatXIII »

Mezzie wrote: post #237
wizofaus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean it's not true. There's an argument that given the world's population today we should be churning out geniuses (of the caliber of Newton or Einstein or Beethoven etc,.) all the time now, but the fact we're not suggests there's something about the social environment we grow up in that strongly discourages the level of sustained commitment to a particular specialty neccessary for genius to develop. Having s…

Strongly disagree on distraction being the cause. I spent a lot of time around potential geniuses growing up, and what sticks out to me is how many of them had their lives all planned out by the adults around them before they were in middle school. If anything, I think the lack of those people is because we've decided original thought isn't a virtue in our geniuses: We'd rather stick them in labs and use them tweakin…

> It gets repetitive pretty quickly if you have the insight to start figuring out how it works, which those kids would. Genius kids' hobbies tend to differ from their peers'.

"I understand and now no longer care" is one of the most freeing feelings out there.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#406

Post by wizofaus »

Balgair wrote: post #243
wizofaus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean it's not true. There's an argument that given the world's population today we should be churning out geniuses (of the caliber of Newton or Einstein or Beethoven etc,.) all the time now, but the fact we're not suggests there's something about the social environment we grow up in that strongly discourages the level of sustained commitment to a particular specialty neccessary for genius to develop. Having s…

Woah, woah, who says we're not churning out geniuses? The rate of scientific research is doubling every ~18 months[0]. The arts have had an explosion of growth and creativity in the last decades. Some of the best musicians ever are currently living. Some of the greatest revolutions in science are currently on going. I mean, we got the vaccine to covid worked out over a weekend! [0] https://www.industrytap.com/knowled…

Sure, there are plenty of people born these days who presumably have the capacity for genius of the greats of the past. And yes, the sheer number of scientists working today, with access to knowledge and facilities far beyond what was available centuries ago is producing a stream of research and increased scientific understanding that is far greater than it's ever been. None of that invalidates the hypothesis (which is all I'd call it) that there'd potentially be more stand-out geniuses if we didn't live in a world with so many distractions available in devices we carry around with us all the time.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#407

Post by klabb3 »

labrador wrote: post #394
klabb3 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how introducing flashy short videos that produce a dopamine hit in the easily amused is going to grow Facebook I can easily see this pivot lead to a short term growth, but I don't get why this metric is so blindly trusted, when it's clearly more complex. (If there is one thing I really appreciate about engineers, is that most of us understand trade-offs, and our null-hypothesis is that almost everything…

> Now, Tiktok has come along and likely by chance found an even more powerful doom-scroller, the dopamine 9000 I don't think older people who were raised in a longer attention span world (without even flashy jump cuts on TV) will find short attention span videos appealing. I could be wrong. One thing that would tell me I'm wrong is if there was a robust amount of people over 40 on TikTok. I don't have that data, but…

I have observed almost the opposite. Sure, younger people are early adoptors but the older folks don't have a natural resistance and are easily hooked. People addicted to Facebook are increasingly middle aged.

That's another reason why I think fb needs to calm their tits and chill out a bit – sure, Tiktok is super popular at the moment but this level of addiction is something I expect younger generations to cope with better. It wouldn't surprise me if the tiktok reign will be short lived.

TV is a good example, because it had a similar effect on hijacking previously unexplored attention mechanisms. It's also a good example because it deteriorated into an irrecoverable ad-hell, yet younger generations found refuge in higher quality substitutes (Netflix etc) and now cable is dying slowly (as they should). Thanks to a modernized and relatively sane approach, tv as a medium is better and makes more money than ever. It speaks to the fact that in the long run, consumers will go elsewhere when giants feed them crap products and – importantly – by the time they do, the giants are unable to keep up.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#408

Post by wizofaus »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #404
wizofaus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean it's not true. There's an argument that given the world's population today we should be churning out geniuses (of the caliber of Newton or Einstein or Beethoven etc,.) all the time now, but the fact we're not suggests there's something about the social environment we grow up in that strongly discourages the level of sustained commitment to a particular specialty neccessary for genius to develop. Having s…

Alternative (but not exclusive) explanation: the easy pickings for geniuses have been picked over, and it takes longer than before to achieve genius-level accomplishments as a solo prodigy. Neither Einstein nor Beethoven contributed to multiple fields like Newton or Leonardo DaVinci did. [Though Beethoven—or any musician—may be bad example(s) to include here: music is a field that is much less objective in ranking qu…

Beethoven's influence on the Western classical music tradition isn't disputed by any expert in that field - it truly was outsized and unmatched by any other individual composer. I'd accept the Beatles probably deserve the same recognition re popular music. It's fair to wonder how transformative they would have been if they'd existed in an era of Tiktok, Tinder and Snapchat.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#409

Post by smoldesu »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #311
smoldesu wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really can't imagine any situation where a younger gen z kid finds anything Facebook owns cool. Really? Things must be different now, I remember Instagram being the most popular social media platform at my high school.

I'm specifically talking about younger gen z... 14 and 15 year olds today. I might be basing too much on a few anecdotes, but it seems Instagram is heading the way of Facebook in terms of generational "coolness." I suspect it's just starting to hit a wall similar to Facebook did. TikTok is eating all of it.

Oh, I guess. I don't really think most people care about "coolness" these days though, if they gave half a shit about privacy or security then they wouldn't be wooed by software like TikTok. I'd imagine most of them use whatever is ubiquitous, kinda like how WhatsApp isn't glorious, but almost everyone outside the US uses it.

My impression of the younger Gen Z is that they don't really care about internet optics. For better/worse, many of them developed motor skills after they learned how to use YouTube, and it's not uncommon to find them using the sketchiest of ad-infested websites just to watch Johnny Bravo. If Millennials are characterized as narcissists empowered by technology, Gen Z is a wave of rats trained to check off the Terms and Conditions box for their cheese. In large part, this is Microsoft and Apple's fault for designing computers so simple that a baby can use them. In Frank Herbert's prescient words, "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

All of this is to say, I think the average 14 year old would be equally excited to unbox an Oculus Quest and an iPhone. Even if they're largely different devices (even different price points), they're probably not concerning themselves with the ethical implications of owning a VR headset. Most of them will probably Google how to sideload Pavlov or VRChat on it within 15 minutes of turning it on. That's just my $0.02 though, perhaps things are different outside of the northeastern US.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#410

Post by Balgair »

wizofaus wrote: post #406
Balgair wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, woah, who says we're not churning out geniuses? The rate of scientific research is doubling every ~18 months[0]. The arts have had an explosion of growth and creativity in the last decades. Some of the best musicians ever are currently living. Some of the greatest revolutions in science are currently on going. I mean, we got the vaccine to covid worked out over a weekend! [0] https://www.industrytap.com/knowled…

Sure, there are plenty of people born these days who presumably have the capacity for genius of the greats of the past. And yes, the sheer number of scientists working today, with access to knowledge and facilities far beyond what was available centuries ago is producing a stream of research and increased scientific understanding that is far greater than it's ever been. None of that invalidates the hypothesis (which…

Wait. How can you disentangle the distractions of the world we live in from the result that there are more top-tier people working today? Saying that the variables are independent isn't enough. I'd say that the null hypothesis is that great communications technology is the root cause of both distractions and more 'geniuses'. You can't have one without the other to my eyes.
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