Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssalazar | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

From Edward R Murrow famous speech: This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

The novel element is combining the passive medium with infinite content. In my circles, sitting slack-jawed in front of the TV for hours was something that only those with little mental energy or drive did[1]. By contrast, probably 75% have some non-trivial degree of slack-jawed passive social media consumption, even more so since IG and Tiktok.

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.

Idk how people do this, its just so boring. I tried tiktok and the first 200-300 scrolls were interesting, but then its just people regurgitating the same comedy/meme. Sure you can find a niche subject you're into like cooking, but most topics do get kind of dry after a while. I do think I'm in a minority though and know quite a few who spend hours a day on tiktok/insta.

It's enjoyable for 20 minutes a day, especially when waiting on something.

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.

One idea I had was being able to share your curated algorithm to others. ie. Your instagram explore page, or your specific tiktok recommends. People could subscribe to x person's recommends and see what they see.

In this spirit, I think Tiktok would actually be a tremendously good matchmaker for finding either friends or romantic partners. I think a lot of their recommendation AI actually figures out what you might like ahead of actually showing it to you, by trying to sort you into a cohort of people with very similar tastes. Which is why as a new user its sometimes scary how Tiktok can almost predict what you might like. E.g. people into cars, 30-40 yrs old, rural probably also like DIY.

That's a good point. A simple k nearest neighbors search of users would likely turn up very similar people to you even if you don't explicitly include any demographics.

What a coincidence, me too. I think there should be a marketplace for them. Ability to lock changes, or go back to an earlier version of your algorithm. Power user tools for curating it better.

That's the next influencer game imo. Having people want to see your feed(s)

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.

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

I wonder if there are individual YouTube compilations of similar videos (think "Funny Cats" montages) that have generated more profit than Funniest Home Videos shows.

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

Max Headroom was a human powered simulation of such a future.

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

There was a time I hadn't thought about Max Headroom in years, now I feel like he's all over the place again.

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).

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

Yes, we already have "slow AI". It's the corporate paperclip machine. It's has a strict value function; make money to shareholders. And it will do what ever it takes to make more of it.

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.

Why do you think that a malevolent AGI wouldn't use these tactics to make money / influence public perception?

I think these are two sides of the same coin.

Of course it will, but it's something happening now by slow AI. We don't need any research on some hypothetical. We don't need to frame this as a technological problem, it's clearly a social one, of which we suffer the consequences today.

Broadcast radio & tv are definitionally auto-play, arguably much moreso than social media apps which have pause and rewind and browsing functionality.

I digress, the scalability point is fair and this is an irrelevant sidebar

Being only semi-serious, but: wouldn't an auto-generated Netflix look pretty much like Netflix?

In my lifetime the content didn't get automatically adjusted to my needs to get me hooked.

No, but it was undoubtedly produced with the intention to get the most people hooked as possible. Traditional media was just less effective at hooking people because of the limited number of distribution channels and the cost of producing content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com