Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

> "These AI challenges, I would add, apply to monetization as well: one of the outcomes of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes is that advertising needs to shift from a deterministic model to a probabilistic one; the companies with the most data and the greatest amount of computing resources are going to make that shift more quickly and effectively, and I expect Meta to be top of the list. None of this matters, though, without engagement."

Relevant quote:

> "The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client." ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

This is slightly more complex with the social media business model: the product is the viewer, rather like a fish. The heroin-like bait to catch the viewer is the stream of short distractive entertainment content. The actual client buys the fish (the viewer) from the social media outfit. The actual client is an advertiser out to sell a product, a government out to push propaganda, a politician out to get votes, etc.

The more interesting aspect of this is that the clients might be paying the social media providers to control the content stream as a means of manipulating their audience. Weapons manufacturers might want Facebook/Instagram/Twitter to bury anti-war content; corporate media giants might want independent outlets booted off the recommendation algorithm results; established political parties might want independents hidden from view; etc

It's very plausible that this monetization model - i.e. not just the delivery of targeted advertising content to the 'engaged' audience, but also the targeted removal of competing content as a kind of shadow control of what that audience gets to see, is part of the revenue stream of Meta, Google, Twitter, etc.

Of course, people will agree that China is doing this with TikTok, but many tend to get uncomfortable if asked if the US government and major corporations are also playing this game on Twitter, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.

Isn't the whole premise of modern social media to get you to engage in stuff you would not normally engage in out of societal norms, but is data driven to prove you can't look away?

Most modern "personalized infinite feeds" are preying on these psychological tricks where we can't look away from something shocking, seductive, or comforting. i.e. show something painful and then show something pleasureful to play games with your dopamine and adrenaline.

Technology will continue to get more persuasive until we find moderation with it. The medium will continue to evolve and we'll continue to increase our screentime year over year cutting into our sleep and work until we do so.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology

https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/multimedia/infographics/ge...

I even wrote a book on this topic from the perspective of a millennial. While most of my mental health issues were because of my addiction to the internet/technology/media, I can only begin to wonder how this fares to the rest of the world given some of the known statistics about depression, anxiety, self-harm, and more at younger ages.

- generating drawing that upon close inspection don't have obvious defects.

- generate hand drawn text.

- being able to replicate the same character along multiple angles consistently with the same style.

I feel like this is going to become increasingly hard because there are many things in drawing that can't be capture quite well with words.

It's analogous to code being more expressive than no-code drag and drop.