The End of Social Media

A similar topic comes up in music all the time, too: People accuse their favorite band of changing their style in order to get mainstream appeal and, therefore, more money. Which is definitely true to some extend, but I don't think this makes paying musicians a bad thing in general. And it's the same thing with content creators on the internet.

> you can monetize their content.

Wouldn't that put the blame on the monetization of social media? Content creators are trying to make money, social media companies determine what kind of content is relevant and worthy of views, thus which content deserves the money. Content creators seem to be at the mercy of providing content that will be recommended.

I view it as a sort of "don't hate the player, hate the game." And the social media companies determine the rules of the game.

The fact that consumers as well as creators need permanent accounts in order to use the platform enabled a level of tracking that normal studios and publishers could never have dreamed of. Warners could never put activity loggers into their viewer's eyeballs to figure out the exact rate at which the content of frame N leads them to continue watching at frame N + n. They had to rely on some level of positive word of mouth and positive reviews. They needed to leave some lasting impression that after their viewers spent a few minutes going home and thinking about it, they still thought the content was worth recommending.

That is all gone now.

I find this to be very hopeful, because it means we can design and form networks that elevate people, not lower them into mindless zombie states.

Nothing wrong with making a few bucks off of your craft.

And over the last decade youtube creators has been providing content with quality way superior compared to what more traditional entertainment industry has been producing (mainly marvel junk food, low effort remakes and SNL)

But I think the author's general point isn't about the information being unavailable (even if croc was the whole word, you can just write 'croc animal') but about the internet being engineered as a distraction machine. He didn't set out to look for shoes--but once they were presented, suddenly he found himself shoe shopping despite having no internet in purchasing shoes.

The mind boggles.

It can take tens of minutes to hours for major news sites to report on a breaking event (e.g., the fall of Kabul). Meanwhile, you can get detailed - albiet in some cases very innacurate - information within minutes of it happening simply by watching for Tweets from people on the ground.

Hard disagree. I want to see everything from everyone I follow in a specific newest-to-oldest order. I also don't want to see other shit in my feed (X liked Y, who to follow, whatever), but I'm fine with having it outside of the main feed (be it a sidebar or a click away).

I also want to "tag" my follows into lists (family, close friends, topic X, topic Y), allowing me to filter through the timeline.

Currently only Twitter and Mastodon allow me this use case, and that's what I use on a semi-regular basis. Everything that deviates from that (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube's home feed) also loses me as a regular visitor with zero exceptions.

But the reason everything deviates from that eventually is clickthrough rate on ads. If my timeline is confusing enough, I'm more likely to click on ads.

However the author also posits that whether intelligence is increasing is still controversial and difficult to prove conclusively.

[1] Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century https://books.google.com/books?id=Z_-ykOVpRccC

"I dislike ads and only stupid idiot babies would tolerate platforms with ads, therefore everyone using the majority of websites is an idiot" is such lazy thinking. IDK, I'm a huge fan of social sciences which means I might as well be the devil to many engineers/HN posters.

They try to make consumer to buy the product in all means. Which means, that this education is often very far away from facts in the most of the cases.

This is so obviously false. If education was the goal of advertising, ads would inform about the negative sides of the products as well. I've never seen that. The goal of advertising is to make people buy more using any psychological trick you can come up with.

If you want to educate people, you need to do actual education. Bombarding people with propaganda is not education.

I need to access Youtube from a completely different IP address, with a different user agent and browser window size to get rid of certain themes and suggestions that magically appear on the front page. Browser fingerprinting is responsible for this adversarial dynamic I find myself in.

I am sure they are still hoovering up all my data but I hope they at least heed the signal that some people will pay for ad-free alternatives!

What about Hacker News?

I don't use it to watch political content, so I don't get much of it.

I'm not addicted to YouTube. I don't spend that much time on it. It's not my go-to source when I go online. Maybe I'm in the minority, but when you treat it only as a video hosting service where you can follow specific feeds, I don't think it's really problematic.

Many bloggers are trying to do it as a way to gain income at this point, and the ads are either all over the site or inserted directly into the "content".

No, actually, we can't. By "we", of course, I mean garden-variety consumers.

The legal, financial, and social barriers to entry are far too high.

Anyone attempting to make the next youtube would be priced out of existance, anyone trying to make another reddit would be reduced to a smouldering crater by the time the lawsuits hit them, assuming that paypal doesn't force them to do an onlyfans first.

It's not 2003 (when 4chan started) any more. The internet game is fixed, rigged and it will only become more restrictive, not less.

Fuckerberg pulled the ladder up after him; there's not gonna be another movement -at least not coming from the internet.

ADDED: I do tend to think the commercialization of the Internet with advertising was probably inevitable, but someone could probably construct at least a vaguely plausible narrative around a less commercialized post-NSFNET world.

> We've spent a good twenty years now, and longer really, building the infrastructure to ensure that when it comes to the World Wide Web, FAAMNG+ companies - not just restricted to US-centric ones but globally really - can make sure that the things you see, and the way the algorithms work, are done in a way that is good for you.

Wait, maybe I'm being hit by Poe's law here -- is your post actually sarcasm?

Every time I see a sentence like this, I interpret it as the first step of an attempt to reduce speech.

Step 1: Identify 'problematic' content.

Step 2: Create rules to limit the distribution of 'problematic' content.

Step 3: Broaden the definition of 'problematic' content to include anything that disagrees with a specific point of view.

Step 4: Dystopian hell straight from Orwell.

> can make sure that the things you see, and the way the algorithms work, are done in a way that is good for you.

Is this a 'woosh' moment? Is this intended to be satire?

> I used to be against mass surveillance, logging everything

> Is this what we should look into next?

If this is satire, can you please clarify?