441–450 of 464 posts
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I long pressed on videos to say "not interested" that show gross dermatology videos, root canals, and ear cleaning. I would still repeatedly get those when I was using the app.
Pressing "not interested" does nothing. The reason you keep getting these is because you subconsciously enjoy them. You look a few seconds more than someone who truly doesn't want to see it.
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> 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…
Facebook needs to stop being afraid to launch new products. They should have launched a TikTok clone as an independent brand. Instead, they're falling into the Microsoft trap of "Everything has to be shoehorned into our existing userbase and products."
The hard work is figuring what dethrones TikTok and building _that_
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My 50s are still a long way ahead of me and yet I didn't last 10 minutes on tiktok.
I check it out every few months or so when there's a new TikTok article on the front page of HN, and I can never understand it. All I see is 20-something nobodies dancing and making faces in front of a camera. I'm in my 40s and it's just not for me.
Perhaps you are engaging with these videos you are not interested in by finishing the videos, etc.
Modern social media leaves a very big gap - that was filled by old Facebook, or to some extent MySpace: The "people directory" where basically everybody has a page, and you can see what friends are doing, or look up acquaintances and strangers. For me, social media feeds were never addicting, but more tedious. I found visiting friends pages and sometimes finding an update, sometimes not, like a slot machine, more add…
And no body will use it, like how no one uses Mastodon. Because discovery on Activitypub is one of the worst especially on an independent server, where you are basically "tooting" to your self.
Normal users don't understand what is an instance or what is a server. Which is fine, if advanced users adopted Mastodon it would be enough for the HN crowd, but they didn't because of the network effect.
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I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces. I wouldn't know because I don't get a lot of satisfaction from groups and I don't use the marketplace, but people say that they serve as a small town gathering place in a lot of locations, sort like Craigslist was for awhile. I don't see ho…
Facebook groups and events is basically the only reason I use Facebook, and while it’s very anecdotal I’m not the only one in my also anecdotal network. It’s not actually the functionality that works for Facebook, it’s the fact that people have a Facebook account that they check. As more and more people quit, it becomes more and more of a bother to continue using Facebook to organise things, but when they have 3 bill…
Unfortunately e-mail is slowly dying for normal users. Most apps are now emphasizing phone numbers, and some of them don't even allow E-mails to sign up.
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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.
It's a testable hypothesis if you can get enough people to agree that their kids should be banned access to all such distractions (and such a ban to remain in place into adulthood). Obviously they'd still need access to electronically available information. Whether discussion forums/messaging apps count as distractions might be a grey area. I honestly don't know what the result would be, or how long it would take to…
I mean, theoretically, yeah. You could do the test if you had some sort of absolute tyranny over people, a ton of money, about 1000 babies to otherwise do nothing else with, staff to raise those babies according to the experiment, and the 20-35 years of time to wait for the experiment to conclude. I'm sure I'm forgetting some crucial variable to control for though.
But that test is never going to be run. Nobody has that kind of time, that kind of money, that lack of morals, nor that energy to devote to this. There isn't a review board on the planet that would allow for this to occur, for good reason.
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>You can choose to both not be afraid and still walk through fire, so to speak. Fear is a healthy emotion, properly tempered. And it's an entirely rational response to a threat to my freedom and way of life. China is no less than that.
> Fear is a healthy emotion, properly tempered. And it's an entirely rational response to a threat Yes, and, expressing emotions helps us move beyond them. Holding onto them indefinitely is not necessary for them to be part of our experience.
Yes and sometimes in expressing those emotions we realize that they're underlayed by a logical basis that our instinct was informing us about, as when we fear the rise of a genocidal communist dictatorship as a global power monger.
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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.
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Anecdotally as a zoomer ('98, so I guess that's technically just on the precipice of being a zoomer), I definitely feel like a lot of my friends and colleagues my age have some form of attention deficit disorder, myself included (I've got pretty massive ADHD, but it mostly doesn't affect me other than making me hyper to the point of being annoying to others around me with my constant fidgeting and shifting). It's not…
Curious, what video games?
As a kid I would switch a lot, but God of War and the Devil May Cry series drew me in, for similar reasons to Vermintide these days. Was also partial to some Unreal Tournament and Quake multiplayer, I think highly mechanical games tend to work great for restless people like me since it's a good outlet for my fidgeting ticks!
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Is there innovation? Seems like Tiktok is just a more "evil" iteration of Vine.
The algorithm™. ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, had previously launched one of the most popular news aggregators in China, running on the same / a variation of the same algorithm (machine learning, etc. based afaik). Thats why its taking off so much - just like ByteDance's other products. That AI or whatever it is is very, very effective at understanding what you want.