Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

After social media anything goes; the rest are just extensions of the mind control social media made possible. Crypto nor AI would’ve been the hype they are without the current depressing iteration of social media and popular ‘influencers’ promoting their ‘businesses’ to somehow legally take your money. Of the only communities still out there that have some sort of free thought, like HN, even on HN, people are defending TikTok for being ‘great for discovery’. Even though it’s likely a Chinese state weapon and responsible for controlling a billion+ people their every waking (and probably therefore sleeping) moments. With seemingly smart people defending garbage like that, what does the rest matter? Who is going to listen to reason while scrolling through endless empty money grabs (which somehow they believe are adding actual value to their lives)?

There is an article on the HN homepage about leaded petrol lowering IQ; I bet that in 100 years TikTok etc will be considered far more detrimental than that.

I've come across countless great artisans and small businesses I would have never discovered otherwise, all thanks to social media. I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on products from these small businesses.

I will go so far as to say that millions of small businesses exist because social media provides them with global reach. As an example, if you forge, say, artisan chefs knives made out of meteorite, no one in your town/village/etc likely cares, but there are thousands of people worldwide that will gladly buy from you.

TikTok/Reels is simply the next evolution in information condensation. It's entertaining but also educative. I might not care to spend 20 minutes learning about the intricacies of, say, forging Damascus steel, but I'll gladly watch a couple TikToks on it.

The problem with condensed information is that it is extremely lossy. Sure, you may learn something with the bite-sized entertainment offered by a TikTok video or Instagram Reel, but the deeper substance is not there. It’s like saying that by eating 200 individual cheerios, or maybe 200 individual pieces of all kinds of cereal, you’ve eaten a full meal. But you haven’t, really.

Learning and understanding requires expending some kind of effort, and easy access to condensed information actually precludes you from experiencing that. If we don’t digest what we learn we are no better than LLMs — mindlessly regurgitating small bits of non-integrated information back and forth to each other.

That’s well said. I mostly use LLMs to help me learn faster, not to do my work for me. There’s a lot more value to applied learning but it does require a lot of time and effort.

There are plenty of topics you can get the gist of in 30-60 seconds.

When the alternative is not spending any time learning those topics at all, I'll take the 30 seconds.

I'm not going to spend minutes to hours learning something I'm barely interested in to begin with. As far as general knowledge goes, TikTok/Reels are great.

TikTok is another everything platform. If I used it, I imagine I could take any stream of thought and somehow warp it into a reason to use TikTok. It is very easy to pretend that the platform doesn't matter and it is just a carrier to provide the opportunity to engage in new thoughts or interactions. I made a huge mistake allowing reddit to be my go-to. I did not think twice about going from thinking "I want to study insects" to reading the top 500 posts of all time for insects hobbyists, learning almost nothing except apparent insider-knowledge and insect drama, feeling burned out, and continuing on from that thinly veiled meme-cynicism-comment-meme-article-comments new-tab new-tab new-tab cycle (in the context of insects) to the rest of the reddit machine. Maybe something is wrong with my brain but I'm going to assume that TikTok is actively trying to draw in every thought and intention into it's algorithm, and leave someone scrolling TikTok rather than continuing with whatever it is they intended to do.

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