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First, make me care
181–190 of 262 posts
Re: First, make me care
#182This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it
Isn't that the most followed user on TikTok Khaby Lame (his facial expression)? Looks like he just sold his company for $900M.
Re: First, make me care
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snow Crash explored this much more literally, supposing that there may be memes so powerful they can function basically as magic spells that reprogram people's brains.
My favorite example is actually one that I believe could be true[0]: self-reinforcing cycles of human conflict, that resemble the life cycle of a parasite. From an old (2014) SlateStarCodex essay[1]. Some of it is going to be controversial read today[2], so I'll just give you the relevant "money quote" from the end: What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma? Consider the war on t…
Also the most successful parasites have defense mechanisms to protect it. The process of radicalization and cultural heritage in general is a type of defense to make sure the parasite survives.
Re: First, make me care
#184This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…
This is leaking to loads of other media too - movie trailers have started with some quick action shots, then BIG text saying "trailer starts now". Like a trailer to a trailer. Which is released after a teaser for a trailer. They even have recurring sound effects (vine boom sounds, but movie trailer edition where every action event (explosion, punch, scene change) is accentuated with a distinct drum boom sound effect, often in time with the dramatized remix of recognisable music). I hate it lol.
As for tiktok / other short video clip format content, one trend I've seen is to start the video with the conclusion (e.g. someone falling over), then starting with the buildup. Since these videos are played on loop anyway, they trick the viewer into thinking they missed the buildup.
Re: First, make me care
#185This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it Isn't that the most followed user on TikTok Khaby Lame (his facial expression)? Looks like he just sold his company for $900M.
Damn, I'm in the wrong industry.
I think it's different for tiktok (as a non-tiktok user so take this with a huge grain of salt lmao), people don't watch one creator's videos one after the other, they get put in the big soup of clips that people scroll through for sometimes hours a day. And a lot of that is people sticking to one formula, because for many, the predictability is comforting / puts them in the tiktok brain off frame of mind.
Which isn't a new phenomenon - lots of people have "comfort shows" on e.g. Netflix, often the studio series with long seasons like sitcoms. They're comfortable because they often maintain a similar energy or formula over their run time, and missing parts of it (like current-day episodic films) isn't a big issue.
Re: First, make me care
#186This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…
This is part of why I hate TikTok so much. I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music. A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking…
I went back to CDs because the friction of having to stand up, walk to the player and change the disc is enough to stop me from skipping songs every few seconds.
For discovering new music, I go to the flea market every so often and buy some random discs. Some are unlistenable, but a lot are alright. I found New Mind[1] this way and really loved it.
Re: First, make me care
#187This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…
Attention is all you need, after all. On its own, this is interesting. But when you consider that people actually need attention for things like their jobs, the road, their children, &c... it starts to sort of look a bit like a superweapon.
And when propaganda is injected into it - subtly, through many channels and methods - it becomes worse. I'm confident that the western world's rightward shift is down to targeted social media campaigns. It doesn't help that said social media stopped checking for fake news and bent the knees to said rightward shift, because money.
Re: First, make me care
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is part of why I hate TikTok so much. I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music. A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking…
Check out KEXP and SomaFM. KEXP in particular is a great way to discover new music that you might not normally listen to. https://www.kexp.org/ https://somafm.com/
Also adding Radio Paradise, apparently one of the first online radios (https://radioparadise.com/). That said, it does have a skip (and pause) mechanism, so if you really don't like something you can skip to the next one.
Re: First, make me care
#189This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…
There almost is no hook, the hook is that the time investment for each video is so small your brain doesn't even need to think about whether it should watch or not.
And the other factor is I think the "rat pulling a lever" thing.
A rat is in a lab, pulls a lever, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. Pulls again... no treat. Pulls again, treat comes out, nom. This goes on, 10 pulls with no treat, but sometimes something comes out so the rat keeps going. You get the idea.
This is a lot of social media. You end up scrolling through a lot of shit, adverts and subtle propaganda, passively absorbing it until you get rewarded with something you genuinely enjoy and get the good hormones from.
Re: First, make me care
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
>TikTok [is] a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a distributed hacking attempt on the human mind. I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.
Isn't this pretty much the definition of a meme? I mean before meme just became synonymous with funny cat videos. Like the actual meaning of the word.
Dawkins original definition was an idea that replicated unchanged, in an analogy to a gene, which is essentially a unit of DNA small enough to replicate unchanged.