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Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

bfi.uchicago.edu

131–140 of 169 posts

Re: Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

#131

I watch TikTok and read reddit religiously because I'm in my 50s, and I need to make sure I can understand what is relevant to the younger people I work with. Also understanding memes, etc. so that I don't get too old with my thinking.

As a 20-something guy I can’t imagine this strategy working

It actually works great. I'm not going around saying "hello fellow young people, did you see the top post on reddit?" but it's good enough so that I'm not clueless as to what's being said in our chat rooms and I can comment.

Re: Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

#132

I mean, yeah, that's an incredibly small amount of money to get everyone else to do something. I'd pay $1000 to have everyone lose their cars. Heck, if you could guarantee it would happen, I will pay $100k today so that everyone in the USA can no longer drive their cars. That means the opposite. The disutility is really low and the network utility is positive. If I charged you $29 to have all your peers lose Tik Tok,…

> I will pay $100k today so that everyone in the USA can no longer drive their cars. It's nice to know that you'd happily pay a sum of money you're capable of paying to ensure ambulances can't get their patients to a hospital, people can't drive their wives in labor to have the baby delivered, trucks can't transport medicine between cities, farmers have no efficient way to get their food distributed once harvested.

If God has said that you are to die, then who is a doctor to challenge that? I will gladly pay $100k to support God's will but I won't pay $100,001.

Re: Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

#133

I mean, yeah, that's an incredibly small amount of money to get everyone else to do something. I'd pay $1000 to have everyone lose their cars. Heck, if you could guarantee it would happen, I will pay $100k today so that everyone in the USA can no longer drive their cars. That means the opposite. The disutility is really low and the network utility is positive. If I charged you $29 to have all your peers lose Tik Tok,…

Why would you pay $100k to stop people driving their cars?

I just feel like it and I have the money. What cause will have you pay $28 to stop but not $29? Lunch for two at The Bird?

Re: Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

#134
post #5

Reminds me of a high school fundraiser where students paid for 5 minute pauses to a day of nonstop beiber music

Facebook, Twitter, etc. describe the tactics they devise to manipulate computer users as "products". "Products" that sell for zero dollars. In the real world,, one might imagine a product strategy something like 1. Create a product that solves a problem 2. Sell the product to those affected by the problem Under the so-called "tech" company version of reality, the process is more like 1. Create a "product" that create…

They created a product that solves the problem of people not watching ads compulsively, and sold access to that product to people with ads.

Re: Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

#135
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It is quite bizarre we call them social networks. They used to be social networks until they got littered with short-term engagement boosting content and ads. Facebook in 2006/2007 was so awesome.

The thing is, Facebook was never awesome. Really. Never. It demonstrably reduces happiness and life satisfaction. It’s just bad. And it’s easy to quit. Really.

In my opinion, there is no way that early Facebook was reducing happiness and life satisfaction in aggregate. I doubt you were a Facebook user in that period if that’s your perception. It was so benign in the early days.

Re: Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be fine with the same reciprocity regarding car export rules for instance ? On principle the "reciprocity" card can't be used only when it helps and discarded otherwise.

I think here, the question of reciprocal digital communication and the (free) flow of information is markedly different from the reciprocity of physical goods, as the latter has historically had far stricter entry requirements, regulatory, monetary, or otherwise. Regarding the former, none of the global players are perfect when it comes to unencumbered access to their respective digital markets, but as Tiktok (and re…

PRC regulatory requirements for communication is expensive for domestic players, why should western entrants be spared? That's like allowing PRC auto in US on less stringent safety requirements. The reason FB and twitter pulled out in 09 after minority/terrorist attacks was because they didn't have the moderation system in place, while PRC platforms had 10000s of expensive, physical bodies doing the grunt work at the time. Which was prescient, and it wasn't until western platforms started implementing mass moderation post NZ shooting that they started initatives to retner PRC market (FB & Google at least), because they finally spent the money and can now scale it in PRC. It was only internal drama at FB and Google that killed the project. If anything TikTok has to bend backwards harder than US platforms to appease US gov because they don't know what "speech" triggers US politicians, whereas in PRC, western companies just had to say yes to censorship and access requests.

Re: Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

#137

Sometimes, I wear a T-shirt that shows someone snorting a line of apps with a razor blade and a mirror nearby. Addicts are addicts. Perhaps, it's a socially-acceptable form of addiction with personal, interpersonal, etc. tolls nonetheless.

Link to the shirt?

Re: Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a 20-something guy I can’t imagine this strategy working

It actually works great. I'm not going around saying "hello fellow young people, did you see the top post on reddit?" but it's good enough so that I'm not clueless as to what's being said in our chat rooms and I can comment.

Your work chat rooms are filled with discussion of reddit posts and tik-tok?

I just struggle to see how your strategy makes any sense or what the purpose of it even is.

Re: Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

#139
Interestingly, in Some Smaller Democratic Countries, Facebook may function as the essential platform for society-level political discussion. In my Small Country, government members have made relevant statements first via their social media accounts, not via journalism. Most public intellectuals here seem to have a FB account, and a probably increasing amount of discussions in "real journalism" actually stem from some FB thread that went out of hand.

I find this really interesting sociologically, because at the algorithms level, this means that political discussion in A Small Society is actually curated or influenced under-the-hood by a US-based Megacorp.

Basically, if you're not on FB in My Small Society, you're missing out a good deal of political discussion.

There have been attempts of building local, homemade online environments for political discussion in my country, but these haven't really taken off, because, well, everybody's already on Facebook, including politicians. My only hope is that FB will become increasingly annoying to use because of their ad policies, and maybe this would cause more people to abandon the platform and build homemade alternatives on their own.

IMO all kinds of decentralised Smolnet-like things might have good potential for political discussion in Small Societies, but maybe they're still waiting for their time. Quite possibly, simply waiting for the next generation of users -- that are more touchy about the technical, surveilliance and algorithm-level details of online discussions.

Re: Large shares of consumers use social media out of a fear of missing out

#140

I watch TikTok and read reddit religiously because I'm in my 50s, and I need to make sure I can understand what is relevant to the younger people I work with. Also understanding memes, etc. so that I don't get too old with my thinking.

As a 20-something guy I can’t imagine this strategy working

Thank you for the reminder of how unimaginative 20 year olds are about their future.

That's not a dig at you. You're too busy doing stuff and getting along to actually have any idea what life is about. That has to be a biological necessity or you'd implode

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