Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

coryzue.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 347 posts

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#161

Post by passion__desire »

bnralt wrote: post #68

One thing I’ve noticed is that the culture on Twitter now is quite different than it was a decade ago, and the platform has calcified. A decade ago the common adivce for how to connect with people - Tweet often, comment often, follow accounts - connected you with a lot of people, and you would often end up following each other. I started a new account recently (hadn’t used my old one in years), and doing so now got m…

Do you really want to be friends with 8 billion people? Let's say you want to be friends with only 500 of them. How should those 500 be selected out of people who see your tweets? It has become a norm in social media, only real-life friends follow you on social media if you are not a famous person, otherwise its a suspicious behaviour. People can have a transient meaningful conversation in the comments section, never to see each other again.

My school teacher jokingly gave a small scenario, he said "Imagine you know everyone in the city, you have to say hi or atleast nod to everyone. Not doing it would be to acknowledge you don't care for them."

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#162

Post by timeagain »

BryanLegend wrote: post #155

If you really want to fix your Twitter/YouTube addiction the easiest way I've found to do it is unfollow/unsubscribe/unlike everything, turn off watch history, & install plugins like Control Panel for Twitter and Unhook for YouTube.

A little friction is the best way, agreed. Another thing I do is read Reddit on old.Reddit.com on mobile. I destroyed my login by changing the password to a random string I don’t remember. It’s kind of hard to read and hard to collapse comments correctly. The default subreddits are atrocious. I find that it has cut my Reddit time to about 10m/day.

As I read this it strikes me how powerful addiction and habit are that I still go at all

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#163

Post by random3 »

the_snooze wrote: post #26

>And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And yet, my felt experience of this change is the exact opposite—as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? It always tickles me when terminally online people realize that human connection doesn't scale . It's valuable precisel…

IMO it's bit ironic that people seek maximum diversity within a single platform without taking into account the effort to seek the diversity beyond that platform.

There are online communities beyond X and, event within X you can just choose to track select groups you follow and constantly unfollow what you don't like.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#164

Post by TeMPOraL »

ragazzina wrote: post #140
jklinger410 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? This is a well observed trend where appealing to a broader audience makes the content worse. People, as individuals, are unique and therefore interesting. Appealing to more than one person relies on what those people have in common. The more people you try to reach, the less in common they all have. If the content is going to speak to w…

I am very interested in your take. When Michelangelo sculpted the Pietà, the pain it expressed was a feeling that many people had shared, so it became culture. But when a teenager makes a tiktok about the pain of being rejected by their crush, and it's a feeling many people have shared, and many people like it, that's basic, vague and shallow.

What makes the tiktok vague and shallow isn't the topic itself, but the awareness that there's already a hundred thousand identical tiktoks expressing the same or similar feelings in roughly the same way.

What makes it "not culture" is that everyone is watching one or few of those hundred thousand fully exchangeable tiktoks.

A thing which is basic, vague and shallow can become an important cultural work too - it just must become known to approximately everyone in a society. It must somehow become the one representative work in its class, so that when someone makes a reference, everyone knows exactly which work is being talked about, and that everyone else knows it too. Being unique is not strictly necessary, but is highly helpful.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#165

Post by passion__desire »

nullindividual wrote: post #78
_fat_santa wrote: post #16

One thing I've realized about social media, especially X/Twitter, is that it's not a singular place, that is you can have 4 feeds on twitter from different users that might as well be different social media platforms. I've noticed if you follow the "Indie Hackers" on X then you will get lots of self promotion (ie. "My startup just hit $X/MRR!!, here's how I did it: substack.com...."). On the other hand there are othe…

Interesting YouTube channel, looks like it is worth a watch. You'll note even he conforms to the algorithm, though. Just look at all of those video thumbnails with his face.

If content is this good, I will allow it. Manipulation is good if the end result is in my favour.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#167

Post by slowhadoken »

I find 90% of social media interactions to be inauthentic. Communication in massive free-for-all groups is weird. It causes people to want to be right, win, or sell you on something. It’s funny that people would look got truth on divisive argument websites.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#168

Post by feoren »

thrwwyunpopular wrote: post #121
losteric wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An ugly problem with an attention economy is that you are rewarded for seeming useful and interesting, but once the attention has been given, there is no incentive to actually deliver > To be fair, most web users are happy with the arrangement - they get an endless feed of free tiny doses of dopamine while they avoid the real responsibilities of life. I'd argue it's mostly the latter. Most creators produce content…

The harsh reality is that any conversation about what "people" want needs to factor in the fact that half of "the people" are dumber, more simpler-minded than the average person. No, you and I don't want to look at staged animal rescues or celebrity drama... but if the average person does, then so does at least 50% of the population. We're in the minority.

> half of "the people" are dumber, more simpler-minded than the average person.

Spiders Georg would like a word with you. And 99.99% of people have more than the average number of legs. And "the average person" is not something you can actually imagine. Think about "the average driver". You're actually thinking of an asshole driver, because asshole drivers are more salient. You don't notice "the average driver".

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#169

Post by honkycat »

I started a twitter a few months ago, and then deleted it after I realized the current meta is to say something extremely vapid and wrong to phish for annoyed engagement.

That is where we are at. Annoying people for follows.

I deleted it the next day.

Online culture is over. As people have improved at debating we have realized half the time you are shadow boxing with someone who doesn't even believe what they are saying. Or hell, anymore it could be a literal bot.

It is bad faith everywhere. It is all a waste of fucking time.

Not to mention the clear brigading and bot-nets on Reddit that makes arguing with the wrong person account suicide.

Just use the internet for what it was meant for: photos of cute animals.

Re: The slow death of authenticity in an attention economy

#170

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn »

jklinger410 wrote: post #113
the_snooze wrote: post #26

>And yes, on the surface this incentivizes people to create better content. The better your content is, the more it gets seen, and the more money you make. And yet, my felt experience of this change is the exact opposite—as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? It always tickles me when terminally online people realize that human connection doesn't scale . It's valuable precisel…

> as people seek more engagement, their content gets worse. What’s going on here? This is a well observed trend where appealing to a broader audience makes the content worse. People, as individuals, are unique and therefore interesting. Appealing to more than one person relies on what those people have in common. The more people you try to reach, the less in common they all have. If the content is going to speak to w…

Interestingly this is the exact opposite of the usual argument as to why Shakespeare is still popular, i.e. that his work speaks of a deep universal truth about the human condition.
Post reply on HN