There's olympics for persons with disabilities. TikTok is in one of those but with other similarly sized companies. News at 11: 1080p today looks worse than 5 years ago, ending a a two decade streak of innovation and improvement to the world's telecom system.
TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
61–70 of 222 posts
Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
#62Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
#63Earlier 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"?
We’ve been trying to “educate” people on nutrition for a long time, but this country is still fat as hell.
Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Came here to say exactly this. People also listen to individual podcast episodes that clock in at 2 or 3 hours, and are hugely popular. Movies are getting longer at the cinema too -- what used to be 85 minutes is now 150 minutes. TikTok has not "won" at all. There's a place for content of all different lengths. The death of the attention span has been greatly exaggerated.
These are definitely not the same. How many people are actually paying full attention to a 3 hour podcast? The majority will be listening to it while on their commute, or at the gym, or doing chores around the house. My wife (a civil engineer) has a podcast going in the background even while working . I asked her how she actually manages to pay attention to it and she says that it's mostly for the background noise. >…
When I do chores or shower or commute, I'm paying attention. It's not background noise. The people are saying interesting things about interesting subjects. If I wanted background noise I'd put on music.
Just because one person uses a podcast as background noise, doesn't mean everybody else is.
Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
#65TikTok and those consuming it can rot.
Some of us will continue to be reading War and Peace level works and watch "lengthy" movies.
Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
#66Too 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…
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 understand the motivation but this mindset has failure modes of its own: I'm noticing an increasing number of longform YouTube essay channels adding tons of unnecessary padding to increase the runtime. They don't all do this-- to pick a random example, I think Defunctland videos are exactly as long as they need to be-- but a bunch of the smaller ones do. Ultimately there's no metric shortcut for actual quality.
Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
#67Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
#68Too 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…
> 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.
Could it be that the shorter videos that are now 30-60 seconds present the same information as they did when they were ~10min, just without all extra prologue, epilogue, and sponsor inserts? Wasn't one of the reasons they were ~10min in the first place simply to get monetized better?
Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
#69Is the posting account a bot? It’s posted only links and zero comments since it was created.
Re: TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning
#70This post popped up a blocking window before I was even 3 sentences in, so maybe unsurprising that I clicked away in less than 60 seconds. If the author wants people to read whatever it is they have to say, maybe they should not put distractions in front of their writing?
Wow it is that bad ! It's a white full screen on-your-face message that no one asked for, and it literally appears as soon as you start reading the content! If that wasn't ironic enough to the title of the article, upon hitting the "X" and then "Back" on my phone (because it generated enough rejection on me that I didn't want to keep reading), the popup appeared again (-: so double annoyance for the price of one.
The worst part is that it pushes an item onto the history stack both when it opens and closes. So I need to press back 3 times to go back. It's a small thing to complain about but it's still atrocious.