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“But it is also a depressing time suck that can get you to waste hours of your time on garbage and nonsense. Like most things in life, you get out what you put in.”

This is enough of a downside to say all the other positives are irrelevant. You could call this “brain rot” for the masses.

I don't think the medium of short form video is redeemable. Its occasional positives are the delivery vehicle for the many negatives, the sugar coating around the poison. It's rotten by just about any measure: properties of the medium, what types of business it attracts, messages that thrive, how well it reflects reality, aggregate effects on people across a variety of outcomes, the aftertaste of using it, etc.

I think the best question to assess it is does this make us better people or not, and to what degree? From what I have seen, the answer is it seems to be pretty significantly de-skilling us in attention, agency, nuance, psychological wellbeing, etc. It makes us more vulnerable to influence and manipulation. The businesses that benefit the most from deploying it are advertising-based, which naturally leads to surveillance and algorithms and pace of consumption that maximizes addiction. The messages that perform best are emotional and attention seeking. There is no information quality control. The consumption pattern it suggests leaves no room for thinking, processing emotion, or nuance.

The personal crusade I'm on is to build a competing product at the quality level of TikTok/Insta that diverts interest & attention toward books, which as a medium is both a lot more of a known quantity and whose consumption naturally results in longer attention spans, greater literacy, and all the nth order consequences of written culture. It's great that things like BookTok exist but ultimately that energy & activity needs to find its way over to a healthier home.

I agree that is is irredeemable. I'm excited for Oracle to take over because then TikTok will degrade to a point where I'm not compelled to use it anymore!

> build a competing product at the quality level of TikTok/Insta that diverts interest & attention toward books, which as a medium is both a lot more of a known quantity and whose consumption naturally results in longer attention spans, greater literacy, and all the nth order consequences of written culture

This sounds great in theory and has been tried a few times (see: Goodreads, Storygraph, Worm.so and a few others) but without the social aspect I think it is difficult to gain traction. A lot of my favorite books I've found by going to local bookstores and looking at the employee recommendations.

Haha yes hopefully Oracle works its anti-magic on TikTok, that'd be lovely to see.

Agree social & network effects are essential to achieving the mission. We (Margins) are building that part out now after spending the last year and a half perfecting the single player experience, it's very early but so far it's going great and we went viral again this holiday season. Social also needs something different than the 'let's make an early 2010s social product' approaches I keep seeing people trying, that stuff just cannot work in the age of AI bots poisoning the commons.

I don't think any of the existing players are close to the quality levels of TikTok/Insta, certainly not GR or SG, and there's always new copy/paste projects that come and go, its kinda become a genre of solo dev project like weather apps. I also think all these Goodreads-like apps are following the wrong formula to win the mainstream, they tend to get stuck appealing to niche user interests. Of all of them Fable made the best attempt at it but wasn't ever original enough in formula or high enough in quality, and they burned through $27m largely failing to find PMF and sold for peanuts.

Local bookstores are necessary/essential parts of winning back attention from social media and offer the unique value of physical presence and community, but will never be sufficient to get all the people addicted to these digital drugs away from their apps. Apps really are powerful things that offer unique experiences that people have come to expect, so I think a realistic theory of change involves an app being the medium to route attention to healthier ends. How exactly to do that is indeed the challenge!

It makes sense, if I were trying to construct an algorithm to make sure I gave people their hits I would also have to push in things they hadn't shown any interest in or even actively disliked, considering that people get inputs from the reality around them outside my service and as such they may change their behaviors and inclinations, I would need a way to note that is the case and respond.

You're describing the multi-armed bandit problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

right, but I was commenting on why the idea that TikTok and other social media platforms will not challenge you is wrong, because even as poor a programmer as myself can see I would need to put some things in that challenge people so as to map and respond to changes in people's preferences over time.

> Most of the books I read this year (well over 100)

That's one book ever third day. Are you really challenging yourself and expanding your mind, or are these just time wasters?

How far can a mind expand? Like is there really anything new?

Does all reading need to be challenging and mind expanding? A lot of the books were "just for fun" sci-fi/fantasy reads. A few of them were "mind-expanding". It's good to have a mix of the two.

I listen to audiobooks while I walk the dog, which at 4x 30min walks ends up being 120min/day. At 2x speed that alone is ~4 hours of progress per day. I also listen while cooking and cleaning which adds up to a _lot_ of time.

> This means that it also frequently shows you videos outside of your "bubble" as a test to see if you're also interested in other topics.

Namely far-right, xenophobic content, mixed with subversive propaganda pushed by state actors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

I have not seen any of this and I am well aware of it existing, but I imagine that will change once Oracle takes over.

It doesn’t sound like you were challenged. The alg probing you with stuff it thinks you might like based on things people with similar interests liked it quite the opposite of challenging.

Filter bubbles have become so standardized that people have forgotten what being challenged is like.