191–200 of 222 posts
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Instagram started serving me violent content out of the blue recently. My reels feed went from mostly hiking and skiing videos to POV videos from Ukrainian and Russian grenade drones and accelerationist "joke" videos normalizing the idea of war with China.
It was like a switch had flipped with how suddenly the app was like "let's warp this guy's sense of normalcy".
Too simple of a narrative. At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2025/02/12/launched-... So I think we're seeing more of a bifurcation: in-depth longform videos are becoming 30, 40, 60, even 90 minutes long, whereas anything shorter than 10 minutes is being compressed to 30-60 seconds. The…
Reading Debord's Society of the Spectacle in the age of TikTok is surreal. In some ways, it reads like prophecy. He mapped the inevitability of image-mediated life before we had the feeds to prove him right. In other ways, it feels trivial. Today's hyperreality makes the theory so obvious it barely registers as theory at all, more like a weather report. We don’t have to imagine the spectacle when we're already drowni…
Very prescient given the book is from 1967.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "shit" to "good" ratio in literally every field was much less skewed to the "shit" side before smartphones and social media came along. It's always this same fallacy: "hey, that was always a thing!". Sure, drugs have "always" been a thing, but did you have fentanyl producing real-life zombie parades in the streets just ten years ago? If we make these reductionist claims, we can say just about every phenomenon was…
You missed my second statement, I think. How about instead of lamenting the existence of social networking and smartphones (by the way, social networking has the same effect on a laptop), we try to educate people to not waste their time on "content"?
I didn't. Nothing in my post could possibly make any reasonable person think I missed it. It bears no connection whatsoever to it, nor does it contradict anything I wrote.
>social networking has the same effect on a laptop
You carry your laptop literally everywhere you go and use it in every imaginable situation you can find yourself in for more than six straight hours every day? You really pull out your laptop while waiting in line at the grocery store? You text on it while driving? You use your laptop strolling down the street at any given moment, or at restaurants with friends, really?
Get real.
It made me realize how much the incumbents myopically prioritize ad engagement above all else.
TikTok and those consuming it can rot. Some of us will continue to be reading War and Peace level works and watch "lengthy" movies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won't even look at a youtube video essay about an obscure vintage RPG (my preferred form of guilty pleasure viewing) if it's under 20 minutes long.
I watched a 2 hour video on the history of computer RPGs, I think it was specific to DND, and found it captivating. Would also like to hear your recs.
Too simple of a narrative. At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2025/02/12/launched-... So I think we're seeing more of a bifurcation: in-depth longform videos are becoming 30, 40, 60, even 90 minutes long, whereas anything shorter than 10 minutes is being compressed to 30-60 seconds. The…
Worth mentioning that literally any video under 60 seconds is forced to be a short, which is that stupid type of YouTube video where they remove a bunch of controls and make the overall experience miserable. So maybe that’s pushing longer-form content as well. Some people making 30 second videos moves to 90 second ones to avoid the bad format, this crowds the format and pushes others up as well? Totally talking out o…