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Everything we like is a psyop?

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Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#251

Post by jottinger »

culi wrote: post #243
Bayart wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your work but I'll echo others : the title font is too narrow and hurts readability. I've advise for a regular Garamond.

The entire site looks like typical AI design

This is also fair: it's definitely AI-assisted. I'm not a UI person; I have wonky color perception and synaesthesia, and a lot of experience has taught me that what works for ME in UI is what... uh... doesn't work AT ALL for other people.

So it's a problem: I can "hand write it" and have you say "mein Gott, who came up with THIS rubbish? Are they blind? Are they trying to blind US?" or I can have an AI spin something up that looks fairly bland and normalish, but fulfills the specifications I require, and have users go "this looks like a blog that pretty much anyone would write," except the content was always meant to be the differentiator.

And the UI is actually designed to be pluggable, anyway; what I work on is the backend REST services, and the UI goes through those services for all data - it has no access to the underlying datastreams, at all. Everything goes through https://api.bytecode.news, and the intent was that if someone was an awesome UI coder and wanted to show their stuff, they'd write their UI using CoolThing and I'd put it into the system at coolthing.bytecode.news, and if it totally dominated the "normal UI" I'd promote that to the default UI and just leave the other one out there as a reference (the UI you see is also hosted at https://nextjs.bytecode.news, as the "canonical url" for that implementation.)

That way, if someone's going "ooo I could make Struts sing with this" for some reason, well, the API endpoints are published with OpenAPI; go for it. Show the world.

The UI was always secondary to the concepts that drive the information system, and the content was meant to be more important than how the content looked. I'd rather deliver information than flash.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#253

Post by heavyset_go »

thinkingemote wrote: post #185
r-w wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so weird to see empathy-speak be regularly co-opted by habitual mass manipulators. "I don't know if this will make you feel better... but we're concerned with manipulating the reactions to the reactions as well! See how much we care?" It makes me do a double-take every time someone shows actual empathy, because it's used so often as a manipulative tactic to shield oneself against critiques of soullessness.

Manipulation is emotional more than it is logical, about feelings than ideas, more in women than in men, and therefore for the majority of the audience of tiktok etc

Men confuse their feelings, and especially what soothes their egos, with "rationality" all of the time

If you start from a position of assuming objectivity, you are putty in the hands of anyone who "tells it like it is"

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#256

Post by stemlord »

vjk800 wrote: post #149
jrmg wrote: post #64

Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day recently wrote about the Geese ‘Psyop’ and is very skeptical that the PR firm actually accomplished anything to boost their profile: https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-geese-chase (ironically, until now with these articles, I guess!)

> “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.” Here it is. I recall a story of a digital marketing team using Google sponsored link clicks as a metric for how well their stuff was working. Turns out that people just switched to clicking the sponsored link instead of the same link on regular Goo…

Idk, it seems like the marketing process on tiktok doesn't constitute trying to get people to go out of their way to interact/click with your content, tiktok users are just involuntarily fed content on some level (you don't know what the next autoplayed video will be)... how can it not be trival to manipulate that userbase with, in this case, a band whose music is just-good-enough for mass appeal?

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#257

Post by culi »

jottinger wrote: post #251
culi wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire site looks like typical AI design

This is also fair: it's definitely AI-assisted. I'm not a UI person; I have wonky color perception and synaesthesia, and a lot of experience has taught me that what works for ME in UI is what... uh... doesn't work AT ALL for other people. So it's a problem: I can "hand write it" and have you say "mein Gott, who came up with THIS rubbish? Are they blind? Are they trying to blind US?" or I can have an AI spin something…

I didn't mean any disrespect. I just think AI design is the opposite of what you're saying it is. It's flashy and distracting and filled with unnecessary animations that often hinder readability. I think a much simpler design would be beneficial to the readability.

Whether that's accomplished with LLM tools or not

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#258

Post by autoexec »

arcfour wrote: post #201
autoexec wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hope that any band who is actually good wouldn't need a psyop campaign to become popular. Have we really reached a point where marketers have polluted our lives with so many ads for garbage that we're incapable of discovering anything worthwhile unless it has a massive marketing agency behind it? That feels a lot like a racket. "Pay us to solve a problem we created!" is the sort of thing that should be regula…

I know the best way to solve a problem with corruption and lack of transparency: involve the government! Nobody could ever pay off a politician . Surely that would only work in our favor.

If a regulation is written well you don't need to depend on the integrity of any one politician because they aren't responsible for enforcement. The hard part is getting the laws passed in the first place because it requires electing representatives that will serve your interests instead of the interests of the corporations who bribe them. It's our job to make sure that our government is working for us. If it's impossible to do that than our democracy has failed.

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#259

Post by dwroberts »

garethsprice wrote: post #233

This isn't new, Theodor Adorno was making the point in the 1940s that taste isn't something formed in a vacuum and then expressed in the market, it's something the market produces in you and sells back. Chaotic Good is just an extension of the same tricks from back when Eddie Bernays was staging fake suffragette marches to sell cigarettes to women in 1929. The more disturbing implication is that it's not just "everyt…

“possibly every thought you ever had” immediately brought White Noise by Don DeLillo to mind

Re: Everything we like is a psyop?

#260

Post by jottinger »

culi wrote: post #257
jottinger wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also fair: it's definitely AI-assisted. I'm not a UI person; I have wonky color perception and synaesthesia, and a lot of experience has taught me that what works for ME in UI is what... uh... doesn't work AT ALL for other people. So it's a problem: I can "hand write it" and have you say "mein Gott, who came up with THIS rubbish? Are they blind? Are they trying to blind US?" or I can have an AI spin something…

I didn't mean any disrespect. I just think AI design is the opposite of what you're saying it is. It's flashy and distracting and filled with unnecessary animations that often hinder readability. I think a much simpler design would be beneficial to the readability. Whether that's accomplished with LLM tools or not

Also fair. I kinda thought the design for the UI was fairly normal - it looks like a lot of standard Wordpress themes would look, with an admin panel, a primary focused "recent post" and a list of other recent posts in descending order of attention. From a UX perspective, I thought it was okay; the animated circuit thing was my idea, but I tried to keep it VERY in the background, I wanted it to be fun and not a focus.

If you have ideas about what a proper UX would look like, I'm all ... eyes? ears? UX is not my thing and I am willing to consider breaking the molds to make something more awesomer if I can.

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