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Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

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Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#61

Post by swyx »

ZantaWB wrote: post #58
skyyler wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this sentiment before, could you explain what you mean?

He touches on this idea a lot, but most deeply in Infinite Jest where the parallels between between addiction to media and addiction to drugs is a major theme. In that story people have developed 'Entertainments,' basically video segments. Someone makes an Entertainment so unbelievably good that anyone who watches it is immediately stupefied and has no will to do anything but watch the Entertainment over and over. Th…

see also Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death (fantastic title)

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

they were calling this out since 1984 - hard to distinguish between luddism and genuine problems

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#62

Post by np_tedious »

strogonoff wrote: post #37
cloutchaser wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really silly point frankly, and can be applied to any product people have ever gravitated towards. You might claim to not like tv but it still became the most used entertainment product for decades. Same goes for the newsfeed. Any social network or product with a newsfeed will easily beat one without for users using it. Whether utopians like yourself think people like it or not is irrelevant. It’s about sur…

What are those alternatives that you are comparing TV and newsfeed-powered social to? Point to a single product without newsfeed that lost to a product with newsfeed because of refusing to implement this feature.

MySpace?

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#63

Post by 62951413 »

jjeaff wrote: post #46
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…

Hmm, so basically you just sink into an overstuffed recliner and stare into a huge screen while it feeds you content interspersed with commercials?

Idiocracy was a documentary

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#64

Post by stevewatson301 »

personjerry wrote: post #22

If you're an innovator and think along this trend, then you're fighting the fight in the trenches where Facebook and TikTok are already embedded and winning, and AI already promises to win the next round. For me, the question is where can there be a shift that causes the existing competition to become derailed altogether? And how can you help induce such a change, and ride the wave? For example, imagine a social shif…

Such shifts are more likely to happen due to legislation and lawsuits than people voluntarily opting out of using FB/TikTok. (Similar to how the Sackler family was responsible for the opioid crisis which was only brought under control by government action.)

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#66

Post by nonameiguess »

Invictus0 wrote: post #35
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…

David Foster Wallace predicted it all in the 90s

Arguably, Aldous Huxley got pretty close half a century earlier than that, but I guess he failed to anticipate that the United States would become and remain so ideologically committed to keeping recreational drug use illegal that we'd need to find a more expensive and convoluted means to approximate wireheading.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#67

Post by pvarangot »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #19
mjamesaustin wrote: post #3

Does an addict "like" the thing they are addicted to? Or have the chemical responses in their brain been manipulated to the advantage of the person selling the addiction? Recommendation media is the perfection of a system that uses our dopamine response to control the behavior of those viewing it. At some point, I think we can agree that this isn't good for those consuming the content, especially as research shows th…

There's a middle period in addiction where you still get novel enjoyment from the thing you're doing, but finally realize it's bad for you. It seems to be around that time when people choose a path - either quitting that thing or leaning into it, consequences be damned. So yes they still like it, but the ratio between enjoyment and suffering starts to invert such that it's beyond the point of diminishing returns. Bey…

> It seems to be around that time when people choose a path - either quitting that thing or leaning into it, consequences be damned.

It's not that simple. You can fool yourself into thinking there's no consequences like "being on social media 12 hours per day is completely normal, I know a lot of productive people that do it", and then lean into it more. There's also the chasing the dragon thing "maybe Trump will kill himself and if I make the first most upvoted Reddit comment I may become an online celebrity", in which every time you do something it feels like a novel thing because you are waiting for the time you actually get the dragon.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#68

Post by karaterobot »

csixty4 wrote: post #44
ssalazar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world. Doesn't seem all that different from 99% of media consumption thats existed in my lifetime.

yeah that's basically describing broadcast tv & radio

No, that's not what he's saying. Broadcast TV & radio is human-generated, audio and video, and not immersive. It's several steps behind the trend he's predicting. And they are also not equivalent in terms of getting user engagement and attention, which is why those industries have shrunk so much.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#69

Post by mftb »

dylan604 wrote: post #51
Banana699 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those are AI-generated (therefore don't have the potential massive automated scale) or auto-play.

are you sure? it sounds like the exact same playlist on every station with the same owner in the same market with such little care about the content in the playlist but only based on an algorithm. so maybe AI === brain dead corporate owners?

You can't ignore matters of degree. It does sound similar, but just by reducing the content chunk length to ~20 secs, they've dramatically improved the algorithmic manipulation and ad insertion (from their point of view), making it all far more effective.

In the old model people left the tv droning in the background, in the new model, people are riveted by their phones (with 2nd and 3rd screens (and radio (and billboards)) droning in the background).

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#70

Post by nprz »

cloutchaser wrote: post #26
strogonoff wrote: post #15

> That’s because the company correctly intuited a significant gap between its users stated preference — no News Feed — and their revealed preference, which was that they liked News Feed quite a bit. The next fifteen years would prove the company right. Stop right there. What you mean is that their corporate wallets like it. These companies delude themselves if they consider “spend more time in the app” as an indicato…

This is a really silly point frankly, and can be applied to any product people have ever gravitated towards. You might claim to not like tv but it still became the most used entertainment product for decades. Same goes for the newsfeed. Any social network or product with a newsfeed will easily beat one without for users using it. Whether utopians like yourself think people like it or not is irrelevant. It’s about sur…

Crack seems to be a product people gravitate towards, but that doesn't mean it's a good product or beneficial for the user.
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