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Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

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Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#191

Post by benreesman »

crypto420_69 wrote: post #182
benreesman wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might enjoy The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1]. It addresses these themes quite directly. The thing is, we're sort of talking (still somewhat hypothetically) about the Internet becoming more like hard drugs here in terms of entertainment/pleasure/addiction potential, which puts pretty much everyone except for (by HN standards) serious conservatives in a bind on slamming social media: liberals like me and th…

That's Peter Thiel's thesis

We might agree about the problem, but I doubt a pinko social welfare lefty like me and an arch-Randian libertarian “eat the poor” John Galt wannabe agree whatsoever on the solutions.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#192

Post by the_only_law »

benreesman wrote: post #191
crypto420_69 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Peter Thiel's thesis

We might agree about the problem, but I doubt a pinko social welfare lefty like me and an arch-Randian libertarian “eat the poor” John Galt wannabe agree whatsoever on the solutions.

Yeah… “libertarian”

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#193

Post by benreesman »

drekipus wrote: post #157
benreesman wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might enjoy The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1]. It addresses these themes quite directly. The thing is, we're sort of talking (still somewhat hypothetically) about the Internet becoming more like hard drugs here in terms of entertainment/pleasure/addiction potential, which puts pretty much everyone except for (by HN standards) serious conservatives in a bind on slamming social media: liberals like me and th…

> if those societies have high mobility in real-word achievement. So, not our society right now. Our society isn't high mobility? Who has a higher mobility? (* I realise this is the internet but I'm assuming you're talking about one of the five-eyes nations)

Well, I mean us after the New Deal but before smash-and-grab, “how many gold bars can I carry” politics and economics starting gaining steam in the Reagan administration.

I appreciate that’s like one human lifetime and high economic mobility had barely started to come in for e.g. black people before rich people decided to loot the place, but we were headed in the right direction for many decades before this kleptocracy-in-broad-daylight shit kicked in.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#194

Post by benreesman »

the_only_law wrote: post #192
benreesman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might agree about the problem, but I doubt a pinko social welfare lefty like me and an arch-Randian libertarian “eat the poor” John Galt wannabe agree whatsoever on the solutions.

Yeah… “libertarian”

I put all the qualifiers around “libertarian” precisely because plenty of libertarians are perfectly nice people with no designs of building a Bond villain hideout in New Zealand once there’s nothing left to loot.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#195

Post by floren »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #189
ryandrake wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me a little of Star Trek TNG's The Game [1], where the crew becomes addicted to an automated AR/VR game that just sits there autoplaying, directly manipulating the brain's pleasure sensors. Something like this, but one that also slowly transfers the contents of the user's bank account to a corporation, could be the ultimate end-result of our current capitalist-technologist trajectory. 1: https://en.wikipedia.…

> Reminds me a little of Star Trek TNG's The Game[1], where the crew becomes addicted to an automated AR/VR game that just sits there autoplaying, directly manipulating the brain's pleasure sensors. Huh. That appears to be a mostly-accurate summary of Wikipedia's description of the episode, which heavily features the term "addicted". But it's an awful summary of the episode itself, which doesn't use the concept of ad…

> Also, the game doesn't autoplay; it is shown on screen requiring effort from the player

I don't have the clip handy but at one point a character points out to Wesley something along the lines of "want to know the trick to this game? It plays itself!"

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#196

Post by thaumasiotes »

floren wrote: post #195
thaumasiotes wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reminds me a little of Star Trek TNG's The Game[1], where the crew becomes addicted to an automated AR/VR game that just sits there autoplaying, directly manipulating the brain's pleasure sensors. Huh. That appears to be a mostly-accurate summary of Wikipedia's description of the episode, which heavily features the term "addicted". But it's an awful summary of the episode itself, which doesn't use the concept of ad…

> Also, the game doesn't autoplay; it is shown on screen requiring effort from the player I don't have the clip handy but at one point a character points out to Wesley something along the lines of "want to know the trick to this game? It plays itself!"

Yes, that is a line in the episode:

> ALYSSA: You know what the secret is, don't you? Don't force it. If you just let the game happen, it almost plays itself.

But at the beginning of the episode, you see Riker playing:

> ETANA: Concentrate. Make the disc go into the cone.

> RIKER: How do I do that?

> ETANA: Just let go. Relax. You'll do it.

> the first one misses, the second is a success

( http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/206.htm )

You could make the argument that everyone misses their first shot for no other reason than that it gives them a false feeling of accomplishment when they make the second one.

But it would make more sense to say that victory in the game comes from assuming a particular state of mind, presumably one that allows the game to do its thing.

You don't need to "let the game happen" for an autoplaying game to play itself.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#197

Post by grishka »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #32

The Three Trends (according to the article): 1. Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR 2. AI: time -> rank -> recommend -> generate 3. UI: click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. (I may be exaggerating a touch.) It might stop short of a wire into the pleasure centers o…

The fediverse is by design about manually managing your subscriptions. You only see content from people you follow and you're the one who completely controls the presentation of that content.

This entire article is built on the wrong premise that people use social media for entertainment. I certainly don't — I'm not open to any content discovery on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter at all. I use social media to connect with people I mostly already know, and the platforms getting in the way, begging with their "you may enjoy this" is bloody annoying. I'm building my own fediverse project for a reason, after all.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#198

Post by Ruthalas »

dont__panic wrote: post #175
mlboss wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that human creativity is also recombination of existing images/thoughts/experiences. There is no ghost in the machine who comes up with novel ideas that didn't exist before. Everything new is just a combination of old ideas combined in new ways.

That's a bleak view of humanity. I think there's a "spark" in actual humans, who will take content in a completely different direction than something ever seen before. Think Time Cube ( https://timecube.2enp.com/ ). Or Neil Breen movies. I just don't think an AI could ever put together something quite like that.

I agree with your assertion, but the Time Cube site seems like the worst possible example.

It strikes me as being as close to machine generated content as possible. I'm not sure I could have thought of any single thing that felt more like a GPT3 fever dream: disconnected assertions that are divorced from a underpinning understanding.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#199

Post by guelo »

drekipus wrote: post #157
benreesman wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might enjoy The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1]. It addresses these themes quite directly. The thing is, we're sort of talking (still somewhat hypothetically) about the Internet becoming more like hard drugs here in terms of entertainment/pleasure/addiction potential, which puts pretty much everyone except for (by HN standards) serious conservatives in a bind on slamming social media: liberals like me and th…

> if those societies have high mobility in real-word achievement. So, not our society right now. Our society isn't high mobility? Who has a higher mobility? (* I realise this is the internet but I'm assuming you're talking about one of the five-eyes nations)

Quick search says we're #27

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#200

Post by photochemsyn »

sinecure wrote: post #163
photochemsyn wrote: post #14

You have to dig through this entire article to get to the punchline, but here it is: > "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 qu…

Your summary of this phenomenon resonates with my experiences navigating the internet all these years. I find reddit to be the most perfect example of watching something authentic, human, and real... devolve into a manufactured, astroturfed facsimile of a forum community. Years ago, reddit was filled with interesting discussions and analysis. Beautiful debates would rage on /r/news about current events, with equal sh…

Yes, that seems to be the norm on Reddit. A couple years ago I signed up to Reddit and the first thing I tried to post was something to r/news on what I thought was pretty relevant, an Indian news site covering a major China outreach to Pakistan on an energy deal relevant to China's overland effort, the whole 'Belt and Road' thing. I follow energy news, and this was a pretty important thing, I thought, but r/news blocked the post because it wasn't from their 'approved list of news sources' or something. After watching Reddit for a while, I realized most of it was just a corporate media mirror.

I didn't bother to post anything after that, and recently deleted my account there.

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