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Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

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Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#91

Post by nomel »

cwkoss wrote: post #78
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…

VR is never going to be a replacement for short form video. Casual passive consumption of video benefits from being able to fit in between other activities easily. I'm never going to want an immersive experience when I have 2 minutes to kill waiting for a friend to show up at a bar - I just want easily digestible content snacks.

To be fair, I think most everyone agrees that XR is the future, not VR. XR could easily take the replacement.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#93

Post by buildsjets »

cwkoss wrote: post #78
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…

VR is never going to be a replacement for short form video. Casual passive consumption of video benefits from being able to fit in between other activities easily. I'm never going to want an immersive experience when I have 2 minutes to kill waiting for a friend to show up at a bar - I just want easily digestible content snacks.

Likewise. I'd never want to have to take out my handheld computer, boot it up, and connect it to the internet just to kill 2 minutes looking at pictures of cats, when I can just as easily look at my wallet full of cat Polaroids.

I see a future where you blink twice to power up your ocular nerve implants for a few minutes of stim, then power 'em down when you get a popup that your buddy is nearby and ordering drinks.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#94

Post by alt227 »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #85
rconti wrote: post #29

> I saw someone recently complaining that Facebook was recommending to them…a very crass but probably pretty hilarious video. Their indignant response [was that] “the ranking must be broken.” Here is the thing: the ranking probably isn’t broken. He probably would love that video, but the fact that in order to engage with it he would have to go proactively click makes him feel bad. He doesn’t want to see himself as th…

I absolutely loathe YouTube Face. If you've never heard of the term, it's that exaggerated, wide-eyed, often with an open-mouth, expression on most thumbnails. I know that at some psychological level it works, probably because it hijacks the part of our brain that is meant to respond to when a fellow human being in front of us makes that expression - there must be something dangerous going on behind us and we need to…

Veritasium has an excellent video exploring this exact topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#95

Post by jrm4 »

jasonladuke0311 wrote: post #75
jrm4 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of being overly optimistic: Number 4 is an interesting inflection point that could potentially (hopefully) sow the seeds of it's own destruction (or at least radical transformation?) Which is to say, the move from 3 to 4 strikes me as a move toward "real human interaction," owing to the fact that the "content" there is much less prepackaged Kardashianism and much more "real person sharing real thing." Hen…

> Which is to say, the move from 3 to 4 strikes me as a move toward "real human interaction," owing to the fact that the "content" there is much less prepackaged Kardashianism and much more "real person sharing real thing." I believe we are well into number 4 and let me tell you, neither the "person" or the "thing" feels "real". Everything is so contrived, scripted, architected, and manufactured that the entirety of…

So, my take is the following: I still believe that it's all getting "more human," and that this isn't necessarily mutually exclusive of "contrived, scripted" etc. The difference is "Kardashianism" is filtered through big media selling ads, vs. e.g. "TikTok" -- at the point of creation -- is filtered through nothing but the sensibilities of the creator and mostly stays what it was at the point of creation. Ergo, much more human.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#96

Post by stavros »

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…

"Heroin users said they didn't like heroin, but it turns out they take it quite often, so they must like it"

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#97

Post by guelo »

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

TikTok isn't that far off from America's Funniest Home Videos.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#98

Post by gonehome »

elefanten wrote: post #86
gonehome wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urbit is trying to build the tools that enable this (in part by fixing the ad driven engagement incentives that lead to centralization and the current state). One interesting bit is if you’re making vegetables when everyone else is giving away heroin it’s not enough to just to make great vegetables, you really need to offer something that can’t exist outside of what you’ve built because your core technology does some…

Do you have any recommended introduction to Urbit that touches on these possibilities in particular?

Which particular ones? The DevEx auth stuff or the incentive fixing bit?

The ID model is probably where I'd start since it's what fixes spam/moderation problem in a way that can actually work without centralization. When IDs have a small, but non-zero cost spam becomes uneconomical and it's easy to block an ID. IDs also accrue pseudonymous reputation. From there you can start to fix a lot of the other stuff.

The DevEx bit also heavily depends on that. When you build the OS to handle IDs you move the abstraction up the stack. Modern operating systems don't do this in part because they were built before the web. As a result modern operating systems are largely just machines user's use to open a web browser and every centralized web application has to rebuild their entire auth stack and all of the collaboration tooling. They're incentivized to do this and be incompatible with everything else because centralization tends to lead to ad-driven business models and all the incentive problems associated with that.

If the OS handled IDs and collaboration you could just build your app, distribute it to the network and rely on built in OS libraries to do the complex work relying on guarantees from the OS itself. The users wouldn't need accounts on a bunch of centralized services.

People have tried to do this on the unix stack, but it fails for a few reasons[0][1]. It's not impossible to build something else that could work though and rethinking the stack from first principles leads to something that could work.

Imagine if all linux users could just dm each other because the OS itself handled encrypted communication between IDs. You could build and distribute linux apps without a mess of complexity just by publishing it to your node. You get the capability to build really collaborative applications out of the box because of a lot of these guarantees without having to give up control. There's a lot more possible than this in this model - I think it's a path to escape the local maximum we've been trapped in and get closer to the web the 90s cypherpunks imagined (and the personal computer hackers before them).

[0]: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...

[1]: https://urbit.org/overview

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#99

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

stavros wrote: post #96
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…

"Heroin users said they didn't like heroin, but it turns out they take it quite often, so they must like it"

I think your comment is both wrong and spot on.

IMO the "wrong" part is that most heroin users will tell you they fucking love heroin. It makes them feel great/escape from life's problems, and users know this. The fact that users also know that heroin is destroying their lives isn't incompatible with loving it.

The "spot on" part of your comment is that the addictive dynamics between social media and heroin are basically exactly the same. And over the past 5-10 years as this awareness has grown (e.g. documentaries like The Social Dilemma), social media companies have paid lip service to acknowledging some of the dangers of "endless scrolling", but the rise of TikTok has proven that the lip service was always bullshit. The second another company came along with a stronger drug, all the incumbents are immediately trying to copy that addictive drug. They don't give 2 shits about your well-being and never did.

Re: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends

#100

Post by ajmurmann »

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?

IMO the differ here is less about AI vs human curated, but curated/generated for a very broad audience vs one specific consumer, ideally live as their mood or interests change. We aren't there yet with the highly dynamic mood and interest changes (e.g. interest fading after 5 Dr pimple popper videos, let's throw in some wingsuit stuff), but it's on the same trajectory. Address broad audience -> address smaller, niche audiences -> address individuals -> address individuals in the moment
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