Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
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 of the brain... but not by much.
Makes me wonder if there's a market for the equivalent of health food where we go back to social media and deliberately avoid "recommendation media" (which may be the most important two words in the entire post).
I fully expect BeReal's model to change in less than two years from now (probably within a year). I see it quickly devolving into tedium after a while. Users will disable notifications to post, become passive consumers. "Influencers" drive adoption of platforms and it's hard to be the same type of influencer unless you're constantly living that lifestyle, which almost no influencer today actually does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
they were calling this out since 1984 - hard to distinguish between luddism and genuine problems
Literacy requires effort, and protected time to acquire analytical skills that are not natural to humans. Childhood was, then, embraced, because it's the way to get literacy.
All-encompassing technologies that require no effort, e.g. TV or, as it appears to be the case, AR, might end the need for childhood, hence the book title. Among the novel technologies, the computer would be the one to "save" childhood, but only if society requires active (as opposed to passive) competency with computer technology. Quoting Postman:
"The only technology that has this capacity is the computer. In order to program a computer, one must, in essence, learn a language. This means that one must have control over complex analytical skills similar to those required of a fully literate person, and for which special training is required. Should it be deemed necessary that everyone must know how computers work, how they impose their special world-view, how they alter our definition of judgment—that is, should it be deemed necessary that there be universal computer literacy—it is conceivable that the schooling of the young will increase in importance and a youth culture different from adult culture might be sustained. But such a development would depend on many different factors. The potential effects of a medium can be rendered impotent by the uses to which the medium is put. For example, radio, by its nature, has the potential to amplify and celebrate the power and poetry of human speech, and there are parts of the world in which radio is used to do this. In America, partly as a result of competition with television, radio has become merely an adjunct of the music industry. And, as a consequence, sustained, articulate, and mature speech is almost entirely absent from the airwaves \(with the magnificent exception of National Public Radio\). Thus, it is not inevitable that the computer will be used to promote sequential, logical, and complex thought among the mass of people. There are, for example, economic and political interests that would be better served by allowing the bulk of a semiliterate population to entertain itself with the magic of visual computer games, to use and be used by computers without understanding. In this way the computer would remain mysterious and under the control of a bureaucratic elite. There would be no need to educate the young, and childhood could, without obstruction, continue on its journey to oblivion."
I’ve read both Postman books, and Infinite Jest, but I’m adding End of Childhood to Goodreads, thanks.
There's a Monty Python sketch where someone comes up with the funniest joke in the world and dies laughing after penning it. It's eventually learned that anyone who reads or hears the joke immediately laughs themselves to death. Of course, eventually the army gets a hold of it to use as a weapon.
Doesn't seem all that different from 99% of media consumption thats existed in my lifetime.
so maybe AI === brain dead corporate owners?
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).
All these ppl scaring us with AGI are either distracting us from the clear and present dangers of slow AI so they can keep profiting from it , or are just duped by silly technooptimism.
I think these are two sides of the same coin.
I digress, the scalability point is fair and this is an irrelevant sidebar
To wit, I think what's interesting about this Era of media relative to the TV Era is the vanishing proportion of the population that's able to escape the habit.
[1] Not a value judgment: my sister and her husband consume massive amounts of TV but they're also both early-career doctors. I would be braindead at the end of the day too.
The key things are:
1) time offline is on your side. you can saturate yourself with current trends that interest you pretty quickly. You need to allow actual real world time to pass for those trends to update.
2) scroll with purpose and intent. aggressively dismiss things that don't immediately get your attention from any unknown source. (Helps the algorithm actually cater to your interests)
3) tell the algorithm when you don't like something. There's usually a "don't show me content like this" option somewhere. I felt dramatic about it at first, but it's the only tool you have to keep the algorithm from incorrectly assuming you enjoyed the content when you did watch the entire thing (out of sheer curiosity / hope / general inaction).
I noticed I now get a lot of low profile things in my feed that are actually pretty cool and fit the medium nicely. Lots of trade work stuff, before / afters, machines doing stuff, stand up comedy bits, etc. Those personalized things do not have room to flourish if I am giving too many things a chance.
That's the next influencer game imo. Having people want to see your feed(s)
See: https://www.are.na/
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 something different.
I think Urbit’s distribution and handling of auth could be that for distributed DevEx and building collaborative apps in a way that’s way simpler than on the current web stack. It’s not quite there yet but there’s a path to this reality and success is among the potential outcomes.
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...
Google Glass's spectacular failure had a chilling effect on the entire industry, but it failed due to (1) lack of killer apps, (2) poor aesthetics, and (3) consumer concern about privacy.
But ML has revolutionized image and video processing, Apple etc. could design a less hideous headset, and nobody cares about privacy anymore.
I think it would help to not make most of the promotional material about video recording, and not make a huge camera the most visible feature. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Quest lineup, including rumored Cambria and Apple renders, obscure the forward looking cameras.
Google Glass picture, which looks like a webcam on your face: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/19/google-gl...
The Snapchat glasses, as well as the Instagram/RayBan glasses don't seem to have suffered from having a prominent camera, which suggests there was a change in mass acceptance of cameras.
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.
The same was said of video vs. reading. “I’m never going to want a video experience, it doesn’t fit in between other activities as well as reading a page of something.”
There is a middle ground between "AR will never take off as an entertainment medium" and "AR will kill video/images/text."
3d video served by an AR sunglass display is plausible (but probably way overkill for the next decade), but feeling like you're in an entirely different environment while waiting in line at the post office is never going to be a thing people want.
This presumes the existence of important "other activities", and relegates this content consumption as some lower-priority thing done between these activities. I know people who really don't have any important other activities: passively scrolling through video after video is their primary activity. For this [I'd guess growing] group, VR's ability to block out the unimportant real-world is the next obvious step.
1. Medium: Mechanical reel > Digital reel
2. Gameplay: Fixed odds > Adjustable odds > Programmatic adaptive odds
3. Experience: Pull the lever and win or lose > Pull the lever and win even if you lose (e.g. get back change) > Swipe a card and win even if you lose > Swipe a card and watch the game auto-play until you're out of money
After reading that book (in 2014), I made my last Facebook post (the history of the slot machine) and promptly downloaded my data and deleted my account. I'm paraphrasing but Crawford's point was basically that social media is a socio-emotional slot machine.
The phrase he used, "playing to extinction", very much reminds me of what's happening now across most entertainment categories, broadly speaking (autoplay, loot boxes, slot machine-style gaming content, etc.)
Also, one would hope that those that are so addicted that they are fine to just haul-off and piss themselves would be able to think ahead and simply wear a diaper.
Riiiigggghhhhttttt
To give an example, slot machines in Nevada must pay out a minimum of 75% of the take. Additionally, no programming/odds updates or machine resets may be made to the slot machine until the machine has sat idle for a minimum of 4 minutes; and if an update/reset is being made the machine _must_ clearly display that this is occurring.
So the sick thing here is that each loss does in fact bring you closer to the winning spin. One of the only real strategies of slot machines (in the sense that there can be a strategy to a game of luck) is to stand around idling watching other people lose, then after someone leaves a machine with a bad run you immediately drop in to the spot and start playing the same machine.
win = rand() < .75To me that implies that the machine is keeping track of a period of time to make sure it pays out 75% during that period.
Each spin is random and independent of whether it's been on a losing streak or not.
My intent was not to imply that each individual losing pull increases the odds, but more that if you just keep rolling the same two dice long enough eventually it's going to come up snake eyes. And this leads to people (especially gambling addicts) continuing to pull that lever after they are long past what they can afford. They know if they just keep pulling the lever (or more likely pushing the bet max button these days) that eventually it has to pay. But the reality is the casinos are predators that feed on that behavior.
Most casinos actually have a much higher takeout rate than the legally required minimums as well; it's very common that they are set closer to the 90-97% range. It's generally observed that a higher takeout will result in more money for the house. With a higher takeout people are more likely to keep winning a bit and feel like they are getting lucky, so they will actually spend more money than if the aren't hitting at all.
The takeout is configurable. With older machines they have to be manually set at the machines, but with more modern machines it is controlled by a server. The period of time while the takeout remains unchanged is referred to as a cycle. Casinos are generally free to change the takeout so long as it is a minimum of the regulated amount. Then there are the regulations requiring idle time at the machines like I mentioned in my previous comment. Additionally, the casino may need to notify the gaming commission prior to making a takeout change depending on local regulations.
What I'm objecting to is your idea that machines are more likely to payout after they've lost for a while. Each spin is independent of previous spins. The 75% is just a statistical average over the long run.
Worse yet with progressives is they may even span multiple casinos. So that grand prize someone is grinding for and wasting their money on... it may never hit at that casino.
Machines plural - which means a machine that just paid out (in a casino with a large group of machines) can theoretically pay out again before a machine that has a string of losing spins.
Why haven't we discovered life yet amongst the vastness of the stars?
Because they wanked themselves to death in VR pleasure palaces.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
Huh. That appears to be a mostly-accurate summary of Wikipedia's description of the episode, which heavily features the term "addicted". But it's an awful summary of the episode itself, which doesn't use the concept of addiction at all. (Also, the game doesn't autoplay; it is shown on screen requiring effort from the player.)
The game is a malevolent agent which intentionally makes very specific modifications to the players' minds. The relevant concept is infection, not addiction. The plot of the episode is essentially identical to that of the TNG episode Conspiracy[1], or the Buffy episode Bad Eggs[2].
And while not completely identical, the plot is also very similar to Invasion of the Body Snatchers[3]. It's a very, very common theme. (As shown by the fact that TNG did it twice!)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(Star_Trek:_The_Nex...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Eggs_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Sl...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Body_Snatchers
I don't have the clip handy but at one point a character points out to Wesley something along the lines of "want to know the trick to this game? It plays itself!"
> ALYSSA: You know what the secret is, don't you? Don't force it. If you just let the game happen, it almost plays itself.
But at the beginning of the episode, you see Riker playing:
> ETANA: Concentrate. Make the disc go into the cone.
> RIKER: How do I do that?
> ETANA: Just let go. Relax. You'll do it.
> the first one misses, the second is a success
( http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/206.htm )
You could make the argument that everyone misses their first shot for no other reason than that it gives them a false feeling of accomplishment when they make the second one.
But it would make more sense to say that victory in the game comes from assuming a particular state of mind, presumably one that allows the game to do its thing.
You don't need to "let the game happen" for an autoplaying game to play itself.
- People neglect their responsibilities in order to indulge their addiction.
- People consume their resources (e.g., by selling their property) in order to indulge their addiction.
- People fail to achieve their goals because they are distracted by their addiction.
- People alienate their social contacts, either through neglect (see above) or through what is seen as excessive focus on their addiction.
None of these elements appear in the episode. No addiction-related themes appear in the episode.
Here are the plot elements that do occur in the episode:
- A foreign influence infiltrates the group and spreads uncontrollably. It is difficult to perceive directly.
- The foreign influence brainwashes and enslaves everyone who is exposed to it, substituting its own goals for theirs. Far from neglecting responsibilities, brainwashed victims will happily do extra work for no other purpose than to further the foreign goals.
- People who should be absolutely trustworthy, such as Captain Picard or Wesley's mother, are "replaced" by impostors who share their knowledge but whose goals are nefarious. (In this case, the person is not replaced in their entirety, but their mind is replaced with a new one.)
How would you describe that plot?
If you want a TNG episode themed around the perils of drug use, that would be The Naked Now, where the altered mental state of the crew threatens to destroy the ship. If you want one themed around addiction, that would be Hollow Pursuits, where Barclay's "holodiction" severely interferes with his performance of his duties.
I don't think we'll ever reach that. I'm sure there will be non-invasive methods, soon enough.
The thing is, we're sort of talking (still somewhat hypothetically) about the Internet becoming more like hard drugs here in terms of entertainment/pleasure/addiction potential, which puts pretty much everyone except for (by HN standards) serious conservatives in a bind on slamming social media: liberals like me and the many libertarians on here usually feel that the War on Drugs has been a catastrophe, alongside pretty much all prohibition aimed at people who are turning to escapism because the rungs of the real-world achievement ladder have been knocked out above them.
I personally believe that explosive growth in escapism (see: opioid crisis) is driven by shitty opportunities in the real world. There is always going to be some set of highly potent diversions, and there will always be some fraction of the population that has a hard enough time with them to need professional help. But IMO none of Internet pornography, painkillers, video games, or crazy-optimized recommender systems are going to destroy lives and societies in job lots if those societies have high mobility in real-word achievement. So, not our society right now.
I'm probably biased having worked in social media in my life, but the flip side is that I also know how how the sausage is made, I think that sort of balances out. Everyone has to form their own opinion here, my point can be TLDR'd as: "decriminalize drugs" and simultaneously "fuck TikTok" isn't really a consistent worldview. It's reasonable to say "fuck marketing TikTok to children" alongside "decriminalize drugs", and I'd probably agree with both.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...
It's fun to speculate on why that's the case, but it seems likely intractable to nail down.
Although, I'll point out that while they're both categories of addiction, pension funds can only invest in and make profits from the more "innocent-feeling" category.
I'd guess that, if there were a regulatory environment that allowed for public companies that could legally encourage people to indulge their $taboo_addiction, then said $taboo_addiction would cease to be taboo and become more prevalent, for better and worse.
Our society isn't high mobility? Who has a higher mobility?
(* I realise this is the internet but I'm assuming you're talking about one of the five-eyes nations)
I appreciate that’s like one human lifetime and high economic mobility had barely started to come in for e.g. black people before rich people decided to loot the place, but we were headed in the right direction for many decades before this kleptocracy-in-broad-daylight shit kicked in.
And #27 is worse than it sounds, because most people know there are ~200 sovereign states in the word (195 at the moment I believe), and the WEF only has data on 82 of them for this metric (I'm willing to assume that the "no data" ones wouldn't score highly in most cases). So that's "a bit better than halfway up the list", not "clearly competitive with the leaders".
"Click" and "Tap" are essentially the same thing (on a desktop vs. on a mobile device): the user actively selecting what content to view next. So are "scroll" and "autoplay" (for text/image and video content, respectively). In the former, the user has agency over what to view, and in the latter, the transition is automated.
I'm very skeptical that fully automated UI will ever replace giving the user a small selection of recommended items.
Click in the article refers to plain old web navigation. There are links on the page, you move the mouse around and click on whichever one you want.
Tap is referring to "Stories" interaction, which is more narrowed and less user choice than click. A story is playing, you tap anywhere on the screen and the next story replaces it and begins playing.
I actually think "tap" and "swipe" are basically the same? They are both just a "give me the next one please" interaction. But the rest do progress from more user-directed to more computer-controlled.
(Click -> scroll -> tap -> swipe -> autoplay)
The TikTok fyp is vastly better than the Instagram discover tab, which gives you a menu of videos as jumping off point before you get sucked into scrollhole. I agree about autoscroll though. Sometimes I want to watch a video like 10 times, and feel very annoyed when Instagram had the auto scroll feature. I think it's gone now. Instead it just nudges the video up with a little messages that tells me to scroll for more. I always thought that must be a first-time user tutorial, but it never stops, so either it's broken or it's broken.
Sounds like the dream. I hope I live to experience it.
1 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-no...
And the ratio keeps getting “better”. Better content, less friction.
Scary.
I think there's definitely a product in there for people who want a tool to help manage their attention, one they can intentionally shape.
But that product cannot be primarily ad-supported, since the fundamental purpose of ad-supported tech is to command (and sell) attention. Users would need to be customers, not the product, which means they would need to be willing to pay. And since attention is power, anyone producing this would either have to be past motivation for more power, or principled about not abusing the potential in abusing an attention management tool.
I'm sure the userbase and builders who can make this happen exist, but they are smaller. The incentives against it are powerful currents. Most of us will choose the opaque cost of selling our attention and behavioral trail over the transparent cost of our currency. Most of us are not past motivation for more power.
You strap on the headset and see an adversarial generated girlfriend designed by world-class ML to maximize engagement.
She starts off as a generically beautiful young women; over the course of weeks she gradually molds both her appearance and your preferences such that competing products just won't do.
In her final form, she is just a grotesque undulating array of psychedelic colors perfectly optimized to introduce self-limiting microseizures in the pleasure center of the your brain. Were someone else to put on the headset, they would see only a nauseating mess. But to your eyes there is only Her.
It strikes you that true love does exist after all.”
- 8fhdkjw039hd
It has over 660 million users these days, the vast majority of whom are single men.
Something like 30% of the users tell it "I love you" on a daily basis.
This entire article is built on the wrong premise that people use social media for entertainment. I certainly don't — I'm not open to any content discovery on Instagram/Facebook/Twitter at all. I use social media to connect with people I mostly already know, and the platforms getting in the way, begging with their "you may enjoy this" is bloody annoying. I'm building my own fediverse project for a reason, after all.
The discussion concerning trends needs to clearly address which perspective the analysis involves... The OP looks as if it involves recommendations for development trends moving forward, rather than serving advice based on the perspective of creators and contributors of content... That's fine, but the article refers to the Kardassians being upset as creators, as if there aren't tons of other unsponsored creators and app users (without their own TV shows) involved in the process of keeping these platforms vibrant and alive.
As social media apps brutally run towards profit making, they are underestimating the value of creators. If they continue that trend, they will basically turn into pre-programmed TV channels... Losing the very aspect of participation they are built upon. If most app users on TikTok are publishing content, after cycles of being ignored, they simply stop logging in... Not viewing other content, not buying items shown in ads, not engaging, and thus making the app die.
The ideal of opportunity and growth on platforms for independent creators is largely being hijacked on a regular basis, and creators are catching onto it just now, after years of working for little to no reward on platforms that became rich.
There seems to be a constant sentiment to capture the market in order to be a monopoly among social platforms, but the rug gets pulled whenever they do things that alienate users and creators. Instead of thinking about technological advancement and capabilities of platforms, we need to start looking deeply at the value this platforms add to the lives of individuals beyond frivolous entertainment, because instead of creating a user account, for entertainment we could simply watch television, which doesn't sell us the ideal that we can all meaningfully participate and require us to scroll through it on a phone all day.
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 indicator for users liking it, in no sane world it is true.
I like Mail.app because I need to spend so little time in it to get the most value out. I hate Instagram because it happens all the time that I missed a friend’s post because I didn’t scroll far enough.
Curiously enough, this self-centered self-delusion only happens in UI teams of pseudo-free double-sided market “products” where you have to keep viewing ads to make the corp money.
This business model also breaks how the market is supposed to work—the actual users and paying customers are now separate groups, users cannot vote with their wallets (or even leave, because the offering is free and my friends are here so the moat for competitors is infinite), and company’s interests are not aligned with theirs.
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 survival. Not “corporate wallets”
2006 - Facebook introduces newsfeed
2006 - Facebook open to everyone (no need for college email)
2008 - FB unique users overtakes MySpace's
It was a simple timeline of all of your friends’ actions. A raw chronological feed.
The outcry it caused was because it felt like stalking. The following dominance of Facebook did not have anything to do with people’s “revealed preferences” in favour of the algorithmic instrument being discussed (which individually selects content to appal or otherwise engage you so that you spend the most time and generate the most ad profit). News feed wasn’t that instrument—until MySpace went away and Facebook had users reliably locked in.
Facebook didn’t win because users liked the algorithmic news feed that maximises corporate profits by amplifying troll takes and aggravating our psychological well-being, Facebook won before that. It’s important to get the causal relationship right.
Furthermore, their preference is the one that is consequential. Once you are addicted and chemically compelled to choose crack over what is more or less torture, the amount of agency you have is relatively insignificant.
The OP's point wasn't about ads but about the algorithmic newsfeed. The newsfeed is designed and optimized to make you like scrolling. So, yes people do like to scrolling but hate it when they realize that it might take you 20 minutes instead of 2 minutes to get to your best friends new baby announcement. Sure, ads contribute to that frustration, but they aren't the sole reason for it.
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.
Yeah, the analogy wasn't great there but I think the point comes across. This is very timely for me, as I've just had a day spent playing chess (and losing) for hours.
I hate it, but I can't stop, because I get easily addicted to games. Luckily, I've wasted enough time on DotA to recognize the pattern, so I uninstalled the app, but by now I recognize the pattern of "this makes me feel terrible but I can't get enough of it".
Not everyone is, which is, I think, why social media (especially jealousy-fueled ones like Instagram) is so insidious. It's easy to mistake it for enjoyment.
No shit sherlock, if I didn't love chocolate cheesecake I wouldn't need to be on a diet in the first place. But we need to acknowledge (as you put it, "It's easy to mistake it for enjoyment") the ability to say "Even though I am addicted to this thing, I know it's bad for me and I'm trying to stop".
Social media companies are trying to pretend (as they lie through their teeth) that there is no difference. They are modern-day drug pushers and I wish society would treat them as such. Instead of saying "Oh cool, you have that great job at Facebook" I wish we would give them the same amount of social respect we give to corner meth dealers.
It's totally possible to choose to take a drug regularly and at the same time hate it (along with your own guts for choosing to take it). Source: former smoker.
— In case of some addictive substance, one might choose to do it to “get the kick” associated with that substance. Yes! The addictiveness makes the term “preference” highly questionable, and I can totally see how big social is pushing similar bio-psychological buttons with impunity. It’s an important point, but different to mine.
— In the case I described, the preference is in favor of keeping in touch with friends; and using Instagram is a necessary suffering to achieve that preference. There’s no alternative: all my contacts are there, APIs are closed, no competitors, etc. It’s more or less similar to claiming that my revealed preference is driving/taking taxis in a city where there is no public transport: I’d rather avoid both, but I do like to go places.
Users weren’t wrong to dislike this! Facebook violated their assumptions, just as if you learned someone was live-streaming your conversation with them at a bar. In response, Facebook provided more granular privacy controls—but more importantly, users changed their behavior to adapt to the assumptions of the new platform.
(The outcry also highlighted the potential for virality in feed-like platforms, which was great for growth but of course also has negative consequences…)
I found this comment super-insightful. I generally hate online videos with a passion. I DO NOT click "recommended posts" or ads or videos or what I consider garbage. But that doesn't mean I don't sometimes get interested in a thumbnail I see until I realize what "they're" trying to get me to click on.
Even credible channels do this, Linus Tech Tips has such thumbnails and I'm sure it measurably affects their view count. I just lament how so much of getting people to click on videos has become reduced to the kinds of tricks that work on babies. I mean that literally, if you've ever played with a toddler or seen caretakers playing with them, you'll notice they use the same kind of exaggerated expressions and gesticulation.
Is there some way to assert "Given the same audience of X people, adding such thumbnails results in more clicks"?
And it isn't entirely true that including a face mugging for the camera is always the most visually engaging (although representations of people are very attention grabbing). A person in the image is a character for a story, the whole "worth a thousand words" is true in that a whole narrative can be compressed into a single image and viewed with a glance. A person or other sentient being is a character for that story (I'm sure cat thumbnails do well too).
Just try to think of an interesting narrative involving exclusively inanimate objects. Kinda hard; the whole "animate" thing seems to be necessary to give a before, middle, and after to events (ok, maybe collisions, explosives, and rockets might work, they'd probably do well as thumbnails too). A thumb with Linus looking surprised or disappointed or puzzled gives a short and incomplete narrative about the object he is looking at and how it made him feel those emotions. Part of this is that watching the video will give you a more complete narrative.
I would think a human face would be the most effective thumbnail, and that there are psychological reasons for this. When I worked in print magazines, there were metrics thrown around a lot for how well cover subjects did in terms of newsstand copies sold: Animals > inanimate objects; Humans > animals; color > b&w; photos > illustrations; eye contact with the camera > looking away; females > males.
Apps are also getting into the fun, and tons are now including screaming faces[1] as their icon, no matter how related to the gameplay. Can't wait for a productivity app trying to pull off this icon...
https://www.reddit.com/r/weirddalle/comments/vr622j/youtuber...
On Netflix, auto-play is just pulling forward what you would probably watch later. On TikTok and Facebook, you’re autoplaying and auto-opting into a class of content you normally would retreat from.
> "These AI challenges, I would add, apply to monetization as well: one of the outcomes of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes is that advertising needs to shift from a deterministic model to a probabilistic one; the companies with the most data and the greatest amount of computing resources are going to make that shift more quickly and effectively, and I expect Meta to be top of the list. None of this matters, though, without engagement."
Relevant quote:
> "The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client." ― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
This is slightly more complex with the social media business model: the product is the viewer, rather like a fish. The heroin-like bait to catch the viewer is the stream of short distractive entertainment content. The actual client buys the fish (the viewer) from the social media outfit. The actual client is an advertiser out to sell a product, a government out to push propaganda, a politician out to get votes, etc.
The more interesting aspect of this is that the clients might be paying the social media providers to control the content stream as a means of manipulating their audience. Weapons manufacturers might want Facebook/Instagram/Twitter to bury anti-war content; corporate media giants might want independent outlets booted off the recommendation algorithm results; established political parties might want independents hidden from view; etc
It's very plausible that this monetization model - i.e. not just the delivery of targeted advertising content to the 'engaged' audience, but also the targeted removal of competing content as a kind of shadow control of what that audience gets to see, is part of the revenue stream of Meta, Google, Twitter, etc.
Of course, people will agree that China is doing this with TikTok, but many tend to get uncomfortable if asked if the US government and major corporations are also playing this game on Twitter, Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.
Whereas, if you pursue both pushing your agenda and suppressing your opponent's agenda, you will more truly make it zero-sum. Now even the parallel people who would never see/care about your own propaganda would also never see your opponent's propaganda, because you suppressed it at its source.
De-monitization on YouTube should make this obvious to anyone.
Why would YouTube recommend content that isn't going to make them money?
Companies get to decide what makes money / where their ads are placed (this makes sense).
The problem is - the social media companies are big enough that they don't really need to care about your user experience. You AREN'T the customer! All they care about is serving you ads.
YouTube would much rather you have a mediocre experience using YouTube for 5 minutes and they make $0.50 off you than you have an outstanding experience for 30 minutes but they make $0 off you.
You get what you pay for - and with Social Media... That's nothing.
Years ago, reddit was filled with interesting discussions and analysis. Beautiful debates would rage on /r/news about current events, with equal showing of opposing viewpoints. Deep discussions on cinema in /r/movies. Excited chatter about the next video game and people's past favorites in /r/games. It was a place to talk shop for any interest.
Today, reddit is a vastly different place. /r/news is a perfect example of how ad companies and political groups pulled it off. Around the height of Trumps office, the left was able to strongly rally around hatred for the man and therefore hatred for any conservative. During this time of high emotion, the /r/news subreddit had a mod overhaul which completely aligned the political framing to 100% progressive, with a search and destroy mentality to all right wing thought. Only certain "power users" with ties to established media companies and left wing political groups would post articles there and any competing user or troublesome commenter would be banned. After only a few months of this, anyone with a centrist or right wing opinion was banned or just left, and today /r/news is now a perfect echo chamber for progressive politics. If a newbie were to go visit /r/news on reddit today they would have to believe that surely everyone must think this way, and surely /r/news is a reflection of reality, but it is not, it is a curated and controlled echo chamber.
The power inherent in falsifying organic communities and engagement in propagandizing and selling things to people is incredible. Our society is increasingly distrusting of traditional media, news, talking heads and the like, and have turned to the authenticity of social media strangers to get a better idea of the real discourse around current events. When those pools of discussion get poisoned, manipulated, and falsified, it further breaks down our ability to understand each other or feel connected.
On the advertising front,/r/movies and /r/television are merely a constant stream of Movie/TV ads and celebrity gossip. /r/games might as well be the front page of a games industry magazine. The organic discussions are few and far between, and the marketing pushes from content creators are ever more apparent. You will see movies get odd posts by some rabid fan who just saw the newest release and can't wait to share how wonderful it was! Several comments agree that this new movie is a joy, great fun! Then you watch it and it's awful, true garbage, and if you search around you'll find out most real people agree... and you realize you were tricked, no human ever liked this dull film, some social media intern wrote that reddit post and paid for flair to pop it up. You start to realize that from mainstream reviews... to reddit posts.. everything online is bought and paid for. What can you believe?
This is the reality of the modern online social media space. Users are cattle to be herded towards products and worldviews and mindsets. Governments and companies alike prod and seduce us towards their desired result, and we're meant to believe that everything we're experiencing is authentic... but it isn't.
The question now is... what's next? We know that people feel more alone and disconnected than ever before, and that authenticity seems to be in dwindling supply... how can we take back the internet? How can real discussion and community build up again? Maybe it's discord, maybe it's web3.0. Who can say... but we cannot accept that this beautiful cyberspace of human knowledge is becoming the worlds largest marketing ploy.
With stuff like GPT-3 and DALL-E, I'm not sure how much longer this metric will suffice. But I don't think impermanent, semi-synchronous mediums like discord will fill the gap for me. Nor will web3, which, as far as I can tell, is simply a pile of increasingly abstreuse ponzi schemes.
I continue to hope for a decentralized blog + RSS solution. It's as simple as growing the community with existing standards, after all.
I didn't bother to post anything after that, and recently deleted my account there.
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 that increased consumption decreases feelings of happiness and increases loneliness.
Looking back at the last year, are you (or your users) happy with the time spent using the product? Do you/they regret it?
Juicing short-term engagement can be effective for startups, but it isn't everything, and doesn't necessarily lead to lasting value.
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. Beyond that point you are mentally or physically dependent, and it starts to become simply avoiding the withdrawls. The addictive behavior becomes the new normal even if it's totally destructive.
This is why addiction is so hard
Note here: most people are thinking about intoxicants when reading the above, but it's equally true for anything in unhealthy amounts (food, games, running, collecting stamps etc...)
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.
I am far from the demographic for TikTok, but find it super addictive so just keep it off my phone.
I barely use Instagram, but having checked in a few times recently I find myself mindlessly swiping their “Reels” for hours before pulling myself away from it.
YouTube is my goto timewaste, but now when I pick it up on mobile I find myself in their “Shorts” feature which is the same kinda thing.
Just that cycle of short videos in rapid fire…. humour, interesting fact, attractive woman, aspirational products, beautiful scenery, political argument then back around the cycle again is just like digital crack.
Just say no!
YouTube Shorts are decent but I must keep the volume off because for some reason creators think they must add the most annoying music to any video clip they upload. Similar to the way you describe TikTok I feel like I need a cold shower after endlessly scrolling those videos.
9gag seems almost exactly the same as tiktok, it just never got personalized
I don't know who you think is in and out of their target demo, but it has pretty good penetration in lots of age and interest brackets. I would argue that pretty much every demographic is fair game.
That is also why you don't rely solely on your own preferences and behaviors for deciding what product features to build.
Also interesting:
1. The Pre-Internet ‘People Magazine’ Era
2. Content from ‘your friends’ kills People Magazine
3. Kardashians/Professional ‘friends’ kill real friends
4. Algorithmic everyone kills Kardashians
5. Next is pure-AI content which beats ‘algorithmic everyone’
I also have an AI that filters out AI generated content so I only see things sourced directly from people I know to be people. Granted, Cortana sometimes slips and gets it wrong and lets through something that obviously came from an AI... Hmm... I wonder how that happened. Happiness decreases.
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."
Hence why I think 4 to 5 is very far from a sure bet. I'm not sure even what Pure AI could even meaningfully signify here.
The recommendation systems that power "algorithmic everyone" are not optimizing for real human interaction, or real people sharing real things; they're optimizing for the absolute most engaging content that they can find.
This is Kardashian-killing because no one person or brand -- not even Kim -- can create the most engaging content in the world on every single post; and even if they could, they can't do it at a rate to fill an entire feed.
Sufficiently good recommendation systems kill the Kardashians because they can crawl through an ocean of user-generated content and find the winners.
If you combine a sufficiently good content-generation AI with the data you glean from the world's best recommendation system, you can just create the most engaging possible content, without even knowing what that would be.
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 social media feels like The Truman Show at this point.
I think that's one reason that a lot of kids love TikTok but adults generally can't stand it. Kids are looking for sources that show them how to act. TikTok is basically a giant tips channel. Here's how to be silly, here's how to dance, here's how to be a goth... It's like an enormous highschool, but if the highschool were completely made up of amateur actors trying to get the most attention.
I think what it actually revealed is that you can sometimes force people to accept something other than their stated preference, if you do it gradually enough and leave them no choice in the matter.
This is what these companies want. Take the power away from a few ultra powerful users (Kardashians for example), and retain that power for themselves.
Even TikTok has its stars (and they're huge now).
I can imagine AI generated icons that only get to continue to persist if they can adequately capture the attention of X amount of productive apes.
Isn't the whole premise of modern social media to get you to engage in stuff you would not normally engage in out of societal norms, but is data driven to prove you can't look away?
Most modern "personalized infinite feeds" are preying on these psychological tricks where we can't look away from something shocking, seductive, or comforting. i.e. show something painful and then show something pleasureful to play games with your dopamine and adrenaline.
Technology will continue to get more persuasive until we find moderation with it. The medium will continue to evolve and we'll continue to increase our screentime year over year cutting into our sleep and work until we do so.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology
https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpao/multimedia/infographics/ge...
I even wrote a book on this topic from the perspective of a millennial. While most of my mental health issues were because of my addiction to the internet/technology/media, I can only begin to wonder how this fares to the rest of the world given some of the known statistics about depression, anxiety, self-harm, and more at younger ages.
I think "whole premise" is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is only so much "organic" engagement to be had. Some social media (e.g. Tumblr) don't try to reach too far beyond that. They're content in their niche. Facebook and TikTok, on the other hand, have infinite ambition and infinite appetite for engagement. They're well beyond the point where they need to employ manipulative dark patterns (and keep inventing new ones!) to keep those numbers up.
Mind elaborating here? I'm interested in your perspective regarding social media not employing newly discovered dark patterns (infinite video feeds, shorter content, targeted ads, personalized algorithms, etc)
Personally I find my time on Tumblr much more gratifying than my time on Facebook (yes I still actively use both) but that's more cultural rather than technical. Is the relative lack of vapid "influencer" types a function of culture or format? I think Reddit is at approximately the same "evolutionary level" but I hardly hang out there so I could be wrong. Reddit might also be the main counterexample to the general rule that sheer size and the OP's three axes all go together.
They’re saying big social media is beyond the ‘natural’ resting size where they would exists if they did not engage in dark patterns, and so must make and use new ones to stay there.
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 shift away from the "online all the time" trend to "hanging out with people IRL", riding the end-of-covid wave.
"Coming wave of opioid overdoses ‘will be worse than ever been before’" Source: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/07/coming-wave-of...
I guess there's still work to be done if this is the government having things "under control."
- generating drawing that upon close inspection don't have obvious defects.
- generate hand drawn text.
- being able to replicate the same character along multiple angles consistently with the same style.
I feel like this is going to become increasingly hard because there are many things in drawing that can't be capture quite well with words.
It's analogous to code being more expressive than no-code drag and drop.
I _like_ seeing my friends' vacation photos and other friends commenting on them.
I _hate_ how reels and stories move from social to broadcast. Why can't my friend group comment on an IG story and have a discussion? Why does it have to be in DMs? (Unless we do that stupid thing where you share out a scene from a story (ugh, yes, I realize how old it makes me that i don't even know what to call it) and tag everyone involved)
The less a platform has the _kinds of content_ that drives the network effect, the less reason for there to be a network at all. It just becomes TV. And I use that comparison purposefully; television is extremely popular, I watch plenty of it myself. But without the active network effects of social media, what drives user-to-user engagement? How do you get new people to sign up, beyond "hey, look at this tiktok I saw"? Or is that enough?
I found this quite profound.
in particular im fearful of the impact on young developing minds, this is literally setting them up for failure or maybe this is the end goal?
Smart people can use instagram, I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Infinite scroll UI and pageless SPA frameworks fixed this to an extent, but apparently that's not enough anymore. Today, the algorithm "knows" that you want to watch this trashy sensationalist video, even though you aren't physically tapping the button to view it.
So Tiktok's format of fullscreen autoplaying video is designed to pass that final hurdle: remove decision making from the user entirely. Throw AI-recommended (and soon, AI-generated) material at them, forever, until they physically exit the app.
No wonder Zuck wanted a Facebook phone back in 2011. iOS and Android actually let you exit the FB app if you wanted to.
Medium: text -> images -> video -> 3D graphics -> VR
A lot of people/companies don't seem to appreciate that the appeal of images and video come from the fact that they represent 'real' (or at least staged-real) events/people/places. Animated videos and scenes from movies seem like categorically different kinds of things, less likely to get attention in news feeds other than as fodder for memes.
3D graphics + VR are never going to be real, and I suspect will never (or not for a long time) have the engagement of images + videos despite being ostensibly more 'immersive'.
The article presents the various media as existing with some inherent ordering of value or preference. Text is not less than Image in any sense, just as VR is not greater than Video. These media may have different characteristics in terms of desirability for business metrics (especially in terms of product differentiation) which make it seem like there is some ordering.
Consider Twitter, which while it might not have the MAU of Facebook (a tall order!) is still a testament to the enduring value of text. And again, this isn't any case for Text being superior in any sense, but rather a way of pointing out that appetites for all of these media happily coexist and probably always will.
A similarly poor ordering (from the past) might look something like:
Medium: print (text) -> radio (audio) -> television (video) -> multimedia (CD-ROM hahaha)
We know of course that audio has not become less relevant over time.
OTOH the effort required for people to participate by creating works in these different media varies hugely. Text and Images are very accessible and are still far more accessible than Video (user research in my job suggests that they struggle to create quality video content more so than still images) and 3d graphics and VR are likely to remain inaccessible (relative to digital photography).
It seems like the future, but it's much further away than we think.
This was never the problem with Twitter. The problem with Twitter is that it has no option to turn of retweets globally; don't show me retweets from anyone, only original tweets. If it had this, so that I would only see original content from people I follow, I would be back on Twitter.
The world is going to shift to sheeple only using apps (shapples?) and those only using services inside a browser (browseers?). Browseers will be much happier and live richer lives.
It strikes me as being as close to machine generated content as possible. I'm not sure I could have thought of any single thing that felt more like a GPT3 fever dream: disconnected assertions that are divorced from a underpinning understanding.
First, from a purely operational and pragmatic point of view, I'm stunned how paranoid well established networks are about the Tiktok competition, willing to make existential changes to mimic them whilst potentially destroying themselves.
Why can't there be differentiation? Why not improve your own network, fix its many issues, allow for some co-existence? "Innovate or die" is an exaggeration for Facebook and Youtube, they aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Second, I'm shocked (but not really) how not a single of these companies (or governments) take a shred of responsibility in even thinking about the human impact. There's already a laundry list of serious problems associated with social media and the trajectory is to just escalate it even more? A machine rapidly feeding you short videos, many to be AI generated, as the ultimate "solution"?
Third, we've already established how the combination of social media and misinformation can lead to fatalities (example: FB and Myanmar), political interference, escalating polarization and instability, and more. The only counter force, ineffective as it may be, would be real users pushing back and trying to "correct" things.
The next generation has no such pushbacks. It's all just one recommendation engine with ultimate power. Do we even know what the fuck we're doing?