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Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

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Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#381

Post by Borrible »

donatj wrote: post #316
mbb70 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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"

You'll be even more shocked when you find out you're coworkers because an HR AI calculated you were a good team fit because of the same preferences.

You think, that's just a joke?

Just wait until you're married...

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#382

Post by Lewton »

Dig1t wrote: post #36
segasaturn wrote: post #4

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.

Traffic is up on X 22% YoY Not quite death, but certainly agree about news outlets no longer seeing it as okay to say that “The internet is freaking out about X” https://advanced-television.com/2023/12/18/research-x-twitte... >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 h…

actual usage by humans is down

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/26/x-twitter-usage-statistics-...

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#383

Post by doix »

Geisterde wrote: post #201
tayo42 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#384

Post by viraptor »

throwaway290 wrote: post #346
gniv wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m surprised people preferred watching the plane movie over whatever they had saved on Netflix on their phone.

Who ever watches Netflix on the phone?

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.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#385

Post by throwaway290 »

viraptor wrote: post #384
throwaway290 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who ever watches Netflix on the phone?

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).

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#386

Post by viraptor »

nebula8804 wrote: post #309
pavon wrote: post #124

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…

Do what I do: have someone else spend their day surfing the web and then have them tell you about it. I subscribe the the "Garbage Day" substack by author Ryan Broadrick. Through this I recently discovered what many consider the first major Gen-Alpha meme: Skibidi toilet [1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KrlkXOxlvCk [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet#Reception_and_i... [3]: https://garbageday.email/a…

That almost feels like the reaction channels or the tv shows that are summaries of some people watching other shows.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#387

Post by WalterBright »

Eisenstein wrote: post #367
WalterBright wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Probably all of the above, but that's just speculation. What's pretty certain is the relentless one-sided approach was no accident.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#388

Post by WalterBright »

Eisenstein wrote: post #365
WalterBright wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I'm way out of step with what most people think, I'm not too concerned about that.

I'm curious how you know what most people think?

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.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#389

Post by jkhdigital »

idle_zealot wrote: post #307
akoboldfrying wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#390

Post by listenallyall »

jkubicek wrote: post #148
listenallyall wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.…

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."
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