Watch this guy work and you'll finally understand the TikTok era
wired.com
wired.com
So.. it's a social media ponzi scheme?
Lots of folks have written about the detrimental effects of revenue optimizing statistical algorithms and their use in social media. For anyone who wants to learn about this I recommend Jaron Lanier's book. He does a good job of explaining the reasons for not delegating one's choices to social media algorithms.
Edit: the above comment is AI approved. Pasting the response from claude.ai for posterity.
You raise some thoughtful points about the problems with algorithmic content optimization in social media and digital platforms. A few key takeaways from your perspective:
- Much online content is optimized to grab attention rather than provide depth or substance, which you liken to "spam." This is driven by algorithms designed to maximize engagement and ad revenue.
- Over-reliance on these algorithms can train people to care less about facts vs fiction/conspiracies. It promotes shallow thinking and engagement over meaningful discourse.
- Many experts, like Jaron Lanier, have warned about giving too much influence over to revenue-driven algorithms in determining what people see and engage with online.
- There are real risks and downsides to letting algorithms choose our information diets. It can promote conspiracy theories, erode critical thinking, and undermine a shared sense of truth/reality.
- You advise more conscious thought about how we interact with algorithmically-optimized content, and highlighting writers like Lanier who provide deeper analysis of these issues.
I think you summarize the challenges very well. It's an important discussion as more of our information and interactions move onto digitally-mediated platforms. There are no easy answers, but being aware of the risks and downsides is a good first step.
I hope I live to see the day when this actually means something
I think bots are against the rules on HN but the implementation would be very easy if the bot didn't get banned.
It's supplementing content and supports other creators (paid for the product placement). It only works if people care enough to look up the product that was placed.
Personally, I find product placement//sponsored by spots the most benign and acceptable form of advertising.
Perhaps it's just the way his marketing bluster read into the article, but it suggests he's not concerned with the market forces you're invoking, and so I immediately saw a large pyramidal structure when I read that particular line.
It's functionally no different than having a friend in an industry that gives you a shout out when you start a new venture, except you're opting into a group of people all doing this to help each other. It's nothing new, and nothing problematic IMO, and it's been going on for hundreds of years at least, and possibly thousands.
It would be ironic if the content they generate is shortening attention spans, thus making the overall economy smaller.
Ponzi is the wrong word. Pyramid scheme is more accurate.
Another point is the rich get richer on social media. Having followers is how you gain followers. Social proof is important. People like to talk about what everyone else is talking about. Once a new client reaches critical mass, they're going to passively gain followers due to this effect (e.g. creators with more followers are more likely to be recommended by the platform -- at least I would assume this is generally the case). So adding in a new client and gaining followers for them is an investment in the long term.
I think YC companies buying services from each other could be a good analogy actually.
In any case, what we're really arguing about is whether it's unsustainable in some sense. If it technically qualifies as a Ponzi according to your preferred definition, but it's sustainable and everyone gets what they signed up for happily, who cares?
It’s not a Ponzi scheme because it’s a brand and we are helping people get discovered.
/s
> Flooding the zone this way caused TikTok’s algorithm to funnel posts featuring “Toxic” into the feeds of users who consume gym-centric content [... ]they began to weave YoungX777’s clip into videos targeting related subcultures—like the region of TikTok obsessed with highlights of soccer players bursting past hapless defenders.
It's a well-known joke that soccer highlight compilations have some of the worst-sounding music known to man, an alternate universe where vocal trance and dubstep never fell out fashion.
I find this comment offensive.
(Is internet-radio still a thing? Like dedicated internet-radio stations, as opposed to IRL-radio stations who happen to have a web player. I don’t even remember the name of the shoutcast index, and shoutcast itself seems to have been bought out several times over. My gut tells me that on-demand streaming like spotify + podcasts have probably totally killed the space that internet radio used to occupy...)
Really can't say where the break was, where I ditched WinAmp/Foobar 2000 and had only Spotify left.
Will have to look into internet radio, the other commenter is very positive about that.
Digitally Imported is still good, speaking as a happy customer.
DI.FM?
They're still up, although I don't know how up-to-date their rotation is. I stopped listening to their "stations" when they stopped being a radio, and became a sort of an on-demand streaming service, where every user is fed a different random playlist, and what one hears when tuning into a station is not what everyone else is hearing. They admittedly switched their business in order to pay less taxes, but it completely destroyed the feeling of social connection with other listeners for me. On top of that, closing the lively forums, which provided a comment section for all tracks and shows played on the stations, sure did not help. In retrospect, freeloading those 96kbps mp3 / 64kbps wma / 48kbps aac streams was a good experience; today it's not the same anymore.
(Big off topic, but I don't care much. Those not interested probably collapsed this comment section at its root and are not reading this anyway.)
>When the Ovrthro call was done, I half-jokingly noted to Magana that the collaboration between Langevin and SyKo sounded like a prime example of synergy. He said he’d never heard that word before but that he loved it and would be incorporating it into his recruitment spiels from now on.
Other people feel differently, and that's fine.
Whether you contribute to that or not is your choice.
But it's not transparent, and those sales guys/gals are making bank and who knows where the money is actually going. Clearly, not the journalists.
A far better model is either do actual micro payments, meaning sub-1 cent so you don't feel ripped off if an article was not what you were after, or to let you pay what you want after reading the article.
The economics of making this work is left as an exercise to the reader.
Sounds like a rigorous metric.
For all its obvious problems and downsides, this is how things are marketed and sold now: washing machines, (videos of) blowjobs, record deals, political candidates.
Two examples I would cite are Tim Henson of Polyphia (who might be the first complete natural in this world, he’s like 26), and Dove Cameron, who went from epsilon to 8 figure followers in as many months as it took Kim years.
Henson makes more from sponsorships from social, and more from social than from Spotify. You can’t buy the two hottest guitars in the world right now without paying him like 9 different ways.
Cameron is making a run at TSwift: the ALCHEMICAL project is already a feeding frenzy without a track dropped, she’s had a lot of vocal coaching since “Taste of You”, she’s got REZZ and Diplo and apparently Sean Penn in her corner, and has more style in her manicure than Swift’s team was able to muster for the entire Eras tour. And frankly, I’m rooting for her: I miss white people pop music with some style.
Someone is going to make a metric fuckton of cash implementing bandits and low-temp LLMs and hashtag embeddings working for the creator rather than as part of the “the Algorithm”.
I’ve failed to interest any investors in this even as one of the main people who “worked on The Algorithm”, thanks for nothing JPow, but someone will make a mint.
I’ve been swearing on this site for 15 years, it’s rarely an issue.
Consider how successful a number of shady SEO practices were until Google shut them down. Then Google stopped caring and simply pushed everything below the fold of Google promotions and advertisements.
It isn't shady to the participants, in the same way that the activities of an organized fraud group aren't particularly shady to the members of that fraud group. They are to their victims, though.
I mean, it's on the front page of Hacker News now, does that count?
It would take a lot of skill to do well though, and I think that's the secret sauce, as I would read it just as easily as watch it if it existed in that "done well" state.
I don't think you can give a good overview of comments in a short video either, it will likely just be the creators own verdict, so it doesn't replace comments well. I'd say that you don't understand a topic until you feel that both sides are right, and you wont get there from summaries.
I personally don't enjoy Tiktok, but I don't see the need to sneer at people who are making a living out of it.
That cool quarter million is an advance, and will end up being used to offset the logistical and marketing costs of recording an album and going on tour, which are both organized by the label. So really, the artist is just temporarily holding on to money that will be paid back to the label.
The top record labels haven't changed places since the bad old days. You know why Spotify's never made a profit in 15 years? It's because all their revenue goes to pay licensing fees to the big 5. Spotify can't make its own music a la Netflix, which is why they're desperate to build podcast revenue.
Why not? Why not be their own label?
b) Still sounds better than selling solar panels, to me at least
Now, I can't stand all the irrelevant prose about the authors' personal experiences, how they met the subject in a cafe, and so many other extraneous details injected in for padding and storytelling. Hunter S Thomson did this decades ago.
If this is about how some TikTok manager games the system, a simple bullet list would be great...and a worthy length given its subject matter.
At the end of the day, it comes down to what I'm looking for: information or entertainment.
When I read a new article (or a recipe, etc.), I do not want to be entertained: I am after specific information.
When I read a novel, though, I absolutely do expect to be entertained, so I enjoy all the fluff.
When I used to read print magazines and papers, they fell into the "entertainment" category. But when I read on a screen, that's not what I'm after; reading on a screen is an inherently uncomfortable process and better suited to bite-sized chunks.
Not that every article written in this way is a winner. But this one benefitted from the format imo
"How some TikTok manager games the system" is an abstract thing. A deep dive into a real step-by-step approach of pumping phony "content" and sneaking it past viewers' defenses - that's a concrete thing that couldn't be more disgraceful, save only for if the article explained that it's all done for a singular reason: every part of this self-referential loop of "content" is an opportunity to get viewers to spend money. That's where the funds for all of this come from: everyone there is a piece of the advertising machine.
I guess I'm old because I don't even find it zoologically interesting.