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Comment by lukeplato | Hacker News Reader

I noticed popular accounts on tiktok are repeatedly doing one specific thing memeticly in their videos because a previous video of it had gained traction. There are probably healthy examples like dancing, but I imagine there's a lot of negative psychological impacts from having your identity being so singular and directly rooted in providing entertainment for others

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"Having your identity be singular and directly rooted in providing entertainment for others" is true of professional athletes. Comedians. Magicians. Writers.

s/entertainment/value/ , it's true of software engineers. Plumbers. Construction workers. Homemakers. Traders.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

This is what humans in groups do, have always done, and there's nothing wrong with it. It's like a group sitting around a campfire each taking their turn to make joke, sing a song, do a dance, be profound and have others try out the same thing and take it further until the next new idea pops up.

It's lovely.

Am I a human or am I a brand?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hubrandity

https://youtu.be/rPHK494AUxE

What is a human but an idea.

It's a limit of the platform. If a creator has found 'product market fit' it's obvious that they want to produce more. The problem is that they have to limit themselves to the same content unless they want their account to be deranked by videos that are not equally desired by their audience.

The platforms should offer a granular way to influence the algorithm, e.g. creators could mark their videos 'onbrand' and 'offbrand'.

> There are probably healthy examples like dancing

(almost) None are healthy since their motivation isn't healthy in the first place. It's just triggering our monkey brain part which seeks attention, the problem is that it was never designed to be world wide scale, you end up with an army of mimics doing the most random shit ever for internet points, 99% of it being either useless or borderline pornography

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